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The Absence of Love | Antonioni Retrospective 2019

Humans are intruders in the film world of Michelangelo Antonioni: they destroy the harmony of nature and society. Only when they act in solidarity with their fellow man do they have a chance to become part of something meaningful.

GENTE DEL PO (1943-47), shot not far from where Visconti was filming Ossessione, this is a short documentary, but in spite of its neo-realistic moorings, it is at the same time a personal statement: an effort to comprehend the world via the moving image. Not the other way round. Antonioni’s realism does not attempt to show anything natural, humane, dramatic, and particularly not anything like an idea, a thesis. Just memory forms the model for his art. Memory as images like photos, paintings, writing – they form the basis of his later work – an adventure, where the audience peels off the many layers, like off an onion: a painting, more than once painted over.

On the face of it Antonioni’s debut feature, Chronaca Du Un Amore (1950) is a film noir, like Visconti’s first opus Ossessione. The dominant feelings that would run through all his films are already in place – emotional neglect, alienation, existential angst and loneliness. Set in the director’s birthplace of Ferrara the drama follows ex-lovers Paola and Guido and their desire to do away with Paola’s rich husband Enrico Fontana. This is no crime of passion, because Paola and Guido are unable to make it as a couple – but what they can do is profit from Fontana’s death. Life in the city is a reflection of the conspirators state of mind. Their neuroses is felt in the chaotic streets and the frenetic buzz of the cafes. The surreal urban jungle is a one of the main themes of Antonioni’s opus. And he observes his main protagonists when they area lone and in the dramatic scenes, creating an elliptical structure with these two dynamics points: action and echo. As Wenders said: “The strength of American Cinema is a forward focus, European cinema paints ellipses”.

I VINTI (1952) is set in three different countries (Italy, France and the UK), exploring the lives of three young criminals who steal not out of material necessity, but just for fun. But their crimes are and the involvement of the Police is just a backdrop to Antonioni’s main focus: his protagonists’ daily lives. As the crimes recede more and more into the background, the investigations peter out – shades of L’ Avventura and Blow Up.

In LE AMICHE (1955) Antonioni finds the structure for his features, seemingly overpopulated with couples and friends – who are all busy, but play a secondary role to their environment, in this case Turin. Clelia has come to open a designer shop and soon meets up with four other young women, all much wealthier than she is. Their changing couplings with men end tragically. Set between Clelia’s arrival in Turin and her leaving for Rome, LE AMICHE is a kaleidoscope of human frailty, in which the audience is waiting for something to happen, some sort of boy meets girl story, but when something really happens, it takes second place to the main thrust of the narrative and we become as disorientated as the characters themselves. Antonioni does not tell a story with a beginning and an end, he informs us, that the world can exist without stories. Because there is so much more to see in the city of Turin, as there will be in Rome: Clelia is only the messenger, sent out by Antonioni to be a traveller, not a story teller. She is his archetypal heroine.

Aldo, the central protagonist in IL GRIDO (1956/7) is the most untypical of all Antonioni heroes: he has been expelled from paradise, after his wife has left him. Refusing to really let himself go he sticks to his environment, travelling with his daughter in the Po Valley. Leaving his home town and looking back over a life dominated by the factory chimney, it is his past history which has forced him to leave. He becomes more and more marginalised: an outsider. And even when living near the river in a derelict hut, he becomes a victim of the environment – the same landscape, seasons and time he spent there. El Grido ends tragically, because Aldo (unlike most other Antonioni heroes) insists on keeping to his past: he does not want to cross the bridges which are metaphorically there to be crossed. And Aldo’s titular outcry becomes a good-bye, even though he is back home. Il Grido is also Antonioni’s return to neo-realism, another contradiction, because he was never really part of it.

L’AVVENTURA (1960) has four main protagonists, three of are human, but are dwarfed by the third – Liscia Bianca, a rocky island in the Mediterranean See. A group of wealthy Italians visit the island but when they want to lead they discover that one of their Anna is missing. Her boyfriend Sandro starts to look around , but soon becomes more interested in Claudia, Anna’s best friend. When they all leave, without having found Anna, Claudia and Sandro are ready to start a new life together. Antonioni is often compared with Brecht. In common with the German playwright, the characters he refuses to dramatise the narrative. Brecht’s actors do not identify with their roles and the audience is not drawn into the play, but left outside to observe. The same goes for Antonioni. Antonioni’s skill is that he first introduces time scale and environment, before developing the narrative, via the actions and words of the protagonists. The island’s waves provide the feature’s ambient score. The fragility of the emotions comes out in the way the protagonists talk – but mostly they are at cross-purposes. The overall impression is not that of a modern film with sound, but of a very sad silent movie. At Cannes in 1960, the feature was mercilessly jeered at the premiere, but won the Grand Prix nevertheless – a rare case of the jury being ahead of the public.

In LA NOTTE (1960) allows us to share a day in the company of the writer Giovanni and his wife Lydia. When their friend dies in a hospital, they realise that their own love for each other has also been dead for quite a while. Antonioni uses his characters like figures on a chess board. They are real, but at the same time cyphers. He does not tell their story, but follows their movements from one place to an another. There is no interconnection between them and their environment. They have lost all feeling for themselves, others and the outside world. Their world is cold and threatening. Antonioni offers no irony or pity. He is the surgeon at the operating table, and his view is that of the camera: mostly skewed over-head shots. It is impossible to love La Notte. Whilst Antonioni was the first director of the modern era, he is also its most vicious critic.

When L’ECLISSE (1962) starts in the morning, it feels somehow like a continuation of La Notte. Before Vittoria (Vitti) ends her relationship with Francisco, she arranges a new Stilleben behind an empty picture frame. Next stop is Piero (Delon), a stockbroker. Vittoria is like Wenders’ Alice in the City: a child in a world of grown-ups, repelled by their emotional coldness. Piero, very much a child of this world, is all glib superficiality, his friend’s remark “long live the façade” sums it all up. The lengthy panorama shots show very little empathy with the eternal city, the more silent ones seem to convey a ghost town populated by worker ants, dwarfed by huge buildings. The music only sets in after the half way point of the film. The couple’s last rendezvous is symbolic for everything Antonioni ever wanted to show us: none of the two shows up, we watch the space where they were supposed to meet for several minutes. L’Eclisse will lead without much transition to Deserto Rosso, where Monica Vitti is Guiliana, wandering the streets, getting lost in a fog on a very unlovable planet.

DESERTO ROSSO (1963/4)

Guiliana: “I dreamt, I was laying in my bed, and the bed was moving. And when I looked, I saw that I was sinking in quicksand”. Guiliana’s world is threatening, everything is out of scale, the buildings in a nearby industrial estate are unbelievably tall. The machines in the factories, the steel island in the sea, and the silhouettes of the people around her are all closing in. We travel with her from this industrial quarter of Ravenna to Ferrara. She is never still, and by the end she is in front of a factory gate. In Deserto Rosso objects become blurred, they seem to be alive, making their way independently. The camera never leaves Guiliana during her nightmare, and we experience the world through Guiliana’s eyes: “It is, as if I had tears in my eyes”.

In her son’s bedroom she sees his toy robot, the eyes alight. She switches it off – but this is the only action she is allowed to master successfully. There is always fog between her and everybody else, even her lover Corrado is “on the other side”. Roland Barthes called Antonioni “the artist of the body, the opposite of others, who are the priests of art”. For once, Antonioni is at one with the body of his protagonist: Guiliana’s body is not like the many others, she will never get lost.

BLOW UP (1966)

A film to be seen only see once – and never again, in case you suffer the same fate as Thomas’ photos: Blow Up. Antonioni to Moravia: “All my films before this are works of intuition, this one is a work of the head.” Everything is calculated, the incidents are planned, the story is driven by an elaborate design. The drama, which is anything but, is a drama, perfectly executed. Herbie Hancock, the Yardbirds, the beat clubs, the marihuana parties, Big Ben and the sports car with radiophone, the Arabs and the nuns, the beatniks on the streets: everything is like swinging London in the Sixties: a head idea. Blow Up is Antonioni’s most successful feature at the box office – but not one of his best.

ZABRISKIE POINT (1969/70)

Given Cart Blanche by MGM, Antonioni produced a feature in praise of American Cinema. Zabriskie Point sees the birth of American Cinema from Death Valley. Antonioni has to repeat this dream for himself. But he had to invent his own Mount Rushmore, his Monument Valley, to make a film about the country in his own image. A car and a plane meet in the desert. The woman driver and the pilot recognise each other immediately. The copulation scene in the sand is a metaphor for the simultaneousness of the act, when longing and fulfilment, greed and satisfaction are superimposed. Then the unbelievable total destruction: the end of civilisation; Antonioni synchronises both events, a miracle of topography and choreography. This is Antonioni’s dream: the birth of a poem.

The TV feature MISTERO Di OBERWLAD (1979) and IDENTIFICAZIONE DI UNA DONNA (1982) added nothing to Antonioni’s masterful oeuvre. After a massive stroke in 1985, left him without speech and partly paralysed there was BEYOND THE CLOUDS (1995), a collaboration with Wim Wenders, and Antonioni’s segment of EROS (2004). AS

ANTONIONI RETRO: THE ABSENCE OF LOVE | BFI JANUARY 2019

The Colour of Pomegranates | Sayat Nova (1969) Bluray release

Dir: Sergei Parajanov | Armenia | 79′ | Biopic Drama |

This heady, avant-garde cinematic reverie depicts the life of highly acclaimed 18th-century Armenian poet and musician Sayat-Nova (Vilen Galstyan) from childhood to his death, particularly focussing on his relationships with women. Glowing in a new bluray release, the sumptuously fantastical visual poem is said to serve as a metaphor for Parajanov’s own life. It was only officially seen in western cinemas in 1982 and immediately hailed as a masterpiece by cinephiles and critics alike. The director – who was to spend a large part of his creative life behind bars on account his sexuality and political beliefs – had spent the intervening years in prison with the authorities re-editing and diminishing his prized work.

Sergei Parajanov was influenced by Sergei Eisenstein and Alexander Dovzhenko and his highly stylised and dreamlike film blends new techniques such as the use of jump-cuts with exquisite tableaux often seen in silent film to tell a story drenched in ancient Armenian art and folklore, and opening with a quote from a poem crafted by Sayat Nova: “I am he whose life and soul are torment”. His major contribution to the world of cinema was in raising the profile of his non-Russian Soviet heritage of Georgia, Armenia and Ukraine.

Parajanov was born in Soviet Georgia of Armenian parents in 1924 and started life as a musician before discovering film-making at the famous Soviet Russian All-Union State Institute of Cinematography film school in Moscow. He married in 1950 but his wife was sadly murdered the following year, possibly by her family on the grounds of religious scruples. A second marriage ended in divorce and precipitated a disenchantment with his own film oeuvre when he saw how Andrei Tarkovsky made use of dreams to present allegory in his extraordinary debut Ivan’s Childhood (1962).

In Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964) Parajanov once again depicts ancient traditions through a tragic but magical tale of doomed love set in the exotic wilds of the Carpathians.

In Pomegranates, Sofiko Chiaureli is cast in five both male and female roles, underlining Parajanov’s attitude to non-binary sexuality and artistic freedom. He then made two more films sealing his international success on the film stage, allowing him to travel abroad and embark on his final auto-biographical project Confession, before dying of cancer in 1990. MT

THE COLOUR OF POMEGRANATES | SPECIAL EDITION BLURAY FROM 19 February 2018 | COURTESY OF SECOND SIGHT DVD.

Lady Bird (2017)

Dir.: Greta Gerwig; Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Tracy Letts, Lucas Hedges, Timothy Chalamet, Beanie Feldstein, Odeya Rush; USA 2017, 94 min.

LADY BIRD is a mischievous turn of the century tale of teenage angst and suburban boredom carried with aplomb by a brilliant Saoirse Ronan as young woman beset by a rigid mother and a repressive Catholic childhood.

Gerwig kicks off her semi-autobiographical debut as a writer and director with the quote “anybody who talks about Californian hedonism has never spent Christmas in Sacramento”. Christine McPherson (Ronan) has renamed herself Lady Bird, and lets this be known at home and at school, verbally and in writing. Sacramento is an uninspiring place, particularly if you, like Lady Bird, live on the wrong side of the track. The family is struggling, with mother Marion (Metcalf) often working double-shifts as a nurse – and father Larry (Letts) is a victim of the recession. After finding out that her first boyfriend Danny (Hedges) is gay, Lady Bird makes use of an invitation to his grandmother’s splendid mansion to change her image: not only does she dump her best friend Julie (Feldstein) for the glamorous but superficial Jenna (Rush), she also pretends that she lives in said Gran’s upmarket abode. Obviously, this lie cannot last long, but when all is revealed, Lady Bird has lost her virginity to the politically aware Kyle (Chalamet), who turns out to be a nasty snob and womaniser. Lady Bird’s main target of scorn is her mother, who is desperately trying to hold the family together and just wants her daughter to study close to home. Meanwhile Lady Bird has set her sight on an East Coast university. With Larry backing his daughter’s follies de grandeur, the college search becomes the focal point of confrontation between the two women.

The scenes in the catholic school are often hilarious: a priest is directing a school play of Shakespeare’s The Tempest – but he is the American Football coach, and his directions on the blackboard look very much like the playbook for his usual students. On the TV the McPherson’s watch the first knockings of the Iraq war, but it makes no impression on them: just another war far away from home. Trapped in the1950s, Gerwig’s Californian capital seems to take pride in a provincial anti-intellectualism, and Lady Bird fights it in vain. Religion is still the overriding cultural influence; but materialism is king. Marion’s love for her daughter is expressed in monetary terms rather than emotional values.

Despite a rather soppy ending, Lady Bird impresses with a heroine who is anything but perfect. DoP Sam Levy (Frances Ha) uses sugary colours to highlight the infantile banality of the settings; Ronan’s towering performance leads an outstanding ensemble cast. Gerwig proves undeniably that California has places that can easily compete with the Mid West for American traditionalism. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 16 February 2018

The Shape of Water (2017) * * *

Dir: Guillermo del Toro | USA / 119’ | cast: Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Doug Jones, Michael Stuhlbarg, Octavia Spencer

Last year’s Golden Lion for Best Film went to Guillermo del Toro for this utterly empty second-hand spectacle THE SHAPE OF WATER in a year where the jury and the programme largely lacked imagination (apart from Susanna Nicchiarelli’s NICO, 1988, who won the Orizzonti Award for her stunning biopic of the final years of the renowned model and musician Christa Pfaffen, played by a feisty Trine Dyrholm).

Del Toro’s very thin narrative of a mute woman falling in love with an amphibious creature, used by the CIA at the height of the Cold War, around 1962, is a total rip-off: it uses the main protagonists of Rachel Ingall’s 1986 novel MRS. CALIBAN, the creature itself is a replica of the titular CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (Jack Arnold, 1954), and the story is a compilation of countless cold war spy movies of the Eisenhower era, when the Red menace was infiltrating the USA. Clearly no money was spared on design and images, but del Toro’s feature might not have won without the help of Annette Bening, Hollywood actress and – first female – jury president.

In a US government laboratory, two workers (Sally Hawkins and Oscar winner Octavia Spencer) uncover an horrendous secret experiment that the lonely and single Elisa (Hawkins) finds strangely alluring. It involves an amphibious creature (played by Doug Jones) who is infiltrated into the installation and comes under threat by the agent in charge (Michael Shannon), who intends to do away with the beast once it serves its purpose. But Elisa falls strangely in love with the sea creature and puts her own life in danger in her bid to ensure its survival, aided and abetted by her colleague Zelda (Octavia Spencer); her neighbour Giles (Richard Jenkins), and kindly scientist (Michael Stuhlbarg in his second strong role of 2017).

Serving as a subtle social critique, there’s a great deal to enjoy in this fluid fantasy film enriched by Alexandre Desplat’s majestic score, but it is by no means the jewel in del Toro’s crown that includes gems such as Cronos (1993), The Devil’s Backbone (2001), Hellboy (04) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), for which he received an Oscar nomination for screenwriting. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 16 FEBRUARY 2018 | VENICE 2017 REVIEW

The Mercy (2017) ***

Dir: James Marsh | Writer: Scott Z Burns | Cast: Colin Firth, Rachel Weisz, David Thewliss, Ken Stott, Mark Gatiss, Finn Elliot | Drama | 101′

James Marsh captures the tragic Englishness of this sad Sixties maritime mystery about a decent man who loses his way.

Colin Firth and Rachel Weisz are utterly convincing as the loving couple at the heart of this watchable biopic about the doomed attempt of amateur yachtsman Donald Crowhurst to compete in the notorious 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race. Crowhurst’s story is an evergreen portrait of British sporting failure. Spurred on by middle-class ambition, and the desire to make something of his happy but humdrum existence, the competent sailer gets caught up in the headlights of potential fame, and fails – spectacularly. And somehow, only the English themselves can appreciate this also ran tragedy.

The Crowhurst story has spawned various theatrical and literary adaptations, and even a chamber opera: The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst. Eric Colvin plays him in Simon Rumley’s upcoming low budget indie thriller Crowhurst which purportedly features the actual vessel that set sail in the endeavour.

Without mining the stormy depths of the tale’s dramatic potential, The Mercy is a poignantly becalmed but strangely gripping family drama with its mystery hanging over us rather like that of the Bermuda Triangle, taking us back down memory lane to the quaint old days of the late 1960s where in the pleasant seaside town of Teignmouth, Devon. the Crowhursts are a respectable family with Donald desperately seeking to shore up his ailing business and educate his kids. Striking a rather bum note in the opening scene, Marsh then guides us through calm waters where Donald attends the annual London Boat Show attempting to sell a special kind of navigation device that nobody’s having. So he decides to turn his sailing hobby into a money-making exercise – the jackpot for the winner being £5,000 – around £70K in today’s money) raising finance via entrepreneur Stanley Best ( a reliable Ken Stott). It’s an enterprising idea but Crowhurst foolhardily agrees to include his house in the if he fails to complete the race.

Firth is brilliantly cast as Crowhurst – blending just the right amount of pathos and self-belief in his portrait of an unsatisfactory businessman of a rather nervous disposition who can’t take pressure and lacks personal conviction (possibly due to his mother dressing him as a much wanted girl until the age of 17). His marriage is clearly happy and Rachel Weisz plays his wife as a typically supportive English rose, stalwart in her affections and a brilliant mum but rather passive and naive in a commercial sense, as most women were in the those days.

Nagged by doubt, but spurred on by the media circus and a PR man called Rodney Hallworth – a strangely comic turn from David Thewlis – there are clearly technical drawbacks with his boat which looks unsuitable even to cross a puddle let alone the Atlantic – but after ominous delays he finally sets out at the end of October. Follies de grandeur then subside as he encounters his own demons and slowly starts to fall apart off the coast of South America, realising there is no way back or forward in the bathetic denouement, which Marsh leaves suitably vague. We leave overwhelmed with that familiar feeling of sadness mingled with resignation both for Crowhurst and for British sportsmanship, and sympathetic for his wife, not a great role Weisz but one she plays with thoughtful grace. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 9 FEBRUARY NATIONWIDE

The Interpreter (2018) | Berlinale 2018 Special

In Martin Šulík’s thriller, Peter Simonischek senses danger when he opens front door of his elegant Vienna appartment to a well-dressed old man Ali Ungár (Jiří Menzel), who later emerges the interpreter in this war-themed drama levened by the same piquant humour as the Austrian actor brought to last year’s standout Toni Erdman. Orphaned by WW2, he has located the home of the SS Officer who might have killed his parents – or at the very least, knows the location of their final resting place. He instead meets Georg (Peter Simonischek) who informs him that he’s actually the son of the Nazi, and that his father is long dead. A darkly comic exchange follows and Ali heads home to Bratislava.

Ali is short of money and so he grudgingly agrees to meet Georg when he shows up, suggesting an expedition. Georg wants to visit the places his absent father spent time in during the war, and wants Ali to guide him – with a daily fee, naturally. Georg is surprisingly jovial considering he’s planning a tour of holocaust hotspots. This section of the film plays like a geriatric road trip, complete with a jaunty soundtrack. There’s an ironic detachment to the humour, but the tones grows more sober as the crucial nub of the narrative is revealed. A reveal very late in the game makes a delicious twist to proceedings but the film doesn’t hang its hat on this one turn of events.

Both Menzel and Simonischek are brilliant; each are endearing in contrasting ways. Georg is a louche and opportunistic ladies’ man, Ali a serious-minded traditional. Georg’s easy-going glibness collides with Ali’s buttoned up decency: the contradiction provides a frisson and a feels genuine and real. Flipping between comedy and tragedy, Martin Šulík’s buddy drama works through their war-themed conflicts – with a timely resonance that makes The Interpreter feels both retro and refreshingly contemporary. Two ageing men who are keen to free themselves from the past each with a different style but both private and, in a way, isolated. Jiří Menzel plays the role is world-weary and worldly-wise Ali, Peter Simonischek is Georg, the light-hearted maverick with a difficult secret past. The Interpreter is one the best thrillers to come along for some time. MT

BERLINALE SPECIAL PRESENTATION | BERLINALE 2018

https://vimeo.com/254993281

Dovlatov (2018) * * * | Berlinale 2018

Dir: Aleksey German Jr. | Cast: Artur Beschastny, Danila Kozlovsky, Milan Maric, Anton Shagin | 126′

Aleksey German Jr certainly knows how to create a stylish film. Under Electric Clouds was awarded a Silver Bear for Artistic Contribution for Cinematography in 2015, so it is a shame his latest offering about the literary heroes of Russia is another gorgeous cover to a rather empty book.

Set in 1971, it follows the festivities surrounding Leningrad’s October Revolution two decades after the death of Stalin, and is seen from the perspective of budding writer Sergei Dovlatov who, subsequently became a well known author read by millions. Here played by Milan Maric he has moved back in with his mother and is experiencing recurring dreams about Leonid Brezhnev. Communism is very much alive and kicking. But sadly, like a glossy magazine with juicy headlines, this filmic foray never really mines the dramatic potential of the weighty themes and characters it attempts to celebrate.

For all its aspirations Dovlatov is a pseudo intellectual schmooze that glories in an unknown breezy jazz score in the style of Krysztoff Komeda and some soigné cinematography, never quite convinces us of its characters’ desperate misery over their failure to get published. Łukasz Żal’s roving camera haunts the smoky venues where the literati glide endlessly engaged in alcohol-fuelled debate, but we feel little for their plight as real people. We’re expected to oh and ah as Pushkin, Dostoyevsky and Brodsky parade before us but despite their eventual acknowledgement as literary geniuses here they feel here like cardboard cutouts in a school play. Well-clothed and fed, they just swing around Moscow like a group of disenchanted uni students bemoaning their lack of a publisher. One or two dramatic moments puncture the day to day literary lock-down of these writers’ bland existence, but there are no standout performances to speak of: even Dovlatov remains a colourless cypher despite his intellectual pretensions, fecklessly neglects his kid and his intelligent wife (Helena Sujecka). An opportunity to lift the lid on the real lives and characters of these literary giants and the importance of their work has been sadly missed. MT

BERLINALE 15-25 FEBRUARY 2018 | SILVER BEAR for Outstanding Artistic Contribution | Costume and production Design

Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (2018) ** Berlinale 2018

Dir: Gus Van Sant | Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Jonah Hill, Rooney Mara, Jack Black, Udo Kier | Biopic | US 113′

Joaquin Phoenix plays a recovering alcoholic artist in Gus Van Sant’s latest drama. And it’s a gruelling journey padded with scenes of fuzzy humour, based on the autobiography of prolific cartoonist John Callahan whose drawings lighten the load. Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot chronicles the aftermath of an accident which leaves him quadriplegic, his doodles providing a creative outlet for his bitter frustration and struggle to come off the wagon, in a reduced physical state.

On and off screen lover-cum-nurse Annu (Rooney Mara) gives him affectionate support along with John (Joaquin Phoenix) his patron, gay philanthropist Donnie (Jonah Hill). Feelgood but toothless, Don’t Worry is also quite tedious to watch as the frequent flashbacks shows the before and after, Phoenix often wallowing in self-pity and milking his melancholy for all he can get. But there are amusing scenes where he rides his wheelchair in traffic and up skateboard ramps. When it comes to paraplegic comedy dramas, Kills on Wheels (2016) did it better, along with the memorable Untouchable (2011).

Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot tries to be touching and soulful in its portrait of redemption. And despite its strong cast, it just adds insult to injury. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE | BERLINALE REVIEW 2018

Brotherhood of the Blades II * * * DVD release

Dir: Yang Lu | Action Drama | Korea | 120’

An action-packed prequel to the acclaimed 2014 original, starring CHEN CHANG (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Assassin), BROTHERHOOD OF THE BLADES II is sumptuously set in the late Ming dynasty of China, where Shen Lian (CHANG), a loyal warrior of the Imperial Guard, is searching for the truth behind a conspiracy that framed him.

Brotherhood Of Blades is gorgeous to look and engrossing to watch, its historical narrative fraught with intrigue and moral ambiguity. And although we never feel for the characters they certainly keep us entertained in glowing set pieces involving intense action and intricate swordplay where the camera darts back and forth, often at ground level looking up to the skies or in intimate close-up. Lavish emerald landscapes sparkle like priceless gems jostling with opluent period interiors. Moments of silence intensify the delicate fight sequences with echoes of House of Flying Daggers. Not a masterpiece but a competently crafted and entertaining Korean martial arts thriller. MT

BROTHERHOOD OF BLADES‬ 2: THE INFERNAL BATTLEFIELD to DVD ‪on 12th February‬ courtesy of Thunderbird Releasing

Willem Defoe | Berlinale Homage 2018

This year’s Berlin International Film Festival is awarding the American actor Willem Defoe with an Honorary Golden Bear in recognition of his career featuring over 100 performances and spanning nearly 40 years since his 1981 debut in Kathryn Bigelow’s debut drama The Loveless. His enormous technical range as an actor extends all the way from the personification of the unfathomably evil to the portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth. In addition to his celebrated cinematic appearances, Dafoe has also pursued a parallel career in theatre, his other passion.

Born in Wisconsin in 1955, Willem Dafoe began studying theatre formally at the age of 17. In 1977, he was one of the founding members of the renowned New York theatre ensemble “The Wooster Group”, where he remained a member for several decades. In addition to his activities on stage, Dafoe increasingly began to turn his attention to film work starting in the early 1980s. Walter’s Hill’s Streets of Fire (1984) was soon followed by William Friedkin’s police thriller To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) where he played ruthless counterfeiter Eric “Ric” Masters, a villain who will stop at nothing to rival his adversaries.

In 1986, Dafoe’s portrayal of Sergeant Elias Grodin in Oliver Stone’s anti-war drama Platoon would expose him to a wider audience. He received his first Academy Award nomination for his performance in the break-through film. Two years later, Martin Scorsese successfully recruited him to fill the leading role as Jesus Christ in his hotly debated literary adaptation The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Still in the same year, Dafoe co-starred alongside Gene Hackman in director Alan Parker’s civil-rights-era drama Mississippi Burning (1988) (right). In the film, Dafoe plays a young FBI agent fighting against racism and the Ku Klux Klan.

Many multifaceted roles would follow, in films such as Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Wim Wenders’ In weiter Ferne, so nah! (Faraway, So Close! 1993) and The English Patient (1996). In the year 2000, Dafoe shined as Max Schreck in the horror film Shadow of the Vampire by director E. Elias Merhige. His brilliant turn as a member of the undead earned him his second Academy Award nomination.

In 2002 Dafoe appeared under the direction of Paul Schrader in the biopic Auto Focus. In 2004 Dafoe collaborated with director Wes Anderson on the latter’s The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. Parallel to these appearances, he slipped into the role of Norman Osborn, aka the villainous “Green Goblin”, three times for the Spider-Man movie franchise (in 2002, 2004 and 2007).

In 2009 Danish director Lars von Trier cast him as the male lead alongside Charlotte Gainsbourg in his psycho-thriller Antichrist – the film became the subject of controversy due to scenes featuring graphic sex and violence. In 2011 Dafoe put on an extraordinary acting performance once again as a lonely hunter in Daniel Nettheim’s thriller The Hunter. Three years later, in Abel Ferrara’s biopic (right) Pasolini Dafoe portrayed the Italian filmmaker in the final period of his life, shortly before his murder.

Last year Dafoe has appeared in Kenneth Branagh’s feature Murder on the Orient Express (2017). The German-American joint effort The Sleeping Shepherd (directed by Frank Hudec) is currently in pre-production. He has also finished filming under the direction of Julian Schnabel for At Eternity’s Gate, in which he plays Vincent van Gogh. Dafoe’s role in The Florida Project earned him both a nomination for the British BAFTA Awards and recently his third nomination for an Academy Award, in the category of Best Supporting Actor.

The ten films of the Berlinale Homage:

Antichrist (Denmark / Germany / France / Sweden / Italy / Poland 2009, Director: Lars von Trier)
Auto Focus (USA 2002, Director: Paul Schrader)
The Hunter (Australia 2011, Director: Daniel Nettheim) (image/left)
The Last Temptation of Christ (USA / Canada 1988, Director: Martin Scorsese)
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (USA 2004, Director: Wes Anderson)
Mississippi Burning (USA 1988, Director: Alan Parker)
Pasolini (France / Italy / Belgium 2014, Director: Abel Ferrara)
Platoon (USA 1986, Director: Oliver Stone)
Shadow of the Vampire (USA / United Kingdom / Luxembourg 2000, Director: E. Elias Merhige)
To Live and Die in L.A. (USA 1985, Director: William Friedkin)

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL | 14 – 24 FEBRUARY 2018

Inferno (2009) | Mubi

In 1964, Henri Georges Clouzot, the acclaimed director of thriller masterpieces Les Diaboliques and Wages of Fear, began work on his most ambitious film yet. Richard Chatten looks back at his unfinished work INFERNO (L’ENFER) and the documentary that emerged 45 years later.

Dir: Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea | Cast: Romy Schneider, Serge Reggiani, Costa Gavras | 96′ | DOC

Like many other fields of human endeavour, the intricacies of the filmmaking process are often seen at their clearest when things go wrong, as has already been revealed in the fascinating documentaries, The Epic That Never Was (1965), about Josef Von Sternberg’s 1937 attempt to film I Claudius, and Lost in La Mancha (2002) about Terry Gilliam’s abortive The Man Who Killed Don Quixote in 2000.

Another such blighted project was Henri-Georges Clouzot’s L’Enfer (literally Hell), on which the plug was pulled in 1964, leaving behind 185 cans of film (about 13 hours) around which 45 years later Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea assembled this remarkable documentary.

Known to have been a drama about an insanely jealous husband featuring Romy Schneider and shot in both black & white and colour (as indeed had Clouzot’s classic documentary Le Mystère Picasso in 1956), that was about all that was known about the film until Claude Chabrol filmed Clouzot’s original script in 1994, which revealed a plot about the proprietor of a lakeside hotel (played in Chabrol’s version by François Cluzet) who becomes unhinged through jealousy in a fashion similar to Bunuel’s El (1953) and Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

Clouzot (1907-1977) had been a gifted director with a mean streak a mile wide (frequently evident in his films) whose earlier and later years had been plagued by health problems (mental as well as physical). His most recent film, La Vérité (1960) with Brigitte Bardot had a been a critical and commercial hit and Columbia wrote Clouzot a blank cheque for this next projected film with Romy Schneider anticipating that Clouzot would enjoy equivalent success with Miss Schneider as he had had with Bardot. Unfortunately, while La Vérité had had the firm hand of producer Raoul Lévy on the tiller, Clouzot took the responsibility upon himself of producing L’Enfer and ran wild with both time and money, shooting hours and hours of bizarre ‘psychological’ colour tests while driving his cast and crew mad on location in Auvergne until after just 10 days in July 1964 his star Serge Reggiani walked out after being forced repeatedly to run behind a camera car along the side of a lake. Clouzot shortly afterwards suffered a heart attack that provided the pretext to pull the plug on a production that had run hopelessly out of control.

The existing footage in Dayglo colours that he left behind – much of it Miss Schneider, including her water-skiing in blue lipstick – is absolutely eye-popping (plenty of it not surprisingly has become popular on YouTube), but suggests he was more interested in them than in delivering a coherent narrative, portions of which also exist in black & white. Clouzot’s sole subsequent completed feature, La Prisonnière (1968) was a sadomasochistic drama also in pop-art colours (also known as Woman in Chains) that suggests how L’Enfer might have turned out had it been completed, and is ironically largely forgotten today.

Regrets that it may have been an unrealised masterpiece clouded the judgement of critics when they reviewed Chabrol’s version of 1994, and Chabrol ruefully observed that plenty of films have been unfavourably compared to earlier versions that had been made, but this must have been the first to be unfavourably compared to an earlier version that was never made! The two films would make a good two-disc box set, since the documentary makes much more sense if one has the grasp of the plot afforded by Chabrol’s version (which unfolds in straight linear sequence, whereas Clouzot’s film was going to be told in flashback); and watching Chabrol’s film the scene of Cluzet running alongside the lake now carries considerable additional dramatic impact as one experiences the thrill of recognition of finally seeing in its intended context what we saw poor Reggiani forced to do again and again thirty years earlier. @Richard Chatten

NOW AVAILABLE ON BLURAY COURTESY OF ARROW ACADEMY | MUBI

Berlinale Competition titles | 15-25 February 2018

The Berlin Film Festival – Competition line-up complete

Directors including Benoit Jacquot, Gus Van Sant, Alexey German Jr, Małgorzata Szumowska, Thomas Stuber and Laura Bispuri will compete in this year’s Competition while Isabel Coixet and Lars Kraume feature in the Berlinale Special strand.

Berlinale will open for the first time with an animation feature, Isle of Dogs, by Wes Anderson, in a dazzling line-up of World premieres starring the likes of Joaquin Phoenix, Jonah Hill, Rooney Mara and Jack Black. For Alexei German Jr, this is his second Berlin’s competition title since Under Electric Clouds in 2015. He returns with a feature that follows several days in the life of Russian writer Sergei Dovlatov.

Jacquot’s thriller Eva, played by Isabelle Huppert, a playwright encounters a mysterious woman when he takes shelter in a chalet during a violent snowstorm. The feature is based on James Hadley Chase’s novel Eve is the sixth time the French director Jacquot and Huppert have worked together. Jeanne Moreau originally played her part in a 1962 adaptation directed by Joseph Losey. This latest version World premieres at Sundance in January. Stuber’s drama In The Aisles stars Toni Erdmann actress Sandra Hüller, while Bispuri’s drama Daughter Of Mine, explores a young girl’s relationship with both her biological and adoptive mothers. This is the second time Alexei German Jr’s work plays in competition since his 2015 feature Under Electric Clouds.

Meanwhile, Coixet’s drama The Bookshop sees British Actress Emily Mortimer playing a woman who decides, against polite but ruthless local opposition, to open a bookshop, a decision which becomes a political minefield.

Competition Line-up

U – 22 July (Norway)

Dir: Erik Poppe (The King’s Choice)

Cast: Brede Fristad, Ada Eide, Andrea Berntzen, Ingeborg Enes

World Premiere

7 Days in Entebbe | USA/UK |

Dir: José Padilha (The Elite Squad, Garapa) |

Cast: Rosamund Pike, Daniel Brühl, Eddie Marsan, Lior Ashkenazi, Denis Menochet, Ben Schnetzer

World premiere – Out of competition

Ága | Bulgaria/Ger/France

Dir: Milko Lazarov (Otchuzhdenie) | Cast:Mikhail Aprosimov, Feodosia Ivanova, Galina Tikhonova, Sergey Egorov, Afanasiy Kylaev | World premiere – Out of competition

Ang panahon ng halimaw (Season of the Devil) | Philippines

Dir: Lav Diaz (A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery, The Woman Who Left)

Cast: Piolo Pascual, Shaina Magdayao, Pinky Amador, Bituin Escalante, Hazel Orencio, Joel Saracho, Bart Guingona, Angel Aquino, | World premiere

Museo (Museum) | Mex | Dir Alonso Ruizpalacios (Güeros)

Cast: Gael García Bernal, Leonardo Ortizgris, Alfredo Castro, Simon Russell Beale, Bernardo Velasco, Leticia Brédice, Ilse Salas, Lisa Owen
World premiere

Unsane | USA
By Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, The Good German)

Dir: Claire Foy, Joshua Leonard, Jay Pharoah, Juno Temple, Aimee Mullins, Amy Irving

World premiere – Out of competition

3 Tage in Quiberon 3 DAYS IN QUIBERON

Germany / Austria / France
Dir: Emily Atef (Molly’s Way, The Stranger In Me)
With Marie Bäumer, Birgit Minichmayr, Charly Hübner, Robert Gwisdek, Denis Lavant
World premiere

Black 47
Ireland / Luxembourg
By Lance Daly (Kisses, The Good Doctor)
With Hugo Weaving, James Frecheville, Stephen Rea, Freddie Fox, Barry Keoghan, Moe Dunford, Sarah Greene, Jim Broadbent
World premiere – Out of competition

Damsel
USA
By David Zellner, Nathan Zellner (Kid-Thing, Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter)
With Robert Pattinson, Mia Wasikowska, David Zellner, Nathan Zellner, Robert Forster, Joe Billingiere | International premiere

Eldorado – Documentary
Switzerland / Germany
By Markus Imhoof (The Boat Is Full, More Than Honey)
World premiere – Out of competition

Las herederas (The Heiresses)
Paraguay / Germany / Uruguay / Norway / Brazil / France
By Marcelo Martinessi
With Ana Brun, Margarita Irún, Ana Ivanova
World premiere – First Feature

Khook (Pig)
Iran
By Mani Haghighi (Modest Reception, A Dragon Arrives!)
With Hasan Majuni, Leila Hatami, Leili Rashidi, Parinaz Izadyar, Ali Bagheri
World premiere

La prière (The Prayer)
France
By Cédric Kahn (Red Lights, Wild Life)
With Anthony Bajon, Damien Chapelle, Alex Brendemühl, Louise Grinberg, Hanna Schygulla
World premiere

Toppen av ingenting (The Real Estate)
Sweden / United Kingdom
By Måns Månsson (The Yard, Mr Governor), Axel Petersén (Avalon)
With Léonore Ekstrand, Christer Levin, Christian Saldert, Olof Rhodin, Carl Johan Merner, Don Bennechi
World premiere

Touch Me Not
Romania / Germany / Czech Republic / Bulgaria / France
By Adina Pintilie (Don’t Get Me Wrong)
With Laura Benson, Tómas Lemarquis, Christian Bayerlein, Grit Uhlemann, Hanna Hofmann, Seani Love, Irmena Chichikova
World premiere – First Feature

Transit
Germany / France
By Christian Petzold (Yella, Barbara, Phoenix)
With Franz Rogowski, Paula Beer, Godehard Giese, Lilien Batman, Maryam Zaree, Barbara Auer, Matthias Brandt, Sebastian Hülk, Emilie de Preissac, Antoine Oppenheim
World premiere

Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot USA

By Gus Van Sant (Milk, Promised Land) | With Joaquin Phoenix, Jonah Hill, Rooney Mara, Jack Black, Udo Kier

World premieres at Sundance.

Dovlatov | Russian Federation / Poland / Serbia | World Premiere | Director: Alexey German Jr. (Paper Soldier, Under Electric Clouds | With Milan Maric, Danila Kozlovsky, Helena Sujecka, Artur Beschastny, Elena Lyadova

World premiere

Eva | France | World Premiere | Director: Benoit Jacquot (Three Hearts, Diary of a Chambermaid) | With Isabelle Huppert, Gaspard Ulliel, Julia Roy, Richard Berry

World premiere

Figlia mia (Daughter of Mine) | Italy / Germany / Switzerland | Director: Laura Bispuri (Sworn Virgin) With Valeria Golino, Alba Rohrwacher, Sara Casu, Udo Kier | World premiere

In den Gängen (In the Aisles) | Germany | World Premiere | Director: Thomas Stuber (Teenage Angst, A Heavy Heart) | With Franz Rogowski, Sandra Hüller, Peter Kurth

Mein Bruder heißt Robert und ist ein Idiot | Germany | World Premi| Direction: Philip Gröning (Into Great Silence, The Police Officer’s Wife | With Josef Mattes, Julia Zange, Urs Jucker, Stefan Konarske, Zita Aretz, Karolina Porcari, Vitus Zeplichal

Twarz (Mug) | Poland | Director: Małgorzata Szumowska (In the Name of, Body) | World Premiere | With Mateusz Kościukiewicz, Agnieszka Podsiadlik, Małgorzata Gorol, Roman Gancarczyk, Dariusz Chojnacki, Robert Talarczyk, Anna Tomaszewska, Martyna Krzysztofik

World Premiere

Berlinale Special Gala

The Bookshop | Spain / United Kingdom / Germany Premiere | Director: Isabel Coixet (Things I Never Told You, My Life Without Me, The Secret Life of Words | With Emily Mortimer, Bill Nighy, Patricia Clarkson

Das schweigende Klassenzimmer (The Silent Revolution) | Germany | Word Premiere | Director: Lars Kraume (The People vs. Fritz Bauer) | With Leonard Scheicher, Tom Gramenz, Lena Klenke, Jonas Dassler, Florian Lukas, Jördis Triebel, Michael Gwisdek, Ronald Zehrfeld, Burghart Klaußner

Special at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele

Gurrumul – Documentary
Australia
By Paul Williams
International premiere – Debut film
In Cooperation with NATIVe

Viaje a los Pueblos Fumigados – Documentary
Argentina
By Fernando Solanas (The Hour Of The Furnaces, Tangos, The Exile Of Gardel, Memoria del saqueo – A Social Genocide)
World premiere

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | 15 -25 FEBRUARY 2018 | COMPETITION TITLES

Human Rights Watch Film Festival 2018 | 7 – 16 March 2018

The 22nd edition of the London Human Rights Watch Film Festival opens in time for International Womens Day, on 8th March. The festival includes 14 award-winning international documentary and feature films, half of them directed by women. The opening night film Naila and the Uprising directed by Julia Bacha shines a light on the role of the women’s leaders of the First Intifada (which took place 30 years ago) who not only led a popular civil resistance campaign for national liberation, they also fought tirelessly for their rights as women. As ever the programme reaches many corners of the globe, from Palestine, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Iran, Qatar to Pakistan, France, USA, Venezuela, Cambodia, Democratic Republic of Congo and the closing night film from Liberia which follows environmental activist Silas Siakor as he empowers local people to fight illegal land grab. It’s a worthwhile and watchable programme rather than a worthy one we particularly recommend:

THE POETESS

Saudi poetess Hissa Hilal made headlines around the world as the first woman to reach the finals of the Arab world’s biggest televised poetry competition, “Million’s Poet.” The Poetess is the inspiring story of a woman risking her personal safety and seizing an opportunity, live on TV in front of 75 million viewers, to use her wit and lyricism to critique patriarchal society and religious extremism, and to urge a more peaceful Islam.

THIS IS CONGO

March 7 | 6.15pm RIBA London | Benefit Night screening with Q&A with Dir Daniel McCabe + Fergal Keane (BBC)

A whistleblower, a patriotic military commander, a mineral dealer, and a displaced tailor share a glimpse of life amid Africa’s longest continuing conflict. Over the last two decades, the Democratic Republic of Congo has seen more than 5 million conflict-related deaths, multiple changes of government, and the wholesale impoverishment of its people. This is Congo provides an immersive and unfiltered look at this lush, mineral-rich country, from the rise of Rwandan and Ugandan-backed M23 rebels in the North Kivu region of Congo in 2012 to the present day via four profoundly resilient characters.

WOMEN OF THE VENEZUELAN CHAOS.

March 13 | 8.40pm | Barbican & March 15 | 6.15 Barbican with Q&As on both nights with Dir: Margarita Cadenas

What is going on in Venezuela at the moment? Embodying strength and stoicism, five Venezuelan women from diverse backgrounds each draw a portrait of their country as it suffers under the worst crisis in its history amid extreme food and medicine shortages, a broken justice system, and widespread fear. The women share what life is really like for them and their families as the truth of the country’s difficulties are repeatedly denied by the government. Featuring stunning visuals and creative soundscapes, Women of the Venezuelan Chaos presentsa uniquely beautiful country and people, who remain resilient and resourceful despite the immense challenges they face.

12 DAYS

March 10 | 4.00pm | Barbican | March 11 4.00pm Barbican

Every year in France, 92,000 people are placed under psychiatric care without their consent. By law, the hospital has 12 days to bring each patient before a judge. Relying on little information beyond doctor recommendations, a crucial decision must be made: will the patient be forced to stay or granted the freedom to leave? Focusing primarily on these public hearings, renowned filmmaker and photographer Raymond Depardon captures the raw and vulnerable interactions at the border of justice and psychiatry, humanity and bureaucracy. Absorbing and thought-provoking, 12 Days gives a platform to those whose voices are so rarely considered. Golden Eye Prize, Cannes Film Festival 2017

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH FILM FESTIVAL 7 – 16 MARCH 2018

Loveless (2017) |

Dir: Andrei Zvyagintsev | 127min |Drama | Russia

Andrei Zvyagintsev’s long-awaited follow-up to Leviathan sees a divorcing couple forced to cooperate in the search for their missing son. LOVELESS is scripted by Oleg Negin who also wrote The Banishment, Leviathan and Elena and once again there is common ground in the alienation and emotional emptiness of the characters. With Loveless Zvyagintsev would have us believe that the Grim Reaper has finally visited Russia and stolen its human soul and spirit. What remains is a collection of spiteful, self-seeking, sociopathic types whose only pleasure is shopping, social media and mindless sex: the result of a culture that forces them into loveless marriages to procreate and conform.

In Moscow a young couple have already been through a bitter divorce but are still sharing a home. Their young son Alexsei sobs silently in his bedroom in one of the most moving scenes in this otherwise sensually barren affair, while his parents, who never wanted him, bicker about how best to sell the family flat. Boris (Alexei Rozin) is a tubby, pasty-faced office worker whose new girlfriend, an aquisitive blond, is needy and close to her conniving mother. His soon-to-be-ex-wife Zhenya (Maryana Spivak) is hostile towards her son and husband. A beautician, she is now dating a rich but hard-edged businessman twice her age with a pristine appartment in an upmarket part of town. There is nothing to recommend any of them: physically and spiritually they represent the worse form of life. There is a feeling that this reptilian sub-species is alive and kicking – not just in Moscow – but in much of the civilised world.

When Alexsei disappears during his parents’ separate date nights, the film becomes a police procedural of utter desperation. Moscow looks like a frozen forest filled with creatures from another planet: these s0-called parents are merely psychopaths and narcissists going through their vacuous routine, their only despair is for themselves rather than the loss of their son. This is a bitterly depressing film but visually impressive and inventively framed. If you’re looking for two hours of penetrating desperation and frightening emptiness LOVELESS will do the trick – and it’s coming to a cinema near you. Be warned. MT

LOVELESS IS SCREENING NATIONWIDE FROM 9 FEBRUARY 2018

https://youtu.be/9gYwlMCWRs0

Michael (1924) | New 2k Bluray release

Dir: Carl Theodor Dreyer | Writer: Thea von Harbou | Silent | 90′

Danish auteur Carl Theodor Dreyer is best known for his five major films made over a protracted career of 40 years from The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Vampyr (1932), Day of Wrath (1943), Ordet (1955) and Gertrud (1964). His output was hampered by lack of financing due to his unique cinematic vision which was viewed as uncommercial and his perfectionism often made him unpopular to work with. But the result is an intensely stylish studies of human crisis or religious conviction.

The German drama MICHAEL (Mikael) was one such psychological drama exploring three characters involved in a love triangle. Variously released as Chained (in the US) and The Story of the Third Sex, a more candid allusion to the film’s homosexual subtext, it features a mesmerising performance from Benjamin Christensen as “The Master,” an artist of international fame for his portrait of an art student Mikael (the sylthe-like Walter Slezak/Lifeboat), who awakens latent feelings of illicit desire while the two are tousling for the affections of an impoverished duchess who comes to have her portrait painted (the luminous Nora Gregor/The Rules of the Game). Such is the intensity of their smouldering rivalry that when The Master dies suddenly, Mikael comes under extreme public scrutiny as the perpetrator in his demise although it later emerges that he died from natural causes. This dreamlike silent drama leads on to a subtle subplot involving another tortured ménage à trois.

Filmed on a magnificent studio set, and in intimate close-ups where the characters often appear as if in a halo, silhouetted against the mysterious darkness, the piano accompaniment lends a sinister almost ghostly tension to the story. The meticulous camera moves with stealth drawing us in to the intrigue while maintaining an unsettling distance. Passion glows but never sizzles in Rudolph Mate and Karl Freund’s cinematography, Freund has his only role as an actor, in vignette, as an jovial art dealer. The film was scripted by Dreyer with Fritz Lang’s wife, Thea von Harbou (Metropolis, M), based on Herman Bang’s 1902 novel Mikaël. A real treat avant-garde gem.MT

Masters of Cinema presents MICHAEL for the first time ever on Blu-ray | 12 February 2018

A Suitable Girl (2017) * * *

Dir.: Sarita Khurana, Smriti Mundhra | Documentary | India/USA 2017, 90′

Sarita Khurana and Smriti Mundhra’s moving debut documentary takes an analytical but sympathetic look at arranged marriages in India, where the 21st century collides with centuries old rituals and morals. The continuing plight of women sits uncomfortably aside its burgeoning economy and scientific advances.

Shot over four years, the interlocking narrative follows the lives of three young women from different backgrounds and intellectual capabilities whose future is entirely determined by marriage. There is Dipti, a homely and kind-hearted girl approaching thirty, whose whole life has been about finding a man. Her ample figure and swarthy looks do not fit the modern trend for slim, pale-skinned Indian girls. She has tried traditional dating sites and matchmakers for years and it seems the lack of a ‘life partner’ rules her every waking hour as she languishes in despair with her despondent parents. Interviews are arranged where parents lay down their requirements, but the kids still have the last word. Dipti’s desperation ends with a miracle. But we are left wondering if such blind faith in one person can be a good thing.

Ritu is aloof and ambitious. Living in Mumbai with an MBA and a career in financial services. She has an independent, Western lifestyle – but her mother Seema, who is a professional matchmaker, puts pressure on her daughter to marry emphasising the importance of a good husband: ‘You won’t amount to much concentrating on your job”. Seema is well aware of the double standard in the marriage industry: girls have to be “fair-skinned, slim, soft-spoken and beautiful, whilst men must have a large income and an important family to back them up. Ritu’s goal has never been to get married but she finally gives in. Luckily for Ritu, her chosen husband Aditya, who is also working in the finance industry, shares her view on marriage: “In my next life I want to be born in Europe, so I can marry post forty”. After their splendid and very costly marriage, the couple both pursue their careers in Dubai, commuting together to work.

Meanwhile, Amrita has an MBA in business studies but a rather naive view of life. Living in Delhi she is happy to go along with her parents’ arrangement for a marriage to Keshav, a young man set to inherit the family business – “because their horoscopes match”. The couple settle down at the family compound 400 miles from Delhi, where Amrita becomes chief-cook and sari-wearing housekeeper, contrary to her expectations of working in the business alongside him. plans to work together. Her husband’s decisions are final – in the end the disillusioned Amrita comes off worst of the three. “My world revolves around him. You lose your identity, when you marry, and that is one thing I never wanted to do. 80% of people, who come to my home, do not know my name. They are just recognising me as Keshav’s wife”.

A Suitable Girl is informative and enlightening, making us feels for these young women and building an informative portrait of middle class India which sees the large metropolises of Delhi and Mumbai as the most popular cities, and Calcutta and Chennai the least favoured, in modern terms. What emerges is a traditional continent still caught in the Dark Ages from a social viewpoint – where parents still rule the roost and decide the future of their daughters – often with the help of astrologers and face-readers. AS

A SUITABLE GIRL | Opening on Friday, 23 February | Q&A Screening with co-director Sarita Khurana
http://dochouse.org/cinema/screenings/suitable-girl

Strangled (2016) | Home Ent release

Dir/Writer: Árpád Sopsits | Thriller | Hungary | 118′

For his third feature, director Árpád Sopsits (Videoblues, Abandoned) transports us back to post revolutionary Hungary in this taut and vividly atmospheric historical thriller based on the serial killings of six young women that took place between 1957-67 in the town of Martfű in the South East. The sinister mood of corruption and social unease bleeds into the murder investigation tainting proceedings and forcing local detective Katona (Zsolt Trill) to convict their initial suspect who continued to abused by fellow inmates in prison, while the murders continued.

The tone is cautious and unsettling as gradually events unfold in the industrial town where we first meet unappealing factory-worker Réti (Gabor Jaszberenyi) waiting for his girlfriend, who is later found murdered – but we’re constantly kept unsure of his culpability as he serves his life sentence, remanded from the death penalty, due to his previously clean record. The investigation procedural is complex and fraught with controversy, not least because the head of the inquiry, the rather unsavoury Bóta (Zsolt Anger) is unconvinced they’ve picked the right man, and also fancies Reti’s sister Rita (Szofia Szamosi). Meanwhile factory worker Bognar (Hadjuk Karoly) has been up to no good abusing his wife and attacking other women he meets along the way. His lascivious enjoyment of his victims makes for unsettlingly convincing viewing in Gabor Szabo’s stunning camerawork and lighting, but Sopsits focuses more on evocative sound effects – screams and deep breathing – than vision, keeping us in the dark, quite literally. When Katona’s sidekick Szirmai (Peter Barnai) enters the investigation, scenes of torture and depravity feed into the general atmosphere of corruption, mistrust and unease surrounding the anti-communist uprising of 1956 and there’s much to be admired in Rita Devenyi’s sleek set design. Although overlong, STRANGLED certainly creates an evocative sense of the joyless and sinister era in this small-town microcosm that echoes a wider political landscape. MT

NOW AVAILABLE. COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA | 5 FEBRUARY 2018

Green Book (2018) ****

Dir: Peter Farelly | Nick Vallelonga, Brian Hayes Curry | Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Mahershala Ali, Linda Cardelini, Sebastian Maniscalco | US Drama | 130′

An African American classical pianist and his Italian working class driver travel towards better understand in this charismatically crafted road movie from Peter Farelly (Dumb and Dumber).

Green Book is the latest in crop of racially aware films and certainly one of the most moving and enjoyable. It sees the suave classical musician and a bulky Bronx bouncer continually at odds in a stylish road movie that travels to greater understanding in the US Deep South of the Sixties. Paradoxically, the bouncer is white, the pianist black. But it doesn’t end there. There is also a delicately handled homophobic issue at play. The movie is given extra mileage and a hint of humour by a distinctive duo of Viggo Mortensen and Ali Mahershala.

The title refers to Victor Hugo Green’s The Negro Motorist Green Book, which was published annually from 1936-1966 to advise black travellers where they could safely graze and stay during the dangerous days of Jim Crow and the sundown laws. Nick Vallelonga bases his script on a real friendship that arose during a tour made by the regal musician Don Shirley (Ali) and his driver who remained close until their deaths in 2013. Being classically trained, the Jamaican-born Shirley could turn his hand to tinkling the ivories in any musical style from classic to impro music, and prides himself on his aristocratic background and fluency in several languages. But his Southern tour needs the protection of a white man and Viggo Mortensen’s straight-talking family geezer Tony Villalonga fits the bill.

In his latest drama Peter Farelly isn’t afraid to experiment or go to the dark side of racialism but also knows when to pull back. Sean Porter’s luminous cinematography really sets the night on fire with his glowing glimpses of New York, Alabama and Louisiana as the two motor south in their turquoise Cadillac.

Character-wise this is a knockout: Viggo Mortensen really inhabits the short-fused Italian who is never without a cigarette or a meal in his mouth. In contrast Mahershala exudes style and panache as the prim but troubled troubadour who lives in a penthouse above Carnegie Hall, decorated with his personal throne and elephant tusks.

Musical references are plenty and Shirley “plays like Liberace but better.” and these musical sequences from Chopin to Jazz are so convincing we’re left wondering whether playing the paino is another of this Mahershala’s many talents. MT

Screening NATIONWIDE | MARRAKECH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2018 premiere

Loving Vincent (2017) * * * *

Seven years in the making LOVING VINCENT is a mini-masterpiece from directors Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman. Each of the 65,000 frames is hand-painted in the style of Van Gogh’s own work, to explore the mystery behind his tragic death. The film makes a superb companion piece to Van Gogh: A New Way of Seeing that highlighted the close relationship between Vincent and his brother Theo, told through their extensive correspondence. Other films about the famous post-impressionist painter are Vincent & Theo and Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh. But this animated biopic drama sheds light on the controversy surrounding Vincent’s fatal gunshot wound, suggesting the possibility of murder.

Despite his prolific output of 800 paintings in fewer that ten years, Van Gogh was only 37 when he ended his troubled life in July 1890, during his stay in the countryside boarding house of the Famille Revoux in Auvers-sur-Oise, Northern France. Although the performances are entirely animated, it is possible to identify the actors playing their roles due to the astonishing likeness of their animated counterparts. LOVING VINCENT glows with a ravishing lucidity to create a story that feels intriguing, intimate and heartfelt in its gentle examination of the facts behind Van Gogh’s turbulent final months and his early childhood memories, revealing the painter’s sorrowful ‘sadness at not amounting to anything’. Van Gogh is played by Polish actor Robert Gulaczyk and the detective work is done by Douglas Booth’s slightly sleazy Armand Roulin, who as the postman’s son, is the least convincing element of this highly inventive and enjoyable exposé. MT

NOW OUT ON BLURAY from 12 February 2018

Ingmar Bergman | A Definitive Film Season | January 2018

Ernst Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) was a Swedish director, writer, and who also produced in television, theatre and radio. He is recognized as one of the most accomplished and influential filmmakers of all time, who made over 60 feature films and documentaries during his long career that focused on themes such as death, illness, faith, betrayal, and insanity.

Persona headlines a short retrospective of the Swedish director’s films to celebrate his centenary year which opens in January. Also released in selected cinemas UK-wide will be The Touch (1971) on 23 February and The Magic Flute (1975) on 16 March. In addition, Summer with Monika (1953), Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957/left) and Cries and Whispers (1972) will be available to cinemas through the BFI so that they can mount their own mini-retrospectives during this centenary year.

BFI Southbank’s Ingmar Bergman: A Definitive Film Season, includes virtually everything Bergman wrote for the screen, taking in well-known films such as The Seventh Seal (1957) and Wild Strawberries(1957), and ground-breaking TV series like Scenes From a Marriage (1973) to lesser known titles, and those scripted by Bergman and directed by his collaborators. All in all more than 50 films directed or written by Bergman, as well as several TV series, will screen at the BFI accompanied by an ambitious events programme, designed to bring Bergman and his work to life for a new generation. This will include discussions, immersive experiences and talent-led events.

Bergman also directed over 170 plays. From 1953, he forged a powerful creative partnership with his full-time cinematographer Sven Nykvist. In his dramas he regularly cast Harriet and Bibi Andersson, Liv Ulmann; Max von Sydow and Ingrid Thulin. His homeland of Sweden was the setting for nearly all his film; but from 1961 he began shooting on the island of Faro with Through A Glass Darkly.

English film critic Philip French referred to Bergman as “one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, he found in literature and the performing arts a way of both recreating and questioning the human condition”.

INGMAR BERGMAN RETROSPECTIVE | JAN-FEB 2018 | BFI | NATIONWIDE

Jonaki (2018) * * * * | Rotterdam International Film Festival

Dir.: Aditya Vikram Sengupta; Cast: Lolita Chatterjee, Ratnabali Bhattacharjee, Sumanto Chattopadhyay, Jim Sarbh; India/France/Singapore 2018, 97’.

Director/writer Aditya Vikram Sengupta follows his impressive debut Labour of Love with another love story set in a decaying world after the British left India and featuring a great comeback from 81 year old actress Lolita Chatterjee in the title role. Elliptical structure JONAKI (meaning firefly in Bengali) incorporates episodes from the life of beloved grandmother whose arranged marriage at the age of sixteen ruined her life.

Lying on her deathbed in hospital, Jonaki is lost in memories recalling the love her life, a young Christian man (Sarbh) she was forbidden to see by her strict mother (Bhattacharjee) and father (Chattopadhyay). Her parents want her to marry a rich man who runs his own business, and owns a local cinema. During British rule, Kolkata was made the capital of the “Jewel in the Crown”, that lead to the Indian upper classes in the city becoming quite wealthy: The magnificent locations featured in the film now look like a mixture of Buñuel’s Viridiana and Mrs. Havisham’s mansion in Great Expectations. But the old glory is gradually falling into decay, and Jonaki feels imprisoned in her home. Sengupta acts as his own DoP, creating ethereal and otherworldly images underlined by a unusual casting choices: Jonaki’s parents seem to be the same age as she was in her teens and early adulthood – whilst she is now eighty, and is criticised and often punished by much younger protagonists. Only her lover is the same age as she is, accentuating their spiritual bond.

There is a surreal and eerie quality running through this distinctive drama: In the dormitory of a girl’s Christian boarding school, the girls’ sleeping patterns sleep are synchronised, we also come across an orange-loving scientist who dreams of England and grows a horn on his forehead, which he later burns off. The local cinema is destroyed by fire, and is then replaced by a modern version – without seating. In the boarding school, oranges roll out of the rooms into the corridor; Sengupta partitions these rooms with glass walls and coloured windows, to allow the action to unfold simultaneously. At one point, we see poor Jonaki listening to her parents discussing her difficult behaviour in a room next door.

Jonaki falls between genres; the viewer is drawn in and memerised by the ravishing images, the continuously changing lights and shadows. The episodic narrative is stringent, working like memory itself – meandering, reminiscing, leaving threads and picking them up again later. Sengupta offers his own cinematic vision, unique in todays’s so often predictable film landscape – and is all the better for it.AS

WORLD PREMIERE AT ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL UNTIL 4 FEBRUARY 2018

https://youtu.be/QqPfx7IZ8NU

Have you Seen the Listers? *** (2018) | Rotterdam International Film Festival

Dir.: Eddie Martin; Documentary with Anthony Lister, Anika Lister, Kye Lister, Lola Lister, Molly Lister | Doc | Australia 2017, 87′

Rarely have form and content been so complimentary as here in Eddie Martin’s (Lionel) documentary about the installation and graffiti artist Anthony Lister and his family. Editor Johanna Scott puts the whole project on fast-forward – very much in keeping with an artist whose lifestyle is a non-stop, emotional mayhem.

Anthony Lister (*1979) studied at the Queensland College of Art under Max Gimblett and was awarded a BA in 2002. As a teenager in Brisbane he had already starting developing graffiti into an art form. “Being as reckless as possible” was the headline under which he painted and lived. His wife Anika – the couple has three children – bore the brunt of Anthony’s hectic life, more often than not fuelled by drugs and alcohol. He dedicated his first exhibition in Brisbane (2001) to his grandmother, who encouraged him to paint after his father has left the family just before Anthony’s sixth birthday – a transgression the artist would later repeat himself. Soon he earned good money, and bought a house for his family in Brisbane – only to leave for New York, because “Brisbane was too small for me”. In his Brooklyn studio he engaged his family in his work (“We were a team”), we can watch Kye and Lola painting on the pavement in front of the house. Soon Anthony was exhausted, and the family returned to Brisbane where his murals were much admired until the council painted over them – and would later fine him for the graffiti work they had ask him to create.

Lister then set off to New York and Miami again, missing his family, but living the life of a free artist – while Anika was left to look after the children alone. London, Italy and Paris followed, before yet another return to the family in Brisbane. His work is often centred very much around his children, his super-heroes and villains delighted him as much as his off-spring. But he craved the life with mates in the art set, and Anika was written slowly out of his life. Feeling this estrangement, Anthony took his family on a long camping holiday beside the ocean, followed by a moved to Sydney, where they lived in a four-storey house which was more like a squatters hideout, than a family home but suited Lister down to the ground. At this point, Anika cleared on and left him with the children. leaving Anthony’s life out of control: he was arrested in New York and appeared to be“blind to the needs of his children and wife”. Work provided compensation. But in reality his selfish concerns would have an impact on the family he neglected but very much needed.

Most of the family story is told by the Super-8 and video films Anthony and Anika shot during their relationship. These portray a recalcitrant artist crying whilst painting his family on canvas. Lister is his own harshest critic – although he continually falls back on his promises, sharing aJekyll and Hyde personality with countless men who have not grown up emotionally – allowed their to suffer for the art the public adores. A deeply disturbing portrait of a self-destructive creator. AS

ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | 24 JANUARY – 4 FEBRUARY 2018 | International Premiere

New World (2013) | Bluray release

Dir.: Park Hoon-jung; Cast: Park Seong-ung, Hwang, Choi Min-sik, Lee ja-seng, Ji-hyo Song; South Korea 2013, 134′

Park’s ultra-violent, epic gangster movie is unfortunately all mouth and no trousers. Images of mass slaughter, however stunning – and Chung Chung Hoon certainly pulls out all the stops in this department – can never replace the gaping void left by an incoherent narrative that ultimately leaves most viewers yawning on the sidelines, or even checking their ‘phones.

After the death of the senior boss of the gangster conglomerate Goldmoon, three men fight in a bloody war for his succession: Lee Jeong-gu (Park) seems to have the best chance, he at least appears to have his act together – more than can be said for the loose cannon Jeon (Hwang), who is an out and out psychotic. The third contender is Lee Jong-jae (Lee), who happens to be a policeman who has infiltrated the gang on orders of his superior chief Kwang (Choi). To make sure that Lee is keeping on the right side of the law, Kwang has ordered Lee’s pregnant wife to keep an eye on him, sending regular reports to the chief. But Lee is really in love with Shin-woo (Ji-hyoSong), who is also a mole set up by Kwang. After her cover is blown, Lee has to shoot her to save her from more torture. After Kwang himself is killed, the plot deteriorates even more, ending in its bloody conclusion. That the gangsters behave like corporate junkies, when not hell bent on killing each other, is hardly a novelty after a while. Overall, Park has nothing new to offer, just a higher head count than his fellow directors. Shame about the gorgeous images, and the highly skilled professional work of all departments. AS

NOW ON BLURAY COURTESY OF EUREKA VIDEO MONTAGE SERIES | 18 JANUARY 2018

Orchestra Rehearsal (1979) | Bluray release

Dir.: Federico Fellini; Cast: Baldwin Baas, Elisabeth Labi; Italy/West Germany | 70′.

Fellini’s little known TV vignette is a rather anarchic undertaking which suffers from its episodic form offering moments of brilliance, but even longer stretches of opaqueness.

Seen as Fellini’s only contemporary effort – his other films always reaching out to the past – Orchestra still has some hallmarks of his classics, with the film crew always present, this time we can hear Fellini as the director of a documentary crew filming the rehearsal. Everything gets off to bad start after members of the union squabble about musicians’ payment, and when the conductor (Baas) arrives, things get even worse. He is an arrogant German (perhaps a caricature of Herbert von Karajan), and behaves like a dictator, alienating everyone before he is ‘sidestepped’ by demolition workers who arrive and tear the place apart. The harpist (Labi) is the victim of falling walls, and after the mayhem stops, the musicians, like frightened children, suddenly obey the conductor.
This was sadly the last music every composed by Nino Rota – a Fellini regular. DoP Giuseppe Rotunno (The Leopard), also collaborated on Fellini classics such as Roma, and he excels here in the limited space allotted to him. But overall the director seems oddly tired and not at home in this contemporary setting. AS

ON BLURAY | 12 FEBRUARY 2018 | COURTESY OF ARROW ACADEMY

House | Hansu (1977) | Dual format release

Dir: Nobuhiko Obayashi | Chiho Katsura | Cast: Kimiko Ikegami, Miki Jinbo, Kumiko Ohba | Fantasy Horror | 88′

This utterly outlandish cult fantasy flick feels like Five Go Mad in Dorset translocated to Japan and directed by Mario Bava. Nobuhiko Obayashi’s second feature follows the endlessly silly and psychedelic shenanigans of a motherless Japanese teenager who sets off with her six school friends to escape a much yearned for summer holiday with her dad and his new, weirdly placid girlfriend. Oshare (Ikegami) and her mates eventually fetch up in a carnivorous countryside cottage belonging to her aunt, who has since died and haunts the property along with her demonic cat. The cartoonish craziness is a non-ending nubile nightmare featuring phantasmagorical happenings: a carnivorous piano; a vomiting picture, spooky sound effects (including a catchy piano theme tune), as the giggly girls disappear one by one in this lewd, low-budget grand guignol gobsmacker. MT

NOW AVAILABLE ON EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA SERIES

Journey’s End (2017)

Dir.: Saul Dibb | Cast: Sam Claflin, Paul Bettany, Asa Butterfield, Toby Jones | UK | 107′

Saul Dibb (Suite Francaise) make great use of Simon Reade’s taut script to depict this gloomy WWI chronicle, set in a dugout at Aisne Northern France over a four-day period in March 1918.

Based on Vernon Bartlett’s novel and the seminal 1930 play by RC Sheriff, JOURNEY’S END is unrelentingly harrowing. And rather than creating a worthy and alienating throwback to the era, Dibb succeeds in connecting us to the present with well-formed and convincing characterisations of real people who we can relate to, an and feel for, rather than relics from another point in time. Powerfully projecting the narrative beyond the confines of its cramped surroundings, he also makes the threat of the impending air strikes ever-present and audible as a force just over the parapet where the men make their final tragic sortie, he also creates a love interest for Captain Stanhope in the shape of Raleigh’s sister who is captured in a pleasant vignette in her country drawing room, adding welcome contrast to the despondency in the dugout. Sam Claflin plays Stanhope, slowly losing his mind in a haze of whisky. But to everyone else he is a hero. The unit is held together by his second-in-command, Osborne (Bettany), a former schoolteacher, who is gentle and understanding, but somehow longs for his own death. Fresh from the training academy, Lieutenant Raleigh (Butterfield) pleads with his uncle, a general, to secure him a posting in Stanhope’s battalion. He admires Stanhope, who was an older pupil at his school, but nothing prepares him for what is to come. The German offensive keeps the tension as tight as the mens’ measly rations, and when Raleigh and Osborne are sent out with a handful of soldiers they manage to capture a German who will be cross-examined to confirm the exact date of the planned attack. This bloody undertaking is only the curtain-raiser for the mass slaughter that was to occur during the German bombardment. There are terrific performances, among them Toby Jones as the cook, trying to please everybody so he can stay out of the line of fire. DoP Laurie Rose (High Rise) captures the tortuous trenches where the men wait for their death. There have been many war films over the past century commemorating the mass slaughter with ultra-realism and picturing those horrifying days. But this is a grim record that really brings home the realisation that none of us is ever ‘entitled’ to peace or to happiness: We don’t have a right to anything. Remembrance is necessary, and every single record of the two World Wars offers another opportunity for us to recall the bitter events that finally united Europe. And how important that union still is. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 2 FEBRUARY 2018

Property is No Longer a Theft (1973)***** Bluray release

Dir: Elio Petri | Writer: Ugo Pirri | Cast: Ugo Tognazzi, Flavio Bucci, Daria Nicolodi | Italy | Comedy Drama 126′

Property is No Longer a Theft is the final part of a trilogy by Elio Petri which comprises Investigations of A Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) and Lulu the Tool (1971) aka as Le Classe Operaia va in Paradiso. Bergman allowed himself a “faith” trilogy and Antonioni an “alienation” trilogy, so Petri, as a politicised filmmaker, delivers a “neurosis” trilogy. The inherent sickness of acquiring property, money and power is viewed from a darkly comic perspective: a corrupt Italian capitalism where the thieves, both legal and criminal, thrive and fall.

Total (Flavio Bucci) is a young bank clerk striving for a more meaningful existence beyond the daily grind of dealing with rich businessmen and their money. To get his own back on one of his clients – a wealthy but slightly dubious butcher (Ugo Tognazzi) – Total steals the meat man’s car, amongst other possessions, and kidnaps his young girlfriend Anita (Daria Nicolodi). Total’s motives are a crazed sense of social justice – punishing the rich butcher who he sees as representative of a corrupt class. Yet capitalism has rules that Total cannot break and he pays a severe price for his anarchic intervention.

Few films present us with a philosophy of theft. The emotionally-charged arguments in The Godfather 2 or spiritual tension in Pickpocket have a theoretical and philosophic power. Coppola depicts stealing as a natural activity. Bresson, as a means to find spiritual grace. Yet Petri presents us with a bitter and ironic escapade in ‘praise’ of a thieving world whose logic and highly normalised rules we cannot ignore.

A Brechtian/Godardian distancing effect interrupts his story, with monologues by his characters functioning as unreliable narratives. We criticise and examine their relationship with money and one another. These talks to the camera are filmed in a faintly sinister manner: leering, sweating people anxious to justify their actions whilst the sub-text is often a cry of pain. They’re vulnerable, very human and sometimes deeply sad. Without its comedy Property is No Longer a Theft might have been a tedious political diatribe against capitalism. Yet a brilliant and biting script makes for a compelling, even grotesque, experience as every mad attempt to justify the logic of stealing and owning is hilariously exposed.

Despite his humble role as the local butcher, Ugo Tognazzi’s character is an ill-educated, coarse and ego-driven man living a ‘nouveau riche’ lifestyle. He sexually abuses his girlfriend (Nicolodi’s Anita), who is partly complicit with his treatment and is strongly aware of how she functions in his and other men’s lives. In contrast, bank employee Total often appears deranged and deluded in his pursuit of justice.

Albertone (Mario Scaccia) is a burglar/professional actor employed by Total to rob the butcher. They’re caught by the police. Albertone dies during the interrogation. At his public funeral, a speech is delivered praising the criminal class over the legal class of thieves. Hyperbole is piled up in praise of Albertone, resulting in richly absurd comedy. The phrase “honour among thieves” has never been so superbly ridiculed in the cinema.

Property is No Longer a Theft is both very funny and very serious. It’s a bitter, radical and complex film about monetary contagion. Total suffers from itching, odd tics; always wearing gloves so as not to be physically contaminated by the touch of money. (There’s a great scene where he asks the bank manager for a rise. When refused he takes a banknote and burns it in front of his boss.)

“…in the struggle, legal or illegal to obtain what we don’t have, may fall such with shameful illnesses; they become plagued, inside and outside.”

Total’s opening speech sets the tone for the rest of the film. The characters’ almost farcical antics are captured by Petri’s acute eye for detail as Total purses his intension to be a “Marxist Mandrake”. The break-ins and bungled robberies are excitingly filmed. Fiercely exact editing and camerawork gives the film an exhilarating rhythm (accompanied by an off-centre and spiky score form Ennio Morricone)

Like Francesco Rosi, Petri is an almost forgotten director who urgently needs to be re-evaluated. Property hits all the capitalist bulls’ eyes and is a minor masterpiece, along with his feature debut L’Assassino (1961). More Petri please | ALAN PRICE© 2018

NOW OUT ON BLURAY FROM ARROW | 20 MARCH 2018

Downsizing (2017) **

Dir: Alexander Payne | Wri: Jim Taylor | USA / 135’ | cast: Matt Damon, Christoph Waltz, Hong Chau, Kristen Wiig

Matt Damon headlines a cast that includes Kristen Wiig, Christoph Waltz, and Laura Dern in Alexander Payne’s unconvincing sci-fi social satire about a man who chooses to shrink himself (literally) to simplify his life.

Shot in Toronto the magnificent Norwegian fjords, Downsizing provides a startlingly speculative and outlandish Sci-fi adventure that sounds intriguing on the drawing board but throws up issues that are unattractive and downright unpalatable in practiceAs the film opens, Damon’s amiable character Paul Safranek is hit with a brainwave – downsizing not only his family home – but also himself – will cut costs as his placidly mediocre lifestyle with wife Audrey (Wiig) rapidly becomes increasingly difficult to sustain, let alone finance. Payne widens to premise to include themes of human consumption and depletion of the Earth’s precious reserves with one radical and idiotic solution – miniaturisation, the idea being that a small tin of baked beans can suddenly feed the entire family for a whole week (living in a shoebox in their previous garden). Welcome to the grotesque future of Downsizing, where a wet-wipe will suddenly become an environmental hazard of even greater proportions. Once Paul is reinvented as a midget, there’s something unpleasantly grotesque and indelicate about the whole idea of giant rosebuds and diamonds as big as your head. The phrase “small and perfectly-formed” also loses appeal especially in the pastel world of Paul Safranek. There’s nothing glorious or admirable about his insipid existence as a phone salesman in the new “Leisureland”, where even he takes offence at a customer who says: “Don’t get short with me”. Meanwhile, his rather uncouth neighbours (Christophe Waltz and Udo Kier) feel too far-fetched and glib to make this new existence appealing; a better word would be ‘sad’. There could be some really appealing aspects to Payne’s thoughtful projection, but somehow he and co-writer Jim Taylor settle for a mediocre, mealy-mouthed and small-minded drama rather than a bitingly witty microcosmic satire, along the lines of previous features Sideways, About Schmidt and Nebraska. And given that most of us are already tired of the relentlessly onward march of digital technology and the dehumanisation of our daily lives, the idea that this could be taken further simply has no future in the real world. Thanks Mr Payne, but no thanks. MT

OUT ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 26 JANUARY 2018

Becoming Who I Was (2017) ****

Dir: Chang-Yong Moon. Co-directed by Jeon Jin | 95’ | 2017 | KOREA

After a boy is discovered to be the reincarnation of a centuries-old Tibetan monk, his godfather takes him on an epic and often arduous spiritual pilgrimage through treacherous and magnificent natural landscapes from Ladakh in India discover his Tibetan Monastery in this upbeat and sumptuously filmic Berlinale Generation Kplus winner.

Chang-Yung Moon’s debut doc – eight year’s in the making – is all about profound faith and unconditional love, but not in a worthy, intense way. Infact, this gently amusing and poignant buddie movie shows how a little boy called Padma Angdu gradually rises to his vocation and has great fun in the process with his friends and loving godfather in the remote and snowy mountains region of northern India and Tibet.

Rosy-faced Padma has a lot of spiritual responsibility on his shoulders – in the same way as a Jewish boy studies for his Barmitzvah or a Christian kid prepares for his Confirmation – Padma must study the holy scriptures in preparation for a formal ceremony from the young age of 6 until he becomes a “Rinpoche’ in his teens when he will rise in rank above his godfather Urgyan Richzan. Sometimes the pressure is too much for Padma and he is driven to tears but Richzan offers calm guidance and support as well as occasionally teasing him.

Moon serves as his own DoP but the striking aerial shots of mountainsides were actually achieved with the use of drones. There are also intensely personal moments where we see Padma at prayer and instruction in the brightly coloured interiors of his rustic mountain dwelling. Moon gives us access to the private world of the monks in this enjoyable and enlightening documentary portrait that maintains its allure and serenity while bringing us much closer to an understanding of what it is to be a spiritual ‘precious one’ or ‘Lama’ in Tibetan Buddhism. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 22 JANUARY 2018 | BERTHA DOCHOUSE | CURZON BLOOMSBURY

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri (2017)

Dir: MARTIN MCDONAGH | United Kingdom / 110’ | cast: Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, Abbie Cornish, John Hawkes, Peter Dinklage

In Martin McDonagh’s latest pithy social satire a frustrated and grieving mother antagonises her local police force calling to attention the lack of progress in the search for her daughter’s killer.

Confrontation is the name of the game in this unforgiving black comedy set in the Southern United States. Conflict is rife, incendiary arguments erupt, nearly everyone resorts to violence, be it for political or personal reasons. Grudging forgiveness sometimes follows, but not necessarily as a matter of course. Frances McDormand paints the heroine Mildred as an unlovable tyrant, in the smalltime, small-mindedtown of Ebbing. A divorcee, she has lost her teenage daughter, who was raped and left to die almost on her doorstep. After a month, the terminally ill sheriff (Harrelson) has not come up with any suspects and the trail has gone cold, so Mildred pushes her own agenda forward, renting three billboards with a strong message accusing the sheriff of incompetence. This is not a particularly sensitive move but it’s an effective one, sending the townsfolk into quiet meltdown against the mother of three. Meanwhile, the much-liked Willoughby is dying of cancer. But Mildred’s vendetta knows no bounds and she finally takes her complaint further, leaving DC Dixon (a strong comedy turn by Rockwell) with terrible injuries. Strangely enough, Dixon seems to learn his lesson and channels his energy into re-opening the case. Dixon and Mildred begin a friendship, but not on the lines the late sheriff would be approve of.

McDormand is brazenly brilliant as the hard-bitten Mildred who conveniently forgets that she argued with her daughter on that fateful last evening, jokingly wishing that she would be raped for not following her advice. Race, gender, anger and forgiveness are the are all in the mix in this toxic town where casual violence is par for the course. The narrative is anger-driven rather than goal-oriented, and the fun is very much in the process rather than the solution: this is no whodunnit. THREE BILLBOARDS is very dark, shot through with brutal stabs of humour: DoP Ben Davis catches the mood with his stark, widescreen images. This is Trump country, and the Confederate Flag rules. God help America. AS

Martin McDonagh was born in London to Irish parents. He is a renowned playwright and filmmaker, and won an Academy Award for his debut short, Six Shooter (06). He subsequently directed In Bruges (08) and Seven Psychopaths (12), which played at the Festival and received the Midnight Madness People’s Choice Award. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (17) is his latest feature.

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM FRIDAY 12 JANUARY 2018

The Cinema Travellers (2017) ****

Dir: Shirley Abrahams, Amit Madheshiya | Doc | 96′

Indians all over the sub-continent have always been united by their love of film. From Bollywood to the arthouse cinema of Tollywood (home of Telugu and Bengal), India has one of the world’s richest and most prolific film industries giving pleasure to young and old, rich and poor alike. THE CINEMA TRAVELLERS is the story of three men and their passion to keep film alive by bringing it to their fellow countrymen, wherever they may be.

Five years in the making, this joyfully touching documentary takes filmmakers Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya on the road with two mobile cinemas that journey across rural India with the men behind the endeavour of offering their films to communities who share their love of the movies. Times have changed since the trio first put the show on the road but it is a show that must go on despite the challenges.

None of them has become rich – most of the time plying their trade to the poorest of the remote communities is a struggle for survival; a labour of love that brings deep satisfaction rather than financial gain, but they make ends meets. We meet the amiable 70-year old projector specialist whose 40 years in the repair business have seen the gradual rise of digital film, and as the future bids farewell to past, his cranky projector is finally put to rest, his rain-damaged stock of magical moving images reduced to a blur. Then there is the cinema manager with a young family clamouring for cash back home, to put food on the table. Both are driven by a desire to work in the industry they love and this authentic cinema verité portrait records their genuine zest, sometimes tempered by moments of sadness at the passing of the old days, but without ever resorting to sentimentality.

In the end, the team are excited by the future of digital projection as they unveil their brand new projector, one comments:”I’m as happy as a man on his wedding day”. There’s a gentleness and philosophy in all these men, and this subtle and atmospheric arthouse gem blends the poignancy of the past with the thrill of the future of film. In India the love of film feels on a par with Britain’s obsession with football. MT

THE CINEMA TRAVELLERS | Bertha Dochouse, The Curzon Bloomsbury at the Brunswick, London WC1N 1AW FROM 26 JANUARY 2018

The Picasso Mystery (1956) Tribute to Francoise Gilot

The only mystery about Picasso, for many people, is his legendary popularity given the well-documented abuse of his lovers which today would, no doubt, give reason for public outcry. “Women are machines for suffering” he told his lover, the artist Francoise Gilot, in 1943. And this statement is certainly borne out in his tortured and butchered depictions of the female subjects that clearly represented real life. But Gilot survived him and lived another 80 years. The artist and feminist icon died on 7th June 2023.

Picasso, despite his genius, was a serial adulterer who drew strength and artistic inspiration from his lovers, two of whom killed themselves, and one died of natural causes only four years into their relationship. Françoise Gilot escaped his clutches after a seven year relationship which produced Claude and Paloma Picasso.

The Picasso Mystery (1956)

As a legendary artist and painter, his skill is undisputed and masterfully captured here in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1956 film showing Picasso in the act of creating works for the camera. Many of these paintings were subsequently destroyed and may only still exist on film. Clouzot was not the first to depict Picasso’s process of creation, that honour fell to Belgian director Paul Haesaerts in his BAFTA-winning A Visit to Picasso (1949) that featured the Malaga-born painter sketching out images on glass plates from the viewpoint of the camera.

Francoise Gilot (1921-2023) was already an accomplished artist in watercolours and ceramics but her own career was eclipsed by that of her more famous lover who dissuaded the galleries from buying her work and even tried to block her memoir Life With Picasso from publication, after their affair ended. Despite all this her cubist painting ‘Paloma a la Guitar’, sold for $1.3 million at Sotheby’s in London in 2021. Two films would depict her life with the artist: Surviving Picasso in 1996 and Genius in 2018.

Picasso himself was a master of simplicity. With a handful of black marks he could suggest a form that would be gradually fleshed out into a full scale sketch, collage or oil painting. Here, Claude Renoir’s camera captures each artwork’s creation as it comes into being, utilising a series of transparent canvases, until the final reel when the film switches to a CinemaScope ratio and burst into colour. The film went on to win the Special Jury Prize at Cannes 1956. Truly magnifique! MT

NOW ON BLURAY together with A VISIT TO PICASSO and Man Ray’s ‘home movie’ LA GAROUPE (1937).

Three films by Jia Zhangke | Arrow

Jia Zhangke has become widely regarded as one of world cinema’s most accomplished filmmakers and a leading figure of the Sixth Generation movement of contemporary Chinese cinema.

24 CITY (2008) here Jia successfully combines documentary and fiction film as he charts the transformation of a military hardware factory into a complex of luxury flats, and the social impact this has on the community. 112′

A TOUCH OF SIN (2013) this Cannes prize-winner follows the lives of four people across China who are driven to acts of violence. An angry miner enraged by corruption in his village; a migrant who discovers the infinite possibilities of owning a firearm; a receptionist at a sauna who is pushed to the limit by a client; and a young factory worker drifting through the foreign-owned factories and nightclubs of the south. 125′

Jia Zhangke’s restaurant in Shanxi province, China

MOUNTAINS MAY DEPART (2015) is an intimate and moving drama spanning several decades, which charts the impact of China’s capitalist experiment on the lives of one family. 126′

NOW ON ARROW PLAYER

God’s Own Country (2017) | Bfi Flare Film Festival 2018

Dir.: Francis Lee; Cast: Josh O’Connor, Alec Secareanu, Gemma Jones, Ian Hart; UK 2017, 104 min.

Francis Lee’s feature debut is often hard watch to watch. This dour and utterly realistic portrayal of a gay relationship in the Yorkshire countryside does not spare humans or animals. But in spite of the gloominess of landscape and relationships, Lee allows a chink of sunlight into this country-noir.

Johnny Saxby (O’Connor) is a lost soul: he works for his stroke-impaired father Martin (Hart) on the family farm, his mother (Gemma Jones) watching his every step. The only entertainment is alcohol and quick sexual encounters in the pub toilet. Josh resents the world – but not as much as himself. Enter Gheorghe (Secareanu), a Romanian farm worker, hired to help Josh with the overbearing tasks of looking after the varied livestock and the land. Josh might be a country yokel, but he knows how to provoke Gheorghe at their first meeting: he calls him a Gypsy – but Gheorghe, who speaks near perfect English, wrestles him to the ground showing he’s no pushover. Gheorghe comes from a farming family experience and shows imagination and knowledge whilst saving a new-born lamb, Josh warms to him, and after yet another wrestling match in the mud, the two become lovers. With his mother growing more and more suspicious of the two young men, Josh’s father suffers a second stroke, leaving him bedridden for good. Stressed out, Josh takes up again with one of his casual lovers, but is caught in flagrante by Gheorghe, who leaves the farm.

DoP Joshua James Richards (Songs my Brother taught Me) beautifully captures the dappled Yorkshire countryside – always changing from light to shadow in support of the moody narrative. O’Connor is brilliant as Johnny, showing both vulnerability and brutal aggression. Secareanu is his equal: his Gheorghe is a much more developed personality than Johnny, but he is traumatised by the events in his homeland – one can only guess how homosexuals are treated in rural Romania, but we don’t know that he is not bisexual. Josh’s parents are trying to hold everything together, but in the end, they are both totally dependent on their son. So Josh, for the first time, gets a chance to be his own master.

God’s own Country has, in contrast with many contemporary British films, an intricate narrative, and a proper dramatic arc: Lee, who grew up on a farm in Yorkshire, directs with assurance, never rushing anything; incorporating the gloomy landscape into the human mire. A great character study, and a visual feast, even though some more delicate souls might have to close their eyes now and again. MT

Screening during Bfi Flare on 1st April |ON BLURAY AND DVD FROM 29 JANUARY 2018

The Innocents: Madness and Desire in Gothic cinema

Madness and Desire in The Innocents

We lay my love and I, beneath the weeping willow,
But now alone I lie, and weep beside the tree.

Singing O Willow Waly, by the tree that weeps with me,
Singing O Willow Waly, ’til my lover returns to me.

We lay my love and I, beneath a weeping willow,
but now alone I lie, Oh Willow I die, Oh Willow I die.

So begins one of the most chilling films of all time: Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961). The tune repeats throughout, a recurring refrain of terror, still capable of sending a chill down the spine over fifty years after the film’s release.

Although now rightly held as a great masterpiece of cinema, it wasn’t always so for The Innocents: upon release, the film was not an immediate hit – perhaps because it failed to feature either the camp fun of the early haunted house drawing room mysteries, or the shocking thrills then so in vogue. The film starred Deborah Kerr as the prim and proper governess hired to look after two children who she becomes convinced are haunted by a former governess Miss Jessel (Clytie Jessop) and a valet played by Peter Wyngarde, in one of his early film roles.

In the late 1950s, Hammer Films had redefined horror with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958), smashing onto the Gothic scene with blood, gore, sex – and colour. By contrast, the black and white restraint of The Innocents seemed to owe more to the psychological horrors of Val Lewton’s Snake Pit unit, who had created a spate of low budget masterpieces over at RKO Pictures during the 1940s. However, upon inspection, there may be more similarities between the Hammer output and The Innocents than there first appears.

In Dracula, for instance, Hammer had focused on the sexual undertones of Bram Stoker’s novel, using the tale to explore the unfulfilled and unexpressed sexual desires of women living within a repressive, patriarchal Victorian society. In its story of a vicar’s daughter becoming governess to the estranged niece and nephew of a dashing playboy, who subsequently succumbs to either madness, desire or ghosts (depending on your interpretation), The Innocents can be read as a similar exploration into Victorian values and repression. In other words, Dracula and The Innocents share both genre and theme, and even their stylistic differences have perhaps been overplayed: like Dracula, The Innocents is both shocking and frightening, and even Jack Clayton felt that his portrayal of the beastly Peter Quint owed too much to Hammer (and many purists of Henry James – who wrote The Turn of the Screw, the novella on which The Innocents is based – appear to agree, rejecting the film as a cheapening of its source material).

It would seem, then, that what really distinguishes Dracula and The Innocents is their varying degrees of obliquity: where Dracula is hiked skirts and girls on beds, The Innocents is half-glimpsed men in misty towers. In making his film, Clayton was reportedly influenced by the essay The Ambiguity of Henry James (Edmund Wilson, 1934), the first part of which gives itself over to a detailed exploration of a theory which claims that ‘the young governess…is a neurotic case of sex repression, and the ghosts are not real ghosts at all but merely the hallucinations of the governess’. Freud, it’s fair to say, was in the air. Wilson also states that ‘nowhere does James unequally give the thing away: almost everything from beginning to end can be read equally in either of two senses’ – and thus we have the ambiguity of the essay’s title and, perhaps, the defining characteristic of Clayton’s approach to the material. For him, it was vital not to succumb fully to either interpretation, but instead to preserve this ambiguity.

To this end, then, he degraded film, shot through mist and frosted windows, and on many occasions (though not all, as is sometimes stated) shows first the governess’ terrified face, and then the ghosts – therefore implying the ghosts may well be only in her head (this ambiguity was also a key component of Deborah Kerr’s superb performance as the governess). Again following Wilson, we can note ‘that there is no real reason for supposing that anybody but the governess sees the ghosts’. Perhaps, therefore, what we are watching is not a ghost story, but a descent into madness. In some senses, this ambiguity (and specifically the refusal to posit the ghosts as real) ties The Innocents back into the original lineage of haunted house drawing room mysteries, in which natural answers were ultimately posited to explain away supernatural elements. Of course, the governess’ potential madness and the undercurrents of desire also tie the film into two other distinct strands of Gothic cinema.

In the Gothic tradition, madness has been there since the beginning. It’s already there in early works of both literature (Jane Eyre, 1847) and cinema (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, 1920). By the early 1930s, it’s a staple of the Classic Universal Horror cycle, simultaneously responsible for, and a response to, the monstrosities at the heart of Frankenstein (1932) and The Invisible Man (1933). It’s there too in Dracula (1932), as it had been in Stoker’s novel (interestingly, in their streamlining of the text, Hammer chose to jettison Renfield, the Count’s crazy underling, who, as performed by Dwight Frye, remains one of the most effective elements of Universal’s adaption; prior to Hammer, the character had also featured memorably in Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922), as he would do again in both Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)).

If, in Dracula, Renfield’s already mad mind is corrupted further by his dealings with the vampire Count, elsewhere madness is shown as the result of more natural and human causes. For instance, in The Hands of Orlac (1924) and Gaslight (1940), nefarious criminals strive to drive others to madness for the sake of – what else? – financial gain. Gaslight, though, can also be seen as belonging to what some have termed ‘Female Gothic’, a strand descended from the likes of the Brontë sisters, which serves to explore the subjugation of women to patriarchal authority (especially within the home). Gaslight’s director, Thorold Dickinson, has spoken of how he wished to undermine Victorian values and attitudes to women within the film, and thus a second clear link with The Innocents is formed: where Hammer’s Dracula ultimately reasserts the importance of Victorian family values, in The Innocents these values lead only to death.

Death too, of course, is the fate ultimately suffered by Jack Torrance in The Shining (1980), surely still the greatest on-screen Gothic exploration into the disintegration of a mind. As Torrance, Jack Nicholson gives the performance of his career, so extreme a gurning gargoyle of a madman that cinematic madness is left with no place to go (or, indeed, to hide).

Much like madness, the theme of desire also dates back to the founding texts of the Gothic canon (we’ve already seen how it’s present in Dracula, and The Turn of the Screw itself dates back to 1898). The fact that much early Gothic fiction was written for, and by, women perhaps helps explain the recurring themes of sexual desires kept at bay by male-dominated Victorian society (let’s not forget that the turning point for the suffragettes was not until 1912). However, it’s also true that there was a tendency in early Gothic work – especially that belonging to the ‘Male Gothic’ tradition – to feature the female characters in minor roles, or as part of an ensemble. In cinema, this (male) tradition is perhaps best represented by the notion of the Scream Queen – the screaming heroine who faints when confronted with the beast, as most famously exemplified by Fay Wray in King Kong (1933).

King Kong, of course, was made by RKO – the studio which, with producer Val Lewton, would help move horror away from the monster movies of Universal, and towards a more psychological approach. Indeed, Lewton’s 1942 Cat People (directed by Jacques Tourneur) concerns a young bride who believes she is cursed to turn into a killer cat whenever she becomes sexually aroused. If the premise and the studio-saddled title make it all sound rather daft, the film in fact remains one of the most haunting and beautifully played explorations into repressed desire, and the effects of such repression upon the repressed, in cinema history – second only, perhaps, to The Innocents. @ALEX BARRETT

AVAILABLE THROUGH EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA | AMAZON.CO.UK, TALKING PICTURES TV

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) | Bluray dual format release

Dir: Billy Wilder | Writers: I A I Diamond, Billy Wilder | Comedy drama | US |

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is a triumph largely due to the wittily elegant repartee that Wilder wrote with I A I Diamond for Robert Stephen’s world weary Holmes and his sidekick Watson, played by Colin Blakely. Teetering on the edge of romantic drama the film delicately suggests, in an jokey endearing way, that the sleuthing duo are also a gay partnership, an assertion that Watson fiercely seems to refute, deeply concerned for his public reputation. But their status is somehow left gently in the ether in a clever scene where Holmes wants to disentangle himself from siring a child for a Russian ballerina. And later when Watson asks him if he can prove his sexuality via female conquests: “There have been women, haven’t there, or am I being presumptuous?” Holmes responds: “yes – you are being presumptuous.” Although the film feels dated in its classic 1970s aesthetic – a brassily florid and theatrical look – there is a great deal to enjoy thanks to the amusing dialogue and perfectly pitched performances. MT

AVAILABLE on dual format bluray from EUREKA Masters of Cinema series | January 22 |2018

Daphne (2017) | Home Ent release

DAPHNE is a fresh and believable comedy about a spiky young Londoner who seems at odds with everyone and everything in her life. Played with verve by Emily Beecham, who won ‘Best Actress in a British Film’ at Edinburgh 2017 for her feisty take on today’s young womanhood, Daphne is the impressive feature debut of Peter Mackie Burns (Come Closer) who has the maturity to give the film a tongue in cheek lightness of touch that makes it so watchable. Nico Mensinga’s sparky script is fraught with witty insights capturing the capital’s contemporary snarky vibe.

Part of Daphne’s problem is her fractious relationship with her worldly-wise mother – a wonderful Geraldine James. She is also loath to admit her interest in the opposite sex, and fearful of rejection, she makes each flirty encounter a battleground, a move that only encourages prospective boyfriends, particularly Tom Vaughan-Lawlor’s Joe whose declaration of undying love sends Daphne running for cover, with a nonchalant ‘whatever’. To make matters worse, her job as a part time chef is going nowhere, especially Daphne down-spirals into self-destruction. We’ve all been there in various guises and DAPHNE certainly rings true. It’s a perky comedy drama that champions the kind of ennui emblematic of youth – boredom laced with episodes of vulnerability; a goalless existence borne with snappy impatience. Helped along by a breezy score from Sam Beste, DAPHNE is all about that mid-point in our twenties or thirties – that limbo-like state before we realise our full potential and where it could lead. MT

OUT NOW ON DIGITAL DOWNLOAD | DVD FROM 22 JANUARY 2018 |

7 Restorations | Berlinale Classics 2018

BERLINALE CLASSICS 2018: SEVEN RESTORATIONS WILL CELEBRATE THEIR WORLD PREMIERES. The Berlinale Classics section of the 68th Berlin International Film Festival will present the world premieres of a total of seven films in digitally restored versions.

WINGS OF DESIRE | Der Himmel über Berlin by Wim Wenders

Wim Wenders’ prize-winning classic Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire, Federal Republic of Germany / France 1987) returns to the screen in a new, digitally restored 4K DCP version. Two guardian angels keep watch over Berlin, until one of them falls in love with a mortal woman. He chooses to become human, giving up his immortality, and an entirely new world is revealed to him. The film was shot on both black-and-white and colour stock. At the time, that required several additional steps in the lab in order to produce a final colour negative, which was several generations removed from the camera negatives. This version, restored by the Wim Wenders Foundation, is based on the original negatives;

MY 20th CENTURY | Az én XX. századom by Ildikó Enyedi

Az én XX. századom (My 20th Century, Hungary / Federal Republic of Germany 1989), the feature debut of the winner of the 2017 Golden Bear, Ildikó Enyedi, is a complex, poetic fairy tale, and an homage to silent movies. Shot in black-and-white, the film follows the very different live of identical twins in Old Europe at the dawn of the 20th century. Using the original camera negative and the magnetic sound track, the film was digitally restored in 4K by the Hungarian National Film Fund – Hungarian National Film Archive, working with Hungarian Filmlab. Cinematographer Tibor Máthé (HSC – Hungarian Society of Cinematographers) supervised the digital grading.

Source: Sony Pictures Entertainment, © Columbia Pictures Corporation Inc.

Fail Safe by Sidney Lumet

Sidney Lumet’s thriller Fail Safe (USA 1964) is an impressive critique of the Cold War military doctrine. When an errant U.S. bomber threatens to destroy Moscow, the president calls the Soviet premier on the red phone to try to prevent a retaliatory nuclear strike. The film was restored in 4K under the aegis of Sony Pictures Entertainment and its head of restoration, Grover Crisp. The incomplete camera negative was supplemented with the use of a duplicate negative. Conforming the various different source materials presented a special challenge to the restoration team.

THE CRANES ARE FLYING | Letjat schurawli by Michail KalatosoV

Letyat Zhuravli (The Cranes Are Flying, USSR 1957) by Mikhail Kalatozov was Soviet cinema’s first international hit after World War II. Made during the period of liberalisation that followed Joseph Stalin’s death, this unusual black-and-white film’s expressionist images tell the tragic story of two lovers after Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. The film brought international fame to Mikhail Kalatozov and his lead actress, Tatiana Samoilova. Letyat Zhuravli was restored by Mosfilm under the leadership of general director Karen Shakhnazarov. The ditigal 2K restoration, on the basis of the original negative, was supervised by the head of restoration Igor Bogdasarov.

LIFE ACCORDING TO AGFA | HaChayim Al-Pi Agfa by Assi Dayan

Director Assi Dayan was lauded by the International Jury of the Berlinale in 1993 for the courage and honesty of his HaChayim Al-Pi Agfa (Life According to Agfa, Israel 1992). The film revolves around a Tel Aviv bar, where a world of bohemians, business people, junkies, tourists, pimps, and soldiers all meet. The events of a single night, captured in black-and-white photos, are a microcosm of a society that considers itself liberal and tolerant, but in which seemingly trivial actions can become explosive. The 4K restoration was produced by the Jerusalem Cinematheque – Israel Film Archive, where the negative was scanned. It was supervised by cinematographer Yoav Kosh and supported by the Israel Film Fund.

TOKYO TWILIGHT | Tokyo Boshoku by Yasujiro Ozu

With Tokyo Boshoku (Tokyo Twilight, Japan 1957), Berlinale Classics will provide a rare opportunity to see a largely unknown and seldom shown work by Yasujiro Ozu. The theme of the end of a family living together is one that Japanese directing maestro Yasujiro Ozu often reworks, and here he has given it a dramatic twist. In wintery Tokyo, a family’s silence leads to its breakdown. Tokyo Boshoku, considered Ozu’s most sombre post-war film, was digitally restored in 4K on the basis of the 35mm duplicate negative provided by the Japanese production company Shochiku, managed by Shochiku MediaWorX Inc. Colour correction was led by Ozu’s former assistant cameraman Takashi Kawamata and cinematographer Masashi Chikamori.

Source: Deutsche Kinemathek

THE ANCIENT LAW | Das alte Gesetz by E.A. Dupont

The Berlinale Classics section will open on February 16, 2018, at 5 pm in the Friedrichstadt-Palast with the premiere of the Deutsche Kinemathek’s digital restoration of the 1923 silent film classic Das alte Gesetz (The Ancient Law) directed by E.A. Dupont. ZDF/ARTE commissioned French composer Philippe Schoeller to create new music for this version, which will be presented by the Orchester Jakobsplatz München with Daniel Grossmann at the podium.

The full programme of the Berlinale Classics section:

Das alte Gesetz (The Ancient Law)
Dir: Ewald André Dupont, Germany, 1923
World premiere of the digitally restored version
in 2K DCP

Az én XX. századom (My 20th Century)
Dir: Ildikó Enyedi, Hungary / Federal Republic of Germany, 1989
Presented by Ildikó Enyedi and Tibor Máthé
World premiere of the digitally restored version
in 4K DCP

Fail Safe
Dir: Sidney Lumet, USA, 1964
World premiere of the digitally restored version
in 4K DCP

HaChayim Al-Pi Agfa (Life According To Agfa)
Dir: Assi Dayan, Israel, 1992
World premiere of the digitally restored version
in 4K DCP

Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire)
Dir: Wim Wenders, Germany / France, 1987
Presented by Wim Wenders
World premiere of the digitally restored version
in 4K DCP

Letyat Zhuravli (The Cranes are Flying)
Dir: Mikhail Kalatozov, USSR, 1957
World premiere of the digitally restored version
in 2K DCP

Tokyo Boshoku (Tokyo Twilight)
Dir: Yasujiro Ozu, Japan, 1957
Presented by Wim Wenders
World premiere of the digitally restored version
in 4K DCP

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL WILL RUN FROM 14 FEBRUARY – 24 FEBRUARY 2018

Mirror | Tarkovsky Retrospective ICA London

MIRROR is a stream-of-consciousness, totally without any narrative. The narrator, on his deathbed, looks back on his life. The only structure is the time-setting: pre-war, war and post-war. Mirror is the best example of the director’s “sculpting in time” approach to filmmaking: images and sound (in this case classical music) melt into a memory lane in which the time frames are interchangeable. Sometimes the film is labelled as metaphysical and it is hardly surprising that the USSR censors even tried to ban any export of the film, helping to make it into a legend.

CURRENTLY IN RETROSPECTIVE AT THE ICA LONDON JANUARY 2018

The Housemaid |Co Hau Gai (2016) * * | Dual Format Bluray release

Dir/Writer: Derek Nguyen | Gothic Horror | Vietnam | 105′

Set in 1953 Vietnam during the First Indochine War, Derek Nguyen’s premise is a captivating one with faint echoes of Chantal Akerman’s Almayer’s Folly, but that is where this comparison ends. An orphaned country girl is hired as a housemaid at a haunted French rubber plantation where she unexpectedly falls in love with the French landowner Captain Sebastien Laurent, awakening the vengeful ghost of his dead wife, Camille. Despite being the third-highest-grossing horror film in Vietnam’s history THE HOUSEMAID is rather a derivative slice of Gothic eeriness which fails to deliver despite superb production values and superb cinematography from Sam Chase (who cut his teeth on Shaft and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). Stunning visuals and overactive jump scares are strung together by a threadbare narrative that appears to cherry pick from far better films of the genre such as The Woman in Black, Thriller and even Night of the Living Dead. Amateurish performances across the board fail to inject the promised erotic charge of life into this rather moribund shocker that nevertheless has a certain sinister appeal for those committed to Vietnamese cinema. MT

NOW OUT ON DUAL FORMAT BLURAY COURTESY OF EUREKA MONTAGE SERIES

The King’s Choice (2017)

Dir: Erik Poppe | Writers: Harald Rosenlow-Eeg, Jan Trygve Royneland | Cast: Jesper Christensen, Anders Baasmo Christiansen, Karl Markovics | History Biopic | Norway | 133′

Royalty makes a stand against Hitler in this solidly-crafted and deeply humanist Oscar hopeful from Norwegian director Erik Poppe.

Norway’s popular King Haakon VII (a dignified Jesper Christensen) is brought to his knees, quite literally, during three dramatic days in 1940 when he is presented with an unimaginable ultimatum from Nazi Germany: surrender or die. The action revolves during a diplomatic crisis that sees Norway suddenly and unexpectedly plunged into hostilities, despite neutrality and previous good relations with its invaders. The German’s approach, via the Fjords, is announced during Radio reports and telephone exchanges that telegraph Norway’s entrance into the Second World War.

Poppe’s film works both as an intimate portrait of a loving family man, who hailed originally from Denmark, and a rousing and visually stunning WWII epic illuminating a little known episode of Norwegian history. We get a glimpse of the ageing king from all aspects – he would go on to live for another 17 years despite declining health – playing with his grandchildren; dealing with matters of state and even engaging with a young soldier (Private Seeberg/Arthur Hakalahti) on the enemy battle lines. The tension quietly mounts as the Royal family are forced to separate. Haakon and his son, Crown Prince Olav are taken under cover of darkness to refuge, where the king makes his solitary final decision in a coruscating showdown with Karl Markovics’s bristling German envoy. THE KING’S CHOICE is a captivating cinematic adventure, despite its lengthy running time, largely due to impressive handheld camerawork, magnificent snowbound set pieces and the rousing human story at its core. MT

OUT ON DVD FROM 15 JANUARY COURTESY OF THUNDERBIRD RELEASING.

Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars (2017) Prime Video

Dir: Lili Fini Zanuck | Writers: Stephen “Scooter” Weintraub, Larry Yelen | Music Biopic | 213′

Fans of Eric Clapton will certainly know the facts behind the ’god of guitar’s’ eventful life. In her flawed but emotionally penetrating rock-doc, Lili Fini Zanuck’s poignantly conveys the years of heartache behind this fated and fêted musician.

Lili Fini Zanuck and Eric Clapton are longterm friends and collaborators: He provided the score for her feature Rush, back in 1991. And despite the use of a meandering, counterintuitive narrative to tell his, often tragic, story with its ill-judged epilogue feeling more like a cheesy commercial for Clapton’s current project rather than a fitting finale, the study is mostly thorough in its breadth and depth, chronicling the life story of an Englishman who has suffered, been severely tested and has come up trumps.

Life in 12 Bars is an ironic title given Clapton’s years of alcoholism, so let’s hope this is refers to his mastery of the guitar, an instrument that was to be his muse, his whipping boy (we are shown how he uses it as anger therapy), and his saving grace throughout his life. The film opens with a fabulous account of Clapton’s early childhood, his artistic reveries and discovery, aged 9, that his mother had abandoned him: he was brought up by his grandmother Rose Clapp. We learn how Clapton turns his disappointment and rejection into developing his musical technique from his teens to his involvement in blues-based and psychedelic groups. The Yardbirds and The Cream years are covered in compelling depth, and Zanuck shows how Clapton did his bit for the blues, and was headhunted by Mayall who got him playing for the Bluesbreakers. He even moved into Mayall’s home with his family.

But Zanuck and her writers Weintraub and Yelen tend to gloss over certain aspects of his career – probably out of respect to friendship – and it’s Clapton himself who owns up to his behavioural shortcomings as an introvert who couldn’t relate to women but became obsessed by one of them, Patti Boyd, during her mariage to George Harrison.

So although the film goes into almost forensic detail on some aspects of the story, other years are befuddled – almost as if in an booze-fuelled haze – such as his career as a solo recording artist which gave rise to a several salient albums. Pattie Boyd merely serves the narrative as a flirtatious cypher who cannot make up her mind between him and George, while he is yearning for her love, howling at the moon for her to leave George, which she eventually does, but by then too much damage has been done for them to make a go of things. Talking faces are almost entirely absent to give context to this period of his life, particularly his closest friend, Ben Palmer.

Zanuck has a cinematic way of conjuring up the days lost to booze and drugs in Hurtwood, Clapton’s country house in the depths of Surrey. But his romantic affairs take on a rather hazy anecdotal feel, the story often flipping back and forth. And there’s a curious bit where Zanuck suddenly goes back to Clapton’s mother’s second rejection of him, arriving from Canada with her two latest children. And this comes towards the end of the story, father than at the beginning where it would have clearly better informed us of the emotional arc that coloured his career.

Clearly this fundamental rejection was going to lead to a lack of trust, and vulnerability issues that would go on to jeopardise any kind of lasting romantic attachment. But it’s these years that are so movingly conveyed by Zanuck, showing Clapton heartbroken over Boyd after dedicating Layla to her, and retreating into a ‘safe’ world blunted by drugs and alcohol.

There’s much to enjoy here in this freewheeling trip back to a rich and vibrant musical era. And it’s heart-warming to see how Clapton has finally managed to overcome his demons, albeit circuitously, despite a rather cheesy ending which actually has the strange effect of making the legend seem less interesting than he appeared to be at the beginning of his career. MT

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Lover for a Day (2017) ***

Dir: Philippe Garrel | Cast: Eric Caravaca, Esther Garrel | 77min | Drama | French

Philippe Garrel is back With another family affair that brings to a close his trilogy that started with Jealousy. This grainy black and white Parisian story is as sweet and light as a mini croissant and just as innocuous, showing slim insight into the mind of a woman despite a collaboration of four writers, including the veteran Garrel himself. If you enjoy his work it’s watchable enough, but rather too slight and generic to have general appeal. Daughter Jeanne (his own daughter Esther) finds herself at home again with Papa (Caravaca), as her first love affair ends abruptly. But family life is interupted by her father’s young lover Ariane (Chevillotte) who is a philandering part-time porn model. The intimate domestic trio discuss love, fidelity and friendship but not to any degree of satisfaction or insight, and Arianne frequently becomes jealous when father and daughter spend the evening together. There is a candid intimacy to the dialogue but it all feels rather trite. Esther is a natural, as is Caravaca, but Chevillotte’s Arianne struggles to feel authentic and her story is largely hollow and implausible. Even with a running time of 77 minutes LOVER fails to be involving often feeling like an amateur college piece; well-crafted but rather will of the wisp. MT

ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSES COURTESY OF MUBI | 19 JANUARY 2018

A Woman’s Life | Une Vie (2017)

Dir: Stephane Brize | Drama | France | 114min

Hot on the heals of his 21st century social drama, The Measure of a Man, that won the Cannes Best Actor Award in 2015, the adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s first novel, is a painterly domestic tragedy set in 18th century Normandy that tackles similar social issues occuring 300 hundred years beforehand.

Intimate in scale (shot on Academy Ratio) and delicately appealing, A WOMAN’S LIFE follows Chemla’s bon chic bon genre heroine Jeanne from her teenage years until her mid forties, echoing the the kind of tortured tragedy familiar in all Maupassant’s work – in some ways he’s the French equivalent of Thomas Hardy in that his stories are firmly rooted in the landscape with a palpable feel for Gallic traditions. We first meet the heroine Jeanne (Judith Chemla) planting lettuces in the pottager of the Chateau she shares with her Baron father (Jean Pierre Darroussin) and Baroness mother (Yolande Moreau).

Brizé’s choice of the Academy ratio – used in silent film – embodies the closeted almost claustrophobic nature of Jeanne’s domestic environment full of love and laughter until she is introduced to her future husband, a flawed and improvished nobleman, Viscount Julien de Lamare (Swann Arland). Her life will never be the same again.

Working with his regular writer Florence Vignon, Brizé condenses the novel into an engrossing drama (just short of two hours) that quails away from the habitual mannered approach of classic period dramas to create a naturalistic and impressionist portrait that retains considerable dramatic heft, thanks to Anne Klotz’ suberb editing, while also being sensitive and delicately rendered in Antoine Heberle’s exquisite visuals that flip from vibrant summer days to the wretched, rain-soaked wintery ones that hint at doom and disaster from the beginning.

The film unravels in a succession of suggestive short scenes that sketch out episodes in the narrative leaving us to fill in the gaps with our own imagination and leave time for Jeanne to contemplate and process her thoughts and feelings. Married life with Julien is no bed of roses : when Jeanne finds her maid Rosalie’s bedroom empty in the night, a brief but melodramtic scene in the garden follows implying that Julien and Rosalie are up to no good. It soon emerges that Julien’s poor family traits are inbred.

True to the page, Brize reworks Maupassant’s mistrust of religion and the church in general: The consequences of Jeanne’s reliance on the family pastor (Francois-Xavier Ledoux) for moral guidance over her husband’s behaviour lead to more heartake involving her seemingly close friend and neighbour Georges de Fourville (Alain Beigel), whose wife, Gilberte (Clotilde Hesme) flirts with the cheating Julien.

The Baron, a strong but largely silent performance from Jean-Pierre Darroussin, is extremely vocal when it comes to his grandson (played by Finnegan Oldfield as a late teenager and beyond) who appears to have inherited his father’s profligacy and lack of integrity, but Jeanne turns a blind eye to these traits, investing her love in him and channeling all her hope for the future in his empty promises.

Judith Chemla (Camille Rewinds) gives a calm but resonating performance as Jeanne generating considerable empathy as she slowly absorbs years of sadness, loss and emotional turmoil to her considerable detriment as she reaches middle age. One again Stephane Brizé has made a powerful and immersive character drama, impeccably crafted and enormously moving. MT

NOW ON RELEASE FROM 12 JANUARY 2018

Leatherface (2017) | DVD release

French directing duo Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, who rose to fame with their standout debut Inside, have done their best to give an arthouse twist to Tobe Hooper’s 1974 cult original TCM replacing his pared-down grainy indie look with a grungy green-sheened shocker, blunting facial features and darkening scenes of gory violence and misogyny. It’s a tolerably decent adaptation which echoes Malick’s Badlands.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has so far re-emerged from its blood-soaked stable with seven reimagining of variable quality of which Leatherface is a prequel to the original. Texas Chainsaw 3D (2013) was the worst which ironically made a healthy profit unlike Tobe’s original, made on a shoestring budget adding considerably to its appeal; it became a champion of the ‘less is more’ school of horror filmmaking. Although Tobe died as this one premiered, he could go to his grave peacefully in the knowledge that his film will be remembered – the others won’t.

The plot is more sparing than the mostly obscured carnage, but sound effect vividly convey the deep horror of proceedings. A cast of mostly Bulgarian newcomers is led by US stalwarts Stephen Dorff (as seedy sheriff Hinton) and Lili Taylor who plays Verna, a deranged chainsaw-obsessed mother who attempts to pass on her addiction to her son Jed (Boris Kabakchiev) in the family’s wooden farmhouse in deepest Texas, 1955. Jed gradually gets on board with the family’s ghoulish games. But when Dorff’s daughter becomes a victim of the demonic Verna, he punishes her by placing Jed in a draconian remand home Gorman House, where ten years later, under an assumed name for public protection and also as a ploy to keep us on tenterhooks, the long-term inmate has developed into a fully blown psychopath, wreaking acts of unspeakable violent towards the nursing staff.

The horror of Leatherface largely derives from what is insinuated rather than seen. And this extends beyond the classic chainsaw screeching. Although, make no mistake, some of the brutality is hard to watch – if indeed you can glimpse it in the murky darkness – and most of the violence is sadly inflicted on female characters although, parodoxically, Verna is the arch villainess of the piece. But not all the horror is fuelled by gore: There is one particularly unsavoury individual with enormous moobs – did they really have them in those pre-pill days of the 1950s when crops and the water supply was still pure and oestrogen-free?.

ON RELEASE | EST 18 December 2017 | DVD 8 January 2018

Attraction (2017)

Dir.: Fyodor Bondarchuk: Cast: Irina Starshenbaum, Alexander Petrov, Alexander Petrov, Rinal Mukhametov | Sci-fi | Russian Federation 2017, 117′.

Director Fyodor Bondarchuk, son of the late Sergei (Waterloo), has filmed a script by Andrey Zolotaryov and Oleg Malovichko about a Moscow teenager falling in love with a stranded alien as an outlandish extravaganza that completely relies on the brilliant widescreen images of Mikhail Khasaya for its entertainment value.

An alien spaceship is shot down in a suburb of Moscow and teenager Yulya (Starshenbaum), living in a high rise block with her father after the death of her mother, just gets away with her life, being surprised by the attack whilst in bed with her boyfriend Artyom (Petrov). Her father, high-ranking officer Lebeder (Menshikov), is put in charge of containing the space ship, and finding out the intentions of the aliens. Yulya falls in love with Hekon (Mukhametov), one of the alien survivors of the crash, who has saved her life. Meanwhile, Artyom and his group of teenage hoodlums chase the alien, whom Yulya is hiding. In a grand finale, Artyom, having stolen the impregnable shield of Hekon, chases the lovers until the bitter end.

ATTRACTION was a big hit in Russia, earning around a million Roubles at the box office. Undemanding, to say the least, it is just the same eye-candy Hollywood aims for, but is even more prudish than its equivalent US products, and also shares the laborious dialogues about the meaning of it all at the end – these are supposed to be relevant, but are as banal as everything gone before. The characters are one-dimensional, and there are no twists in the narrative, every move is well telegraphed. Even the glittering technology employed cannot hide the emptiness of this spectacle, which is strictly for the genre fans. AS

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 17 JANUARY 2018 | Reviewed at THE UK RUSSIAN FILM FESTIVAL | 19 NOVEMBER 26 NOVEMBER 2017

The Banishment | Izgnanie (2007) | bluray release

Dir: Andrey Zvyagintsev | Cast: Marie Bonnevie, Konstantin Lavronenko, Alexander Baluev | Russia | Drama | 118′

After critical acclaim with THE RETURN, Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s second feature kicks off with a gritty opening sequence that gives the early impression of an edgy and sinuous thriller with a potential for brutal violence. Not so. What we actually get is an unsettling social drama based loosely on a story by William Saroyan entitled The Laughing Matter.

Set in an indiscriminate time and place (could be the seventies, certainly Northerly, could be somewhere in Russia, it is actually Moldova) it has a ‘retro’ feel although we never get the answers to these questions. But this enigmatic quality and an ominous soundtrack adds to the suspence of this unusual film. The story centres on Vera, a timid and insecure mother (played by the Norwegian born actress Marie Bonnevie) and her relationship with Alexander and his brother Mark. It follows on from the tragic events of one summer when they take their two children to the country dacha for a family holiday, and certainly to lay low, although we never find out why. The general mood is one of tension and impending doom that soon descends into bewilderment as the sprawling story unfolds. Overlong and at times confusing, this is certainly not the masterpiece it led us to believe it would in the opening sequence, it is nevertheless a film that begs to be noticed for its cinematic impact and well-crafted performances. Meredith Taylor ©

OUT ON BLURAY |16 APRIL 2018 | ANDREY ZVYAGINTSEV

All the Money in the World (2017) ****

“There’s a purity to things, that I’ve never found in a human being” says the billionaire oil magnate John Paul Getty as he drools over his art treasures in Ridley Scott’s rip-roaring rollercoaster of a thriller that deftly explores the psychology behind the super rich. Yes, they are “different from us, they have more money” and they don’t want to part with a penny. Or so we discover in this lush biopic crime drama that takes us through the events surround the scandal. Apart from mistrust, this cinematic parable also explores the nature of power and of fear – a fear of letting amassed wealth drain away to the next generation.

Getty senior famously refused to pay the ransom demand for the release of his favourite grandson – then only 16. The film opens on a sultry summer evening in Rome (1973), where John Paul Getty III is bundled into a van by Calabrian gangsters. The tough old tycoon suspects the boy of colluding with his mother in the scheme, but also resents the power struggle and wants to avoid setting a precedent for kidnappings everywhere.

Gorgeous to look at – like flipping through a Seventies copy of Vogue or Tatler – this is an intoxicatingly visual romp through events. It also pictures the life of the glitterati at play and under pressure in their plush playgrounds. Richly adapted by David Scarpa from John Pearson’a paperback Painfully Rich: The Outrageous Fortune and Misfortunes of the Heirs of J Paul Getty. The story still has resonance for many who remember the spate of Red Brigade kidnappings (1973 – 1978), when kids of rich Italian industrialists – and often their entire families – were forced into exile in Switzerland.

Extraordinary also that Christopher Plummer was a last minute shoe-in for the disgraced Kevin Spacey: he slips into his role with the consummate ease of a python slivering over a plump leather setttee. Glinting and salivating over his precious art collection – as his oil empire ratchets up another million – he fondles the telex tape as if it were made of satin. There’s a touch of poetic licence to the drugged-up way Getty Senior’s son John (Andrew Buchan) is portrayed – in one scene he is wheel-chaired and comatose, but this gives more importance to Michelle Williams’s role as the smoothly delightful Abigail, his petite but deadly plucky wife and mother of kidnapped Paul (Charlie Plummer in another thoughtful turn). Mark Wahlberg plays his standard role as Chase, Getty’s CIA-trained negotiator and bodyguard. There is also a vignette for Olivia Magnani the silky brunette from Paolo Sorrentino’s sophomore feature The Consequences of Love (2004), she plays the wife of arch mobster Mammoliti (Marco Leonardi). The only slightly bum note is the over-sensationalised Italian kidnap sequences where Roman Duris does his best a good guy/gangster Cinquanta with a French accent and the swagger of League of Gentleman’s ‘Pop’. But that’s a small criticism of this lush and supremely enjoyable way to start 2018 filmwise, smug in the knowledge that money isn’t everything – but it helps MT

OUT ON RELEASE FROM 5 JANAUARY 2018

Rey (2017) ****

Dir: Niles Atallah | Biopic Drama | Chile/France | 91′

California-born, Chile-based Niles Atallah’s King (Rey) is a surreal imagined drama with roots in the largely forgotten history of Patagonia and based on the life of the French country lawyer Orélie-Antoine de Tounens (1825-1878), who travelled in 1860 to a remote part of southern Chile, where Mapuche Indians were in fierce battle for survival with Chilean military forces keen on expansion. Mapuche folklore told them to expect a white visitor who would help them to unite their native Indian population in the region into the new Kingdom of Araucania and Patagonia, and so agreed to make him the hereditary monarch of this realm that is typically accepted as part of Chile and Argentina. The story of how far he got in realising his dreams is shrouded in mystery, but Atallah is not so much interested in facts, but in the mindset of the man who wanted to be King.

Told in five chapters and an epilogue, we first meet de Tounens (Lisboa) riding on horseback through the Patagonian wilderness, holding in his hand a self-made flag: the self-declared King is on the way to meet Mapuche chief Manil, to discuss the foundation of the kingdom. But Manil has died, and his son Quilipan, is not willing to meet Tounens, because he is a white man (winka) and the Gods would be angry if he stayed. Tounens is accompanied by the scout Rosales (Riveros), who soon betrays him to the Chilean authorities. Imprisoned, Tounens is put on trail; in the courtroom, everyone is wearing a mask. Tounens is accused of plotting the overthrow of the Chilean government with the help of France, supported by his fellow countrymen Lachaise and Desfontaines, who are “ministers’ in his cabinet. Threatened with the death penalty, Tounens is finally deported to France.

Atallah asks the question: why would a rather ordinary man from the Dordogne want to become the monarch of a wild region of South America? During his research, Atallah discovered how Tounens had promised the government in Paris a new colony, called “New France”, three times the size of the motherland, and full of mineral wealth. Yet to the director this is only part of the story, because nobody recorded the tale from the Mapuche’s perspective. Even today, along with the other indigenous inhabitants, the Mapuche don’t feel like being part of Chile or Argentina; they are discriminated against, and live in fear of the authorities.

Atallah has created the fictional aspect of history re-told in his own way: in 2011 he buried the film stock of 35mm, 16 mm and Super Eight in his garden, to see for himself what history does to film. Furthermore, he used stop-motion and puppetry in the deliriously feverish passages of his feature; on top, images are scratched and disfigured to give the feature the historic quality he was aiming for. Somehow reminiscent of the work of Guy Maddin, along with Eraserhead, Aguirre and Zama, Rey is inventively creative: a nightmare vision of history with a protagonist who created his own apocalypse. AS

PRINCE ANTOINE IV, the latest heir and pretender to the throne of Araucania and Patagonia died on December 16, 2017 aged 75.

ON RELEASE AT ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 5 JANUARY 2017

Tempestad (2016)***

Wri-Dir: Tatiana Huezo | DoP: Ernesto Pardo | Doc| Mexico | 105′

Tatiana Huezo’s structurally-flawed second feature explores the timely phenomenon of human trafficking and migration through the interweaving stories of two women in Mexico.

While one shares an emotionally subdued story of her conflicted life as circus clown and mother. The other tells of her relief to escape the trauma of a prison sentence for human trafficking that then led to her being locked her away so the government could be seen to controlling the country’s migration issue and keeping it out of the headlines. But although each woman’s story is powerfully emotive in its own right, the individual impact is strangely lost in Heuzo’s decision to disconnect the spoken narrative from the valuable images accompanying them, so limiting the ultimate clout of the revealing experiences central to this female road movie.

TEMPESTAD is a lyrical and often dreamlike socio-political study that speaks from the heart but feels strangely alienating to watch despite its human interest credentials. The visually arresting prize-winning footage of a rain-soaked bus journey through lush landscapes of the massive country bears little relation to Miriam’s voiceover which deals her harrowing time in the confines of a baking-hot male-dominated prison. We hear how she subsequently became one of Mexico’s “pagadores” in a corrupt system where her family was forced to pay for her upkeep in a non-government institution, in order to keep her story from surfacing. Clearly Miriam was unable or unwilling to appear on camera so her words play out on an audio-track over the footage featuring unknown people making their way on a similar journey across Mexico from Matamoros (on the Texan border) to Tulum, over a thousand miles away.

To make things even more confusing, Miriam’s story actually begins in the aftermath to her release from jail and then works backwards to explain how she got there. Then, half an hour into the film, we meet the middle-aged circus clown Adela going about her days combining work and looking after her children. There is no connection between the two women at this stage, but Huezo continues to cut between the two stories without revealing Adela’s involvement in the film, so further weakening the heft of her premise. This all becomes clear in the final denouement. Despite these serious structural errors, Ernesto Pardo’s stunning camerawork is to be applauded in this worthwhile portrait of human suffering that raises the profile of Mexico’s murky past. MT

ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FRO, 5 JANUARY 2018

Mine Own Executioner (1948) | Bluray release

Dir: Anthony Kimmins | Writer: Nigel Balchin | Psychological Drama | UK | Burgess Meredith, Barbara White, Kieron Moore, Dulcie Gray

In the 1940s there was a cinematic fascination with psychoanalysis, madness and psychology in general. Three well known films, Spellbound, The Snake Pit and The Seventh Veil are watchable, if highly flawed, productions. In spite of Hitchcock, Salvador Dali and George Barnes’s photography (Spellbound), James Mason’s suave authority (The Seventh Veil) and Olivia De Havilland’s commanding presence (The Snake Pit) all are romanticised, over-wrought and heavily Freudian. None presents an authentic picture of the very hard practical struggle to be an effective therapist or a willing patient. And to be honest none was probably meant to.

In 1947 Anthony Kimmins’s Mine Own Executioner (scripted by Nigel Balchin from his own novel) was released to public and critical approval and was that year’s entry for the Cannes Film Festival. Until very recently it was an almost forgotten film. Now issued on Blu-Ray, Mine Own Executioner stands up as probably the best film on psychology from the latter half of that uneasy decade – a time not only of the post-war reconstruction of cities but the building up of confidence again in war-traumatised minds.

Felix Milne (Burgess Meredith) is a lay psychiatrist. He is overworked and under-challenged by his rich and complacent clients. One day Molly Lucian (Barbara White) calls on him to ask if he will consider taking her husband as a patient. Adam Lucian (Kieron Moore) has been severely disturbed by his time in a Japanese POW camp and his killing of a Japanese soldier. An accumulation of anxiety and guilt have made him schizoid – resulting in his attempt to strangle his wife. Initially Milne is reluctant to take on Adam but eventually does. What then follows is ‘a race against time’ plot with Milne trying to therapeutically guide Adam and stop him from attempting to murder his wife again. Added to this conflict are sub-plots about marital difficulties with Patricia Milne (Dulcie Gray) and the psychiatrist’s obsessive sexual interest in Barbara Edge (Christine Norden, as a blonde femme fatale) the wife of a close friend.

Anthony Kimmins (an good all round craftsman) directs Mine Own Executioner with great assurance: assisted by Wilkie Cooper’s photography he gives the film a noirish edge. The scenes with Adam in the jungles of Burma and then the family bedroom are remarkable for their nightmare menace. And in the intimate scenes between Felix and Patricia, Kimmins shows considerable sensitivity with his actors (her patience / clumsiness and his loyalty / irritation are counterpointed with skill and finesse.)

Yet what solidly grounds the film’s mental health practice with mental torment is the subtle scripting of Nigel Balchin (whereas Ben Hecht’s script for Spellbound points up far too much.) Admittedly Balchin had to simplify his novel but he didn’t compromise on its moral alertness. After the war Balchin became an industrial psychologist and, according to his daughter, had always wanted to be a therapist. Balchin’s experience and knowledge certainly shows through. Take the deft manner in which Balchin’s writing plays with the subliminal effect of Freudian symbolism: the cigarette lighter that doesn’t always work, Milne’s fingering of his pipes, the stealing of a walking stick by Adam and his compulsive kicking of a stone on the road plus the breaking of objects by Patricia. Such signage is never made self-conscious. Each small detail beautifully enhances character motivation.

As in Balchin’s novel The Small Back Room (brilliantly filmed by Michael Powell in 1949) there’s a concern with the power of authority, deference and professionalism. The coroner’s inquest scene has him obsequiously lapping up the evidence of Milne’s colleague Dr. Garstein (John Laurie) as more medically credible than Milne’s statement. Whilst in the opening scenes in the clinic, where Milne does voluntary work, the chief administrator declares to a visiting dignitary that “The world is full of neurotics. But we haven’t the money to treat them all.” These niggardly things, related to Milne’s experience and competence, accompany an undermining feeling that Adam was the wrong patient for him.

Performances in Mine Own Executioner are very strong and focussed; here are fallible people placed in destructive and dangerous situations where they genuinely try to do their best. No spectacular breakthroughs but doggedly hard perseverance. To this add sly Freudian references, a desperate man on the roof scene, influenced by Hitchcock, and a prescient war veteran guilt (The Manchurian Candidate and the Vietnam War wasn’t even round the corner) all making for an excellent compelling thriller.

In the credits for Mine own Executioner the words of the poet John Donne appear.

“There are many Examples of men, that have been their own executioners, and that have made hard shrift to bee so;…some have beat out their braines at the wal of their prison, and some have eate the fire out of their chimneys: but I do nothing upon my selfe, and yet am mine owne Executioner.”
Donne, Devotions 1624

The Val Lewton production The Seventh Victim (1942) and Sam Wood’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943) also quote John Donne. No coincidence then that in the forties, there is a renewed academic interest in metaphysical poets and the workings of the mind.

Perhaps the film’s climax could have been more open-ended and downbeat, but this is still 1947 British cinema, and Kieran Moore might have sometimes toned down his acting: however light and dark are carefully balanced both to entertain and instruct. That’s not meant as a dull sounding commendation, nor intended to signify a ‘worthy’ effort but direct you to a tremendously gripping antidote to Hollywood psychiatry. Mine Own Executioner is a really serious film about the psychological damage inflicted by both the helper and the helped. ALAN PRICE© 2018

NOW AVAILABLE ON BLURAY COURTESY OF NETWORK amazon.co.uk

Women on Top | 2017

Hollywood may still be struggling with female representation as 2018 gets underway, but Europe has seen tremendous successes in the world of indie film where talented women of all ages are winning accolades in every sphere of the film industry, bringing their unique vision and intuition to a party that has continued to rock throughout the past year. Admittedly, there have been some really fabulous female roles recently – probably more so than for male actors. But on the other side of the camera, women have also created some thumping dramas; robust documentaries and bracingly refreshing genre outings: Lucrecia Martel’s mesmerising Argentinian historical fantasy ZAMA (LFF/left) and Julia Ducournau’s Belgo-French horror drama RAW (below/right) have been amongst the most outstanding features in recent memory. All these films provide great insight into the challenges women continue to face, both personally and in society as a whole, and do so without resorting to worthiness or sentimentality. So as we go forward into another year, here’s a flavour of what’s been happening in 2017.

It all started at SUNDANCE in January where documentarian Pascale Lamche’s engrossing film about Winnie Mandela, WINNIE, won Best World Doc and Maggie Betts was awarded a directing prize for her debut feature NOVITIATE, about a nun struggling to take and keep her vows in 1960s Rome. Eliza Hitman also bagged the coveted directing award for her gay-themed indie drama BEACH RATS, that looks at addiction from a young boy’s perspective.

Meanwhile, back in Europe, BERLIN‘s Golden Bear went to Hungarian filmmaker Ildiko Enyedi (right) for her thoughtful and inventive exploration of adult loneliness and alienation BODY AND SOUL. Agnieska Holland won a Silver Bear for her green eco feature SPOOR, and Catalan newcomer Carla Simón went home with a prize for her feature debut SUMMER 1993 tackling the more surprising aspects of life for an orphaned child who goes to live with her cousins. CANNES 2017, the festival’s 70th celebration, also proved to be another strong year for female talent. Claire Simon’s first comedy – looking at love in later life – LET THE SUNSHINE IN was well-received and provided a playful role for Juliette Binoche, which she performed with gusto. Agnès Varda’s entertaining travel piece FACES PLACES took us all round France and finally showed Jean-Luc Godard’s true colours, winning awards at TIFF and Cannes. Newcomers were awarded in the shape of Léa Mysius whose AVA won the SACD prize for its tender exploration of oncoming blindness, and Léonor Séraille whose touching drama about the after-effects of romantic abandonment MONTPARNASSE RENDEZVOUS won the Caméra D’Or.

On the blockbuster front, it’s worth mentioning that Patty Jenkins’ critically acclaimed WONDERWOMAN has so far enjoyed an international box office of around $821.74 million, giving Gal Godot’s Amazon warrior-princess the crown as the highest-grossing superheroine origin film of all time.

The Doyenne of French contemporary cinema Isabelle Huppert won Best Actress in LOCARNO 2017 for her performance as a woman who morphs from a meek soul to a force to be reckoned with when she is struck by lightening, in Serge Bozon’s dark comedy MADAME HYDE. Huppert has been winning accolades since the 1970s but she still has to challenge Hollywood’s Ann Doran (1911-2000) on film credits (374) – but there is plenty of time!). Meanwhile, Nastassja Kinski was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Honour for her extensive and eclectic contribution to World cinema (Paris,Texas, Inland Empire, Cat People and Tess to name a few).

With a Jury headed by Annette Bening, VENICE again showed women in a strong light. Away from the Hollywood-fraught main competition, this year’s Orizzonti Award was awarded to Susanna Nicchiarelli’s NICO, 1988, a stunning biopic of the final years of the renowned model and musician Christa Pfaffen, played by a feisty Trine Dyrholm. And Sara Forestier’s Venice Days winning debut M showed how a stuttering girl and her illiterate boyfriend help each other overcome adversity. Charlotte Rampling won the prize for Best Actress for her portrait of strength in the face of her husbands’ imprisonment in Andrea Pallaoro’s HANNAH.

At last but not least, Hong Kong director Vivianne Qu (left/LFF) was awarded the Fei Mei prize at PINGYAO’s inaugural CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON film festival and the Film Festival of India’s Silver Peacock for her delicately charming feature ANGELS WEAR WHITE that deftly raises the harrowing plight of women facing sexual abuse in the mainland. It seems that this is a hot potato the superpowers of China and US still have in common. But on a positive note, LADYBIRD Greta Gerwig’s first film as a writer and director, has been sweeping the boards critically all over the US and is the buzzworthy comedy drama of 2018 (coming in February). So that’s something else to look forward to. MT

CATE BLANCHETT WILL HEAD THE JURY AT 71st CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | 8-19 MAY 2018

The Man with the Iron Heart (2017) | Home Ent release

Jason Clarke and Rosamund Pike star alongside Jack O’Connell and Mia Wasikowska in this visually impressive but structurally questionable portrait of the rise of Nazism and the Heydrich assassination attempt at derailing its genesis.

Reinhard Heydrich was the leader of Czechoslovakia under Nazi occupation, and also the man behind the Final Solution. Douglas Sirk was the first to make a film about the affair only a year after it happened in 1943. Fritz Lang followed, and 75 years later came Anthropoid (Sean Ellis). But this is a far grander outing with its stellar cast and cool visual style, and unfurls in two sections; the first describing the rise to power of Heydrich, a swaggering libertine whose military career is masterminded by his politically astute wife (a gracefully convincing Rosamund Pike), who suggests he joins the Nazis at a time where they were merely a collection of incongruous agitators where under the control of Himmler (a shify Stephen Graham) he helps the party to the height of its merciless power. The camera then focuses on the group of Czechoslovak Resistance fighters who plot Heydrich’s assassination.

Scripted by French director Jimenez, Audrey Diwan, and British screenwriter David Farr (Hanna), the film opens in dour mood in the run up to the car journey in Kiel where Heydrich (Clarke) was court-martialed and rejected by the army for his sexual misconduct. After his marriage to his then girlfriend, Lina (Pike) he starts to flesh out as an increasingly draconian and ambivalent tyrant in tense and confrontational domestic scenes with his wife and during his professional duties as the Nazi party takes shape in onset of WWII.

The film flips back and forth incorporating photo montage and building considerable tension and feelings of unease as we witness Heydrich’s strict surface persona as a ‘family man’ and respectable officer to his uncontrolled and violent side that frequently often breaks out leading to his nickname “the man with the iron heart”. At first, Lina appears to have the upper hand, having saved his career and agreed to bestow her bounties on him. But she is gradually diminished by his psychopathic personality into a confused and alienated woman. And this is also a reflection of how wives fared under Nazism. The second half feels looser and far more underwritten with the characters of Jan (O’Connell/Anthropoid), and his Czech colleague, Jozef (Jack Reynor/Sing Street), who arrive in Prague to prepare for their mission, abetted by their Resistance colleagues, including Mia Wasikowska as a love interest. There are scenes of cruel brutality, with children being threatened and families taking cynanide tablets as Guillaume Roussel’s rousing score plays up the emotional bits leading up to the final coruscating showdown in the church where Czechs thrillingly give it their all to a mortifying finale. And Despite the strange dichotomy of its two halves and changes in tone, Jimenez pulls it all off with panache. THE MAN WITH THE IRON HEART is a highly entertaining and intelligent film and deeply affecting. MT

AVAILABLE ON BLURAY and VOD FROM 15 JANUARY 2018

Raw (2016) | Bluray release

Dir: Julia Ducournau | France/Belgium | Horror Fantasy Thriller | 99′

RAW has a distinctive visual style that made it one of the most refreshingly gruesome watches of 2016, scooping awards at Cannes, Sitges and London for Franco Belgian auteur Julia Ducournau. Often gory but never schlocky, her debut feature sees a young vegetarian woman struggle with an identity crisis as she completes her training to be a vet, while gradually growing obsessed by meat.

Justine is desperate to conform to her family’s expectations and fit in with her new friends but a freshers’ night hazing ritual forces her to sample raw rabbit liver, awakening her tastebuds to the temptations of flesh of all kinds – not just the animal variety. Previously committed to a diet of free from beast protein she suddenly finds herself drooling over the lusty bodies of the male students and the blood dripping from the severed finger of her close friend during a particularly challenging bout of bikini waxing.

There are echoes of Cronenberg’s body horror and Belgian cult outing Alleluia to Ducournau’s compelling mix of horror and fantasy thriller, which she describes as “a modern ancient tragedy about too much love”, Raw is both grim and bracing in its originality with a dynamite central performance from Garance Marillier (star of Ducournau’s 2011 short Junior) as Justine, the wide-eyed fresher student we first encounter spitting out a piece of sausage during a family lunch on the way to the Vet college, where they also trained decades before. An unsettling scene featuring a horse’s anaesthesia is then followed by a gruesome initiation ceremony where students are drenched in blood before their exams begin – is this from the horse? All very visceral and disturbing. The scenes that follow in her Vet college are steeped in motifs relating to bestiality and brutality.

Ducournau nips between the genres with the help of her cinematographer Ruben Impens who takes us down into a claustrophobic world of sweaty bodies and frightening procedures including one scene where Justine is plagued by a mysterious seeping rash, while mobile phones capture the zeitgeist of the student milieu echoed in a well chosen score that includes the Orties’ aptly named: Plus Putes que routes les Putes. “An animal that has tasted human flesh is not safe,” How true. This clever filmmaker has since returned to the small screen with the series Servant now on AppleTV+. MT

NOW AVAILABLE ON limited BLURAY from 19th April 2021 |AMAZON.CO.UK

Five Sensationalist Movies of the 1930s

Sensationalism in the media is not a new trend: as early as 1930, film production companies have been luring audiences into cinemas with spectacular war films, swashbuckling historical dramas and lurid tales of the supernatural.

And who better to start with than Howard Hughes, the master of thrills and scandals – in his films and in private life. Hell’s Angels (1930) was planned as a silent film, but the sound revolution made Hughes change his mind. It took over two years to complete after shooting finished as the new technique had to be married to the older version. During the process of shooting, producer Hughes went through four directors: Marshall Neilan; Luther Reed; Edmund Goulding and James Whale. None of them lasted long, and when the feature was released, the credits just named Hughes as the director. The Danish silent-film star Greta Nissen was supposed to play the role the femme-fatale Helen, but Hughes ‘discovered’ the 18 year old Jean Harlow, who would have a successful but short career (she died aged 26 of kidney failure). The filming of the many aerial combat scenes cost the lives of three pilots, and Hughes himself was hospitalised after crashing his plane. By far the most expensive of the five features, Hell’s Angels would cost today 45 Million Dollars. But, compared to contemporary times the story was somehow mundane. Brothers Monte and Ray live in Oxford and join the Royal Flying corps at the outbreak of WWI. Monte is a womaniser, even having an affair with his brother’s girl friend Helen (Harlow)who is shown as a slut. Meanwhile Monty is denounced as a coward and will be dragged by his brother into a daring raid on a German munitions depot. But the escape is successful and their true colours come through when they are captured by the enemy.

Danish director Carl-Theodor Dreyer (Ordet) is known for his austere and minimalist features. Vampyr (1932) is quietly terrifying: DoP Rudolph Mate (D.O.A.) creates an unsettling atmosphere: constantly changing angles as the protagonists emerge from an eerie world of shadows. The vampire in question is an old lady, Marguerite Chopin (Henrietta Gerard). But the real devil is the village doctor who poisons the young Gisele to lower her defences so that the vampire can attack her. Saviour Nicolas de Gunzburg (Allen Gray) has a particularly nasty revenge in mind for the doctor: he suffocates him in a silo of flour, before driving an iron stake through his heart. Vampyr is a poem of subtle images,minimalist in dialogue and sound, the inter-titles more effective than the spoken words.

William Dieterle, Hollywood emigrant from the famous Max Reinhardt Theatre in Berlin, filmed Victor Hugo’s classic The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) as a cautionary tale and a timely reminder of xenophobia and societal prejudice against outsiders. Charles Laughton excels as the titular hunchback Quasimodo, and Maureen O’Hara is Esmarelda. Frollo, the Chief Justice is besotted by Esmeralda, even though she is married. After the Phoebus, Captain of the Guards, is killed, Esmeralda is accused of his murder by the jealous Frollo. Quasimodo and the King of the Thieves join forces to free the innocent woman. Dieterle uses the same fable-like style as in A Midsummer’s Night Dream (1935). Dieterle remains true to his theatrical background in this spectacularly surrealist outing, whose subtle nuances lie in the spoken word.

James Whale (Frankenstein) is the Daddy of the modern horror feature. The Invisible Man (1933) (main picture), based on H.G. Wells’ novel, is a brilliant variation of the “Mad Scientist” genre. Chemist Dr, Jack Griffin (Claude Rains) invents a medicine which makes him invisible. His fiancée Flora Cranley (Gloria Stuart), daughter of Griffin’s boss, literally loses him from the beginning, while Griffin is staying in an inn, trying desperately to reverse the process. But the drug makes him aggressive and murderous, and his victims pile up – particularly during the train crash which sees the police hot on his trail. As always, there are darkly comic moments with Whale: Griffin’s underpants, ‘run’ around on their own, to the consternation of onlookers. The Invisible Man is much more subtle than Frankenstein because Griffin’s metamorphosis is truly chilling.

King Kong, directed in 1933 by Merian C, Cooper and Ernest B. Schloedsack is, in spite of three re-makes, by far the most spectacular version of the tale of ‘beauty and beast’. The gigantic ape falls madly in love with Fay Wray and the ending on the Empire State Building still has an emotive pull that’s never repeated in the much more expansive and expensive modern versions. Having seen it for the first time as a student in Berlin, I remember many of us leaving the cinema, hollering just like King Kong under the arches, as the trains roared past above. AS

FILMS AVAILABLE ON AMAZON PRIME; EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA,

Glory (2017)

Dir.: Kristina Grozeva, Petar Valchanov; Cast: Margita Gosheva, Stefan Denolyubov, Kitodar Todorov, Milko Lazarov, Ivan Savov); Bulgaria/Greece 2016, 101’

GLORY is a spare and rampantly funny satire on contemporary Bulgarian life – crowned with dynamite double twist denouement worthy of Frank Capra.

Groseva and Valchanov reunite with the cast and crew of their standout debut The Lesson. This time Margita Gosheva, is Head of PR Julia Staikova, for the Minister of Transport Kanchev, who has been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. When honest railwayman Tzanko Petrov (Denolyubov) finds a Million Lev in a bag on a deserted railways line and hands the money in, Staikova is all poised for a PR stunt: Petrov will be awarded a medal by the grateful Minister Kanchev (Savov); the whole ceremony captured on TV. But Petrov desperately needs a makeover and Julia’s team sets to work on his stutter. Then Petrov reveals that his fellow workers steal diesel fuel to top up their meagre salaries -, and is prepared to name names. But Kanchev’s lack of diplomacy lets the side down and, to make matters worse, Julia re-styles Petrov with a cheap digital watch, replacing his family heirloom – a Russian ‘Slava’ – which then goes missing. The timepiece is of great sentimental value to Petrov – a metaphor for the traditional Bulgaria – and he won’t be fobbed off with a replacement – that seems to embody all that’s glib about the new. Sadly Julia’s PR stunt goes from bad to worse when a local reporter takes up Petrov’s case. The PR woman emerges a self-seeking, control freak and Gosheva plays her with ruthless inflexibility – giving no quarter to her husband, or gruelling IVF injection schedule. Petrov, on the other hand, hails from a long-gone Bulgaria where Communism and a rural existence are now out of fashion. He’s not after money (just the 85 Lev he had picked up before finding the money bag), but his watch, with an engraving from his father – his only tangible link to the past. Well- paced and punchy, Glory culminates in a well-staged off-camera finale that perfectly caps everything that has gone before in this impressive feature. DoP Krum Rodriquez avoids total realism, always finding new ways to conjure up the cataclysmic difference between the worlds Julia and Petrov inhabit. Finally, the end is a brilliant exercise in off-camera violence, closing this impressive feature. Groseva and Valchanov pull the whole thing off with consummate skill: Who says, that the second film is always the most difficult?

GLORY IS NOW ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE VENUES | LOCARNO 2017 REVIEW.

Berlinale: Generation 2018

Generation 2018: On true fairy tales and magical realities

Last year’s Generation strand featured some really hot titles, proving that youth cinema is capable of surprising and entertaining the older generation – not just its key audience. In its 41st edition, Generation reinforces its reputation for presenting ambitious new discoveries in the international contemporary film scene to young people told at eye level.

16 feature-length films have already been selected for the competition programmes Kplus and 14plus. In the diverse cinematic formats characteristic of the section, narratives follow their young protagonists through magical worlds of imagery, creating their very own realities that make the contradictions of the fragile adult world visible in subtle ways. The complete 2018 Generation programme will be publicised in mid-January.

Generation 14plus

303 | Dir: Hans Weingartner | Germany | World premiere

303 tells the story of two university students, Jule (Mala Emde) and Jan (Anton Spieker) who leave Berlin together in an old camper on a road trip south, but for different reasons. As they philosophise on the world and themselves in passionate discussions, director Hans Weingartner maintains a natural closeness to the two young people against breathtaking backgrounds. After his contribution for the episodic film Germany 09, 13 Short Films About The State Of The Nation (Competition 2009), Weingartner, who was also a GWFF Best First Feature Award jury member in 2006, presents his second film at the Berlinale.

Cobain | Dir: Nanouk Leopold | Netherlands / Belgium / Germany | World premiere

After Wolfsbergen (Forum 2007), Brownian Movement (Forum 2011) and Boven is Het Still (Panorama 2013), Dutch director Nanouk Leopold will be represented at the 2018 festival in the Generation 14plus competition. In her characteristic style of quiet radicalism, her newest film follows 15-year-old Cobain as he wanders through the city in search of his self-destructive mother. On his way he runs into her old friends, social workers and the methadone clinic. In his feature film debut, Bas Keizer gently and stirringly embodies the young man who must grow up far before his time.

Danmark | Dir: Kasper Rune Larsen | International premiere

When 16-year-old Josephine finds out she’s pregnant, she sleeps with laconic Norge and tells him he’s the father. What follows is a wary approach in which questions on responsibility and commitment become increasingly important for the two young people. In his feature film debut, in attentively registered gestures and looks, and keenly observed bodies, faces and things the two protagonists say or don’t say, Kasper Rune Larsen paints a perceptive portrait of young people with deep respect for their wishes and fears, their mistakes and desires.

Güvercin (The Pigeon) | Dir: Banu Sıvacı | Turkey | World premiere

Only on the roof of his parents’ house, above the alleys of a slum in Adana, with his beloved pigeons, can Yusuf find peace, and himself. Finding a foothold in the dystopian world outside is more difficult. Banu Sıvacı’s feature film debut – which she also wrote and produced – follows Yusuf in sharply composed imagery through difficult times. His expressions and the twists and turns of his body open up his very own inner world that has lots to tell about the outside one.

Les faux tatouages (Tattoos) Dir: Pascal Plante | Canada | International premiere

In Les faux tatouages (Tattoos), Pascal Plante tells the story of young love – tenderly, but without drifting into pathos. Misfit Theo, played by Anthony Therrien (lead in Corbo, Generation 14plus 2015), meets Mag on his 18th birthday, and she invites him to spend the night with her. Music is the language they have in common: Framed by wild punk rhythms and filled with youthful passion, a relationship unfolds whose intensity is only increased by its unavoidably approaching end. With great candour and precision, Plante captures the hopes and dreams of young people on their path into an uncertain future.

Para Aduma (Red Cow) | Dir: Tsivia Barkai | Israel | World premiere

Director, Berlinale Talents alumna and Jerusalem native Tsivia Barkai was already a guest of Generation in the 2006 14plus competition with her first short film Vika. In her feature film debut, she tells the story of patriarchic order, and youthful desire and rebellion. Benny, a young woman, lives in East Jerusalem and sees her father’s religious, utopian nationalism with increasing scepticism – unlike the secret embraces of her girlfriend Yael. A story told in pictures as powerful as the stormy yearnings of its heroine.

Unicórnio (Unicorn) | Dir: Eduardo Nunes | Brazil | International premiere

The mysterious drama by Brazilian director Eduardo Nunes develops the story of 13-year-old Maria, who lives alone with her mother in rural isolation. When a young man moves into the neighborhood with his herd of goats, their lives are thrown off balance. Using intoxicatingly immersive images, Nunes transmits the radical language and magical realism of author Hilda Hilst into a mystical, fairy-tale world in an imposing widescreen format.

Virus Tropical | Columbia / France | Dir: Santiago Caicedo | European premiere

Paola is growing up in Quito, Ecuador, as the youngest of three sisters. Dreams burst, companies fail, love grows and withers. In his feature film debut, director Santiago Caicedos translates the autobiographical story of the Ecuadorian comic illustrator Powerpaola into fast-paced, graphically daring, animated images. Emancipatory protest and a declaration of love combine to form an ironic perspective on contemporary Latin America.

Generation Kplus

Allons enfants (Cléo & Paul | DIR: Stéphane Demoustier | France | World premiere

Three-and-a-half-year-old Cléo is the reigning hide-and-seek champion. But then one day she forgets which path she took in the park. Suddenly the world is full of strangers staring at their smartphones. Cléo sets out on her own in the hustle-bustle of Paris in search of her brother Paul, who is only slightly older – and lost as well. In tender proximity to its tiny protagonists, this laconic cinematic fairy tale by Stéphane Demoustier turns the daily urban doldrums into a marvelous cosmos of wonderful things, places and encounters.

The Incredible Story of the Giant Pear | Dir: Philip Einstein Lipski, Amalie Næsby Fick, Jørgen Lerdam | International premiere

Mitcho and Sebastian are quite surprised when they fish a message in a bottle out of the water one day. Inside is a letter from the mayor J.B., who vanished without a trace, and a seed that grows into a giant pear overnight. The pear turns into a sailboat and suddenly the anxious Sebastian and the hydrophobic Mitcho find themselves in the middle of the ocean with a mad professor. Based on the picture book by Jakob Martin Strid, this fast-paced, magical animation by a trio of directors tells the story of an adventurous journey to the mysterious island where Mayor J.B. is now believed to be located.

My Giraffe | Dir: Barbara Bredero | Netherlands / Belgium / Germany | International premiere

Patterson’s best friend has a long neck and soft, brightly-spotted fur. His name is Raf, he was born the same day as Patterson, and he is: a talking giraffe. Now the two of them are turning four, and soon it’ll be their first day of school. Only animals aren’t allowed at school. Inspired by the classic Dutch children’s song and poem by Annie M.G. Schmidt, and told with a wink, this film is an imaginative story on value and flux in an unusual friendship.

El día que resistía | Dir: Alessia Chiesa | Arg/France | World premiere

They play hide-and-seek, read to each other, roughhouse and tumble with their dog Coco: At first glance, the siblings Fan (8), Tino (6) and Claa (4) lead an unburdened childhood life. But they are completely alone, and the forest is just outside, and wasn’t there something about a big bad wolf? With ample sensuality, Berlinale Talents alumna and Argentina native Alessia Chiesa’s feature-length debut unfolds into a dreamy but increasingly gloomy world.

Gordon och Paddy (Gordon and Paddy) | Dir”: Linda Hambäck | Sweden | International premiere

Told in wildly popular Scandinavian whodunit style, frog police chief Gordon, voiced by Stellan Skarsgård, and his assistant Paddy (Melinda Kinnaman) uphold the law of the forest, track down nut thieves and protect forest residents from the fox. Courteousness is legal and dirty tricks are illegal. But that’s always a question of perspective, as this absorbing animation shows using oodles of charm and attention to detail, by filmmaker Linda Hambäck, born in South Korea.

Les rois mongols (Cross My Heart) | Dir: Luc Picard | Canada | European premiere

Montreal, October 1970. Twelve-year-old Manon’s poverty-stricken family breaks apart: His father has cancer and his mother is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. When Manon and her little brother are to be taken to a foster family, she makes a daredevil plan. Featuring stirring actors and skillfully linked to the real-life upheavals, this film manages to create a moving portrayal of those times, simultaneously exposing the lies and lack of understanding in the grown-up world in tragic and humorous ways.

Sekala Niskala (The Seen and Unseen) | Dir: Kamila Andini | Neth / Austral / Qatar | Euro prem

In Sekala Niskala (The Seen and Unseen), Indonesian director Kamila Andini, who presented her debut film The Mirror Never Lies at the Berlinale (Generation 2012) searches for answers to the question of how to say goodbye to a beloved person. Shaped by the Balinese understanding of Sekala – the seen, and Niskala – the unseen, Andini gives the world experience of a ten-year-old girl and her very ill twin brother an imagery of remarkable expressive power.

Supa Modo Germany | Dir: Likarion Wainaina | Kenya | World premiere

This drama by Kenyan director Likarion Wainaina, co-produced by Tom Tykwer, tells the inspiring story of nine-year-old Jo. In her acting debut, Stycie Waweru embodies with touching earnestness the terminally ill girl who dreams of being a superhero. Against all odds and battling the time left her, a whole village takes it upon themselves to make Jo’s last wish a reality: to make a film and star in it. Wainaina succeeds in creating a deeply moving observation of the comforting value of imagination in the face of the finiteness of a still young life.

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | GENERATION PLUS | 15-25 FEBRUARY 2018

Three Brothers | Tre Fratelli (1981) | Bluray release

Dir: Francesco Rosi | Drama | Italy | 113′

Films centred round the death of a parent can be an effective, if dramatically obvious, springboard for an exploration of family feeling. Grief, regret and resentment could potentially explode. Nothing of any melodramatic flavour occurs in Francesco Rosi’s Three Brothers. Here the mother’s funeral takes place near the end of the film, acting as an epilogue to its principal story of the coming together of the brothers.

Raffaele (Philippe Noiret) is a judge, living in Rome, presiding over a terrorist case for which he risks assassination. Nicola (Michele Placido) is a militant factory worker in Turin, whose marriage has failed. Rocco (Vittorio Mezzogiorno) works as a teacher in a correctional institute for boys based in Naples. The North and the South. And three brothers of different generations – aged in their fifties, forties and thirties – leaving the city to return to their countryside birthplace in the region of Puglia.

Early on we quickly realise that Rosi is schematically setting up the story to portray a divided nation under the shadow of the political events at the beginning of the 1980s. That Three Brothers represents a microcosm of Italian society and one of several planes in which Rosi explores culture and character, proving to be a rich seam for a critical humanist enquiry. His threads are angry terrorist threats and actions, industrial action leading to violence, religion presenting a false utopia and marital breakdown and stress. The chaotic tension for the brothers being aligned too, yet not placated, by the old father’s reflections (a magisterial performance from Charles Vanel) and Nicola’s young daughter’s innocence. All the characters live in their separate worlds. Yet Rosi wants them to connect not only through love but with a greater awareness of the problems and contradictions of a disturbed society.

Rosi fully admits to his didactic tone as follows:“Most people in Italy live in despondency and confusion, and in dealing with current situations one must do so with clarity, and risk seeming schoolmasterish.” This approach works well in the café sequence where Raffaele is questioned by the local villagers, watching the TV news about a terrorist incident, over what should be done. The spontaneous and concerned debate is brilliantly executed. It doesn’t work so well in Rocco’s dream sequence where he leads his boys to burn the objects of their poverty and create a false utopia (Deliberatively naïve though the scene may be it’s still artistically mismanaged.)

Rossi’s previous films Salvatore Giuliano (1963) or The Mattei Affair (1973) are overtly more political and angry works. Three Brothers is measured and lyrical. There are fantasy expressions of violence (A chilling assassination of the magistrate on a bus) but it is Rosi’s attempt to reconcile differences, examine conscience and mediate on death that gives Three Brothers its power. Critic Pauline Kael described it as“A wonderful film that moves on waves of feeling”. For once I agree with Kael. The quiet emotional resonance is realised by superb performances all round, the luminous photography of Pasqualino de Santis and the integrity of Rosi’s direction.

If not quite a masterpiece (Rocco remains an unexplored character – his answers to problems is flawed by an under-written script and the director’s occasional lurch into clumsy symbolism) the film contains so many unforgettably poetic moments. The framing of the three brothers, grieving for their mother, just before dawn in the house and courtyard, is a scene played out by as if they were a trio performing elegiac chamber music This almost forgotten film was nominated for an Academy Award. And has never before been available in a video format in the UK. It’s one of Rosi’s finest films. Alan Price©2017 ****

NOW AVAILABLE COURTESY OF ARROW FILMS & VIDEO

The Sin of Nora Moran (1933)

Dir: Phil Goldstone | Writer: Frances Hyland from the play by Willis Maxwell Goodhue | Cast: Zita Johann, Alan Dinehart, Paul Cavanagh, Claire DuBrey, John Miljan, Henry B. Walthall, Cora Sue Collins | USA / Drama / 65 min

Although this poverty row avant-garde masterpiece plainly avails itself of the relaxed censorship of pre-Code Hollywood, it’s quite unlike anything else from that era; its most obvious pre-Code hallmark being the astonishing amount it manages to pack into just over an hour’s running time. Long before the end, your head is spinning from the film’s unending assault on your senses, and critics at the time just didn’t get it (not helped by the catchpenny title derived from ‘The Sin of Madelon Claudet’, for which Helen Hayes had recently received an Oscar; the working title had been ‘The Woman in the Chair’). Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times, for one, dismissed it simply as “all very muddled and parts of it are apt to be exceedingly depressing.” He also claimed that it “strives to emulate the “narratage” story treatment as it was done in ‘The Power and the Glory'”. Since production of ‘The Sin of Nora Moran’ wrapped at the end of June 1933 while William K. Howard’s ‘The Power of the Glory’ (often stated to have inspired the non-linear structure of ‘Citizen Kane’) opened in August, this has to have been simple coincidence, and ‘The Sin of Nora Moran’ goes way, way beyond Howard’s more celebrated film in its use of the form. To Hall, ‘Nora Moran’ was just “a bewildering mass of scenes”, but seen today it’s perfectly easy to follow; you just never know what new technical flourish the extraordinary hybrid of narrative and visual elements past, present and future this film is going to next throw in your face.

Polish-born independent producer-director Phil Goldstone (1893-1963) was a silent film veteran and former president of Tiffany Pictures who had recently acquired the poverty row outfit Majestic Pictures with the intention of upgrading its product. ‘The Sin of Nora Moran’ was the first of only two talkies he directed (the other being a 1937 version of that old exploitation warhorse, Eugène Brieux’s ‘Damaged Goods’); which makes his mastery of the new medium all the more remarkable, aided by Ira Morgan’s Germanic photography and editing by Otis Garrett (later a director himself) that makes Eisenstein look like Mizoguchi. (An uncredited Heinz Roemheld contributes an energetic score that never lets up for a moment, adding to the film’s continental feel.) The film completed, Goldstone continued to demonstrate his commitment to this labour of love by commissioning a sophisticated (if extremely misleading) poster from Alberto Vargas that is better known today than the film itself.

The most surprising thing about this film is that it’s not a remake of a European original, since it certainly feels like one. It was actually based on a play by newspaperman Willis Maxwell Goodhue (1873-1938) originally titled ‘Burnt Offering’; and as befits the title, the script at one point goes into remarkably graphic detail about the process of execution in the electric chair. Nora is injected with an “opiate” (the word used) to prepare her for the end, which paves the way for the hallucinatory stream of consciousness that follows. Sometimes it feels like a German silent kammerspielfilm, at others like forties ‘film noir’ and still others like a wide range of art cinema yet to come (including late Dreyer and early Bergman, Resnais and Oshima). The nearest equivalent I’ve hitherto come across to the remarkable associational non-linear structure of this film – constantly jumping between times, places and viewpoints – is in another neglected masterpiece (from Japan of all places!) Keisuke Kinoshita’s ‘Snow Flurry’ (1959).

Dark-eyed Zita Johann, whose short-lived film career was nearing its end when she made this film, looks haunted as only she could in the demanding title role; while Alan Dinehart is given rather more to get his teeth into, and a somewhat more nuanced characterisation than he was usually accustomed to. Highly recommended. RICHARD CHATTEN

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLuQgtTVPNE

Brad’s Status (2017) ****

Dir/Writer: Mike White | Cast: Ben Stiller, Austin Abrams, Jenna Fisher, Michael Sheen Luke Wilson | Comedy drama | US | 102′

This welcome addition to the intergenerational conflict genre sees Ben Stiller as a father fraught with past regrets and present doubts on a trips that threatens to sabotage the boy’s hopes for the future.

Although BRAD’S STATUS sounds like a maudlin affair, it turns out to be hilarious, insightful and upbeat. Written and directed by Mike White who also stars as one of Stiller’s old school friends – a gay man who has found the same success on screen as he has in real life – this could turn out to one of best comedies of 2018. Stiller plays Brad with a wealth of subtle mannerisms that succinctly convey the modern angst of his midlife crisis in what White terms as “whiteman’s first world problems”, but we all empathise with him in his constant social-media meltdown. Similar to Stiller’s recent role in Noah Baumbach’s Meyerowitz Stories – here he plays the father rather than the offspring, but he’s a man who is essentially happy with his middle class life as founder of a worthwhile nonprofit group who enjoys a stable marriage and a decent rapport with his talented teenager. But a touch of envy and ego creeps in when he ruminates over the perceived successes of his old friends. Brad feels deflated by their fame and financial status, but also at the feeling of being left out of an invitation to a recent reunion gathering, an omission that he puts down to the fact that: “it wasn’t friendship that bonded them, but a perceived level of success”, in a peer group where he feels the inferior member. All these anxieties are relayed in Brad’s stream of consciousness as the two make their way to Boston and Cambridge (Massachusetts). Son Troy is played thoughtfully by Austin Abrams.

Michael Sheen, Luke Wilson and Jemaine Clement also give flawless performances as his successful friends. The humour lies in the series of comedy scenarios showcasing their ‘perfect’ sex and money-filled lifestyles. In contrast Brad ‘sees himself soldiering with his sad little life. And there’s a hint of amusing narcissism too in the way he ‘blames’ wife Melanie (Jenna Fisher) for being too content with her life and not being demanding enough about their choices. The only criticism here is the over-grating score. BRAD’S STATUS is a heart-warming film because Brad is just such a convincing character and one who chimes with us all as we overthink and reflecting on our lives, often to our own detriment. This is cleverly brought to a head by an incident involving Troy’s newfound friend (Shazi Raja), who confronts Brad with his own self-pity and solipsism in an ego-crushing moment that he had hoped might lead to an opportunity for an oldest-swinger-in-town flirtation. The final scenes navel-gazing as the regrets of the past meet the hopes for the future. It’s amusing and highly relevant in capturing today’s mood of mindfulness As Melanie so rightly says: “Be present, I love you”. MT

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 5 JANUARY 2018

Top Ten Indie films of 2017

It’s that time of year again when we take a look back at a year’s worth of indie and arthouse films and remember some we enjoyed most. Meredith Taylor picks her Top Ten releases of 2017.

US DRAMA – CERTAIN WOMEN

The lives of three women intersect is this gracefully understated but convincing drama from US director Kelly Reichardt. Full of subtle insight and lasting resonance. Certain Women Meditates on contemporary life from the female perspective in an utterly enthralling yet low-key, often ambiguous way. Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart and Laura Dern star

FOREIGN LANGUAGE DRAMA – TONI ERDMANN

Filmmaker Maren Ade has created one of the most poignant and refreshingly humorous German arthouse comedy dramas of recent memory – it never drags despite its three-hour running time. Picturing the absurd and often awkward nature of family relationships, this is a life-affirming experience not to be missed, especially at Christmas time. After The Forest for the Trees and Everyone Else, Ade is working her way slowly but surely to the top as most of the most refreshing European writer directors around..

HORROR – THE EYES OF MY MOTHER

This sumptuously crafted thriller is compelling, twisted and terrifying in its quiet and light-footed depiction of loneliness and psychopathy. Nicholas Pesce’s debut is deeply enthralling from start to end (main pic).

UNREQUITED LOVE STORY – SUNTAN

There’s something sad and awkwardly compulsive about this cautionary tale of a misguided intergenerational liaison between a lonely man and a glib young woman who meet in an island paradise. One of the best recent dramas about delusional love and its grim aftermath that perfectly epitomises the sinking realisation of being ‘over the hill’ on a holiday fling, while still holding on to the dream . Slim and but beautifully scenic and deeply resonant in its evergreen theme.

ANIMATION – MY LIFE AS A COURGETTE

Claude Barras’ impressive stop-motion animation is a tender tale probing life’s saddest moments: not a kid’s film but one that chimes with the kid inside us. Heart-breaking yet uplifting at the same time, Celine Sciamma has cleverly scripted Gilles Paris’ sombre autobiography that is both a sensitive study in grief and an authentic portrait of children growing up, coming to terms with sadness and learning how to look after each other. A real gem.

THRILLER – HOUNDS OF LOVE

Based on a true story, this tortured and claustrophobic character study of evil and human depravity is set in a quiet middle-class Australian backwater. Showcasing the dynamite duo of Emma Booth and Stephen Curry as real life partners Evelyn and John White, this is a stunning debut from writer/director Ben Young.

LGBT DRAMA – CALL ME BY YOUR NAME

Despite its awkward title, this charming drama was the breakout hit of 2017 for all audiences not just the gay crowd. Beguiling, mysterious and compelling, Sicilian director Luca Guadagnino conveys the claustrophobic August heat of the film’s Po Valley setting and the chemistry between leads Armie Hammer and Timothee Chalamet – who went on the win various awards – permeates every scene. This is Oscar material and deserves to be.

UK DEBUT – LADY MACBETH

It’s rare that a virago creates mayhem and gets away with it in literature or film. But this is exactly what happens with Florence Pugh’s Katherine in theatre director William Oldroyd’s feature debut, based on classic Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. In 19th rural England, Pugh plays a young bride sold in marriage who falls desperately in lust with a worker on her impotent husband’s rural estate in North Yorkshire. Oldroyd maintains an unsettling dread throughout in a drama brimming with venomous malcontent.

UK COMEDY – MINDHORN

If you liked Alan Partridge or Alpha Papa then Mindhorn will appeal. This is a comedy that washes over you like a cloud of laughing gas – if you’re in the right mindset: there are scenes so hilarious it’s impossible to remain dignified; others so cringingly embarassing you will never been seen wearing lycra again – let along tight jeans, or at least in the way Julian Barratt does as the main character Richard Thorncroft in this big screen debut for TV veteran Sean Foley. Thorncroft is a pot-bellied ‘has been’ who lost his acting talent but not his sense of self belief. The Isle of Man is pictured as a rain-soaked backwater full of caravans and twee tearooms.

BEST DOCUMENTARY – WATER AND SUGAR: CARLO DI PALMA, THE COLOURS OF LIFE

Carlo Di Palma was one of the most influential cinematographers of the 20th century, influencing the careers of Antonioni and Woody Allen with talent, warmth and personal magnetism. His story is told in this memorable documentary that showcases the collaborative nature of filmmaking, showing how Di Palma’s warm approach made everyone he worked with even better.

TOP TURKEY – HAMPSTEAD

Hopkins’ fraud of a film is full of middle-aged cyphers floating around in a fantasy world of the Seventies where they meet for coffee mornings and discuss worthy causes. But in the real place, this lot passed on decades ago to be replaced by the likes of Hugh Skinner’s fundraising nerd or the smiling Romanians touting The Big Issue at every street corner. Robert Festinger’s script teeters from crass to cringeworthy with no laughs to be had, and a score that jars. Hampstead is utterly specious and hollow – even Diane Keaton can’t save it.

BEST CLASSIC BOXSET – FOUR FILM NOIR CLASSICS

A fantastic box set that brings together dazzling high def print of some of the best films in the crime genre: THE DARK MIRROR (1946) starring Olivia de Havilland; Fritz Lang’s SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR (1947) with Joan Bennett and Michael Redgrave; FORCE OF EVIL (1948) directed by the underrated Abraham Polonsky; and Cornel Joseph H Lewis’ THE BIG COMBO (1955); with its terrific score by David Raksin with dynamite duo Cornel Wilde and Jean Wallace. The dual format edition comes with a hardback book on the films. MT

ALL FILMS NOW AVAILABLE AT AMAZON, EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA, ARROW FILMS & VIDEO, ARTIFICIAL EYE and STUDIOCANAL | all films were shown on general release in 2017

Walk With Me (2017)

Dir.: Marc J. Francis, Max Pugh; Documentary narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch; UK 2017, 94′

WALK WITH ME is a tad too lightweight and also overly uncritical of the centralised structure of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh’s process, but it certainly works as an appetiser for learning more about him and his life’s work in the field of meditation.

Directors/writers/DoPs Marc J. Francis (When China met Africa) and Max Pugh (The Road to Freedom Peak), who were also co-producers and co-editors, have created a loving, but fragmented portrait of Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, who was born in Hue, Vietnam in 1926. He has established the ‘Order of Interbeing’ in the ‘United Buddhist Church’, teaching Mindfulness Training and ‘Fourteen Precepts’ originally in one monastery in the South West of France (Plum Village) and four in the United States, where Thich had been a regular participant on the lecture circuit before his debilitating stroke in 2014. Recently, centres in Paris, Hong Kong, Thailand, Australia and Germany have been added.

Mindfulness has entered the mainstream dictionary of Western business consultants; who, with many other visitors from all walks of life, around 45000 yearly, are paying guests in these monasteries for a respite from their stressful life. Here the boarders live alongside female and male monks, who bound by celibacy, : if they disobey these ‘perpetrators’ have to repeat their last ‘development stage’ in this strongly hierarchical order. Having given up all worldly possessions, and committed to a vegetarian diet, the monks are reminded, every fifteen minutes by a bell or gong, to interrupt their activities so as “not to fall into the trap of running on auto-pilot”. Outreach work is encouraged, an episode in State Prison is particularly interesting. Every two years, monks are all allowed to visit their families. In a hilarious scene, the parents of one young monk show him a life plan he had drawn up as a young teenager, where every personal and professional achievement is shown in yearly stages, ending with a total success story at the age of forty.

It is almost impossible to film any concept like mindfulness. The directors often drift into Terrence Malick territory, when showing the commitment to nature. And the long shots of preparing food, or eating rice cakes with slow deliberation, are not enough to get the audience nearer to an understanding of this state of being. Perhaps, the key lies in Thich’s autobiography. When he was an ordained monk in his native Vietnam, he was also, since 1956, the editor of ‘Vietnamese Buddhism’. In this capacity he contributed to the political life in his country. After visiting the USA at the beginning of the 1960s, he returned to Vietnam in 1963, where he got active in the Peace Movement, making neither friends with the South or North Vietnam leaderships. Or the CIA for that matter, who sabotaged him being included in a more peace-minded government in South Vietnam. He returned to the USA, meeting Martin Luther King, who proposed him for the Nobel Peace Price. With the war in his homeland becoming more and more vicious, Thich moved to France in 1968, founding his first monastery near Paris. His teachings stem from being totally frustrated by the results of any political action he had undertaken. So, yes, WALK WITH ME is certainly worth a watch but not the ‘be all and end all’ of this worthwhile state of being or the Monk’s work. AS

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 5 January 2018

Napoléon (1927)

One of the highlights of silent film is the digitally restored version of Abel Gance’s cinematic triumph NAPOLÉON. This magnificent film is enhanced by Carl Davis’ rousing score and technical touches to reveal the original tinting that make it feel edgy and contemporary enough for modern audiences as it approaches it centenary.

It portrays the early life of the legendary French soldier who was go on to make his mark in world for centuries to come. In opening scenes Napoleon Bonaparte is seen playing with his school friends in the snow, already asserting his powers of leadership in an impressive performance by Vladimir Roudenko. Albert Dieudonnéthen plays the adult Napoleon as he forges ahead with a successful military campaign in Italy. Running at over 5.5 hours, this is an absorbing and thrilling experience blending melodrama with moving musical interludes and combining intimate domestic scenes with full scale widescreen historical recreations that offer insight into the French Revolution and Italian campaigns of 1796. MT

Digitally restored by Photoplay Productions and the BFI National Archive, with a newly-recorded score, composed and conducted by Carl Davis, Napoleon (1927) comes to UK cinemas, DVD/Blu-ray and BFI Player | Back this December 2017

Jupiter’s Moon (2017)

After success with his Cannes Un Certain Regard winner White God (2013) Hungarian auteur Kornel Mundruczo mades it into the festival’s main competition last year with this flawed sci-fi thriller that sees a young immigrant shot down while illegally crossing the border into Hungary. Terrified and in shock, he finds his life has mysteriously been transformed by the gift of levitation.

Clearly the director has honed his craft since his previous arthouse winner with its strong amd imaginative narrative . JUPITER is visually more ambitious and technically brilliant but narratively a mess. The bewildering storyline starts off with a great premise – a Syrian refugee becomes an angel in one of Jupiter’s Moons where a cold ocean known as Europa spawns new forms of life. The metaphor is clear and cleverly thought out yet the film tries to be too many things, a political commentary and an action thriller: less would have been far more effective than more. After a blindingly intriguing opening scene, the shaky handheld camera continues in a tonally uniform almost continuous take that eventually feels exhausting, and hardly ever gives up, detracting from the enjoyment of the stunning set pieces.

Zsombor Jéger is the central character but not a sympathetic or particularly engaging one as Aryan, the Syrian refugee who is gunned down by László (György Cserhalmi), the nasty leader of a refugee camp in Budapest. Aryan survives his injuries and then discovers an uncanny ability to float, and from then on desperately tries to find his father with the help of a nefarious doctor, Stern (Merab Ninidze), who has been struck off for medical malpractice. Aryan is inveigled into a plan to defraud Stern’s rich patients into believing he has faith healing properties, but this is a tenuous ploy that again feels too gimmicky.

White God had a believable plot with engaging characters but Jupiter’s Moon, although a far more technically skilful film, feels hollow, glib and also frankly quite laborious despite the arresting visual wizardry of White God cinematographer Marcell Rév. Ninidze Stern’s Gabor is a quixotic and cunning rogue and far and away the most exciting character in an ensemble of cardboard cyphers. Along with the visual mastery there is an impressive atmospheric score that helps to ramp up the tension and also adds a certain gravitas. A shame then that the whole things feels so underwhelming and unwieldy as a story. Clearly the director is trying to up his game but needs to establish whether he wants to go for arthouse audiences or the mainstream crowd. White God was starting to build him a fanbase, but this seems like a step backwards. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 5 January 2018

Kills on Wheels | Tiszta Sziwel (2015) | bluray release

Dir.: Attila Till; Cast: Zoltan Fenyvesi, Szabolcs Thuroczy, Adam Ferkete, Monika Balsai; Hungary 2016, 105 min.

Phantasy and reality coalesce in director/writer Attila Till’s (Panic) feature KILLS ON WHEELS, when a disabled trio become successful serial killers using their wheel chairs as a perfect camouflage. Casting aside taste and political correctness, Till unleashes his mayhem with tongue firmly in cheek in this a darkly comedic buddy movie.

Two disabled teenagers, Zoli (Fenyvesi), suffering from a spinal deformity, and Barba (Fekete), who has mild cerebral palsy, share a room in a care home where they are working feverishly on a graphic novel in which they overcome their disabilities and excel as heroes. Into their lives comes ex-fire fighter Rupaszov (Thuroczy): who looks like a grizzly bear and seems ill-fitted to his wheelchair. Straight out off jail, he is working as a hitman for a Serbian gangster. Rupaszov employs the boys as helpers, but his Serbian master asks him to kill them, getting rid of witnesses is his code of survival. Rupaszov nearly follows through, attempting to drown his helpless victims, before having second thoughts in this raucous comedy that is Hungary’s hopeful in next year’s Academy Awards.

There are two sidelines in the narrative: Rupaszov had a relationship with a nurse, who is now getting married, the ageing ex-fire fighter making a fool of himself at her wedding. Whilst this strand is well integrated, Till’s attempt at seriousness sits rather uneasily with the audience: Zoli needs a life saving operation, and his mother (Balsai) is willing to get the money from her divorced husband, Zoli’s father, who left soon after his birth. Not able to cope with a disabled child, he fled to Germany. Whilst his mother pleads in vain with him, Zoli would rather die than ask his father for anything. Luckily for him, the trio is getting more and more successful in their chosen profession…..

This rowdy and often violent caper is carried forward by the two disabled teenage actors Fenyvesi and Ferkete, imaginative images supplied by DoP Imre Juhasz. One of the assassinations on a beautiful square in Budapest is choreographed in the style of a ballet for wheelchairs. The Hungarian title means “From the button of my heart”, referring to the coming-of-age aspect of the narrative. Whilst everyone wants to see the disabled being more integrated in society, the choice of their liberating profession is somehow embarrassing, even though the merging of the graphic-novel into real life takes some of the sting out of it. In spite of its originality KILLS ON WHEELS is slightly repulsive, since the use of violence, however ingenious, is disturbing, relegating it the to the curio status – not withstanding its success at the Hungarian box-office. AS

DUAL FORMAT RELEASE ON 15 JANUARY 2018 | MONTAGE PICTURES RANGE | EUREKA ENTERTAINMENT

The Prince of Nothingwood (2017)

Dir.: Sonia Kronlund; Documentary with Salim Shaheen; France/Germany 2017, 85 min.

In her first full length documentary feature, Sonia Kronlund captures the desperate atmosphere in Afghanistan where its most prolific filmmaker, Salim Shaheen struggles to create no-budget movies in this war torn country – 110 so far – and he’s still only in his fifties.

Best known for her work in French television, Kronlund has an in-depth knowledge of Afghanistan and is highly aware of the dangers in following Shaheen on his trip to the mountain region of Bamiyan, where he is going to shoot number 111 of his oeuvre: filming with take place in a safe area, they still need security guards.

Shaheen emerges a fiesty character and a film maniac: as a child he sneaked into the local cinema whence he was sent packing, and punished when he got home. He made his first short films in his mid teens. His brother lost his life in the Soviet invasion of 1980, and forced Shaheen to flee to Iran. Two years later, he joined the Afghan army and was lucky to survive, playing dead during an attack. A year after demobilisation, he married his first wife in 1984 and acquires a VHS camera, directing his first feature The Undefeated. With support from friends and family members in the cast and crew, Shaheen Films was born in 1892, as the Soviet Army was retreating. A decade late he opened a makeshift cinema in his basement. But the 1993 Civil War hampers his film projects: Whilst shooting Gardab, a rocket killed ten of his crew, the director had a narrow escape. With the Taliban is hot on his heels, he continues his filmmaking, but they still burn many of his features. Eventually fleeing to Pakistan, he made a living as an actor, but once again returns to his homeland in 2001, after the Taliban’s fall, undefeated and undefaticable – producing about ten films a year; slowing down to “only’ five features a year from 2009.

There is a role-play going on between Kronlund and Shaheen: he is the great male leader, she is the very frightened woman, asking for his macho protection. But there are limits even for Shaheen: Kronlund never gets to interview the director’s two wives, or his daughters: they are kept away from the camera. The film’s title is a quote by Shaheen: ‘not Hollywood, not Bollywood just Nothingwood’. And he really makes films out of nothing for a severely curtailed home market, because there are only four functional cinemas left in Kabul. Kronlund’s portrait of Shaheen runs parallel to the war, which has never left the country. Even when shooting in Bamiyan, they discover the Taliban has destroyed the Buddha relics. Shaheen has to be a emotionally resourceful, often masquerading as a clown for the benefits of authorities, flighting to survive and create in this sad, impoverished country. AS

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 15 DECEMBER 2017

Persona (1965) Ingmar Bergman Retrospective January 2018

Dir.: Ingmar Bergman; Cast: Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Margaretha Krook, Gunnar Björnstrand; Sweden, 83′.

Silence has always played a big part in Ingmar Bergman’s oeuvre – his 1963 feature The Silence being a perfect example of his near obsession with the theme. In The Silence it was God who was the un-communicative element. In Persona an actress uses silence as a way of protecting herself in a loosely structured philosophical discourse exploring the wider meaning of the word ‘persona’.

During her performance of Electra on stage, the actress Elisabeth Vogler (Ullmann) suddenly stops reciting her words, as if making a conscious decision not to utter another line during the play. After a medical examination a doctor (Krook) diagnoses her physically and psychologically sane, and she is sent with nurse Alma (Andersson) to a remote seaside retreat to recover. Alma tries to help Elisabeth, opening up to her, and sharing intimate secrets in the hope of bonding with her patient. To no avail. When Alma later discovers that Elisabeth has denigrated her in a letter to her doctor, Alma. is naturally discouraged and disillusioned. The two women engage in a psychological battle, but the result is a merging of their psyches as they gradually become more like each other: in the end, Vogler’s husband (Björnstrand), visiting the two, talks to Alma, mistaking her for his wife.

Freud compared dreams to an archaic language whose interpretation could be contradictory. Delving deeper, he examined the work of the linguist K. Abel, to find out about the opposite meaning, or antonyms, to certain words whose lexicography or roots appear to contradict their contemporary meanings. The word ‘person’ means a man or woman in possession of all faculties. But the French word ‘personne’ can mean someone or no-one depending on the context in a sentence. In PERSONA Bergman, examines the double meaning of the word ‘mask’: is the actress, in this case Elisabeth, using the mask, on stage, to hide her face, to deliver the text faithfully, or to cover up her deepest feelings. Littre wrote that mask means “wrong face, painted on”, and therefore de-masking allows the true meaning of the person’s intentions to be disclosed. By confessing her own deeper self, Alma (meaning: the giver of good) offers up her own confessions.

According to Greek mythology, Electra saved her little brother and disobeys her stepfather’s orders so as to save her real father. In the same way, Elisabeth uses her silence to ‘disobey’ society. But when Alma discovers what Elisabeth really thinks about her, she loses her own identity: instead of giving, ie. healing, Elisabeth’s unkind words diminish her. But at the same time, Elisabeth has destroyed their complicity: her mask has dropped, destroying their relationship. In de-masking her, Alma becomes Elisabeth: the nurse had undergone an abortion, and Elisabeth had also harboured murderous feelings towards her own child.

The brilliance of Sven Nykist’s compositions almost eclipse Alma’s monologue, as we are mesmerised by the poetic ebb and flow of the characters’ faces, melting into the landscape. As ever, Bergman is relentless: Mallarme wrote about the rich, decoded postulates, but Bergman proves that he only deals in delusions.

PERSONA HEADLINES A SEASON OF INGMAR BERGMAN’S FILMS DURING JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 | BFI SOUTHBANK, LONDON

Alice in the Cities | Alice in den Stadten) 1974) | Restored and Remastered

Dir.: Wim Wenders; Cast: Rüdiger Vogler, Yella Rottländer, Lisa Kreuzer; West Germany 1974, 110’.

ALICE IN THE CITIES was one of a trilogy of early road-movies by German director Wim Wenders, but the first in which found his very personal style. With the glowing b/w images of his regular collaborater and DoP Robby Müller (Paris, Texas), Wenders develops a poetic realism dealing with a psychological conflict in a subtle and often lyrical way.

German journalist Philip Winter (Vogler) has been sent to the US, to write about the daily life on the sub-continent. But he is traumatised by the visit, losing his ability to hear and see. When he finally returns to his newspaper headquarters New York, all he has to offer is some rather personal Polaroid photos. Winter literally flees New York – but is stopped at the airport where flights to Germany are suspended due to a strike. Booking a flight to Amsterdam – the nearest city to Germany – he meets Lisa Van Damm (Kreuzer) and her nine-year old daughter Alice (Rotländer). Lisa has just split up with her husband, and the three spend the night in a hotel – but when Vogler wakes up, he is alone with Alice. Lisa turns out to be an elusive character: she misses two rendezvous’ at the Empire State Building and Amsterdam airport. Winter travels with the girl to Germany to try and look for Alice’ grandmother, a woman called Krüger who lives in Wuppertal. As it turns out, she really lives in Munich, where Lisa has joined her as the police search desperately for Vogler and the young girl.

Vogler is a rather fragile character, like most male protagonists in Wenders’ features before he moved to the US. There is even a hint of gender confusion: Vogler gets on much better with Alice than his girlfriend Angela, and when he finally returns to Germany, life goes back to normal. There are some great shots of the mono-rail train in Wuppertal, and a long scene in a café, where an old-fashioned jukebox is the main attraction, rather than Alice and Vogler, who make an unconventional couple rather reluctant to give up their journey – by now Vogler’s emotional immaturity has put him on the same developmental stage as Alice, who gains confidence in the company of this older man. An Ozu-like helicopter shot of a slowly disappearing train ends a road movie about little sense and much sensibility.

Yella Rottlander is the standout here, as the film’s title suggests. Alice not only dominates Vogler, but the whole feature. She is sometimes capricious, but very much able to adjust to situations and people. Her screen presence is astonishing, and she totally lacks self-consciousness. Vogler’s Winter is a day-dreamer, who loves to get lost: not it’s not only women are an enigma for him. Wenders direct this elegy of two lost souls with great understatement and perceptiveness. The often dreamy images complement the fairy-tale allure of this adventure. AS

NOW OUT ON BLURAY DVD DUAL FORMAT FROM 4 DECEMBER 2017

Song of Granite (2017)

Dir.: Pat Collins; Cast: Colm Seoighe, Michael O’Conthoala, Macdara O’Fatharta, Jaren Cerf, Kate Nick Chonaonaigh; ROI/Canada 2017, 98 min.

Pat Collins’ portrait of Irish Dean Nos singer Joe Heaney (Seosamh O hEanai) is an exercise in displacement. Elliptically, and often enigmatically, we follow Heaney from the village of Carna on the west Coast of Ireland, where he was born in 1919, to his exile in the United States and Canada – from the mid 1960s until his death in 1984.

Biopics often fall short of our expectations due to endless Talking Heads sharing their own thoughts, but here Collins relies on sound and image to get his subject across, at it works. Heaney is played by three different actors: Colm Seoghe as a boy – by far the most impressive of the trio; Michael O’Conthoala in his forties and Macdara O’Fathharta as the ageing Heaney in his sixties. Heaney lived for a long time in isolation in Carna, he was only “discovered” by the public at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, after which he emigrated to New York. Collins does away with a narrative structure; long shots and many close-up framing of faces are mixed with static shots of landscapes, giving the feature the feeling of a daydream. Sometimes Collins switches to plain naturalism: when an ethnomusicologist visits Heaney’s village, his father sings into an ancient recoding machine, Collins arranges the scene with four villagers in framing his father, the background is made up by a two door-shaped crevice. The camera wanders from back- to foreground, creating a composition, which is conceptual perfect – but creates a feeling of distance. The same can be said for the shots in New York -actually filmed in Montreal: Heaney in his porter uniform, lonely in his basement flat, meeting another Irish musician and the introduction of two females, Rosie (Cerf) and Maire (Chonanonaigh), whose identity remains in the dark – as do many aspects of this docudrama. The Irish folk songs, liberally sprayed throughout, are taken in long takes, performed without instrumental accompaniment, are also part of the overall structure, creating a historical, almost anthropological style.

Whilst Collins aesthetic braveness should be applauded on the one hand, Heaney remains an elusive figure: his feeling of displacement in North America is underwhelmingly documented. We never get any nearer to who Heaney was. He is sucked into the structure of a film whose aesthetics are taken much more seriously than the character it aims to portray. Overall, this leaves a hollow feeling, almost like an idyllic picture postcard from a bygone era. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 15 DECEMBER 2017 NATIONWIDE

Una (2017) | HE/Bluray release

Dir: Benedict Andrews | Writer: David Harrower | Cast: Ben Mendelsohn, Rooney Mara, Ruby Stokes | 91′

The intensity between Rooney Mara and Ben Mendelsohn make this disturbing drama a compellingly haunting if ultimately rather unsatisfying experience. Adapted for the screen by David Harrower from his 2005 play Blackbird, the film has a strange, fractured structure that flips back and forth losing much of its dramatic heft in the process. Mara is Una a young woman who was seduced by Ray (Mendelsohn) a middle-aged father and neighbour when she was only 13. This may have worked for Una, had he not then left her, and this sexual abandonment lies at the core of her need to track him down and resolve the emotional conflict that has obsessed her for the previous 15 years. Meanwhile Ray has a good job in retail, and has changed his name. The two-hander plays out in Ray’s workplace, like the chamber piece of its origin, with occasional forays into the outdoors. There’s a strange feeling of alienation heightened by Thimios Bakatakis’ cool interior visuals, placing the central characters in semi-lit separate frames, with Jed Kurzel’s eerie occasional score, unmistakably echoing his work on Snowtown and The Babadook. Ruby Stokes plays the young Una, in a confusing way – with Mara’s voiceover – that initially makes us mistake her for Ray’s real daughter. Harrower’s clammy claustrophobic treatment makes for an unsettling denouement to this sorry, but all too familiar tale of rejection, sexual frustration and unrequited lust. MT

NOW OUT ON BLURAY | 8 JANUARY 2017

7 Neo-Realist masterpieces

The Italian Neo-Realist movement kicked off just after the Second World War and brought together a group of Italian filmmakers who focused their ideas on stories set amongst the poor and the working class reflecting the austerity of the era and government cut-backs. Frequently using non-professional actors or children, or professionals playing strongly against their normal character types, the films were set in a background populated by local people brought in for the films.

NEO-REALISM rejected the strict guidelines that had been imposed during the war years by Benito Mussolini’s ‘White Telephone’ films that toed the party line and, instead, explored themes of economic hardship, oppression and social injustice in everyday life, particularly amongst the working classes. These had been brought about by the devastation of the war years and changes in the nation’s psyche after the war which caused fractures in film industry financing and actual physical damage to some film studios and equipment. Not deterred by this a group of filmmakers got together and decided to use this difficulty to create an entirely new style: Neo-Realism was born.

The main protagonists of the Italian school auteur-wise were Vittorio De Sica with Bicycle Thieves (1948); Alessandro Biasetti with the photo-realist 1860,(1934); Giuseppe De Santis with Riso Amaro/Bitter Rice (1949); Luchino Visconti, who made the first film in the genre: Ossessione (1943) followed by Roberto Rossellini’s: Rome Open City, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes just after the War. Manoel de Oliviera (Aniki Bobo/1942) Jean Renoir (Toni/1935) had also embraced the style, and traditional elaborate studio sets gave way to shoots in the countryside and in the open streets.

ITALIAN NEO-REALISM rapidly declined in the early 1950s when the economic situation improved. Viaggio in Italia (1954) was widely regarded as the culminating masterpiece and the film that inspired the French New Wave and, in to a certain extent THE POLISH FILM SCHOOL and Indian filmmakers. By then, most Italians were also ready for the optimism offered by American cinema. The vision of existing poverty and despair, presented by the neorealist films, were seen as a dampener on a nation anxious to embrace the mood of optimism, prosperity and change and no longer wanted their dirty laundry washed in public, so to speak.

The individual became the main focal point in the Italian cinema that followed in the 1960s. Antonioni’s Red Desert and Blow-Up take neo-realist themes and develop them in the search for knowledge brought on by Italy’s post-war economic and political climate. Giovanni Columbu’s Su Re (2012) and Pasolini’s Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo (1964) and Padre Padrone embody the characteristics of neorealism even though they were made much later and therefore cannot be classified as belonging to the genre.

Some filmmakers such as Vittoria de Sica and Luchino Visconti drifted away from pure neorealism into allegorical fantasy with films such as Il Miracolo di Milano (1951). One of the more tragic and moving is Umberto D (left), a story of elderly post war poverty. Other features that embraced the genre are Jean Renoir’s Toni (1935), La Nave Bianca, Roberto Rossellini, (1941) Aniki-Bobo, Manoel de Oliviera (1942); People of the Po Valley, Michelangelo Antonioni (1947) Bitter Rice, Giuseppe de Santis(1949); Stromboli (Roberto Rossellini, 1950); Bellissima (Luchino Visconti, 1951); and Rome 11.00, Giuseppe De Santis (1952). MT

NOW AVAILABLE THROUGH CRITERON, EUREKA Masters of Cinema and AMAZON.CO.UK.

Mountain (2017)

Dir: Jennifer Peedom Narrator: Willem Dafoe | Doc | 74′ | Australia

Willem Dafoe narrates Sherpa director Jennifer Peedom’s dazzling documentary about a growing obsession with mountain climbing. And for those seeking a challenge in their otherwise safe lives, scaling great heights is clearly the answer. MOUNTAIN certainly proves a terrifying watch for those who prefer to admire nature’s peaks from ground level.

Dominated by an overbearing soundtrack, this is a magnificent and vertiginous spectacle. The camera sweeps and soars over the heighest heights of the world often leaving us gasping for breath while pondering the psychological states of those who only feel alive when they are dicing with death. While Renan Ozturk’s camerawork is extraordinarily death-defying, Defoe’s gravelly narration is as craggy as a granite rockface.

The film opens in stark black-and-white, accompanied by the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s thunderous tones, before picturing a lone free climber clinging to a cliff face, exhilarated by the view around him. Peedom describes a need to reconnect with nature that began roughly in the last century when war ceased to provide the derring-do missing in these climbers’ lives. Turning historical, the film points out how the desire to conquer and break new ground all started with Hillary and Tenzing. Whereas nowadays scaling Everest has become almost like queuing on the entrance to the M6 on a bank holiday – with a better view, and a more expensive initial outlay – climbing the mountain requires financial outlay equivalent to remortgaging the house. The losers are often the poor Sherpas who risk their lives because this is often their only way of earning a living.

Apart from mountaineering in snowy peaks, dry rocky peaks are also scaled in a film that crosses continents leaving no stone unturned in the extreme sports scenario: BASE jumping, daredevil mountain biking, wingsuiting (that resembles flying around clad in a giant bat suit). Some clever dick is also seen tight-roping across two peaks in Castle Valley, Utah. Eventually we start to tire of these feats and long for serene rolling hills and gentle valleys – even at 74 minutes the film overeaches its wow-factor. And the frequent vignettes of a Buddhist monk praying feel somehow misguided considering the many sherpas and climbers who have lost their lives rather than found nirvana.. Ultimately this is an awesome undertaking from Peedom who deserves to be congratulated although her film feels more of a personal feat rather than a piece of entertainment. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 15 DECEMBER 2017

Caniba (2017)

Dir: Verena Paravel, Julien Castaing-Taylor | 97′ | Doc | France

Documentarians Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Leviathan) are back with another impressionist take on human behaviour, which although highly imaginative often raises more questions than it answers.

Their last venture somniliques (2017) focused on sleepwalking, and now their camera explores the macabre phenomenon of cannibalism through the life of Issei Sagawa, who was convicted of eating his human victims and is now living a semi-reclusive life and hoping for remission.

The filmmakers actually manage to gain access to Sagawa for a series of palpably disturbing but brief interviews conducted in his home in Japan. It transpires he was deported from France in 1981 after serving a meagre two-year sentence for the murder of Dutch student Renée Hartevelt and since suffering a life-limiting stroke several years ago, he is confined to his home under the sole care of his sibling and rival – the two are clearly in conflict. And whilst the fate of his victims was gruesome, the ageing and infirm Sagawa is not exactly living the life of Laurie since being released from his jail term (which could have been more draconian in his native Japan). As with many killers, his crimes have attracted a certain notoriety and he continues to explore his fetish through creative expression in manga comics and porno film work. He also admits that his cannibalism cuts both ways: he expresses a desire to be eaten, and harmed.Although cannibalism is an extreme form of human behaviour, it is not as unusual or as eccentric as many assume. Some anthropologists even liken it to highly passionate sexual or spiritual desire: a wish to consume or even become one with another being, such as when Christians take in “the body of Christ” during the Communion service. So the expression: “you look good enough to eat”, has both a literal and a metaphorical significance.

Visually this is a sensual piece of filmmaking – in the most disturbing way possible. Intimate close-ups of bloated faces and distorted limbs float across the screen and the score is suggestive of sucking and licking, while explicit sexual activity actually takes place between – what we assume to be Sagawa – and an unnamed woman. The film is also enlivened by home movie footage of Sagawa and his family. The filmmakers keep their distance from the subject matter, never attempting to probe or offer any explanation. Their experimental approach is purely observational and it works. MT

NOW ON RELEASE AT ARTHOUSE CINEMAS | UK Premiere Saturday 16 December Bertha Dochouse

Mountains May Depart (2015)

Writer| Director: Jia Zhang-ke | Cast: Tao Zhao, Yi Zhang, Zijian Dong, Jing Dong Liang | 131′ Drama China

“Time will transform mountains and rivers, but our hearts will remain the same “

Jia Zhang-ke’s MOUNTAINS MAY DEPART is an beguiling and ambitious piece of filmmaking from a Chinese director whose previous dramas A Touch of Sin and Still Life have inventively captured the changing face of modern China.

Opening as a feisty arthouse love story in the director’s hometown of Fenyang, in the mining province of Shanxi, south of Beijing, the film gradually morphs into a creatively expansive essay film on the future of a wealthy Chinese family and the challenges it faces in adapting to life in a globalised society of Australia. The narrative unfolds in three parts that take place in 1999, 2014 and finally 2025.

The central character Tao is celebrating the dawn of a new century to the rhythms of an old one, in the ancient streets of Fenyang. China has embraced Western capitalism and fast-forwarded itself into a rapid expansion which will see its economy eventually crash and burn within two decades. The new Gods are technological rather than spiritual: cars, machines and mobile phones: and the alienating power of communicating without interacting is strengthening its soul-destroying grip on society.

The director’s wife and longtime collaborator Zhao Tao (Still Life) plays Tao, a simple carefree country girl, in love with Liang (Liang Jingdong) a coal-miner, but is soon tempted into arms of nouveau rich entrepreneur Jingsheng (Zhang Yi), who takes over the mine where Liang is working and steals his girlfriend in the process. In true ‘Posh and Becks’ style, they name their firstborn “Dollar” in celebration of their wealth in this upwardly mobile lifestyle (Yuan Renminbi would have turned out to be a better name, in hindsight). Eventually the threesome cross paths again in the second act in 2014 where Tao is visibly transformed into a sad and introspective woman who realises the error in her ways, and is reduced to a state of deep depression following her father’s death. Dollar eventually comes full circle into the present day state of economic meltdown as his life spins sadly out of control, alienated from family and country, and working as a Deliveroo-style courier.

Nelson Lik-wai Yu’s visuals illuminate and enliven this powerfully intelligent and prescient indie which, despite an ill-judged English language third act, and a slightly clunky opening, resonates with a superb central performance from Zhao Tao. MT

NOW ON RELEASE AT ARTHOUSE CINEMAS NATIONWIDE | 15 December 2017

What Will People Say (2017) | Dubai Film Festival 2017

Actor/director Iram Haq’s impressive sophomore title WHAT WILL PEOPLE SAY plays out as a grippingly atmospheric thriller in which a beautiful young Pakistani girl plays the enigmatic and wilful heroine. Screening as a world premiere at this year’s Toronto, it offers refreshing and intriguing take on what could otherwise have been just another story about cross cultural conflict and tragedy or even wander down a fashionable politically correct route.

Nisha (Maria Mozhdah) is leading a double life — at home she is obedient to her traditional Pakistani father – played masterfully here by Adil Hussain (Lunchbox) – but to her friends she is a typical Norwegian teenager, hanging out in bars, dating and spending her time on her phone. But her father catches her flirting with a boyfriend upstairs in the family home one day and brings her world crashing down in a fit of anger, brutally disassociating himself from her behaviour, and taking her off to his family in Pakistan (the locations are actually India).

Haq makes great use of an atmospheric soundtrack to telegraph doom and despair in this often sinister story which makes great use of its snowbound and exotic locations. India looks stunning in Nadim Carlsen’s beautifully composed shots captured both on the widescreen and in intimate jewel-like settings. Apart from the strong central cast, Haq uses periphery characters to warn of danger, tempt and tease a girl who rapidly has to adapt from her Western lifestyle to the world of a closeted and protected unmarried woman in a highly restrictive Muslim-dominated society.

Sadly, Nisha is rather underwritten as a character – whether by intent in respect of cultural traditions or by omission – it’s never quite sure, but strangely this works to the film’s advantage and Haq makes her character come alive a way that feels both authentic and beguiling. Yer we feel for Hussain’s father figure who internally struggles with his duty as a traditional father requiring him to impose draconian measures on his daughter while he still clearly loves her – it’s a tough role but Hussain pulls it off with dignity, strangely evoking our respect and sympathy in this shocking and convincing arthouse parable that lifts the lid on a society that still adheres blindly to its traditions. MT

DUBAI FILM FESTIVAL | 6-13 DECEMBER 2017

https://youtu.be/b8_dBOzufWQ

Faithfull (2017)

Dir.: Sandrine Bonnaire | Documentary with Marianne Faithful | France 2017 | 62′.

With 63 films under her belt, Sandrine Bonnaire is a talented actress but needs to hone her documentary making skills. This portrait of British singer/songwriter/actor/performance artist Marianne Faithful, who celebrates forty years on the stage, is slim not only in running time, but also in technique. She fails to bring out the essence of the English singer, songwriter and actress in a strangely invasive film, reducing Marianne Faithfull nearly to tears on one occasion during filming.

FAITHFULL relies heavily on early Sixties footage and TV clips for its watchability. We learn that Faithfull first met Jagger at a party in early on in her career when she was attacked by the main-stream media for not committing herself to being the motherly female “when there are so many ways for her to spend her days; cleaning the home for hours or rearranging the flowers”. On the London stage, she was Ophelia, confessing unashamedly that she could sometimes not perform, because of drugs. Then there are wonderful clips from “The Girl on the Motorcycle, in which she starred as Rebecca.

But it was a miscarriage at 19, at the end of her five year long relationship with Jagger which really damaged her. “Mick wanted children” – and yes he did indeed, having now fathered eight. What followed was a descent into drugs, influenced by her reading William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. But Faithfull always got up and persevered, as her more recent concerts show, getting even better.

Bonnaire will be remembered for a rather embarrassing scene in the car when Faithfull asked her more than once, to turn off the camera and leave her be. But Bonnaire, instead of listening, put the camera even closer to her wounded face. Subconsciously, the director repeats exactly the treatment the teenage singer got from the establishment press. The only way to enjoy this documentary, is to concentrate on Marianne Faithfull’s music, and there is luckily a great deal to enjoy here. AS

REVIEWED DURING BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2017

Hidden Reserves | Stille Reserven (2017)

Dir: Valentin wolrd Hitz; Cast: Clemens Schick; Lena Lanzemis, Marion Mitterhammer, Daniel Olbrychski; Austria/Germany/Switzerland 2016, 96′

HIDDEN RESERVES sees Vienna 2033 as a frightening dystopian landscape where even dying is not for free. Inspired by Fahrenheit 451, Valentin Hitz’ brilliantly abrasive scenario is stunning to look at and only diminished by his choice of femme-fatale.

This is a world where the capitalist state is greedy beyond the dreams of avarice: we watch as wagon-loads of humans on life-support are ferried into giant warehouses, where they are stored Amazon style. And that is just what these cocoons are: debt-ridden bodies waiting waiting to be harvested for organ donation, surrogacy, or even data storage. Little wonder then that death insurance is literally ‘to die for’, it’s the only surefire way of guaranteeing the ‘right to die’.

Vincent Baumann (Schick) sells death insurance salesmen, and he will go to any lengths to get that signature on the dotted line. Emotionally he is nearly catatonic, sexually he is casual and promiscuous:indulging with his boss Diana Dorm (Mitterhammer) in the company bathroom.
Naturally, this sort of environment needs a counterforce, and it comes in the form of a guerrilla unit, led by the enigmatic nightclub singer Lisa Sokulowa (Lanzemis). The group try to cut off the warehouse power supply to put an end to those suffering on death’s door. Dorm instructs Schick to infiltrate the ‘terrorists’, but once exposed to new blood from outside the sterile insurance system, he falls for Lisa and things get complicated when her father Wladimir (Olbrychski), who invented the depot technology, enters the fray.

DoP Martin Gschlacht (Teheran Taboo) creates an intelligent and visually impressive Sci-fi world where the guerrillas live in a noirish ’60s , and the technocrats’ in hues of chilly blue, the identification installations look like blocks of ice. Schick is superb in his alien mien, even when he turns human – and the scenes in Prater Park, having fallen into disrepair, are magical. This remarkable feature is marred by the choice of Lanzemis as the chanteuse. Singing “Teach me Tiger, or I’ll teach you” – composed by Nino Tempo in 1959, and sang by his sister April Stevens – as a diva Lanzemis’ Lisa channels a cabaret singer of the Weimar Republic, her sole expression throughout is monotonous, tight-jawed annoyance. Have a look at the lyrics of “Teach me Tiger” and you decide: they are extremely daring for the late 1950s, and Lanzemis brings absolutely nothing to the party with her reckless lack of emotional range, seriously putting the whole endeavour in a bad light light. A perfect exercise in miscasting. AS

WINNER | BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY | AUSTRIAN FILM AWARDS 2017

Andrei Tarkovsky | Sculpting Time | Deluxe Bluray Boxset

Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky influenced many contemporary filmmakers, amongst them Lars Von Trier, Claire Denis, Steven Soderbergh and Nuri Bilge Ceylan.

All seven of Tarkovsky’s features including MIRROR (1975), SOLARIS (1972), STALKER (1979) and ANDREI RUBLEV (1966) (left), IVAN’S CHILDHOOD (1962), THE SACRIFICE (1986) and NOSTALGIA (1983) appear on Blu-ray in the much-anticipated Andrei Tarkovsky box set (Tarkovsky.co.uk)

Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) was born in the same year as François Truffaut and Nagisa Oshima. His father, Arseny, was a poet like Bernardo Bertolucci’s father. Tarkovsky called Tolstoi’s “War and Peace” his ‘art school’. He studied Arabic before attending film school. Even though he was not very fond of Sergei Eisenstein, the Stalinist censors both liked their first film – in Tarkovsky’s case Ivan’s Childhood (1962) – but it was censored. Like Eisenstein before him, Tarkovsky was not an easy man to work with. Derek Malcolm reported from the set of The Sacrifice, shot on the Faroe Islands in Sweden, that the British actress Susan Fleetwood shivered in her nightgown for over thirty minutes waiting for Tarkovsky to turn up because, as a production assistant later related, the director was adjusting his scarf in front of the mirror. And after a house was burned down during the shooting of the same film, some parts of the footage was lost due to a defective camera; the director was not happy with the rest of the material, and asked for a completely new house to be built.

The Russian auteur’s films are not about anything in particular; they show a cosmos of everything. “You can’t materialise eternity”, the director said. “And since the world we live in is enigmatic, the images should be the same.” We cannot really classify Solaris a Sci-fi film, or Stalker an adventure film – but in both cases the narrative (if we can call it such) is just a pretence. So be prepared to “live” in his films, go with the slow flow and they will take your breath away.

ANDREI RUBLEV (1969) was a startling achievement. In 205 minutes, the director dramatises the life of the great medieval Russian painter, the episodes are divided in eight chapters. The world of Andrei Rublev, who painted religious icons, is brutal (the infamous death of the horse will upset animal lovers) and chaotic. There is darkness everywhere, and the gloom only lifts in the last scenes, when the black-and-white changes into colour. The film was forbidden in the USSR until 1971, and western versions run with cuts of more than thirty minutes.

SOLARIS is Tarkovsky’s only love story, based on the novel of the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem. As Hoberman pointed out, Solaris very much resembles Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Unlike in most Sci-fi films, there are no gadgets or special effects. When Kelvin, a psychologist, arrives at the space station of the ocean planet Solaris, he finds a artificial manifestation of his death wife Hari, who killed herself ten years ago. Kelvin, still feeling guilty, is only too happy to relate to the ‘new’ Hari, even though he fears that she is just a machine. But her second suicide is harrowing, and Kelvin literally flees back into his childhood. Solaris is by far the most emotional of his films.

MIRROR is a stream-of-consciousness, totally without any narrative. The narrator, on his deathbed, looks back on his life. The only structure is the time-setting: pre-war, war and post-war. Mirror is the best example of his “sculpting in time” approach to filmmaking: images and sound (in this case classical music) melt into a memory lane in which the time frames are interchangeable. Sometimes the film is labelled as metaphysical and it is hardly surprising that the censor’s of the USSR tried even to ban any export of the film, helping to make it into a legend. (The title is on long release at the BFI)

STALKER , based on the novel ‘Roadside Picknick’ by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (whose novel ‘Hard to be a God’ was filmed twice), and tells a story about post-nuclear Russia. Stalker, a man of near super-natural powers, guides a writer and a scientist into the Zone – a fearful place deep underground – a forbidden location, where intruders are threatened with long prison sentences. There are some Sci-fi elements, but unlike Solaris, the narrative somehow holds the action and the meta-physical and spiritual world together. Brown monochrome sepia tones and an abundance of water in all forms (one of the director’s favourite themes), create an end-of-world atmosphere, a surreal place of decay and Wagnerian ‘Untergangstimmung’ .

Tarkovsky’s first feature IVAN’S CHILDHOOD (1962), tells the story of 12-year-old Ivan who, orphaned by Hitler’s invading troops, becomes a scout for the Soviet army, risking his life slipping between the marshy front lines. Ivan’s Childhood won Tarkovsky notice in the West by being awarded the Golden Lion at Venice.

In the early 1980s, Tarkovsky left Russia permanently; his filmmaking career started again in Italy where he followed a TV documentary TEMPO DI VIAGGIO (1983) with NOSTALGIA (1983), written in collaboration with the distinguished screenwriter Tonino Guerra (right). In Nostalgia a Russian writer tours Tuscany with his translator, researching a suicidal 18th century Russian composer. Homesickness and despair frustrate him until he meets Domenico, a madman, who convinces him to take on a task – walking a lit candle from one end of a spa pool to the other – to ‘save the world.’ By the time Tarkovsky started work on his next and final film, THE SACRIFICE (1986) he knew he was seriously ill with cancer. A Swedish production, The Sacrifice is an allegory of self-sacrifice in which a man played by Erland Josephson gives up everything he holds dear to avert a nuclear catastrophe. The use of Josephson and cinematographer Sven Nykvist, both of whom were best known for their collaborations with Ingmar Bergman, indicate the influence of the Swedish director, one of the few directors that Tarkovsky really admired.

Many contemporary filmmakers have been influenced by Tarkovsky; from Béla Tarr and Lars Von Trier to Claire Denis and Steven Soderbergh. Many of his influences are clear – the long takes in Béla Tarr’s WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES (2000) and Steven Soderbergh’s take on SOLARIS (2002), while some directors such as Lars Von Trier, Aleksandr Sokurov and Carlos Reygadas have explicitly cited his influence. The season will include screenings of Von Trier’s The Element of Crime (1984), Sokurov’s Mother and Son (1997) and Reygadas’ Japón (2002). Other work deeply indebted to Tarkovsky which will be screened will include Andrei Zvyagintsev’s The Banishment (2007) Claire Denis’ The Intruder (2004) and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Distant (2002), the latter of which even uses a sequence from Stalker as humorous counterpoint to a porn film on TV. For many great directors such as these, Andrei Tarkovsky remains their guiding spirit. AS

THE ANDRE TARKOVSKY BOX SET | SCULPTING TIME | AVAILABLE WWW.AMAZON.CO.UK

Menashe (2017) |

Dir: Joshua Z Weinstein |Documentary | USA / Israel | Yiddish, English | 81 min · Colour

There’s a faint but unintentional whiff of Woody Allen to Joshua Weinstein’s sorrowful cinema verite portrait of a put-upon Hasidic Jew struggling to survive between the modern world and orthodoxy. This is also the first full length feature in Yiddish for 70 years.

According to the Talmud, the definition of happiness is: “a nice wife, a nice home and clean dishes” but Menashe’s Brooklyn home is an untidy flat where he lives with his young son Rieven after the death of his wife Leah. Chastised by the strictures of his ultra religious local community and particularly ‘The Ruv’, an Hasidic overlord, who demands he re-marry according to the Talmudic Laws, Menashe is desperate to keep his son who is his only consolation as he battles to hold down a job in the deli run by an equally unforgiving boss.

In this predominantly male feature, Weinstein paints womenfolk into a dark corner where their ‘kvetching’ (nagging) and overbearing nature is one of the downsides to life rather than a joy, but it’s very much a case of “you can’t live with them, but you can’t live without them” and this adds to Menashe’s rather miserable situation. Infact, the tubby but likeable chap cannot seem to do anything right either at home or work although he prays desperately to his memorial candle and pleads with his brother in law to let him bring up Rieven. But living with his son is not permitted unless he takes another wife, because “man cannot live alone”, according to the scriptures.

Far from downbeat, MENASHE is an enjoyable and fascinating insight into the Brooklyn Hasidic community and Weinstein adds cinematic texture with vivid street life, lively musical interludes of the men singing and dancing and sweeping views over the glittering skyline. Menashe plays himself and comes across as a rather bumbling but sincere and sensitive father who clearly loved his wife despite their early arranged marriage and discord largely arising from difficulties in conceiving their cherished son, and Menashe buys a tiny pet bird and regales Rieven with nature stories complete with sound effects, to give him a break from his uncle’s stern and rather insipid contribution.

The three-handed script is wise and full of local flavour and insight exploring the nature of fatherhood and religious observance, and a palpable tension builds during the preparations for Leah’s memorial service which Menashe hopes to hold at home, despite his brother in law’s objections on the grounds of its general unsuitability. A surprising denouement offers hope in this heart-warming and affecting snapshot of a niche community dovetailing into the contemporary world. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE AT ARTHOUSE VENUES 8 DECEMBER 2017

Blade of the Immortal (2017)

Dir: Takashi Miike | Writers: Hiroaki Samura, Tetsuya Oishi | Action Thriller | Japan | 140′

Seasoned manga director Takashi Miike seems to be live forever like his hero Manji played by Takuya Kimura in what is purported to be the Japanese director’s 100th film. How can any artist be original with this body of work behind him, Indeed, BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL lacks the inventive touches of his earlier work but it’s certainly enjoyable and as highly polished as Majii’s extensive weaponry. Adapted from Hiroaki Samura’s manga of the same name, it follows a Shogunate samurai warrior who is endowed with immortality due to the poisoned chalice delivered on him by a white-veiled Buddist nun in the opening scenes. This curse – or boon – depending on how you look at it, is delivered in the form of ‘sacred’ bloodworms scattered on his fatal wounds inflicted during a fight to avenge his sister’s death at the hands of the ruthless Itto-ryu, a school of fighters led by the weirdly tattooed Anotsu (Soto Fukushi). In this way he is rendered impervious to lethal wounds – which heal at the drop of a sword – severed limbs cleverly finding their back to his body. Initially this sounds just the ticket for a Shogun warrior, but as time goes by he gets sick and tired of the whole charade until he meets cute Rin (teen star Hana Sugisaki), a determined tomboy who iis also seeking revenge for her parents who were also slain by the Itto-ryu. This is flesh on the bloody bones of the saga, which limps on in a gore-fuelled second act which never really develops its existing immortal characters but just keeps on introducing us to other ghoulish weirdos including Sabato Kuroi (Kazuki Kitamura) and mysterious monk Eiku Shizuma (Ebizo Ichikawa) who appears to possess an antidote to the bloodworms in a series of subplots during its 140 minutes of blood-letting and limp-lopping tempered, with occasional stabs of humour amid the mass slaughter. All good clean fun. MT

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 8 DECEMBER 2017

Jean-Pierre Melville | Collection | bluray release

Bluray releases to celebrate the artistically ambitious cinema of independent filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973) in his centenary year.

France in the 1940s and 50s is seen as a broken nation, where male solidarity – be it in the gangster milieu or the bourgeois living rooms – relegated women as second class citizens– or even worse, as cold blooded killers. But the defeat in the WWII to the Germans on the battlefield, was nothing compared with the moral degradation as the result of the collaboration between the huge majority of French citizens with the Nazis, until their liberation by allied troops in 1944. Much admired by Jim Jarmusch and Quentin Tarantino as well as the directors of the French New Wave, it’s chief protagonist Melville was so revered he had a part in Godard’s seminal Breathless (1960).

Melville’s feature-length debut LE SILENCE DE LA MER (1949), is a drama about the Nazi Occupation which was made cheaply and clandestinely, and none the worse for it. Melville’s collaboration with Jean Cocteau on an adaption of the latter’s novel LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES (1950) is a claustrophobic, psychologically astute drama about a sister and brother retreating into an isolated world of erotically charged game-playing. Despite disagreements with the author, it remains one of the finest of all Cocteau adaptations, its keenest admirers having included François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol. Though the noir-tinged melodrama WHEN YOU READ THIS LETTER (1953) is perhaps Melville’s least typical film, there’s still much to enjoy both in its depiction of a faintly Americanised Nice underworld and in its psychological ambiguities.

BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1956) was Melville’s first script as director and offers a light-hearted portrayal of an ageing criminal whose passion for gambling and women jeopardises his plans to rob a casino. Beautifully shot by Henri Decaë, the film is a love letter to Paris and an affectionate nod to Hollywood heist movies like The Asphalt Jungle. Melville’s homage to America TWO MEN IN MANHATTAN (1959), sees two journalists (one played by the director himself) investigating the disappearance of a French diplomat in New York. Another German Occupation outing, Léon Morin, Priest (1961) is a study of deception in which an attractive priest crosses the boundaries of his calling in trying to convert a female member of his congregation. A complex film of ambiguities and ironies, it boasts superb lead performances from Jean-Paul Belmondo and Emmanuelle Riva.

One of Melville’s great thrillers, LE DOULOS (1962), is a dazzlingly intricate tale of deadly suspicion and betrayal starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Serge Reggiani. Establishing an atmosphere of unease, distrust and deception with a beautifully staged opening scene, Melville combines ingenious plot twists with a near-mythic evocation of underworld customs and fashions, and also shows what happens to treacherous women. The gangster Silien (Belmondo), best friend of Maurice (Reggiani) is suspected, to have sold his friend out to the police. But the true culprit is Maurice new girlfriend Therese (Hennesy). And she suffers heavily (and graphically) for it: Silien first beats her up to get the address of a new burglary, than he kills her brutally, making it look like an accident. Later, Melville shows how brave and honorable Silien and Maurice are dying for each other – Nicolas Hayer’s cold, grainy images very adapt to this this drama of male solidarity to the death.

Melville is probably best known for his artistic crime movies which he made in the latter part of his career, and these feature in Part Two of including LE SAMOURAï (1967), LE CERCLE ROUGE (1970), LE DEUXIEME FLIC (1972) THE ARMY OF SHADOWS (1969) and L’AINE DES FERCHAUX. Melville made meticulously stylised films with an abiding interest in loyalty and betrayal, courage and camaraderie, honour and dignity: themes found not only in his tense explorations of underworld ethics, but in his lesser-known earlier studies of troubled, even perverse relationships.

JEAN PIERRE MELVILLE’S bluray releases are available on Amazon | 4 December 2017

The Red Soul (2017) | IDFA 2017

Dir.: Jessica Gorter; Documentary; Netherlands 2017, 90 min.

Nearly 65 years after the death of Joseph Stalin, director/co-writer Jessica Gorter (900 Days) asks citizen of the Russian Federation the question if Stalin was a tyrant or a saviour. The response is illuminating, sad and relevant.

Current polls put Stalin and Putin on top of the popularity pole in the Russian Federation: the former is mostly defended by older people, who see the Stalin era as the highlight of Russian world dominance. Even when confronted with the legacy of the Camps, an old woman literally spits at the interviewer: “When two men in our factory came back from the camps, they were strong like bulls. Look at today’s youth – they are weak and pale”.

Overall the majority still sees Stalin as a creator of strength and stability. Even the father of a young man who died after his meth-lab caught fire, blames the lack of discipline under the post-communist regime for the death of his son. He is joined by many who equate Stalinism with a time without drugs, prostitution and harsh but just sentences for criminals.

The ones who who mourn the victims of the Great Terror, tell harrowing stories: An order from Moscow KGB asked the authorities in Leningrad, at the height of the Great Terror in the late 1930s, to shoot six hundreds people. The proud answer was quickly delivered to the Moscow HQ of the security services: the quota was doubled, and 1200 citizens met their death. Today, the supporters of the Stalinist terror bemoan the existence of bank accounts, which were not needed in those days. Stalin, so one of his defenders, “was unselfish and wanted nothing for himself.”

People who are trying to keep count of the forgotten names of the million of victims get very little assistance from the current government. And those who try to identity the corpses in the mass graves like in Severodvinsk, make very little progress: in 23 years of digging around in the mass graves of 20000, only 83 bodies have been identified. Two elderly women are standing near a street in the city of Severodvinsk, which was built by prisoners. They show the filmmakers the exact place where they watched their mother in the long columns of inmates, who where marching to work. School children in the same city talk today about their parents and grandparents who are either proud of the achievements of Stalinism, or bemoan the dead members of their families who died in the camps.

Two sisters in St, Petersburg talk about how their parents were denounced by a family member to the KGB and arrested. Their father did not survive, but when their mother returned to the family ten years later, she blamed nobody: it was simply the way of life. And the sisters have internalised this: they are very worried about “having slandered Russia with the story of their parents. We don’t want it to come back to us like a boomerang. It is, after all, our country”. The major consensus for the young historians, gathered in the Crimea, is “that we cannot judge this era. Pride and Pain are equal”.

Gorter and DoP Sander Snoep excel in showing the harrowing images of the mass graves, and the sites of the old camps. It will never be known how many Russians, among them many ’believing’ communists, have died during Stalin’s terror. The fact that even at the beginning of the 1960, fifty-three Camps existed in the old USSR, is proof of the vast number of victims. But today, Stalin and his system is still defended by too many – supported by a government which is more interested in creating a new Russian Nationalism than defending the victims of the past – or the fledging democracy of the present. AS

SCREENING DURING IDFA | 15 November – 26 November 2017

Golden Dawn Girls II (2017)

Dir.: Harvard Bustnes; Documentary; Norway/Finland 2017, 91′

Harvard Bustnes’ portrait of three women whose men are leading politicians in the neo-fascist Greek Golden Dawn Party, is illuminating, but also very frightening. The trio exemplifes good PR in motion as they work tirelessly, using all the tricks in the book to convince and cajole – not only the filmmaker, but also the Greek electorate – into believing that their party is the victim of corrupt democracy, while hiding the fact that they want to replace democracy with a Fascist state, built on the Nazi model.

Eugenia (Jenny), Dafni and Ourania represent three generations of woman: Jenny is the wife of Greek MP Giorgos Germenis, a former metal bassist and baker, who was rewarded for 18 years of service to the party with a seat in Parliament in the 2012 elections. Jenny is a platinum blonde, whose no-nonsense approach could give her a successful career as an estate agent. Dafni is the white-haired mother of fellow MP Panagiotis Iliopoulos. She plays the role of the family carer, rallying her grandchildren in on the act, as they run around with toy weapons. Even a priest and friend of the family, joins in the game of throwing grenades.

Dafni accuses the government of perpetrating a national genocide: “The government wants us to disappear, like the Incas. One day, there will be no more Greeks. But we have the blood of the old Greek heroes in our DNA”. Nevertheless, even on TV, she is able to formulate what will happen next with their political enemies: “We will drink their blood with a straw after the elections”. When the left-wing rapper Pavlos Fyssas is murdered by a crowd of Golden Dawn supporters, neither Jenny, Dafni or Ourania want to discuss the incident. Ourania is a postgraduate psychology student, animal lover and Disney fan, the Little Prince is one of her favourite book. She is the daughter of founder and party leader Nikolaos Mihaloliakos, who finds himself in jail with the majority of the Golden Dawn MPs, after weapons are found in their HQ. But she finds nothing wrong with party member Ilkias Kasidiaris, who still supports the Colonel’s Fascist dictatorship (1968-1974), and hits a woman member of the Communist Front three times in the face during a life TV debate, having assaulted another woman from the Radical Left. The Golden Dawn women get very active during the election campaign of 2014, since most the men are in jail. But after their release, the trio step back from the front line, retreating into the shadows of their husbands, fathers and sons.

Only once do the women show their true colours– after watching marching party members singing “Communists, you will be turned into soup” and “Fuck the Jews”. Asked by the director, who they hold responsible for the Greek crisis, the old chestnuts come out: “The Protocol of Zion. It is a universal conspiracy. The Jews change the government, even in America.” After being reminded, that Obama is not Jewish, the conspiracy theories go on “The Jews choose people, give them money and trap them with blackmail, and use them as puppets”.

DoPs Lars Skree and Viggo Knudsen follow the rapidly changing locations, and often get a little glance in, after the door is shut, because some Party meetings are off limits. Bustnes tries to the very end, to get a disclaimer from the women, but they will never admit that they or their men are Nazis, even though video and photographical proof is there. To the end they play the game of denial, seeing themselves as victims. It goes without saying – Golden Dawn Girls is a disturbing look at modern politics. AS

SCREENING DURING IDFA 2017 |

The Distant Barking of Dogs (2017) | IDFA 2017

Dir: Simon Lereng Wilmont | Denmark| Doc | 90′

The Distant Barking of Dogs is set in Eastern Ukraine on the frontline of the war where in the spring of 2014, an armed conflict erupted between the government and pro-Russian separatists. After almost a year of widespread fighting in the eastern region of Donbass, a young boy survives with his grandma in the village of . Poignant and poetic, the film follows 10-year-old Oleg day to day life as he gradually loses his innocence beneath the pressures of war, rather like the character in Ivan’s Childhood.

As locals gradually leave the village for safety, Oleg and his cousin Yarik play in the ravishing rural pastureland, often strewn with the detritus of conflict. Hnutove is fast-becoming a ghost town and we are made acutely aware of the importance of human relationships, and how vital the constant reassurance of people and animals is for emotional wellbeing, as Oleg and his grandma Alexandra – who have nowhere else to go – are thrown together. Oleg (who mother is dead) must grow up quickly in a world threatened by the challenges of hostility and privation. And although the boy rises to the occasion, his generation of young Ukrainian children will clearly bear the scars of war for many years to come.

Behind the rough and tumble of play, there is always a unsettling feeling of doom and Lereng Wilmont delicately dramatises how the kids are actually living in a war zone, where death lies in wait at every turn in a conflict that shows no sign of abating, despite the often calm and bucolic surroundings, As the film wears on the tone becomes more bleak as the kids inspect a handgun by belonging to a local teen called Kostya. A disturbing scene shows them shooting at frogs in a well, and later Oleg is scuffed by a passing bullet.

There is a close intimacy to Lereng Wilmont’s camerawork illustrating just how babyish these children still are, their little faces and staring eyes hardening as they confront scenes that would mortify most adults. We feel for these tiny souls alone in the face of evil. A fitting folkloric score sounds gently in the background, punctuated by occasional bomb blasts. This is a resonant and evocative documentary that sheds light on the deeply human experience in contemporary war zones. MT

THE DISTANT BARKING OF DOGS | IDFA 2017

Lu Over the Wall | Yaoke Tsugeru Lu No Uta (2017)

Dir.: Masaaki Yuasa | Fantasy | Anime with the voices of: Shota Shimoda, Kanon Tani, Minako Kotobuki, Soma Saito; Japan 2017, 112 min.

Director Masaki Yuasa follows his brilliant The Night is Short, Walk on Girl with another eccentric outing featuring a teenage band and a mermaid. LU OVER THE WALL is a spontaneous combustion of music and waterworks that bursts into action in the seaside town of Hirashi Bay, where sullen teenager Kai (Shimoda) is stropping his way through life, resentful of his mother abandoning the family to work as a dancer in Tokyo. Kai fancies himself as a musician and has secretly been posting his efforts on the internet where he meets fellow musician Yuho (Kotobuki), who talks him into to joining her band with her lover Kunio (Saito). Their lively gigs in an abandoned amusement park awaken the musical mermaid Lu (Tani), whose exotic voice and fins that turn into feet when she dances, make her a winning addition to the band. Soon Lu even liberates the local stray dogs from their home, and they turn into amphibious creatures called ‘merdoggies’.

But the townspeople are suspicious of Lu and blame her for causing floods in the region. According to folklore, mermaids are reputed to steal the locals and change them into fish. But Lu’s father, a shark-like creature, comes to the rescue and Kai and Lu declare their love. But can a mermaid really live with a human, particularly when a jealous human like Yuho is around?

The only trouble with Lu is that Yuasa has trouble fitting all his ideas and characters into this inventive new take on a classic mermaid tale, given the meagre running time of just under two hours. There’s enough material here for many hours of enjoyment and the music and images are beautifully cohesive and delightfully entertaining. We really care about Lu and her friends as they frolic in their marine home. Lu is delicately innocent and misunderstood by the locals, in contrast to the more streetwise Kai and Yuho. But Lu is redeemed in the grand finale of this anime treat made fluid and gloriously flowing by its flash animation style. AS

NOW ON RELEASE AT ARTHOUSE CINEMAS | 1st DECEMBER 2017

Love, Cecil (2017)

Dir/Prod: Lisa Immordino Vreeland | Doc | US |

Cecil Beaton (1901-80) would intensely loathe his biopic being described as a “warts and all” affair, but it is just that. The mercurial Oscar-winning set and costume designer, best known as the Royal family’s photographer, emerges as a quintessential English dandy – both stylish and controversial – in this frank and unsentimental documentary directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland, who is on familiar territory having brought us docs on Diana Vreeland (her husband’s grandmother) and art collector Peggy Guggenheim.

Beaton’s greatest achievement in the world of cinema were his Oscars for Gigi (1958) and My Fair Lady (1964), and it goes without saying that he fell out with George Cukor, who he felt embodied his intense dislike for the ‘vulgarness’ of Hollywood. Early on Beaton recognises that he was a jack of all trades but also a master of some: apart from his cinema success he was fêted in photography; theatre design and writing (his published diaries are narrated here in the suitably velvet tones of Rupert Everett) .

“Tormented by ambition” from an early age, Beaton grew in Hampstead in a large well-to-do family. Whilst appearing fluffy on the outside he possessed a steely interior resolve and a keen visual awareness that would serve him well in his creative endeavours. His one regret was never finding a soulmate: he died alone – declaring himself a ‘bad picker’ – after numerous homosexual affairs, and even a dalliance with Greta Garbo, which is heavily hinted on by Leslie Caron – the star of Gigi – who also claims that he was considered talented between the sheets by both men and women. After Cambridge in the early 1920s, Beaton became a photographer for Vogue and almost sabotaged his reputation in 1938 with a bizarre and ill-judged use of the word Kike (a racist term for Jew) in one of his photo-montages for the magazine, a notorious incident that almost derailed his career. Beaton apologized profusely for this aberration and set off to record the Second World War in various part of the world, as a penance.

Another naughty faux pas came in connection with Greta Garbo. The reclusive star allowed him to take a series of pictures of her on the understanding that only one would be published. Beaton handed the lot over to Vogue, causing Garbo, not surprisingly, to block him for over six months. The two eventually reconciled and after Beaton’s death in 1980, three photographs were found in his room — one of Garbo and two of his male lovers.

Apart from Leslie Caron’s insights, Vreeland’s film is enlivened by talking heads: designer Isaac Mizrahi, David Bailey, David Hockney and the Beaton biographer Hugo Vickers, all of whom have strong opinions on the late icon – no doubt as he had on them. But Cecil Beaton was not a man for half measures: “Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary”. Clearly the man lived up to his ideals. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 1 DECEMBER 2017

The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017)

Dir: Bharat Nalluri | US-Ire-Can | Cast: Dan Stevens, Christopher Plummer, Jonathan Pryce, Morfydd Clark | Drama | 104′

The Man Who Invented Christmas is a brave attempt to explore the creative process that inspired Charles Dickens’ to pen A Christmas Carol, offering a behind the scenes look at one of England’s best known and most celebrated writers.

Enlivened by a sterling British cast led by a plausible and personable Dan Stevens as Dickens, Jonathan Pryce as his profligate father and Christopher Plummer as the curmudgeonly Scrooge, this is an atmospheric Christmas story that glows with quaint charm but is completely underwhelming as a dramatic narrative, laden down by wooden clichés that reduce the enduring appeal of the writer and his legendary novella.

In 1843 Dickens has suffered a set-back in his writing career and is casting around for creative ideas to finance his growing family and spendthrift father. In his darkest hour, tormented by his pregnant wife (Clark), beset by childhood fears and cherishing hopes for the future, he is visited by the prickly central character of his budding storyline about a mean old man who is disarmed and reborn by the true spirit of Christmas. Scrooge appears to him in supernatural form – as an embodiment of his past trauma – needling and nudging him into writing his novel, while the wolf is howling at the door.

Based on Les Standiford’s book of the same title, director Bharat Nalluri (Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day) does his very best to add another another glowing bauble to the cosy Dickensian Christmas cinema tree with this imagined drama that looks as spectacular as a glass decoration but feels just as hollow. Somehow, the more the film tries to portray Charles Dickens’ human fears and doubts and the methods behind his talent, the less authentic the author actually appears.Creative genius is an intangible and mysterious quality, and should remain just that. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 1ST DECEMBER 2017

The Rebel Surgeon (2017) | IDFA 2017

Dir/Writer: Eric Gandini | Doc | Sweden | 52′

Director, writer and producer Eric Gandini is known for exploring aspects of our highly evolved Western society, first through his documentary debut The Swedish Theory of Love (2015) that delves into the existential black holes in the Swedish lifestyle, and now with his latest documentary The Rebel Surgeon where he takes the debate further by comparing the Swedish medical system with that of a still developing country of Ethiopia, through this slim but heart-warming story of a maverick orthopaedic surgeon, Erik Erichsen.

We hear how Dr Erichsen became so disillusioned by Swedish bureaucracy that he dropped out and moved to the East African country to work as a general surgeon, with his Ethiopian-born wife and partner Sainnat. Amongst the tropical lushness of this magnificent part of the World, he finds professional fulfilment (some might say “playing God”) as never before, rescuing lives in a small field hospital in the small community of Aira and with very limited resources – there is neither money for, nor access to, decent equipment, so he must be enterprising and creative in his methods. He works with a small domestic drill, plastic strips, jubilee clips, bicycle spokes and fishing lines: he even uses a woman’s hair slide during prostate surgery, and performs life-changing operations on the sick and wounded patients from all over the region. Ethiopians have a tough and uncompromising life but they never die alone, unlike most people in so-called ‘civilised’ societies. Here Erichsen exchanges bureaucracy for a heavy patient list – each person gets a few minutes – but they are grateful as only three doctors are available for every 100’000 inhabitants. Dr. Erichsen and his wife work full on to clear their load, but their work is 100% treatment and diagnostic-based, rather than computer or admin-orientated.

Made on a low budget, and none the worse for it, Gandini’s film makes for compelling viewing, enriched by images of the magnificent verdancy of the region’s tropical landscapes which contrast starkly with horrific nature of the medical cases presented and the gruesome surgical procedures that follow. Erichsen clearly loves his work and the adulation that comes from his patients, but his dry sense of humour and pragmatism also provide laugh out loud moments, along with some wincing. There is space to reflect on how extreme material hardship is in no way linked to emotional poverty; clearly these rural Ethiopians are a stoic bunch who accept their prognoses without flinching, and who look after each other and are eternally grateful for the Swedish doctor’s help, often returning to visit once they are cured. It’s not all good, but death is part of life for these people, and they appear to accept their fates philosophically, if nothing can be done.

It is easy to see why Erichsen finds the work in Ethiopian so satisfying. Here his opinion is unchallenged (except occasionally by his wife) and he is bound by few rules, hailed as a hero, and gets to make all the decisions. In Sweden he is challenged not only by the system, but also by the patients themselves who are exacting and whose expectations of life and medical treatment available are extremely exacting, Erichsen insisting that the mindset of the Swedes is far worse than the material poverty of Ethiopia.

After his decade long tenure in Ethiopia, Erichsen must return to life in Sweden, which he does with a heavy heart. And we are left contemplating the future of his Ethiopian surgical team who will battle on without him. Meanwhile, life will never be the same for Erichsen and his wife back in the Northern Europe, but every cloud has a silver lining, as we discover in the finale.

REVIEWED AT IDFA | NOW PREVIEWING ON FESTIVALSCOPE | PENDING DISTRIBUTION

Political Thrillers of the 1970s

The Seventies spawned a series of thrillers exposing the political tensions that were reverberating across Europe. It was a decade when the social turmoil that marked the late 1960s gave way to a more strident politics that involved stark and sometimes violent contrasts between left and right. A decade that was scarred by the emergence of uncompromisingly radical groups such as the Red Army Faction and the Red Brigades.

In response to this charged moment, a number of filmmakers across Europe turned to the format of the thriller. Stylish and enduringly popular with audiences, they saw it as the perfect vehicle through which to explore conspiracies, authoritarian regimes, and political violence.

Costa-Gavras’ legendary Z (1969) headlines an era that would showcase some of the best political thrillers of an era that would continue with Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970), The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975) and The Day of the Jackal (1973).

State of Siege (1972) (15) (État de siège) Bergamo Film Festival 2022

Dir Costa-Gavras | Cast: Yves Montand, Renato Salvatori, O. E. Hasse

A tense political thriller set against the background of Latin America’s dirty repressive politics, State of Siege is one of the finest political thrillers of the 1970s. Costa-Gavras casts Yves Montand in the lead as an undercover American agricultural advisor who is kidnapped by guerrillas in Uruguay.

Special Section (PG)

Dir Costa-Gavras/FR IT West Germany 1975 | 118′ | Cast: Louis Seigner, Roland Bertin, Michael Lonsdale

Costa-Gavras sets Special Section in Nazi-occupied France during the Second World War. When a German officer is murdered, the collaborationist Vichy government decides to pin the killing on six petty criminals. Loyal judges are then called in to convict them as quickly as possible in a special court. Costa-Gavras won Best Director at the 1975 Cannes film festival for this brilliant thriller.

The Mattei Affair

Dir Francesco Rosi | IT 1972 | 116′ | Cast: Gian Maria Volontè, Luigi Squarzina, Peter Baldwin

This investigative thriller The Mattei Affair focuses on the death of Enrico Mattei, an influential businessman who made enemies in the mafia. His story is interspersed with Rosi’s investigation into the disappearance of his friend, journalist Mauro De Mauro, who was undertaking research for the film. Led by a magnificent performance from Gian Maria Volontè, The Mattei Affair is one of Rosi’s finest works and won the Palme d’Or at Cannes (ex aequo) in 1972.

The Odessa File (Prime Video)

Dir: Ronald Neame | Cast: Jon Voight, Maximillian Schell, Maria Schell, Derek Jacobi, Mary Tamm | UK 130′ 1974

A Holocaust diary captures the imagination of Jon Voigt’s diligent investigative journalist Peter Millar, who sets out to uncover the truth behind a powerful Nazi organisation called ODESSA. Adapted for the screen from Frederick Forsyth’s bestseller by Ken Ross and Ronald Neame, who cut his teeth behind the camera working for Hitchcock on the first talking picture made in England, Blackmail (1929).

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (18)

Dir Elio Petri/IT 1970 | 115’/Italian | Cast: Gian Maria Volontè, Florinda Bolkan, Gianni Santuccio

In Elio Petri’s visually stunning film was nominated for an Oscar having won a Silver Bear at Berlinale in 1969. It sees a corrupt police official attempting to show his invincibility by creating a murder scene where the evidence can only lead investigators to him. Starring Gian Maria Volontè who provides a mesmerising performance, this is a sly and slick condemnation of the state and the police from one of Italy’s major political filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s.

The Long Good Friday (on Amazon Prime)

Dir John Mackenzie/GB 1980 | 115′ Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren, Paul Freeman

In this iconic British thriller, gangster Harold Shand, a gritty Bob Hoskins, sees himself as the big shot property developer of London’s rundown dockland and becoming a legitimate businessman in partnership with the American Mafia. However, his plans are waylaid when a number of his associates are brutally attacked and he realises that the gangland he thought he ruled over was a much more divided and complex territory.

The Day of the Jackal (15) (Prime Video)

Dir Fred Zinnemann/GB FR 1973 | 143′ | Edward Fox, Terence Alexander, Michel Auclair

Edward Fox made his name in Fred Zinnemann’s legendary film that explores the attempts of a right-wing paramilitary group to assassinate French President General De Gaulle following the independence of Algeria. The Day of the Jackal is one of the twistiest thriller of the 1970s and never outstays its welcome despite the long running time.

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (15)

Dirs Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta/Ger 1975 | 106′ | Cast: Angela Winkler, Mario Adorf, Dieter Laser

A key political film of the New German Cinema, a young woman’s life is scrutinised by police and press after she spends the night with a suspected terrorist. Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta co-directed and adapted The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum from the controversial novel by Heinrich Böll.

Days of ’36 (12) (Meres tou ’36)

Dir Theodoros Angelopoulos/GR 1972 | 104′ | Cast: Vangelis Kazan, Kostas Pavlou, Thanos Grammenos

Angelopoulos’s stylised thriller is set in 1936 just before the Metaxas’ dictatorship. A trade unionist is murdered in broad daylight one of the suspects rounded up is Sofianos, who claims to be innocent. But when a minister visits his cell he takes him hostage with tragic consequences in an elegantly composed affair that one the Greek director the FIPRESCI prize at Berlinale 1973.

Illustrious Corpses (PG) (Cadaveri eccellenti)

Dir Francesco Rosi/IT FR 1976/120′ | Cast: Lino Ventura, Tino Carraro, Marcel Bozzuffi

Lino Ventura stars in this atmospheric thriller based on Leonardo Sciascia’s novel Il Contesto. He is a quietly confident detective appointed to investigate the mysterious murders of several senior members of Sicily’s judiciary, linked to skulduggery in the Italian communist party.

Man on the Roof (15) (Mannen på taket) |

Dir Bo Widerberg | Cast: Carl-Gustaf Lindstedt, Sven Wollter, Thomas Hellberg | 1976

In this 1970s Nordic Noir thriller based on The Abominable Man by Swedish crime writers Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, Carl-Gustaf Lindstedt is Beck, a detective investigating a brutal murder in a hospital that leads to incidents of police brutality and culminates in a showcase finale on the rooftops of Stockholm.

The Flight (CTBA) (Die Flucht)

Dir Roland Graf/East Germany 1977/94′ | Cast: Armin Mueller-Stahl, Jenny Gröllmann, Erika Pelikowsky

One of the final films made in East Germany featuring Armin Mueller-Stahl – who also appears in Costa Gavras’ Music Box (1989). Here he plays a doctor who is refused permission by the GDR to take up a research post in the West, and so links up with an underground network who claim to be able to cut through red tape. But there is is a hitch, as there always is. Grand Prix Winner Karlovy Vary 1978.

Circle of Deceit (18) (Die Fälschung) (Available on Amazon)

Dir Volker Schlöndorff/West Germany FR 1981/108′ | Cast: Bruno Ganz, Hanna Schygulla, Jean Carmet

In Circle of Deceit Schlöndorff weaves romance with political intrigue in a thriller shot on location in Beirut. Bruno Ganz and Hanna Schygulla are the lovers who navigate a complex moral and political maze in a country on the brink of war.

SOME TITLES NOW AVAILABLE ON NETFLIX, PRIME VIDEO, BFI PLAYER and BERGAMO FILM MEETING 2022

Jacques Rivette – Master of Games | bluray releases

Andre Simonoveisz looks back at the life and work of New Wave director JACQUES RIVETTE (1928-2016).

Jacques Rivette was born in Rouen, where he shot his first short film Aux Quatre Coins in 1948, inspired by the work of Jean Cocteau. The following year he moved to Paris, submitting his film to the prestigious IDHEC Film School where he was rejected. Undeterred, he took courses at the Sorbonne and soon became an habitué at the Cinemathèque Française, run at the time by Henri Langlois. Meeting up with the other members of what would become the “Band of Five” – all film critics at “Cahiers du Cinéma”, who would later form the Nouvelle Vague movement as directors: Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol.

Rivette was the political exception with his left-wing leanings, the rest, particularly Godard, were very much to the right. Nevertheless, Rivette was the leading theoretician of the group and when he took over the editorship of Cahiers from Rohmer in 1963, he opened up the magazine to luminaries outside the film word, namely Roland Barthes and Pierre Boulez.

In 1950 Rivette directed his second short film Le Quadrille, produced by Godard who also played the lead. Four years later, Rivette and Truffaut began a series of interviews with film directors they admired, among them Hitchcock, Hawks, Fritz Lang and Orson Welles. In 1952 Rivette filmed his third short Le Divertissement, followed by Le Coup du Berger (1956), scripted by Chabrol. With borrowed money and short film reel ends, Rivette begun to shoot his first feature film Paris Nous Appartient in 1958. Running out of money, the film was only finished and premiered in December 1961, long after Godard and Chabrol had started the movement with their first films.

Paris Nous Appartient has all the hallmarks of the later Rivette films: mysteries, theatre productions (in this case Shakespeare’s Pericles) and old houses. But Rivette’s films are not simply mysteries, but studies of the phenomenon of mysteries. In this way, Rivette produced narratives about narratives; about the process and working of fiction itself. All this relates to Rivette’s closeness to anothor movement of the time, the “Noveau Roman” along with Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras. It took him until 1966 to make his next film, Suzanne Simonin, la Religieuse de Diderot, which starred Anna Karina. The government tried to ban the film but it eventually became Rivette’s only hit at the box office. But Rivette was deeply rustrated with the conventional way he worked, particularly his script writing, which bored him.

With Amour Fou (1968) he started to improvise whilst shooting, culminating in his most important work, Out 1 : Noli me tangere, (left) an experimental film which runs for nearly 13 hours and was shown in Le Havre in 1971 as a “work in progress”. Since then it has been rarely shown, until the recent DVD/Blu-ray release by Arrow Films and Video. The audience of Out 1 were reluctant to let go of the film, and like many serials, they wanted the film to continue indefinitely. Emotionally, they had bought into the story and identified with its characters. This interesting development implies that the real community of Out 1 is the community of the film itself, not only formulated by the cast and crew, but also by the viewers: who (unwittingly) were witnessing a process of strong identification, built up over the 13 hour viewing. Out 1 was the first film the audience “wanted to live in”: it appeared that he actors had forgotten that they were acting and Rivette realised crucially that “men want to solve a conflict by denial, women through dialogue”.

Women, particularly, dominate nearly all Rivette’s films. Regular collaborator Bulle Ogier once said about Rivette’s work: “The actor works out her role according to the scheme: an exercise in improvisation to the edge of despair. It’s then up to Rivette to put the jigsaw together in the montage”. And Juliet Berto, also a regular of Rivette’s films, concludes: “Rivette’s main directing work was done at home during the editing stage: that’s where he organises the disorderly action of the puppets”.

Céline et Julie vont en Bâteau (1974) is perhaps the ultimate Rivette film. To start with, the title could mean in translation ‘Celine and Julie are taken for a ride’ or ‘Celine and Julie are falling into fiction’. The leading duo, who could be lovers, sisters or simply friends, enjoy a life of games, storytelling and magic tricks. One day, Celine (Dominique Labourier) tells Julie (Juliet Berto) about the house of the Levinson family (which she dreamed about), where the two young women become maids, to save the life of Madlyn (the daughter of widower Olivier) from the murderous intents of Camille, his sister in-law, and Sophie, both of whom want to marry Olivier. But Olivier can’t marry as long as Madlyn is alive so the women want to kill the child. The Levinson house is like most of Rivette’s houses: large, rambling and mysterious. Analytically speaking, the house is the geographical centre of the psyche, the spatial organisation of our first remembered world; and first and foremost shelter; a place of security and a more complex version of the maternal womb, were we can dream in peace. These are common factors of Rivette ‘houses’, and in all cases the protagonists are women, whilst the house belongs, or is at least inhabited by a man. Life the city of Paris, the bourgeois houses become the ‘theatres’ for Rivette’s mobile performances. In La Bande des Quatre (1988), four young actresses from the Paris banlieu try to solve the mystery of a house’s owner.

Wining the Grand Prix in Cannes in 1991 with La Belle Noiseuse was certainly a high point for Rivette, together with his two films about Jeane d’Arc. The first was Jeanne la Pucelle, which starred Sandrine Bonnaire as a very earthy version of the saint. With the second (also starring Bonnaire, Secret Defense(1998), Rivette came full circle with his love for Hitchcock as a critic. It is a loose rebuilding of the Electra myth; and, like Hitchock in Vertigo, Rivette reinforces in this his most important neo-noir film, the theme of the double through the use of a shadow: When Ludivine (Laure Marsac) enters the office of Walser (the man who murdered her father), harsh light casts a full shadow of Ludivine’s body on the wall between her and Walser (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), as a violent reminder of her murdered sister.

Games are the main standard bearers for for Rivette’s narratives: from the Coup du Berger onwards, ‘play’ and ‘games’ are, among other things, the vehicle for this tension in his narratives; for a desire for structure; a sense and context and a contradictory imposition that remains open to experiment, chance and unpredictability.

These magical games, indulged by the double protagonists of Celine et Julie, or in Noroît (1976) or Duelle (1976), are a sign of refusing maturity. The inability to grow up and to stay in a world of magic and mystery; but also a trap in which the child-goddess can only repeat the same confrontation with herself/other, or face mutual destruction. Which brings us to the conclusion of Rivette’s oeuvre: His films are created in the spirit of a kindergarten group performing an end-of-year show for the grown-ups, but also the other way round.

Rejecting the ‘auteur’ theory and calling it a myth, Jacques Rivette fell neither into the trap of self-centred Jean-Luc Godard, who needs to keep re-inventing himself; nor did he succumb, like Truffaut and Chabrol, to the banalities of commercial cinema. Ultimately he was the playful grown-up child of his own films; always conscious that “when curiosity disappears, there is nothing left but to lie down and wait for our last breath”. AS

THE JACQUES RIVETTE COLLECTION IS NOW OUT ON DVD BLU-RAY COURTESY OF ARROW FILMS AND VIDEO | CELINE ET JULIE IS ALSO CELEBRATING A BLURAY RELEASE ON 20 NOVEMBER 2017 COURTESY OF BFI FILMS

The White World according to Daliborek (2017) | IDFA 2017

Dir: Vit Klusak | Writer: Vit Klusak, Marianna Stranska | Doc | Czech Rep | 90′

Czech documentarian Vit Klusak turns his camera on white racist supremacy for his latest documentary which is shot through with the same dark humour as his debut Czech Dream, although this shocking expose leaves a bitter taste in the mouth despite its hilarious moments.

In the Czech Republic lives Daliborek, a pasty-faced larded lump of a man who, at 37, still lives with his mother, abusing her verbally and occasionally even physically, asking her to “stand to attention” in front of his friends.

Although Daliborek raises some laughs with his outlandish behaviour throughout, we titter in sheer disbelief rather than out of genuine pleasure, a feeling of sickness replacing any genuine mirth, in the aftermath to this alarming film. Klusak is entirely dispassionate about his subject, who is clearly more of a super-sized bully than an outright threat. But when Daliborek joins his like-minded friends, it’s easy to see how any form of extremism can quickly get out of hand and threaten democracy, or lead to mass violence – genocide even – as we have learnt from the past.

Giving full rein to this nutter on the big screen serves to make us in no doubt whatsoever about these characters who exist in society and are to be pitied and demeaned rather than feared, as long as they live securely in within their families; although the startling epilogue to the doc poses more concern.

Daliborek regularly rants on youtube with tuneless misogynist and sexually explicit songs that garner hundreds of views per clip. Meanwhile, his vampish mother Vera is in denial as she desperately dates online and posts fluffy photoshopped pictures of herself on Facebook. As the film gets underway, she has formed a relationship with another racist man. Daliborek’s bedroom is a sight for sore eyes: Neo-Nazi flags deck the walls along with supremacist crosses. But when he meets (an equally overweight) girl, he totally respects her prudishness and refusal to have sex, even after the couple have dated for several months. Clearly he’s no psychopath.

You have to pinch yourself at times while watching this bracingly rampant stuff; it could easily be a well-scripted spoof. And liberals and minorities will be calm in the knowledge that Daliborek’s life is actually rather sad and monotonous. He doesn’t even get to have sex with his girlfriend.

Eventually Vera’s boyfriend and Daliborek start to bond during their karate afternoons in the nearby park, both men demonstrating their tough-guy moves chopping bricks – or not. This is certainly thought-provoking stuff and absolutely compelling to watch, although Klusak never really gets to the bottom of why Daliborek has become so outrageous, given his humdrum life in a bland provincial village with hardly any crime, or immigrant population. He does not even bother to vote in the local elections. So clearly, he must have reached his point of view out of sheer boredom and lack of direction.

The final ‘epilogue’ is tragic and really raises far more questions than it attempts to answer. During a family visit to Auschwitz, Daliborek tries to go out on a limb and deny the holocaust in front of a survivor, who has just given frank and open talk about her experiences. MT

SCREENING DURING IDFA | 15-26 NOVEMBER 2017

#Starvecrow (2017)

Dir.: James Carver; Cast: Ashlie Walker, Ben Willens, Jeremy Swift, Sky Lourie, David Bark Jones; UK/Italy 2016, 89 min.

Hailed as the “first selfie movie” or “Hypereal”, director/co-writer James Carver’s debut is more than a gimmick – nor is it revolutionary or innovative.

Cut from a 69 hour shoot in London, Venice Beach, Geneva, Norway and Hastings, it features a cast making use of their mobiles – hacked CCTV camera images are then added to the mix along with hand held camera clips. What makes ♯Starvecrow stand out is not the blend of technology, but the dark content: behind the candidness and their lifestyle dominated by being tech-savvy 24/7, the teenage protagonists hide withering secrets.

Ben (Willens) is a control-freak, charming at first, but we soon learn that his obsession for filming everything with his mobile is a way to manipulate and repress Jess (Walker), who has just returned from rehab. Jess is pregnant, and Ben’s only comment is “get rid of it”. She needs freedom to reflect on her next step, which he is unwilling to give her. When Jess goes with a group of friends to a weekend party in a bungalow near some remote woods, we soon learn that the all these men are only too willing to abuse the girls. There are shades of Blair Witch in the silvan setting, and when the party is gate-crashed by a trio of masked men, things get surreal.
Bookended by a graphic birth scene, ♯Starvecrow tries to shock with its directness, and it succeeds – partly. But overall, the total lack of structure reduces the impact: too often the actors have to explain the goings on. The cast, being their own DoPs, somehow handle both roles more than adequately. In the end, it is the old-fashioned hide-and-seek story which saves the day – technology comes a distant second. But that will not deter countless imitators of trying their luck – alas, they should be warned: Carver succeeded to some degree in spite of his lack of cinematographic know-how, others will not be so lucky, because they will lack the quasi-novelty factor. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 24 NOVEMBER 2017 AT SELECTED CINEMAS

I’m Fat (2017) | IDFA 2017

Dir: Halit Levy | Doc | Israel | 53’

Tel Avivi filmmaker and counsellor Halit is obese and she feels defined by it despite her humour, appealing personality and talent evident in this colourful documentary which she made and narrates herself. She’s happy in her body, and of being a lesbian in love with her life partner Chen, but fat is something you cannot hide – it’s the ultimate taboo, the elephant in the room. I’M FAT is a straight-talking and illuminating film exploring in the issues surrounding obesity today.

The problem is clearly visual, like baldness but unlike sexual identity or even infertility – that are not readily apparent until you delve deeper – fat is literally in your face, and can’t be disguised.

Halit does not feel diminished by her state but she is clearly bugged by it enough to express how it affects her life and describes her journey towards change. Through talking with various therapists what comes to light is fascinating and also tragic: in Halit’s case sexual abuse as a child could be the root cause of her condition, it left her with a deep-seated need for control and self-protection.

I’M FAT is well made and absorbing putting its points across simply and clearly as it debates the questions raised. Reuven Brodsky’s camera gets out and about in the seaside capital offering a rich flavour of the vibrant modern metropolis that is Tel Aviv. The documentary’s psychological insights will be of interest to all audiences helping society as a whole understand the complex issues that often lie behind obesity and at just under an hour it doesn’t overstay its welcome with a positive and convincing finale. MT

SCREENING DURING IDFA | 15-26 november 2017

Suburbicon (2017)

Dir: George Clooney | Co-writers: Cast: Julianne Moore, Matt Damon, Oscar Isaac, Noah Jupe | Drama | US | 105′

Matt Damon and Julianne Moore star in this seductive but flawed satire that touches on social greed, marital dissatisfaction and insurance fraud. Directed by Clooney from a script by Joel and Ethan Coen, Suburbicon parades as a pastel and pristine 1950s family drama, but behind the scenes matters are going seriously awry in the moral compass of its squeaky clean citizens.

Gardner Lodge (Damon) is a family man who is clearly dissatisfied with his seemingly peaceful existence due to his desire for Margaret (Moore), his crippled wife’s live-in sister. Gardner and Margaret form a covert plan to stage a home invasion, collect the insurance money, and clear the decks of his wife (also played by Moore) and run away to Aruba. But the idea flounders due to the interference of Oscar Isaac’s shrewd loss adjuster – echoing TV detective Columbo – and Gardner’s appealingly astute son (Noah Jupe).

This 1950s pastiche plays out in the style of a Noirish version of Mad Men that reveals a tawdry face racial hatred and marital disquiet behind the manicured gardens of this plastic paradise. Performances are pitch-perfect as the tale’s tone claws at the edges of unsettling paranoia. SUBURBICON is ultimately a suspenseful and highly entertaining film that throws its toys out of the pram in a misjudged melodramtic meltdown in the final scenes.

George Clooney was born in Lexington, Kentucky. He is an Academy Award–winning actor, producer, writer, and director. His filmmaking credits include Good Night, and Good Luck (05), and the Festival selection The Ides of March (11). Suburbicon(17) is his latest film. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2017 REVIEW

The L-Shaped Room (1962) | Bluray release

Dir.: Bryan Forbes | Cast: Leslie Caron, Tom Bell, Brock Peters, Cicely Courtneidge, Bernhard Lee, Patricia Phoenix, Avis Bunnage | UK 1962, 126′.

Bryan Forbes started his career in film as a scriptwriter: The Angry Silence (1960), directed by Guy Green, featured Richard Attenborough as a worker caught between management and union. A year later came Forbes’ debut as director with Whistle Down the Wind, a near classic, telling the story of three Lancashire children who believe that a hiding criminal is Jesus.

The L-Shaped Room, based on the novel by Lynn Reid Banks, most famous for her children books, was Forbes quintessentially English answer to the French nouvelle vague movement; Phil Wickam wrote “it feels like half a New Wave film”, which did Forbes not enough credit. Soon after he went to Hollywood and in spite of eventually returning to England, he will be remembered mostly for mainstream works like International Velvet and The Stepford Wives, hardly trashy, but safe and lacking the originality of his early work.

The L-Shaped Room is set in a Notting Hill boarding house which back in the day was a grim part of London (the novel was set in even more downtrodden Fulham), where Jane Fosset (Caron), a French girl pregnant from a one-night-stand, moves into the squalid L-shaped attic room. She falls in love with Toby (Bell), who is suffers from low self-esteem and is writing his first novel, which gives the film its title. The house is owned and run by fierce landlady Doris (Bunnage). Like most of her tenants, she is not sympathetically portrayed: “I never close my door to the nigs”, she is obviously a racist – as many were in those days – but too shrewd not to take the money from her black lodger Johnny (Peters, who had just starred in To Kill a Mockingbird).

The ageing lesbian Cicely Courtneidge offers a poignant portrait of lonely later life. When Jane visits a Harley Street doctor, she is told to “marry or have an abortion”; the good doctor is angling for the profitable latter solution, since abortion was still illegal and single parenthood deeply frowned upon at the time. His mercenary character helps Fosset to decide to keep the child. When Toby finds out that Jane is pregnant he leaves her, not able to father a child who is not his own.

Caron’s Jane comes across as the only emancipated character in this community of sceptics and traditionalists. The actress had originally rejected the downtrodden female characters penned by Forbes and together they worked at making Jane more of a feminist. It’s a demanding role but Caron pulls it off with tremendous flair. Her rapport with Toby is convincing and Bell is superb as a man in smitten by love but fraught with his own demons. The poignant ending shows Jane walking up the steps with the new lodger (Nanette Newman, Forbes’ wife), saying an effecting goodbye to the room that saw her through such an emotional period of her life. The English girl cannot understand Jane’s affection for the crummy place.

DoP Douglas Slocombe’s grainy black-and-white images show a London lost in time, closer to the Victorian era than the 20th century. The streets seem shabby, drab and provincial. Claustrophobic rooms make the place more like an open prison trapping the tenants in an impoverished, curtain-tweaking neighbourhood, where nowadays they would be part of the edgy London scene. The prudishness is over-bearing; when Jane and Toby try to embrace each other in Hyde Park, a warden intervenes. London is not swinging at all in this dingy Notting Hill setting that was simply a poor man’s version of Kensington and would remain so until the 90s.

The L-Shaped Room is a celebration of Jane’s emotional awakening in a place of repression and middle-class values. John Barry’s sublime score echoes the heart-rending sadness and emotional desperation in this over-looked masterpiece of British New Wave cinema.

NOW AVAILABLE ON DVD, AND ON TALKING PICTURES TV

Buster Keaton: The General, Sherlock Jr, Steamboat Bill | Bluray release

Between 1920 and 1929, Buster Keaton created a peerless run of feature films that established him as one of the greatest actor-directors in the history of film. Three films in particular showcase his talents Sherlock Jr, The General and Steamboat Bill, Jr.

SHERLOCK JR (1924) A film projectionist and amateur sleuth offers to solve the case of a missing watch, but is instead framed for the crime. In his obsession to clear his name he literally steps into the screen to bring his fantasies to life, in one of the most remarkable sequences in cinema history.

THE GENERAL (1926) A courageous railway engineer crosses enemy lines to pursue some union spies who have stolen his locomotive, and his girl. Widely considered to be Keaton’s masterpiece, it stages some of the most enjoyable chase sequences ever committed to film.

STEAMBOAT BILL, JR (1928) A steamboat caption receives notice that his son intends to make a visit for the first time in many years. What emerges is not the strapping youth of his dreams, but a boy who wouldn’t say boo to a goose, let alone help him to compete with his arch-rival. Best remembered for its climactic cyclone sequences in which Keaton performs a number of death-defying stunts whilst an entire town is destroyed around him, this was Keaton’s last independent silent comedy and also one of his best.

NOW ON BLURAY FROM 20 NOVEMBER 2017 COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA.

Brakes (2017)

DIR: Mercedes Grower | UK | Comedy | 85′

Shot on a shoestring budget over several years, this unconventional tragi-comedy compendium explores modern love for Londoners through a series of nine amorous encounters. Depressingly realistic and cringeworthy rather than funny or affecting, BRAKES starts well but is unable to sustain our enthusiasm beyond the half-way mark due to a lack of laughs, questionable production values, tonal uneveness and the overly episodic nature of the narrative. Some of the vignettes are dismal and feel staged rather than authentic.

BRAKES is the directorial debut of English actress Mercedes Grower and is cast from a selection of Britain’s top comedy and dramatic acting talent who do their best in the circumstances: Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt (The Mighty Boosh) alongside Paul McGann (Withnail & I), Julia Davis (Nighty Night), Kerry Fox (Shallow Grave), Steve Oram (Sightseers), Roland Gift (The Fine Young Cannibals), Peter Wight (Babel, Atonement), Kate Hardie (Mona Lisa), Seb Cardinal (Cardinal Burns) to name but a few.

The film received a Special Jury Mention for the Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature Film at the Edinburgh Film Festival 2016 and has won audiences over at many festivals since, including LOCO London Comedy Film Festival and the inaugural ‘Cineramageddon’ event, curated by Julien Temple, at this year’s Glastonbury Festival. MT

BRAKES IS ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 24 NOVEMBER 2017

Lost in Paris (2016)

Dir.: Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon; Cast: Fiona Gordon, Dominique Abel, Emmanuelle Riva, Pierre Richard; France/Belgium 2016

Belgium born Vaudeville artist Dominique Abel and his real-life wife Australian Fiona Gordon attempt to bring the world of the MusicHal back to life with moderate success in the quirky LOST IN PARIS. As in Rumba and Iceberg, music once again plays a major role as do Abel and Gordon, who co-write the script.

The film centres on Canadian librarian Fiona (Gordon) who lives in a snowbound kitsch village whence she hops on a plane to Paris to help her ageing mother in distress. Unfortunately, Aunt Martha, who is losing it a bit, is not at home when Fiona arrives so she decides to hit the town and enjoys herself, somehow landing up in the river Seine. She also manages to lose her luggage, which is later found by wayfarer Dom (Abel), who lives in a tent of the river’s edge. He helps himself to her money and even steals her jumper, which actually suits him. As you may have guessed, Dom and Fiona were fated to meet one other; forget about Aunt Martha, whose fake funeral they are attending, she’s actually very much alive and mischievous into the bargain.

Abel and Gordon’s films are very much an acquired taste, and not everyone learns to love their gags, which feature a very tall and slim Gordon, and a Ronnie Baker like Abel. But the main issue here is their scripting: there’s not enough interest to sustain the audience even for 90 minutes, because the episodic structure runs soon out of steam, leaving with long stretches of nothing between the gags. But the great, late Emmanuelle Riva is obviously enjoying herself, and for that alone (and a short appearance of veteran comic Pierre Richard on a park bench), LOST IN PARIS is worth watching.

In a Lonely Place (1950)

Dir.: Nicholas Ray Writers: Andrew Solt and Nicholas Ray

Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Graham, Frank Lovejoy, Martha Stewart; USA 1950, 94 min.

Based on the novel by Dorothy B.Hughes, and scripted by Andrew Solt with collaboration from director Nicholas Ray and producer Robert Lord, IN A LONELY PLACE was the second time that Ray and Santana, the production company owned by Lord and Bogart, had worked together after Knock on any Door. Shot in the autumn of 1949 at Columbia Studios, with only three days location work in LA, IN A LONELY PLACE has become a true Film noir classic for various reasons not least because the marriage of Ray and the film’s leading actress, Gloria Grahame was on the rocks, rather like that of her relationship with leading man Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart).

Dixon Steele, a Hollywood scriptwriter, “whose last success was pre-war”, is an alcoholic, violent and ageing man. In a nightclub, his agent Mel Lippman tries to interest him in an adaptation of a novel. Steele is grumpy and bored, and asks the hat-check girl Mildred Atkinson (Stewart), to come home with him to read the final part of the novel for him while he relaxes at home. Next morning, Steele is visited by his friend and army buddy, Detective Sergeant Brub Nicolai (Lovejoy), who tells him, that Atkinson was murdered on her way home from Steele’s house, and her body thrown from the taxi. Meanwhile Steele has fallen in love with a neighbour Laurel Gray (Grahame), an aspiring actress. He wants to marry her, but after Gray experiences Steele’s violent temper she gets cold feet, only to make him keener with the famous lines: “I was born when she kissed me, I died when she left me, I lived a few weeks while she loved me”. Steele, who has made remarks that tie him to the Atkinson murder, is in the end cleared by Nicolai, but Gray leaves him for good.

Shot by legendary DoP Burnett Guffey (Human Desire, Bonny & Clyde and Bogart’s last feature The Harder they Fall), IN A LONELY PLACE evokes the spirit of Scott Fitzgerald in that it is a film about angst and alienation in Hollywood. In the original ending, Steele kills Gray, and is arrested by Nicolai. Ray shot the new ending more or less in secret, being afraid that Columbia boss Harry Cohen would explode at the unhappy ending. But to be on the safe side, Ray directed both final sequences in three days in mid November. One critic wrote at the time of the premiere, that – “not unlike Albert Camus’ The Stranger, Nicholas Ray’s remarkable IN A LONELY PLACE represents the purest existentialist primers”. AS

NOW SHOWING AS PART OF THE BFI GLORIA GRAHAME RETROSPECTIVE | FROM 24 NOVEMBER 2017

Matilda | Matylda (2017) | UK Russian Film Week 2017

Dir.: Aleksey Uchitel; Cast: Michalina Olszanska, Lars Eidinger, Luise Wolfram, Danila Kozlousky, Sergey Garmash, Ingeborg Dapkunaite, Thomas Ostermeier; Russian Federation 2017, 109’

Aleksey Uchitel, whose work so far has oscillated between mundane crime dramas like Break Loose, and the pretentious and misogynist His Wife’s Diary, a biopic about the Russian writer Ivan Bunin, directs the script of Michael Katims and Aleksandr Terekhov very much in the spirit of the latter. The affair between the future Tsar Nicholas II and the ballerina Matilda Kshesinskaya (Matylda Krzesinska) is a pompous melodrama, a cross between the ‘kitsch’ of West German post WWII Sissy films and a second-rate James Bond extravaganza.

Set at the beginning of 1890, when 17-year old Matilda (Olszanska) was one of the stars of the Imperial Mariinsky Ballet in St. Petersburg, Uchitel shows the teenager as a heart-breaking tease, leaning on high-ranking officer Vorontsov (Kozlousky) to participate in a daring riding competition – just for a kiss. But the future Tsar (Eidinger) is first in line, and soon the two are so madly in love, that Nicholas thinks about abdicating. Whilst Nicholas father Aleksandr III (Garmash) is very much in favour of his son marrying Matilda, his wife Maria Feodorovna (Dapkunaite) favours a marriage to the German princess Alexandra (Wolfram) who has brought her confidant Dr. Fisher (Ostermeier) to Russia. He captures Vorontsov and tries, in an early version of waterboarding, to find out some secrets which might compromise Matilda. But Vorontsov overpowers the doctor, and leaves him in the tank – to be discovered by Alexandra, who dumps Matilda’s bloody ballet shoe into the water. Vorontsov, jealous and obsessed by Matilda, kidnaps her, and wants to die with her a boat full of TNT.

Uchitel is one of many directors portraying teenagers in love with men twice their age, showing them as predators. The reality, that these older men in power positions are coercing the young women, never seems to occur. Even Matilda’s few ballet scenes are shown in the context of rivalry with another ballerina. Apart from this, we see her in numerous forms of semi-undressed, being the object of male gaze of the director and DoP Yuriy Klimenko, who worked with Uchital on Break Loose. He wallows in slow-motion and sickly pink images, always objectifying Matilda. Apart from the ridiculous plotting, violence is as gratuitous as fare-fetched in its execution. Acting is straight from the 1950s, with the lines articulated with the earnestness of school children.

The real Matylda Krzesinska emigrated after the Revolution to Paris, where she founded her own ballet school in the 1920s, her students include Margot Fonteyn, Alicia Markova and Maurice Bejart among others. She went on dancing until aged 64, when she was on stage of the Royal Ballet Covent Garden at a Charity event. She certainly deserves better than this caricature of a film. AS

SCREENING DURING UK RUSSIAN FILM Week | 19-26 NOVEMBER 2017

https://youtu.be/abegrlwje_Y

Tom of Finland (2017) | bluray release

Dir: Dome Karukoski | Cast: Pekka Strang, Jessica Grabowsky, Lauri Tilkanen | Finland | Biopic | 112min

Dome Karukoski’s biopic about Touko Laaksonen – aka Tom of Finland – is a thoughtfully poignant and stylish portrait of an intriguing pioneer of Gay art in the second half of the 20th century.

His story also charts the development of social and sexual mores of the Post-War era where the illicit nature of his nascent sexuality provided the erotic charge for pencilled images of well-endowed and masculine musclemen often rocking official uniforms astride motorbikes or engaged in sporting or heavy duty activity.

We first meet Touko (Pekka Strang) in the immediate aftermath to the War living in Helsinki with his sister Kaija (Jessica Grabowsky) and suffering from the after effects of killing a Russian pilot. Kaija works in the art department of an local advertising agency and he joins her, developing his own art style after hours. At a time where homosexuality is still illegal in Finland, he also dabbles in cruising in the local woods where the Police are active in combatting the activity ahead of the 1952 Helsinki Summer Olympics. One of his ‘fuckbuddies’ Nipa (Lauri Tilkanen) later turns up as a lodger and romantic hopeful for his sister, leading to an subtly-played menage a trois, a script device of Aleksi Bardy’s fractured narrative structure that, despite its occasional incoherence – largely due to the ambitious time period untaken – manages to convey a believable onscreen chemistry for the males, while dashing Kaija’s romantic hopes during an evocative summer interlude in the family’s blissful country house in the lake region.

TOM OF FINLAND is a painterly affair with some sumptuous cinematic moments, not only in the glorious outdoor sequences, but also in the Art Nouveau splendour of Helsinki’s architecture. The city’s downtown soigné offices and cocktail bars and the stylish interiors of Touko’s own apartment provide a showcase for the country’s iconic designs: Aalto chairs and Lindfors lighting. And the elegantly austere colour palette of Northern Europe contrasts well with the sun-drenched segments in ’70s California, where Touko’s work is finally published and earns the nom de plume ‘Tom of Finland’. There is a witty scene with the fanzine printer who suggests: ‘Tom of Sweden would sell more,” while the editor retorts: “But it seems, Finland has bigger cocks”. While Nipa struggles with throat cancer back home, Touko meets a local gay couple: Doug (Seumas Sargent) and Jack, played by Norwegian Jakob Oftebro, who become firm friends.

Despite the minor narrative setbacks, TOM OF FINLAND is enjoyable and fascinating to watch. Strang’s Touko is an appealing almost endearing character and his love for Nipa, a classically trained ballet dancer, is completely convincing and touching. Apart from his sister, Touka’s wider family remain completely in the dark, although it is clear in final scenes that he never got the family appreciation he justly deserved for his iconic style. MT

TOM OF FINLAND IS ON BLUEAY from 20 NOVEMBER 2017

The Death of Louis XIV (2016) Bfi player

Director: Albert Serra Writers: Thierry Lounas | Cast: Jean-Pierre Leaud, Bernard Belin, Philippe Crespeau, Filipe Duarte, Irene Silvagni | 110min | Biopic Drama | France\Spain

Dying very slowly is always going to be a painful affair, especially in the 18th Century. The lack of medical knowledge and the quackery of charlatan doctors, not to mention the absence of pain relief, clearly made the final hours of life unbearable even for the privileged Roi de Soleil (1638-1715).

French New Wave veteran Jean-Pierre Léaud gives a performance of subtle dignity as Louis XIV in Catalan director Albert Serra’s painterly and well-paced portrait that captivates and mesmerises for just under two hours, despite its length and almost entire confinement to the interior of the King’s rooms in Versailles.

Crafted in the same luminescence as his Locarno Golden Leopard Winner The Story of My Death that explored an encounter between Casanova and Dracula, Albert Serra this time casts professional actors instead of newcomers and the result is a drama that resonates and delights both visually and emotionally..

We first meet the Bourbon King taking in the mellow pleasures of late summer in the grounds of the palace of Versailles in a scene that oozes balmy fruitfulness in the gentle Autumn breeze. Already suffering from gangrene in his leg he is confined to a creaky wheelchair that travels at a snail’s pace like the remainder of the film – and none the worse for it.

Retiring to his boudoir after a brief glimpse of court where he flourishes a feathered hat at the ladies in recognition of their invitation to a soirée – which he declines – clearly proves he is much loved and admired amongst his female côtérie. Although the rest of the film takes place in the confines of his bed chamber it never once feels claustrophobic or unpleasant despite the sight of his gangrenous leg and his numerous attempts to imbibe his favourite ‘Vin d’Alicante’ and biscotti. Louis cuts a fragile but endearing and rather kindly figure, if a little cantankerous late at night when he demands water – but only to be served in his crystal glass – and one who commands respect and even sympathy in final hours of suffering.

Serra manages to evoke the majesty of his legendary opulence with just a few props and trinkets obviating the need for a large budget and or a vast cast and crew. But there is still no doubt as to the power Louis commands from his court and personal advisers who are seen clapping when the king does manage to down the odd grape or two after several weeks of illness, that seem to indicate a reprise especially when he orders a ‘chicken chaud froid’ shortly before slipping away.

Louis continues to reign from the comfort of his lacy underpinnings with the assistance of his physician, Fagon (Patrick D’Assumcao), and priest Le Tellier (Jacques Henric), who crowd around his bed. Clearly they compete for the King’s praise and like many great men he exerts power over them with his waning authority still sparking imperiousness with moments of touching vulnerability as he struggles to maintain control.

Sumptuously mounted and richly textured this is a film to savour and enjoy, and its finest moment is undoubtedly when a magnificent Mozart mass plays on the soundtrack as Louis listens in all his finery. Long live the King!. MT .

NOW OUT ON Bfi player

Bad Day for the Cut (2017) Prime video

Dir.: Chris Baugh; Cast: Nigel O’Neill, Susan Lynch, Jozef Pawlowski, Anna Prochniak, Stella McCusker, Stuart Graham; UK 2017, 95 min.

First time director/co-writer Chris Baugh has delivered a very bloody, moody and convoluted revenge thriller, saved by the widescreen photography of Ryan Kernaghan and a strong cast.

Farmer and part time motor mechanic Donal (O’Neill) lives with his mother Florence (McCusker) in Northern Ireland. After his mother is murdered brutally, her son goes out on a spiralling revenge hunt, digging deep into the IRA past of his family, and finding out about a sex-trafficking ring run by Frankie Pierce (Lynch) and her ‘consultant’ Trevor (Graham). Two of their henchman try to hang Donal, making it look like a suicide, but one of the assassins, Bartoz (Pawlowski), a Pole from Bydgoszcz, messes up with tragic results.

The secrets of the past, personal and political, uncovered by Donal, are more than enough for one feature, Baugh doesn’t need to overload the narrative with a sex-slaves sidebar, giving the piece more than a hint of misogyny: although to be fair, the female gang leader Pierce (Lynch) is far more deadly than her sidekick Trevor – whom she sacks in front of her little daughter in a rather hilarious scene – only Kaja (Prochniak), as the out and out victim, is shown any sympathy. If you don’t mind gratuitous violence Bad Day certainly cuts the mustard, and looks good into the bargain with its convincing ensemble cast. As an exercise in innovative brutality, Bad Day wins hands down – with more domestic appliances than you can shake a blender at, but it’s pretty bloody as thrillers go. AS

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Most Beautiful Island (2017) ***

Dir. Ana Asensio | Spain/US. 2017 | 80′ | Thriller

Many aspects of this true life tale of an ‘illegal alien’ Spanish grifting to survive in New York could come across as a little far-fetched, but its creeping paranoia also perfectly captures the climate of our increasingly unpredictable modern world. Based on the experiences of the film’s writer, director and star, it went on to win the grand jury prize at 2017’s South by Southwest.

MOST BEAUTIFUL ISLAND is best described as an urban thriller. Asensio’s Luciana is a desperate young woman who finds herself inveigled into situations she might have questioned and not counternanced in her native country, which she has fled in tragic circumstances. The pared down approach of dialogue and aesthetic adds to the film’s menacing allure where a brooding tension builds slowly towards the stark finale. From the early scenes there is a palpable feeling of dread when a confused Luciana is confronted by a hostile doctor who she consults about her feelings of nausea. We all know about the draconian rules surrounded the provision of health care in the US and this only adds to the sense of alienation. Surviving through a series of menial jobs – dressed as a chicken to promote a restaurant, and as a nanny to spoilt brats – Luciana cannot even rely on her self-seeking colleague, Olga, support or sympathy. And when Olga comes up with an offer Luciana cannot refuse, this does not arouse her suspicions. It involves lucrative work at an evening venue. All shoe has to do is dress up. Alarm beels ring when it emerges that the work could be both dangerous and humiliating. Our fears are borne out as she descends into the basement of a dodgy Chinese restaurant. No bags or mobile telephones are allowed at the venue, where she is urged by a threatening female master of ceremonies to ‘look like she is at a party’, while Luciana joins a group of similarly black-dressed young women who are each given a number and told to join ‘the game’.

There are shades of Eyes Wide Shut and even Frankie & Lola to this unsettling thriller which often sacrifices substance for atmosphere, the final denouement falling short of our expectations. Asensio uses a Super 16 camera to shoot her film, eking out a meagre budget to great effect. Jeffrey Alan Jones’ score is as mean and as sinister as the storyline of a claustrophobic but effectively scary feature debut. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 16 NOVEMBER 2017

Shalom Bollywood (2017) | UK Jewish Film Festival 2017

Dir/Writer: Danny Ben-Moshe | Doc | US | 85′

In his feisty all singing all dancing doc Danny Ben-Moshe shows how religious taboos led to the first superstars of Indian cinema being Jewish. India has always been extremely tolerant towards its Jewish population, it was deeply frowned on for Hindu and Muslim women to appear in film back in the early years of the 20th century, so their roles were generally played by men, until female Jewish stars filled the vacuum.

Light-hearted and full of cheeky chutzpah Shalom Bollywood: The Untold Story of Indian Cinema explores the rise to fame of four such prima donnas — Sulochana, Pramila, Miss Rose and Nadira — and a token male David Abraham, whose charisma was such that marriage was unable to contain him to one female, but he always remained the toast of the town and the most-invited man in Mumbai’s soigné cinema soirées. Abraham was also known as “Uncle David,” and he charmed the birds from the trees until a stroke robbed him of his speech.

You get the impression that Ben-Moshe is really desperate to push his point showcasing these Jewish divas as his restless camera darts from pillar to post chockfull of original footage and talking heads that prattle away volubly about the triumphs of their proud community. And although the films they discuss are not necessarily the most well known to mainstream audiences, Shalom provides solid entertainment as a taster of Jewish-led Bollywood films of the last century.

This is a far cry from the director’s previous work Code of Silence, which raised the lid on child sex abuse in Melbourne’s Orthodox Jewish community. Here we learn how a few thousand Jews lived peaceably amongst the Muslim and Hindu majorities. They were the long-established sect of Bene Israelis, and also Jews from Iraq. Sulochana was actually called Ruby Myers. She captured the imagination of her male co-stars with her dusky beauty seen mostly in animated stills, as footage of her silent films is hard to come by but includes the remarkable 1927 Wild Cat of Bombay, where she does a ‘Kate Blanchett’, playing multiple female and male roles in this cult extravaganza. Esther Abraham, hailed from Calcutta and was known by her stage name of Pramila. Her marriage to a Muslim produced the actor-playwright Haider Ali, who provides a lively account of how the different religious communities got on like a house on fire, back in the day.

The film’s final glamorous star was Nadira (Florence Ezekiel), who played opposite Dilip Kumar as ‘the vamp’ – simply a female who fluttered her eyelids and wore high heels – during the 1950s and ’60s with films like Aan. These stars were quick to learn from their Hollywood peers and provided a new kind of emancipated female in contrast to the submissive characters of the era.

Shalom Bollywood skims over a great deal of detail surrounding Hindu language issues the stars encountered but as a fun and lightly informative flick through the era’s silent cinema and the ‘Golden Age’ of film it’s certainly provides insight. MT

SCREENING DURING UK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL | 9 – 26 NOVEMBER 2017 | NATIONWIDE

Russian Film Week | 19 November – 26 November 2017

Russian Film Week (RFW) returns this year for the second time and is twice as big, marking it as the biggest cross-cultural Russian event to have taken place outside of Russia.

The nationwide programme includes shorts, animation, documentary films and features intended to bridge the gap between Russia and the West through culture. And whilst the ‘greats’ – such as Eisenstein, Tarkovsky, or Andrey Zvyagintsev (Leviathan, Loveless) – are well known to cineastes, the RFW mission is to bring us the full scope of Russian cinema to an international market and celebrate its artistic merit with global audiences.

There will be a chance to see new films such as MATHILDE (Alexey Uchitel/left) and ARRYTHMIA (Boris Khlebnikov/below), and the latest in Russian cinema all with a Russian theme, whether from Russia or other countries — based on Russian literature, people or events, enlivened by Q&A sessions, exhibitions and masterclasses including a documentary strand as part its FemFest, Revolution Centenary, and Ecology Days. Waterstones Piccadilly will host throughout the week free VR demonstrations provided by Russian VR Seasons and PlanetPics (Natural Treasures of Russia programme).

RFW opens with a screening of ATTRACTION, and climaxes with the BFI closing screening of MATHILDE on the 26th November, and Golden Unicorn Awards Charity Gala Dinner on the 25th. This is when the winners in 12 awards categories, including Best Foreign film About Russia, will be announced – as decided by a renowned international jury.

In attendance of the festival, will be over 75 of Russia’s most talented directors, producers and actors including: Fedor Bondarchuk, Alexander Yatsenko, Valery Todorovsky, Alyona Babenko, Anna Mikhalkova and Aleksey Uchitel.

RFW takes place in venues including the BFI, Science Museum, PictureHouses, Curzon Cinemas, Ciné Lumière, Regent Street Cinema and more London, Cambridge, and Edinburgh.

As 2017 is the Year of Ecology in Russia, RFW have teamed up with WWF UK to raise funds for the WWF Amur Tiger Conservation Project in Russia over the duration of the festival. RFW and Synergy University have also launched a special Student Ecology Short Film competition with a special Golden Unicorn–Synergy Award. So RFW looks set to be a highlight of this Winter’s festival circuit. MT

RUSSIAN FILM WEEK | 19 – 26 NOVEMBER 2017 | LONDON | NATIONWIDE

Fahrenheit 451 (1966) | Bluray release

Dir: Francois Truffaut |Cast: Julie Christie, Oskar Werner, Cyril Cusack, Anton Diffring | Sci-fi Drama | 112′

One of the many pleasures of Truffaut’s adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 has become the power of the bibliophile. When the fireman of the future turn their flame-throwers on a pile of 1950/60’s paperbacks (it’s now over fifty years since Truffaut chose them for the film) their book covers appear achingly nostalgic, to older cineastes. Many of these retro Penguins and Pelicans still turn up in charity shops and though it hasn’t come to pass that our government will destroy them, maybe, just maybe, instead of becoming ash, they remain unsold and unread?

It’s fascinating to watch Fahrenheit 451 in our social-media age when more time is spent reading words on screens rather than on paper. Technology has ‘burnt’ into our reading behaviour making a ban on books almost unnecessary. We’ve ‘freely’ chosen, assisted by advertising, to absorb information on computers, TV and film over experiencing knowledge gleaned from the inner life of books of fiction or philosophy.

Fahrenheit 451 depicts large television screens (a prophetic novelty in 1966 that we can now easily purchase) that in Truffaut’s ‘future’ are removed of word content in the form of credits or announcements. Our miniaturised phone screens, tablets and laptops, so commonplace in 2017, are never seen. Nor is any character depicted taking a selfie. The film’s routine narcissism consists of people without mobile devices, travelling on trains and hugging or touching their clothed selves, in a sad auto-erotic manner, indicating that clinging to a vestige of self-love is a last resort in a society where no one looks happy, and therefore is disinclined to reflect this on film.

Truffaut has claimed that Fahrenheit 451 is not science fiction. This is true in the sense that the technological menace of the book’s mechanical hound, and the horribly graphic manner in which would-be suicides are vacuumed of any depression, is absent. But Ray Bradbury, allowing for his technological terrors, was more of a poetic fantasist than a genre SF writer. Truffaut attempted to convey threats to intimacy (Fahrenheit 451 is more to do with repression and denial of human closeness). And Bradbury, also mindful of loss, is as differently soulful about that as Truffaut.

Guy Montag (Oskar Werner) discovers that after reading his first book, Dickens’s David Copperfield, he is re-born (“Chapter one. I am born. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life or whether that station will be held by anybody else these pages must show.”) His wife Linda (Julie Christie) discovers his crime and betrays Montag by informing the captain of the Fire Service (Cyril Cusack). Once they discover Montag’s secret hoard of books, Montag kills the captain, burns his room and escapes to the country to join the book people, who have each chosen a book to preserve for future generations. In Montag’s case it’s Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. The formerly placid and neutral Montag is to be transformed by symbolic tales depicting morbid states of catalepsy, hallucination and terror.

On my 4th viewing of Fahrenheit 451 I was much more aware of the film’s lightly humorous tone, making for a telling picture of social conformity: particularly this absurd exchange between Montag and the captain.

The Captain: By the way, what does Montag do on his day off duty?
Guy Montag: Not much, sir, just mow the lawn.
The Captain: And what if the law forbids it?
Guy Montag: Just watch it grow, sir.

Or the lovely in-joke announcement, by one of the book people, who’s preserving his text, in his memory, in order to survive its physical destruction.

Book Person: And I’m The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury.

Whether by accident or design, the film’s book titles take on their own filmic pattern of meaning. I’m sure film students have written essays and published theses, on the trajectory of key books in Truffaut’s film, relating to the moral awakening of Montag. The first book that we see burning is Don Quixote (A story of a man pursuing illusions) then The Moon and Sixpence (A story of a man renouncing the conventions of society to become an artist) and David Copperfield (A story of a man who wants to determine his own fate.) All can be viewed as stages in Montag’s development from destroyer to creator, fireman made lover slowly seduced by his books.

The obedient state servant rejects a “zombie” (Montag’s word) society. Fireman burns books. Fireman reads and comes to revere books. Fireman becomes his freely chosen book. “Kerosene is a perfume” says Montag, explaining his book burning work, to Clarisse (Julie Christie doubling up as wife alter-ego and book person). Interestingly Truffaut’s film has no equivalent line of dialogue to suggest that the smell of a book’s pages become Montag’s preferred love perfume.

If there are flaws in Fahrenheit 451 they centre round some occasionally stilted dialogue. (Though this can be viewed as the natural result of a highly controlled zombiefied society plus Truffaut’s lack of English over co-writing the screenplay). And when the book people begin to appear near the end and start to introduce themselves – for example (“I am Pride and Prejudice Book I and I am Pride and Prejudice book 2” ) you immediately think what a great idea but not quite worked out properly. Then a miracle occurred. During the shooting of the film, it went and snowed. As the snow falls people walk back and forth, reciting chapters to themselves, and we experience eloquent screen poetry – greatly enhanced by Bernard Herrmann’s touching music.

Fahrenheit 451 was deeply unappreciated by audiences and critics in 1966. Today its menacing charm both excites and disturbs. This is a world as lyrical as Truffaut’s earlier films: though now beguiling us with a melancholic dystopia: our desperate attempts to recover a sense of self – even if fulfilment of feeling is most tenderly realised in love’s surrender to the printed word. Alan Price © 2017

NOW AVAILABLE ON BLURAY

Heartstone (2016)

Dir/writer: Gudmundur Arnar Gudmundsson | Cast: Baldur Einarsson, Blaer Hinriksson, Dilja Valsdottir, Katla Njalsdottir, Soren Malling, Nina Dogg Filippusdottir | Drama | Iceland | 129′

In a remote Icelandic fishing village the hostile terrain provides a chilly counterpoint to the sexual awakening of two young teenagers in this movingly thoughtful if overlong feature debut. The young cast of newcomers is really what makes HEARTSTONE such an affecting drama, rather than its meandering narrative. We feel for them in their unsettling changes, but this would have held more more dramatic weight with a tighter edit. This is a small criticism for an impressive start. Writer-director Gudmundur Arnar Gudmundsson has really marshalled his material and created an impressive film that certainly shows great insight into the kids’ confused state of adolescence.

The story follows best friends Thor (Baldur Einarsson) and Kristjan (Blaer Hinriksson) are who are at a loose end in this remote outpost, and given to bouts of aggression, sadly directed at wildlife, but there is also a tenderness between the boys – and they are only boys – with Thor still really only a child. Despite the country setting, family life isn’t easy and Thor is constantly teased by his older sisters — Rakel (Jonina Thordis Karlsdottir) and the more creative Hafdis (Ran Ragnarsdottir), who has a penchant for Bjork. Their father has cleared off with a younger woman, leaving their mother (Nina Dogg Filippusdottir) unsettled emotionally as she casts around for another man. Kristjan’s father (Sveinn Olafur Gunnarsson) is rather butch and macho – clearly a homophobic and hard drinker. The boys have already tried their luck with girls: Beta (Dilja Valsdotttir), and her friend Hanna (Katla Njalsdottir). But their true colours slowly emerge (and I mean slowly) on a spiky camping trip – not least due to the undergrowth. There’s a memorably dramatic scene where Kristjan’s father takes the boys up a mountain side to search for gulls’ eggs but the pace slackens during the final scenes despite a certain poignance in the ending that makes this an impressive first feature. MT

NOW ON RELEASE FROM 17 NOVEMBER 2017 | VENICE 2016 REVIEW

https://vimeo.com/181909026

Bye Bye Germany | UK Jewish Film Festival 2017

Dir: Sam Garbarski | Cast: Moritz Bleibtrau, Antje Traue, Tim Seyfi, Anatole Taubman | Ger/Lux/Belgium 2017 | Drama | 101′

Sam Garbarski’s rousing but tonally uneven drama takes place in the immediate aftermath to the Second World War where in Frankfurt, 1946, Moritz Bleibtrau’s glibly charismatic Jewish businessman has lived to tell the tale and is back to the drawing board of his previous existence, running a linen business owned by his family – who were not so lucky and mostly perished during the Holocaust. He and his other self-appointed salesmen try inventive ways to inveigle themselves into the homes and hearts of the local German housewives in order to peddle their wares, and get the business up and running again.

Based on Michel Bergmann’s ‘Teilacher’ trilogy the narrative is true to the page but somehow the book’s intended dark humour misfires on the screen, although the themes raised are certainly worthwhile in exploring the subtle nature of immigration and repatriation. Meanwhile, David shares a palpable onscreen chemistry with special agent Sarah Simon who is investigating questionable links to his past concerning a possible Nazi collaboration.

BYE BYE GERMANY is a lively and fast-moving drama if you buy into its humour, so let’s not bounce it out of court. If nothing else it is a tribute to the European Jews who chose to remain in their homeland of Germany with its painful reminders and past hostilities. MT

SCREENING DURING THE UK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL 9 NOVEMBER – 26 NOVEMBER 2017

Manina | The Lighthouse-Keeper’s Daughter (

Dir.: Willy Rozier; Cast: Brigitte Bardot, Jen-Francois Calve, Howard Vernon; France 1952, 76 min.

Also known in the UK/US under the title The Girl in the Bikini, this was 17y-ear old Brigitte Bardot’s second feature. The same year, after turning 18, she married the director Roger Vadim, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Director and writer Rozier had a long, but not very distinguished career, directing 38 features between 1938 and 1976, of which 56 Rue de Pigalle is the best known. Manina is, apart from Bardot’s striking screen personality, quiet ordinary for its time. Mature student Gerard (Calve) listens to a lecture about a hidden treasure off the coast near Ajaccio: gold coins, worth a fortune, are hidden in amphorae, after the ship carrying them way back in Phoenician times, sank. Gerard remembers diving near the rocky island of Levezzi five years ago with friends, and finding such a amphora. Not liking his law studies very much, he decides to become rich, borrowing money from friends to finance his expedition. In Tangiers, he makes the acquaintance of the smuggler Eric (Vernon), whose boat they will use to recover the gold coins. After a tediously long evening in the cabaret and a subsequent brawl, the two set out with Eric’s men to Levezzi. When they meet Manina, Eric remembers her from his last visit, but is stunned, that she has turned into a luminous beauty. Manina also sings (Bardot would record over 80 songs in her career), is very agile on the high and dangerous rocks, from which she jumps like a fish into the sea. She certainly has all the mysterious qualities of a mermaid, and Gerard falls in love with her. Eric too makes an attempt to kiss her, but is rewarded with a hefty slap. Finally, Gerard finds the amphorae with the coins, but Eric has his own agenda.

It is impossible not to be fascinated by Bardot, the moment the ingénue appears on the screen, one forgets the tedious plot, she is simply stunning, fully dressed or in a bikini. She seems not to act, but fro locks around the mountains, as if she had always lived there. It is in her nature, to be what she role demands. As one can see in films, where the director took her serious, and not used her as sex-object, like Godard or Clouzot, she could easily carry the film – but even at the beginning of her career, Bardot had all the talent to act out all nuances of her screen personalities. Whilst mostly careering around in full speed in Manina, Bardot, literally, hits the right notes with her sad songs, and her devastation, when Gerard nearly dies. She simply was a natural actress – the rest is male projection and publicity. AS

MANINA IS NOW OUT ON BLURAY COURTESY OF EUREKA CINEMA | AMAZON.CO.UK

Filmstars Don’t Die in Liverpool (2017)

Dir.: Paul McGuigan; Cast: Annette Benning, Jamie Bell, Juliet Walters, Kenneth Cranham, Vanessa Redgrave; UK 2017, 105 min.

Redeemed by the brilliance of leads Annette Bening and Jamie Bell, this rather sentimental psycho-drama recalls Peter Turner’s memoirs about his relationship with Hollywood star Gloria Grahame (1923-1981). Opting for a tricky flashback narrative, director Paul McGuigan introduces the doomed lovers in late 1970s London where Grahame (Bening) is trying to re-establish her career on the London stage; while Turner (Bell) is ‘resting’ in Primrose Hill. Returning to the US, Grahame discovers that her low-level cancer has come back with a vengeance but she is very much in denial, and rejects chemotherapy for fear of losing her hair, and her acting career. She comes back to live with Turner in the home her shares with his parents (Julie Walters and Kenneth Graham), Ironically, he is playing the part of an doctor while Grahame is dying, but still hopes to play ‘Juliet’.

Gloria Grahame emerges as a complex character, obsessed with cosmetic surgery in a bid to achieve absolute beauty. Her relationships ended mostly tragically: the marriage to director Nicholas Ray (1948-1952) ended in divorce on account of her infidelity with his 13 year son Anthony, whom Grahame later married later in 1960 causing widespread scandal. But Turner was anything but straight: in the film he mentions his bi-sexuality en-passant, but script-writer Matt Greenhaigh decides not to follow this up. There is a telling scene in California, when Gloria’s mother Jeanne McDougall (Redgrave) reminds her daughter poignantly about her predilection for younger men. And there is no mention of how Grahame got to know the Turner family, in the first place.

Polish born DoP Urszula Pontikos uses soft colours, avoiding the usual kitchen sink grime in Liverpool. There are not many laughs, but when the couple pay 90 pennies for two pints, laughter erupted in the cinema. Overall, Bening and Bell play their hearts out, and really convince us of their amour-fou. Like a late Bruckner symphony, they carry their filmstars beyond the realm of everlasting torture and loss. AS

SCREENING DURING BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 4-15 OCTOBER 2017

https://youtu.be/uoRaUCeDLQ4AS

Manifesto (2017)

Dir.: Julian Rosefeldt; Cast: Cate Blanchett; Germany/Australia, 94′.

Writer/director Julian Rosefeldt (The Creation) transposes his installation of the same name to the big screen with this tour-de-force of ideas held together by Cate Blanchett, who appears in 13 different incarnations, breathing life into the tenets of Dadaism, Futurism and Suprematism and others whose credos enlightened the 20th century.

To say this is an odd film, is not an understatement. Apart from the lack of narrative, words and ideas dominate – despite Christoph Krauss’ images (mostly panorama shots from high above), which are stunning. When watching, it definitely helps to have some knowledge of art history and its movements, since the funny side of it all can only be appreciated with this background. MANIFESTO is, after all, a head-idea; an artificial construct which can be deciphered with pleasure – but some knowledge is simply a pre-condition.

It starts off with Blanchett playing a tramp, declaiming the Communist Manifest by Marx and Engels. Later, she changes into a bourgeois housewife, who lectures her family with a tract on the superiority of Pop Art. Husband and children are required by hee to fold their hands as in prayer, while they are waiting for mother to finish so they can start eating the turkey. Blanchett also plays a Primary school teacher, not only adamant that her kids learn about Jim Jarmush’ golden rules of filmmaking, but reminding them too, what JL Godard preached: “It is not where you take things from – it is where you take them to”. For good measure, the little ones also learn about the Von Trier/Vinterberg Dogma Manifesto: only handheld cameras, no artificial light. Blanchett also gives a staggering turn as a ballet master, directing a camp Busby Berkeley imitation of glitzy Martian girls dancing to a text about money distribution. And finally, there are two Cate’s at the same time at work in a TV studio: One is the anchor, who interviews the second Cate, who seems far away in the pouring rain, being interviewed on Conceptual Art, based on the text of Sol de Witt. When the interview is over, we discover that Cate II was in the studio next door, where the rain machine is switched off after the questioning finishes. MANIFESTO is certainly a great work offering endless subject for discussion – and musings are guaranteed for those who are in the know. For the rest, Blanchett’s performance is simply staggering. AS

OUT ON RELEASE FROM 15 NOVEMBER 2017 NATIONWIDE

56, rue Pigalle (1949) | Bluray release

Dir.: Willy Rozier; Cast: Jacques Dumesnil, Marie Dea, Aime Clariond, Rene Blancard; France 1949, 88′.

Willy Rozier (1901 – 1983) was know for his exotic taste, and 56 Rue de Pigalle does not disappoint: a brazen mixture of film noir and melodrama, the plot swerves wildly between the two genres, the protagonists having to change track often.

Nautical engineer Jean Vigneron (Dumesnil) is also a fanatic water sportsman, competing in races with his yacht. Whilst having a collision with another boat, captained by Ines de Montalban (Dea), he falls in love with the married woman. Jean tries to meet her at social occasions, and makes friends with her husband Ricardo de Montalban (Clariond), who is much older than his wife. Ricardo declares his everlasting friendship with Jean in a nightclub, not knowing that Jean is lusting after his wife.

After the yachtsman finally seduces Ines, Jean’s butler Lucien Bonnet (Blanchard) blackmails him with letters from his mistress. Jean is willing to pay, and puts his yacht on the market. Ricardo, always the gentleman, but not very intuitive, lends Jean 1.1. Million Franc, but after Jean pays off Bonnet, the rogue turns round and murders his partner in crime, pocketing the money. Obviously, Jean is a suspect, and since he does not divulge Madame de Montalban’s involvement, he has to stand trial. By now, Ricardo has finally learned the truth (he wanted to shoot Ines during a hunt, but was disturbed), and hopes that Jean is found guilty and beheaded. But Ines finds the copies of the incriminating letters in his jacket, and Jean is quitted. But Ricardo swears revenge, and the lovers have to flee to a French colony in Africa, where they await Ricardo’s arrival, fearful of his revenge.

Shot in atmospheric black and white by renowned veteran Fred Langenfeld (Topaze, Le Coeur sur le main), the narrative is full of twists, but these swings and roundabouts are often too clumsy. Rozier did not only introduce Brigitte Bardot in Manina (1952) to a wider audience, but did the same for the beautiful Françoise Arnoul in L’Epave (1949), which was distributed in Britain as Sin and Desire. Finally, after the release of 56 Rue Pigalle in France, the critic François Chalais was very harsh on the film, and Rozier challenged him to a duel. They fought with swords, and Rozier got satisfaction, when he cut Chalais. An epitaph, somehow in line with the wild story of the feature. AS

NOW AVAILABLE ON BLURAY FROM 13 NOVEMBER 2017 COURTESY OF EUREKA | AMAZON

New Chinese Cinema | Pingyao International Film Festival | Year Zero 2017

Eastern Promise was lavishly delivered this year at the inaugural PINGYAO CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (PYIFF) offering audiences from all over the world a chance to enjoy the latest in Chinese independent cinema for 10 days (28 October-4 November). The indie film festival is the brainchild of filmmaker and producer Jia Zhangke who grew up in Fenyang, near the festival’s setting in the UNESCO World Heritage walled town of Pingyao (in the province of Shanxi) – a four-hour bullet train journey south west of Beijing.- was determined that one day he would raise the region’s profile from one of coal-mining to a cradle of Chinese creativity.

PYIFF also offered local Chinese cinephiles their first opportunity to sample a prodigious Jean Pierre Melville retrospective in their own homeland. The competition also paid homage, with its awards, named after Roberto Rossellini, and the Chinese director Fei Mu, and showed a selection of the latest releases including Vivian Qu’s Venice Biennale 2017 standout ANGELS WEAR WHITE and Xiaogang Feng’s rousing epic YOUTH that recently played at Toronto Film Festival 2017.

Venice Film Festival’s long-time artistic director Marco Mueller masterminded an eclectic programme where two strands in particular showcased the talents of emerging Chinese filmmakers – the soi-disant ‘tiger’s and ‘dragons’ (also honouring Ang Lee). The CROUCHING TIGERS section offered the opportunity to see debut or second films from new directors. The HIDDEN DRAGONS gave a platform to genre fare and a NEW GENERATION series showcased mostly Chinese indie fare. Chinese cinema has had a rough ride in its homeland in the past due to the deemed unsuitability for general release of some of its titles – perhaps Xi Jingping will see fit to loosen the silk strings that restrict the autonomy of independent cinema, while standing by the communist tenet to promote China’s cultural creativity: an uneasy paradox. The original dates of the festival were delayed by the 19th Communist Party Conference. While there is a desire to promote culture, the programmers were also forced to ban several South Korean titles due to a contretemps between Beijing and Seoul. Festival opener YOUTH had initially caused problems due to its ‘controversial’ depiction of the 1979 Sino-Vietnemese war. While press attempting to take photos during the opening gala were threatened by a fierce-looking security guards bearing truncheons (most Chinese continued to film the proceeding oblivious – in the spirit of Tiananmen Square), Chinese law also states that accredited journalists are entitled to complimentary lodging and subsistence – so none of us went hungry at lunchtime as we tucked into delicious bento boxes prepared by the chefs of Jia Jhangke’s ‘Mountains May Depart’ Restaurant which is located in a new arts centre which is gradually being developed on the site of a former industrial zone.

The good news is that mainstream Chinese film production is thriving abundantly with around 700 films being made each year so PYIFF is a healthy move in the right direction, thanks to Jia Zhangke and Marco Muller, a ‘foreigner’ who enjoys a close and charismatic relationship with the Chinese. And their efforts to encourage young filmmakers have certainly paid off. But Zhangke is not resting on his laurels: filming for his title ASH IS PUREST WHITE (Jiang hu er nv) a violent noughties-set love story is already underway, his talented wife Tao Zhao (right, at the PYIFF opening ceremony) takes the leading role. MT

REVIEW LINKS to the latest CHINESE INDIE FILMS at PYIFF | YEAR ZERO | 28 OCT – 4 NOV 2017

THE TASTE FOR RICE FLOWER

A FISH OUT OF WATER

ONE NIGHT ON THE WHARF

YOUTH

ASH

Ben Gurion – Epilogue (2016) | UK Jewish Film Festival 2017

Dir.: Yariv Mozer; Documentary with David Ben-Gurion; Israel/France/Germany 2016, 70 min.

The majority of Yariv Mozer biopic’s focuses on his six hour b/w interview with the Jewish leader David Ben-Gurion in 1968, intended as the basis of a feature film about the ex-premier’s life. This film was released in 1970, but faded without impact. The British film crew who shot the interview in the spartan Side Boker kibbutz, had to build a new set with an extensive library, to create a background fitting the profile of the man who founded modern Israel as its first Prime Minister for 13 years, before rather abruptly resigning from government in 1963, when he was Minister of Defence.

1968 marked the 20th year since the founding of Israel, and Ben-Gurion, who came to what was then Palestine (a British Protectorate) from Poland, at the turn of the 20th century, lived there during the era when Zionism was not a combative ideology, let alone an imperialistic one. As far as 1948 goes, Ben-Gurion states unequivocally: “I believed we had the right to this country. Not taking it away from others, but recreating it.” But one year after the 1967 war, the same man wanted “to give most of the territories gained in that war back in exchange for peace”. That this never happened, he somehow foresaw, talking about the government he had left: “You are not considering the future, you are only considering the present.”

Documentary evidence about life during Ben-Gurion’s time show the changes in society from early settlements to state-building. But Ben-Gurion is alwys modest: “I did not guide Israel, I guided myself”. He was always a voracious reader, and as an eight year old boy, he was enthusiastic about Mark Twain’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The documentary is enriched with excerpts from some of his great Knesset speeches, and meetings with Ray Charles and Albert Einstein.

The six-hour original was found in the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive without an audio, which was later discovered in the Ben-Gurion Archive in Negev. The only criticism here is that the film seems rather short on material. It would provide an ideal companion piece for the Israeli documentary The Settlers, directed by Shimon Dotan, which tells the story of Rabbi Moshe Levenger and his followers, who started building settlements in Israeli occupied territories, making it now nearly impossible for a Palestinian state to exist. Neither consecutive Israeli governments, nor their USA counterparts have stopped this movement, which is in direct contradiction of the Geneva Convention. Ben-Gurion was certainly a little biased when talking of “not taking away from others”, yet in 1968, there was still a chance of “recreation”. But since, the dream of Theodor Herzl has ended up in a cul-de-sac of a Sparta in the desert, because Israel “did not consider the future”. AS

SCREENING DURING UK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL 9 – 26 NOVEMBER 2017

Will it Snow for Christmas? (1996) | BFI Bluray release

Deeply moving but never sentimental this remarkable debut from FRENCH writer/director Sandrine Veysset is testament to a mother’s unflinching love and dedication to her family of seven kids growing up on a farm the south of France.Based on a book by Antoinette de Robien (La Reine Margot) it provides an intimate portray of family life under the draconian glare of their distant father (Daniel Duval) who also has another family who live nearby. Helene Louvart’s sensitive camerawork and the use of ambient sounds rather than a musical score makes for a naturalistic feel as we join the family in their everyday country life. Heartfelt performances from the young cast support Dominique Raymond star turn as the mother. And Veysset remains detached and non-judgemental throughout, her feminine intuition guiding the narrative that shows how a mother’s love is instinctive and unselfish at all times. MT.

BFI DUAL FORMAT 4K RESTORATION IS OUT ON 20 NOVEMBER 2017

Ewa (2017) | UK Jewish Film Festival 2017

Dir.: Haim Tabakman; Cast: Avir Kushner, Efrat Ben Zur, Gil Frank; Israel/France/Germany/Poland 2016, 85 min.

Sophomore director Haim Tabakman (Eyes Wide Open), made his name as documentary filmmaker. His second feature is a slow-burning chamber piece whose characters wrestle with the legacy of the Shoah.

Set in a rural outpost in Israel in 1972, newly retired Yoel (Kushner) looks after his wife Ewa (Ben Zur), who suffers from a non-specified blood disorder, requiring daily injections. But Ewa still goes out to work everyday, whilst Yoel is bored with his newfound free time. Whilst looking for some papers in a ramshackle outhouse, he finds a letter from the bank, reminding his wife to pay a mortgage instalment for a flat in the nearby village. Yoel investigates, and finds that his wife has installed a lover in the flat. Yoel talks to the man, and asks him to repair his old motor-cycle, which he stole from the British in 1946. From neighbours Yoel discovers that the man’s name is Emil and has been in a German concentration camp – just like his wife Ewa. In an interesting conversation with the policeman Kobi, whose father also spent time in a Camp, Yoel is reminded that surviving the KZ is not the end of the matter: “My father still lives in the Camp” says Kobi resigned. Confronting Ewa, Yoel is shocked to find that Emil is her husband, whom she married before WWII in Poland, before they were both deported to the Camps. “He died in the camp, but then he was alive”, says Ewa rather enigmatically.

It soon transpires that Ewa has spent an unspecified, but certainly decade-long time living with two men. After Yoel tells his wife that he intends to evict Emil, she has a relapse and spends some time in hospital, whilst Yoel moves Emil’s furniture into the outhouse, where both men go on repairing the motorcycle. After Ewa returns, Yoel swears “that he has enough of this madhouse” and wants to move out. But deep down, he knows, that there is only one solution.

The trio seems to live in a bubble more or less cut off from the outside world. True, Yoel and Ewa’s daughter Judith visits with the parents with her boyfriend Eyal, Judith confining in her father, that she is pregnant, “but don’t tell Mum”. After that we never see Judith again and we are left watching this painful ménage-a-trois develop. And painful it is: Ewa with her divided localities, Yoel, who thinks that he has a right to “own’ Ewa, because they have a child, and Emil, lost in a strange land, clinging on to Ewa, because she is the only link to his past. Ewa and Emil: both doubly fragmented by having to make a choice, they don’t want to make. And in the background the monstrous holocaust: trying to destroy lives many decades after the survivors were “liberated”.

DoP Axel Schneppat, who worked with Tabakman on Eyes wide open, lets everything unfolds slowly, showing the desert like countryside as an depressive background to the unfolding of the past reconquering the present. Brown and grey dominate, even the hospital is filled with ghostly colours. The three act out their grief with emotions always underplayed. EWA makes a passionate point about the post-traumatic hell of holocaust survivors, but is still tender in showing the unbearable loss. AS

SCREENING DURING THE UK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL 9 -26 NOVEMBER 2017

North by Northwest (1959)

Dir: Alfred Hitchcock | Cast: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason | Writer: Ernest Lehman 136′

There’s a glorious irreverence to Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘wrong man roadie’ that makes it funny and thrilling despite the lengthy running time. This is largely due to Ernest Lehman’s sparklingly witty screenplay, and Cary Grant who displays the same suave insouciance as Roger Moore in his utter refusal to take anything seriously, despite sinister scenarios constantly threatening danger.

As dapper advertising executive Roger O’Thornhill, Grant is mistaken for an imagined spy, forcing him to dice with death at every turn; evading James Mason’s arch villain while channelling a universal ‘mummy’s darling’ turn – alongside the marvellous Jessie Royce Landis – until he falls for the dulcet charms of the much younger but highly resourceful Eva Marie Saint (he was 45, she only 27).

The Mount Rushmore settings are astonishing, not least for Robert Burks’ daredevil camerawork, while Hitchcock’s laudable re-creation of the Frank Lloyd Wright house on the precipice is an ingenious money-saving exercise that adds a twist of sophistication to the final denouement. This priceless classic picked up the Silver Shell at San Sebastian in the year of its release, but Ernest Lehman’s brilliant script went away unrewarded at the 1960 Oscars. MT

NOW SHOWING ON BBC2

Félicité (2017)

Dir: Alain Gomis | France / Senegal / Belgium / Germany / Lebanon 2017 | Lingala | Drama | 123 min · Colour

Senegalese Auteur Alain Gomis is best remember for Today his striking portrait of a man’s final hours in Dakar. Félicité is another resonant snapshot of a proud and independent woman that gradually opens its focus from an individual to an entire society in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Félicité (Vero Tschanda) works as a singer in a bar in Kinshasa. Singing is her therapy but also the joy she brings her audiences who are seduced by the rhythm of her music and her powerful, melancholy melodies. When Félicité’s son has a terrible accident, she desperately tries to raise the money needed for his operation, heading off on a breakneck tour through the backstreets to the wealthier districts of the Congolese capital. Her friend Tabu offers to help Félicité but she is not keen on the idea due to his often erratic behavioir. Reluctantly, she accepts and Tabu turns out to be the saving of her son’s rehabilitation. has a hard time picking up his old life, but it is lady’s man Tabu of all people who manages to coax him out of his shell. Félicité’s seedy flat then becomes the setting for this well-crafted drama with its plucky central performance by Tschanda.

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 10 NOVEMBER 2017

REVIEWED AT BERLINALE 9-19 FEBRUARY 2017

The Unseen (2017)

Dir.: Gary Sinyor; Cast: Jasmine Hyde, Richard Flood, Simon Cotton; UK, 108′

Director/writer Gary Sinyor, best known for his debut feature Leon the Pig Farmer (1992), fails to breathe life into a strong premise in his psychodrama exploring the aftermath of tragedy for a bereaved couple whose son drowns in their swimming pool. Married couple Gemma (Hyde) and Will (Flood) blame themselves, their grief manifesting in the usual psychosomatic ways, but when their friend Paul steps into help, inviting them to his B&B in the Lake District, he becomes more the problem rather than the solution in this skimpy, poorly-acted, attempt at slick arthouse horror. Gemma’s blurred vision and the forced happy ending will send you away with a sick headache rather than a feeling of satisfaction. MT.

SCREENING NATIONWIDE FROM 15 December 2017

Remember Baghdad (2017) | UK Jewish Film Festival 2017

Dir.: Fiona Murphy; Documentary; UK/Iraq/Israel, 69 min.

Director/DoP Fiona Murphy (Neither Fish or Fowl) has chartered the history of Jews living in Babylon, then Mesopotamia and now Iraq for over 2600 years. The Babylonian Talmud was written here, and Baghdad was the centre of the Jewish community of the region – in 1917 140, 000 Jews made up a third of the capital’s population but today, only a handful Jews (and one unused synagogue) remain. Murphy has followed Edwin Shuker from North London to Iraq, to buy a house in the city his family called home for centuries.

In 1947, Renee Dangoor was crowned the first Miss Baghdad. Murphy interviews her family, one of the many Iraqi Jews living in London, who share photographs of their middle-class Jewish life in Baghdad after WWII. Since its foundation in 1921, Iraq has had a turbulent history. King Faisal was the official head of the country, but British influence only ended completely after 1932, when the British mandate ran out. Fascist influence in the country grew when the Great Mufti emigrated to Iraq and was instrumental in having Hitler’s Mein Kampf translated. Five years later pro-Nazi forces took over the region for a few months, before Allied Forces arrived. But they stopped short of occupying Baghdad and the Jewish population were targeted in attacks organised by the Grand Mufti, who wanted to unite the Arab world behind Hitler. In the May riots of 1941, 180 Jews were killed, and over a thousand injured.

After Faisal returned later that year, the British entered Baghdad, and the Grand Mufti fled to Berlin. Whilst many middle-class Jews felt safe in Iraq, working class Jews organised illegal emigration to what was then called Palestine. When Israel was founded in 1948, after the partition, the climate for Jews in Iraq changed again for the worse. In 1950 Jews were fired from jobs, their shops were boycotted, and some were hanged. 70 000 emigrated, leaving their homeland with only a few shekels. In 1951 over 120 000 of them had emigrated to Israel, where there were not very welcome: newsreel images show the bewilderment of the Jewish citizens: for them the Iraqi Jews were poorly dressed and “looked like Arabs, people without a culture and even speaking the language of the enemy”. Just 7000, mostly middle class Jews remained in Iraq, but they thrived; one of the interviewed talked in great length about the chocolate factory owned by his father.

There were even Jewish MPs in parliament. After 1956, when Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, and British forces left, some of the Jewish women wanted to leave, fearing new unrest. In 1958 the Royal family was killed, the military coup brought Brigadier Quasim to power. A Jewish witness stated, that their family, who run an import business for American cars, were afraid that “would have to live like communists”. But instead, the embassies of Warsaw Pact countries and their allies, all bought big American vehicles, making 1951 “the best year for business”. Again, the remaining Jews felt safe. In 1963, with the help of the CIA, Quasim was killed, and his regime was replaced by the Ba’ath Party – a certain Saddam Hussein becoming deputy leader in 1969. Before that, in 1967, the Three-Day War, in which Iraq fought alongside four other Arab countries against Israel, finally signalled the end of Jewish life in Baghdad. Survivors of the exodus to Britain and Israel tell about phones being cut off, one member of the family hanged, and a flight across the northern mountains to the Kurdish part of Iraq. In 1971 just a few hundred Jews remained.

Edwin Shuker had to give up the idea of buying back his family home in Baghdad – it would have been too dangerous. But he did the next big thing, buying a house in the north of the country. “I hope, that in sixty years o so, there will be a Jewish community in Baghdad. Or it will end with me” he say shoulder shrugging. “But I can’t leave the country behind for good”. There is simply too much to leave behind. Taut and informative, Remember Baghdad is a history lesson about little known facts and events, making sad reading. AS

SCREENING at UK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL 2017 | 6-26 NOVEMBER 2017

Lasciati Andare | Let Yourself Go (2017) | UK Jewish Film Festival 2017

Dir/Writer: Francesco Amato | Cat: Toni Servillo, Veronica Echegui, Valentina Carnelutti | Comedy | Italy |

A mildly amusing comedy that looks encouraging then rapidly goes downhill with Toni Servillo playing a sophisticated psychoanalyst who runs into problems due to his unavoidable sedentary lifestyle on the couch. Set in the upmarket surroundings of some plush Italian neighbourhood, Let Yourself Go starts brilliantly with a strong line-up and a convincing storyline: divorced but successful shrink, still involved with his attractive and intelligent ex-wife but foisted by his own ego – there’s no fool like an old fool – throws it all away for a feckless and unsuitable younger woman and a lifestyle that doesn’t really ring true. The Great Beauty‘s Tony Servillo is far the best thing about this good-looking Jewish-themed comedy drama. He certainly raises a chuckle in the early scenes with his knowing glances and light-hearted disdain for most of his patients, and his wife who is agreeable and amusing. (Carnelutti in fine form). But after he meets the feisty fitness trainer Claudia (Echegui), the narrative becomes more ludicrous and far-fetched with some slapstick situational comedy that grows irritating because the initial laughs are based on a convincing scenario, whereas the later scenes are not. Amato has lost his own plot. MT

SCREENING DURING THE UKJFF | NATIONWIDE | 7 NOVEMBER UNTIL 27 NOVEMBER 2017

Marjorie Prime (2017)

Dir.: Michael Almereyda; Cast: Lois Smith, John Hamm, Geena Davis, Tim Robbins; USA 2016, 99 min.

Director/co-writer Michael Almereyda (Experimenter) adapts Jordan Harrison’s play for the screen in an un-stagey triumph that interweaves Beckett, Sartre and Phil Dicks, exploring themes such as memory, family and death – the latter not only on a personal level, but concerning humanity as a whole: “Computers have all the time in the world”.

Eighty-five year old Marjorie (Smith) is suffering from the onset of Alzheimers and her loving family, daughter Tess (Davis) and her husband Jon (Robbins), have installed a simulated, personalised digital projection of her dead husband Walter (Hamm) in the futuristic house near the beach. Walter is in his prime, around forty, and received daily tuition by Tess and Jon about Marjorie’s life – the exception being the death of her son. Walter is also instructed to look after Marjorie’s health; he tries to make her eat and drink regularly. But basically, his function is to make Marjorie’s decline more palatable for her. They reminisce over the feel-good features of her youth, such us the crush on a high-ranging French tennis player. And Tess reminds her husband that the man in question was hardly French, just Canadian, and only an amateur player. But Jon shrugs this off: allowing Marjorie a great deal of slack, and flattery is only a minor sin. The longer the ‘interactions’ go on, the more one suspects that all participants are holograms – something author and director have clearly intended. Computers may have all the time in the world, but the human race is only too ready to be replaced by them. To start with, they have a much more precise recollection than the human race. What stands for memory, is just the recollection of the original incident, re-memorised and re-told so often that the original event assumes only a random connection to the present.

DoP Sean Williams uses the house in Long Island as a perfect background for this placcid chamber piece. Colours are subdued and the functional building is just the perfect bland showcase for the holograms. Late Schubert strings are the ideal score for this endgame, where everything is in the past; the waves of the ocean more pacifying and reliable than humans. It is good to see Geena Davis in a major role again, but Lois Smith is the centre of this Artificial Intelligent drama which plays out as a long good-bye. AS

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FRO 8 NOVEMBER 2017

Angels Wear White (2017) Chinese Film Series 2021

Dir: Vivian Qu | Drama | China | 101′

Writer and director Vivian Qu was the producer of Black Coal, Thin Ice and rose to fame with her debut Trap Street. Her second feature is a low-key female-centred affair that deals with the complex web of corruption that emerges after two young girls are assaulted in a seaside town. This is a subtle and luminously delicate drama that leaves the details of the crime offscreen to deal with the psychological effects on the teenagers who are both underage, one of them only 12. Covering similar ground to Black Coal, ANGELS WEAR WHITE offers a bleak but affecting insight into the plight of women generally in modern China, not only from middle-class backgrounds but those who have escaped rural poverty and found themselves at odds with the criminal elements in more prosperous areas.

Teenager Mia (Wen Qi) is a chambermaid in a resort town on the island province of Hainan. During her night shift on reception she checks in a man and two little girls, Wen (a tiny and delicately vulnerable Zhou Meijun) and Xin (Jiang Xinyue), who are staying in the room next to him. One of the girls has a blonde wig and orders drinks, but what happens next during the night is never revealed on camera, although it turns out later the girls have been abused, and undergo a hospital examination.

Clearly both teens are suffering from the strict ‘Tiger’ parenting and harsh discipline at school but they keep the trauma under wraps until Wen runs away from mother’s home and turns up at her estranged father’s in the middle of the night, sleeping on the beach when she can’t get in. Mia is scared of losing her job, so fails to give any evidence about why her older more sophisticated colleague Lily was bunking off with her boyfriend.

Police Inspector Wang (Li Mengnan) leads a cursory investigation where the girls gloss over the facts frightened to reveal the truth due to the shame they feel and how the consequences of their revelation might be viewed – not only by the authorities but also their own community and society as a whole. Mia is more streetwise, but the other two are really very naive compared to Western teens. A canny female lawyer (Shi Ke) probes further and gets a better grasp of Mia’s impossible plight.

Qu views her characters dispassionately, we cannot help feeling for them and the deplorable lives they lead, especially little Wen, who only looks about 9, but clearly understands more than she reveals in this dainty, pastel-hued portrait captured by Belgian cinematographer Benoit Dervaux. A subtle occasional score adds a haunting atmosphere to this impressive modern noir. MT

NOW SHOWING DURING THE CHINESE CINEMA SERIES AT SELECTED ONLINE SCREENS IN LONDON 2021 INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Murder on the Orient Express (2017)

Dir.: Kenneth Branagh; Cast: Kenneth Branagh, Johnny Depp, Judi Dench, Willem Dafoe, Penelope Cruz, Michelle Pfeiffer, Olivia Coleman, Leslie Odem jr; Malta/USA 2017, 114’

Director, producer and star Kenneth Branagh has filmed Michael Green’s script of Agatha Christie’s 1930s murder mystery MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS with the tragic earnestness of a Dostoyevsky novel. He never allows himself any sort of playfulness or improvisation, and the veteran Hollywood cast fails to animate this re-make of Sidney Lumet’s 1974 version of the crime novel which is dead on arrival on the screen.

Even Lumet, a much more innovative director than Branagh, struggled with the transformation of the page to the screen: after all, we have 12 suspects and just one setting – even though Branagh manages to let the cast out into the snow for a few minutes, after the train derails during a storm: he even manages to botch that outing, but more of that later. Branagh’s collaborators on Cinderella and Thor PD Jim Clay and Haris Zambarloukas are here again – the DoP using his 65mm lens to great wide-screen effect, but Branagh’s direction is as stale as the cast whose performances are stuffy and lacklustre – for the most part.

Johnny Depp’s rake Ratchett is Dillinger warmed-up, Judi Dench’s Russian princess is stiff and detached; Penelope Cruz plays her Spanish missionary with the gloom of eternal repentance; Willem Dafoe’s detective has the poker face we’d expect from a sleuth and Michelle Pfeiffer feels almost on her last legs. But Olivia Coleman is the standout giving real verve to her Hildegard Schmidt. Sporting a ludicrous moustache, Branagh is joylessly pompous as Hercule Poirot. In a nod to the 21st century, Sean Connery’s army colonel has been replaced by Dr. Arbuthnot (Odem), who also happens to be black.

Agatha Christie based her novel loosely on the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, and the director has chosen black and white for the Armstrong family-related flash-backs, but then also used the same for selected scenes on the train, muddling the narrative even further. There are too many embarrassing moments, worst of all the grand finale in the snow: Poirot has decided to seat all twelve suspects on a bench at the entrance to the train tunnel, like naughty kids waiting for a school detention. Despite a massive budget, this stolid costume drama looks like an exhibit from some crusty museum featuring the mummified characters from Norman Bates’ motel. AS

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE

Ferrari: Race to Immortality (2017)

DIR: Daryl Goodrich | Doc | Sport |

Don’t be put off by the title of this stylish and highly entertaining film about the daredevil racing drivers of the 1950s. Anyone who appreciates a trip down memory lane – packed with original footage – will find this a great watch. Based on Chris Nixon’s ‘Mon Ami Mate’, a biography of British Ferrari drivers Mike Hawthorn and Peter Collins, whose derring-do and reckless ambition was aided and abetted by Enzo Ferrari and his iconic racing cars, who told his champions: “Win or die, you will be immortal”.

These were courageous men who weren’t afraid to lose their lives doing what they enjoyed best. And most of them did. But they weren’t the only ones to lose their lives. Many spectators also perished when cars left the track and careened into the crowd – such as during the 1955 Le Mans race – killing 83 people in an horrific fireball. Between 1950 and 1960, 39 drivers in motor-racing were killed behind the wheels of tin cars that made a mockery of today’s ‘health and safety’. But Enzo’s love was for his brand and his precious vehicles, and if anyone was killed he laconically asked the question: “And how is the car”

Watching Ferrari, you can’t help falling for the charm and suave charisma of these brave and likeable gentlemen heroes. And the camaraderie between them all feels genuine and heartfelt. Some were playboys but others fell in love on the circuit, such as Mike and Peter went to marry their sweethearts. Director Daryl Goodrich packs e extraordinary tension into a story packed with nostalgia for the good old days of sporting heroes who really deserved their celebrity reputations and were prepared to die for the sport of princes. MT

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM FRIDAY 3 NOVEMBER 2017

Love and Bullets (2017) | Pingyao Film Festival | Year Zero 2017

Dirs: The Manetti Bros | Cast: Claudia Gerini, Carlo Buccirosso, Serena Rossi, Giampaolo Morelli, Luciana De Falco, Mario Rivelli | Musical Romance | 133′ | Italy

Naples meets Brooklyn in this Versace-themed Mafia-musical melodrama. LOVE AND BULLETS is as subtle as a oyster poisoning but considerably more fun. What you get is high octane entertainment that never takes itself too seriously in delivering a raucous laugh out loud tale of deception that frequently breaks into warbling vibrato including a few bum notes – and not just on the music front. The jamboree outstays its welcome with camerawork that is often questionable, but there is much to enjoy — despite a few detours and dialectical complexities – that are not easy to follow, even for Italian audiences. Due to the raucous sound effects, this is one film where you can munch popcorn to your heart’s content and not disturb a fly.

We kick of in a Baroque cathedral where Donna Maria (Claudia Gerini) is mourning the death of her fish-farm magnate husband and crime boss, Don Vincenzo (Carlo Buccirosso), who suddenly comes alive in the privacy of his ornate coffin, giving forth in fruity bass tones and casting doubt over his identity to one and all.

Flipping back a few days it emerges that Maria and Vincenzo have faked his death. His two sidekicks, Rosario (actor-singer Raiz) and the more charismatic Ciro (Giampaolo Morelli), are advised to take over the reins by Donna Maria and ensure that no one finds out that Vincenzo didn’t die in a mussel tank shot by his rivals – cue the first joke: “Americans don’t know mussels from missiles”. This the tenor of the comedy.

But hospital nurse Fatima (Ciro’s first love) sees Vincenzo in hospital on the operating table, and matters are complicated when Ciro’s finds he still holds a candle for her – and she for him – making bumping her off a big problem, especially when they smooch to ‘their song’ Flashdance – (remastered by Giorgio Moroder who contributed to the foot-stamping score along with Pivio and De Scalzi); so feelings flood back but give Ciro a difficult choice: should he go for money or love?

Some of the jokes have a distinctly racist undertone, and swearing is the order of the day in the less light-hearted second half making us less forgiving of the bouts of narrative torpor. That said, this is a gutsy and well-performed musical with Gerini pulling all the stops out in a terrific turn. Morelli is the star turn on the male front and let’s hope we get to see more of his stylish chops in future. Buccirosso makes a good job of the difficult role of Vincenzo who has to be vulnerable and macho at the same time, and the film looks gorgeously lurid in its retro aesthetic thanks to DoP Francesca Amitrano, production designer Noemi Marchica and costume designer Daniela Salernitano.MT

PINGYAO FILM FESTIVAL UNTIL 4 NOVEMBER 2017

A Fish out of Water (2017) | Pingyao Film Festival | Year Zero 2017

Dir: Lai Kuo-An | Cast: Runyin Bfi, Jen Shuo Cheng, Peggy, Tseng, | China | 90′ A young family on a beach in the midst of a crisis discover a beached fish. The young son Yi-An (Run-yin Bai) is morbidly fascinated but dad Haoteng (Jen Shuo Cheng) picks it up and jokingly threatens his wife Yaji (Peggy Tseng) with it. This moment of uncanny surrendering to warmth and humour is typical of Lai Kuo-An’s superbly enigmatic and engaging debut. The cheeky literalism of the scene is also deceptively simple. Nothing else that follows will be quite so straightforward. The main problem is the boy. Yi-an keeps telling everyone that he wants to go and visit his former mother and father who lived by the sea. He acts up at kindergarten and even tries to get his ailing grandfather (Akio Chen) to help him. His parents are understandably concerned but are also distracted by their own problems. They both work hard: Haoteng has a stall where he bakes and sells rolls; and Yaji works for a real estate agency that deals in the kind of high end apartments that contrast painfully with their own pokey home. As Haoteng’s father becomes increasingly debilitated after a stroke, Yaji decides she has had enough and moves out to her sister’s, taking Yi-an with her.

The domestic drama is permeated by the central mystery of Yi-an’s former life. Lai Kuo-an offers very little in the way of explanation and the little boy with his glare and pudding basin cut seems at times like Damian from The Omen. The acting by the two adult leads is brilliant. Jen Shuo Cheng is particularly good as the slightly loutish man wholly unequipped to deal with the blows life is dealing him. His birthday party attended only by his catatonic father and his possessed son is a tragi-comic masterpiece. Hsu Chih-chun’s unfussily rich cinematography grounds the magic in the confined homes and breathes a little easier on an excursion to find Yi-An’s former family. Ultimately, we are treated to a celebration of the family which – despite the difficulties involved – proves so resilient it can even move between lives. John Bleasdale.

SCREENING DURING PINGYAO FILM FESTIVAL | YEAR ZERO | UNTIL 4 NOVEMBER 2017

Mr Emmanuel (1944) | UKJFF 2017

Dir.: Harold French | Cast: Felix Aylmer, Greta Gynt, Walter Rilla, Peter Mullins; UK 1944 | 97′

Director Harold French, mostly remembered for his atmospheric Simenon adaption The Man who watched the Trains Go By, has directed Louis Golding’s script with a subtle passion dominated by Otto Heller’s grainy the black and white images.

Set in 1936, Mr. Isaac Emmanuel (Aylmer) a widower, has worked all his life for the Jewish Welfare Board and is now all set to emigrate to Palestine. But in the seaside village where he visits German Jewish evacuees, he meets young Bruno (Mullins), who has not heard from his mother for a long time. The boy is so distraught, that he tries to commit suicide. To reassure him, Mr. Emmanuel travels to Germany Bruno’s mother.

What started as a tender story of a man with a mission, soon escalates into a harrowing morality play. In Berlin, Emmanuel lives in a guesthouse where everybody is Jewish. From the window of his room he sees a neon sign on a theatre advertising a singer he once looked after as a child, back in England, Elsie Silver (Gynt). Emmanuel goes to see her after a concert but her German boyfriend, a high-ranking Nazi Willi Brockenburg (Rilla), is unwilling to let her meet him. Later at a party in the presence of Himmler and Goering, a Nazi functionary is shot dead. Somehow the Gestapo links Emmanuel with the assassination, and confines him. The surprise ending is rather stunning. But like Mr. Immanuel, who does not want to break his promise to Bruno, other Jews in Germany are also put into a moral quandary. Elsie uses Brockenburg, who is besotted with her, to help Emmanuel, whilst Bruno’s mother lives with a Nazi, who offers her a cruel choice.

Aylmer is very convincing, whilst Gynt, a Norwegian actress, plays Elsie Silver with a panache and verve, reminding us of Carole Lombard’s Maria Tura in Lubitsch To Be or not to Be. DoP Heller shows that Berlin is a just a prison, particularly compared with England’s peaceful small town life. Mr. Emmanuel is a gem: it is not only about the evils of fascism, but how the victims of the Nazis cope when their lives are under threat. AS

UK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL 2017 | NATIONWIDE | 7-26 NOVEMBER 2017

Revolution: New Art for a New World (2016)

Dir: Margy Kinmonth. With the voices of Daisy Bevan, Tom Hollander, Sean Cronin, Matthew Macfadyen, Eleanor Tomlinson | Documentary | UK | 85min

Bafta-nomimnated documentarian Margy Kinmonth (Hermitage Revealed) provides a whistlestop tour of Russian Avant-garde art in ths informative and engrossing exhibition on screen – REVOLUTION: NEW ART FOR A NEW WORLD.

Politically, the turn of the 20th century was a pivotal time, but also creatively things would never be the same again as Russia’s young and thrusting artists provided their own revolutionary counterpoint to Lenin’s political agenda. An astute artist in her own right, Kinmonth engages with Andrei Konchalovsky and other descendants of the legendary artists to create a brilliant documentary that combines impressive photographs and archive footage with filmed imaginings (with a sterling British cast) of the radical climate that flooded through Russia a hundred years ago, when inventiveness broke free, flourished and even drove the nation forward in those formative decades, and still exerts a powerful influence on the contemporary art world of today.

For those interested in art or political history this is a fascinating piece of filmmaking. Kinmonth is clearly well-connected as she tours the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Russian Museum and the State Hermitage Museum to show works by Chagall, Pimenov, Rodchenko, Kandinsky and Malevich and to interview leading art world luminaries among whom are Mikhail Piotrovsky and Zelfira Tregulova and the grandson of the architect Shukhov, whose free-standing Shabolovka Tower structure in Moscow provided radio broadcasting throughout the region during the early 1920s.

Despite the often tragic deaths of the artists in Gulags during Bolshevik purges of the 1930s, the revolutionaries had pushed the word out from Moscow and St Petersburg with the aid of ‘art trains’ that promoted their work and ideals with lectures, agitational propaganda and posters.

Kinmonth deftly weaves her linear narrative through the various Avant-Garde movements of Suprematism, Futurism and Constructivism to Socialist Realism to show how these influential artworks and even ceramics live on to tell their story even after the heyday of the movement with Kazimir Malevich’s famous Black Square Suprematist painting (1915) now valued at many millions of USD. MT

REVOLUTION: NEW ART FOR A NEW WORLD will be broadcast in the BBC’s upcoming Russian Revolution Season and will air on Monday 6^th November 9pm on BBC4

REVOLUTION: NEW ART FOR A NEW WORLD will be released on DVD 3rd April 2017

BFI Gloria Grahame Retrospective | Film Noir | Nov/Dec 2017

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This Winter the BFI are celebrating the life of screen siren GLORIA GRAHAME with a retrospective of a smouldering film career showcasing her talents – usually in supporting roles – garnering her critical acclaim and an Academy Award for her nine-minute role in THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL (1952) starring alongside Kirk Douglas, who was nominated but went away empty-handed.

Gloria Grahame appeared in more than 30 films during the 1940s and 50s and died shortly after returning to her native New York, from a visit to her friend Peter Turner, a stay which forms the basis for the 1987 biography Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool and Paul McGuigan biopic drama which opens the retrospective on 14 November 2017, and stars Annette Bening as Grahame.

Born Gloria Hallward, in Pasadena, California on November. 28, 1923 to the British actress, Jean Hallward, who had played Shakespearean and other classical roles on the British stage, Gloria Grahame made her stage debut in Chicago soon after finishing high school. Broadway then beckoned, where she worked as understudy in Thornton Wilder’s play By the Skin of Our Teeth, an a number of other stage roles. Her Hollywood debut was in 1944 with Richard Whorf’s comedy flop BLOND FEVER. She went on to star as Ginny in Edward Dmytryk’s 1947 racially-charged noir thriller CROSSFIRE, alongside Robert Mitchum. She later claimed Ginny was her favourite role and she was nominated for an Academy Award which sealed her success for the following decade in titles such as THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH (1952) and OKLAHOMA! (1955).

Offers dwindled during the 1950s as she brought up her family with Nicholas Ray, occasionally appearing in TV and stage outings, particularly in comedy roles in The Man Who Came to Dinner; Head Over Heels. She was married to Stanley Clements, Nicholas Ray, Cy Howard and Anthony Ray. MT

Here is the BFI Line-up:

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool

UK 2017. Dir Paul McGuigan. With Annette Bening, Jamie Bell, Julie Walters, Vanessa Redgrave. 105min. Digital. Cert tbc. Courtesy of Lionsgate

Ageing Hollywood star Gloria Grahame (Bening), a goddess of the silver screen in the 1940s, now resides in Liverpool doing small theatre gigs to help support her children. While dealing a health scare, she develops an unlikely romance with charming 20-something Peter Turner (Bell) – a relationship that’s soon tested to its limits.

Tickets £15, concs £12 (Members pay £2 less)

Gloria Grahame: Femme Fatale Film Noir Icon | TRT 90min | TUE 14 NOV 18:10 NFT1

This lavishly illustrated talk by Adrian Wootton OBE, CEO of Film London, will celebrate the onscreen brilliance that defines Gloria Grahame as one of the iconic femme fatale heroines of the era. Wootton will explore her working relationships with major filmmakers such as Frank Capra, Fritz Lang and Vincente Minnelli, as well as her tumultuous and often controversial personal life. Tickets £6.50

IN A LONELY PLACE | MON 13 NOV 18:20 NFT3

USA 1950. Dir Nicholas Ray. With Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy. 98min. Digital. PG. A Park Circus release.

Nicholas Ray’s beguiling blend of murder mystery and unusually adult love story is one of the finest American movies of the early 50s. The lonely place is Hollywood: scriptwriter Dix (Bogart) is prime suspect in the murder of a young woman, until neighbour Laurel (Grahame) provides him with a false alibi. But as the pair embark on a romance, his volatile temper – exacerbated equally by the studio and the cops – makes her wonder whether he might have been guilty… Brilliantly adapted from Dorothy B Hughes’ novel, Ray’s tough but tender film is spot-on in its insightful characterisation of Tinseltown and of the troubled lovers. Marvellously cast, Bogart and Grahame bring an aching poignancy to their painful predicament.

THE BIG HEAT | FROM FRI 24 NOV

USA 1953. Dir Fritz Lang. With Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Jocelyn Brando, Lee Marvin. 89min. Digital. 15. A Park Circus release

Fritz Lang’s stark thriller about a cop fighting city-wide corruption is also a classic tale of revenge and redemption. After a senior policeman kills himself, detective Dave Bannion (Ford) begins to suspect a cover-up between his superiors, local politicians and a seemingly inviolate crime-lord. Persisting with his investigations, he comes under attack, at which point his mission turns personal rather than professional. Famous for its (off-screen) violence – notably a scene involving Gloria Grahame, Lee Marvin and boiling coffee – Lang’s film is pacy, unsentimental and to the point in exploring the thin line between the law and rough justice. The robust direction, terse script and unfussy performances ensure the movie feels strangely modern.

CROSSFIRE | FROM FRI 24 NOV

USA 1947. Dir Edward Dmytryk. With Gloria Grahame, Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan, Robert Young. 86min. 35mm. PG

This was one of Grahame’s earliest substantial roles. Her portrayal of a dance-hall girl who witnesses a murder earned her an Oscar® nomination and also set the mould for her screen persona. As the police investigation into the crime leads to a manhunt for a missing GI, the film takes an uncompromising look at the problems men had readjusting to life after war.

WED 15 NOV 18:30 NFT2 / SAT 18 NOV 18:30 NFT2

Sudden Fear + intro by Adrian Wootton OBE, CEO of Film London*

USA 1952. Dir David Miller. With Gloria Grahame, Joan Crawford, Jack Palance. 111min. Digital. PG

Gloria Grahame read Macbeth in preparation for the role of Irene Neves – looking to Lady Macbeth to locate the emotional drive to manipulate a man to murder, as she does with Palance’s actor-cum-fraudster Lester Blaine. Joan Crawford is at the film’s core and plays the melodramatic angle to perfection but Grahame is compelling as the driving force behind the murderous plot

THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL | MON 13 NOV 20:30 NFT2* / SUN 19 NOV 17:00 NFT2

USA 1952. Dir Vincente Minnelli. With Gloria Grahame, Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner, Dick Powell, Walter Pidgeon. 118min. 35mm. PG

This classic Hollywood take on the movie business tells the tale of a ruthless producer and the effect his dealings have on his friends and colleagues. Grahame received a Best Actress in a Supporting Role Oscar® for her portrayal of Rosemary, the wife of screenwriter James Lee Bartlow (Powell), despite being on screen for only nine minutes.

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THE GLASS WALL | FRI 17 NOV 18:20 NFT2 / THU 30 NOV 20:35 NFT2

+ intro by season curator Jo Botting, BFI National Archive*

USA 1953. Dir Maxwell Shane. With Gloria Grahame, Vittorio Gassman, Ann Robinson. 85min. 35mm. PG

One of Grahame’s lesser-known titles, this film also offered her a rare starring role. She appears opposite Italian star Vittorio Gassman, who plays a Hungarian illegal immigrant determined to remain in the US, with one night to track down the person who can save him from deportation. Grahame gives an exquisite performance as a woman on the breadline who forms a bond with the desperate man.

HUMAN DESIRE | MON 20 NOV 18:20 NFT2* / MON 27 NOV 20:40 NFT

USA 1953. Dir Fritz Lang. With Gloria Grahame, Glenn Ford, Broderick Crawford. 91min. 35mm. PG

The role of Vicki Buckley in this classic noir about a man’s affair with a married woman shows Grahame at her most complex and scheming. As the film progresses the layers of her character are slowly peeled away, and the audience teeter between sympathy for her tragic life and abhorrence at her capacity for manipulation

THE COBWEB | TUE 21 NOV 18:20 NFT3 / SUN 26 NOV 14:45 NFT1

USA 1955. Dir Vincente Minnelli. With Gloria Grahame, Richard Widmark, Lauren Bacall, Charles Boyer, Lillian Gish. 123min

Vincente Minnelli’s lush melodrama revolves around the struggle for power among staff and inmates at a psychiatric hospital. Grahame plays the neglected wife of Dr McIver (Widmark), frustrated by his dedication to his work and stifled by the small-town mentality of those around her. The colour photography emphasises her brassiness, enhancing her waspish yet sensual performance.

OKLAHOMA! | DATES AND TIMES IN DECEMBER TBC

USA 1955. Dir Fred Zinnemann. With Gloria Grahame, Shirley Jones, Gordon MacRae, Rod Steiger. 145min. U

While she was not a natural chanteuse (she was tone-deaf) Grahame’s naïve, endearing vocal style in this musical western brings genuine charm to her portrayal of Ado Annie and she sung the role completely without dubbing. Annie’s romantic to-ing and fro-ing offers comic relief from Rod Steiger’s menacing pursuit of the wholesome Laurey (Jones), while the whole is interspersed with some of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s liveliest tunes.

NAKED ALIBI | DATES AND TIMES IN DECEMBER TBC

USA 1954. Dir Jerry Hopper. With Gloria Grahame, Sterling Hayden, Gene Barry. 86min

A policeman pursues a suspected murderer to a Mexican border town, both men driven by desperation and their own personal demons. Grahame is at her most seductive as a nightclub singer caught between them; she finally finds the love she’s desperate for, but will the chance for happiness come too late?

DATES AND TIMES IN DECEMBER TBC

Merton of the Movies

USA 1947. Dir Robert Alton. With Gloria Grahame, Red Skelton, Virginia O’Brien. 82min

Showing how fast Hollywood forgot its roots, this broad parody of silent cinema was made barely 20 years after the coming of sound. Red Skelton was coached in physical comedy by Buster Keaton for his performance as a small-town boy seeking fame and fortune in the movies. Grahame luxuriates in the glamour of her role, as a film star who seduces the innocent abroad.

ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW | DATES AND TIMES IN DECEMBER TBC

USA 1959. Dir Robert Wise. With Gloria Grahame, Robert Ryan, Harry Belafonte, Shelley Winters. 96min

Director Robert Wise offers a heist movie with a twist, as Robert Ryan’s troubled WWII veteran confronts his prejudices when he embarks on a bank job with a black jazz performer (Belafonte). A very personal project for Belafonte, the film is one of the last Hollywood noirs ever produced. Grahame makes an impression in the small role of Ryan’s sexually frustrated neighbour, in her swansong as a screen siren.

DATES AND TIMES IN DECEMBER STILL TO BE CONFIRMED

Ash (2017) | Pingyao International Film Festival | Year Zero

Director: Li Xiaofeng | Cast: Luo Jin, Xin Peng, Nie Yuan, Jiang Peiyao, Huang Jue, Yang Yiwei, Sun Hao,

Director and co-writer Li Xiaofeng improves on his thoughtful but flawed debut Nezha with this sinuous and sumptuously cinematic modern morality thriller the explores through a fractured narrative the simple premise: a choice of redemption or recidivism for two young killers.

Elegant and intriguing, ASH has echoes of Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin in its reflection on good and evil in contemporary China where a young detective Chen Weikun (Nie Yuan), is tasked with investigating the brutal murder of an ordinary man Ma Xudong (Yang Yiwei), in a local cinema. He draws a blank with the victim’s family but pursues a shady suspect who is seen loitering in the shadows. Flipping toward a decade, we then meet surgeon Wang Dong (Luo Jin),who is celebrating his wedding anniversary with his wife, Xuan Hui (Jiang Peiyao) and it soon emerges that the two men are strangely linked. The tension mounts as the mist gradually clears on the fulll story involving a long-standing pact forged between Xu and Wang after their crimes which continue to haunt them, as Chen doggedly probes the past.

With its universal theme, cast of subtly instinctual newcomers whose personalities contrast to great effect, and pristine technical craftmanship from Dutch DoP Joewi Verhoeven, ASH makes for an absorbing and provocative watch. Simon John Fisher Turner’s atmospheric score creates just the right mood for this first class, if overlong Chinese thriller. MT

PINGYAO INTERNARIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | YEAR ZERO | 28 Ocotber – 4 November 2017

The First Lap (2017) | London Korean Film Festival 2017

Dir: Kim Dae-wan

Kim Dae-hwan follows End of Winter with a slim and slowing-moving domestic character-driven piece that had its international premiere in the Filmmaker of the Present competition in Locarno 2017.

Ji-young and Su-hyeon have been dating for several years in a relationship characterised by its visceral closeness rather than sexual passion. When accidentally falls pregnant the couple visit their respective parents who urge them to do the respectable thing and provide a stable home for their baby.

THE FIRST LAP feels contemplative and freewheeling as it explores the fluid dynamic between its protagonists, observations them dispassionately with scant dialogue against a background of political turmoil – such as last winter’s candlelight protests that led to the impeachment of Park Geun-hye.

Performances and strong and subtle with Kim Sae-byeok (The Day After) convincingly natural as Ji-young, surpassing her feelings of panic at her sudden change of circumstances. For his part, Cho Hyun-chul, makes for a more playful character as Su-hyeon in a coupling that feels more like a friendship than a romantic union. Well-crafted but unremarkable, THE FIRST LAP is a realistic look at a millennial love. MT

THE FIRST LAP | FESTIVAL CLOSING GALA | LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL 2017 | LOCARNO 2017 REVIEW

Pingyao Impressions Theatre | Pingyao Film Festival 2017

Imagine London’s Tate Modern museum. Then imagine it three times larger and you have Pingyao’s brand new theatre building designed by an architect schoolfriend of the Chinese independent filmmaker Jia Zhangke.

The two grew up in the walled Ming village and were determined to make a name for their world heritage birthplace – and they have certainly done it in style. This brand new theatre combines stylish design with state of the art technical wizardry to tell the tale of the ancient UNESCO walled city built over a thousand years ago in the province of Shanxi, four hours by bullet train south of Beijing.

Zhang Yimou’s Impressions series is already well known for its world-class quality and inventive staging. While other shows are happening outdoors in other parts of China, the indoor Pingyao version comes across as being a far more intimate and involving experience where we actively become a part of each scene with the actors appearing to speak directly with you, especially in the ‘street market’ set.

This makes Impressions Pingyao unique and exciting as attendees are free to walk around the set and follow the action as it unfolds in various stagings in the vast space, as different spotlights track the sumptuously dressed characters in their delicately rendered vignettes that each have a individual stage setting.

It emerges that Pingyao history is rooted in its legendary banking system – banks have existed here for a millennium. The bittersweet human story unfurls against the backdrop of these traditions. Unique and utterly beguiling PINGYAO IMPRESSIONS is one of the exciting new creative aspects of contempo China uniting the past with the present day. MT

SCREENING IN PINGYAO DURING THE YEAR ZERO PINGYAO FILM FESTIVAL UNTIL 4 NOVEMBER 2017

One Night on the Wharf (2017) Pingyao International Film Festival | Year Zero

Dir: Han Dong | Writers: Han Dong, Jia Zhangke | Cast: Chai Chenggang, Liang Jingdong, Han Sanming, Gao Bo, Chen Ji, Si Haozhao

Poet turned director Han Dong collaborates with festival head Jia Zhangke in this darkly satirical literary curio that mulls over themes of crime and bureacracy during one night in a rural Chinese hostelry.

One Night on the Wharf’ serves as poetry in motion when q group of intellectuals hole up in a waterside bar to spend a long night debating and shooting the breeze. They are poet Dingzi (Chai Chenggang) Wang Shu (Liang Jingdong) and Ouyang (Han Sanming). Dingzi is the first to get his coat, and leave for the ferry which he promptly misses having flirted with a young woman in a kiosk, but it’s not clear how he ends up at odds with local thug Baipi (Gao Bo), over something in his luggage, who calls in security in the shape of Xiao Li (Chen Ji), a sort of back-up officer for the local police. Things go from bad to worse as the jobsworth Xiao Li gets involved and the piece breaks out of its chamber mold and into the following morning’s ferry where Dingzi and his mates come face to face with bumbling Baipo for a showcase showdown.

The film offers up a sometimes flawed but always entertaining and poetic slice of Chinese life involving the dynamic at play between the powers that be, the intelligentsia and the wayfarers. Its mixed cast of professionals and newscomers give the piece a naturalistic kick and Zhou Yunpeng’s perky score punctuates proceedings to great effect amd the whole ensemble looks slick amd professsional. MT

PINGYAO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | YEAR ZERO | 28 October – 4 November 2017

The Taste for Rice Flower | Mi Hua Zhi Wei (2017) | Pingyao Year Zero 2017

Chinese filmmaker Pengfei’s Underground Fragrance was a delicately rendered story of love amongst the ruins of Beijing’s property boom, and won him the Fedeora award at Venice Film Festival 2015. His second feature explores love of a different kind: that of a Dai woman for her only daughter and her strongly felt ethnic heritage, in the Yunnan province of China, where the drama unfurls in magnificent pastoral landscapes and vibrant interiors of her small village.

Taste of Rice Flower brims with positive energy unlike its visually alluring but oppressed predecessor and takes a more pragmatic approach to its marginalised characters who are also caught in the cultural maelstrom of 21st century change. Pengfei gently ruminates on the lives of these ethnic minorities, and the result is enchanting. Many Eastern cultures have travelled to the West and the large cities in search of work, and although it’s normal for their young to be left at home with older members of the family, the naturally presents a challenge for both children and parents, and this is the focus of the narrative. Ying Ze – who co-wrote with Penfei – plays the mother (Ye Nan) whose city experience has left its sophisticated mark on her appearance and tastes, but she is now glad to be home. But village life is far from idyllic as the local women complain about dressing in costume for an cultural event and the children have all the latest gadgets and modern labels, not to mention a newfound sense of entitlement, as they try to bargain for favours with their elders.

Sadly Ye Nan’s daughter (Ye Bule) has gone the same way, although insecurity and latest resentment could be the reason for her bad behaviour and lack of parental guidance. When he school friend Xianglu (Ye Men), falls ill the elders try to cure the girl with their shamanistic rituals — eventually leads to tragedy.

Taste of Rice Flower is a simple parable but never drifts into melodrama or cliche. If offers Pengfei a chance to raise the profile of changing values emerging out of a clash in tradition and modern life. The humour is often subtle but effective, and Liao Pen-jung’s ravishing visuals find beauty in everyday life in a thoughtful and subtle insight into contemporary China. MT

SCREENING DURING PINGYAO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 28 October – 4 November 2017

Thelma (2017)

More than a character study of a sheltered, sexually repressed young woman with supernatural powers, THELMA is a graceful and provocative existential horror story that couldn’t be more different than Trier’s gentle love story debut – Oslo, August 31st. As clinical in tone as Evolution (2015) THELMA has with a much more down to earth feeling despite quirky moments of fantasy, it sets Trier out as an highly inventive filmmaker at the top of his game.

Eili Harboe plays the closeted Thelma, who moves to the sophistication of Oslo from her small-town existence and protective parents, played by Henrik Rafaelsen and Ellen Dorrit Petersen. At university, she strikes up a friendship with Anja (Kaya Wilkins), but it soon emerges that this is no ordinary relationship and one that goes against her morals as a devout Christian not to mention her own sexual preferences. One day a bird strikes the library window sending Thelma into seizures at her desk, as she gradually becomes aware of unusual ability accompanied by disturbing nightmares. There’s an unsettling undertone to proceedings heightened by Jacob Ihre’s hyper realist visuals and Ola Fløttum’s creepy orchestral score that often plays over the teasing interactions between Thelma and Anya hinting at the unfolding doom.

Harboe skilfully hovers between coquettishness and ingenuous behaviour in her friendship with Anya but with the absence of parental backstory we’re left guessing about their or even Thelma’s motivations for most of the time – which may or may not appeal to some viewers. It does seem that her father is an unduly controlling and undemonstrative. There’s an amazing scene at the Oslo Opera House where Thelma is forced to leave her seat due to sexual arousal at Anya caressing her hand – or simply that she overcome and confused emotionally due her devout beliefs or just generally lacking of emotional support. Trier keeps his characters at arms length throughout, leaving us guessing while he concentrates on atmosphere and tone in this stylish and disturbing drama. MT

THELMA IS ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM November 3 2017

78/52 (2017)

Dir: Alexandre O Philippe | Cast: Alan Barnette, Justin Benson, Peter Bogdanovich, Jamie Lee Curtis, Amy E Duddleston, Jeannie Epper | Doc | US | 91′

The title of Alexandre O Philippe’s documentary refers to the technical way of shooting the shower scene in Hitchcock’s horror classic Psycho: 78 camera setups and 52 cuts. It was the most exacting and difficult scene to shoot during November 1959. Psycho also represented the first physical attack against a naked woman on film, and in the privacy and sanctity of her bathroom – and the first image of a flushing toilet. Psycho is now considered a watershed in film history, ushering in an era of fear and uncertainty after the calm and orderliness of postwar positivity.

Hitchcock claims that he made the film in black and white because the flushing away of the blood in the shower would have been too shocking, although the torn shower curtain idea had already been seen before in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1923) . Peter Bogdanovich, who attended the very first press screening of Psycho in New York’s Times Square, makes the most salient point: “Women were top billing during the ’30s and ’20s and that gradually evaporated during the ’40s and ’50s when they slipped into second place, and that’s what the movie’s saying – it’s about killing off the woman”.

What follows is a dissection and debate – mostly by men – about the ground-breaking film, and its terrifying scene that seems to represent a culmination of all Hitchcock’s work up to this date, with the likes of American cinema luminaries such as Walter Murch, David Thomson, Eli Roth, Peter Bogdanovich and Bret Easton Ellis who all share their thoughts on the moments and motivations of Psycho. There is also comment on Gus Van Sant’s panned 1998 remake. A great deal of what is said is salient and apposite, but there’s also a large amount of pointless detail and waffle set to an ultimately annoying and redundant, violin score (nothing like Bernard Hermann’s masterpiece original) that thankfully fades out when we get to watch the scene clips,with commentary from Hitchcock himself, who puts the whole idea down to voyeurism; also claiming that Psycho was not serious and questioning why people found it so shocking. Those who enjoyed Hitchcock Truffaut (2015) will probably feel that most of the ground has already been covered in that superior documentary.

What the film does engage with – and that’s fascinating – is the role, positive and negative, of the mother figure in American Society since the 1950s, and how ultimately women have had the easy option of home-making and child-rearing, but also seducing and withholding (sexually) and therefore were due to be punished. And here Hitchcock admits, laughingly, that his mother scared him as a young boy and that’s putatively why he grew up to be sexually repressed with the need to punish womankind. This revelation could then have segued into a debate about the reportedly negative experiences had by Tippi Hedren, Grace Kelly or even Kim Novak while working for the director. So an exploration of Hitchcock’s suppressed sexuality that spawned the film could have been really intriguing but that’s clearly another documentary. 78/52 has weight and integrity and is certainly worth a watch. MT

OUT ON 3 NOVEMBER 2017

Le Samourai (1967) | Pingyao Film Festival – Year Zero | Jean-Pierre Melville Retrospective

Dir.: Jean-Pierre Melville; Cast: Alain Delon, Francois Perrier, Natalie Delon, Cathy Rosier; France/Italy 1967, 101’.

Le Samourai is a crime thriller all about loneliness. Dialogue is minimal, and even Francois de Robaix’s melancholic score is seldom used. Cinematographer Henri Decae – who had helped Truffaut (Les Quatre Cents Coups) and Chabrol (Les Cousins) on their way – photographs Alain Delon’s hapless contract killer Jeff Costello in his little claustrophobic flat, and he is only free in his criminal underground where he is chased by the cops through the Paris metro.

When Costello assassinates a night-club owner, he makes a fatal mistake in not also killing the only witness who clearly saw him: La pianiste (Cathy Rosier). This ‘error’ will be his Achilles heel. Costello then sets up a game of chess, in which he is sure to lose, in spite of his brilliant moves. Le commisaire (Perrier) knows Costello’s guilt, but cannot break his well-constructed alibi: Janet Legrange (N. Delon), an upper class call girl is in love with Costello, but he is too sad to feel anything. She lies to the police, in spite rough-handling. The hunt in the metro is the centre peace of Le Samurai: Costello’s footwork and his knowledge of the smallest details, outwits the technology and manpower of the police. The endgame – in the nightclub of the original kill – is a cat and mouse game, which Costello has set up to save the innocent.

Based on the un-credited novel by Joan McLeod and co-written by Melville, Costello’s only friend is a canary, like his master in a cage. His counterpart, Le commisaire, is only marginally more full of joy de vivre: he has spent too many hours behind his desk, sending his men off on goose chases like a load of toys soldiers. He is a saner version of Ahab, but instead of madness there is too much resignation to make him a proper bloodhound. His bluster is a front, he looks forward to retirement, as much as Jeff looks forward to death. Janet is not much better off: she wants Costello for herself, but even sharing him doesn’t bring her happiness. Rosier’s pianist is a walking enigma: she is perhaps engaged in the sordid killing of her boss, tries to stay neutral, but her big eyes only reflect the hurt and self-hurt, she also sees in Costello. A rather gloomy Paris of the sixties is the proper background to this noirish tale, where all is lost before it begins, and all participants are like caged animals prowling around to end it.

Melville would never again reach this silent intensity: Le Samourai could be subtitled La course du Lievre a Travers les Champs, a late Rene Clement feature, dealing with the same morbidity and forlorn self-loathing.

SCREENING AS PART OF A JEAN-PIERRE MELVILLE RETROSPECTIVE | PINGYAO FILM FESTIVAL | GROUND ZERO 28 OCTOBER – 4 NOVEMBER 2017

Perfect Blue (1997)

Dir.: Satoshi Kon; With the voices of: Junko Iwao, Tica Matsumoto, Shinpachi Tsuji, Massaki Okura | Anime | Japan 1997, 81′.

Based on the novel by Yoshikazu Takeuchi comes this psychological phantasy which can be seen as a fore-runner for today’s obsession with the cult of celebrity, onscreen violence and female repression. Japanese filmmaker Satoshi Kon (1963-2010) casts Junko Iwao as Mima Kirigoe, the leading member of a girl-band CHAM! who decides to become an actress in a TV crime series. After she plays a rape-victim, her manager Rumi (Matsumoto), who was once a pop singer herself, warns her of the potential psychological consequences. But Mima goes ahead, and is hunted down by Me-Mamia (Okura), a fan who has turned into a malicious stalker. Me-Memia tries to rape Mima, but she kills him in self-defence. His body cannot be found in the TV studio and Mima loses all sense of reality, unable to differentiate between reality and the plot of the TV murder series in which her character if forced to deal with imaginary figures invading her world. After the script-writer Todokoro (Tsuji) is murdered, Rumi suddenly turns against Mima, pretending to be her former self. The finale on the streets of Tokyo is a brilliant showdown.

The complete title of the novel Perfect Blue: Complete Metamorphosis is an acute description of the film’s narrative: Mima, insecure and always willing to please her male bosses, cannot take the pressure of acting as a victim, and soon loses her fragile self: she becomes more and more part of the TV play. This nightmarish scenario is shown in minute detail, and the realism is often hard to take. But Kon never loses his perspective in this striking and provocative debut: his character Mima is not just another helpless woman, but a young girl who has to mature enough to withstand the pressure of her place in a world of media dominated by men. Made for just 25 000$, Perfect Blue grossed over 112 million USD alone in the USA. AS

In cinemas 31st October from Anime Ltd and National Amusements

The Voice of the Moon | La Voce della Luna (1990) | Bluray release

Dir.: Federico Fellini; Cast: Roberto Benigni; Paollo Villagio, Nadia Ottaviani, Marisa Tomasi; Italy/France 1990, 120 min.

Fellini’s last feature, shot three years before his death, was not one of his most memorable. Harking back to La Strada, where the innocent and naïve both have voices of wisdom, The Voice of the Moon, is a freewheeling affair, and not in a good way. Based on a novel by Ermanno Cavazzoni, who also cooperated with Fellini on the script, has some humour in its episodic settings but overall the impact is one of confusion and chaos.

Ivo Salvini (Benigni) has just been released from a mental institution, and is pleased to join ex-prefect Gonella (Villagio) on his meanderings in the Emilia-Romagna countryside. Gonella has been sacked because of his paranoia, and it soon becomes clear that he is a danger to anyone he meets – apart from Ivo – who has fallen madly in love with Aldina (Ottaviani), who rejects him. In a raucous scene she is crowned “Miss Flower 1989”; and finally, the Moon is captured and dragged out of the sky by some brothers, making everybody happy. At the end a madman shouts: “What am I doing here? Why was I put here in the first place?” To which Salvini answers: “If we all quietened down a little, maybe we’d understand something. What a shame that the career of one of Italy’s greatest director’s should end with this self-parody, with little to recommend it. AS

NOW OUT ON BLURAY

Grace Jones – Bloodlight and Bami (2017)

Die:. Sophie Fiennes | UK/Ireland. 2017 | Musical Biopic | 115′

As fabulous now as when she was in 1979 – when I first experienced her at a concert in Italy’s famous Covo di Nord Est – Grace Jones still rocks. At almost 70, her voice has mellowed, wavering occasionally, but her glamour and star power are just as potent and her aura and outrageous antics as just spectacular, if not more.

After an overture of Slave to the Rhythm where Grace performs in purple regalia and a golden sunburst mask, Fiennes cuts to an autograph session with fans fawning: “I’ve been waiting to see you for 25 years” – Grace responds “so has my mother”. Suddenly we are following her through Jamaica airport for an exuberant reunion with her mother (who looks like Aretha Franklin), son Paolo and niece Chantel, and as night falls, the camera pictures a sultry moonlight gig in the torridly tropical island, drenched in lush emerald forests.

At at raucous and voluble family meal we get some backstory on the Jones and Williams troubled family backstory in a scene that culminates in a full-throated performance of Wicked and Williams’ Blood as Grace struts around amid strobes – sporting nothing but a black leotard and a massive clotted cream moonshaped crown – by Irish hatter Philip Treacy – Fiennes tribute captures the warmth and ebullience of Jamaica and Grace’s defiant irreverence.

Grace was once a Bond Girl – May Day – in A View To A Kill and also appeared in Conan The Destroyer, but here we witness the real Grace for the first time: The woman behind the act, and she’s as feisty and strangely vulnerable as you would imagine. Champagne flows throughout as Grace moves constantly, making angry phone calls and negotiating in French – she lived in Paris for many years with French photographer Jean Paul Goude who styled her legendary look and shtick. Opening an oyster with difficulty she snarls: “wish my pussy was still this tight”. Fiennes’ punctuates the gutsy real time footage shot in her kitchen, car and dressing room – with Grace’s mesmerising Dublin stage show, but both are beguiling and cinematic. Fiennes’ shirks the traditional documentary format – there are no photos or archive footage, making Bloodlight And Bami fresh, feisty and intriguing for longtime fans who have never really experienced the woman ‘behind the scenes’. It’s also longer than most docs at nearly 2 hours.

La Vie en Rose is performed in a blossom pink setting – all softly sequinned and shimmery. Bloodlight And Bami – the film’s title is Jamaican for the recording studio lighting. She’s busy raising money for her next album, accompanied by her bass duo Sly and Robbie. Grace is no wallflower when it comes to things financial: she wants to be paid upfront for every concert, but will trawl through the old stalwarts just to raise money for her new work. You get the impression these old numbers bore her slightly, as she rants through Nipple to the Bottle, tottering gamely on amazingly amazonian legs. “Sometimes you have to be a high-flying bitch”.

Jones hasn’t forgotten the ghosts of the past: her abusive step-grandfather fuels the angry energy for her stage persona. Her parents lived away from Jamaica in New York during her childhood but she’s now closer to her mother and goes with her to church back home.

Pull up to the Bumper is vigorously vampish. Her lyrics – like her lips and bone structure – are strong and powerfully stand the test of time. Grace is vulnerable, scary and exotic – a feminine volcano that smoulders and could erupt at any time. Fiercely feline she purrs more like a jaguar than a pussycat. Her following is eclectic and all-encompassing: middle-aged men; sophisticated women and the gay crowd, all attracted to her burlesque bravado and musical power.

In concert footage, Grace mesmerises with performances of Pull Up To The Bumper and more personal tracks including Williams’ Blood, This Is and Hurricane. She is s force of nature, and certainly a force to be reckoned with. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE

London Korean Film Festival 2017 | 26 October – 19 November 2017

Korea has been in the news more than ever this year with a South Korean presidential impeachment and a change in government, not to mention the current North Korean crisis. Thankfully Korean Cinema has maintained a positive news profile with Bong Joon-ho’s creature feature OKJA becoming the most widely seen Korean film ever made. On this note, the 12th London Korean Film festival returns to London and across the UK offering another expansive selection of films from 26 October – 19 November.

This year’s opening film will be Hong Sangsoo’s Cannes acclaimed, THE DAY AFTER (2017) will kick-off the festival at an Opening Gala with Cinematographer and frequent Hong Sangsoo and Bong Joon-ho collaborator, Kim Hyung-ku in conversation on the 26 October. The festival closes on 8 November (in London) with the UK Premiere of emerging director Kim Dae-hwan‘s Indie relationship hit from Locarno, THE FIRST LAP (2017) (followed by Director Q&A), which sees a directionless unmarried couple wade through family encounters and a potential pregnancy, in a fresh verité style that is both funny and heartwarming.

Two out of the five Korean hits to grace Cannes Film Festival this year were crime and action thrillers typical of the booming Korean Noir genre, illuminating the dark side of society: THE VILLAINESS follows a female assassin trained from a young age, and THE MERCILESS (2017, Studiocanal, premiering at LKFF 2017) from Byun Sung-hyun, is a Tarantino-esque moody neo-noir thriller following double-crossing gangsters.

The FILM NOIR strand begins with an example of Lee Man-hui’s renowned anti-communist filmmaking, with one of his very early films in the genre, BLACK HAIR (1964), which follows the loyal mistress of a gang boss, whose life takes a horrific turn for the worse after a violent rape is exposed. The newly restored THE LAST WITNESS (1980) that recently screened in Berlin and Busan film festivals, with director Lee Doo-yong, is based on a crime novel by Kim Seong-jung and follows lone wolf Detective Oh Byeong-ho as he goes in search of the murderer of a small time brewer. Film Noir was thriving in the 1990s, and we’ll celebrate a strong selection from that decade: the darkly humorous DEAD END (1993), THE RULES OF THE GAME (1994) following small town thugs trying to make it big and GREEN FISH (1997), the directorial debut by Lee Chang-dong who is now widely regarded as South Korea’s greatest living director.

CLASSICS screening this year will include NOWHERE TO HIDE from Lee Myung-Se (Korea’s anger to John Woo, is a highly stylised violent action noir and an influence on The Matrix.

KILIMANJARO (2000) is the rarely screened, but highly accomplished feature from Oh Seung-uk, starring veteran actor Ahn Sung-ki and Park Shin-yang; an engrossing noir following a detective mistaken for his identical twin brother, a gangster.

DIE BAD (2000) is action maestro Ryoo Seung-wan‘s sensational debut made in 4 parts over 3 years, following two young men (played by Ryoo and Park Sung-bin) whose lives change forever after a deadly student brawl.

A BITTERSWEET LIFE (2005) is Kim Jee-woon‘s follow up to A Tale of Two Sisters(2003) a thrilling noir that shows the ultra violent consequences of falling for the wrong girl.

A DIRTY CARNIVAL (2006) follows a low-level debt collector as he murders his way to the top, played by one of Korea’s leading actors Zo In-sung.

NEW WORLD (2013, UK Home Ent. release by Eureka) is the second directorial feature from Park Hoon-jung, the writer behind The Unjust (Ryoo Seung-wan) and I Saw The Devil (Kim Jee-woon), in which undercover cops and shady policemen plot to gain control of Korea’s biggest crime syndicate.

COIN LOCKER GIRL (2015) is a female crime melodrama from first time director Han Jun-Hee starring veteran actress Kim Hye-soo as the psychotic crime boss known as ‘mom’ whose unsavoury trade includes organ trafficking and loan-sharking.

IN BETWEEN SEASONS (Lee Dong-eun)

CINEMA NOW strand COME, TOGETHER (2017) is Director Shin Dong-il‘s new drama about a family of three whose ranks are collapsing – a rare insight into Korean society’s highly competitive nature. WARRIORS OF THE DAWN (2017) is the popular Joseon Era drama filmed almost entirely outdoors, as a guerilla style road movie, following a group of mercenaries tasked with protecting the newly crowned prince.

THE MIMIC (UK release in 2018 date tbc, Arrow Films) directed by Huh Jung is a chilling K-horror that follows a woman, haunted by the disappearance of her son, who is drawn to a local legend of a monstrous tiger that lures people into its cave.

CRIME CITY (2017) is an indie crime caper based on a true story, from director Kang Yoon-sung, that follows a detective (Ma Dong-seok), as he hunts down a Korean-Chinese gang headed by Yoon Kye-sang.

WOMEN’S VOICES celebrates four drama and one documentary, CANDLE WAVE FEMINISTS (2017), deconstructs the misogyny and discrimination that was rife within the revolution that led to Park’s impeachment and her spiritual mentor Choi Soon-Sil’s arrest.

JAMSIL (2016) the feature debut of writer-director Lee Wanmin, is a rare look at two women’s transformative friendship, following a harrowing long-term breakup.

MY TURN (2017) focuses on pregnancy within the workplace, after a nurse becomes pregnant and tensions and backlash surface.

MILD FEVER (2017) captures the subtle rift between husband and wife, following a secret that surfaces from the past.

NIGHT WORKING (2017) follows a friendship between two factory workers, a Korean woman and a Cambodian immigrant.

Younger audiences will delight in the two Animations this year: LOST IN THE MOONLIGHT (2016) following 13 year old Hyun Joo-ri as a dreamy, shy girl who gets sucked into a fantasy world and Franky and Friends:

TREE OF LIFE (2016) is an exciting adventure in the Fairytale Kingdom, as two friends Kwon and Pong create havoc by asking for more food than they can eat, learning a useful lesson about the perils of wastefulness.

LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL London venues include: Picturehouse Central, Regent Street Cinema, ICA, Phoenix, Close-up, LUX, Birkbeck’s Institute of Moving Image, SOAS, Kingston University, National Film & Television School, British Museum and KCCUK The festival tours to: Glasgow Film Theatre, Manchester HOME, Sheffield Showroom, Nottingham Broadway Cinema, Belfast Queen’s Film Theatre until 19 November 2017.

LKFF | 26 OCTOBER – 19 NOVEMBER | NATIONWIDE

Breathe (2017)

Dir.: Andy Serkis | Cast: Andrew Garfield, Clare Foy, Hugh Boneville, Tom Hollander, Diana Riggs; UK 2017, 117′

Andy Serkis has chosen a bio-pic of polio victim and disabled campaigner Robin Cavendish for his directorial debut. Written by William Nicholson (Shadowlands) and produced by Robin’s son Jonathan Cavendish, BREATHE is laced with a heavy dose of saccharine, from which Robin and his wife Diana emerge in a saintly glow.

After finishing his army career as a captain, Robin Cavendish (Garfield) goes to work in the tea-broking business in Africa. During a cricket match back in England, he meets his future wife Diana (Foy) and they return to Kenya, where in 1958, Robin suffers a polio attack leaving him paralysed from the neck down, unable to breathe or speak.

Against medical advice, Diana has her husband flown back to the UK, where he is put on respirator. Suicidal, not wanting to look at his newborn son, Robin wants his wife to end his life, but she is stubborn. Again defying doctors’ advice, she has Robin moved out of the hospital into the new family home in the country. Later, Oxford Don and inventor Teddy Hall (Bonneville) creates a special wheelchair for Robin. The couple visit Spain and France, and have countless parties at home, enlightened by Tom Hollander, who plays both of his Diana’s twin brothers. The couple also helps other patients, who are bedbound, founding charities with polio specialist Dr. G.T. Spencer and their own Refresh project, which allows patients and their families to have holidays. Robin Cavendish, who was given three month to live, died aged 64, a record for a polio victim.

This is a rousing film especially for those inflicted with the debilitating disease, but Jonathan Cavendish’s treatment lacks the objectivity really needed to do his parents justice in examining the wider issues involved. Nicholson’s script is a mixture of English stiff-upper-lip and ‘stay chipper whatever the circumstances’, skirting over the obvious difficulties the couple must have faced, for example, with sex. DoP Richard Richardson keeps the mood jolly with pastel colours and redundant panorama shots; whilst Nitin Sawhney’s score is of near-religious intensity. Garfield and Foy do their utmost but a less hagiographic approach would have certainly rendered a less cloying, more meaningful and realistic result. AS

BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL OPENS ON 4TH OCTOBER 2017 – 15 OCTOBER 2017

Call me by your Name (2017)

Dir: Luca Guadagnino | Armie Hammer, Michael Stuhlberg, Timothee Chalamet | 133′

Directed by Luca Guadagnino and based on André Aciman’s 2007 novel of the same name, CALL ME BY YOUR NAME has similar stylishly languorous credentials to its forerunner, I Am Love, as it ravishingly unfurls.

In 1980s Cremona, where the summers are blindingly hot and torpid during the August holidays, one English family make their yearly vacation. Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet) is the musically gifted and sexually naive teenage son of Jewish parents, an eminent Classics professor (Michael Stuhlbarg) and his wife, who are accustomed to a philanthropic gesture of inviting another Jewish student to stay at their villa to help with research. This year’s intern is Armie Hammer’s rather too sexy and urbane Oliver, who looks more like one of the Greek statues Elio is wont to study, than a budding historian. Elio is smitten in discrete ecstasy as he descends into emotional meltdown. Guadagnino conjures up the heady world of la Dolce Vita that mingles with the sexual undertow and uneasiness of Body Heat and the elegance of a James Ivory classic (he co-wrote the script). And it all looks stunning.

Elio and Oliver grow closer as the Ferragosto shutdown approaches, swimming, sunbathing and sampling the locale ‘by night’; Elio gawping at Hammer’s pecs – as we do too. In return, Hammer treats him with thinly-veiled disdain, coming and going at will and flirting outrageously while rocking a massive Star of David on his tanned and tousled chest. While he is every so slightly brash, the Perlmans are discretion itself, as Elio’s father gracefully points out. Elio doesn’t know where to put himself as his burgeoning sensuality is challenged by his ‘bon chic bon genre’ credentials, he teeters like a Tom cat on a hot tin roof, wanting to howl at the moon, bewitched and bewildered.

When he meets Esther Garell’s girl next door, he is flummoxed by her gamine charm and distracted by his burning desire for someone who is clearly not available, fluffing his own chance at enjoably losing his own virginity in the process. His father misjudges the sexual ambiance -or does he?- coming up with one of the best son/father soliloquies of recent years where he outlines emotional intelligence for his son’s benefit. This is something every teenager should hear. CALL ME BY YOUR NAME is a thoroughly enjoyable, slow-burning romantic drama which should be savoured more than once. It has so much more to offer than its awkward title belies, and merits its generous running time. MT

NOW ON RELEASE FROM 27 OCTOBER 2017 | BERLINALE REVIEW 2017

UK Jewish Film Festival 2017

The UK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL has become one of the most-anticipated film events across the UK and the 21st edition will again showcase world, European and UK premieres of the best new Israeli and Jewish cinema on offer with 75 films from more than 20 countries at 115 screenings across London, Belfast, Leeds, Manchester and Nottingham.

This year’s UKIJFF Opening Night Gala, on 9th November at the BFI Southbank, is An Act of Defiance, directed by Jean van de Velde. Set in South Africa, 1963, it is based on the true story of ten black and Jewish men who are arrested for conspiring against the Apartheid system. Led by fellow defendant Nelson Mandela, the group plead not guilty, which in turn highlights the corrupt political system in power. This riveting drama captures a pivotal moment in the fight against racism, exploring the role of South African Jews in making Apartheid history.

Further galas and premieres will include Ferenc Török’s 1945, a powerful and innovative study of a post-war, village community, which competed at Berlinale 2017 and is a likely contender for the Festival’s Best Film Award. The ramifications of WWII are felt in Sam Garbarski’s Bye Bye Germany – a slightly overwrought but entertaining comedy set in Frankfurt, 1946 – and in a more contemporary setting for Menno Meyjes’s The Hero, a dark thriller by the co-writer of The Empire of the Sun.

Paradise – (left) the spectacular Venice Silver Lion winner from Russian master filmmaker Andrei Konchalovsky – will also screen nationwide at the festival, along with Avi Nesher’s latest drama Past Life. and Yaniv Berman’s unsettling thriller Land of the Little People. On a lighter note, there is Shlomit Nehama and Emil Ben-Shimon’s The Women’s Balcony – the most commercially successful film to date in Israel – and Francesco Amato’s gentle comedy Let Yourself Go!, worth seeing just for Toni Servillo in the lead role. New the party will be Erez Tadmor’s social drama Home Port and Haim Tabaman’s (Eyes Wide Open) eagerly-awaited Ewa.

A Documentary strand examines the life of the founder of the State of Israel with Ben Gurion, Epilogue, made from rediscovered footage of an exclusive interview. Jerry Lewis: The Man Behind the Clown is a timely portrait of the remarkable entertainer, while the surprising story of another Hollywood legend is revealed in Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story directed by Alexandra Dean and produced by Susan Sarandon. Archive features, old and less so, will include a tribute to Oliver Sachs with Penny Marshall’s moving classic Awakenings; while the secret identity of a young Jewish woman in the mid-19th century is scrutinized in The Governess by Sandra Goldbacher. Mr Emmanuel is the only feature digitised by the BFI for a new project of Jewish archive films; filmed in 1944 it provides an insightful, historical document of British cinema when a Jewish man travels to Berlin.

In addition to the exciting showcase of Jewish focused films and TV in this year’s Festival, there will be a night of awards for Best Film, Best Debut, Audience Choice and now Best Screenplay. The Pears Short Film Fund returns for the 11th year and there will be screening of the 2017 winners The Master of York, by Kieron Quirke, and The Outer Circle by Adam Baroukh.

UK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL | NATIONWIDE | 9 -26 NOVEMBER 2017

Liberami | Deliver Us (2016)

Dir: Federica Di Giacomo | 89 mins

Exorcism is still a fact of contemporary life particularly in Catholic countries such as Italy where every year more and more people claim that their illnesses are caused by demonic possession. Father Cataldo is a veteran priest, one of the most sought-after exorcists in Sicily. Every Tuesday, many believers follow his mass of liberation, searching for a cure for some adversity for which there does not seem to be a label or a remedy.

Italian documentarian Federica Di Giacomo won the Venice Horizons Award last year for this penetrating study of an ancient practice that has found its way into the contemporary world with as much conviction as it did in Medieval times. What emerges doesn’t provide answers but gives fascinating insight as Di Giacomo combines interviews and footage to show how, in some ways, exorcism is enjoying a boom especially in Sicily where this candid observational approach completely avoids sensationalism. MT

DELIVER US (Liberami) is in cinemas 27^th October and on DVD 30^th October#DELIVERUSFILM

The Tiger: An Old Hunter’s Tale (2017) | Bluray release

Dir; Park Hoon-jung | Cast: Choi Min-sik, Jeong Man-sik | Action Adventure | South Korea | 139′

New World (2013) director Park Hoon-jung sets his ambitious Colonial epic in the impressive region of South Korea’s Jirisan National Park where veteran star Choi Min-sik gamely pits his wits against a real-looking CGI tiger, a metaphor for the era’s Japanese oppressors, in a film feels like Korea’s answer to The Revenant. Although THE TIGER gets rather bogged down in fantasy snowdrifts halfway through its bulbous running time, there is plenty to admire in the fabulous snowy wastelands with an historical backdrop adding intellectual ballast to the cut and thrust of the wild outdoors. Tiger-wise the mighty beast is amongst the most authentic in the mechanical world, head and shoulders above the other ‘animals’ that took part in this enjoyable mix of nature and history. Certainly a Korean outing to relish. MT

BLURAY COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA | 6 November 2017

Dracula (1979) | Bluray release

In 1979 two very different screen versions of Dracula appeared. Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu and John Badham’s Dracula. Nosferatu has attained cult status as one of the cinema’s great vampire films, whilst the more traditional Dracula still remains in a bit of a limbo. Herzog employed Klaus Kinski to play the count. Whilst Badham’s choice was Frank Langella. Dracula is visually a throwback to Tod Browning’s 1931 film. However Bela Lugosi was not a role model for Langella. Of the three actors Langella is the most romantic and undoubtedly the sexiest Count Dracula. (Christopher Lee in the Hammer Dracula projected a dark primal eroticism but not couched in the Byronic style of Langella). Badham’s film exudes an energy that is enjoyably theatrical. Frank Langella had played the part hundreds of times on the Broadway stage. By the time Dracula went into production he’d honed his sophisticated performance. Thirty eight years on, Langella still manages to bestride the widescreen with vigour and conviction. Take for instance an early dinner table scene where Dracula is asked to more fully explain the meaning of the word Nosferatu. A guest says “Undead”. To which the count replies, “Ah, it means not dead.” At that moment a servant cuts his finger whilst carving a joint of meat. The man sucks his bleeding thumb. Langella observes him with a natural and heightened seriousness. Blood is Dracula’s vital life source. I doubt if today such a scene could be played so straight. A mannered jokiness would inevitably ensue. Now our times for Dracula, as well as the TV Sherlock, are too knowing.

Dracula is romantic but not romanticised. It’s handsomely mounted, intelligently scripted and well acted. The film has genuine “Romantic Agony values” and gothic spirit. It’s pleasingly anti-Victorian; covertly criticising social progress and the repression of any contrary and liberating energy that hints at the satanic. The count’s not the only sexy animal to be found on board here. His attractive admirer Lucy (Kate Nelligan) has a feisty strength. Her fiancé Jonathan Harker (Trevor Eve) proves loving but rather stolid, failing to satisfy her once she’s experienced the count’s charisma. And after she’s been bitten by Dracula, Harker, Dr.Seward (Donald Pleasance) and Van Helsing (Laurence Olivier) cannot physically restrain her from joining her dark soul-mate.

Dracula’s production values are impressive. The set design is authentically spooky (all those candles lighting the count’s residence). John William’s exciting music is charged with atmosphere, while Gilbert Taylor’s cinematography has been corrected to achieve the more monochrome look that the director intended.

At the home of Dr.Seward, Dracula expresses a desire to throw himself into the rush of humanity. To that Mina van Helsing (Jan Francis) declares, “You have a great lust for life, Count.” His reply is simply, “How well you phrase it.” Dracula then gives Mina a piercing look causing her to faint. If you like your Dracula to be irresistibly handsome and seductive then Frank Langella is the actor for you. This Dracula is a treat and one of the best screen outings the count’s ever had. Alan Price.

NOW OUT ON BLURAY

A Tale of Two Sisters (2003) | Bluray

A Tale of Two Sisters is a loose adaptation of a Korean fairy tale called “Janghwa Hongryeon” – meaning Rose Flower, Red Lotus. The film’s association with the colour red is displayed early on when the sister Su-yeon (Moon Geun-young) picks some poppies growing outside the parent’s country home. This blood symbolism, related to a split psychology, gradually becomes more apparent.

A teenage girl Su-mi (Im Soo-jung) assisted by a nurse, is brought shuffling into a room of an asylum to be interviewed by a doctor. Su-mi has thick black hair almost covering her face and recalling the menacing woman of the first Ring film. She’s asked if she remembers her family and what happened on the day she was admitted to the instituition.

There’s a rapid dissolve to her former slightly younger self, and her sister Sun-yeon (Moon Geun-young) arriving at their parent’s country home. This is where we meet their kind but ineffectual father (Kim Kap-soo) and his second wife (Yum Jung-ah). The stepmother’s cold and threatening behaviour proves the oddest in a house where many oddly disturbing things happen. Into an atmosphere of fear and distrust appears the ghost of the real dead mother, a caged bird that’s killed, the visiting sister-in law, who disturbed by the stepmother’s manic storytelling, has an epileptic seizure, strange noises and a murder that perhaps never happened. The sisters become trapped in a house where it becomes difficult to know who’s really the tormented and who’s doing the tormenting.

A Tale of Two Sisters is a psychological thriller/horror film with nods towards the ghost story. Discovering the secret of the family’s unease proves to be a compelling pleasure. Everything’s strongly directed, technically brilliant, very well acted and beautifully photographed. Yet in spite of its emotional power A Tale of Two Sisters is ironically somehow flawed by the plausible mad state of Su-mi. Though it’s never explicitly stated, she suffers from a disassociate identity disorder – a condition creating a perception of things through two different identities.

The film’s psychological underpinning is never fully ‘explained’ by any doctor character. Mystery is a great strength of A Tale of Two Sisters. Combine this with dramatic visuals of commanding beauty (swirls of dark brown lighting, potent reds and a patterned set design of dining room, bedrooms and kitchen are incisively edited to genuine horror film shocks).

However the family’s disturbing behaviour is perhaps revealed by a tendency to over-elaborate on plot detail. There are too many storyline incidents. Ghostly appearances (who really is inside that bloodied bag?) and suspicious behaviour all round is excessively displayed (though never gratuitously so) in the last third of A Tale of Two Sisters. Even after a second viewing and consulting an online plot description, I felt A Tale of Two Sisters couldn’t avoid the charge of artistic error, leading to narrative confusion: mainly because of an unreliable narrator perspective.

Through the prism of Sun-Mi’s madness we begin to get a misleading account of events. It’s not merely a case of the right / wrong actor viewpoint but writer / director Kim Jee-woon’s mistaken choice of viewpoint. A bit too many things happen – is the epilepsy scene really necessary and maybe the ghost of the mother shouldn’t have been repeated with such intensity? The films terrific style works against the story of the fate of the film’s protagonist, so that things begin to falter and stumble, causing us to loose sympathy with sister Su-mi’s anxious state of mind: almost but not quite. For the film has a rich sensual texture prompted by strong and gripping compositions. Perhaps this tension between being a horror-thriller and ghost story isn’t fully resolved. A tendency to let its audience experience too much “disassociation” gradually flaws A Tale of Two Sisters.

Yet putting that criticism to one side, this production stands head and shoulders over many contemporary horror films. For when frightening it equals the best parts of the Ring film trilogy. Not quite a classic horror: but intelligent and good enough for me. Alan Price©2017

NOW AVAILABLE COURTESY OF TARTAN Blu-Ray

Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017)

Writer/Dir: S Craig Zahler | Cast: Vince Vaughn, Jennifer Carpenter, Tom Guiry, Don Johnson, Udo Kier, Fred Melamed | Thriller | US | 132′

Vince Vaughn plays a lean, mean, decent human being in S. Craig Zahler’s terrific BRAWL IN CELL BLOCK 99. infact its almost impossible to believe the integrity of the lead character Bradley Thomas who is forced to do what a man’s gotta do when his pregnant wife is kidnapped and threatened with death and the mutilation of her baby, in this tightly scripted vicious crime thriller that puts all Thomas’ problems down to the Mexican drug trade he’s involved in. With lines like: “Don’t call me a foreigner, the last time I looked the flag wasn’t coloured red, white and burrito”, this is a free-spirited affair that grabs you by the lapels with its straight-talking narrative and some of the best bare-fisted fighting scenes ever committed to celluloid. In fact the only criticism of BRAWL is the slighted bloated running time of over two hours, hardly a crime thanks to the fruity cast who keep us entertained throughout, with some awkward laughs at the unmitigated violence of it all. Vaughn is terrific as the guy who tries to salvage his ailing marriage by financing his future running drugs for a local gangster, but ends up in jail for defending his accomplices in a pick-up that goes wrong.

Best known for his Western Horror Bone Tomahawk, S. Craig Zahler packs genre tropes into a endlessly moving action thriller that continuously erupts with shocking violence. Vaughn’s Thomas is a solid mensch of a man whose stoicism and emotional intelligence is trounced only by his courage and physical prowess. After being made redundant he pulverises his wife’s car into the driveway, rather than take his anger out of her, despite her confessing to an affair, which the two resolve in calm dialogue each admitting their faults. After being convicted and set to the ‘FRJ’ prison, Thomas resolves to tough it out with his wife’s support, but a sinister threat from the beautifully-besuited Udo Kier, sends Thomas into slowly unravelling meltdown. At this juncture, the film turns from a sober crime drama to something outlandishly deranged. There are memorable vignettes from suave prison warder Don Johnson, snippy guard, Fred Melamed and a seething Mustafa Shakir. The dialogue is witty and sardonic as the body count rises and the nightmare reaches its astonishing denouement, with our hero setting a new benchmark for the all time action hero and 21st century man. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 20 OCTOBER 2017

The Death of Stalin (2017)

Dir. Armando Iannucci. Fr-UK-Bel | Comedy Drama | 106′

Armando Iannucci’s stylish Soviet satire plays out like a classic Mel Brooks comedy. This light-footed but abrasively cynical dramedy lays bare the grasping sculduggery of Stalinist Russia with a humour as bleak and bracingly vicious as the Gulags where nearly 10-20 million people lost their lives between 1929 and 1953. Our story kicks off in Moscow, where the cockney-tongued Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin) collapses in his state rooms, having suffered a fatal stroke.

Best known for The Thick Of It, In The Loop and Veep, Iannucci again exposes the ugliness of power and politics in a film that echoes the global crisis of faith in our leaders. But what really bolsters this lavish production is seeing so many fabulous actors all doing their stuff in enjoyable comic turns. Amongst Stalin’s coterie of counsellors there is Michael Palin (Vyacheslav Molotov); Steve Buscemi (Nikita Khrushchev); Simon Russell Beale (Lavrentiy Beria) and even Paul Whitehouse (Anastas Mikoyan); not to mention Dermot Crowley (Kaganovich). The humour lies in their need to pretend to be unanimously respectful of Stalin’s death while, behind the scenes, a farce plays out with hilarious gags as they all jockey for position and copy with the petulant posturing from Rupert Friend and Andrea Riseborough as Vasily and Sventlana, Stalin’s kids.

Based on a graphic novel by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin, THE DEATH OF STALIN also shows how ordinary people were casually abused and manipulated by the powerful elite – this is a fascinatingly caustic comedy plays up the pitfalls of a regime that replaced an equally unequal set-up of the Tsars, who at least had taste!. These characters are dead ugly and thoroughly unlikeable, swinging around the vast and vacuous corridors of power, exposing the same loathsome view of Russia that transpires in Andrei Zvyagintsev’s contemporary drama LOVELESS; clearly nothing has changed in the intervening years; the tone here is breezier, but just as back-biting.

Rupert Friend’s Vassily does sail a bit close to the wind in his silliness, but Jason Isaac steps in with comic astringency as Army Chief, Georgy Zhukov. On the whole these politicians are as frighteningly convincing as a species as Jeremy Corbyn or even Michael Gove. Steve Buscemi’s Khrushchev is a clever conniver who gradually gets his way through a process of stealth and self-pity. Witty and throughly entertaining. MT

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 20 OCTOBER 2017

Dina (2017)

Dir: Antonio Santini, Dan Sickles | Cast: Dina Buno, Scott Levin | Doc | US | 102′

Antonio Santini and Dan Sickles explore the joys and idiosyncrasies of an autistic Jewish couple who meet and marry in this poignant and quirkily humorous vérité portrait of love and companionship. DINA serves as an understated tribute to emotional resilience and an indomitable desire for human closeness.

Although there are clearly moments of awkwardness and embarrassment here, Santini and Sickles are never patronising, treating their subject matter with respect and dignity. DINA emerges an engaging and revealing study of human tenderness at its most touching and honest. 48 year-old-widow Dina Bruno is certainly forthright but not apparently autistic when we first meet her making arrangements for her second marriage to Scott Levin, who works in the local Walmart. She is clearly on the outer fringes of the ‘spectrum’ whereas Scott is possibly more affected. The two met at an outer Philadelphia social group for ‘neurologically diverse’ adults. Dina has been ‘retired sick’ after a stabbing attack from an ex (‘the psycho’) left her depressed and traumatised. Her first husband died of cancer.

Although the couple both seem keen on each other, it’s clear that Dina is the more experienced, sexually and emotionally, of the two. Living alone in a flat above a shop, Dina is armed with a strong sense of self-esteem and, although overweight, is happy in her skin with few of the anxieties that bug most modern woman. However, Scott has always lived with his loving parents and is possibly a virgin, admitting to masturbation and given to romantic crooning of “Before the Next Teardrop Falls”, but expressing a deep fear of tactile expression and sex. Something that Dina is determined to remedy, and Scott willing to learn.

Tenderness and tolerance are the watchwords of Dina and Scott’s relationship. They make a rather endearing couple on a bus trip to the New Jersey seaside for the first time, but when Dina presents him with a copy of The Joy of Sex, Scott is clearly out of his comfort zone. But sex – or lack of it – never becomes an issue between the two of them, simple another step on their journey towards mutual fulfilment. The wedding night is relaxed and informal with a focus on their enormous champagne glass-styled jacuzzi, rather than the lack of action between the sheets (“I wonder what a honeymoon is like for a passionate couple” – muses Dina, aloud).

Scott’s parents are a warmly supportive couple who encourage him not to worry when he breaks down in tears over his performance anxiety, and this contrasts sharply with Dina’s fractious relationship with her slim, blond mother who finds her daughter ‘self-absorbed’. The couple are clearly sociable and have regular meet-ups with close friends Monica Ferrero and Frank Costanzo, whose happy marriage gives Dina and Scott something to hope for.

The filmmakers avoid a judgmental approach leaving the couple plenty of space to express themselves freely without time pressures in this well-crafted indie that never overstays its welcome. There’s a feeling here that Scott and Dina are forging something worthwhile and wonderful – in a small way, but a meaningful one nevertheless. When two people decide to really make a go of things, the result is invariably a success!. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 20 OCTOBER 2017

GRAND JURY PRIZE DOCUMENTARY WINNER | SUNDANCE US

The Party (1968) | Bluray release

Dir: Blake Edwards | Cast: Peter Sellers, Claudine Longet, Jean Carson, Al Chacco | US | Comedy | 99′

Peter Sellers is the star turn as a bumbling Indian actor mistakenly invited to a glitzy Hollywood party in Blake Edwards’ ingenious comedy satire that showcases Sellers’ ability to be vulnerable and hilarious at the same time, his extensive range of signature accents getting an extensive airing from ‘Gunga Din’ to Italian and Russian, while causing the whole evening to implode. This was the only time Edwards directed Sellers away from the Pink Panther series but it’s a good’un. MT

NOW OUT ON BLURAY COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA.

The Lovers (2017) | Bfi London Film Festival 2017

Dir.: Azazel Jacobs; Cast: Debra Winger Tracy Letts, Aidan Gillen, Melora Walters, Jessica Sula, Tyler Ross; USA 2017, 97′.

Writer/director Azazel Jacobs (Terri) seems unable to make his mind up whether THE LOVERS should be a farce; a comedy character study, or simply a rom-com. In the end it falls between all stools, the capable cast is left with a banal script and even worse dialogue: the story of a married couple who fall in and out of love simply degenerates into an endless loop of boredom. Mary (Winger) and Michael (Letts) seem to have passed the sell-by-date in their marriage and have both taken lovers to relieve the daily tedium of their jobs. They can hardly stand each other at home, and their long-term lovers, Robert (Gillen), a so-so successful writer, and Lucy (Walters) a dancer and ballet teacher, are distraught with cajoling each one to commit to relationships that have no convincing backstory but seem to provide light relief. The prospect of a visit from Mary’s and Michael’s son Joel (Ross) and his girlfriend Erin (Sula) offers an ideal opportunity for a final showdown, and both promise their respective paramours that after the kids have left, they will throw in the towel. But alas, a chance encounter in bed rekindles old flames, and even though the split seems final, it’s far from the end. Shot mostly in domestic and office locations, this has the feeling of a TV series of the 1970s, when bed-hopping was something new. But Mary and Michael, are so dull and suburban as characters: apart from sex they seem to have no other interests in their work, or the creative pursuits of their lovers. Finally it emerges that Michael was “once into music”, and to prove it, Michael shows he can still tinkle the ivories of their piano that became a sideboard. But soon, even this narrative string is discarded for more of the same old nonsense – involved Lucy actually hissing like a cat at Mary, who sits baffled behind the steering wheel of her car. Jacobs has realised the eternal truth: that longterm menage à trois, can only function as such and marrying a lover, creates another vacancy. Some relationships are clearly never meant to end, but you really can’t wait for this tedious merry go round to stop and let you off. AS

BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 4-15 OCTOBER 2017

Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day | Acht Stunden Sind Kein Tag (1972) | Bluray release

Dir.: Rainer Werner Fassbinder; Cast: Gottfried John, Hanna Schygulla, Luise Ullrich, Wernr Finck, Wolfgang Schenck, Renate Roland, Kurt Raab; West Germany 1972; 467′.

This is certainly the most optimistic film of Fassbinder’s entire career: Made for TV and divided into five episodes, lasting around 95 minutes each, the prolific German director tries to be ready to compromise his usual pessimism for a more “user friendly” content, at the same time giving in to the aesthetic of television. Unlike those in Berlin, Alexander Platz, also a TV production, the working class heroes here have a chance to make their lives better. Originally planned for a much longer run, Fassbinder only finished five episodes.

Set in Cologne, a city dominated by industry, the narrative focuses on toolmaker Jochen (John), his family and friends. All five episodes have their different titles, always the names of couples, even though Jochen and his wife Marion (Schygulla), are always at the centre of the action. Fassbinder liked to cast actors from the 1950s in his films, and Eight Hours is no exception: Jochen’s grandma (Ullrich) and grandfather Gregor (Finck) are always integrated into a story, where working life and private stories form what could in hindsight be termed socialist realism, even though Fassbinder tried very hard to use the structure of existing TV series – so as not to lose the TV audience who were unaccustomed to his usual, rather artificial mode of story-telling. Human conflicts are always resolved. And Fassbinder used contemporary themes, often involving female financial dependency as a reason for women staying put, even after love has gone. He also transferred his other pet feature film topics to his TV work, namely the difficulties faced by immigrants (Gastarbeiter) in Germany. Housing costs also play a big role in his characters’ lives: Jochen and Marion are shown as a very modern couple, clever and sexy, always keen on finding solutions.

Fassbinder has never been so accessible as in Eight Hours: he tries very hard to adjust to the expectations of the TV audience. But at the same time, the episodes show the rewards of active community life, and how it invariably leads to a better life for the working class protagonists. The characters are enthusiastic but never revolutionary, their fighting spirit is contagious, and they are always likeable, and their happiness is well-earned, as are their little victories in the fight against capitalism. Only some of Fassbinder regulars, like Kurt Raab as Harald, are allowed to act as caricatures of mean-spirited Kleinbürger.

The whole series tries to raise the consciousness of the audience, hoping to give some practical examples of problem solving. In this way, Fassbinder stays with the tradition of Agitation Cinema of the Weimarer Republic. Discussions are always down to earth: in the pub, Jochen tries to explain to Marion’s little brother that the streamlining in he factory will mean less money for the workers. But Fassbinder was criticized by many from the Left for this approach; even some of his regular actors, like Harry Baer, called Eight Hours much too’ insipid’. It is certainly true that Fassbinder often made use of post-war comedies structure to get his message home. And Luise Ullrich, who was a star of the UFA between the wars, uses a cheeky cleverness, which reminded some of the worst Nazi comedies. But overall, Fassbinder’s “gentle revolution” was welcomed by the TV audience. And West Germany’s most successful soap opera Lindenstrasse, broadcast in 1990s, was proud to “stand on the shoulders of Eight Hours”. AS

EIGHT HOURS DON’T MAKE A DAY | NOW ON BLURAY/DUAL FORMAT | ARROWVIDEO@FETCH.FM

Araby (2017) | BFI London Film Festival 2017

Dirs: Joao Dumans, Affonso Uchoa | Cast: Aristides de Sousa, Murilo Caliari, Renata Cabral, Glaucia Vandeveld | Brazil | Drama | 96′

An ordinary life takes on evergreen themes and universal implications in writer-directors Affonso Uchoa and Joao Dumans’ delicate rendering of turmoil in the industrial town in Brazil, when thoughtful teenager, Andre (Murilo Caliari) discovers a notebook that chronicles the eventful life journey of his injured neighbour Cristiano (Aristides de Sousa), a factory worker in the aluminium mines.

Tempered with an atmospheric folkloric soundtrack, this is a cold-eyed but fitting tale for our turbulent times, and an endlessly fascinating politically-infused road movie that gradually broadens out and shifts in tone from the narrow social realist focus of an ordinary young boy, into the multi-faceted decade-long peripatetic experiences of a working man who has travelled from shore to shore, and recorded his fascinating lifestory.

Forty-something Cristiano’s hand-written wanderings come to light when Andre (Murilo Caliari) discovers and becomes engrossed in his notebook, after the factory-worker is injured in an accident at work. And once Andre starts reading the film sets off on its wondrous and finely detailed chronicle of Cristiano’s remarkable wanderings, footloose and fancy-free, through all life’s eventualities, from petty crime and retribution, to love and rigorous labour in order to earn his living, while experiencing the massive country that is his native Brazil.

This is a gently magnificent and free-spirited film exploring an ordinary life that slowly opens up to extraordinary proportions. MT

SCREENING DURING LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2017 | 4 – 15 OCTOBER 2017

Chez Nous | This is Our Land (2017) | Bfi London Film Festival 2017

Dir.: Lucas Belvaux; Cast: Emilie Dequenne, Andre Dussollier, Gillaume Gouix, Patrick Descamps, Catherine Jacob; France/Belgium 2017, 117 min

Belgium director/co-writer Lucas Belvaux has chronicled a local election campaign in the north of France, with similarities to the real world very much intended. Set in a unnamed town close to Henin-Beaumont in the Pas-de Calais region, where Marine Le Pen was elected as MP in June, after having been thoroughly defeated in the preceding presidential elections, Chez Nous is centred around a a-political community nurse, who is exploited by a far right Party called RNP.

Pauline Duhez (Dequenne) an over-worked community nurse, divorced with two little children, who has to watch, how her patients and most of the townsfolk are suffering from a permanent reduction of their living standard. Whilst her father Jacques (Descamps), is a fierce trade unionist, Pauline is susceptible towards populist right wingers, like Dr. Berthier (Dussollier), the local doctor, who looked after Pauline’s mother, who died of cancer. Berthier is a gentlemanlike neo-fascist, in the mould of Tixier-Vignancour, who was Minister in the Vichy regime, and collaborated with right-wing militias after the war. Berthier has now left military resistance behind, and helps the RNP (Renewed National Party) to gain power in a democratic way. This cannot be said for his erstwhile friend Stephane ‘Stanko’ (Gouix), who is still working for the military wing of the RNP. He was the first love of Pauline at college, and when he re-appears in her life, old feelings resurface. After Pauline agrees to be the RBN candidate for mayor of the town, Berthier warns ‘Stanko’ to leave Pauline alone: the party cannot afford a scandal, if it becomes public that Pauline has relationship with a para-military soldier. Whilst old friends warn Pauline off he engagement and candidature, ‘Stanko’ is ready to sacrifice his relationship with Pauline for the good of the party. But Pauline, who has doubts, confronts Berthier and stands down. She chooses a life with Stanko, who lies to her, that he is a changed man, who has left the armed struggle behind.

CHEZ NOUS is full of ironies: the daughter chooses the opposite end of politics from her father, her lover is really more dangerous than the Doctor, whom she rejects in the end, and the RNP has difficulties in getting rid of old fighters, who still use force. Pauline, politically naïve, is lost among the scheming politicians, particularly Agnes Dorelle (Jacob), the Party leader, who appeals to Pauline’s feminism. A late twist also helps to bring some loose ends together.
Most of the characters are based on figures of the crime novel Le Bloc (2011) written by co-author Jerome Leroy. This helps to keep the protagonists very earthy: in spite of the topic, politics are secondary; Belvaux concentrates on the motives and personalities of the participants. Some dry humour also helps, and Dequenne is particularly convincing. DoP Pierric Gantelmi d’Ille, who worked with Belvaux on Pas son Genre, captures the provincial atmosphere brilliantly, creating a feeling not unlike a Simenon novel. AS

SCREENING DURING BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 4-15 OCTOBER 2017

Funny Cow (2017) | BFI London Film Festival 2017

Dir: Adrian Shergold | Cast: Maxine Peake, Paddy Considine, Tony Pitts, Kevin Eldon, Christine Bottomley | UK | 103′

After his evocative biopic Pierrepoint: The last Hangman, Adrian Shergold turned his talents to TV work but returns to the big screen with another English story. Maxine Peake stars in the central role of FUNNY COW, a Northern stand-up comedian fighting men and audiences during the 70s and 80s. There is a great deal of talk about Yorkshire, but Shergold’s film explores the negative and exploitative side of Bradford and Leeds, where women were traditionally seen but told to put a sock in it. The poignantly tragic-comic ‘Funny Cow’ attempts to see the humorous side of this world where men ruled violently and women were forced to be back-seat drivers, but the cliché-ridden realism leaves little to the imagination. Our heroine grows up on the backstreets and marries chauvinist Bob (Pitts), who neglects and beats her, like her mother (Bottomley), who has become an alcoholic. Finally, the stand-up has enough and leaves her husband, moving in with shy bookseller Angus (Considine), who introduces her to highbrow “culture”, which she rejects; at the same time finding Angus a bit too detached – love and attention are forever connected with the violence she and generations of working class women have suffered. But Funny Cow reconnects with another stand-up performer Danny (Eldon), who is alcohol-dependent and clinically depressed. When he can’t perform one day, the promoter grudgingly accepts Funny Cow as his replacement, warning her that the sexist audience, not used to female comedians, will “murder” her as she fights for career. Maxine Peake gives an engaging performance, gamely carrying the film through long, rather dreary passages, her drive and commitment making Funny Cow convincing, whilst she copes with Shergold’s TV-film-like structure. They say the old jokes, are the best ones. Here the jokes also bear witness to an unamusing era in female history. AS

SCREENING DURING BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2017

The Party (2017)

Dir: Sally Potter. Cast: Kristin Scott Thomas, Patricia Clarkson, Timothy Spall, Cillian Murphy, Emily Mortimer, Bruno Ganz, Cherry Jones | UK | DRAMA | 71′

After the lush languor of Orlando comes the sleek satire of THE PARTY: Sally Potter has never done laughs before, but here there are some mean ones but nothing unsurprising. This middle class chamber piece is very much a British affair with a British cast – strangely, the most appealing characters are German and American. Shot in bare black-and-white it certainly strips bare the themes involved: Politics, Love, Sex and Money: but what else is there? Intellect, of course, and that is supplied in spades by Timothy Spall’s lounge hang-dog lizard Bill who is hosting a soirée for six close friends for his wife Kristin Scott Thomas’ Janet, who has just been appointed Shadow Health Minister. This is one of those ghastly evenings where everyone has ‘an announcement’ and no one appears to be particularly in a good mood, apart from Bruno Ganz’ soothing alternative therapist Gottfried who talks in cliches along with the other guests, each saying exactly what you would expect them to, representing a different aspect of the social spectrum. Ganz’ news is announced as their ‘last supper’ by his warm and waspish wife April (a brilliant Patricia Clarkson) as she slumps gracefully into a squashy settee. Very much queen of the back-handed compliment she is also the lynchpin who holds the party together, and by the end announces: “our marriage is not looking so bad, compared to this lot”. Everyone is focused on their own issues in that fashionably distraught way well-known to city-dwellers. The only cheesy smile comes from Janet, not least because of her news, but also because of a secret lover who keeps phoning and texting while she pops the vol-au-vents into the oven like some modern day Fanny Craddock. Tom (Cillian Murphy), is a melodramatic financial type who snorts coke in the loo and carries a gun (yeh Sally all city-types snort coke, and carry guns – if only you knew!). The whole affair is book-ended by Janet pointing a gun from her open front door in a ruse that feels bit too formulaic and trite, in the scheme of things. The problem with THE PARTY is an insistence on toeing the party line: everything is so predictable, and unoriginal. There’s even a lesbian couple played by Emily Mortimer and Cherry Jones, who are expecting triplets, and whose dominant versus submissive shtick is cringeworthy in the extreme. The finale showdown involves interweaving infidelities. THE PARTY is an amuse-bouche, and it certainly doesn’t outstay its welcome. And by the time you’re home you’ll be casting around for that bluray of Orlando. MT

RELEASES ON 13 OCTOBER 2017 NATIONWIDE | Berlinale review

Mademoiselle Paradis (2017)

Dir: Barbara Albert | Cast: Maria Dragus, Devid Striesow, Lukas Miko, Katja Kolm, Maresi Riegner, Johanna Orsini-Rosenberg, Stefanie Reinsperger, Susanne Wuest, Christoph Luser | Austria | Biopic Drama | 97′

Rococo Vienna is the setting for this formal but painterly portrait of the legendary Dr Anton Mesmer seen through the experiences of a young bind pianist Maria Theresa Paradis, who sought his help to restore her sight in 1777. Adapted by Kathrin Resetarits from Alissa Walser’s novel ‘Mesmerized’, Barbara Albert offers a rather detached but finely-tuned arthouse drama offering a flimsy but fascinating exposé of Austrian Habsburg society during the time of Mozart when metaphysics, science alternative medicine were all on an equal footing, with unregulated doctors literally practising on unsuspecting patients.

The film opens as the 18 year-old Mademoiselle is seen playing the harpsichord, her cataract-ridden eyes rolling as she jerks her head from side to side. It is not a pretty sight but the music is delightful. Her wealthy family encourages her talent, but a good marriage is imperative in high-society. So parents Joseph (Lukas Miko) and Maria (Katja Kolm) consult Dr Mesmer (David Striesow/The Counterfeiters) whose methods are based on animal magnetism and positive fields of energy, otherwise known as ‘healing hands’.

Initial results are positive and Mesmer and his wife are keen to gain credibility in court circles to further their cause. But bizarrely, once Mademoiselle’s sight improves her keyboard skills start to deteriorate. A difficult film to warm to: not only are the characters unattractive physically, they’re also unappealing personality-wise, so we have no emotional investment whatsoever in whether the patient is cured, or not. But Mesmer’s methods make this compelling and he by no means comes across as a saviour or a quack, thanks to a skilful performance from David Striesow. Infact Mesmer seems to be the only character here with any chink of humanity, despite remaining rather a cipher. Mademoiselle comes across as a spoilt brat but an intelligent one, and her character and foibles are subtly and convincingly portrayed the Romanian born Maria Dragus ( White Ribbon ) and form the mainstay of what would otherwise would be a rather airless affair compared with Jessica Hausner’s more satisfying Amour Fou, from the same era. Award-winning documentarian Nikolaus Geyrhalter is one of the producers. MT

ON PRIME VIDEO

Bitch (2017)

Dir.: Marianna Palka; Cast: Marianna Palka, Jason Ritter, Jaime King, USA 2017, 93 min.

Writer and director Marianna Palka (Good Dick) also stars in her anarchic portrait of a woman pushed aside by her husband once too often. BITCH is a slim but taut and deftly-handled feminist parable – the sheer pace and untamed aggression making it gripping and watchable.

Jill (Palka) runs home and kids for her husband Bill (Ritter), who works for a city corporation and is hardly ever home. Spending most of his time in the office, he sexually exploits a dependent co-worker into the bargain. When she gets sacked in a widespread office cull, Bill puts in a good word for her, but is rebuffed by the boss and vents his frustration on his wife, undeservedly calling her a bitch. Something snaps in Jill and she turns into a vicious virago, making life hell for husband and four children, whom she has served efficiently for so long. Moving into the cellar of the family home, Jill starts growling and behaving like a violent dog. The family is obviously shocked, and Jill’s sister Beth (King) suggests a psychiatric home. But Bill is against the idea – what would the neighbours think?. But his absence from work costs him his job, and when his lover arrives, inquiring caringly about his wellbeing, Jill ‘smells’ her presence and goes berserk. Scots actress Palka is astonishly convincing in both animal and human form, and shows how ultimately behaviour, rather than negotiation, is sometimes the only way to bring change. DoP Armando Salas assists with a handheld camera, capturing the human dog during long runs through the neighbourhood. The jazz score by Morgan Z. Whirledge is just right for this explosive tale which should send alarm bells to all males of the human variety. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 13 OCTOBER 2017

Double Date (2017)

Dir.: Benjamin Barfoot | Cast: Danny Morgan, Michael Socha, Kelly Wenham, Georgia Groome | UK 2017 | 89′.

Benjamin Barfoot’s spoof Slasher movie is murdered by Danny Morgan’s dreadful script and a flimsy narrative that cannot survive even 90 minutes. The feature debut sees two spooky sisters Kitty (Wenham) and Lulu (Groome) corralled into helping Jim (Morgan) lose his virginity on the final night of his twenties. But unbeknown to Jim and his best best friend Alex (Socha), the sister’s have an ulterior motive for seeking out male virgins – it involves body parts, but not those that immediately spring to mind. To say that the material is raw, is an understatement. Only DoP Laura Bingham (also a newcomer), comes away with any credit. Overall, Double Date ends up with a lot of blood but very few laughs. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM FRIDAY, 13 OCTOBER 2017

The Summit | La Cordillera (2017)

Dir.: Santiago Mitre; Cast: Ricardo Darin, Paulina Garcia, Elena Anaya, Christian Slater, Dolores Fonzi; Agentina/France/Spain 017, 114.

Another corruscating critique of politics comes from Director/co-writer Santiago Mitre (Paulina) whose cynical eye captures the way politicians deal with each other and their citizens. In spite of structural fault lines, Mitre captures an uneasiness which also affects the personal sphere of the participants.

Argentine president Hernan (Darin) travels to Chile where the presidents of eleven South American States meet to form an Oil producing conglomerate on the same lines as OPEC. But Hernan has trouble at home: his estranged daughter Marina is mentally unstable, and her ex-husband threatens to unmask the president with a corruption scandal which happened when Hernan was a mayor. Hernan is welcomed by the Chilean president (Garcia), who has chosen a mountain retreat in the Andes, reminiscent of the Swiss Alps, for the titular summit. Behind the scenes meetings are obviously more important than public, plenary sessions, as it becomes soon clear that Hernan’s vote will be decisive. The Brazilian president is totally opposed to any participation of the USA, whilst Hernan plays a waiting game. Suddenly, all hell breaks lose with his daughter and son in law making his official duties fraught with difficulty, and the American envoi (Slater), makes him an offer that’s almost impossible to refuse. The only honourable person seems to be a journalist (Anaya), who grills the presidents mercilessly. But Hernan is not the only one well-schooled in avoiding concrete answers. The mountain resort is not only geographically removed from the population, it is a symbol of the political structure of the sub-continent. Hernan is sleeping with a mistress, and the luxury of the surroundings lacks for nothing: it might as well be Washington DC. The score by Alberto Iglesias reflects the uneasiness of the setting, and Javier Julia’s (Wild Tales) images, particularly the panoramic shots from high above, show the splendid isolation of the rulers. AS

BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL | 4-15 OCTOBER 2017

School Life (2017)

In a Georgian mansion in rural Ireland maverick educators John and Amanda have devoted their married life to bringing out the best in their pupils, along with their foppish Head Master Dermot Dix. And if you had young children, you’d send them to the idyllic prep school at Headfort House near Kells in County Meath. In this entertainingly footloose documentary we spend a year with the kids and staff and their wonderful approach to learning.

The directors’ narrative is as unstructured as the couple’s teaching methods. John and Amanda are as tender towards their charges as they are to each other. But discipline is also firmly in place and respect is the watchword; and it flows both ways. John is the Latin Master but he also teaches the liberal arts, music and painting. English Mistress Amanda, is responsible for drama – and there is a lot of fun. John and Amanda are often seen sharing a fag as they chat through their day in their cottage on the grounds, giving each other tips and encouragement – clearly the pupils are also their ‘children’ and they know just how to bring out the best in them. But they are dedicated to their life’s work and have also to consider what would happen when they eventually retire: “What would we do all day, if we didn’t come here?”. When little Florrie, a troubled but talented kid, appears on the scene from London, she is a brilliant drummer in the school’s rock band but lacks discipline. John deftly handles her tears and tantrums without batting an eyelid and the children all call him ‘Sir’, as a mark of respect – without a shred of resentment, or ever questioning his authority, in public or in the cosy dorms.

At the end of term, there is success for two children with places at Eton and Harrow, and John gently mimics the posh accents the boys may encounter once installed. At the same time, young Ted’s dyslexia has improved in this caring environment and there are prizes – and hugs – all round. A tender and touching portrait of what a school should be. MT

OUT ON 13 OCTOBER 2017

Pop Aye (2017) | BFI London Film Festival 2017

Dir: Kirsten Tan | Drama | Singapore/Thailand | Thaneth Warakulnukroh, Penpak Sirikul, Bong | 104′

Kirsten Tan’s enchanting film debut follows a disillusioned romantic and his elephant across Thailand on a mission to connect with the past. This deceptively simple tale has so much to say, most of it non-verbally, about the ennui of urban life and nostalgia for love, and does so with an understated gracefulness of touch, a distinct visual style and an astringent humour that shows considerable maturity and insight. Clearly she has thought a great deal about her script and subtle characterisations, and it shows.

World-weary Thana (Warakulnukroh) lives a banal existence in plastic Bangkok. Once a well-known architect, his marriage to a shopaholic (Sirikul) is soul-destroying, and his clients now prefer technology to his personal approach. One day he leaves home and just keeps on going, reuniting on the way with his childhood pet Popeye (Bong), a fairground elephant destined for the scrapheap. The two become soulmates in their eventful journey back to Thana’s hometown of Loei, where faded flashbacks reveal how Popeye joined their village life after his mother was shot dead.

Thana opens his diatribe on the perils of city living, in the first of several encounters with helpful strangers the unlikely couple meet along the way. Another more spiritual interlude involves a Buddhist pauper Dee (Khumdee) who senses his end is nigh and whose final wish is to see his estranged girlfriend, who redeems herself in the final scenes, along with Thana’s long-lost uncle (Pongpab) who has a few surprises up his sleeve. Meanwhile, the police take constant potshots at Popeye: roving elephants are regarded as a ‘threat to the public tidiness’, as they continue their illuminating journey. Chananun Chotrungroj’s clever camerawork draws similarities between the misty landscape and Popeye’s vast hindquarters, uniting beast and countryside in a metaphor for Thailand’s lost rural traditions, in poignant contrast to the brash and alienating march of progress unfurling in Bangkok’s glitzy skyline.

Tan’s characters are as subtle and complex as every one of us, and each brings out a new dimension in her story, revealing bittersweet ironies and universal truths, but always with spry humour. And all the while, Popeye is the sad reminder of the country’s past, seen through his knowing gaze and gentle demeanour. MT

NOW SCREENING AT THE BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 4 0CT0BER – 15 OCTOBER 2017

Filmworker (2017) | BFI London Film Festival 2017

Dir.: Tony Zierra | Documentary with Leon Vitali; USA | 94′.

Stanley Kubrick is without doubt one of the greats of 20th Century cinema. His perfectionism and dedication is also legendary as Tony Zierra (My big Break) illustrates in his haunting documentary of how an actor fell under Kubrick’s spell, becoming his right-hand man in an act of near-religious submission. Even now, 18 years after his master’s death, he works tirelessly transposing the film archive onto 4K material.

In 1975, actor Leon Vitali was a young man with a great film and stage future ahead of him and offers from the National Theatre. Securing one of the main parts as Lord Bullingdon in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. Vitali went on to admire Kubrick so much, that he soon gave up his acting career to learn the craft, finally talking Kubrick into getting him a job on the The Shining (1980). Once Kubrick had gained his trust, Vitali was tasked with casting the child roles for the Cult horror feature. In Full Metal Jacket (1987), Vitali’s main contribution was helping the actors live up to the exacting demands of the director. Whilst returning to his acting career in Kubrick’s final feature Eyes wide Shut (1999), Vitali also helped with various technical tasks.

Being around Kubrick meant often working a 16 hour day and Vitali became a trusted adjutant of the control freak, even worked around the clock during large projects. His three children, who are interviewed, leave no doubt that they came second in the pecking order for Dad’s attention. Other interviewees, like Ryan O’Neal and Matthew Modine, talk about Vitali’s obsessive relationship with the often cantankerous Kubrick. If Vitali detected others’ shortcomings, he brought them to Kubrick’s attention. The obsessive job has taken its toll on Vitali. Physically as well as psychologically, he has aged beyond his years. Now haggard, he’s still driven by fulfilling a self-imposed workload as Kubrick’s personal assistant beyond the grave. FILMMAKER is an absorbing and haunting portrait of obsession. AS

SCREENING DURING BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 4-15 OCTOBER 2017

Cargo (2017) | BFI London Film Festival 2017

Dir: Gilles Coullier | Sam Louwyck, Wim Willlaert, Sebastian Dewaele | 91′ | Drama | France/Bel/Ned

There have been a number of really good marine-themed films of late including Mario Herce’s Dead Slow Ahead (2015); Delphine Coulin’s Stopover/Voir du Pays; Axel Koenzen’s Deadweight; and Felix Dufour-Laperriere’s Transatlantique. Sadly this is not one of them, but is worth a watch.

What starts as an intriguing ‘man overboard’ thriller rapidly plunges into the maudlin territory of people trafficking in the grim Dutch debut that tries to be all things to all people with a male-centric narrative exploring the aftermath of tragedy for a struggling North Sea fishing company after the patriarch suffers a life-changing fall. Written, directed and produced by Gilles Coullier, the ace up CARGO’s sleeve is a brooding turn from Flemish actor Sam Louwyck as Jean, the eldest son responsible for the ailing fleet. Battling to bring up his 8 year old son, the single father is also tasked with managing his youngest brother Francis, who is a loser hiding his homosexuality, and the black sheep of the family William, who truculently wants to carrying on the family business, against all odds. Three signatures are required to put the business to bed. The other good thing about CARGO is David Williamson’s widescreen camerawork that makes the dismal North Sea coastline sing powerfully with muted blues and forboding greys, echoing the sentiments of this turbulent family saga with its universal themes of migration, financial crisis and the ties that bind. MT

SCREENING DURING THE BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2017 | 13,14,15 OCTOBER 2017

The Cakemaker (2017) | BFI London Film Festival 2017

Dir: Ofir Raul Grazier | Cast: Sarah Adler, Zohar Shtrauss, Tim Kalkhof, Roy Miller | 104′ | LGBT Drama |

Narrative torpor is not the only thing on the menu in this genteel gay-themed film debut from Israeli director Ophir Raul Grazier. Two stories of grief and bereavement interweave in a thoughtful but flaccid study of long-distance love that unfolds between Berlin and Jerusalem. Lust has nothing to do with it when young German baker Tomas (Kalkhof) meets married Israeli business man Oren (Miller) who calls by his cafe looking for directions, but also swings both ways. We are led to believe that the two then fall for each other, in the absence of any kind of convincing chemistry or even rapport. Oren then goes back to his wife Anat (Sarah Adler) and son in Jerusalem and after a brief silence, Tomas finds out he has been killed in an accident back home. The grief-stricken baker then goes to Jerusalem to scope out Anat and her family and ends up inadvertently working for her, although the two are totally unaware of their connecting backstory. As they cope with sadness of loss, cafe life in Jerusalem poses all kinds of Kosher problems for Thomas’ who cooking skills are hampered by not being Jewish, although we are persuaded that the cakes he makes are popular amongst the un-Orthoodox customers. THE CAKEMAKER is an LGBT title that wouldn’t say boo to a goose, let alone a nice fat challah during Passover; but there’s a quiet respectability here and it’s decent and well-performed. MT

BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2017 | 4 OCTOBER – 15 OCTOBER

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Dir.: Denis Villeneuve; Cast: Ryan Gosling, Ana de Armas, Robin Wright, Sylvia Hoeks, Jared Leto, Harrison Ford, Mackenzie Davis; USA 2017, 164 min.

Ridley Scott set his original Blade Runner in 2019; and since we are nearly there, Denis Villeneuve (Arrival) has had to catapult us another 30 years into the future where LA is a chaotic ruin, where snows falls regularly with a permanent orange halo in the sky. Climate change has taken its toll. But this is nothing, because north of the metropolis, including San Diego, everything is, literally, just a dump populated by human scavengers. Canadian director Villeneuve has come from art-house cinema, and proves successfully that you can make a blockbuster costing 180 million dollars with the aesthetics and quality of an indie movie.

In this dystopian nightmare, a narrative emerges more or less where Ridley Scott (who is an executive producer) left off. LAPD officer K (Gosling) – himself an android (Mark Nexus 9) – is hunting down the rebellious model Nexus 8 survivors, and we witness him successfully executing a contract. But the aftermath is much more important: K finds evidence that the distinction between humans and androids has been breached. Reporting to his superior, Lieutenant Joshi (Wright), he is told to forget the whole affair: all evidence is being destroyed. But K is himself a rebel and goes on researching. Niander Wallace (Leto), who more or less owns the country and the plant where the much more pliant Nexus 9 model is produced, is not amused, and sets his executioner Luv (Hoeks) on Joshi. K. Luv is a killing machine who never moves a muscle in her angelic face. On his way back into the past, K first encounters a mind technician (Davis), whose identity will be of absolute importance, and finally Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard, who has gone missing for thirty years, and now lives in the ruins of Las Vegas, gambling with himself and watching holograms of Elvis and Frank Sinatra.

Much more important than this wild chase – K still uses Ford’s battered mini-plane – is the relationship between K and Joi (de Armas), an inferior service android, who serves K on every level. But Joi develops feelings for her master, and finally even sacrifices her life, just to be with him. For me, the highpoint is the scene where K invites a hooker to the flat, and Joi wraps her holographic self around the woman, while they love together: all three of them longing for a human experience. When K finds the small wooden horse that has been a feature of his dreams, he’s not sure if this memory was implanted in the factory; ironically, Wallace the designer is calling the androids ‘angels’, wanting to develop them further, so they can reproduce.

The soullessness is astonishing: the wooden horse is a sensation because nobody has seen a tree. And naked women ply their trade with building-sized holograms. K, like his namesake in Kafka’s castle – is lost in the power play, but still yearns to be a human. Considering the state of the species, he should have second thoughts.There is lot to admire here, and Villenueve’s subtle, sensitive direction makes one forget the substantial running time. Writers Hampton Fanchor (who scripted the 1982 version) and Michael Green keep the focus and take their time developing each character. The music by Benjamin Wallfisch and Hans Zimmer supports the eerie atmosphere, and British DoP Roger Deakins (A Serious Man) creates a ghastly shadow world in bleached colours, creating an atmosphere of permanent darkness and fog. Gosling and de Armas are a couple from an inverted Sodom et Gomorra, by Proust. AS

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE.

https://youtu.be/2Wroofd1bB0

Untitled (2017) MUBI

Dir: Michael Glawogger, Monika Willi | Austria / Germany 2017 | English, German | Doc | 107 min · Colour

In Untitled seasoned documentarian Michael Glawogger fulfilled his final dream of freewheeling round the World for a year just photographing everything he saw, with his cameraman Attila and sound engineer Manuel Siebert. There was to be no narrative or theme, no formal structure, just pure freedom to see what happened, and this is the result – after Glawogger’s tragic death from malaria less than half way though the project – a final unfinished reverie of random footage was put together by his longterm collaborator Monika Willi, and accompanied by notes from his diary narrated by Fiona Shaw.

Untitled has a looser more poetic feel that his previous outings Workingman’s Death, Megacities and Whore’s Glory, spooling out with shades of Kirsten Johnson’s recent roundup Cameraperson. The crew travelled south from Austria through the Balkans and on to West Africa where their ramblings are captured in silent musings and dynamic sequences that unfold in a nonlinear format gliding peripatetically north and south, east and west, and not in chronological order. Animals, people and buildings get equal treatment as Boa’s camera often trails behind farmer’s trucks bearing sheep and cattle.

In Dakar, coal black muscle bound bodies of Senegalese wrestlers gleam in the hazy sunshine of a dust-up; a vigorous massage on the hard stone floor of a Moroccan Hammam; a fur-coated woman roams through the dilapidated houses of Apice Vecchio in Campania, abandoned since 1962 on the verge of a threatened earthquake when the villagers moved across the valley. Kids and goats rifle through the fly-tipped waste in Erfoud in the Sahara desert and the war amputees’ sports club of Freetown play football on the beach in Liberia. In Kosovo a son and father climb through the structure of a unfinished housing block amid howling wind.

Wolfgang Mitterer’s score is more a patchwork of ambient sounds than formal composition as Monika Willi captures the essence of Glawogger’s previous strands and preoccupations: the injured, oppressed and desolate, particularly animals and children. His desire was for personal freedom and his envy of those who have no agenda but to stare from a window all day is palpable: “the death of freedom is to foresee every possible disaster and plan accordingly. Fear is a terrible companion.” His poignant ending in Harper, Liberia seems to echo through all of these images. MT

WHORE’S GLORY IS NOW ON MUBI

The Reagan Show (2017)

Dir: Sierra Pettengill, Pacho Velez | Doc | US | 74′

Pettengill and Velez’ entertaining documentary captures the pageantry, absurdity and mastery of the made-for-TV politics of Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) entirely through White House footage and archive news reports. And although the directors brings nothing especially new to the party that covered the Reagan Administration from 1980-1988), with Donald Trump’s arrival in the White House, even the Reagan presidency needs to be re-evaluated.

Asked in 1980, why Ronald Reagan was elected president of the USA, a journalist friend of mine ventured his opinion: “The powers that are, wanted to give the job to somebody who read the cue-cards the best”. He was referring to Reagan’s acting career; though mostly spent in B-pictures, Reagan was a household name, and his portraits of the average, good-natured American (in the majority of his features), made him an ideal figure to identify with. Even if the truth about him – working as an informer for the FBI – would have been leaked, it would not have made any difference at the polls. Reagan himself was much more self-aware than one assumes. Asked by a TV interviewer if it helped to have been an actor before becoming president, he answered; “I don’t know how I would have done the job, if I had not been an actor.”

Yes, he had trouble spelling names, like the one of New Hampshire governor John Sununu, whose election he sponsored: the recorded interview had to be interrupted many a times, before Reagan got it right –but hey, George W. Bush could hardly string a complete sentence together. And even if Reagan’s appearance before the TV cameras with a saw in his hand, representing his fight for a meaner budget, was truly cringe-worthy, it seems more funny than malicious today. Anyhow, ‘staging the message’ was/is always part and parcel of the ‘White House Show’ – until Trump decided to break all the rules. The reason we have so much material on the Reagan years, is, that his administration recorded more events, than the five before combined.

Reagan was a cold-war warrior, and even after only one year in office, public opinion showed that the US population was more afraid of an all-out nuclear war with the USSR than 12 months before; further more, the majority of the US population thought that nuclear war with the USSR was inevitable. The president was in/famous for two of his statements: one was his support of the Strategic Defence Initiave (also known as ‘Star Wars’), the other one naming the USSR “as an evil empire”. But being the master communicator he was, Reagan turned from a falcon into a dove in his last years in the White House. Whilst president Gorbachev hired US PR agencies to help with his image (quite successfully, he gained the support of Margaret Thatcher and Francois Mitterand), Reagan had suffered a set back in the Iran affair in late ‘86: his prisoners for weapons deal cost him the support of his political base, and, for once, the great communicator had to retreat. In the end, Reagan even retracted his “evil empire” outburst: in the presence of Gorbachev he told reporters in Moscow “this quote belonged to another time, another era”.

The footage of Ronald and Nancy Reagan in Ronald McDonald costumes, entertaining a group of children, might be the funniest of this lively and often witty documentary, the overall perception is that, even if the Reagan presidency was “an MA in PR” compared with the present White House inhabitant, Ronald Reagan was a balanced human being. MT

OUT OF COMPETITION | LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW | 2-12 AUGUST 2017

1st Pingyao International Film Festival 2017 | Oct 28 – Nov 4 2017

The First Pingyao Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon International Film Festival (PYIFF) will take place in the Ancient World Heritage city from 28 October until 4 November 2017.

The project is the brainchild of award-winning filmmaker Jia Zhangke (Mountains May Depart), Marco Müller is artistic director and award-winning actress Fan BingBing (I Am Not Madame Bovary) its Ambassador. PYIFF will be held amid the magnificent Ming Dynasty site of Pingyao from October 28 – November 4, with a brand new festival Complex, incorporating a 1500-seat open-air arena, showcasing this arthouse extravaganza.

Fan Bingbing is one of China’s best loved actresses and took part in the the jury at the 70th Cannes International Film Festival this May. Jia Zhangke’s hope is to create an industry meeting place in Pingyao ‘dynamising the Landscape of Cinema’ with the creative input of new and established Chinese filmmakers; international auteurs; programmers; producers and investors. The main Jury will consist of: Feng Xiaogang, Johnnie To, Walter Salles, Aleksandr Sokurov, Olivier Père, Anurag Kashyap, James Schamus, Roger Garcia, Alexander Rodnyansky and Tony Cao.

RETROSPECTIVE

This year’s retrospective will tribute the Centennial of Jean-Pierre Melville, the “Father of the French New Wave” with 10 recently restored Melville classics, including: The Red Circle, Le Samourai, A Cop and Army of Shadows. Melville’s films have been an enriching influence on Chinese cinema over the years, particularly for John Woo, Johnnie To and Ann Hui. Besides screening the restored version of most Jean-Pierre Melville’s films, the festival will also include two Chinese language films deeply influenced by his work. The symposium will provide a forum for well-known directors, researchers and filmmakers to discuss and examine their own cinema in relations to Melville’s output. Rémy Grumbach, nephew of Jean-Pierre Melville and co-founder of the Melville Foundation will be there to take part. PYIFF will also hold an exhibition of Melville trailers, posters and film stills in the festival’s main site Pingyao Festival Palace.

The festival’s comprises 6 strands: “Crouching Tiger” (section for new directors), “Hidden Dragon” (special focus on genre film), “Galas”, “New Generation China”, “Best of Fest” and “Retrospective/Tributes”. The “Retrospective & Tributes” section will screen classics to pay tribute to filmmakers who have contributed to the international film industry.

PINGYAO CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL http://www.pyiffestival.com

Goodbye Christopher Robin (2017)

Dir.: Simon Curtis | Cast:Domhnall Gleason, Margot Robbie, Will Tilson, Alex Lawther, Kelly MacDonald, Stephen Campbell Moore; UK 2017, 107′.

In trying to tackle the complex relationship between Winnie-the-Pooh author AA Milne (1882-1956) and his son Christopher Robin, Simon Curtis (Woman in Gold) finds the guilty party: the boy’s mother Daphne (Margot Robbie). Aided by scriptwriters Frank Cottrell Boyce and Simon Vaughn, Dorothy ‘Daphne’ de Selincourt becomes a garish parody of a woman without a heart; although contradictory evidence found in the adult writing of C R Milne is written out.

Bookended by the two World Wars, the story opens with AA Milne (Gleason) in the West End Theatre scene of 1920, where flashbulbs remind him of his traumatic time in the trenches. Having written for the stage and the magazine Punch, Milne declares “I’ve had enough of making people laugh, I want to make them see”. Daphne had given birth to their son Christopher Robin, named ‘Billy Moon’ by his parents. The couple soon gravitate from London to Hartfield East Sussex, where AA Milne was to write his two most famous books Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928), illustrated by the Punch cartoonist EH Shephard (Campbell Moore), who visited the Milnes often and had a close relationship with the author, sharing post traumatic stress disorder.

Daphne is shown as an endlessly neglectful mother, seeking out out the brights lights of London’s social scene while leaving CR in the hands of his nurse Olive ((MacDonald). When Olive is on leave, Milne senior shows off his parenting skills in strange ways: when he finds his son on the table with knife and fork in his hands, he reprimands him “if somebody falls through the ceiling, they would injure themselves, drawing blood” – making sure the audience gets the wartime analogy. After the Winnie-the-Pooh books achieve worldwide success, Daphne decides to get in on the act, making hay out of Milne’s success despite being previously being on the verge of leaving him – she even sells one of his private poems to a newspaper, and gives her son short shrift when he tearfully complains “all these stories are just lies” – she retorts “There is no blubbing in this house”. A sentimental reconciliation between CR, returning from the war, and his parents shows Daphne again at her best: never in film history have you witnesses a mother less delighted by the survival of her son.

The dinner party conversation at the Milne house would make PG Woodhouse proud: Dinner guest: “I was at the Somme”, “How was it?” “Bad show”. Obviously, this only goes to emphasis how the British stiff upper lip kept the sensitive male in check. Clearly Curtis intends this as an indictment of the upbringing Milne’s children’s books revered, but is it really worthwhile, or even desirable, to criticise the values of the past through today’s spectrum? AA Milne is shown trashing his son’s room with a cricket bat, demonstrating that, unlike mother, he really regrets the rotten childhood he had forced on him. Whilst the PD department gets all the credit, GOODBYE is just too sweet and torpid – apart from its misogynist ideology – to keep even the most ardent Pooh fanbase engaged. Years from now this film will be forgotten, the books and poems will live on. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE NATIONWIDE

Le Plaisir (1952) | Dual format release Bluray/DVD

Dir: Max Ophuls | France | 97′ | Drama |

Three of French writer Guy de Maupassant’s short stories are sumptuously brought to life by German director Max Ophuls in this arthouse treasure LE PLAISIR. With elegantly polished, often tongue in cheek, performances from Jean Gabin, Danielle Darrieux and Simone Simon and glowing black and white camerawork, Ophuls delicately conjures up the 18th world of the author’s Normandy settings and lush summer landscapes in this cleverly plotted, gorgeously rendered, light-hearted costume drama. Le Masque: a masked dandy hides a secret in this evergreen fable of desire and lost youth; La Maison Tellier: a lively tale about a well-respected brother madam who takes her girls on an outing to her brother’s village to attend the first communion of her niece and attracts additional business; Le Modèle: A painter chases his muse until she catches him in this amusing parable that shows how the path to love never runs smoothly. MT

OUT ON 23 OCTOBER COURTESY OF ARROW ACADEMY | £24.99 | arrowvideo@fetch.fm

The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

Legendary GET CARTER composer, Roy Budd is to have his lost score for Rupert Julian’s silent classic film, THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA premiered at the London Coliseum, 24 years after his untimely death in 1993. On October 8th 2017, Budd’s masterpiece score will be performed by the 77 piece Docklands Sinfonia Orchestra, conducted by Spencer Down, alongside a screening of the silent film in a world premiere event.

British jazz musician and composer Roy Budd, is best known for the film scores of Get Carter with Michael Caine and The Wild Geese with Roger Moore and Richard Burton. In 1989 Budd acquired the only surviving original 35mm reel of Rupert Julian’s silent 1925 film, The Phantom of the Opera, and lovingly restored it to its former glory before composing his own score to the film, a sweeping romantic symphony. Phantom is the sound of Budd blossoming from jazz virtuoso to classical maestro.

A self-taught pianist and child prodigy, in 1953 aged six, Budd performed his first concert at The London Coliseum on the same bill as Roy Castle and went on to perform with stars such as Aretha Franklin, Bob Hope, and Antonio Carlos Jobin as well as scoring 40 feature films.

Throughout his childhood Budd, who has perfect pitch, won a number of televised talent competitions, before releasing a single, “The Birth of the Budd”, when he was still a teenager, and becoming the resident pianist at one of London’s jazz meccas, the Bull’s Head pub in Barnes. In 1971, he sealed his place in film history when, aged 22, he was hired by Mike Hodges to score his grim revenge drama, Get Carter, starring Michael Caine. The music budget was a mere £450, but Budd, along with a bassist and a percussionist, recorded a spine-tingling harpsichord motif which is now iconic. In 1981 The Human League covered the theme from Get Carter on their multi-million selling album Dare.

In 1989 Budd acquired an original 35mm film print to the 1925 silent film Phantom of the Opera from a collector. He restored the film to its full glory using an experimental two colour process and original tints from the film’s original release. Budd completed a full orchestral score for the film using an 84-piece orchestra and recorded this with the Luxembourg Symphony Orchestra. In 1993, with five weeks to go before a London premiere at the Barbican in partnership with UNICEF and European tour, Budd suffered a fatal brain hemorrhage and passed away at just 46 years of age. The concert was cancelled and Budd’s widow Sylvia was asked to foot the bill. Sylvia has fought for 24 years to give the score the public airing it deserves.

Phantom of the Opera is arguably Budd’s greatest achievement: a grand soundtrack for full orchestra with several themes and leitmotifs that pay tribute to the great composers of the concert hall and screen, while at the same time unmistakably the work of its inspired creator.

LONDON COLISEUM | 8 OCTOBER 2017

Night is Short, Walk on Girl (2017)

Dir.: Masaaki Yuasa; Anime with the voices of Kana Hanazawa, Gen Hoshino, Hiroyuki Yoshino; Japan 2017, 93′

Masaaki Yuasa returns to the big screen with his first release in 13 years. Night is Short, Walk On Girl, based on the Manga by Tomohiko Morimi, is a variation on the One Night action Manga, itself the Oriental equivalent of Cornel Woolrich’s pulp novels featuring the doomed hero with just one night to prove his innocence and rescue his girl –while the clock ticks away. In this case, it’s the girl of the title, Ottome, meaning ‘girl with black hair’, who runs the show.

Set in Kyoto, Senpai (Hoshino), a shy senior college student from an upmarket background, is in love with teenager The Girl (Hanazawa) who keeps her feelings for him buttoned up. Senpai pursues her at every corner, but The Girl is much more streetwise than he is. After a mutual college friend’s wedding party, Senpai tries to find a seat near his paramour, but comes under attacked by a gang robbing him of his clothes, leaving Senpai deeply embarrassed and forced to beg strangers to lend him some underwear. The Girl, meanwhile, lucks out by winning a drinking contest with a God-like creature, Rihaku, thus liberating one of his debtors. As the night goes on, The Girl meets the ‘God of the old Books Market’ (Yoshino) along with Todo-son, an unhappy collector of erotic Japanese art, and a group of nihilists, who fall under her spell. A college theatre production turns into a out-out slapstick show, and, in the final section of this riotous night journey, The Girl fights tornados and icy hail, as the anime reaches its momentous finale

One word of warning: The title is completely misleading as The Girl never walks but rushes around madly, a tireless adventuress, seeking out excitement at every corner. Senpai is more contemplative and we learn a lot about the inner workings of his mind, where Ego and Id fight it out. There seems to be no ‘dramatic arc’ – this is a fairy tale told on speed. It would have been good to learn more about the innovative animation: for example, if people get drunk or act embarrassingly, their bodies are suffused by different shades of red, with Senpai being the main victim – but the subtitles don’t leave much time for admiration. The film’s characters are based on the drawings of the Manga by Yusuke Nakamura, and the director successfully marries this rather minimalist style with his overpoweringly fluid action scenes.

Some critics have accused Yuasa of celebrating Senpai as a stalker, but while he seems to be a bit of a control freak, he is very unsuccessful at it. Yuasa has stuck to the first sentence of the novel “This is not a story about me, it’s a story about her”. AS

OUT ON RELEASE FROM 3 OCTOBER IN CINEMAS NATIONWIDE

The Road to Mandalay (2016)

Dir.: Midi Z; Cast: Wu Ke-xi, Kai Ko; Myanmar/Taiwan/France/Germany 2016, 108′

Burmese auteur Midi Z shares own experience in this doomed love story about two illegal immigrants escaping prison and poverty in Myanmar (from his home town of Lashio) to seek a brighter future in Thailand.“The young Burmese, feeling imprisoned in their home country, and regard Thailand as a place where they could set themselves free and have a brighter future. Nonetheless, they have no idea that they are very likely to be imprisoned again, and this time in a bigger place. I’m fortunate, if I hadn’t come to Taiwan to study, I might have ended up like one of the character in the film”.

Z, who has directed documentary films before switching to features, shows his skills in catching the smallest details, not only on the coalface of the factory, but also in the relationship between the two main characters. Guo is stoic, but has a grasp of reality, whilst Lianqing is dreaming of a bright future – but relying on Guo to make it happen. Guo shows respect for Lianqing’s innocence and does not even kiss her. They live like brother and sister, with Guo hoping for more, without verbalising his feelings during their dangerous trip from the Myanmar border to Thailand. They have paid the people-traffickers, who take them over the Mekong river into the ‘promised land’ (the titular Mandalay is more symbolic than real), the journey often interrupted to bribe border control and policemen. Guo, whom fellow travellers call ‘simple Guo’, falls in love with Lianqing at first side, and lets her travel in the front of the vehicle, taking her place in the boot, even though he has paid a higher price. After they arrived in the suburbs of Bangkok, he tries to get her a job in a restaurant, but the young woman has set her sights higher: she wants to work in the city, selling clothes. But since Lianquing has no identity papers, she fails with her application, and starts working washing dishes. Arrested during a police raid, Guo has to bail her out. But love cannot save Lianqing from her burning ambition which also leads to her fate in this brilliantly-acted drama of illegal immigration and unfulfilled amour-fou. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 29 SEPTEMBER 2017

Hunting Season (2017) | San Sebastian Film Festival 2017

Dir/Writer: Natalia Garagiola. Argentina/USA/France/Germany/Qatar | 105′ | Drama

Natalia Garagiol’s feature debut is an evocative and nuanced take of alienation that makes good use of its stunning locations in windswept Patagonia to tell a well-drawn and convincingly performed story of family discord in Argentina.

In the opening scenes teenager Nahuel (Lautaro Bettoni) is expelled from his Buenos Aires boarding School after a tiff on the games field and is shipped off by his affable stepfather Bautista (Boy Olmi) to spend some time with his distant father Ernesto in a wintery Patagonia. Here father and son keep continue to keep their distance in the new family set-up consisting of wife Clara (Rita Pauls) and three young step-sisters.

Game ranger Ernesto takes Nahuel hunting with him and teaches him how to use a gun in the hope of bonding after their difficulties and gradually the two become less frosty towards one another to despite a distinct verbal froideur in this story telegraphed by its often menacing atmosphere – mostly over the dinner table – in body language rather than meaningful dialogue. In flashbacks it emerges that the rift between the men seems to have developed after the loss of Nahuel’s mother but all this plays out in the final scenes via a video on his mobile and a roadside contretemps with his dad.

Fernando Lockett’s blue-tinged images often picture Nahuel as a distant and disengaged character who is ruminative, morose and miserable in common with the icy landscapes surrounding him. The only solace appears to be from Bautista, although it’s unclear why Nahuel can’t stay with him, rather with his hostile father, who seems to hold some grudge against him as the pair eventually thrash it out with some success. With appeal for young audiences as well as the arthouse crowd, TEMPORADA DE CAZA is a sure-footed first feature for Garagiola and a deserving winner of the SIC Award at this year’s Mostra. MT

NOW SCREENING AT SAN SEBASTIAN FILM FESTIVAL

CRITICS’ WEEK WINNER VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 30 AUGUST – 9 SEPT 2017

https://youtu.be/25DljJromt0

Brimstone (2016)

Dir.: Martin Koolhoven; Cast: Dakota Fanning, Guy Pearce, Emily Jones, Carice van Houten; USA 2016, 148 min.

Dutch writer/director Martin Koolhoven brings a new chapter to the history of male-on-female violence depicted in film. That this all-out exploitation feature is sold as a feminist revenge story makes it even worse.

Set as a 19th century Western and told as an elliptical flashback story, BRIMSTONE is an ultra-violent, voyeuristic joy ride featuring a deranged Reverend (Pearce), who hunts down his daughter Liz (Fanning), to fulfil his God-given right to incest, quoting the biblical story of Lot and his daughters as an example. Having driven Liz’ mother Anna (Van Houten) to suicide, the Reverend then enjoys sex with his daughter who also happens to be his granddaughter. Liz has a long history of male-inflicted suffering in a brothel, where the film then features endless sequences that would look radical even on a common or garden porn site.

Koolhaven has a lot to answer for: why, for example, did he cast a six-year old girl and then give her the following dialogue: “Has your mother told you what a whore is?” Other scenes depict gratuitous violence directed towards women – did he really believe this is not exploitation at its worse? By all means hit at abuse to illustrate the point, but to over-expose it merely adds insult to injury. And to makes matters worse these scenes are almost wordless, the female characters having very little dialogue to express their feelings or concerns in defence of their treatment. Occasionally Koolhoven descends into self-parody in the scene where the Reverend tells his victims to be aware of men, describing them as “wolves in sheep’s clothing”. Filmed in panoramic shots by Dutch DoP Roger Stoffers, Brimstone breaks the records for disingenuous virtue-signalling AS

NOW ON MUBI

Beauty and the Dogs | Aala Kaf Ifrit (2017)

Dir.: Kaouther Ben Hania; Cast: Mariam Al Ferjani, Ghanem Zrelli; Tunisia/France/Sweden 2017, 100 min.

Writer/director Kaouther Ben Hania’s mockumentary The Blade of Tunis raised eyebrows in her home-country of Tunisia. For her first feature she has chosen another provocative theme: police brutality. Based on the novel Coupable d’Avoir eté Violé (2013) by Meriem Ben Mohamed and Ava Djamhidi, her film makes for a harrowing watch, shot in nine single sequences by Johan Holmquist.

Mariam (Al Ferjani) is a student, who goes to a party with her friends, where she is attracted to Yousef (Zrelli) But the evening is far from romantic. After the pair go to a nearby beach, Mariam is captured and raped by two policeman, whilst a third forces Yousef to go to an ATM and take money out, for not arresting him. But Mariam’s ordeal has only just began and although Yousef supports her, the hostility she meets from hospital staff, both the private and public, is shocking. Doctors refuse to certify Mariam’s injuries, and send her to the police station, fearing conflict with the authorities. There, Mariam is questioned aggressively, called more or less a slut for not wearing a burka, and unfortunately, one of the police officers recognises Yousef as one of the demonstrators during the recent unrest. But worse is to come when Mariam and Yousef turn up at the station of the accused officers’ police station where the young woman is reminded, to “think about the honour of her country” and asked to withdraw her accusations. Yousef, shouting “this entire country is a prison’” is arrested, and Mariam left alone with the officers.

BEAUTY AND THE DOGS is a tour de force of resistance by Mariam, who somehow finds the strength to persevere with her case. The only criticism here is Ben Hania’s failure to reveal what really happens until the final scenes: when Mariam lays on the floor of the police station, watching it all on her mobile. This way, unnecessary tension keeps the audience in suspense and away from the unfolding drama. That said, Ben Hania offers a fearless and spirited story from her native Tunisia. AS

SCREENING DURING BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2017

Manolo: The Boy who made Shoes for Lizards (2017)

Dir: Michael Roberts | Doc | US | 97′

Manolo Blahnik. The name has become synonymous with luxury and given rise to the catchphrase “getting your Manolos on” to mean enjoying a night – or day – of fanciful pleasure, promising a romantic encounter, or even love. These elaborate “fuck-me” shoes are not for the faint-hearted – or structurally challenged – with invariably vertiginous heels and delicate designs. They are also beyond the reach of ordinary mortals making them even more desirable – the stuff of dreams for the average working girl or boy. In MANOLO: THE BOY WHO MADE SHOES FOR LIZARDS, director Michael Roberts delves into the life of their creator, a Canary Islander described as a “poet in couture” by fashion luminaries Anna Wintour and Isaac Mizrahi who wouldn’t be shod in anything shoddy. Maverick dreamer Manolo still fizzes with enthusiasm for his legendary footwear. Meanwhile, Roberts cobbles together a polished, foot-lose and narrative-free film scoping out the designer’s way of life, ideologies and relationships in a career that has spanned Sixties London, 1980s New York (immortalised in Sex in the City) and contemporary culture, capturing the essence of a dreamer who loves flowers, animals, Nature and freedom (don’t we all?). So Manolo embodies the poetry in all of us, and has made millions selling us our own dreams. Anyone interested in fashion will enjoy this fluffy, fun and fascinating film. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 29 SEPTEMBER 2017

Our Time Will Come (2017) | BFI London Film Festival 2017

Dir. Ann Hui. HK | Historial Drama | 130′

Best known for her noble drama A Simple Life, Ann Hui rose to fame with her Japanese occupation-themed dramas, Love in a Fallen City (1984) and Song of the Exile (199. She returns to the era with her latest: OUR TIME WILL COME a languorously-paced and lushly-crafted snapshot of WWII occupation which explores the bitterly poignant experiences of a young woman who becomes a resistance fighter. Hong-Kong’s struggle for freedom is resurfacing again today, over seventy years later.

In 1942, serious-minded school teacher, Fang Lan (Zhou Xun) is living with her mother (Deannie Ip) when her boyfriend Wing (Wallace Huo) leaves to work for the Japanese. Fang is inspired by seeing how a local intellectual goes underground with the help of Dongjiang resistance guerrillas and decides to join their forces under the auspices of their suave leader (Eddie Peng Yuyan), eventually rising up through the ranks.

The undercover operations are stunningly captured in vibrantly elaborate images on the widescreen and in intimate close-up, often echoing French classic Army of Shadows (currently at the BFI Melville retrospective). The unobtrusive classic score adds a certain gravitas and Zhou Xun is the standout in an absolutely brilliant performance of elegant dignity as Fang, slowly gaining stature into her resistance role.

The film also stars the wonderful Tony Leung who plays a war veteran, now taxi driver, in a recurring black and white vignette set in comtemporary Hong Kong. In the black and white opening scene, and again half way through, he recalls the fond memories of the bravery of resistance leaders he once knew including Fang Lan.

SCREENING DURING BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 4-15 OCTOBER 2017

Pecking Order (2017)

Dir.: Slavko Martinov; Documentary; New Zealand 2017, 88 min.

New Zealand born director/writer Slavko Martinov (Propaganda) has lovingly crafted a portrait of Christchurch Poultry, Bantam and Pigeon Club, whose whole existence is under threat just – two years before their 150th anniversary. What starts as a Mockumentary, turns into a very humane observation about ordinary people and their obsession with feathered friends – and themselves. Pecking Order is a little gem: just short enough to keep our attention, making us smile at the serious competitors battling for glory – and ourselves.

It has to be said that the feathered friends in question – mostly chicken – really do live the life of Riley: they have their special diets such as fresh Hazelnuts, before a bath in the kitchen sink, and afterwards they are dolled up with the blow dryer and combs. That is, if they are seen as worthy material for the prizes given out at the National Show. Otherwise, it’s the dinner table or, for the younger ones, the ‘Chicken Heaven’.

The Club’s crisis could not have come at a worse time as the preparations for the National Show, held at Oamaru, should by now be in full swing. But since the veteran Doug Bain has taken up presidency of the club – albeit as a caretaker, – things are not Going according to plan: open rivalry has broken out, one side supporting Doug, the other wanting him to be replaced with Mark Lilley, a much younger man, who is supposed to take the club into the 21st century – with the internet and all that. This amusing narrative ricks over as we enjoy a chaming slice of New Zealand life which still seems stuck in the 1950s.

We also learn to take the ‘bible’ of the club seriously: The New Zealand Poultry Standard, a chuncky tome written by Ian Selby, who tells everyone at the club to study it carefully before going to National Show. One of the competitors is sixteen-year old Sarah Bunton, who admits freely, that she is obsessed with chicken.

Finally, just before the National Show opens, peace is restored. At the event in Oamuru, the final judgement is left to ‘neutral’ judges from Australia, who after long deliberations, give their verdict. One of the runners-up is surprisingly sanguine about the outcome: he has never married, and lives just for his hens and cockerels. “One day, they will find me on the ground between the cages”. AS

IN CINEMAS FROM 29 SEPTEMBER 2017

The Merciless (2017)

Dir: Byun Sung-hyun | Cast: Him Si-wan, Sul Kyung-gu | Crime Thriller | South Korea | 117′

Byun Sung-hyun’s The Merciless looks absolutely stunning as it opens on the waterfront where a man is celebrating his release from prison with his gangland mentor as a series of revelations about their ambitious past slowly unfurls in this dramatic and stylish thriller that often feels a bit too clever for its own good.

Jo Hyun-su (Yim Si-wan) is the young criminal and Han Jae-ho (Sul Kyung-gu) his aspirational father figure in this noirish South Korean exploration of like-minded friendship between felons. As long as you don’t thing too much it slips down as easily as a lychee cocktail.

Although this sounds like a contradiction in terms, the two have high hopes of rising to the top the criminal underworld. Hyun-su sons proves himself to the older Jae-ho (Sol Kyung-gu) by saving his life in a knife attack and this loyalty leads to them working together once they are back in the real world. But when push come to shove their motives are very different. Jae-ho is desperate for a chance to kill his boss, Chairman Ko (Lee Kyoung-young) who was behind the attempted prison hit. Meanwhile, Hyun-su is tasked with taking down a enterprise linked to the Russian mafia, in an operation led by the masterful Chief Cheon (Jeon Hye-jin) who is bent on putting Ko and his associates in the klink.

This is a colourful and tonally cohesive genre thriller which have echoes of Infernal Affairs. Visually it’s lushly and vibrant but narratively there are drawbacks. Performance-wise too there is much to enjoy and the rapport between the leads crackles with charismatic, especially in regard to Yim Si-wan (a Korean pop singer who also goes by the name of Siwan). And although the film is more style over content, it’s a good-looking piece of filmmaking that slightly outstays its welcome at nearly two hours. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE | LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL 2017 | CANNES REVIEW

Zoology (2016) Zoologiya

Dir.: Ivan I. Tverdovsky; Cast: Natalia Pavlenkova, Dimitri Groshev, Irina Chipizhenko; Russia/France/Germany 2016, 87 min.

After his stunning debut Correction Class, Russian auteur Ivan Tverdovsky’s second feature is a metaphor for modern life imagined through a wonderful mix of social realism and absurdist parody set in a provincial coast town in the Crimea, where middle-aged Natasha (Pavlenkova) works at a procurement manager at the Zoo. Life is miserable at home with her religious maniac mother (Chipizhernko) who spends the day watching television. At work, she prefers the animals to her conniving co-workers who are always playing tricks so she has more or less resigned herself to the fact that nothing will happen in her life, suffering silently but with dignity until, out of the blue, she grows a tail. This event seems even more sensational when her mother tells her stories of other women in the neighbourhood having grown tails after being possessed by the Devil. Natasha consults her doctor but tests are inconclusive. The hospital radiologist Petya (Groshev) is supportive and the two get to know each, falling in love against all odds. Even after she is fired at work (as a sacrifice for her incompetent boss), she sees life with Petya as a huge advancement on her past – until she discovers the magical properties of her new appendage.

DoP Alexander Mikeladze can claim much of the credit for the film’s success. The images are dispondently grim, as in Natasha’s home, her work place or the hospital. The only colour, a radiant blue, emerges when the lovers walk by the sea. ZOOLOGY conveys the angst of a society in limbo: the older citizens have returned to the blind faith of religion – but they use their belief mainly to ostracize others. The younger generation resorts to self-help in self-healing evenings, modelled on US television. But the main theme is isolation and a failing infrastructure: 26 years after the fall of Stalinism, most parts of the nation still look for a new identity, turning against each other, or living in total indifference. Pavlenkova’s performance in this fairy tale is stunning, Tverdovsky just keeps the narrative anchored in a desolate society, where a huge vacuum of soullessness and misanthropy makes everything seem possible. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 28 SEPTEMBER 2017

Gray House (2017) | BFI London Film Festival 2017

Writer/Dir: Austin Lynch | With Denis Lavant, Aurore Clement, Dianna Molzan | US | Doc | 76′

David Lynch’s son Austin follows in his father’s footsteps with this unsettling semi-fictional documentary mood piece that explores disenchantment and day to day survival in various parts of America through the lives of its five blue collar protagonists. Wordless cameos from Denis Lavant and Aurore Clement help add a note of familiarity but it’s never made clear why they feature in GRAY HOUSE, which Lynch’s is first feature made with the collaboration of cinematographer Matthew Booth.

Suggestion is perhaps a better word that storytelling to describe the way Lynch hints at dissatisfaction through starkly beautifully minimalist landscapes inhabited by his protagonists, it is nevertheless an affecting work but not for the mainstream who may find its style alienating and difficult to engage with. Intriguing yes, but it’s certainly no barrel of laughs: we first meet Lavant peddling his lonely craft in the dimly lit shades of a Texas dawn. He is then pictured stirring a large vat in a monochrome workshop. Next up, we hear the grim testimonials of work to survive oil men in the fracking town of Williston. A women’s prison in Oregon and a rural cabin in Virginia are other settings that receive Lynch’s mournful gaze in describing the working-class malaise of its sorrowful citizens.

Booth’s camera seems to haunt its characters, prowling around and swooping in on them but also offering straightforwardly framed interview sequences Scored by lilting ambient sounds this is a thoughtful and disquieting piece of filmmaking. MT

BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL | 4 -15 OCTOBER 2017

Canaletto and the Art of Venice (2017)

Dir: David Bickerstaff | 82′ | UK | Documentary

Exhibition on Screen offers us an unparalleled big screen entree into Her Royal Highness The Queen’s collection of paintings by the Venetian 17th Century artist Giovanni Antonio Canal (Canaletto), which is spread between the Royal palaces, offering unique insight into treasures captured here by David Bickerstaff’s agile camera in glowing colours and pristine detail.

Canaletto & the Art of Venice also takes us to the heart of Venice to explore the origins of the artist’s work and features behind-the-scenes footage of The Queen’s Gallery exhibition and interviews with curators and art experts. Instead of a simple trawl through Canaletto’s output, the film offers insight into the artist’s central role in 18th century Venetian ‘vedute’ or landscape painting. Art Historian Charles Beddington gives a fascinating lesson in art history – avoiding worthiness with a twist of dead pan humour – and showing Canaletto’s particular penchant for painting dogs, so even the most disinclined viewer gets to understand how this genre developed in the early 18th century. Lucy Whittaker, a senior curator, offers her two-penny worth along with Rosemary Sweet, Curator of Urban History at Leicester University, and Rosie Rozzall, Curator of prints and drawings at the Palace.

We learn that Canaletto (1697-1768) was born into a middle class family in one of the city’s small squares where he grew up sketching the surrounding rooftops. The turning point of his life came when he travelled to Rome with his father, Bernardo Canal, a theatrical designer, and this saw the start of his work as a stage designer. Venetian painters were masters of colour and Canaletto was no different, soon striking out on his own as a view painter. But it was the English travellers, not the Italians, who admired his work and bought it home as a souvenir of the lagoon, a major stop on the Grand Tour.

Canaletto was also skilled in Capriccio painting – a sort of magic realism of the art world – where paintings were embellished with architectural fantasy, placing archaeological ruins and fictional elements into their compositions, from the Rialto Bridge to the Piazza San Marco, and the Palazzo Ducale to the Church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo. His craftsmanship was meticulous and attentive and he often offered character studies focusing on Venice itself, always refusing to repeat himself. When Canaletto went to London between 1748 and 1755, Venice lost its main ‘vedute’ painter.

The Venetian artist’s financial acumen and keen business sense saw rise to a way of making more money from the existing works when, in the 18th Century, print-making came into vogue. Caneletto’s work could be attractively reproduced for those who could not afford his paintings. With his keen financial flair, he set up the Pasquale Press with English businessman Joseph Smith, so his works could be made into prints and delivered to London clients, for additional fees. Smith sold much of his collection to King George III and now Buckingham Palace houses the largest collection of Canaletto’s work, which was far more popular among English patrons that the Italians.

The remarkable group of over 200 paintings, drawings and prints on display offers unique insight into the artistry of Canaletto and his contemporaries, and the city he became a master at capturing. Bickerstaff also offers a sneak view of the interiors of Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. CANALETTO is well-crafted and watchable for art lovers and travellers alike. MT

ON RELEASE AT SELECTED CINEMAS FROM 26 SEPTEMBER 2017 | THE EXHIBITION ON SCREEN series now shows in 55 countries worldwide, recently expanding into Columbia, Korea and Lebanon | Main image courtesy of Exhibition on Screen.

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Director: David Lean |Script: Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson | Score: Maurice Jarre | Cast: Peter O’Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Omar Sharif, Jose Ferrer, Claude Rains, Jack Hawkins, Anthony Quayle, Arthur Kennedy, Donald Wolfit, Zia Mohyeddin | UK/USA 1962 227′ | Adventure Drama

Based upon the writings of T. E. Lawrence entitled Seven Pillars Of Wisdom, a diary never meant for open publication, but allowed by his estate after his death, the making of Lawrence Of Arabia is a drama of epic proportions spanning three decades and worthy of a film in itself.

Alexander Korda kicked it all off in the 30’s, wanting Leslie Howard and then Walter Hudd as lead, but this all collapsed when the British Governor of Palestine at the time forbade ‘any large gatherings of Arabs’. John Clements, Clifford Evans, Robert Donat, Laurence Olivier and even Cary Grant were also in the frame subsequently, as was Burgess Meredith in 1949 and then Alan Ladd. In 1952, Harry Cohn offered it to Powell and Pressburger, but they declined. Then, in 1955 Terrence Rattigan picked up the reins with Dirk Bogarde in mind and even got as far as location scouting in Iraq, only to have it all unravel as the King was assassinated and Iraq descended into revolution. When producer Sam Spiegel finally came aboard in 1959, he wanted Marlon Brando, but Brando backed out to go and do Mutiny On The Bounty…

Alec Guinness was great, but too old, even though he played Lawrence in Rattigan’s well-received 1960 play Ross. Then it was to be Albert Finney, who infact undertook extensive screen tests, but eventually also backed out, citing that he didn’t want to be a star; frightened of what it would do to him as a person. He also, it had to be said, hated signing multi-picture deals.

Peter O’Toole had meanwhile appeared as a mere cameo in an otherwise forgotten film called The Day They Robbed The Bank Of England, which Lean saw, and knowing instantly that he had his man, even when Peter Hall refused to release him from his RSC contract in Stratford and Producer Sam Spiegel also initially rejected him.

As film commenced in Jordan, the script was in disarray, the original writer Michael Wilson, who had done such a fine job on Bridge On The River Kwai left the project, after a year working on the script in a state of high dudgeon. Robert Bolt was drafted in, at first purely to write only dialogue, on the back of his hit play A Man For All Seasons. But at one point, as the cameras rolled in the desert, with the script still incomplete, Bolt was gaoled for a month for marching in a CND demonstration and had to be extricated from gaol -against his own wishes- by Spiegel in order to complete the script (he wasn’t allowed to write it in prison).

There are legion stories emanating from the two-year(!) shoot, in Jordan, Spain and Morocco; of new talents cutting their teeth, like Freddie Young working with the new Super-Panavision camera with 70mm colour stock. The industrial kit needed to hold the massive cameras being lugged out into the desert, against the heat, the wind the sand and the flies… but, after all this, what we are left with is an extraordinary coming together of some amazing talent, from the writing to the design, the music, the costumes and the performances.

So, what of the new 4k digital formatted release? Well, It’s magnificent. One of the greatest films ever made, so crisp, clear and sharp, it could have been shot yesterday. Lawrence was nominated for ten Academy Awards and went on to win seven, including 1962 Best Picture and Best Director. Inexplicably, Omar Sharif, Peter O’Toole and writer Robert Bolt all failed to score. With Kwai, five years earlier also winning seven Oscars, David Lean really was at the top of his game and knew he wanted to capitalize on it. His next outing was called Dr Zhivago.

Bearing in mind he had come up through editing, having cut over 20 feature films prior to taking the helm as a Director, Lean later wanted to lose 40-minutes from Lawrence, but also knew he wouldn’t know where from- lest he lose the magic in the trimming.

So. What is Lawrence of Arabia all about? Seriously? Well, it’s about an eccentric Englishman who goes out into the desert, turns native, goes mad and then comes back home. All 227 glorious minutes of it. Go and see it for goodness sake and stop asking damn’ fool questions.

Is it any good? Well, I’ll leave you with several published quotes from the time of the original release: John Coleman, writing in the New Statesman- “none of it is good enough. Setting to one side the obligatory, contemptible music, the film never decisively makes its mind up what its after…”

Penelope Gilliatt “Two And A Half Pillars Of Wisdom…. A thoughtful picture with an intensely serious central performance, but it doesn’t hold together in great excitement.” New Yorker Andrew Sarris of The Village Voice- “Dull, overlong and coldly impersonal… hatefully calculating and condescending” The bottom line is, we all still remember David Lean.

NOW ON NETFLIX

Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day | Dual Format Bluray

Eight Hours Don’t Make A Day | Dual Format Blu-ray & DVD | 24 September 2017 |

Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a prolific filmmaker during his short career had been making features for a few years when he produced this terrific family series working with West German television channel WDR. What started as a couple of episodes eventually grew to five feature-length programmes to be broadcast monthly, due to its popularity.

It’s easy to understand why audiences would be captivated by this Coronation Street style story of the Krüger family and the ups and downs of their lives both in the workplace and in between the sheets: this has something for everyone and often plays out like an early version of a German-set Auf Weidersehen Pet, as follows the extended family: Jochen (Gottfried John, Berlin Alexanderplatz) and his lover, Marion (Hanna Schygulla, The Marriage of Maria Braun) MT.

ON RELEASE FROM 24 SEPTEMBER 2017

Wajib (2017) ****

Dir: Annemarie Jacir. Palestine-France-Germany-Colombia-Norway-Qatar-United Arab Emirates. 2017. 96’

Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir conjures up a well-paced and watchable family drama fraught with difficulties for the patriarch and his prodigal architect son, who has returned from Rome for the wedding of his sister. Based on her own family, Jacir is familiar with the territory here in Nazareth where customs requires wedding invitations to be hand delivered, so WAJIB essentially plays out like a road movie where the two spend a great deal of the running time driving around while thrashing out their issues. The pain of Abu Shadi’s divorce still haunts him and infects the respectful relationship between the grown men that gradually grows more and more tense, especially when it emerges that Abu has been less than truthful about Shadi’s situation, failing to mention his son’s relationship while trying to matchmake at each encounter. Their journey also serves as a forum for Jacir to broaden the discussion on local politics, viewed from inside and outside the region, in this well-judged and wry drama. MT

NOW ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 14 SEPTEMBER 2018

YOUTH JURY AWARD LOCARNO 2017 | BEST FILM | DUBAI INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 6-13 DECEMBER 2017

Our Last Tango | Un Tango Mas (2017)

Dir.: German Kral; Drama-Documentary with Maria Nieves and Juan Carlos Copes; Argentina/Germany/Italy 2015 | 85′ |

Argentine born writer/director German Kral (Musica Cubana) who studied at the Film School in Munich under Wim Wenders (credited as one of the executive producers), has created a passionate and imaginative portrait of Argentina’s leading Tango dancers, Maria Nieves and Juan Carlos Copes, now both in their 80ies. But Our Last Tango is much more than history: it is gender warfare of the worst kind, with Maria’s and Juan Carlos’ life story easily as dramatic as their dancing career.
Born in the early1930ies, Maria and Juan Carlos came from a modest background, and met as teenagers in one of the Milongas, the dancing halls of Buenos Aires, “where the poor tried to forget their hard lives dancing at the weekend”.

Nieves and Copes devoted their lives to the Tango, but the Golden Age of the dance came to an abrupt end in the 50ies with the advent of rock. But Copes re-wrote the book: his choreography changed the Tango forever: his stage show gave the art not only a new lifespan in Argentina, but the couple introduced it to the world, even the USA, where Tango was as good as unknown. But whilst Maria just lived for Juan, the latter was more interested in her as a dance partner. They married in Las Vegas, but after their return to Argentina, Juan Carlos left her for a world tour. In his absence, Maria found a new partner, but when Copes returned, they lived and danced together again. But Copes became an alcoholic and philanderer. Without telling Maria, he married Myriam, and the couple had two daughters. Maria’s adoration of Copes turned into hatred. The couple went on dancing together, hardly speaking to each other, before Copes decided (under pressure from his wife) to break completely with Maria. She was over 60, when he told her, that their Japan tour would be their last engagement. Today he is dancing with his daughter Johana, who admits, that she was at first just a stand-in for Maria, whilst Nieves, after a long depression, also got her career going again.

Kral has introduced two couples, representing Nieves and Copes as youngsters and middle-aged dancers. They walk through Buenos Aires with her, visiting places of the past and sharing their reflections with Maria, who occupies the lion’s part of the docu-drama, whilst Copes contributes some rather arrogant and barbed comments: when confronted with his life style, which led to the break-up of their relationship, he is proud of himself: I had to do it, because I am a man”.

DoPs Joe Heim and Felix Monti have not only contributed to the magic of the dance scenes, their glorious panorama shots of the nightly Buenos Aires, with Maria wandering around the city, are a celebration of her resurrection. But the main memory of Our Last Tango is the dance itself: passionate and very, very sexy. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 22 SEPTEMBER 2017

Of Body and Soul (2017)

Dir: Ildikó Enyedi | Drama | Hungary 2017 | 116′ · Colour

Nearly two decades after My 20th Century (1989), Hungarian auteur Ildikó Enyedi’s returns with an arthouse curio whose compellingly clinical visual aesthetic contrasts bolding with its central theme: love in a Budapest abattoir.

OF BODY AND SOUL is the latest in a string of slaughterhouse-set films: Maud Alpi’s Gorge, Coeur Ventre (2016) and Hassen Ferhani’s 2015 documentary Roundabout in My Head which portrayed the human element in an Algerian abattoir. But Enyedi’s animals are somehow more appealing than their human counterparts, although the striking similarities between man and beast are poetically crafted in this slow-burner with its sleek performances and economical dialogue.

The film opens in a forest where a doe and deer are seen nuzzling on the snowy lakeside. We are frequently reminded of the scene as the story unfolds. Enyedi then cuts to the abattoir where cows are silently led to slaughter peacefully unnaware of their fate and final moments which arrive with a clunk and a gush of blood on the tiled floor. Meanwhile, in the canteen it’s lunchtime for laconic finance director Endre (Géza Morcsányi) and he notices a newcomer to the queue in the shape of icy blond Maria (Alexandra Borbély), a quality control superviser.

The young woman sits silently in the sterile surroundings. Hers is a world of figures and data, and she has no emotional memory, due to a difficult past and a continuing need to return to her childhood therapist. Her much older boss Endre is avoidant but a great deal more forgiving in his approach to human connection. Tentatively, like the woodland animals, they begin a frosty friendship and discover they have the similar dreams at night. A robbery in the slaughterhouse means that Endre has to call in the services of a sultry shrink Klara (Réka Tenki) who gives each member of staff the psychological once-over but what she discovers is shrouded in enigma.

In the privacy of her room Maria is a disengaged porn watcher. She acts out her innermost thoughts with plastic toys still seems dissociated from her feelings, judging by her glacially vacant expressions. Enyedi maintains the film’s tension and cold intimacy of tone with a tinkling occasional score where graphic blood and bone images of the slaughterhouse are counterposed with the hyperrealism of Maria’s antiseptic home-life seen in tactile moments involving food and furry toys, and magic realist sequences in the snowbound forest, courtesy of Mate Herbai’s pristine soft and shallow focus visuals.

This story of two people attempting to discover the realm of the senses, at first apart and then together, threatens with its cold-eyed voyeurism, but the central characters remain too enigmatic to make the film a satisfying experience despite its stringent humour, striking aesthetic and impressive performances from the ensemble cast. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE | REVIEW BERLINALE 9-19 FEBRUARY 2017 | GOLDEN BEAR WINNER

In Between (2016) | Ba Bahar

Dir.: Maysaloun Hamoud; Cast: Mouna Hawa, Sana Jammalieh,Shaden Kanboura, Mahmood Shalbi, Ahlam Canaan, Henry Andrawas; Palestine/Israel/France 2016, 102 min.

Maysaloun Hamoud’s portrait of three young, independent Arab women living in Tel Aviv captures the lifestyle of a new generation of Palestinian women, fighting prejudice from the Jewish majority and their own – religious fundamentalist, male dominated – families, regardless of their Muslims or Christian backgrounds.

Laila (Hawa), a successful lawyer; Salma (Jammalieh), a lesbian bartender; and DJ who shares a flat with computer science student Nour (Kanboura) who is the shy one of the trio, avoiding the party-orientated lifestyle of her flatmates. Nour is also the heroine of the story. sharing her life with fiancé Wissam (Andrawes) who works for a Palestine charity in a small town. Wissam takes the high moral ground when talking to Nour or her family, but cannot hide his own insecurity when he encounters Laila and Salma, calling them ‘whores’. He is adamant that Nour moves out of the shared place, finding her alternative accommodation. But Nour rejects this offer and also his wish to bring the wedding date forward. Confronted with female resistance, Wissam loses his cool and rapes his fiancée brutally.

Laila and Salma make sure that Wissam does not get away scott-free. Naturally the wedding is cancelled, but both women have their own, very different problems with their partners. Laila is courted by a Jewish lawyer, but she knows only to well that he is messing her around “still waiting to present a kosher bride for his religious parents”. When she meets Ziad (Shalabi), a liberal Palestinian, the scene seems set for romance. But soon Ziad starts controlling behaviour: So she gives him the boot.

Salma has fallen in love with Dr. Dunya (Canaan), but this all ends in tears with her father promising to incarcerate her, when he discovers her lesbian life. He is running for re-election as mayor: “I can do without people finding out that my daughter is a lesbian”. Salma escapes, but the break with her Christian family is final. Along with these trials and tribulations, the women have to fight off daily discrimination from Jewish citizens, some of them showing their distain for Arabs openly. “We do not bite”, says Laila to a shop assistant, who is not very happy, to serve her and Salma.

IN BETWEEN is a very honest film with its themes of drugs and alcohol, and charged sexual atmosphere – these women are no suffering wallflowers – they pay the price for going against their familes of all denominations. It is a radical new beginning for the region; a growing number of relationships are now developing between unobservant Jews and Palestinians: fighting the good fight against all shades of fundamentalism with love. So despite of some structural problems, IN BETWEEN is one of those films which really deserved to be made, and seen. AS

https://youtu.be/fPiVZj8Mm7o

In the Name of All Canadians (2017) | Hot Docs 24 – 26 September 2017

One of the documentaries screening in this September’s HOT DOCS WEEKEND is a ‘celebration’ of Canada’s 150th IN THE NAME OF ALL CANADIANS. It comprises six shorts especially commissioned for Hot Docs, North America’s premier documentary festival. Produced by Dan Montgomery (Tower) the project aims to explore and embrace the spirit of Canada’s long history rooted in Colonialism, and its genuine multi-cultural and multi-lingual heritage but, sadly, seems to present a picture of a nation at odds with the ideals and inspirations of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The film opens with L’Inspecteur an enchanting hand drawn animation combined with an eerie score and elderly female talking heads expressing the efforts they had during their school years to preserve their French language and identity in Manitoba, where it had been suspended as a subject by an overzealous Government. French was re-introduced as a language of instruction in the late 1960s, after a ban of nearly fifty years. During this time francophones were able to rely on a network of dedicated people to preserve their language.

Best Memory features various Canadians discuss their personal interpretations of the words ‘Enter’ and ‘Exit’; ‘Anger’ and ‘Revolt’ with some lyrical and unexpected results.

As usual, Muslims feature heavily with a discussion on Canadian women on wearing the burqa and hijab. Aisha Jamal and Ariel Nasr’s The Long Way Home offers an emotive experience from Montreal citizen Abousfian Abdelrazik, who found himself imprisoned for three years when returning to Sudan for a family visit, evidencing the Harper government harsh refusal to intervene in a tragedy affecting one of their citizen.

Vivian Belik’s Last Resort is a dour but scenic piece examining the indigenous Ktunaxa Nation’s attempt to prevent developers trying to build a ski lodge on sacred land.

And last but not least, Karen Chapman’s segment Lessons Injustice takes us through a constant stream of unidentified streets and highways while a Black voice talks of his rights but not his responsibilities in a country that feels hostile and alienating to him and his child. Canada has a wealth of talented filmmakers who each year create outstanding features showcasing the nations’ cultural diversity and richness, but the narrative of this often maudlin documentary, seems to focus of those who are far from content in this 150 celebration. MT

TICKETS AND FULL PROGRAMME HOT DOCS WEEKEND | 24 – 26 SEPTEMBER 2017

Lubitsch in Berlin: Six Silent Films | Bluray release

ICH MÖCHTE KEIN MANN SEIN (I DON’T WANT TO BE A MAN) Dir.: Ernst Lubitsch; Cast: Ossi Oswalda, Curt Goetz; Germany 1918, 45 min. (Silent)

DIE PUPPE (THE DOLL) | Dir.: Ernst Lubitsch; Cast: Ossi Oswalda, Hermann Thimig, Victor Janson; Germany 1919, 48 min. (Silent) |

DIE AUSTERN PRINZESSIN (THE OYSTER PRINCESS) | Dir. Ernst Lubitsch; Cast: Ossi Oswalda, Victor Janson, Harry Liedtke, Julius Falkenberg; Germany 1919, 58 min. (Silent)

SUMURUN | Dir.: Ernst Lubitsch; Cast: Ernst Lubitsch, Pola Negri, Paul Wegener, Jenny Hasselqvist; Germany 1920, 85 min. (Silent)

ANNA BOLEYN (DECEPTION) | Dir.: Ernst Lubitsch; Cast: Henny Porten, Emil Jannings, Paul Hartmann, Ludwig Hartau

DIE BERGKATZE (THE MONTAIN CAT) | Dir.: Ernst Lubitsch; Cast: Pola Negri, Victor Janson, Paul Heidemann, Wilhelm Diegemann, Hermann Thimig, Edith Meller; Germany 1921, 79 min.

In From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer’s pre-eminent history of the German film between the two world wars, Ernst Lubitsch dominates the chapter entitled The Shock of Freedom, dealing with the films which followed the Armistice in 1918. Kracauer is not uncritical of Lubitsch’ four ‘blockbusters’ – Sumurun and Anna Boleyn are in this collection of six Lubitsch films – (the others were Madame DuBarry and The Loves of Pharaoh) – the author is emphatic: were it not for Lubitsch, “the German film comedies of the time would hardly be worth mentioning”. As it turns out, the comedies are in a way much more impressive than the big productions: they so much more innovative, and even anarchic. Many of Lubitsch’ collaborators went on to enjoy long careers, often in Hollywood, as did the director himself.

Unfortunately LUBITSCH IN BERLIN does not include Paul Davidson, who was a well-known actor and chief-executive of UFA after the merger with Deulig. He became the producer of 39 Lubitsch films in Berlin. Some time after the director left for Hollywood in 1922, Davidson committed suicide but while he produced all six films, the actress Ossi Oswalda was the star of the three Lubitsch comedies I Don’t Want to Be a Man, The Doll and The Oyster Princess. Oswalda was the German Mary Pickford. She starred in 51 films between 1916 and 1933 – but could not adjust to sound films and died in poverty in Prague in 1947, four month before Lubitsch’ own demise in Hollywood. Script-writer Hanns Kraly, who was co-writer with Lubitsch for the films of this collection, followed Lubitsch to Hollywood, where they worked together again for Eternal Love (1929). Kraly has over 87 credits, among them 100 Men and a Girl and It Started with Eve. And last, but not least the masterful DoP Theodor Sparkuhl was behind the camera, not only for the films in this collection, but in a career that spanned over hundred features. He working in France and Hollywood after leaving Germany in 1928. Highlights were Renoir’s La Chienne, as well as Beau Geste and The Glass Key in Hollywood.

In I Don’t Want to Be a Man, Ossi Oswalda plays a teenage tomboy under the power of a draconian governess and a even more dictatorial and moralistic guardian (Curt Goetz). When Ossi has enough, she buys herself a tailored suit, dresses like a man and goes to a ball where she meets her guardian, who does not recognize her. The two get drunk together, even kiss, and in the morning Ossi is not only in love with her former tormentor, but wants to remain a woman for the rest of her life. The ball scenes are exceptional, Lubitsch’ talent for crowd scenes is perfectly showcased. Oswalda is very convincing in both roles, exuding a charming playfulness that outshines the rest of the cast.

The Doll is the most innovative of the three medium length features. The Baron of Chanterelle is dying, and wants his nephew Lancelot (Thimig) to marry, so the bloodline can continue. But Lancelot is afraid of women, and he flees into a cloister to get away from it all. But the monks are only interested in eating and drinking, and once they find out that Lancelot is heir to a fortune they hatch a scheme to get their hands on the money, convincing the young man to marry a mechanical doll, perfectly produced by master constructor Hilarius (Janson). But Hilarious’ apprentice accidentally destroys the doll, and his daughter (Oswalda) takes over in an amusing performance. The crowd scenes are magnificent, played out against the backdrop of a Grimm Brother’s design. The Doll is an early comedy masterpiece.

The same goes for the Oyster Princess, a satire on Hollywood films, where everything is over-cooked. The wealthy Oyster King (Janson) is tyrannized by his daughter overbearing (Oswalda) into find her a prince she can marry. Oswalda, who still sleeps with her teddy-bear, is not really after a husband, but wants to impress her contemporaries. The impoverished Prince Nicki (Liedtke) is chosen, but he sends his friend and servant Josef (Falkenstein) to have a look at Ossi. In a mix-up, Josef is taken for the real Prince, and Ossie marries him – but sends him away in the wedding night so she can go sharing her bed with her teddy. It all ends well but not before Lubitsch makes a fool out of the Hollywood style, in some scenes even outdoing his future employers; producing the kind of gags even the Marx Brothers would have been proud of!

In Sumurun (An Arabian Night), based on Max Reinhardt’s stage production, Lubitsch himself plays Yeggar, a hunchback who denounces the love affair between the old Sheik’s (Wegener) son and his mistress, the dancer Yannaia (Pola Negri), to the vengeful ruler, who kills the couple. Realising his humanity, Yeggar then murders the old Sheikh. Kracauer had this to say about the 1920 silent film thus: “loaded with kisses and corpses, this story phantasy pretended superiority to its theme, by satirizing it pleasantly.”

For Anna Boleyn (Deception) Lubitsch splashed out 8.5 million marks on this gruesome spectacle, that depicts Henry VIII’s lust for sex and murder. Torture scenes predominate, and, in contrast to Danton (1921), Lubitsch doesn’t need to embroider the facts as Henry VIII (Jannings) and Anna Boleyn (Porten) provided enough material to be exploited. Highlights are the murder of Boleyn’s lover and her own execution scene where the masses joined forces to converge on the Tower, giving Lubitsch an excuse to a chance to max out his crowd control mastery.

Finally, Die Bergkatze (The Mountain Cat) was a rare box-office failure for Lubitsch. In follows notorious Don Juan, Lieutenant Alexis (Heidemann) who seduces Lilli (Meller) the daughter of his fort commander (Janson). He’s also secretly in love with Rischka (Negri), leader of a robber gang, who infiltrates the fort. The two women fight for Alexis before Rischka ‘sees sense’ and gives Alexis up. Reinhardt’s stage designer Ernst Stern (who emigrated to London in 1933) was responsible for the innovative mixture of expressionism, Jugendstil and oriental fairytale. There are hardly any straight lines in the designs, everything is elliptic, full of scrolls and squiggles. Curved frames predominate this inventive silent film and, Lubitsch uses distorting mirrors for the dream-scenes to complete the magic of this highly unusual piece.

The last word should go to the pioneering Guardian film critic Caroline Alice) Lejeune (1897-1973) as quoted by Kracauer: “Lubitsch had a way of manipulating his puppets that gave multitude, and in contrast, loneliness, a new form. No one before had so filled and drained his spaces with wheeling masses, rushing in the figures from every corner to cover the screen, dispersing them again like a whirlwind, with one single figure staunch in the middle of the empty square” AS

LUBITSCH IN BERLIN | EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA | 18 SEPTEMBER 2017

Borg/McEnroe (2017)

Dir: Janus Metz Pedersen | Shia LaBeouf, Sverir Gudnason, Tuva Novotny, Robert Emms | Sports Biopic Drama | Sweden/Finland/Denmark | 100′

Janus Pederson’s drama of tennis rivals BORG/McENROE is actually far more exciting than the distant memory of their Wimbledon exchanges, if – like me – you’re more interested in their personalities than the game itself. And that’s because tennis is a game of wits and psychology, perhaps more that any other sport, and these are two highly fascinating men, brought to life here appealing by Shia LeBoeuf, as McEnroe, and striking lookalike, Sverir Gudnason as Borg.

Compariing their respective rise to fame through fandom of the 1970s in Sweden and Queens, New York with gently humorous nostalgia as they both master their explosive neuroses, BORG/McENROE then goes straight for the jugular with an all out gripping finale showcasing that last epic match in July 1980 that rocked the world. Ronnie Sandahl’s makes us see how two very different characters actually shared similar strengths of perseverance, dedication and self-belief.

With its pounding score, this is a well-paced and luminously cinematic and absorbing watch not least for its compelling performances from LeBoeuf whose volatile but vulnerable appeal is far more magnetic than the memory of the real mercurial McEnroe (you cannot be serious!), making us feel for him and his private demons. In stark contrast, Gudnason’s nuanced charisma is every bit as mesmerising as he slowly generates an onscreen allure, transforming the captivatingly feline Swede into a magical sports hero. That said, this Nordic production is much more fleshed out in regard to Borg than McEnroe, and there are times when we’d like to have had more New York backstory about the New Yorker with his over-bearing father wittily played by Ian Blackman (Hail,Caesar!). Three different actors play the young Borg, including the young, his own son Leo, who is the most persuasive. Stellan Skargard exerts a masterful influence as his coach and former player, Lennart Bergelin. And Tuva Novotny is his gentle, chain-smoking fiancé Mariana Simionescu. Vitas Gerulaitis as a combative Robert Emms. MT

OUT ON 15 SEPTEMBER 2017

The Graduation | Le Concours (2016)

Dir.: Claire Simon | Documentary | France 2016, 115′

The leading film school in the birthplace of the Seventh Art has always come under immense scrutiny: this has not changed since the prestigious IDHEC (Institute des Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques), whose famous students include Alain Resnais, Louis Malle and Theo Angelopoulos, was re-constituted and renamed La Femis (Fondation Européenne Pour les Métiers de l’Image et du Son) around 1987. Today’s younger generation of filmmakers, who finished the four year course in the old Pathé studios in Montmartre are numerous: François Ozon, Claire Denis, Arnaud Desplechin, Céline Sciamma, Sophie Filliers and Rebecca Zlotowski are just a few of the La Femis’ successes.

The institution is unique in the sense that there are no lecturers: all courses are taught by active members of the film industry. And the over-subscribed entrance examinations (500 applicants competed for just six places of the directing classes), which are the subject of this documentary, are also conducted by these same professionals. Director/DoP Claire Simon (Gare du Nord) has taken time off her teaching duties at La Femis, to chronicle the hazardous process. The contest (the English title Graduation is misleading) starts with part one, when the hopeful students from virtually all walks of life, no qualifications are needed; start with a three hour written test. The panel of professionals fight hard, everyone has favourites, and often, the grades for an applicant (1-20) differ enormously, sometimes into double figures. Simon brings a touch of humour to the proceedings, showing two examiners talking about the wishful outcome of the tests which aim to be politically correct: eight women, seven men, one Asian, one black, one from North Africa and two from a modest background should be included in the selection. And they should come from all over France, not just Paris.

Stage two of the examination process consists of interviews and practical tests. Screen-writing candidates are given one sentence from which they have to develop a narrative. Afterwards they have to ‘defend’ their script in front of a panel of two. Future directors are given a script, a crew and a studio, and have to justify their work to a panel. At last, the lucky survivors are grilled by a ‘jury’ of six, for the final cut. The main issue arising from the selection process is always the same: how do you select talent?. Because opinions differ so much, discussions are often irrational. After the interview of a particular director’s course applicant, some members of the panel – among them the directors Laetitia Masson (A Vendre) and Olivier Du Castel (Theo & Hugo) – criticised the young male candidate for being uncommunicative and “weird”. Others defended him arguing that Dreyer and Cronenberg must have been certainly weird at the age of eighteen. It should be also mentioned that La Femis does not only run courses for the original filmmaking subjects like directing, set design etc,, but also for Continuity, Distribution and Cinema management.

LE CONCOURS is a fascinating portrait of judging the creative process: the arguments may not always be rational, but the result of the selection process justifies the often chaotic and contradictive proceedings. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 15 SEPTEMBER 2017

Disappearance (2017) Verdwijnen | Toronto International Film Festival 2017

Dir.: Boudewijn Koole; Cast: Rifka Lodeizen, Elsie De Brauw, Marcus Hanssen, Jacob Oftebro; Netherlands/Norway 2017, 92 min.

Set in the frozen Norwegian countryside, this chilling portrait of a dysfunctional family is a death dance, performed without mercy, leaving the audience devasted by the waste of human lives. But director Boudewijn Koole (Kauwboy) never allows any sentimentality to develop: he observes his characters with clinical detachment, withholding judgement at all times.

Roos (Lodeizen) is an internationally renowned photographer who regularly visits her mother Louise (De Brauw) and half brother Bengt (Hanssen) in the Norwegian remote wilderness. We soon learn from Bengt that the last visit ended in a fight between mother and daughter, with Roos leaving, without saying good-bye to Bengt. The mother-daughter relationship seems beyond repair: When she was a little girl Roos chose to live with her father, after he left Louise for another woman. But Louise, a former ‘Wunderkind’ and now a piano teacher, is more concerned that Roos has given up the piano and chosen another profession. For Louise, this is a double betrayal – but one she can’t admit to. Struggling to gain her mothers acceptance, and feeling unloved, won’t confess to a serious illness. After a brief dalliance with her ex (Oftebro) in the back of his car, she nearly reveals her unspecified illness (we suspect cancer, because she is examines her breasts at length), but she finally opens up to her mother after another fight which ends badly. Strangely enough, Roos’ refusal to have further treatment, brings mother and daughter together, leading to an overwhelmingly moving finale.

There are some lyrical moments between Roos and Johnny on the ice, where they dance to the pop music of their youth, trying to recreate a past they have both left behind. Nature and animals seem, overall, to promise much more peaceful relationships than humans. Bengt uses Roos’ present of a very sophisticated microphone to bring the ice to “sing”. And Roos is very fond of her mother’s dogs – much more than of their owner. Neither Roos nor her mother are able to give each other unconditional love: they can only love their “mini-self’ in a non-adult way. But they deny their love to the grown-up versions of others. Mother and daughter are both familiar with the idea of loving, but are not able to accept that they are both very different people – and thus, each denies the other’s right to live a different way of life.

Koole has already collaborated with the writer Jolein Laarman on Kauwboy, and uses his script successfully to show, without spare dialogue, the inability of two adults to find a modus vivendi. DoP Melle van Essen’s landscapes are much more powerful than the struggling people who inhabit them, Disappearance is a study of denial, played out against the majestic backdrop of nature. AS

TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 7-17 SEPTEMBER 2017

My Journey Through French Cinema (2016)

Dir: Bertrand Tavernier | Doc | With Thierry Frémaux | France | 193′

Bertrand Tavernier’s love affair with film started with tragedy: as a child of the Liberation, in Lyon 1944, he was also a war child malnourished despite his middle class background. Tuberculosis was diagnosed and he was sent to convalesce in a St Gervais sanatorium where Sunday was dedicated to film. Thus began a life-long passion for film that permeates every frame of his three hour love letter to French cinema which every cineaste will devour with relish on the big screen, and rush to buy the bluray.

Tavernier, who also narrates in a chatty style, offers his unobtrusive but illuminating insights, adding value to the documentary, and is very much a part of the film history that unfolds, mostly from the 1930s,40s and 50s. Tavernier has made some memorable films and acted in others during his glittering career that began as an assistant to Jean-Pierre Melville and an press agent on Jean-Luc Godard; he also got to know many of the legends such as Jean Gabin, Jean Renoir, Jean-Pierre Melville, Jacques Becker and Claude Chabrol, to name but a few. Chocful of anecdotes and observations, this is an ntertaining flip through original footage and archive interviews, enlivened by film clips and posters.

At the same time, Tavernier offers up a critical masterclass in acting and directing as he dissects individual films – and even scenes – giving his two pennyworth on those who he felt deserved better, such as Marcel Carne, of qualifying the technical decisions that Jean Renoir’s made in La Chienne (1931), for example, but also pointing out how Renoir’s charm and desire to be liked could led him to embroider the facts, with the best possible intentions. The only minor criticism is the failure to identify each interviewee, so concentration is vital in order to keep up to speed with Tavernier’s narration.

French historian Thierry Fremaux has contributed by providing ideas for the many clips, so the three hour running time whisks by engagingly. Tavernier also hints at a sequel. MT

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM FRIDAY, 15 SEPTEMBER 2017

7 Days | Sette Giorni (2016)

Dir/Writer: Rolando Colla | Cast: Bruno Todeschini, Alessia Barela, Marc Barbe, Linda Olsansky, Gianfelice Imparato | Drama |

A family wedding in Sicily unites two middle-aged Bohemians who arrive in a sleepy backwater to prepare for the festivities. This ravishingly langorous and deeply affecting Mediterranean arthouse escapade serves both as a love story and a celebration of Sicily and its people.

The Swiss director is best known for his rites of passage scamper Summer Games (2011) which did the rounds on the festival circuit recently. 7 DAYS explores a slow comfortable prelude to baggage-laden doomed love for its tousled twosome, played by Swiss Italian Bruno Todeschini/Delicacy) and Alessia Barela (Summer Games) who make for a convincing onscreen couple with their relaxed and deliciously sensual chemistry tempered by years of romantic disillusionment rather than the high-octane excitement of young lust.

Todeschini plays Ivan, a slightly dog-eared botanist who is instantly drawn to Alessia Barela’s Leventine looks as fashion seamstress Chiara, who is already committed with daughter of 17. Ivan’s brother Richard (Marc Barbe) is getting married and he has arrived early to organise the wedding festivities to Chiara’s best friend Francesca (Linda Olsansky). At first the ramshackle accommodation looks awful but gradually the two work together with the well-meaning locals and in things fall into to place – or not – their passion is fuelled by the pressure of preparing for the big day in the sweltering days and balmy nights in this wild seascape. We get to enjoy some local flora, fauna, history and traditional Sicilian culture, while the couple’s on/off romance sizzles often erupting in angry spats as they both get cold feet, despite the rising mercury. It’s an authentic rendering of late love where maturity and self-dependence are the enemies of the trust and laid back light-heartedness required for love to thrive, let alone develop into something workable and worthwhile and Crolla’s script offers some surprises along the way.

DoPs Lorenz Merz and Gabriel Lobos pull all out the stops in the magnificent locations making the best of the natural wilderness both above the waves and underwater, echoing the emotional rollercoaster of a sunny, often stormy, tale of late love. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 15 SEPTEMBER 2017

Soldiers: A Story of Ferentari | Toronto Film Festival 2017

SOLDIERS, A STORY OF FERENTARI (SOLDATI, POVESTE DIN FERENTARI)

Dir.: Ivana Mladenovic; Cast: Adrian Schiop, Vasile Pavel, Nicolae Marin, Cezar Grumarescu; Romania/Serbia/Belgium 2017, 120 min.

Ivana Mladenovic daring screen debut has an emotional directness which stuns and captivates throughout its two hour running time. Based on Adrian Schiop’s novel about a gay amour fou in one of the roughest suburbs of Bucharest, it combines gay and gypsy issues in a country not known for its tolerance towards minorities.

Schiop also stars as Adi, a shy introvert in his early forties, who is writing a PHD thesis on manele, the popular gypsy music. Adi has no idea that the Ferentari musicians are often exploited by the local mafia, who treat them like slaves. When Adi meets Borcan (Marin), one of the small time Mafiosi, he is introduced to his ‘servant’ Alberto ‘Berti’ (Pavel), a gypsy, who is about Adi’s age, and has spent more than half of his life in jail. Berti soon moves in with Adi, who shares a flat with his translator friend Vasi (Grumarescu) and his girl friend. Being rather naïve, Adi doesn’t appreciate that the couple find the rather rough ex-con difficult to deal and they soon move out, leaving Adi “to his hobos homos”.

Adi has to pay all the rent, and his financial pressure is compounded by Berti’s rampant slot machine habit. Whilst Adi tries to work for non-profit organisations to make up for Berti’s losses, his lover becomes increasingly need y and demanding, wanting permanent attention, and developing psychosomatic issues for Adi to deal with. But Adi enjoys the constant emotional neediness – it makes him feel important and after being dumped by his previous relationship. Before long though the two come to blows. Adi throwing Berti out of the flat, but then welcoming him back. Clearly he has become obsessed by him and needs to decide whether to end the relationship or continue with the toxic terror.

DoP Luchian Ciobanu has filmed the Soldiers on intimate close-up with a handheld camera creating a claustrophobia that feels convincing and real, capturing the confines of the small apartment. But even when the pair go out and about the camera follows them slavishly, showing how co-dependent their partnership really is. The poverty is grim, the streets lined with hovels which are sometimes ruthlessly removed by bulldozers. There is no political message here, Mladenovic’s fly on the wall treatment of this lost souls affair is shown relentlessly and passionately with no holds barred. Soldiers is an emotional rollercoaster, authentically performed and confidently directed. Mladenovic shows great promise for the future. AS

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL | 7-17 SEPTEMBER 2017

https://youtu.be/BYzvz3-peFE

La Notte (1961) | Bluray Release

Dir: Michelangelo Antonioni | Cast: Jeanne Moreau, Marcello Mastroianni, Monica Vitti | Drama | Italy | 122’

Antonioni’s great early 1960s trilogy (L’Avventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse) continues to mesmerise in its haunting multi-layered originality without diminishing in its
mystery. Indeed, the puzzle of existence is the films’ raison d’être. What does it mean to be truly human? And if we have any inkling of an answer to that question how do we meaningfully connect with others to overcome our individual loneliness?

LA NOTTE posits these questions in the context of a bourgeois middle class marriage that is desperately failing. Antonioni never concerns himself with great angry outbursts – the vicissitudes of a naturalistic domestic life are not his territory: but explores how abstractly observed frustration coalesces with a form of passive aggression. The marital tension turns reflective, even static. Antonioni’s prowling camera conveys a calm – though never emotionally arid – neutral ground. Whilst other directors would aim for obvious realism, naturalism or even satire; Antonioni’s cinema is deeply philosophic. What matters to Antonioni is a solitary individualism that needs connection with others so as to be better acquainted with a sense of self. But can we compromise or overcome our solitude?

Nothing happens in La Notte. Everything happens in La Notte. It’s a soulful journey, within a hot day and night of a couple Giovanni (Marcello Mastroianni) and Lidia (Jeanne Moreau). They visit an old friend (a dying writer) in hospital, return home, wander through their apartment, the streets of Rome attend a party held by a literary loving millionaire; and then come the dawn they try to re-kindle their passion for each other. Their estrangement is observed by Antonioni’s startlingly dense and distanced technique. An elegant style of suggestion and nuance – without ever becoming mannered – creates a moral ambiguity; not through the eye of a moralist, but a filmmaker’s drawing board, where nothing is planned in advance, but remains fluid and spontaneous.

Antonioni is always providing a blue-print for a building (cinematic home) for his characters. The foundations may be in doubt but Antonioni compassionately observes the vulnerability of his men and women: the tension in these relationships more often quietly implodes more than explodes (Zabrieskie Point’s explosions being an exception where the suffocating materialism of things is destroyed through a kind of fantasy wish fulfilment).

Many words have been written about Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) and her famous walk through Milan on that hot Saturday afternoon. It’s usually discussed in terms of sexual symbolism (the erosion of her marriage). This sequence is interrupted, more than intercut, with scenes of her husband Giovanni waiting anxiously at home. He reads a letter, paces restlessly thorough his high-rise flat, to eventually fall asleep on a couch. Giovanni the writer/intellectual feels unable to save the marriage. Lidia’s walk through the cityscape is her break from this emotional sterility. However a further sub-text for the walk is for me the signalling of modes and styles of post war Italian cinema.

Lidia smiles in reaction to two men enjoying a laugh on the street. Next she feebly attempts to comfort a crying toddler in a run down, almost war damaged, slum. Both moments echo neo-realist and post neo-realist imagery (I’m thinking of early Fellini-such films as I Vitteloni and Rossellini’s war trilogy). Next, an old woman eating her lunch, scraping at a food carton, has the appearance of a De Sica character in his fifties films. Then Lidia witnesses a gang fight between young men who seem to have strayed out of Pasolini’s Accatone. This is followed by Lidia joing a crowd to watch two men lighting the torches of paper rockets. As the firework rockets shoot into the sky they make you think of a party moment in Fellini (say La Dolce Vita).

La Notte’s roaming scenes are further intercut with Lidia’s body in relation to the city’s buildings. Antonioni, aided by the great photographer Gianni di Venanzo, beautifully films landscape and architecture (If you froze any frame at any moment you would have a stunning composition). Behind such brilliant modernist abstraction is the ghost of a documentary filmmaker: Antonioni’s early films were poetic short documentaries, commentaries on modern life in the late 1940’s and early 1950’. To them, and his features, he brings melancholy and sense of loss. La Notte’s nods to Italian cinema’s genres- neo-realism, realism and naturalism, are referenced and framed within Antonioni’s unique form of modernism.

La Notte is compacted with similar scenes of peoples’ alienated responses to the world round them. Most notably is the appearance of the character Valentina (Monica Vitti) at the party. Valentina threatens to come between the couple. “You’ve completely exhausted me. The two of you.” She finally says. But is her exasperation an expression of her own selfishness rather than concern? Anyway can anyone prevent this marriage from breaking up?

A rich perspective of readings can be allowed for La Notte (and most of Antonioni’s output) because of the director’s deliberate open-endedness. Things are left imprecise but rigorously shown: never creating a cold void but a moving and profound sense of how people attempt to achieve a workable authenticity, even though that’s probably unobtainable. This masterly film, coupled with its equally masterly companion films authentically records the great attempt. Alan Price©2017

NOW ON BLURAY COURTESY OF CRITERION CLASSICS

Venice Film Festival 2017 | Awards

COPYCATS AND THE LACK OF ANYTHING RADICAL

Yesterday the 74. Mostra de Arte Cinematografica in Venice came to an end with a prize giving that symbolised the whole festival in many ways. The Golden Lion for best film went to Guillermo del Toro for his utterly empty second-hand spectacle THE SHAPE OF WATER. Anything really radical was mostly ignored not only by the juries, but in the programme in nearly all the sections. At least the Orizzonti Award was won by Susanna Nicchiarelli’s NICO, 1988, a stunning biopic of the final years of the renowned model and musician Christa Pfaffen, played by a feisty Trine Dyrholm.

Del Toro’s very thin narrative of a mute woman falling in love with an amphibious creature, used by the CIA in the Cold War of the 1950s, is a total rip-off: it uses the main protagonists of Rachel Ingall’s 1986 novel MRS. CALIBAN, the creature itself is a replica of the titular CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (Jack Arnold, 1954), and the story is a compilation of countless cold war spy movies of the Eisenhower era, when the Red menace was infiltrating the USA. Whilst no money was spared for design and images, del Toro’s feature might not have won without the help of Annette Bening, Hollywood actress and – first female – jury president. And talking of Jack Arnold (1912-1992), his INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957) was re-made by Alexander Payne in DOWNSIZING (Competition). The Hollywood veteran had also a hand in one of the Wonder Woman TV-series of 1977.

The rest of the awards were given to worthy contenders such as Samuel Maoz for his critical view of war torn Israel in the shape of FOXTROT (Grand Jury Prize), or simply politically correct features like SWEET COUNTRY by Warwick Thornton (Jury Prize) and Xavier Legrand with his JUSQU’A LA GARDE/CUSTODY (Best Director). Really dark portraits of the USA, like Paul Schrader’s FIRST REFORMED, were ignored, or got a minor nod for best screenplay like the brilliant THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI. Lebanese director Ziad Doueiri (THE INSULT) was equally treated, his main actor Kamel El Basha got the award for Best Actor, but the provocative feature about Palestinians living in Lebanon, went unrewarded.

The only feature worth the Venice journey was hidden in the Out of Competition section: Lucretia Martel’s ZAMA. Her story of a Spanish officer on duty in South America, who yearns for a return to his homeland but is repeatedly thwarted, is an intense study of a man losing his mind, identity and finally part of his body. This arthouse treasure is both utterly frightening and glorious to look at: Martel takes her time introducing the protagonists, before plunging head first into the demise of her hero. Why Zama was not part of the competition, is one of the many questions many asked of Venice director Alberto Barbera, but got a dusty answer in return.

Often one had to go to the Retrospective Classics, to find solace: Claude Chabrol’s rarely shown L’OEIL DU MALIN (with a very young Stephane Audran) was a discovery, Ozu’s THE FLAVOUR OF GREEN TEA OVER RICE was towering, and Emmanuel Hamon’s L’UTOPIE DES IMAGES showed the destruction of Soviet cinema at the hands of Stalinist bureaucrats. The Lion’s share of these nineteen features and nine documentaries in the Retrospective Section offered more infinitely more satisfaction than stoically working your way through the anodyne contemporary offerings.

Ironically, the only other film that stands out besides ZAMA is Errol Morris six-part Netflix series WORMWOOD, a docu-drama about the murder of an US scientist by the CIA, who participated in the biological warfare of his nation in the Korean war, and wanted to blow the whistle. A number of quality films did feature in the Awards: Sara Forestier’s debut M (Giornate degli Autori) where a stuttering girl and her illiterate boyfriend help each other to overcome their difficulties; and Alireza Khatami’s OBLIVION VERSES (ORIZZONTI), a poetic feature about death and perception. But that is not enough to compensate for all the mediocre or downright awful features littering this 74th edition of the Mostra, the standout here being Darren Aronofsky’s MOTHER! another pale imitation – this time aping Rosemary’s Baby. We will hope for better things. AS

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 30 AUGUST – 9 SEPTEMBER 2017

LEONE D’ORO – THE SHAPE OF WATER

LEONE D’ARGENTO – FOXTROT

BEST SCREENPLAY – THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI

BEST ACTRESS – Charlotte Rampling, HANNAH

BEST ACTOR – Karmel El Basha, MEKTOUB, MY LOVE: CANTO UNO

BEST DIRECTOR – Xavier Legrand, CUSTODY

JURY PRIZE – SWEET COUNTRY

BEST EMERGING ACTOR – Charlie Plummer, LEAN ON PETE

Centre of My World (2017)

Dir.: Jakob M. Erwa; Cast: Louis Hofman, Sabine Timoteo, Philine Stappenbeck, Svenja Jung, Jannick Schümann, Alexander Gersak, Nina Proll; Germany/Austria 2016, 114 min.

Writer/director Jakob M. Erwa bases his latest film on Andreas Steinhöfel’s Coming-of-Age novel of the same name, with a good ensemble cast. Erwa is Austrian but one of many of his fellow countrymen to use the German language primarily to make a statement (‘Thesenfilm’). Erwa adopts an overly didactic approach that rathe undermines his viewers’ intelligence, treating the cinema like a lecture theatre. On top, there is more than enough narrative material in the novel, which carefully shortened and structured, could have avoided the unnecessary running time of nearly two hours, filled often with repetitive panning shots of the woods.

Seventeen-year-old Phil (Hofman) lives with his twin sister Diane (Stappenbeck) and mother Glass (Timoteo) in a “Märchenhaus” or ‘fantasy cottage’ near the woods. All they know about heir father is that he was American and number three on the list of her mother’s lovers, his name black-balled. Glass is still rather promiscuous and why she’s chosen to take her children to Germany remains open. Sister Diane is very good and training dogs, and was once arrested for telling a dog to attach its owner. Phil’s girlfriend Katja (Jung) is the polar opposite of her brother: she is fun-loving, whilst Phil is a worrier. When a new boy, Nicholas (Schümann) joins their class, Phil falls in love with him. They have rather awkward sex in the shower and Phil is too cowardly to tell Katja about his new lover at first, pretty soon she joins in the ménage-a-trois. But when Phil surprises the two having sex, he withdraws, telling Nicholas “that he wants him for himself”. At the same time, Diane keeps visiting her boyfriend in a coma in hospital, after he was injured during a storm. Her guilt feelings are compounded by an old family secret, and Phil feels that he has not only lost Katja and Nicolas, but also his sister. His erratic mother is no help, and he has to make a choice.

Erwa’s overly didactic approach feels rather condescending: too much philosophical spoon-feeding is self-indulgent, and mistakenly sees the cinema as a place for a lecture, rather than entertainment. There is more than enough narrative material in the novel, which, carefully shortened and structured, could have shortened the overlong running time stuffed with over-repetitive panning shots of the woods. Long dissolves and embarrassing slow-motion sequences echo the worst excesses of the 70s. Finally, the language: teenagers all over the world do not express themselves like Phil: “A small sliver of cold got between us”. And adults don’t talk to teenagers in parables about life as “a house with many rooms, some empty: “You lock your fear in one of the empty rooms”. What may work as “Bildungsroman” – and there are certainly parallels to the “Young Werther” – is simply too clumsy and lacks conviction on the screen. A little less would have been much more – plus a heavy dose of what is called understatement, avoiding a non-stop parade of over-the-top dramatics. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 15 SEPTEMBER 2017

My Pure Land (2017)

Sarmad Masud’s tense feature debut follows her earlier success with the Oscar and Bafta-nominated Two Dosas. Told from a female perspective, MY PURE LAND explores the standoff between a group of women and their menfolk over title to a family home they occupy in the depths of rural Pakistan.

As the drama unfolds, during a night of sustained gunfire and violent outbursts around the house, the narrative flips back and forth to supply the background details of this real-life story. Masud deftly develops the characters in a film that feels at times like an Eastern-based ‘Western’ in character, beautifully captured on the wide screen and in close-up in the interiors of the traditional home and prison by Haider Zafar.

The male aggravation comes mainly in the shape of uncle Mehrban, who considers it his God-given right to fight for the property, and will do his utmost to exert his authority over the women. His gung-ho attitude is responsible for the death of Nazo’s father and her brother.

These women are no wallflowers – particularly young Nazo, played with graceful feistiness by Suhaee Abro – and slowly develop from timid souls to fearless feminist protectors of their domestic domain learning to use guns and subterfuge. MY PURE LAND is an strangely haunting arthouse piece and its glowering intent is tempered by an atmospheric occasional score and poetic touches – such a soaring flock of doves – that seem to reflect the transient nature of life and the spirit of the dead. This is a slim but luminously crafted indie that makes the best of its low budget with some convincing performances and a satisfying narrative arc. MT

MY PURE LAND is on GENERAL RELEASE FROM 15 SEPTEMBER 2017

Motherland or Death (2017) | Open City Documentary Festival 5-10 September

Dir/Writer: Vitaly Manskiy | Doc | Russia | 99′

A fascinating snapshot of modern Cuba Motherland or Death (which, for more than 50 years, has been Cuba’s motto), chronicles the daily misery of the pre-revolution generation who realise they can now hope for better things as the country moves towards a sea change in its existence. Manskiy acts as his own DoP with Leonid Konovalov in this intriguing snapshot of modern, capturing the zeitgeist of a vivacious country, often down on its knees. Manskiy takes a non-judgemental approach, avoiding the usual human rights agenda or sensationalist victim angles that usually dog the country from the outsiders’ point of view. Nonetheless, Havana is captured as a broken-down backwater haunted by stray dogs and empty streets. MT

The Suspicious Death of a Minor (1975) | Bluray release

Dir: Sergio Martino | Cast: Claudio Cassinelli, Mel Ferrer, Lia Tanzi | Italy | Horror Comedy | 100′

Some consider this more part of the poliziottesco subgenre than strictly a giallo but it is nevertheless a slick and stunning ride through the crime underworld of 1970s Milan where a young girl is brutally murdered uncovering a sleazy slavery and teen exploitation ring. Casinelli is the suave standout as he cuts a dazzling dash through the investigation, which is Martino’s final giallo, based on an original story by Ernesto Gastaldi (Death Walks at Midnight). MT

NOW OUT ON BLURAY COURTESY OF ARROW FILM AND VIDEO | 11 SEPTEMBER 2017

Valley of Shadows | Skyggenes Dal (2017) | Toronto Film Festival 2017

Dir: Jonas Matzow Gulbrandsen | Cast: Adam Ekeli, Kathrine Fagerland | Fantasy Horror | Norway 91′

A young boy ventures into the forest in search of mysterious creatures that eat sheep, in this eerie Scandinavian Gothic fable that uses an unsettling score and an atmospheric sense of place to explore how most of our deepest fears and insecurities often stem from quite banal and explicable childhood experiences.

Jonas Matzow Gulbrandsen fantasy drama unfurls poetically in the remote forests of Norway. Aslak, struggling to connect with his mother, with no father or siblings around, spends most of his time alone alone as his mother has suffered some recent tragedy. Unable to understand or connect with the present, Aslak escapes into a world of fantasy in order to make some sense of his unstable family life and strange events going on in his neighbourhood. Livestock is being slaughtered, and while the local farmers suspect a wolf, Aslak’s fertile imagination goes into overdrive imagining werewolves and other folkloric happenings in the remote woodland surrounding his home in Norway.

Beautifully captured on the widescreen and in intimate close-up by the director’s brother Marius, Valley of Shadows links into Norwegian and European literary and artistic sources to show how kids often endow the explicable and even banal world of adults with a sense of fantasy or even horror, when seen from their own febrile, almost feral perspective. This exotic and rich emotional breeding ground of childhood imagination has given rise to a fabulous creative force resulting in fairytales based on folklore and nature and to deal and explain everyday feelings of loss, fear and bewilderment. And Gulbrandsen has used this fascinating childhood world as the idea for a fantasy drama.

Adam Ekeli is brilliant as the hyper intelligent and wildly suggestible young Aslak whose bewilderment and fertile imagination transform a simple wander through a misty Norwegian wood into a waking nightmare of Gothic horror proportions. The film is exquisitely captured from his gently sensationalist point of view. Working as his own DoP Gulbrandsen collaborates with editor and scripter Clement Tuffreau to create a work of ethereal beauty with an extremely modest budget, and a very simple narrative enlivened by a score from Polish film composer Zbigniew Preisner, best known for his work with film director Krzysztof Kieślowski.

Jonas Matzow Gulbrandsen was born in Bjørkelangen, Norway, and he studied directing at the Polish National Film School in Lodz. He is the director of the shorts Darek (09) and Everything Will Be OK (11). Valley of the Shadows (17) is his debut feature film.

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL 2017 | 7-17 SEPTEMBER 2017

Private Cronicles. Monologue (1999) Chastnye kroniki. Monolog

Di: Vitaly Mansky | Music: Aleksey Aygi | Doc | Russia | 86′

This sepia cine-film diary follows Vitaly Mansky through his youth, offering both a biographical and collective memoir of the times. Born in 1963 in Lvov, (Ukraine) to an aristocratic mother and a politically-active intellectual father, he has since directed over thirty films, achieving critical acclaim on the international stage. From early sixties footage of his parent’s ‘rock n roll’ party on the night of his conception to his early twenties, it offers a fascinating insight into life in Soviet Russia: a tightly-controlled environment where family happiness was considered the main attribute to aspire to in a society where marriage was ‘the done thing’ and couples were compensated with gifts from the State to encourage as many births as possible.

From early footage of Russian tanks rolling into Prague in 1967, to the 21st anniversary celebrations of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1970, and the first Soviet astronauts preparing to conquer Space; Mansky’s doc offers comprehensive insight into social and political life during the last knockings of Communism: and the two are inseparable. He describes the Soviet State as “frozen sputum on the upper lip, that cannot be removed without a soldering iron”.

Sport was a way to prove Communist strength over the intellectual rigour of Capitalism. But although times were hard and winters unbearable (fur coats were inherited), Mansky remembers people dancing in the streets on the many Soviet public holidays, and the long hot Summers in his mother’s dacha offered welcome contrast to freezing winters. There is even a macabre early memory of when he queued to buy a coffin on his beloved grandmother’s death. His mother and her (numerous) boyfriends remain the one constant in his early life: sex education, first love, endless partying; an eventful cruise on the Volga and his early experiences with filmmaking also feature heavily, crammed into this compulsive and meaty biopic that requires intensive concentration to assimilate an immersive digest of over 5000 hours of film material and 20,000 stills.Well worth it though! MT

Strange Colours (2017) | Venice Film Festival 2017

Dir: Alena Lodkina | Cast: Kate Chile, Justin Cortin, Daniel P Jones | Australia | Drama | 85′

Another film from Australia had its debut in the Biennale College sidebar selection where budding filmmakers have a chance to shine away from the main competition. STRANGE COLOURS is beautifully captured mood piece directed by Alena Lodkina who co-scripts with Isaac Wall in this unsettling tale of a young woman returning to see her hospitalised father Max in the remote opal-mining outback of Lighting Ridge, near Alice Springs.

Milena (Kate Cheel) arrives in the hostile terrain after a day-long journey to get short shrift from her cantankerous dad (Daniel P Jones) who merely comments: “you’re not bouncing around like a tennis ball, are ya?”. This is macho man territory and the terse locals see her for her feminine charms rather than personal attributes, a dishevelled older man invites her to a party to meet other drifters: “Even if you’re broke, you can live here”. But she declines and gets an early night in her father’s ramshackle pad. The following morning reveals this as a backwater for single male bottomfeeders, who drink and chat to pass the days. But one of them, in the shape of mine-worker Frank (Justin Courtin), seems more intriguing, leading to the enigmatic second act of this well-paced feature debut.

There’s a cinéma vérite quality to STRANGE COLOURS which indicates Lodkina’s documentary background in a style that associates well with the local flora and fauna of the region adding textural richness to this rather mournful, elusive narrative. There’s gorgeous sequence that shows the glowing irridescent quality of the opals and brings an otherworldliness to the feature that is heightened by Mikey Young’s eerie occasional score.

Suddenly the pace seems to quicken as Milena pursues Frank across the bleached out landscape and the two end up sharing a night together, but Milena promptly decides to leave the following day, a decision that feels prescient considering the facts that slowly emerge. This is a seductive and weirdly beguiling feature that tells the tale of lost souls and those waiting to be found in a distant country forsaken by time. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 30 AUGUST – 9 SEPTEMBER 2017

Oblivion Verses | Los Versos del Olvido (2017) | Venice Film Festival 2017

Dir: Alireza Khatami | Doc | Iran | 89′

Alireza Khatami’s intriguingly elusive debut feature draws you into its kafkaesque scenario where poetic realism coalesces with cinema verite elements and docu-drama to tell a tale set in a rural mortuary in the distant aftermath of murderous regimes, although the South American country of its setting isn’t named.

Juan Margallo plays the establishment’s wizened 24-hour caretaker and he seems to know a great deal more about his defunct and unclaimed residents than we initially imagine. He looks on laconically as one man arrives and weeps pitifully over a recent corpse in the morgue’s vast basement. We also meet a gravedigger (Tomas del Estal) and hearse driver (Maunel Moron) who perform their tasks with quiet resignation when some putative assassins turn up with bodies from a recent debacle in the local town.

The narrative remains evasive in this mood piece, but there is a great deal to admire in DoP Antoine Heberle’s fizzingly vibrant images that capture the daily doings in the morgue and the fascinating characters that inhabit it and flesh out the backstories of their lives and how they met their grim fates. Haunting and arcane, this is a film that seduces you with its macabre charm and leaves you speculating and scheming for hours after the credits have rolled. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2017 | 30 AUGUST – 9 SEPTEMBER 2017

Nico, 1988 (2017) | Venice Film Festival

Writer/Dir: Susanna Nicchiarelli | Cast: Trine Dyrholm, John Gordon Sinclair | Biopic drama | 93′ | Italia, Belgium

Danish singer and actress Trine Dyrholm holds centre stage as the maverick ’70s icon Nico in this stylishly cinematic third feature from Roman director Susanna Nicchiarelli.

NICO, 1988 focuses on the final years of the Berlin-born Christa Pfaffen who died in 1988, aged 49, having enjoyed a full life as mother to Alain Delon’s son, lover to Jim Morrison and muse to Andy Warhol – while also writing vocals for legendary band Velvet Underground.

Resenting the ’80s, Nico emerges a single-minded sullen misanthrope who takes no hostages amongst her associates or band-members while exuding a vulnerable charisma: “I’ve been at the top and the bottom – both places are empty”. Her final lasting love is for her son, a playfully convincing Sandor Funtek (Blue is the Warmest Colour). John Gordon Sinclair gives a dour turn as her manager but Dyrholm dominates in an astonishingly powerful performance.

Even if you’re not a fan, this enterprising part-imagined drama has pleasurably Noirish undertones sashaying through live sessions based on Nico’s last European tour: Paris, Prague, Nuremberg and even Manchester look tantalising through Crystel Fournier’s vibrant lensing as each perfectly composed frame resonates with Nico’s born-again soul. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 30 August – 9 September 2017 | ORIZZONTI AWARD

Victoria & Abdul (2017) | Venice Film Festival 2017

Dir: Stephen Frears | Cast: Judi Dench, Adeel Akhtar, Michael Gambon, Olivia Williams, Simon Callow, Eddie Izzard | UK | Drama | 112′

Queen Victoria had an eye for a good-looking man and clearly missed love and sex after her beloved husband Albert died. In his latest racially-themed, glossily-mounted costume drama Stephen Frears makes hay of the final years of Victoria’s reign (from 1887-1901) with this elegantly saucy snapshot of her last dalliance, purely purely based on friendship and companionship, between the Queen and an Indian clerk, Abdul Karim, sent from Agra to deliver a gold medal in recognition of her Golden Jubilee.

Judy Dench plays Victoria and we really feel for her when she tearfully expresses her feelings of abject loneliness, isolation and responsibility as longest-standing British Monarch and Empress of India: “everyone I loved has died, and I just go on”. Ali Fazal steps fills the void as a convincing Karim who goes on to become her teacher, spiritual adviser and devoted friend. Lee Hall’s witty and engaging script trips lightly over the casual racism of the era contrasting the bitter rivalry and infighting of her courtiers and fey son Bertie with the fair and liberal-minded attitude of Queen Victoria herself in this enjoyable and sumptuously-crafted royal romp. MT

Stephen Frears was born in Leicester, England, and studied law at Cambridge University. His films Sammy and Rosie Get Laid(87), Tamara Drewe (10), and The Program (15) all screened at the Festival, as did his Academy Award–nominated features My Beautiful Laundrette (85), The Grifters (90), Dirty Pretty Things(02), Mrs. Henderson Presents (05), and Philomena (13). His other films include Dangerous Liaisons (88), The Hi-Lo Country(98), High Fidelity (00), and The Queen (06). Victoria & Abdul(17) is his latest film.

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | OUT OF COMPETITION

La Vita in Comune (2017) | Venice Film Festival 2017

Dir: Edoardo Winspeare | Italy / 110’ |cast: Gustavo Caputo, Antonio Carluccio, Claudio Giangreco, Celeste Casciaro

A cultured mayor, a semi-retired gangland boss and a troubled teen are three of the convincing characters in Edoardo Winspeare’s tender-hearted but rambling comedy drama that doesn’t know how to end. LA VITA IN COMUNE is set in the picturesque Puglian seaside town of Disperata that, contrary to its name, is a place that hasn’t been completely abandoned by God’s salvation, as we discover in this lyrical look at life after crisis.

Thoughtfully played by its cast of mainly newcomers LA VITA IN COMUNE is a humorous tale whose tender-hearted warmth comed from the lasting hope that literature, nature and animals can provide the power of healing for the human soul. Mayor Filippo Pisanelli (Gustavo Caputo) feels inadequate in his job of leading his depressed village towards the light, compensating with voluntary work while instilling an appreciation of poetry in the lost and lonely souls of recently released criminal Pati and his teenage son Biagetto, and ex-gangster brother Angiolino. Gradually these disenchanted men find their way back through his perseverance, and their belief in God.

The film opens as Pati Runza (Claudio Giangreco) is robbing a local petrol station killing a dog that attacked him and his brother in the process. He is taken to prison, while his brother Angiolino (Antonio Carluccio) gives Biagetto some toughening up lessons, including how to use a gun. There is also another man, who is central in all the action: the mayor Filippo Pisanelli (Gustavo Caputo). After being released, Pati is deeply affected by killing the dog and starts to dream that the animal has been sanctified in Heaven. Convinced that he has been touched by the hand of God through the dog’s death, he tries to become a better man, but Angiolino is not keen on the whole idea as he needs Pati’s help with another planned robbery. So Pati appeals to Pope Francis for support, and, low and behold, The Pope gives Angiolino a call, or so we are led to believe. Meanwhile, Pati’s estranged wife, Eufemia (Celeste Casciaro), enters the fray in a desperate attempt to knock some sense and normality into the menfollk.

Delicately captured in the rolling seascapes of Southern Italy’s stiletto, Winspeare shows the soft underside of a region normally protrayed with brutality and violence. Although the narrative drifts rather in the final stages there is much to be enjoyed in this often tougue in cheek ant-mafiosi drama.

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | 30 AUGUST – 9 SEPTEMBER 2017

West of Sunshine (2017) | East End Film Festival 2018

Dir: Jason Raftopoulos | Australia / 78’ | cast: Damian Hill, Ty Perham, Kat Stewart, Tony Nikolakopoulos, Arthur Angel

Jason Raftopoulos’ well-meaning but flawed father-son portrait has plenty of twists, but still panders too much to the notorious Australian male ego . It follows a dad with less than a day left to repay a debt while also bonding with his offspring. Low on the tension needed to fuel the countdown narrative West of Sunshine is a metaphor for a life where hope and the future reside under sunnier skies.

Set in a the back end of Melbourne the action takes place between morning and evening, and Raftopoulos loses no time in introducing the two main characters: father Jimmy (Hill) who is running late collecting his teenage son Alex (Perham) from his estranged wife’s house in a middle class suburb. Jimmy is a compulsive gambler working as a courier, and even his best friend Steve (Angel) is running out of patience with him. The clocks ticks by as he first upsets his on-and-off girlfriend, then starts peddling drugs for Mel (Stewart), another ex. In between, he makes a big win on the horses, but schematically gambles it all away. Everything happens more or less in front of Alex, who is told that Dad is “selling vitamins” – before he finds out the truth, tasting some of the coke. Down on his uppers, Jimmy then leaves his vintage car with his debtor, having been beaten up by two heavies. No surprises in store here.

Raftopoulos pulls off the action scenes with a certain aplomb, but when he turns his camera to the emotional father and son scenes the drama turns soggy and kitsch with the use of slow-motion and sunsets. When asked by his mother how his day with Dad went, Alex answers “the best day ever”. Really? AS

SCREENING DURING EAST END FILM FESTIVAL 2018| 19 April 2018

Endangered Species |ESPÈCES MENACÉES (2017) | Venice Film Festival 2017

Dir: Gilles Bourdos | France, Belgium / 105’ | cast: Alice Isaaz, Vincent Rottiers, Grégory Gadebois, Suzanne Clément

Gilles Bourdos’ interlocking trio of stories from American writer Richard Bausch is strangely unengaging despite the colourful antics of its central character Josephine, gamely played here by Alice Isaaz.

After his sumptuous but flaccid biopic drama Renoir French director Gilles Bourdos travels to the Riviera for his latest offering, the vividly shot but narratively over-ambitious and uneven Endangered (Doomed) Species where Josephine is variously beset by difficult characters in her life: a macho tree-surgeon husband; a difficult new neighbour and his pregnant daughter; her future husband and his PhD student whose mother is finally institutionalised.

The first two stories unfurl prodigiously showcasing Josephine’s fraught wedding night with tattooed groom Tomas (Vincent Rottiers from Renoir) ending in tears for the bride, not auguring well for their future and echoing the doomed relationship of her parents (Gregory Gadebois, Suzanne Clement). The second sequence features an incendiary phone call between the pregnant Melanie (Alice de Lenquesaing) and her father, Vincent (Eric Elmosnino) telling him of her putative marriage to a man (Carlo Brandt) nearly forty years her senior, while his news of divorce pales into insignificance in the process. The third and weakest story features Damien Chappelle’s Anthony (who is also a student of Melanie’s father’s baby) and his deranged mother Nicole (Brigitte Catillon).

Bourdos aims to explore the dynamics, pressures and loyalties of family and how ‘sins of the father’ infect future generations, but in doing so some of his characters are not as fully fleshed out as the others, particularly those of Melanie and her partner and Anthony and his difficult love life. The overbearing score often threatens to dominate a film gorgeously captured and vivaviously realised in its ravishing Riviera locations making this an occasionally enjoyable watch despite its drawbacks. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 30 August – 9 SEPTEMBER 2017

BFI London Film Festival 2017 | 4 – 15 October 2017

LONDON has its own film festival showcasing the best of this year’s festival circuit and premiering British films and World premieres that are new or recent to the party

O F F I C I A L C O M P E T I T I O N

The Official Competition recognised inspiring, inventive and distinctive filmmaking and this year is no different with an outstanding competition line-up:

BPM BEATS PER MINUTE Robin Campillo’s relates his own story of campaigning during the 1980s AIDS crisis in this vivacious, fast-moving docudrama that premiered at Cannes 2017 going on to win the Queer Palm, FIPRESCI and Grand Jury Prize. Starring Adele Haneel and Arnaud Valois

ANGELS WEAR WHITE this poignant story (image above) explores the of plight of young women in contemporary China told through tiny and vulnerable Wen and her schoolfriend who are led astray in a local hotel. Touching performances and luminous camerawork make this feel like a viable contender for a ‘Cute Noir’ subgenre.

BEYOND THE CLOUDS (World Premiere) The Colour of Paradise director Majid Majidi’s latest, a family drama, is set in Mumbai

THE BREADWINNER (European Premiere) An Afghani girl disguises herself as a boy to experience life as the breadwinner in this delightful animated drama from Irish director Nora Twomey (The Secret of Kells).

GOOD MANNERS this beautifully crafted fantasy drama won the Special Jury Award at Locarno 2017 for its female-centric tale that unfolds in the rich and poor neighbourhoods of Sao Paolo where a pregnant woman and her live-in nanny experience extraordinary events with the arrival of a baby son. Juliana Rojas, Marco Dutra direct.  Xavier Beauvoi

THE GUARDIANS Xavier Beauvois leads us to surprising places with his First World War story about the women who are left behind to manage the land (European Premiere)

LEAN ON PETE three interweaving stories follow a boy and his horse in Andrew Haigh affecting but flawed film that won its star Best Newcomer at Venice 2017

LOVELESS Contemporary Russia is dismally drawn by Andrey Zvyagintsev as a place for the greedy, acquisitive and self-seeking in a tale of divorce and child abuse, winning him the Jury Prize at Cannes 2017

THE LOVERS (European Premiere) Azazel Jacob casts Debra Winger and Tracy Letts as a long-married couple whose love is put to the test despite the odds.

SWEET COUNTRY – this good-looking Aussie Western is predictably politically correct but eminently enjoyable thanks to its cast of Sam Neill and Bryan Brown who play frontier overlords in the wilds of Alice Springs. Warwick Thornton directs with the style and panache of his previous outings Samson & Delilah an The Turning.

THOROUGHBRED (International Premiere) In Connecticut a friendship is rekindled between two teenagers in Cory Finley’s startling thriller that was the final film for Anton Yelchin.

WAJIB another buzzworthy title from Locarno is this rousing Paletinian family drama from Annemarie Jacir, winning her the Youth Award and the Special Prize at this year’s festival.

F I R S T F E A T U R E C O M P E T I T I O N

The Sutherland Award goes to outstanding first features recognising imagination and craft in the making

APOSTASY Daniel Kokotajl shows how, once again, religious beliefs can divide rather than unite in this unsettling story of sisterhood.

AVA – Another hit from this year’s Cannes stars a stunning Noee Abita as a young girl losing her sight but not her will to go on.

BEAST UK filmmaker Michael Pearce explores the ties that bind and those that tempt us away when a woman is forced. to choose between her family and a enticing stranger in their small, remote community.

THE CAKEMAKER is a debut that has already garnered awards since its release earlier this year. Ofir Raul Grazier portrays a journey towards acceptance in this evergreen story of love and its healing and transformative powers.

CARGO Martin Freeman is the star of this post-apocolyptic thriller that combines elements of fantasy and horror as a father tries to save his son the Australian outback.

COLUMBUS strangers find themselves drawn together in Kogonada’s debut comedy romance set in the Indiana city.

I AM NOT A WITCH Rungano Nyoni’s drifting debut as director and writer explores an incident which finds a little girl accused of witchcraft in Lusaka, Zambia.

JEUNE FEMME Paris is far from the city of dreams for a young woman struggling to keep mind and body together when her boyfriend ditches her, in this astonishing debut from Léonor Serraille.

MOST BEAUTIFUL ISLAND Spanish filmmaker Ana Asensio won the Grand Jury Award at SXSW for this extraordinary and chilling tale about a woman who tries to survive her tortured past by means of a dangerous game.

SUMMER 1993 Little Ana joins her uncle and his family in the Catalan countryside but finds it hard to adapt to her new life and get over her mother’s sudden death.

WINTER BROTHERS this Icelandic feature (left) combines an atmospheric soundtrack with a terrific sense of place in Hlynur Palmason’s unsettling story of brotherhood in disarray.

THE WOUND John Trengrove’s Berlinale standout slowly generates tension in a male initiation story set in the mountains behind Cape Town.

D O C U M E N T A R Y C O M P E T I T I O N

The Grierson Award in the Documentary Competition category recognises cinematic documentaries withintegrity, originality, and social or cultural significance. This year the Festival is screening:

BEFORE SUMMER ENDS Maryam Goormaghtigh | Comedy doc that debuted at ACID, Cannes 2017

BOBBI JENE Elvira Lind | Tribeca Winning story about the competitive world of dance

CHAUKA, PLEASE TELL US THE TIME  Arash Kamali Sarvestani,

THE DEAD NATION Radu Jude | Highly recommended doc about racism in wartime Romania

DISTANT CONSTELLATION Shevaun Mizrahi’s tenderly comic care home documentary

EX LIBRIS – THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, Fred Wiseman’s exploration of a city and its books

FACES, PLACES, Agnès Varda, JR | A top hit at Cannes sees Varda go travelling through France with JR

GRAY HOUSE, Austin Lynch, Matthew Booth | a minimalist portrait of the contempo American malaise

JANE (European Premiere) Brett Morgan looks at the life of chimpanzee expert Jane van Lawick

KINGDOM OF US (World Premiere), Lucy Cohen |

MAKALA, Emmanuel Gras | Congo-set farming story

THE PRINCE OF NOTHINGWOOD, Sonia Kronlund | a film about an Afghan filmmaker

OTHER WORLD PREMIERES/REMASTERS

THE BALLAD OF SHIRLEY COLLINS; HERE TO BE HEARD: THE STORY OF THE SLITS; ARCADIA; ANTONIO LOPEZ 1970: SEX, FASHION & DISCO; FAITHFULL; GHOST STORIES; ABRACADABRA; THE CLIMB, THE ISLAND; THE FORGIVEN; A MOTHER BRINGS HER SON TO BE SHOT; DEAD THE ENDS; LEK AND THE DOGS; TRIPOLI CANCELLED; A BLEMISHED CODE; JOURNEY’S END; PICKUPS; THE WHITE GIRL; FUNNY COW; JABBERWOCKY; A MOMENT IN THE REEDS; A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH; ANCHOR AND HOPE; GOING WEST; SHIRAZ: A ROMANCE OF INDIA; DARLING; WRATH OF SILENCE; FRANZ FANON: BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASK

BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 4 – 15 OCTOBER 2017

M (2017) | Venice Film Festival 2017

Dir.: Sara Forestier, Cast: Sara Forestier, Redouanne Harjene, Jean-Pierre Leaud, |France 2017, 100 min.

Actor and director Sara Forestier creates a simple but moving love story of two outsiders who, against all odds, give each other a new start in life. Wonderfully acted by Forestier and Harjene in the leads, M is passionate, but never soppy.

Lila (Forestier) is living with her grumpy, lazy father (Leaud) and her capricious little sister in a rundown flat. Days ares spent with household chores and looking after her sister and working towards BAC examinations. Lila stutters, and is made fun of in the classroom, even though she is by far the brightest student in the class. Then she meets Mo, an Arab guy who makes a living doing daredevil stunts with his car, and the two seem to be heading for a doomed romance with not much of a future. But Mo is able to loosen her up giving her confidence inspite of her speech impediment. Whilst Lila is progressing her life, the secretly illiterate Mo, loses his job in Lila’s father’s restaurant: he cannot function without reading the orders. Lila’s growing success turns the tables on her romance as she has a one last crack at breaking Mo’s defences down. M enjoys some amusing moments and those between the sisters, are often hilarious. Jean-Pierre Leaud is superb as Lila’s strict but tight-lipped father, hardly ever saying a word, feeling trapped by his paternal role yet never offering any emotional support. Harjane is vulnerability and macho aggression rolled into one. Overall M is a brave debut showing that detail not big ideas often make for an engaging intimate domestic drama. This is a heart-warming tale set in a world of conflicts on all levels. AS

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | 30 August – 9 SEPTEMBER 2017

The Insult (2017) | Venice Film Festival 2017

A TALE OF TWO FILMS

This morning’s Venice competition films could have not have been more different. There was Guillermo Del Toro’s blockbuster THE SHAPE OF WATER, mainstream Hollywood, beautifully framed – but empty and second-hand. Then we watched THE INSULT, by Lebanese director/co-writer Ziad Doueiri (West Beirut), produced by five companies as far apart as Lebanon and the USA and shot on a shoestring, THE INSULT is set in contemporary Beirut, still suffering from the wounds of the civil war. Del Toro’s tale is set in 1962 Baltimore, at the height of the Cold War. Elisa (Sally Hawkins) is a cleaner, isolated, because she is mute. The Defence Ministry Institute she works for, is run by the security villain Strickland (Michael Shannon), who is in charge of an amphibian creature (very much the replica of the creature from the Blue Lagoon), who is also wanted by Russian spies. Elisa and the creature connect and fall in love, and in spite of being shot dead by Strickland, will have a happy under-water future. SHAPE OF WATER is not even secondhand, it is just a wishful retelling of the sort of movies produced by Hollywood in the 50s and early 60s: colourful entertainment for teenagers, before they graduate to adult entertainment. Every shot is artificially framed for the maximum effect, recreating an idyllic world of mild suspense. But the characters are all cartoon figures, making the dialogue superfluous. Production Department and DoP got the Lion’s share of the budget, but the creativity did not stretch to the script department, as is often the case. The result is Jack Arnold meets Douglas Sirk, with Del Toro as the apprentice who loses any originality in the transposition. **

Ziad Doueiri tries hard to make the most out of his scarce resources and succeeds in keeping the audience engaged during the tale of a seemingly mundane conflict which could have led to an outbreak of civil war in Beirut. Toni is a garage owner in the capital, and not too fond of his Palestinian neighbours. When one of them, Yasser, who works as a para-legal for a building company, repairs the leaking drainpipe of his flat. Toni wants an apology, after having destroyed the new pipe. Toni insults Yasser, shouting that wished General Ariel Sharon had killed all Palestinians. Yasser retaliates, breaking his opponent’s two ribs. In court, Yasser is found not guilty, but Toni does not give up, engaging a new, very political lawyer for the retrial. Yasser is represented by the daughter of Toni’s lawyer, who hates her father. All sides are set for a trial by media, whilst the political atmosphere in the city reaches breaking point, as fighting breaks out in the city starts. Doueiri makes it clear that this is a story of male male egos loving nothing a verbal and physical confrontation. The men hold their other side responsible for their or their family’s suffering, overlooking the 1990s civil war where Christian Falange and Palestinian PLO fighters both committed atrocities against the civilian population. But Toni and Yasser seem to use the past as a competitive replay of whose side suffered the most. Before the opening credits, the Lebanese government insisted on a disclaimer, distancing themselves from the film. We wonder why….. ****

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 30 AUGUST – 9 SEPTEMBER 2017

This Sporting Life (1963) | Bluray review

This Sporting Life is set in the recognisable 1960s Wakefield of Northern England but is much more than a working class drama, with its stark and primal themes of death and life struggling to escape loneliness. This is no ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’ tearing down of a destructive and murderous relationship but an irrational attempt to start a wrong and destructive one. And the power of this harsh yet often very tender film derives from David Storey’s fine novel, genuinely inheriting the influence of D.H. Lawrence, adapted by Lindsay Anderson’s acute direction.

Frank Machin (Richard Harris) becomes the rugby player hero of the town. Yet heroes can fall. Frank is injured in a game and needs urgent dental work. Whilst Frank is in the dentist chair, Anderson narrates his story in flashback: how he got to be a rugby player and struggled to convey his love for the widow Mrs. Hammond (Rachel Roberts). THIS SPORTING LIFE is not even a film about sport. The rugby story takes second place to the psychological drama. Anderson succesfully conveys what he intended: “ordinary uncelebrated life on film” but through the prism of an extraordinarily mismatched couple.

Of course the film is also a story of class conflict; noveau riche dissatisfaction; male friendships; neighbourly suspicion and existential doubts – the latter voiced by team board member Stoner (Arthur Lowe) who wonders if Machin is really “the right kind of player” for them. For Machin turns out to be a unpredictable brute force that Mrs. Hammond, Machin’s manager, Mr. Weaver (Alan Badel) and his wife Judith (Anne Cunningham) eventually disown: Frank’s fatal ‘limitation’ is that he’s always just “A great ape on the football field”.

The film comes at the very end of the British New Wave and portrays a bleak Northern location in the same manner as earlier films such as A Taste of Honey, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and A Kind of Loving. Yet it’s far less ’sociological’ than those productions, being more of an art movie without any self-conscious artiness. Lindsay Anderson’s audacious cutting has the shadow of an Alain Resnais edit over him.

There’s also a probable projection of Anderson’s own sexual repression into the film. A fair amount of explicit imagery is centred round the macho play, away from the rugby field, of the footballers and the patronising and tactile gay character of Mr. Weaver. It’s interesting that athough This Sporting Life appeared three years after Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (again starring Rachel Roberts) there’s no direct heterosexual sex scene. The only bit of bare flesh is when Machin attempts to finger Margaret’s top and dress. Then Anderson cuts – not to the bedroom – but sometime later, after they’ve had sex and are physically and mentally dressed again to re-commence their ‘battle.’

For me THIS SPORTING LIFE is a great British film full of superlatives and impeccably cast. Richard Harris and Rachel Roberts give magnificent and electrifying performances – both were nominated for Oscars. All the characters ring true as authentic participants in this tragic story. Anderson’s brilliant direction (this was his first feature) is harnessed to Denys Coop’s beautiful photography and Roberto Gerhard’s brooding and off- kilter music score. David Storey’s film script (his first) was strongly influenced by the observations of Richard Harris, discussed with Anderson. The result is a merging of collaborative talents that Storey generously delivers.

Approximately fifty four minutes into This Sporting Life Margaret Hammond allows herself to smile for the first time. She’s watching her two young children playing with her lodger, Frank. They’re relaxing in the countryside having been driven there in Machin’s car and ostentatious symbol of his sporting success. Margaret’s emotional ice is thawing. It’s not quite happiness but a moment of respite from her repression and suppressed guilt over the death (likely suicide) of her husband. In a film of raw and painful confrontations it’s a very moving and lyrical episode: a welcome pause in an impossible relationship charged with anger, longing and frustration. For the ‘lovers’ arguments appear driven by forces of love and hate that they don’t fully understand. As an audience we watch and think we know better – that this couple is so incompatible. But don’t we also make wrong choices that push us to extremes?

The intense passion of This Sporting Life places it on par with Davies’s Distant Voices, Still Lives and Losey’s The Servant. All three eloquently convey the pain and struggle of being alive and striving for a workable identity against a backdrop of class, hypocrisy and power. Such a very English ‘wild bunch’ remains an international cinema of continuing importance and value. Alan Price©2017 *****

THIS SPORTING LIFE IS NOW ON BLURAY

The Farthest (2017)

Dir: Emer Reynolds | Doc | US | 121′ | With Nick Sagan, Edward Stone, Lawrence Krauss, John Cassani, Carolyn Porco, Frank Drake.

“We are attempting to survive our time, so we can live into yours” said President Jimmy Carter. With this quote begins Emer Reynolds ‘out of this world’ documentary that explores the endlessly evolving story of the NASA’s pioneering Voyager space mission that catapulted two unmanned spacecraft into the unknown in 1977.

In an opening segment that feels bitty in bombarding us with information about the project, what emerges from the onslaught are three salient facts. First is that the spaceships embarked on their journey during a once in a lifetime beneficial alignment of planet (taking place only every 176 years) after five years’ research. Secondly, that the Sun is the size of a tiny grain of sand placed on a 6ft wide table, that roughly represents the Universe. Finally, it takes decades to get out into the Solar System, and that is where the pair are travelling.

The various astronauts at NASA have loaded the mission vehicles with a ‘message in a bottle’ in the shape of an almost weightless golden photograph record (looking like a old style LP recording) that contains two hours worth of information including music, sounds and images aiming at representing the human race, to be picked by any forces beyond our planet.

This is all explained by a series of talking heads who continue to bamboozle us with chestnuts of information which sound fascinating but collectively really mean little to the uninitiated. We gradually find ourselves tuning out as our brains go into overload with the facts, figures and intermittently buzzing sound effects. Fewer commentators would have been more effective, and also some silence to allow us to step back, admire the images and contemplate the enormity of it all. It’s overwhelming. Much of the film features scientists talking about the process behind selecting the soundtrack for the voyage and pictures for the ‘voyager record’ and there is much discussion about the ideal images to represent us as humans. The naked photos were eventually dropped – are they politically correct in Space too?. The only phrase that really sticks out is “it turned out that Uranus wasn’t particularly photogenic” (hadn’t they heard of anal bleaching?). More significantly, the best statement is Sagan’s graceful one about our planet being a place where axiomatically: “everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives … on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

Witticisms aside, THE FARTHEST feels rather alienating in both its form, delivery and subject matter which is a great shame because space travel and exploration are clearly highly relevant to the future of mankind. I realise I should be moved, yet I somehow found the whole thing vaguely underwhelming – interesting but terribly unmoving. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 31 AUGUST 2017

Rosita (1923) | Venice Film Festival 2017

Dir.: Ernst Lubitsch, Cast: Mary Pickford, Holbrook Blinn, Irene Rich, George Walsh, USA 1923, 97 min.

Countless rumors surround the making of Lubitsch’ first US film – never mind the aftermath, when Mary Pickford, whose company produced the film, had all but the last reel destroyed. She claimed that she and Lubitsch disliked each other, even though the Berlin-born director came to Hollywood invited by her “to shoot an adult picture” and get the star away from the image of a little girl. One can say Lubitsch succeeded – surely he did not need the rumoured help of Raoul Walsh.

The story line is slim, as in the many “thousands” of films Lubitsch had directed, causing Kracauer to condemn most of them as mindless entertainment. Rosita (Pickford) is a street singer in Seville and is fancied by the philandering King (Blinn). He has her arrested, but a nobleman, Don Diego (Walsh), rescued her, killing an officer of the guard in the process. The King condemns him to death, seeing in him a rival for the love of Rosita. But all ends well, thanks to the intervention of the wily Queen (Rich).

With a new score from Gillian Anderson and updated intertitles from MOMA this feels an even more grandiose occasion. The mass scenes are brilliantly directed and Lubitsch changes colours three times: most scenes are shot in sepia-brown, the scenes in the prison are shot in dark black and white, whilst some other scenes are have a grainy, more modern feeling. Add on some spectacular orange firework and you get the idea: this would be Lubitsch’ calling card for Hollywood after he went there for good. We have the St. Petersburg film archive to thank for the negative, which allowed the restauration of this small but glittering gem. AS

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | 30 August to 9 September 2017

Hotel Salvation (2016)

Dir: Shubhashish Bhutiani | Drama | 110′ | Cast: Lalit Behl, Adil Hussain, Navnindra Behl | India

In this appealing arthouse drama a 77 year-old grandfather Daya (Lalit Behl) dreams that his life is coming to an end and travels to the sacred site of Varanasi in order to prepare for his final days and achieve salvation according to his Hindu faith. His put-upon son Rajiv (Adil Hussain/Life of Pi) decides to accompany his needy father – more out of duty than desire – but the two gradually bond by the banks of the Ganges while the rest of us experience the inner workings of traditional Hindu life and the spirituality of this hallowed riverside location.

HOTEL SALVATION is the confident feature debut of Indian director Shubhashish Bhutiani who is best known in film circles for his Venice-awarded short Kush (2013). Working with a low budget and including gentle humour to avoid over-sentimentality the director highlights family tension throughout first between Daya and Rajiv and then between Rajiv and his own daughter Sunita (Palomi Ghosh) who is engaged to be married and keen to make her own way in life. Meanwhile, the stressed-out Rajiv is trying to run a business with his efforts being constantly undermined by the niggling demands of his father, who meanwhile is steadily befriending a wise woman of his own generation Vimla (Navnindra Behl). There is no controversy here as the intergenerational conflicts are gently smoothed over despite one frantic scene where the tempo is raised over Sunita’s love life, forcing Rajiv to get back home.

The HOTEL SALVATION in question refers to a rather ramshackle retreat in the heart of Varanasi where the elderly repair to review their lives and come to terms with their own mortality. It is a place of transformative tranquility where a sadhu presides over the daily prayer rituals which are never taken too seriously, as in a scene where the Daya on his last legs commands that the mourning musicians “sing in tune please”. Certainly an experience to relish HOTEL SALVATION is a treasure not to be missed. MT

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE AT ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 28 AUGUST 2017

London Symphony (2017)

Dir: Alex Barrett | Writer: Rahim Moledina | Doc | UK | 72′

LONDON SYMPHONY is a lyrical and poetic monochrome portrait of the capital, unfurling along the lines of Dziga Vertov’s 1929 triumph Man with a Movie Camera that pictured St Petersburg, the film also offers a contemporary twist on the popular 1920s ‘city symphony’ documentary genre or ‘Stummfilm’ that aimed to celebrate and offer insight into everyday urban life such as Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927) whose 90th anniversary the release commemorates.

Divided in four ‘movements’ and set to James McWilliams’ specially composed score, the camera captures the frenetic tempo of a city ‘at work’ in the opening chapter: its train stations, water ways, boats and other transport moods are featured at length offering a rhythmic vigour to the narrative. Playful moments follow showcasing leisure pursuits – monopoly (indoors) and chess (outdoors). The second chapter is the most poetic as the camera ventures into the suburbs, rivers and waterways, where joggers and dogs enjoy the many parks, fields and woods. Pub life and cafe society is interrupted by a look at a busy Foodbank. Part three goes to the heart of spiritual London: synagogues, mosques and temples of all denominations are populated by active worshippers. Culture is expressed in the city’s plethora of museums and galleries, before it returns to work with a glimpse of office life and computer networks. The final chapter deals with transport systems in the metropolis, featuring the many bridges across the Thames. Buses and cyclists hurry homeward, before the rain starts: no London film can be complete without the occasional heavy downpour. London Symphony ends on a light-hearted note with a visit to the theatres and cinemas. Then we say goodnight with the hypnotic crisscrossing of overground tubes through the night.

In his second feature, Alex Barrett and his scripter Rahim Moledina have successfully captured the heart, soul and spirit of a very culturally and ethnically inclusive capital city – with its many seemingly contradictive moods – through the changing tempo that punctuates a vibrant place of work and play. Romance and office life may collide, but there is always room for uniqueness and solitude in a city that still has space for (nearly) everyone. A contemplative documentary about city life with floating, luminous images and a welcome addition to the genre.

LONDON SYMPHONY will be screened with a live orchestra at The Barbican Centre (3rd Sept), the Brutalist Alexandra & Ainsworth Housing Estate. (17th Sept) and the Shree Ganapathy Hindu Temple (October 28th). The music by James McWilliam – who is now in the process of composing for the forthcoming film Close staring Noomi Rapace – will be performed by the Covent Garden Sinfonia.

LONDON SYMPHONY -tour details and ticket booking links here: London, tour over 30 venues throughout the UK. http://www.londonsymphfilm.com/tour.htm.

Loving Vincent (2017) | BfI London Film Festival 2017

The 61st BFI London Film Festival has announced the UK premiere of LOVING VINCENT. Broadcast live from the National Gallery on Monday 9 October, audiences in cinemas across the country are invited to experience the film premiere and the following Q&A with special guests. Tickets go on-sale for the UK-wide screenings from Wednesday 23 August at LovingVincent.Film. Tickets for the National Gallery premiere go on sale on Friday 25 August (BFI Patrons and Champions from 11:30am, Members from 12:30pm) and to the public from 31 August, and will be available from the BFI.

LOVING VINCENT is a stunning, fully painted animated feature, starring Douglas Booth and Oscar-nominated Saoirse Ronan and directed by Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman. Loving Vincent explores the life and controversial death of Vincent van Gogh, told by his paintings and by the characters that inhabit them. The intrigue unfolds through interviews with the characters closest to Vincent and through dramatic reconstructions of the events leading up to his death. BFI REVIEW

THE BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 5 -15 OCTOBER 2017

Back to Burgundy | Ce Qui Nous Lie (2016)

Dir: Cedric Klapisch | Cast: Pio Marmai, Ana Girardot, Francois Civil, Jean-Marc Roulot, Maria Valverde, Jean-Marie Winling | 113′ | France | Drama

Cedric Klapisch (Paris) offers a fresh and funky wine-themed family drama along similar lines to the more sedate Bordeaux-set You Will Be My Son (Gilles Legrand) and the Beaujolais-soaked Saint Amour with Gerard Depardieu.

This time we are in Burgundy in a domaine inherited by three siblings in the shape of Jean (Pio Marmai); Juliette (Ana Girardot) and Jeremie (Francois Civil) whose father (Eric Caravaca – seen in flashback) is on his way out. Once again inheritance, family and business are the main concerns in this light-hearted film which offers insight into the workings of the wine trade in the glorious French countryside and a cameo role for Klapisch in the final scenes.

Jean has recently returned from Australia where he runs a winery with his Spanish wife Alicia (Maria Valverde) and the film is narrated and viewed from his perspective. Up to now Juliette has been running the estate with her younger brother Jeremie and the experienced manager and winemaker Marcel (Jean-Marc Roulot. Juliette has a rather underwritten role beyond her wine-making side, but Jeremy has married into one of Burgundy’s most prominent wine families headed by his overbearing father-in-law Anselme (Jean-Marie Winling) who like Niels Arestrup’s patriarch in You Will be My Son, doesn’t think his son-in-law is really up to the job – and he’s not far wrong. Jean, the more confident and charismatic of the sons – has his own business worries back home and a roving eye into the bargain for one Lina (Karidja Toure/Girlhood), that seems to suggest all is not well with his marriage. Jeremie ‘s issues lie more with his in-laws and wife (Yamee Couture), and he also feels resentful that Jean had been out of touch since their mother died five years earlier.

With its lively soundtrack, fabulous scenery and convincing plotlines Klapisch serves up a really well made and reliable premier cru Classé here. And despite the trio’s trials and tribulations, the tone is always upbeat rather than maudlin. The narrative goes slightly off piste when it floats into the stormy waters of Jean’s relationship with Alicia, who turns up unexpectedly in the saggy third act. That said, Marmai really gives the drama its heart and soul, grabbing the glory in nearly every scene. The other two are more subtle, with Girardot’s Juliette struggling to convince her co-workers, and Civil’s Jeremie coming over as a little bit of a wuss. BACK TO BURGUNDY is an enjoyable and well-crafted film with its stunning scenery and vivacious score by Loik Dury and Christophe Minck giving a feeling of light-headed joie de vivre. MT

OUT ON 1 SEPTEMBER AT ARTHOUSE CINEMAS NATIONWIDE

Suntan (2016) Bluray release

Dir. Argyris Papadimitropoulos. Greece. 2016. 104mins

Deftly drawn and filmic Third features explores the theme of fading romantic hope and loss of respect and confidence seen through the experience of one midlifer in this menacingly suspenseful cautionary tale that proves to a powerful watch despite its predicatible outcome.

This one-sided holiday romance echoes Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake, SUNTAN ‘s focus is heterosexual rather than gay but the relationship between the central characters is similar – a young and vivacious girl teases with and seduces a hesitant older man, seemingly for the hell of it and there’s no other reason why she should be drawn to him on the cusp of life and youthful vigour and a future hundreds of miles away..

SUNTAN in the latest Greek new wave title and Papadimitropoulos joins Yorgos Lanthimos, Alexandros Avranas and Athina Rachel Tsangari all exciting filmmaking talent from Greece.

We first meet 40-something doctor Kostis (Efthymis Papadimitriou) Landing on the Island of Antiparos to take up his at his new job as a GP in the local clinic. A portly smoker, balding and sprouting moobs, Kostis is hardly an adonis but he has a kindly reflectively melancholy appeal. The remote island looks bleak and washed out in the wintery sunshine. Over rowdy New Year celebrations a crude newfound friend describes the ‘hot pussy’ that will arrive with the summer holidays, when the island’s population swells from it meagre 800. Kostis attends to the island’s mostly elderly population while he glumly awaits the warmer weather, which comes with a well-crafted shift in tone and vibrant colours. The sun-filled island suddenly plays host to bawdy young students who sunbathe naked and guzzle beer. And Kostis attends to their injuries caused mainly from bike accidents. The surreal atmosphere is swings between bacchalean feasts and slowmo scenes as Kostis falls for 21-year-old Anna (Elli Triggou), and her crowd of Eurotrashy mates who come and go as they please. Costis plies them all with drinks attempting to inveigle himself into their crwod. But he is just a plaything to these young things. Seemingly a fuck is just fuck and Kostis has seriously misjudged the mood when he admonishes Anna for disappearing to Mykonos without letting him know. Clearly his obsession has got the better of him. Anna is not amused.

Papadimitropoulos takes an ordinary character and pushes him to the boundaries – it would be a shame to reveal more of the narrative, but tragedy is the inevitable outcome for all concerned in this gripping and uncomfortable thriller MT

ON DVD BLURAY RELEASE COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA AMAZON.CO.UK

Return to Ithaca (2014)

Dir.: Laurent Cantet | Cast: Nestor Jiminez, Isabel Santos, Jorge Perugorria | France 2014, 95′ | Spanish with subtitles

As if we didn’t need a negative view of old age in our youth-centric society, Laurent Cantet’s contemplative character piece offers another one. RETURN TO ITHACA is a bittersweet good-bye to the ideas of youth; a meditation on approaching old age embued by feelings of utter despair all seen through the intimate revelations of a group of long-standing friends. Set in a roof-garden in Cuba one balmy summer night, the camera tries to offer emotional distance from the maudlin musings of its protagonists, with a script as stringent as it is depressing. Odysseus could have hardly felt more negative than Amadeo. Cantet (The Class) one again evokes a masterful merger of the personal and the political.

Amadeo (Jiminez), a writer, returns to Cuba after 16 years exile in Spain. Four of his best friends give him a welcome-back on the roof tops overlooking Havanna. But soon Amadeo outlives his welcome: his friends blame him indirectly for their life at home. Rafa, a painter, who can’t paint any more, is particularly angry. Tania (Santos), an ophthalmologist now living in Miami, can’t live on her earnings and needs the support of her children. And Eddy (Perugorria) is a minor functionary of the ruling party, an opportunist, who might be convicted soon for fraud; though he has supported his friends with money and jobs. Another friend has lost his job as an engineer, and works for the black market. Not that Amadeo had a great time in Spain in his first years – but for his friends he has lived in paradise. Soon the mood softens, and their common political past is discussed. All of them were idealistic followers of the Castro regime, but one by one they lost their enthusiasm, and opposed their masters – apart from Eddy, who lived the good life as a party member, whilst supporting his friends in the “inner opposition” materially.

This reflective arthouse piece will naturally have more appeal to the older generations than their younger counterparts. The Cuban adults here are the parents of children who have either left the country, or are planning to get out; the two generations have nothing in common: the parents, who have seen the pre-communist Cuba, exploited by the USA, hanker after their lost ideals; whilst the kids just want out. They all have a common resentment against the regime, not understanding why Amadeo wants to return. AS

NOW ON RELEASE FROM 25 AUGUST 2017 | REVIEW FROM VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2014

Your Name (2016)

Writer|Dir: Makoto Shinkai

Cast: Ryunosuke Kamikim Mone Kamishiraishi, Ryo Narita, Aoi Yuki, obunaga Shimazaki, Kaito Ishikawa, Kanon Tani, Masaki Terasoma

If you’re missing Studio Ghibli, then Makoto Shinkai’s runaway anime ‘love story’ will certainly fit the bill, even though it doesn’t quite match up to the subtly magical humanist undertow achieved by the legendary Hayao Miyazaki and Mamoru Hosoda. Billed as a Sci fi fantasy, this body-swapping romp is a sheer delight, even if the ending may leave you perplexed. It tells the story of a Tokyo schoolboy and girl who undergo weird out-of-body experiences just when a comet is passing over Japan. But when they try to meet up back in their own bodies, real romance turns into a bittersweet and often strangely humorous affair. YOUR NAME is strangely similar in its narrative to the recent Swedish film Girls Lost.

The comet element also vaguely echoes Japan’s 2011 tragedy when a tsunami and an earthquake wreaked havoc on the population. This is conveyed in a startlingly gorgeous opening sequence where earthbound missiles fall through the sky like incandescent fireworks. Fragments of the comet alight in the countryside where Mitsuha is living with her grandma, in a cottage beside a lake. But Mitsuha craves other bright lights: those of Tokyo, where Taki (Ryunosuke Kamiki) is working as a waiter in the evenings after school. One day he wakes up in Mitsuha’s body, complete with breasts and other female attributes. Needless to say, Mitsuha is coping with Taki’s male bits and finding school quite a challenge, especially going to the loo. But her intuition works well when as Taki, she has a crush on a older girl. Several times they actually wake up, and eventually manage to fathom out what is going on with their bodies. It soon emerges that Mitsuha is actually three years ahead of Taki, living before the disaster that destroyed her town and many of neighbours.

Although Shinkai’s multiple plotlines start becoming rather confusing, largely due to memory loss that occurs when the two morph back into their own bodies, this is an impressive anime feature. And although some of the musical choices feel rather out of place with the dreamy status quo, this delightful and delicately rendered visual feast is appealing and entertaining to watch. MT

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 18 November 2016 at VUE AND ODEON CINEMAS

https://youtu.be/AbeZsdlkAVc

The Cloud-Capped Star (1960) | Meghe Dhaka Tara | BFI India on Film

Dir/Writer: Ritwik Ghatak | Cast: Sudiya Choudhury, Nirinjan Ray, Anil Chatterjee, Gyanesh Mukherjee, Bijon Bhattacharya, Gita Dey | 126′ | India | Drama

Ritwik Ghatak is sometimes overlooked in contrast to his Bengali compatriot Satyajit Ray. THE CLOUD-CAPPED STAR is the first part of his trilogy E Flat and Subarnarekha offering an emotional and deeply personal account of post partition poverty in 1950s Calcutta, East Bengal. Sublime in its poignant sadness flecked with occasional dark humour it is a visual masterpiece of chiaroscuro splendour set amid abject suffering of a gentle woman whose continuous acts of sacrifice show that the meek and selfless do not always inherit the earth. Quite the reverse.

The gripping linear narrative enlivening by enjoyable musical interludes centres on Nita (Choudhury) the talented eldest daughter in a cultured Hindu refugee family who puts all her efforts and hard-earned cash into the dreams of her three younger more self-seeking siblings. Falling for a promising but ultimately specious young scientist (Sanat/Nirinjan Ray), her dreams are shattered as her world slowly unravels when Sanat proves to be unfaithful and spineless and her father – the voice of reason and wisdom – suffers a serious accident leaving him bedridden. Richly thematic, this satirical melodrama offers insight into Indian society showing how women are the family underdogs despite their intelligence, perspicacity and perseverance. Ghatak’s inventive use of poetic realism and his convincing characterisations and impressionist interweaving of sound, image and mood convey a palpable feeling for Bengal and its artistic traditions. MT

SCREENING DURING THE BFI’S INDIA ON FILM SEASON | SUMMER 2017

https://youtu.be/7sfrI3UcPWY

Mimosas (2016)

Dir: Oliver Laxe | Writer: Santiago Fillol | Drama | 96min | French and Arabia

In medieval Morocco, two nefarious tribesmen are tasked with accompanying a dying sheikh through the treacherous Atlas Mountains in Oliver Laxe’s eerily hypnotic arthouse drama.

Best described as a meditation on the strength of religious faith, this proves to be a gruelling journey – both physically and metaphorically – but it is resonant and ravishing to watch in its and spartan simplicity, and set to an atmospheric occasional score it has the striking otherworldly quality of Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972) and Last Days in the Desert (2015).

The travellers Saïd (Saïd Aagli) and Ahmed (Ahmed Hammoud) are eventually aiming for the ancient city of Sijilmasa, which is the ancestral home of the sheikh and where he intends to be buried. But death does not wait and reaches him during his final journey on a bleak mountainside. The caravaneers, fearful of the mountain, refuse to continue transporting the corpse.

In a parallel narrative, set in the modern world, a couple of taxi drivers who are modern incarnations of Ahmed and Shakib, fight for the job of taking the sheikh to his final resting place in their rickety vehicles. Shakib is chosen. Once again, his assignment is clear: he has to help the accidental caravaneers to reach their destination.

As the caravan travels, so the mostly reluctant tribesmen diminish in number, as one is drowned in fast-flowing river, as the troup come under fire from bandits, French Spanish director Brings his experience of living in Morocco to bear in a thoughtful drama that sometimes feels elliptical and difficult to connect with for the uninitiated. But there is plenty to enjoy in Laxe’s magnificent visuals and the film connects loosely with Ben Rivers’ 2015 film The Sky Trembles and The Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (2015), which featured Part of the shooting of MIMOSAS.

The cast of newcomers provide convincing performances and only occasionally angry outbursts disturb the tranquility of this placid and relaxing drama enhanced by Mauro Herce’s resplendent cinematography. MT

REVIEWED AT CANNES | WINNER, THE CRITICS WEEK GRAND PRIZE 2016 |

Distant Constellation (2017) ****

Dir: Shevaun Mizrahi | USA/Turk/Ned | Doc | 80′

An Istanbul retirement home is playfully haunted by the rich and colourful memories of its battle-scarred occupants in this impressive and gracefully composed debut from Shevaun Mizrahi.

Outside, high-rise construction takes Turkey into an acquisitive new chapter of its history. But in the faded splendour of their palazzo building, the old guard reminisce with humour, perseverance and poignancy, remembering a time when life was fraught with war and poverty but also held together by a sense of community and the simple pleasures of sex, family, music and the visual arts. Dressed up for another day alone with their memories, the cultured occupants of this care home – who range from late seventies to much older – are left to their own devices, keeping their minds sharp with crosswords in the privacy of their rooms. Others sits together in companionable silence, gazing wistfully into the camera or staring vacantly to the world outside. Mizrahi’s one-to-one encounters are mostly observational and her static camera patiently contemplates each individual without rushing on, even when clearly some are suffering from senility, or even early stage dementia, while others are bent over and crippled by age.

Selma, an Armenian woman in her late nineties. even nods off while chatting (Mizrahi stays off camera, and we don’t hear her voice). She tells how her mill-owning family were chased from their village during the Armenian genocide; the men killed with knives and the animals burnt. “1915 was a terrible time…we were forced to convert to Islam”. Having lost the opportunity to marry, she looked after a Turkish baby for two years, and cried when she left her, never having kids herself. She advises Mizrahi to get married and raise a family when she can but is clearly philosophical about the past: “life has been good to me”.

In another room a soulful photographer attempts to load his camera, repeating over and over again: “I can’t see”. We feel for him, as French music plays softly in the background. Shaved and dressed in a suit and tie, he won’t be going anywhere today but looks forward to his birthday, checking the date on his mobile phone, with a magnifying glass. “in 9 days time, they will bring a cake”. A photo on the wall shows him proudly posing with his camera, his glossy black hair slicked back, he looks like a 1950s matinée idol .

A couple of old boys chat in a stationary lift – which they can’t operate, or pretend they can’t. One says to the other, a heavy smoker: “I’m sick of your breath, take an eucalyptus sweet, or even two” The lift door eventually opens to let two women in. Another – rather dapper pianist – treats us to a classical flurry on the keyboards before gushing forth with some particularly florid memories with his girlfriend in the back of a car: Sexual desire – and the longing for physical touch doesn’t change with age and he is clearly concerned about his emotional future. Hoping there will another relationship in his life (he’s only 77), he swiftly proposes marriage to Mizrahi: “you’re 29, I don’t expect you to stop going out dancing with your friends”. In return, he offers his generous pension, as a dowry.

As dawn breaks, a woodpecker and some spirited birdsong ushers in another day, as residents wash and dress in hopeful preparation. But the swirling murmuration of the starlings also signals the change of season as another winter approaches, suitably recalling the words of Dylan Thomas: ‘Old age should burn and rave at close of day’. It certainly describes these spirited people, captured so charmingly here by Shevaun Mizrahi. MT

NOW ON RELEASE AT ARTHOUSE CINEMAS

Lord of the Flies (1963) | Criterion Bluray release

Dir: Peter Brook | Drama | 99min | UK

Peter Brook, who is still alive at 92, has had a brilliant career in film and theatre adapting literature to the stage and big screen as here with William Golding’s 1954 novel about a gang of English schoolboys who are stranded on a desert island after a nuclear holocaust. Shot in resplendent black and white, Brook’s cinema vérité metaphor for Darwin’s theory of selection is enjoyable and beautiful to watch with as the boys enjoy their new-found freedom to explore captured by Hollyman’s striking black and white cinemawork. But soon their playfulness deteriorates into class warfare as the public school boys learn to hunt, subjugating their rivals into virtual slaves until the devastating finale sorts the savages from the gentlemen.

From the cast of newcomers Edward’s tragic Piggy and Aubrey’s Ralph do really well in convincing us of their trials and challenges in the wild in a film that sometimes moves, but also deeply disturbs, its more brutal elements highlighted by Raymond Leppard’s haunting score. MT

OUT ON CRITERION BLURAY BY CRITERION UK | 28 AUGUST 2017

Venice Film Festival 2017 |

The 74th Venice Film Festival unveils a dazzling array of Hollywood talent enriched by strong arthouse titles in this year’s line-up. Programming supremo Alberto Barbera claimed he was 97% pleased with his selection of films for the longest running (1932) and most classy of the global festivals, that takes place on the Lido from 30 August to 9 September 2017. The festival has recently been upping its game with a newly launched Film Market providing the launchpad for some promising award-season titles and Oscar potentials. All the films are world premiers and seasoned directors compete with debut filmmakers for the coveted Golden Lion, judged by Annette Benning’s jury including Rebecca Hall.

The festival often with a Alexanders Payne’s fantasy comedy, DOWNSIZING that follows Matt Damon’s shrinking man, Damon also also appears in George Clooney’s ’50s set urban thriller SUBURBICON starring Julianne Moore and Josh Brolin. Darren Aronofsky’s psycho horror MOTHER! with the World’s highest earning actress Jennifer Lawrence is the third Hollywood heavyweight in the programme.

The Competition line-up features more eclectic fare with three documentaries: refugee crisis-themed HUMAN FLOW -left – from Chinese maverick Ai Wei Wei’s and Frederick Wiseman’s EX LIBRIS an in-depth exploration of the New York Public Library and William Friedkin THE DEVIL AND THE FATHER AMORTH that explores the real story of an exorcism. Indie-wise MAKTOUB, MY LOVE is Abdellatif Kechiche’s follow up to Palme D’Or winner Blue is the Warmest Colour and Berlinale Golden Bear winner Andrew Haigh (45 Years) presents Steve Buscemi starrer LEAN ON PETE adapted from Willy Vlautin’s book about a boy and an also ran race horse. In the Asian corner is also Hirokazu Koreeda’s mystery drama THE THIRD MURDER, Vivian Qu’s ANGELS WEAR WHITE main pic – and festival closer OUTRAGE CODA a drama about the Japanese Yakuza from director Takeshi Kitano.

Mexico’s Guillermo del Toro brings his Coldwar horror pic THE SHAPE OF WATER, which stars English actress Sally Hawkins and Argentinian auteuse Lucrecia Mantel will be there with ZAMA (left – out of comp) her much-antipated biopic drama based on Don Diego de Zama, a legendary Spanish officer who settles in the Argentine during the 17th century; while LOVING PABLO is a biopic of Pablo Escobar starring Javier Bardem as the drug gangster.

Italian films features largely in the selection but often with a sterling British cast: from Paolo Virzi’s THE LEISURE SEEKER, with Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland whose character is suffering Alzheimers. Andrea Pallaora’s HANNAH with Charlotte Rampling and Sebastiano Riso’s UNA FAMIGLIA. Western-Wise there is Australian director Warwick Thornton’s SWEET COUNTRY, starring Sam Neill and a ‘very bizarre’ musical thriller about love and the Camorra entitle AMMORE E MALAVITA from the Manetti Brothers.

Martin McDonagh’s THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI promises the same dark humour as his breakout hit and best film In Bruges,Other British titles include Stephen Frears’ VICTORIA AND ABDUL with Judi Dench; Deborah Haywood’s Derbyshire-set indie debut PINCUSHION that opens the ORIZZONTI section and MY GENERATION David Batty’s documentary about the Swinging Sixties scripted by Porridge writer Dick Clement and narrated by Michael Caine.

Venice will become the first major festival to introduce a competition strand dedicated to virtual reality with over 20 films judged by a separate jury which this year is headed by John Landis who presents a 3D version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller and a documentary about its making.

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION 74

AI WEIWEI – HUMAN FLOW

Germany, Usa, 140’

DARREN ARONOFSKY – MOTHER!
Usa, 120’
Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Michelle Pfeiffer, Domhnall Gleeson, Ed Harris

GEORGE CLOONEY – SUBURBICON
Usa, 104’
Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Noah Jupe, Oscar Isaac

GUILLERMO DEL TORO – THE SHAPE OF WATER
Usa, 119’
Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Doug Jones, Michael Stuhlbarg, Octavia Spencer

ZIAD DOUEIRI – THE INSULT
France/Lebanon, 110’
Adel Karam, Kamel El Basha, Camille Salameh, Rita Hayek

ROBERT GUÉDIGUIAN – LA VILLA
France, 107’
Ariane Ascaride, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Gérard Meylan, Jacques Boudet, Anaïs Demoustier, Robinson Stévenin

ANDREW HAIGH – LEAN ON PETE
UK, 121’
Charlie Plummer, Steve Buscemi, Chloë Sevigny

ABDELLATIF KECHICHE – MEKTOUB, MY LOVE: CANTO UNO
France Italy, 180’
Shain Boumedine, Ophélie Baufle, Salim Kechiouche, Lou Luttiau, Alexia Chardard, Hafsia Herzi

KOREEDA HIROKAZU – THE THIRD MURDER
Japan, 124’
Fukuyama Masaharu, Yakusho Koji, Hirose Suzu

XAVIER LEGRAND – JUSQU’À LA GARDE

France, 90’
Denis Ménochet, Léa Drucker, Thomas Gioria, Mathilde Auneveux, Saadia Bentaïeb

MANETTI BROS. – AMMORE E MALAVITA
Italy, 133’
Giampaolo Morelli, Serena Rossi, Claudia Gerini, Carlo Buccirosso

SAMUEL MAOZ – FOXTROT
Israel, Germany Fr/Swiss 113’
Lior Ashkenazi, Sarah Adler, Yonatan Shiray

MARTIN MCDONAGH – THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI
UK, 110’
Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, Abbie Cornish, John Hawkes, Peter Dinklage

ANDREA PALLAORO – HANNAH
Italy/Belgium/France, 95’
Charlotte Rampling, André Wilms

ALEXANDER PAYNE – DOWNSIZING
Usa, 140’
Matt Damon, Christoph Waltz, Hong Chau, Kristen Wiig

VIVIAN QU – JIA NIAN HUA (ANGELS WEAR WHITE)
China, France, 107’
Wen Qi, Zhou Meijun, Shi Ke, Geng Le, Liu Weiwei, Peng Jing

SEBASTIANO RISO – UNA FAMIGLIA
Italy 105’
Micaela Ramazzotti, Patrick Bruel

PAUL SCHRADER – FIRST REFORMED
Usa, 108’
Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, Cedric Kyles

WARWICK THORNTON – SWEET COUNTRY
Australia, 112’
Sam Neill, Bryan Brown, Hamilton Morris, Thomas M. Wright

PAOLO VIRZÌ – THE LEISURE SEEKER
Italy, 112’
Helen Mirren, Donald Sutherland

FREDERICK WISEMAN – EX LIBRIS, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | 30 AUGUST – 9 SEPTEMBER 2017

The Untamed | La Region Selvaje (2016)

Dir: Amat Escalante | 100min | Fantasy drama | Mexico Denmark |

Amat Escalalnte follows his Cannes-awarded Heli with a community based sci-fi fantasy drama inspired by the machismo, homophobia and misogyny of his native Mexico.

THE UNTAMED is an obscure and unsettling piece that deftly manages its tonal shifts – from grim social realism to sinister fantasy – in a mysterious narrative slowly unfolds, taking its characters to unexpected places while leaving them firmly rooted in contemporary Guanajuato, weighed down by their reality of poverty, overcrowding and crime.

In the outskirts of a town a large crater has opened up filled with animals that appear to have been affected by an extraterrestrial force. One of these has morphed into a benign tentacled creature capable of giving ultimate sexual satisfaction to the women who visit its cabin in the woods. But the creature can also turn nasty, like a disgruntled male. In this way, THE UNTAMED could work as a metaphor for Mexican oppression and the dire social issues facing the country, or for any other Western country caught in the current climate of political and social uncertainty.

We first meet Veronica (Simone Bucio) a willowy waif in the throws of ecstacy, courtesy of our alien-like tentacled tempter in his darkened cabin. This is one of the most bewildering scenes of the film and is captured by the same cinematographer who worked on Nymphomaniac. In a further twist, the creature is being looked after by a weird couple who are purported to possess psychic powers.

Meanwhile, back in town, young mother of two Ale (Ruth Ramos) is being abused by her husband Angel (Jesus Meza), a brutish civil engineer in a sexual relationship with her brother Fabian (Eden Villavicencio), who works in the local hospital where Veronica turns up later with a strange wound on her torso. The two are clearly attracted to one another and decide to meet up later, where it emerges that Fabian is unhappy with Angel.

The trio’s situation grows all the more desperate due to the Sci-fi occurences in the nearby woods: nothing is clear, everything seems to be degenerating both ecologically and societally for the country and its people who are caught in the grip of circumstances beyond their control.Despite the underwritten characters, Escalante’s attempts to chanel Mexico’s serious social issues into this Sci-fi drama are convincing and exciting marking him out as one cinema’s most visionary contemporary filmmakers. MT

NOW ON BFI PLAYER

Napping Princess (2017)

Dir.: Kenji Kamiyama; Anime; Voices of: Mitsuki Takahata, Shin’nosuke Mitsushima, Tomoya Maeno; Japan 2017, 110 min.

Director/writer Kenji Kamiyama (Ghost in the Shell) continues his critique of Japanese society with NAPPING PRINCESS, an Anime featuring Kokone, a teenage schoolgirl who has to clean up not only the contemporary world, but also a parallel world of sorcerers and monsters. Kamiyama makes impressive use of the Isekai genre – where protagonists have a double life in another world – showing that modern society is not that much different from other eras.

Instead of studying hard for her university entrance examine, Kokone (Takahata), regularly oversleeps and often manages on to fall asleep during lessons. In her vivid dreams, she believes that she is Ancien, the unruly daughter of the King of Heartland, who rebels against her car-obsessed father: every citizen has to drive a brand new vehicle, the production line is active 24/7. Workers are punished for lateness, even though the traffic is near to standstill. When Colossos, a giant mechanical monster appears, the King orders the building of transformer-likes machines which are pedalled from the inside by workers. Ancien, helped by the pirate Peach, makes full use of her magic powers, but is hunted down by the King’s evil mandarin Watanabe, who wants to exile the sorceress for good. Meanwhile, in the ‘real’ world problems also mount up: just before the opening of the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, her hipster father Kijita (Maeno), masquerading as a car mechanic, has finished the computer programme for pilotless cars, which will transport guest and athletes during the games. The programme had been started by Kokone’s mother, who had left her father, the CEO of a big car manufacturing company, who was then unwilling, to invest in pilotless cars. After the death of his wife, Kijita has completed the software program. The Watanabe-like Deputy CEO of Kokone’s grandfather’s company, now tries to usurp his boss, trying to lay his hands on the program. When Kokone realises, that Ancien is not herself, but her mother, she has another ally and can fight back successfully on both fronts, being also helped by her class mate Miori (Mitsushina).

Also known as Ancien and the Magic Tablet (much more appropriate than this rather silly title), Kamiyana connects the two worlds perfectly: the equivalent protagonists complementing each other’s characters to the full. But the main premise is that Kokone is a perfect role model: very much in love with technology, and adept and successful at using it, just like the male protagonists. She uses her emotional intelligence to deal with the opposite sex, who are unable to empathise. The only criticism of NAPPING PRINCESS is that the back-story is told over the rolling end-credits and not integrated into the main Anime.

ON RELEASE: 16th August 2017 A full list of sites can be found here:

http://nappingprincessmovie.co.uk/

https://youtu.be/ZLOBMVpR0Oc

Quest (2017)

Dir.: Jonathan Olshefski; Documentary; USA 2017, 105 min.

What started as a chance encounter – when Olshefski was teaching photography in North Philadelphia – has turned into a documentary about the Rainey family: black, broke but incredibly creative and resourceful. QUEST is not just another opportunity for a white outsider to wax lyrical about deprivation, but a project born out of common interests.

Chris Rainey runs a small home recording studio where budding neighbourhood talents are try to find a way into the professional rapper scene. Whilst the studio is a labour of love, Chris makes a living as a newspaper deliverer – combing art and survival in the same way as former construction worker Olshefski – in order to finance his art projects. The director “could relate to the juggle of the passion project and the day job”. Aware “of the long history of privileged filmmakers going into communities that are not their own”, he avoids marginalising North Philly and the Rainey family, but tells instead a story which is as much about their friendship as the town itself, which he hopes will benefit from QUEST.

‘Ma’ Christine’ Rainey is the pragmatist in the family, working in a badly paid Shelter job, she has learned to economise on all levels. Her arms were badly burned in an domestic accident but she remains stoical, whereas her husband Chris is the dreamer, running his studio with near religious faith. When the matriarch’s oldest son, twenty-one year old William, is diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumour, Ma springs into action. William, whose first child has just been born, is despondent. He even gets a tattoo with a warning sign for chemical pollution, declaring himself a ‘dangerous zone’

. Olshefski workimg as his own DoP and sound designer, wanted to close the project after the re-election of Barack Obama, but a new misfortune struck the Rainey family: their teenage daughter Pearl (P.J.) was hit by a stray bullet and lost an eye. In one of the most harrowing moments of QUEST, Chris recalls his daughter’s first words after he rushed to her aid: “Daddy, I am sorry, I got shot”.

But QUEST is also a celebration of life: when Pearl comes home after a lengthy hospital stay, the street party to welcome her back is something to behold. The discussion between the couple about Pearl’s burgeoning homosexuality is surprisingly rational, Ma blaming her husband “for always obstructing me, when I wanted her to wear some more feminine clothes”. Nevertheless, Pearl would graduate, choosing her own way. When Chris is interrogated by white police officers the tension shows– even though Chis has always supported the police and attended demonstrations against gun violence in their neighbourhood, the friction between police and citizens is always simmering.

Without the frills or mannerism that often accompany this kind of self-styled cinema-verite project, QUEST is exactly what Olshefski planned it to be: “the only agenda is to provide the viewer the opportunity to connect to these incredible individuals and share the love I have for them. This is what I want the viewer to take away. These are people whose voices should be heard.” Olshefski thus avoids a political sermon and just makes do with what he found – which is more than enough. AS

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 18 AUGUST 2017

Dark Night (2016)

Dir.: Tim Sutton; Cast: Anna Rosa Hopkins, Eddie Cacciola, Andres Vega, Marilyn Purvis, Aaron Purvis, Robert Jumper, Ciara Hampton; USA 2016, 85 min.

Director/writer Tim Sutton (Memphis) tries to decipher the Aurora cinema shooting, when James Holmes killed twelve members of the multiplex audience watching Dark Knight Rising in July 2012. His non-sensational, near-documentary style shows a detached approach, not focusing on the individual – perpetrator or victims – but on the malaise of American suburban life, centred around celebrity and gun culture.

It is no accident that Sutton chose Sarasota/Florida as a setting for his absorbing drama: many crime novels are set here (Ed McBain, Elmore Leonard and Sue Grafton, to name a few), and in 1974 TV-Anchor Christine Chubbuck committed suicide on Air in the town’s TV station. Loneliness and fragmentation dominates. Google Earth shots of the Sarasota show uniformity and a lack of any individuality: the town planner seemed to have worked with his Lego set. And the music of Maica Armata is so otherworldly, that we sometimes forget that Sutton deals with real people and not ‘Stepford-like’ replicates of both genders.

After a cut from the black screen, we see a young, blond woman (Hampton) sitting in a parking lot, stunned. The sirens of the ambulances signal distress, their blue and red lights mingle with the same colours of the ubiquitous national flag. This short look at the aftermath is followed by an array of would-be killers and victims: no clue is ever given to who is who. Anna Rosa Hopkins has show-biz aspirations, she poses for the moment fame, she will certainly never achieve. Her real life and her dreams are only connected by a media, who still tells everyone, that everything is possible in the land of the American Dream. Eddie Cacciola is a veteran, visiting meetings with other victims of PDTS symptoms. He is burned out, near catatonic. Marilyn Purvis sits with her teenage son Aaron (who likes to play with his snakes) in front of a TV, where we see for a moment James Holmes on the stand at his trial.

Somebody is interviewing Marilyn about something her son did – but we never learn what it was. Instead guilt clouds their scenes, and there is no empathy between them. Andres Vega, a skater, dyes his hair red – like Holmes did – but is otherwise just a lonely cypher like the rest. Finally, there is Robert Jumper, who takes out his frustration on his dogs. All the characters will meet (symbolically) at the Mall in the evening, before going to the cinema. In sparing us the graphic scenes, Sutton achieves a greater impact than any re-creation of the massacre might have done.

French DoP Helene Louvart (Pina) combines off-centre framing with long, wide-lensed panning shots, where the isolation of the characters becomes clear. In one scene, a man takes out his huge sub-machine gun, pointing it at a neighbour’s house, without its occupant taking any notice. The underlying threat of the DARK NIGHT is created by the fragmentation of all the participants: their individuality is eroded by their longing for a lifestyle they will never achieve. Therefore, one of them will be the shooter: killing humans is, after all, a short step away from target practice and video games. AS

DARK NIGHT IS OUT ON 18 AUGUST 2017

Final Portrait (2017)

Dir/Writer: Stanley Tucci Cast: Geoffrey Rush, Armie Hammer, Clémence Poésy, Tony Shalhoub, James Faulkner, Sylvie Testud | UK | Drama | 90 min

The sculptor Alberto Giacometti was an eccentric, philandering neurotic and a crashingly self-centred bore. He was also a perfectionist, a sharp businessman and a fool for love. Or so Stanley Tucci would have us believe in his rather idolatrous but witty biopic drama that follows the Swiss Italian artist in his Paris atelier during the 1960s, where he worked with his tolerant brother Diego, also an artist.

In his second feature as both writer and director, Stanley Tucci deftly dovetails themes of creative insecurity and narcissism as he delves inside the intriguing subject of what is it to be an artist. Basing his script on James Lord’s biography ‘A Giacometti Portrait’, Tucci conjures up a chaotic genius who process involves constant over-painting directly on the canvas before finally getting the measure of his subject many hours if not weeks after the initial sitting.

In 1964. shortly before his death, Giacometti’s work was fetching record prices forcing him to squirrel away wads of banknotes in his shambolic studio amongst the many works in process. His wife Annette – who he calls a “petite bourgeoise” – is dismayed by his ongoing affair with his ditzy muse Caroline, not least because he lavishes money on his lover while being tight-fisted with his spouse.

One day, Giacometti asks New York art critic and writer James Lord to pose for him. Initially flattered, Lord has no idea of what he is letting himself in for as the portrait, scheduled to take a week, stretches on for much longer amid constant interruptions for restaurants breaks, setbacks and altercations with his wife and lover. Armie Hammer is perfect for the role of Lord: open-faced, cheerful and uncomplicated he plays the long-suffering Lord, with consummate ease.

Genius Giacometti’s method of working flies in the face of other famous portrait painters who are highly organised, fast-working and diligent, often juggling several projects at a time, beginning with pencil sketching and photographic impressions before finally putting paint to canvas. This depicts a man who was disorganised, scatty and unable to work to deadlines, despite his obvious talent.

With a tour de force performance from Geoffrey Rush in the lead role, and Clemence Poesie perfectly irritating as Caroline, this is a stylishly imagined and richly photographed drama that captures the romantic magic of Paris in its Sixties heyday, but is rather denigrates the memory of Giacometti. Worth watching if you can cut it some artistic slack. MT

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 18 AUGUST 2017 | BERLINALE 2017 REVIEW

Locarno Film Festival Awards 2017

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION

Golden Leopard

MRS. FANG by WANG Bing, France, China, Germany

Special Jury Prize

AS BOAS MANEIRAS by Juliana Rojas, Marco Dutra, Brazil, France

Best Direction

F. J. OSSANG for 9 DOIGTS, France, Portugal

Best Actress

ISABELLE HUPPERT for MADAME HYDE by Serge Bozon, France, Belgium

Best Actor

ELLIOTT CROSSET HOVE for VINTERBRØDRE by Hlynur Pálmason, Denmark, Iceland

LOCARNO 2018 WILL TAKE PLACE FROM 1-11 AUGUST 2018

Dead Nation | Tara Moarta (2017) | Locarno Film Festival 2017

Dir: Radu Jude | Doc | 83′ | Romania

Radu Jude’s astonishing documentary follow-up to Aferim! is a chronicle of Romania’s anti-semitism during the late 1930s-1940s told entirely from the perspective of a Jewish doctor, Emil Dorian.

The Romanian director’s fifth full-length film takes the form of a series of stunning professionally taken monochrome photographs (often fading at the edges), featuring groups of ordinary people from the Southern village of Slobozia affected by the horrific ethnic cleansing that raged during the country’s outbreak of fervent Second World War Nationalism. The photographs picture well-dressed family groups, along with farmers posing with their animals and officials proudly sporting their uniforms.

The grisly episode in history contrasts with the benign, often smiling faces of the characters portrayed, striking a poignant note of complicity with viewers who are well aware of their fate, even before they are. Jude narrates against a soundtrack of patriotic anthems and radio broadcasts from the era charting Octavian Goga’s rise to power in September 1937. At the time we hear that a patient in the local hospital is the only Jew suffering from TB and a petition goes round that he should be thrown out. This is the seed of hate that rapidly grew and flourished throughout the country as Romania steadily falls under the grip of Fascism and a Legionnaire’s regime.

Dr Dorian’s florid account of atrocities that occurred during the genocide flows on while the figures in the pristine photographs keep beaming out, beautifully-dressed and posed, almost in defiance of the horrors awaiting them. King Carol II announces there will be no progrom, “but it would be easier for Jews if they left Romania”. Eventually in 1938 synagogues begin to be burnt down as antisemitism rages across the nation and Jewish people become scapegoats. As the country descends into chaos mass deportations take place and the horrors of genocide gradually become apparent. The only hint at personal suffering comes from Dorian himself as he describes “an endless season whose days are grey, cold and bloodstained.”

This episode in history may be not be common knowledge to many viewers (including me, for that matter) but Jude brings it to our attention in a way that makes us want to discover more, and without beating us over the head with a sensationalist portrait, which could have so easily been the case. The film is striking and poetic, the photographs collated with flair and skill. DEATH NATION is a work of art and a documentary that begs to be seen by all. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2-12 AUGUST 2017

https://youtu.be/dLTdgbLIyc4

Le Doulos (1962) tribute to Jean Paul Belmondo

Dir.: Jean-Pierre Melville; Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Serge Reggiani, Monique Hennessy, Jean Desailly, Fabienne Dali, Michel Piccoli, Jacques De Leon, Rene Lefevre; France 1962, 108 min.

Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973) is known mostly for his stylish portraits of the Paris underworld, but he is also considered the ‘grandfather’ of the Nouvelle Vague; though his early friendship with Jean-Luc Godard (he had a role in A bout a souffle), ended in the late 1960s, when Godard started doing away with narratives. For Melville, a great lover of literature, this was sacrilege. LE DOULOS, based on a novel by Pierre Lesou, is an intricate work of continuous betrayal, very much like a Balzac or Flaubert classic.

The title is a French slang word for hat, but also informer, and the film opens with a brilliant long panning shot of Maurice (Reggiani), walking through an endless number of railway arches at night. Everything is desolate, including Gilbert’s dilapidated house. But we soon learn the reason for this atmosphere of doom and gloom: Maurice, just out of prison, is going to kill Gilbert for the murder of his wife. He also steals a lot of money and the jewellery from a recent heist, burying both under a lamppost nearby. A radical change of scenes follows, with Maurice planning a robbery in a wealthy Parisian suburb. He meets his friends Silien (Belmondo) in his chic but tasteless appartment where he lives with his girlfriend Therese (Hennessy). These two have something in common which will decide the fate of all concerned. The robbery goes wrong, when the police arrive on the scene, Maurice is wounded, his partner and a police detective dead. The gangsters here – like Melville himself – are very much in love with their American counterparts: drinking Bourbon in American style bars. While Silien is being interrogated by detectives led by Superintendent Clain (Desailly) in a magnificent continuous shot lasting nearly ten minutes, Therese’s body is found in car which has fallen into a steep ravine in a quarry. In a payback for the murder of Gilbert Silien kills Armand (De Leon), the lover of his ex-grill friend Fabienne (Dali), and his partner Nuttheccio (Piccoli). He also frames them for the murder when he deposits the money and the jewells in Armand’s safe. In the finale, a variation on a Cornel Woolrich theme of ‘race against time’, Maurice puts a contract on Silien’s head, before trying to stop the contract killer.

While Melville always insisted that all his films were really Westerns, LE DOULOS is typically French, starting with a glimpse of poetic realism when Maurice walks towards Gilbert’s house. What follows is very much Flaubert territory, with the protagonists trying to extricate themselves from the roles they have played all their lives, only to trap themselves in the schemes they set up. It really doesn’t matter who is on whose side, the execution of violence overrides all motives and intentions. Talking about violence, women are treated as second class citizens always at the beck and call of men, they are neglected at best. But whilst women, like in most Melville features, are marginal figures in the plot, men are romanticised to no end: they can only be victims or perpetrators.

DoP Nicholas Hayer, who worked for Melville on Two Men in Manhattan (1959), creates a black and white landscape of utter forlornness. Every room seems to be a trap: Maurice murdering ‘the fence’ in the shabby room with the victim’s own revolver, Therese left alone in her flat to be kidnapped and murdered, Silien in the police’ interrogation room, bargaining for his freedom, and finally in his own house, with the contract killer hiding behind a screen. As for Melville, there are shades of Le Samourai (1967) here, but his misogyny is much more striking in the earlier feature, spoiling it to a certain degree. AS

JEAN PAUL BELMONDO 1933-2021

Qing Ting zhi yan | Dragonfly Eyes | Locarno Film Festival 2017

Dir: Xu bing | China US | 81′ | Fantasy Drama

A young woman leaves a Buddhist temple where she has trained as a Nun, in this evocative Chinese drama created entirely from surveillance footage from with celebrated conceptual artist Xu Bing. DRAGONFLY EYES is an unsettling watch but a poetic one that melds conceptual art with cinema: Just the kind of fare that makes Locarno Film Festival tick with the edgy inventiveness that makes it different and daring.

Relying on prestige editing and clever sound design DRAGONFLY EYES rocks with a rakish rhythm while offering audiences essential time out to contemplate its artful originality. This bracing feature recalls the work of Polish artists Anka and Wilhelm Sasnal Fresh and Thai maestro Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Other artists in the shape of Matthieu Laclau and composer Yoshihiro Hano collaborate on the film scripted by the poet Zhai Yongming whose writing responded to the found footage, rather than the conventional way round. Dragonfly Eyes also features computerised voice techniques that alternate between calm chanting and more rasping vocal sounds.

After Qing Ting (‘Dragonfly’, in Chinese) has left her holy home, she finds herself working in a milking factory where she confesses to her colleague Ke Fan that she’d like to set one of the cows free. The cow in question is then seen wandering off down a road in the dark, and footage of various road accidents follows suggesting a doon-laden outcome. The next minute Qing Ting is in a dry cleaning shop and Ke Fan appears to be stalking her as they embark of a tense on/off affair. What emerges feels like the classic misogynist scenario of modern times but the experimental form it takes feels bizarre and often alarming, punctuated by an atmospheric electronic soundtrack. Different but definitely daring and fresh. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2-12 AUGUST 2017

Mrs Fang (2017) | Locarno Film Festival 2017

Dir: Bing Wang | China/Ger/France | Doc | 86′ |

Bing Wang’s low-key portrait of a woman’s final days offers an engaging snapshot of modern rural China. Highlighting our growing concern for issues such as Alzheimer’s and the breakdown of the family unit, this witty and filmic documentary never takes itself too seriously while maintaining the dignity of its central focus.

Mrs Fang (Fang Xiuying) has come home from hospital to die. In the ramshackle riverside farming village of Huzhou, she is now in her late sixties and surrounded by her extended family who gather around her bed. The chatter is irreverent and off-the-cuff – this is just another ritual in their lives together as they share every subtle nuance of her dying days. Daughter and son have given up their jobs to tend to her needs, which appear modest, as she now lies staring vacantly from her bed, a set of prominent yellow teeth bared grotesquely from a hollowed out face. Her son stands in ceremony taking a pulse, and someone says: “he acts like a doctor”. No offence taken, and none intended – this is just an example of the candidness of this community that leavens a film that could otherwise be gruelling. A brief opening scene from the year before has shown Mrs Fang walking peacefully along the river. A year later, the deterioration in her condition is remarkable.

Bing still finds beauty in this seedy backwater. As the men embark on a nocturnal fishing trip, their little boat flashes like an emerald against the cocoa-coloured night sky. The men talk continuously: “It’s a snakehead”, “the battery’s leaking”, “try for a turtle, they’re in the rushes”. Their torch buzzes loudly only drowned out by the endless roar of traffic on the highway. Later they go home, leaving a woman to gut the fish and do the dirty work. Nothing changes, even in China. But the director’s message is loud and clear: How calm, secure and dignified death can be when your family is there to look after you. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2-12 AUGUST 2017

Step (2017)

Dir.: Amanda Lipitz; Documentary; USA 2017, 83 min.

Amanda Lipitz’ feature documentary STEP is proof that finding the right style for your subject matter is the basis of successful filmmaking: fast-moving but with an eye for detail, this is a rollercoaster ride of intensity. It also helps that Lipitz, a native of Baltimore, was a founder member of Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women (BLSfYW) whose class of 2009, entering its senior year, is the central focus of the film. Lipitz is not just a well-meaning outsider who presents the material before disappearing, but a fighter for the rights of one of the most disadvantaged minorities in the US: young black women.

STEP combines the two main goals of the first senior class of BLSfYW: to obtain college placements for all women students and to winning the Bowie State step competition. The documentary centres on the three leading girls of the step team, the “Lethal Ladies”, led by Blessin Giraldo. Blessin, hyperactive and a gifted dancer, puts all her frustrations into the dance routines – her home life is anything but ideal. Mother Geneva is suffering from depression and often unable to look after her family. When Blessin’s little brother discovers an empty ‘fridge again after school, his older sister admits she does not want this kind of life for herself. But Geneva, who has not even met one of her daughter’s teachers since 2009, always fails to live up to promises. Blessin is on the verge of dropping out, but principal Chevonne Hall and school counsellor Paul Dufat make sure that the target of 100% college placements for the class is realised. Cori Grainger is a straight A-student, whose mother has recently married an old friend; the merging of the two families brings new problems for Cori; who, in the end, successfully enters the prestigious Hopkins University. Finally there is Taylor Solomon, who has no problem achieving her grades, but is permanently embarrassed by mum Maisha, a correctional officer proud of her job and of telling all the parents about “her mission”. After the death of teenager Freddie Gray in police custody in 2015, which led to riots, Maisha’s profession makes her an outsider.

The dance routines under the watchful eye of coach Gari McIntyre and the appearance in the final of the competition – the “Lethal Ladies” all dressed as Cleopatra’ – dictate the tempo, even though more time is given to fleshing out the students’ background. DoP Casey Regan makes sure that the cinema vérité aesthetics are always adhered to; the music and the dancing reverberate all the time. Warm, funny and sad, the last word should go to Blessin: “We make music with our bodies. That’s some wicked stuff”. Indeed. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 6 AUGUST 2017

3/4 (2017) | Locarno Film Festival 2017

Dir/Co-writer: Ilian Metev | Cast: Mila Mikova, Nikolay Mashalov, Todor Veltchev, Simona Genkova | Bulgaria | Drama 83′

Ilian Metev makes the most of a limited budget in his confident but delicately drawn cinema vérité style debut exploring the day to day life of a Sofia-based family of four.

Scripted by Metev and co-writer Betina Ip, its focus is the gifted teenager daughter who is competing for chance to study piano in Germany. Mila (Mila Mikhova) is shy and introspective for her age and shares a close but often argumentative relationship with her feisty younger brother Niki (Niki Mashalov). Their father, Todor (Todor Velchev) is too consumed by his work as a physics professor to engage with his kids on anything other than scientific theory but Mila’s piano teacher (Simona Genkova) is calm and kindly, often helping Mila to relax with meditation exercises and breathing techniques as she coaches and encourages her piano practice. The elephant in the room here is clearly the mother who is mentioned but never appears, and her absence is keenly felt throughout this limpid character piece, beautifully captured by Julian Atanassov voyeuristic camara, on mid-range and intimate close-ups.

3/4 is an engaging and tender-hearted piece of filmmaking that lifts the lid on ordinary life in middle-class Bulgaria with a gentle dramatic arc that offers some subtle surprises along the way. It will certainly appeal to the arthouse crowd who will appreciate the naturalistic performances, beautiful lensing and authentic portrayal of ordinary life. MT

70TH LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL | 2-12 AUGUST 2017

Goliath (2017) | Locarno Film Festival 2017

Dir: Dominik Locher | Switzerland | Drama | 85′

Dominik Locher (Tempo Girl) explores the nature of masculinity and fatherhood in his rather bland Swiss-set screen debut GOLIATH which tries to find a new angle on unwanted pregnancy and thwarted masculinity.

Designed to appeal to new audiences, its young lead Sven Schelker plays David a timid office worker who goes all petulant when his girlfriend Jessy (Jasna Fritzi Bauer) announces her surprise pregnancy. Clearly he can’t face the thought of growing up but the couple are clearly quite keen on one another and baulk at abortion after their first appointment. Later on, David fails to man up when the couple are attacked on the train forcing him to re-examine their relationship dynamic where Jessy appears to wear the trousers. So David starts to beef up in the gym, and inject himself with anabolic steroids, slowly becoming the stereotype of dumb machismo. The effort to improve his pecs and charisma only succeeds in the former endeavour. Instead of confidence and masculine allure, the young guy develops a nasty aggressive streak with negative implications for Jessy and the baby.

Locher’s script attempts to break down the stereotypical image of Switzerland as being a pacifist and conservative country in crafting a drama that feels unconvincing and formulaic and a storyline that is predictable throughout, despite trying to go to the ‘dark side’. Obviously there a shady characters and situations everywhere but unlike the impressive thriller Chrieg which succeeded with an authentic dystopian tale, GOLIATH merely tries to overlay an everyday urban story with sinister undertones that just doesn’t convince. The characters are underwritten and bland, and despite the best efforts of its leads and Daniel Lobos’ creative attempts to ‘sex up’ Switzerland by giving the film an artistic feel, the end result is amateurish. Switzerland is a fantastic country which should be proud of its moral and ethic excellence and fabulous lifestyle. Locher just needs to find a real story and tell it well. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL – 2-12 AUGUST 2-17

9 Doigts | 9 Fingers (2017) | Locarno International Film Festival 2017

Dir/Writer: F J Ossang | France/Port | Drama | 99′

Cult French auteur F J Ossang has made a handful of features: L’affaire des Divisions Morituri (1985); Doctor Chance (Locarno/1998; Dharma Guns (2010) and casts a niche selection of French stars for his latest Locarno Golden Leopard hopeful, a Noirish mystery drama with Paul Hamy, Damien Bonnard, Gaspard Ulliel and Pascal Greggory.

9 FINGERS is very much an exercise in style over substance; and if you like Ossang’s style then you will enjoy this enigmatic affair that could easily serve as a metaphor for the crisis-ridden state of the world. Shot in black and white with occasional sorties into the Academy ratio, accentuating the clandestine rather claustrophobic nature of the loose plotline, it follows a character named Magliore (Hamy) who, in the opening scenes, inherits a fortune from a dying man. Kidnapped by a gang after his loot, he then becomes their willing accomplice as they flee an unknown enemy across land and sea aboard a large steamer, beset by a mystery fever which could be typhoid. Utterly pretentious and arcane, this is nonetheless a sumptuously photographed wartime pastiche that feels hollow and bewildering despite the best efforts of its talented cast to breathe life into an episodic, threadbare narrative. Sadly, most of the audience walked out before the end credits rolled. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2-12 AUGUST 2017

Charleston (2017) | Locarno Film Festival 2017

Dir: Andrei Cretulescu | Romania/France | Drama | 119′

Romanian cinema seems to have peaked after its recent New Wave heyday led largely by Radu Jude, Cristi Puiu and Cristian Mungiu. who have all been lauded and rewarded on the international festival circuit. The watchwords here have always been ‘lengthy and slow-burning’ often demanding our attention for over two hours, but on the whole this has been worthwhile. Sadly Andrei Cretulescu’s Charleston overstays its welcome at just short of two hours in a drama that feels distinctly self-indulgent – amateurish even.

But although CHARLESTON is not in the major league, there are elements that recommend it. Barbu Bălăşoiu’s artful cinematography showcases modern Bucharest with style and flair enlivening this tragi-comedy with its contemporary take on relationships, music, cultural and outdoor pursuits, all set to jazzy Massimiliano Nardulli’s jazzy score.

The title CHARLESTON could refer to the dance-off between the film’s central duo – although the tone here is more fraught and sorrowful than spirited, in tune with its 1920s-namesake. It may also allude to the awkward impromptu interlude that occurs midday through the action. The problems throughout is that we feel nothing for our central characters. We are also left unmoved by an opening scene where a young woman (Iona/Ana Ularu) is pictured staring at her phone before rushing headlong into a speeding vehicle. Graveside, we then meet her thuggish other half having a fag as he contemplates the future, and possibly the past. Alexandru (Serban Pavluvu is later seen celebrating his 42nd birthday with a select group of friends – a pale imitation of the one in Sieranevada. After dinner Alexandru answers the door to a strangers who then emerges as his dead wife’s former lover. Clearly our brutish hero was totally unaware of the situation – and gives the mushc younger squirt of a man (Sebastian/Radu Iacoban) a good hiding. The wounded lover still stays around, as if to serve a self-indulgent penance in his cuckhold’s former matrimonial home. This grim aftermath then develops into a mutual outpouring of anger, grief, retaliation, claim and counter claim which culminates in a bizarre road trip to the place where the couple spent their honeymoon.

This all sounds plausible and rather intriguing and there are some elements that really work, But less is always better than more in this lacklustre affair which is over-talkie dialogue-wise and underpowered dramatically. One thing is for sure, time out from the endless bickering between Alexandru and his rival Sebastian could have allowed the audience time out to contemplate the scenario from their own perspective and possibly given them more slack . MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2-12 AUGUST 2017

Prick Up Your Ears (1987) | Re-release

Dir.: Stephen Frears; Cast: Gary Oldman, Alfred Molina, Vanessa Redgrave, Frances Barber, Julie Walters, Wallace Shawn; UK 1987, 105 min.

Portraying the relationship between playwright Joe Orton and his lover and erstwhile collaborator Kenneth Halliwell, director Stephen Frears relies on a brilliant script by Alan Bennett, based on the Orton biography of John Lahr. But it is not the brutal ending, in the summer of 1967, which shocks up most but the seamy atmosphere dominating London at the time, a far cry from the “swinging’ myth of the late Sixties: instead, Frears’ London is a sordid mixture of repression, provinciality and squalidness.

Joe Orton (Oldman), coming from a lower-middle class family in Leicester, met Kenneth Halliwell, six years his senior, when they were both studying at RADA in 1951. Halliwell had a cultured and sophisticated middle-class education, and Orton, whose highest achievements were in shorthand typing, had never met anyone quite like him before. During the course of their relationship, the tables were turned, and new power structure emerged; with Orton not only becoming a successful playwright, but also spreading his wings sexually, cottaging in the seedier parts of Islington, which at the time was still quite run-down.

For a decade, Orton and Halliwell had collaborated writing novels and plays (which are lost), but after both men were convicted to six months imprisonment, in 1962, for defacing highbrow literary works they stole from the local library (Halliwell decorated the walls of their bedsit with collages torn from the book’s pages), Joe developed a new creative energy, which set him apart from Halliwell. As Orton’s agent Peggy Ramsey (a playful Vanessa Redgrave) put it, “Halliwell became the first wife”, being discarded after the success of the ‘husband’.

Some scenes are set in Orton’s home in Leicester, where we meet his sister (and executor) Leonie (Barber) and mother Elsie (Walters in an early caricature). Again, it is surprising, that the ambience of Orton’s family home is not that much different that of the couple’s flat in Noel Street, Islington. And the meetings between Ramsey and John Lahr (Shawn), are more gossiping sessions than literary discourse. When Ramsey gains access to the flat after the murder/suicide, she steals Orton’s diary and Halliwell’s final note: “If you read this, all will be explained. P.S. Especially the latter part”. Even after the gruesome find, Ramsey acts with an egoistical meanness, which is symptomatic of many of the film’s characters.

Oldman is superb as the cocky Orton, who, after all the repression of provincial Leicester, is hell bent on enjoying himself in London. Not to demean Leicester, which has spawned many a talent: Richard and David Attenborough; Michael Kitchen; Graham Chapman; Bill Maynard; Kate O’Mara; Una Stubbs; Julian Barnes, Sue Townsend and Frears himself, to name a few). Whilst aware of Halliwell’s deteriorating mental health, Orton does not see the danger signs: whilst on holiday in Morocco, Halliwell violently destroys Orton’s typewriter. Orton, as narcissistic as Halliwell, seems to get younger during the narrative, whilst Halliwell succumbs to early mid-life depression. Molina’s terrific Halliwell cannot believe that life is slipping through his fingers: he is literally shrinking as a personality, whilst Orton grows into a public figure, even meeting Paul McCartney and writing a film script about the Beatles.

The ending is tragic, but somehow logical: Halliwell feels his life is being diminished by Orton – who is also demeaning his sexually, he cannot bear the reminder of his own failure – in contrast to Orton’s success – neither can be live with the fact that he killed his ‘other half’. Frears’ direction is absorbing, capturing the sadness of a tragic love story and well as the caustic humour the two enjoyed until things went wrong. AS

ON RELEASE COURTESY OF PARK CIRCUS FROM AUGUST 5 2017

Severina (2017) | Locarno Film Festival 2017

Dir/Writer: Felipe Hirsch | Cast: Carla Quevedo, Alfredo Castro, Daniel Hendler | Drama | Brazil | 100′

This conventional but stylish drama from Brazilian auteur Felipe Hirsch is a love letter to literature and reading in general. The story unfolds an old part of Buenos Aires or maybe Montevideo, where a man (Daniel Hendler) runs a vintage bookshop with many rare first editions. It also provides a meeting point for literary lovers to engage in the occasional relaxed soirée. The business runs smoothly and each day he opens shop but only appears to have one tentative customer in the shape of Ana (the coltish Carla Quevedo) who browses the dusty shelves teasingly but never buys. As the man develops a fascination for this young bohemian beauty who lives with her father in a nearby pensione – or so she says – and it soon emerges that her loose mannish clothing enables her penchant for cleptomania, as gradually his books disappear, as his obsession for her increases and an affair eventually develops.

SEVERINA is a delicately sensual affair which wafts enigmatically between reality and mystery until the two interweave and gradually become indistiguishable. A paean to romantic love as much as a celebration of wine-fuelled literary conversation and intellectual debate, SEVERINA recalls the languor of long afternoons and late nights spent reading in companionable silence.

The Brazilian filmmaker bases his drowsy drama on Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s book of the same name and is dedicated to the sheer pleasure of reading. But he keeps his narrative loose and enigmatic. Quevado gives a stunning performance as the seductive but manipulative minx who have the bookseller in her thrall as she comes and goes elusively claiming to live with her father – who could also be her lover – or even both, played by a louche Alfredo Castro in seedy ‘foreign correspondent’ mode. The tone turns more unsettling when he is taken seriously ill throwing the lovers together in the dusty rooms of the bookshop, as the bookseller is drawn inexorably under Ana’s spell in the sinister finale of this persuasive and intriguing Noirish drama. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2-12 AUGUST

Madame Hyde (2017) | Locarno Film Festival 2017

Dir/Writer: Serge Bozon | Cast: Isabelle Huppert, José Garcia, Romain Duris | France | Drama | 95′

Isabelle Huppert joins Serge Bozon for their second quirky arthouse collaboration in this French female take on Robert Louis Stevenson’s legendary novel Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In a gesture to French literature, the film is set in Lyon’s ‘Arthur Rimbaud’ Secondary School where Huppert plays Marie Géguil an unpopular physics teacher unable to inspire or control her rowdy bunch of mixed race pupils.

Serge Bozon has his admirers but his films are an acquired taste outside France and MADAME HYDE is no exception. It shares the same offbeat brand of humour as TIP TOP (2013) which won a special mention at Cannes that year. He also works as a writer and had a small part in Mathieu’s Amalric’s stylish thriller The Blue Room. MADAME HYDE works on two levels: as a surreal fantasy thriller, and an inspirational drama about encouraging kids to rise above their difficulties and find their vocational “beacon” in life, as Huppert Géquil does here. As such this is a worthwhile but often awkward piece of filmmaking that eventually makes it through largely due to Huppert’s game portrayal as the soon to be transformed Mrs Hyde (Géquil/Jekyll) and Romain Duris’ tourette-like comedy turn as the Head Master. There is also support from Jose Garcia as Madame’s rather dense but endearing ‘house husband’ and Malik, a tricky pupil.

And while Madame G starts off as a cowed and fearful figure she herself eventually finds her own mojo’when she becomes a ‘flaming beacon’ after lightening strikes her portacabin laboratory and transforms her into a conduit for change, for everyone concerned. She develops the power of electrical ignition simply through her touch, as the charge sparks visibly through her veins. Although these powers are not all good: the next door neighbours pair of alsatians sadly perish as does a disruptive truant. But for the most part this eerie change of life is for the better – and is not due to the menopause, as her obsequious husband suggests.

Apart from this rather sensational visual trick, Madame’s confidence soars enabling her to engage with her pupils in a special project of building a Faraday cage. She also bonds with a difficult disable pupil Malik (Adda Senani) helping him to develop his interest in physics.

On paper Madame Hyde has some really inventive and worthwhile ideas but the actual film never flows smoothly and there are too many longueurs where the action feel laboured and awkward although Huppert is particularly convincing in her role. Malik also creates an authentic portrait of a young guy struggling to find his feet in life, in more ways than one. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2-12 AUGUST 2017

A Skin So Soft | Ta peau si Lisse | Locarno Film Festival 2017

Dir: Denis Côté | Doc | Canada | 93′

Montreal is the setting for this persuasive arthouse documentary having us believe that extreme body-building is a living art form to be admired, and revered even. It explores the muscle-flexing, grunt-ridden moments dedicated to the practice of corpulent honing for six masculine machos: a personal trainer, a wrestler and four bodybuilders. They are the gladiators of our contemporary civilisation.

Canadian filmmaker Denis Côté is well known for his rhythmic, eclectic documentaries: the first Carcasses explored a ‘car cemetery’; his meditation on animals Bestiaire followed and Joy of Man’s Desiring examined the comforting cycle of work routine. Here at Locarno Denis Côté has won awards for his dramas Curling (2010) and All That She Wants (2008). A SKIN SO SOFT is his hopeful for this year’s Golden Leopard and shows his genuine almost respectful fascination for a subject that many could regard with disdain or even abhorrence. The film moves with Jaguar-like stealth over the bulbous bodies almost luxuriating in the rippling muscles and satin-like skin of the men who work tirelessly to service their physiques.

First up is the largest of the bunch of gentle brutes who has not only developed his physique but also grown his facial hair to Samsonesque proportions. The camera caresses its ebony rich lustre moving down slowly over his pumped up body that requires a special diet and strict beauty routine. The next man is younger and less developed but again devotes a quasi religious dedication to his physical development. All give little quarter to improving their conversational skills, a fact that must depress and bore their womenfolk who treat them with patience and tolerance.

These are clearly self-regarding types who take their exercise regimen seriously but there is also strangely something rather vulnerable about the way this long-suffering and stoical attention to their bodies makes them seem less powerful emotionally. If there is an opposite of anthropomorphism, this is it. One trainer has a more humorous take on proceedings, bemoaning the less than perfect symmetry of his body. And there is a wonderful scene where these scantily clad beefed-up bodies romp riotously, desporting themselves ‘en plein air’ across a field of cows. With its Kraftwerk style soundtrack A SKIN SO SOFT is magnificent stuff and another truly unique creation from the maverick Canadian director. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2-12 AUGUST 2017

Let the Corpses Tan | Laissez Bronzer les Cadavres |Locarno Film Festival 2017

Dir: Helene Cattet, Bruno Forzani | Cast: Elina Lowensohn, Marc Barbe, Stephane Ferrara, Bernie Bonvoisin, Michelangelo Marchese, Herve Sogne | Thriller | 92′ | French/Belgian

Stylishly retro in the same way as their imaginatively entitled first feature The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears, Let the Corpses Tan (Laissez bronzer les cadavres), is the latest edgy thriller from Belgium auteurs Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani, adapted from Jean-Pierre Bastid’s noted novel melding thriller with social and political critique. While Strange Colour was are intricately Art Nouveau, Corpses pays hommage to Sergio Leone’s florid close-up/long shot style of filmmaking.

Corpses’s storyline also brings to mind a racier, more vibrant (thanks to Manu Dacosse’s vivid visuals), frenzied version of Cul de Sac with a stash of gold and shoot-outs all thrown in. Well that’s the way it starts off, at least. In craggy Corsica a raddled writer (Bernier) is lazing away his days in secluded sun-drenched splendour with his loopy lover Luce (the superb Elina Lowensohn). But their idyll is interrupted when some vague acquaintances arrive hoping to conceal their stolen booty in this remote spot. But the local cops (Herve Sogne, Dominique Troyes) are on their tail and promptly arrive on the scene before crims Rhino (Stephane Ferrara) and his gang have a chance to smooth things over. And soon Bernier’s wife (Dorylia Calmel) and son (Bamba Forzani Ndiaye) also join the impromptu party, on spec.

And once the action starts all thoughts of Cul de Sac’s intricate psychodrama and Bastid’s social commentary are literally blown away by an all out stylistic gun battle which blazes non-stop unremittingly – or so it seems – for the rest of thriller. And whilst there’s a welcome Sergio Leone style twang to the proceedings – which whips you back to the ’60s with slices of Ennio Morricone and the popular Italian singer Nico Fidenco (Su nel cielo) thrown in, the hollowness echoes after the twanging shots die out.

LET THE CORPSES TAN is fabulous fun while it lasts but sadly fades from the memory (not the eardrums) once it’s over. That said, it’s just the thing for a sizzling summer night in Locarno – or anywhere else, for that matter!. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2-12 AUGUST 2017

Gemini (2017) | Locarno Film Festival 2017

Dir: Aaron Katz | Cast: Lola Kirke, Zoe Kravitz, John Cho, Ricki Lake | US | Drama | 93′

This low-budget neo-Noir is a US indie version of Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper and Clouds of Sils Maria exploring the links between female friendship and co-dependence, and the nature of celebrity through the complex relationship of a Hollywood starlet and her PA, who are actually closer that they would like to admit.

Katz is best known for his ‘mumblecore’ period but GEMINI, made on a shoestring budget in down LA, sees a move mystery drama in this female-centric affair which may appeal to arthouse audiences with its enigmatic storytelling and washed out ’80s B-movie’ visual style, similar to that of Kelly Reichardt.

Jill LeBeau (Lola Kirke) is the personal assistant in question who becomes a suspect and investigator in the ‘murder’ of her stressed out boss Heather (Zoe Kravitz), who has split from her lightweight boyfriend Devin (Reeve Carney) who was covertly two-timing her with model Tracy (Greta Lee). Heather has recently been a petulant figure for all concerned and there’s consequently a string of a characters from her côterie who could have perpetrated the crime.

Jill emerges the more intelligent and convincing of the professional partnership, further highlighting the dubious nature of celebrity status, but loyal as she is to her boss, she also has her own integrity to safeguard and cannot risk being consumed by Heather’s neediness and narcissistic tendencies.

The film moves at a snail’s pace but the hook is Katz’ dryly witty script that provides some amusing moments. GEMINI is a drama that promises much more than it eventually delivers but will absorb you for its meagre running time with strong performances from Kirke and John Cho’s appealing LA detective. MT

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2-10 AUGUST 2017

A Ghost Story (2017) | Sundance London 2017

Dir. David Lowery; Cast: Rooney Mara, Casey Affleck; USA 2017, 87 min.

David Lowery is re-united with Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck of Ain’t Those Bodies Saints fame for this patchwork piece of paranormal fantasy that attempts a nostalgic revival of the time when ghost stories were free of today’s sensational stunts.

It opens with a Virginia Wolf quote “Whatever hours you wake, there was a door closing”, Mara and Affleck play an unnamed couple debating moving house: she is keen to get away from their semi-rural Texas backwater to somewhere less remote. But the sudden death of her songwriter husband, in a car accident, throws the proceedings into a long goodbye. After Mara has viewed the body in the hospital morgue, Affleck’s body suddenly rises from the gurney, and dressed in a white sheet with cut-outs for the eyes, leaves the hospital and observes her covertly from afar. The first signs of paranormal activity occur when she angers his ghoul by bringing another man back home. Later, when Mara has left the house to a Spanish family, the ghastly spirit makes plates fly and demolishes a table. From a neighbouring house, another ghost waves to Affleck, before the house falls into a state of disrepair and is torn down. We go through a future period when Affleck watches the urbanisation of the rural area, before the story turns back to the first settlers in the 19th century.

There are more questions than answers here, and whilst DoPGregory Crewdson creates an impressively spooky and atmospheric feel, shooting in an unusual format of 1.33:1, with round edges, like in old home movies, the overall impression is underwhelming. This ghost story is bewildering, rather than scary, and sometimes overstays its welcome with too many longuers in the froideur: a poor of version of Park Chan-wook masterpieces. AS

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE from 11 AUGUST | 2017

Winter Brothers (2017) | Locarno Film Festival 2017

Dir: Hlynur Pálmason | Cast: Simon Sears, Elliott Crosset Hove, Drama | Iceland/Den | 89′

There’s a great deal to admire in Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason’s stunning debut Winter Brothers (Vinterbrodre). Visually and thematically this is a intense portrait of fraught and uneasy brotherhood, but the narrative is too slim and meandering to really underpin this dour psychodrama.

Most of the action takes place in the dimly lit caverns of a remote limestone mine in Denmark where the brothers in question Emil (Elliott Crosset Hove) and Johan (Simon Sears) work together, their gruff conversations are often drowned out by the thudding industrial turmoil around them. Emil is the less appealing of the two and given to pinching anything he can lay his hands on, he also peddles his home brew to his fellow-workers. Johan is the more placid and older brother of the pair but clearly there is an uneasy competitive streak that threatens to erupt at any moment, and it does during one striking scene in this tough character driven piece with its occasional flinty sparks of humour.

It soon transpires that Emil’s liquor is a lethal concoction and potentially fatal for one of his workmates, turning the community against him. And as he emerges a victim, we ironically start to feel more sympathy for his mournful predicament as the lonely outsider, largely due to Crosset Ove’s skilful performance. As Emil, he also shines in the sequences where his boss (Lars Mikkelsen) brings him to heel and in his fascination for armed combat and training videos that leads him to obtaining an automatic rifle.

DoP Maria Von Hausswolff’s evokes the vastness of the wild snowbound Northern scenery to great effect, the only brightness coming from the miners’ helmets as they punctuate the bleak hell-hole of the mine. WINTER BROTHERS is a decent first feature showing a director mastering his craft and hopefully developing a stronger narrative in his next title. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL | 2-12 AUGUST 2017

Jacques Tourneur: Fantasy filmmaker | Locarno Film Festival 2017

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL is celebrating its 70th Anniversary with a feline, canine and fantasy theme leading up to the the real mystery – who will win the coveted GOLDEN LEOPARD? There’s a surreal feel to this special edition with Isabelle Huppert struck by lightening in MADAME HYDE, a man who turns into a dog in Vanessa Paradis’ latest film CHIEN and of course the fabulous JACQUES TOURNEUR retrospective with a chance to see CAT PEOPLE (1942); THE LEOPARD MAN and I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1943) in the Grand Piazza which seats 8,000 cinema-goers – Europe’s largest screening venue.

While Jacques Tourneur clearly had a feel for the surreal and a penchant for the macabre, he was not very fond of his four French features, shot between 1931 and 1934: “All those films are mixed up with each other in my mind. They resemble each other so much! It was always the same formula: musical, happy, young.” This is certainly true for Tout Ça Ne Vaut pas l’Amour; Pour Être Aimé and Toto but Les Filles de la Concierge (1934) is a brilliant character milieu study of a concierge. Madame Leclercq is the titular heroine who wants the best for her three daughters, whatever the circumstances. She even ‘rents’ one, Ginettte, to a wealthy suitor, but the ‘happy end’ justifies her method. Les Filles must have had some impact on Tourneur because, thirty years later, he expressed the desire to remake the film: “One could make a marvellous film out of it. People don’t make enough films about concierges, they’re an amazing group.” Indeed, where would be without Carlton, Your Doorman, the legendary concierge in TV hit Rhoda?.

In 1934 Jacques Tourneur returned to Hollywood to work as a Second Unit director at MGM, where he also directed twenty short films. The most interesting of the shorts are Romance of Radium (1937), where the director takes us on a forty-year journey through the discovery process of what would become nuclear power, in just ten minutes! Part historical drama, impersonal chronicle and staged ‘docu-drama’, Romance is very dense; the treatment of the source as something “outside” of our world – it is clearly an early version of Experiment Perilous. What do You Think (1937) is a haunted house mystery, with the plot, structured like a Chinese mystery box, stretching out into the past, and the studios of Hollywood. It is certainly as obsessive as many of Tourneur’s features.

THEY ALL COME OUT (1939), Tourneur’s first feature in Hollywood, was first planned as a two-reel segment for a “Crime does not Pay” series of short films. It follows rather conventional lines (Bank heist and prison rehab), and, is visually satisfying, thanks to a very mobile camera, but its structure suffers from the late embellishment of the narrative.

Tourneur’s next projects for MGM were two Nick Carter features, MASTER DETECTIVE (1939) and PHANTOM RIDERS (1940). As Chris Fujiwara (who will present the retro) puts it: “Master Detective” is quicker and more immediately striking, but Phantom Riders has more in common visually with Tourneur’s later films. If MASTER DETECTIVE looks back to Tourneur’s past with its skilful interweaving of documentary and fiction, PHANTOM RIDERS anticipates the future with its sustaining of mood through rich décor and careful lighting; its low-budget exoticism; and its hint of thwarted sexuality”. But Tourneur really hated DOCTORS DON’T TELL (1941): “I detest this film, it is my worst”. All one can add, is that Doctors is really the most ‘un-Tourneresque’ feature of his career: it is bad, even for a routine film, its banality stupefying.

So after dabbling in the art of filmmaking in the 1930s, Jacques Tourneur’s most important features were to follow during the 1940s. In 1942, Val Lewton, who worked with Tourneur on the Second Unit for A Tale of Two Cities (1935), joined RKO as the new head for B-Horror films. His first project was CAT PEOPLE (1942) directed by Tourneur; the duo would go on to create I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE and THE LEOPARD MAN in 1943 for RKO, before the studio made them go their separate ways with Tourneur commenting: “We were making so much money together that the studio said, we’ll make twice as much money, if we separate them”.

I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1943) went into production just two months after CAT PEOPLE, before the surprisingly successful release of Tourneur’s first RKO feature. Trying to decribe Zombie is not an easy task because Tourneur blurred the border between reality and phantasy in his narrative. Betsy Connell (Frances Dee), a Canadian nurse, takes care of Jessica (Christine Gordon) on the West Indian island of St. Sebastian. Jessica is married to the sugar planter Paul Holland (Tom Conway). She falls in love with Paul’s half-brother Wesley (James Ellison). After a scene with her husband, she falls into a trauma, and after several attempts of ‘curing’ her, Mrs. Rand (Edith Barnett), Paul and Wesley’s mother confesses that she has cast a voodoo spell on Jessica for bringing the family into disrepute. Wesley finally kills Jessica, to set her free. Tourneur preferred Zombie to Cat People, and often cited it as his favourite film. Zombie is Tourneur’s purest film when it comes to cinematic poetry, combining sounds and images into a “power of suggestion”, enhanced by the film’s narrative, which is full of enigma and contradiction, eluding any attempt to interpret it in a linear way. Zombie “is a sustained exercise in uncompromising ambiguity. Perfecting the formula that Lewton and Tourneur had developed in Cat People, the film carries its predecessor’s elliptical, oblique narrative procedures to astonishing extremes. The dialogue is almost nothing but a commentary on past events, obsessively revisiting itself, finally giving up the struggle and surrendering to a mute acceptance of the inexplicable. We watch the slow, atmospheric, lovingly detailed scenes with delight and fascination, realising at the end, that we have seen nothing but the traces of a conflict decided in advance.” (Chris Fujiwara).

THE LEOPARD MAN (1943) is seen, perhaps wrongly, as the weakest of the Lewton/Tourneur collaborations. Based on the novel by Cornel Woolrich (Rear Window), The Leopard Man is set in the nightclub milieu of New Mexico, where club owner Dennis O’Keefe (Jerry Manning) finds a leopard for his girl friend Kiki (Jean Brooks) to perform on the stage of his club. Kiki’s jealous competitor, Clo-clo (Margo), sets the leopard free and becomes one of his – presumed – three victims. Nevertheless, O’Keefe and Kiki suspect, that the leopard is only used by the real murderer to cover his tracks. The title is misleading, The Leopard Man is not about a man who becomes a leopard, but a man who just pretends to be one. Furthermore, the narrative reveals that the three murders are not committed by one person – against the un-written law of the genre. And on top of it all, the killer’s identity is revealed at the very beginning. But in spite of this, The Leopard Man appears to be ahead of its time: the stalking of women and their violent death is not only associated with Hitchcock and his epigone Brian de Palma, but also with the Italian cult directors Mario Bava and Dario Argento. And to go a step further, “it also anticipates Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, in making the sight of a victim’s fear the factor that fascinates the killer and compels him to kill”. Tourneur “attributed the commercial success of his films with Lewton to war psychosis. In war time people want to be frightened.” Leopard Man has the clearest connection to war of the trio, Edmund Bansak comments that “the film is a courageous essay in the random nature of death. War time audience may not have liked The Leopard Man’s downbeat message – that the young and innocent also die, but it was an important one for them to grasp”. Fujiwara calls The Leopard Man ”a pivotal work in the careers of both Tourneur and Lewton. Pushing to extremes the experiment with narrative ambiguity undertaken in Cat People and Zombie, this radical unusual film has its own precise, inexhaustible poetry.”

FROM OUT OF THE PAST (1947) reunites Tourneur with producer Warren Duff, (Experiment Perilous) and DoP Nicholas Musuraka (Cat People). Based on the novel Build My Gallows High by Daniel Mainwaring, Tourneur claimed, “that he participated very closely in the writing of the script. I made big changes, with the agreement of the
writer, of course”. The complex and elliptic narrative is centred around Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum), who runs a gas station in a small town in California. In flashbacks we learn that Jeff was a New York based detective, who was asked by the professional gambler Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) to find his mistress Kathie (Jane Greer), who had embezzled a huge sum from him. Bailey finds Kathie in Mexico, and falls in love with her. The couple hides, but Bailey’s partner Jack Fisher (Steve Brodie) finds the couple, but is shot by Kathie, who disappears afterwards. Bailey, now owner of the gas station, is visited by a member of Sterling’s gang: Sterling has a new job for him, retrieving incriminating taxation forms from his accountant in San Francisco. Kathie is living again with Sterling, and Bailey finds soon out that he is used as the sacrificial lamb. After the murder of the accountant, Kathie shoots Sterling and escapes with Bailey – not knowing that he has phoned the police to tell them their escape route. Of the major features of Noir visual style, as identified by J.A. Place and L.S. Peterson in “Some Visual motifs of Film Noir”, Out of the Past exhibits several: low-key lighting; compositions that alternate light and dark areas; the use of objects as framing devices within the frame. All these elements are however, consistent features of Tourneur’s work outside the Noir genre. They are present to some degrees in Tourneur’s shorts and in all ten American features that Tourneur directed before Out of the Past, including the Technicolor Western Canyon Passage. Fujiwara talks about “the endlessly renewable source of cinematic fascination of Out of the Past”, even though Tourneur himself only belatedly – after the release of the film in France, when he had returned in the late 1960s to his country of birth – acknowledged it as one of his major works, calling it “along with I walked with A Zombie and Night of the Demon, his poetic manifesto.”

BERLIN EXPRESS (1948) was – regarding the topic – a one-off in Tourneur’s work, since the film is set mainly in contemporary post-war Berlin, the divided capital of Germany. Shooting in post-war Germany was like an adventure, the footage had to be sent back to Hollywood for processing. Billy Wilder had to wait for Berlin Express to finish, before starting shooting A Foreign Affair, because film equipment was a scarce commodity. The plot is, as often with Tourneur, secondary: Dr. Heinrich Bernhardt (Paul Lucas) a famous resistance fighter, is travelling from Paris to Frankfurt under an alias. During the journey, an agent, posing as Bernhardt, is killed by an explosion. In Frankfurt, Bernhardt is kidnapped by members of a Neo-Nazi movement. Four members on the train, each representing the four powers who rule Berlin, try to locate Bernhardt, after his secretary Lucienne Mirbeau (Merle Oberon) explains the situation to them. But, as it turns out the Frenchman Perrot is actually Holtzman, the leader of the Nazi underground. He is killed after another unsuccessful attempt on Bernhardt’s life. Lucien Ballard, the DoP was married to Merle Oberon, but his stylish photography does not favour his wife more than the Hollywood star. Berlin Express is actually three films in one: the first is a melodrama, where the Nazis try to kill Bernhardt. The second part is a documentary on Germany’s destruction. The third part is a typical Tourneur study of doubt, terror and impossibility.

Since displacement is a central part of all Tourneur films, post-war Germany was an ideal setting. Michael Henry comments that Berlin Express “was a characteristic Tourneurian work, distilling the feeling of insecurity in which his creatures find themselves plunged as soon as they have been uprooted, placed out of their element, literally side-tracked”. But in spite of the political undertone and the ideological certainty of the protagonists, Tourneur finds ambivalence. This points towards his two 1950s films, Appointment in Honduras and The Fearmakers, both have ideological topics, but are treated with the same ambiguity and doubt as all of Tourneur’s work.

Producer/writer Philip Dunne was assigned to write the script and produce WAY OF A GAUCHO for 20th Century Fox, so that the company could recoup some of the money the Peron government had frozen in Argentina. In March 1951 Dunne informed Fox boss Darryl F. Zanuck that the proposed director, Henry King would not be available, due to his wife’s illness. Dunne goes on: “The man I want to suggest for director is Jacques Tourneur. I am absolutely delighted with the job he is doing with Anne of the Indies. In my opinion, he is a much better director than many who have made big reputations for themselves and draw down huge salaries. He is quick, sure and economical and he is getting flawless performances from his cast.”

Zanuck agreed, and in May 1951 Tourneur arrived in Argentina. Dunne reported a month later to Zanuck: “that the Argentine government’s interest tends to become a little overwhelming. They want to have a hand in every phase of our production. Government officials were very insistent on having big stars in the picture. No reasonable government would behave in this way, but we must remember that we are dealing with incredibly stupid, provincial people”. Whilst Tourneur and Dunne were touring the country for locations, they where invariably followed by spies. Shooting under these circumstances proved difficult. There are rumours that Tourneur drank too much, but in the absence of testimony from Dunne or Tourneur, this cannot be proven. But what is true, is that Dunne and Zanuck did not employ Tourneur to add some scenes to make the central character, Martin Penalosa, more heroic. The film is set at the end of 19th century in Argentina, where Martin Penalosa is jailed for killing a man in a duel. Instead of prison he chooses the army, but does not like the harsh treatment at the hands of Major Salinas (Richard Boone). He saves Teresa Chavez (Gene Tierney), a noblewoman, from the Indians. Martin again disappears under pressure from Salinas, and leads a band of gauchos in resistance against Salinas soldiers. Martin and Teresa fall in love, and the former gives himself up to Salinas, for the sake of his wife and unborn child. It’s easy to see why this straightforward Hollywood adventure would not play to Tourneur’s strength. There is no ambivalence, white is white, and black is black. WAY OF A GAUCHO is beautifully shot, if nothing else. But it marked the decline of Tourneur in Hollywood and he would never been employed by Fox again.

THE FEARMAKERS (1958) is perhaps Tourneur’s last respectable feature before his final decline. Darwin Taylor’s novel The Fearmakers was published in 1945. Allen Eaton (Dana Andrews) returns from a Chinese POW camp after the Korean War. Eaton returns to his Washington PT office to learn that his partner Clark Baker has died under mysterious circumstances, after having sold the business to Jim McGinnis (Dick Foran). Meeting with his friend Senator Walder (Roy Gordon), Eaton is informed, that McGinnis is a suspected foreign agent (meaning he is a Communist). Eaton decides to get a job with McGinnis, and soon finds out he has forged some poll numbers for lobbyist Fred Fletcher. Eaton gains access to the poll material, and with the help of McGinnis’ secretary Lorraine (Marile Earle), proves McGinnis’ guilt. But McGinnid, with the help of his associates, attempts to kidnap and kill Eaton and Lorraine, who overpowers them and despatch McGinnis to the police. Whilst Tourneur thought, “that the film was a failure”, he certainly brings out the contradictions in the plot, featuring a McCarthy-esque Senate Committee for the defence of democracy. Eaton is a typical Tourneur hero, his vulnerability recalls the main protagonists in Nightfall and Easy Living. His recurrent headaches are the psychosomatic manifestations of his doubts. There are moments when we wonder if Eaton is fantasising part of the action. When McGinnis calls him a “brainwashed psycho”, we are again reminded of the thin ice Eaton is walking on, but the film never really challenges his worldview. Eaton is like all true Tourneur heroes – unable to leave reality, which follows him into his dreams: When the camera pans from a window across a dark room and hovers over Eaton’s bed, lit dimly with mottled shadows, we see his anguish in his haunted features. Tourneur suffused his characters with his own anxieties. AS

JACQUES TOURNEUR RETRO | LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2-10 AUGUST ’17

Jacques Tourneur Retrospective | Locarno Film Festival 2017

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL honours the legendary French director JACQUES TOURNEUR (1904-1977) in celebration of its 70th Anniversary this year, taking place in the town’s splendid GranRex Cinema.

Jacques Tourneur (1904-1977) is best known today for a handful of films, all shot between 1942 and 1948: CAT PEOPLE; I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, THE LEOPARD MAN; OUT OF THE PAST and BERLIN EXPRESS. Tourneur was comfortable working in various genres, from Western to Fantasy-horror, and his feature film oeuvre of thirty-three titles (and notable TV work, including a famous Twilight episode) – are all included in this astonishing retrospective. Martin Scorsese is a champion of his much neglected and lesser know features.

At the time of his birth in Paris 1904, Jacques Tourneur’s father – and soon to be filmmaker Maurice (1876-1961) – was working as an artist in a studio near the Luxemburg Gardens. It was a place of horror for the four-year-old Jacques whose early memories include searching desperately for his Christmas presents in “a very long corridor, completely black, and I could make out in the distance, the white spots, that were my presents. I walked forward all alone, torn between the desire for the toys and a fear that almost made me faint, especially as the toys in their packages started to take on a phantom-like appearance”. When Jacques was naughty his unaffectionate parents would put him in a cupboard where the family’s maid was ordered to shake a bowler hat with the words: “It’s the Thunderman!. Jacques later claimed: “this is the source for my obsession to suddenly introduce inexplicable things into s shot, like the hand on the banisters in NIGHT OF THE DEMON, which disappears in the reverse shot”.

Jacques went to the Lycées Montaigne and Lakanal in Paris, before joining his father in New York in 1914. His father still continued to make life difficult for him: “I was the only child to wear suspenders. So the other children spent their time pulling on my suspenders very hard, in order to let them snap into my back. I didn’t dare wear them any more, and walked around holding up my trousers. I think, that was what led me to put in my films comic touches in a dramatic moment, to better highlight the dramatic side: the magician disguised as a clown in NIGHT OF THE DEMON. It’s fascinating to mix fear and the ridiculous, as in the death of the clown in BERLIN EXPRESS”.

Whilst in High School, Jacques started to work as an extra in films and in 1924 joined his father on Never the Twain Shall Meet (1925) and as a script clerk on Tahiti (1925). Jacques was twenty-one when Maurice returned to Europe after the disaster of The Mysterious Island (1929). The farewell was, not surprisingly, frosty: “ He gave me a hundred Dollar bill, saying: “Now get by’”. Jacques worked as a stock player, but his career went into the doldrums. After being arrested for drunkenness (heralding his lifelong struggle with alcoholism), Jacques re-joined his father in Berlin, where in 1929 Maurice was directing Marlene Dietrich in Grischa the Cook. It was in the German capital that Jacques met his wife Marguerite Christiane Virideau; the couple stayed together until Jacques’ death in 1977. Between 1930 and 1934 Jacques was editor and assistant director for all his father’s films, it what was mostly a difficult relationship. And whilst Maurice was working on his second French film as director, he turned to Jacques, and the ensemble cast including Charles Vanel with the words: “I saw the cut of my current film, and it’s the first time a film of mine has been well-edited”. AS

JACQUES TOURNEUR RETROSPECTIVE | LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2017

Williams (2017)

Dir.: Morgan Matthews; Drama/Documentary with Emily Bevan, Jenny Funnel; UK 2017, 109 min.

Morgan Matthews offers up a documentary portrait of Formula One Boss Frank Williams that focuses on his family dynamics – his motor racing takes a (welcome) backseat, giving the film broader appeal. Matthews who also works as co-DoP and executive producer, neatly describes the drama behind the scenes of this dazzling but dangerous sport which has made fortunes for a few despite costing many their lives.

The glamour of the racetrack aside, there is nothing remotely glamorous about the life of Sir Frank Williams (*1942), reduced to paraplegia since his crash in France in 1986. He started his Williams team in the Formula One circus in 1966, but for many years it was the saying went round: “if you want to ruin your career as a driver, join Williams”.

That’s all changed since Patrick Head joined the team as a co-owner in 1977, and led it as Chief Engineer for 27 years to its greatest triumphs, starting with the first Grand Prix win in 1979 at Silverstone. Between 1980 and 1997, seven drivers won the World Championship for Williams, and the team won nine Constructor Championships in the same period. Jackie Stewart and Nigel Mansell, among other drivers, pay tribute to their boss admitting openly to the self-centred, fanatical approach of the company’s founder.

Frank Williams met Virginia ‘Ginny’ Berry first in 1967. It might have been love at first sight, but Virginia’s wedding was already planned, and her family background prohibited a cancellation. Besides, Frank was ‘from the wrong side of the tracks’ – even as a Williams boss in the early decade, he conducted business from a phone box, and didn’t pay his phone bill. Virginia eventually married Frank in 1974 and it was partly with her money, that he built his company, which is now worth over a hundred million.

After his accident in the south of France (Frank, an enthusiastic runner, wanted to catch a plane for a fun run in London the next day), it was Virginia, who stepped in and helped him survive after the doctors in France (and later in London) had given up on him. In 1991 Virginia wrote an autobiography “A Different Kind of Life” with Pamela Cockerill, which has been dramatised with Emily Bevan playing Virginia and Jenny Funnel the interviewing writer.

All this told more or less from the perspective of the couple’s daughter Claire (*1976), who is now the Deputy Team Principal of Williams, having replaced her father on the board of the company as the family’s representative. This has put her oldest brother’s nose out of joint, pottering around in the company’s Heritage Museum, he comments: “Claire wouldn’t know that these rooms exist”. Claire’s view is that he can’t understand that “a girl, and not the oldest son, is in charge”. But progress to get through to her father (“he is only interested in today and tomorrow, never the past”), is limited. She asks him to read her mother’s book, but Frank declines, “I will read it properly before my death”. Claire reads some passages to him, she is crying, but Frank is unmoved, his eyes are cold.

Far from being a hagiography of Frank Williams or the motor sport, Matthew creates a chapter of British gender history: sad and illuminating at the same time. The last word should be with Claire “My mother would have been a great Deputy Team Principal”. There is a photo of Virginia Williams, who died of cancer in 2013, holding up a trophy while standing in for the still-recovering Frank, steering the team to victory. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 4 JULY 2017 NATIONWIDE

Cat People (1942 | Locarno Film Festival 2017

Dir: Jacques Torneur | Cast: Simone Simon, Tom Conway, Kent Smith, Jane Randolph | 73min | Fantasy | US

Paris-born Jacques Torneur arrived in Hollywood with his director father Maurice who taught him how to script and edit. Hired by RKO horror baron Val Lewton, he went on to make a series of highly artistic B movies that played with psychological innuendo – the first of which was box office hit CAT PEOPLE in 1942 – before broadening his talents into other genres. French actress Simone Simon gives a friskily feline turn as a young Serbian wife who fears she is turning into a black panther. This atmospheric cult chiller is lusciously photographed in elegant black and white by Oscar nominee Nicholas Musuraca, and feels as spooky and suggestive to modern arthouse audiences as it did back in the day. MT

JACQUES TOURNEUR RETROSPECTIVE | LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2017

ALSO ON BLURAY | COURTESY OF CRITERION UK

Locarno Film Festival 2017

Known for its edgy and eclectic selection of international independent titles, LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL this year celebrates its 70th Anniversary in the town’s Piazza Grande in temperatures that often sizzle in the late 30s promising a scorching experience and adding a surreal touch to Carlo Chatrain’s inventive programming.

With Olivier Assayas heading the jury proceedings will be more exciting than ever at the lakeside extravaganza, which this year has a distinct fantasy flavour, mingling Hollywood classics with more

The 70th celebration kicks off with Noemie Lvovsky’s drama TOMORROW AND THEREAFTER, starring Mathieu Amalric. And Kevin Merz’ musical biopic tribute GOTTHARD – One Life, One Soul will close the jamboree on 12 August.

Other Piazza Grande titles include ATOMIC BLOND with Charlize Theron and James McAvoy; and WHAT HAPPENED TO MONDAY? starring Glenn Close, Noomi Rapace and Willem Dafoe.

The main competition includes Denis Cote’s TA PEAU SI LISSE; Bing Wang’s MRS FANG; Raul Ruiz’ LA TELENOVELA ERRANTE; Ben Russell’s mining film GOOD LUCK and Serge Bozon’s MADAME HYDE starring Isabelle Huppert and Romain Duris. Other buzzy titles include LUCKY starring Harry Dean Stanton and David Lynch; GOLIATH by Dominik Locher; and WAJIB by When I Saw You scripter Annemarie Jacir.

Stars from the independent film firmament attending this year include Mathieu Kassovitz, who has been awarded the 2017 Excellence Award; Adrien Brody, who will receive a Pardo d’Honore and Nastassja Kinski receiving a Lifetime Award. One of India’s most celebrated film stars Irrfan Khan will join Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani for their love story revenge drama THE SONG OF SCORPIONS, and veteran Fanny Ardant will attend with her new transgender-themed film LOLA PATER. Vanessa Paradis will also be on the Piazza Grande in Samuel Benchetrit’s comedy drama CHIEN about a man who becomes a submissive pet.

In a programme that features the latest European titles from Germany, Austria, Italy, Romania, Turkey, Slovenia and Belgium – not to mention Britain and the host country Switzerland – the side-bars are also promising some hidden gems, as was the case in this year’s Cannes 70th celebration. Of particular interest will be Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s follow-up to The Strange Colour of your Body’s Tears (2013): LAISSEZ BRONZER LES CADAVRES! a thriller which stars Elina Lowensohn.

In the SIGNS OF LIFE strand Radu Jude (Aferim!) will be showing his latest, a black&white historical documentary that explores Romania’s past through recently discovered photographs THE DEAD NATION. Bosnia Herzogovina’s Boris Mitic offers IN PRAISE OF NOTHING, a ‘feelgood’ documentary filmed worldwide by 100+ DoPs and narrated by Iggy Pop. Nelson Carlo del Los Santos Arias feature debut COCOTE is a drama from the Domenican Republic that examines religious cults that challenge the central character’s Christian beliefs. Brazil, Taiwan, Argentina, Columbia, Ukraine, Korea, India, the US and Canada will also be represented. In the CINEASTI DEL PRESENTE section, standouts include 3/4 from Sofia’s Last Ambulance director Ilian Metev; Pedro Cabeleira’s psychedelic drama VERAO DANADO set in a Lisbon steeped in summer torpor; DISTANT CONSTELLATION, Shevaun Mizrahi’s documentary that follows the eccentric inhabitants of a Turkish retirement home and SEVERINO, an obsessional love story from Brazilian director Felipe Hirsch and starring Alfredo Castro (No, The Club).

But probably most inviting of all is the extraordinary JACQUES TOURNEUR retrospective featuring over 20 of his films including some rare and lesser known titles. There are also retrospectives for this year’s awarded stars: Nastassja Kinski; Fanny Ardant, Matthieu Kossovitz and Adrien Brody/

COMPETITION LINE-UP

As Boas Maneiras | Good Manners | Brazil | Marco Dutra | 132′

Clara, a lonely nurse from the outskirts of São Paulo, is hired by mysterious and wealthy Ana as the nanny for her unborn child. The two women develop a strong bond, but a fateful night changes their plans.

Charleston | Romania | Andrei Cretulescu | 119′

A couple of weeks after the fatal car crash of his wife, Ioana, Alexandru is drunk and alone as he celebrates his 42th birthday. He receives an unexpected visit from Sebastian, a shy and younger man, who had been Ioana’s lover for the past five months. Sebastian wants Alexandru to help him overcome the despair caused by the woman’s death.

On The Seventh Day | Jim McKay | USA Spanish, English | 97′

A group of undocumented immigrants from Puebla live in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. They work long hours six days a week as bicycle-delivery guys, construction workers, dishwashers, deli workers, and cotton-candy vendors. On Sundays, they savor their day of rest on the soccer fields of Sunset Park. José, a bicycle delivery man, who is young and talented, hardworking and responsible, is the soccer team’s captain. When his team makes it to the finals, he and his teammates are thrilled, but his boss throws a wrench into the celebration when he tells him he must work exactly on the day of the final. José tries to reason with him and replace himself but all his efforts fail. If he doesn’t work on Sunday, his job and his future will be on the line.

Gemini | US | Aaron Katz | 93′

A heinous crime tests the complex relationship between a tenacious personal assistant and her boss, a Hollywood starlet. As the assistant travels across Los Angeles to unravel the mystery, she must deal with a determined policeman. At the same time, her understanding of friendship, truth and celebrity is deeply questioned.

The Asteroids | Italy | Germano Maccioni

An industrial, endless, alienating province. Once a florid one, now deeply marked by the economy crisis. A province made up of broad fields and abandoned warehouses. This is the universe in which Pietro and his friend Ivan, nineteen year olds in conflict with their family and with school, gravitate. In the background are a series of thefts in churches, carried out by the elusive “candelabra gang”, and a large asteroid looming above, monitored by the astronomy station in the area since it is about to pass very close to Earth. So close that a rather weird friend, obsessed with astronomy and philosophical issues, is certain it will plummet into the planet, wiping out mankind. And while the “end of the world” approaches, Ivan convinces Pietro to take part in one final theft.

Good Luck | Ben Russell | France/Germany | 143′ | B&W

Shot on Super16mm, Good Luck is a portrait of two mining communities operating on opposite sides of a hostile world: the state employees of a 400m-deep underground Serbian copper mine and the Maroon laborers of an illegal gold mining operation in the jungle tropics of Suriname.

Travelling Soap Opera | La Telenovela Errante | Chile | Raul Ruiz /Valeria Sarmiento | 80′

“The film revolves around the concept of soap opera. Its structure is based on the assumption that Chilean reality does not exist, but rather is an ensemble of soap operas. There are four audiovisual provinces, and the threat of war is felt among the factions. The political and economic problems are immersed in a fictional jelly divided into evening episodes. The entire Chilean reality is viewed from the point of view of the soap opera, which acts as a revealing filter of this same reality”. (Raúl Ruiz)

Laissez Bronzer les Cadavres | France/Italy/Belgium | Cattet / Forzino

The Mediterranean, summer: azure sea, sun beating down… and 250 kilos of gold stolen by Rhino and his gang who’ve found the ideal hideout in a deserted village, cordoned off from its surroundings by an artist suffering creative block. But when two cops turn up unexpectedly, this little paradise, formerly the site of orgies and wild happenings, will turn into a hallucinatory, brutal battlefield.

Lucky | US | John Carroll Lynch | 88′

Having outlived and outsmoked all his contemporaries who inhabited his off-the-map desert town, the fiercely independent Lucky, a 90-year-old atheist, finds himself at the precipice of life, thrust into a journey of self-exploration, leading towards the so-often unattainable enlightenment.

Madame Hyde | France/Belgium | Serge Bozon | 95′

Mrs. Géquil is an eccentric teacher despised by her colleagues and students. On a stormy night, she is struck by lightning and faints. When she wakes up, she feels different. Will she now be able to keep the powerful and dangerous Mrs. Hyde contained?

Mrs Fang | Doc | Bing Wang | China | 86′

Fang Xiuying was a farmer born in Huzhou, Fujian in 1948. She suffered from Alzheimer’s for the last eight years of her life. By 2015, her symptoms were already very advanced and her treatment in a convalescent home was ineffective, so it was discontinued in June 2016 and she returned home. The film follows her ordeal first in 2015, and then in 2016 during the last ten days of her life.

Quin Ting Zhi yan | Xu Bing | China/US | 81′

Each of us is captured on surveillance cameras, on average, 300 times a day. These all-seeing “eyes” observe Qing Ting too, a young woman, as she leaves the Buddhist temple where she has been training to become a nun. She returns to the secular world, where she takes a job in a highly mechanized dairy farm. There, Ke Fan, a technician, falls in love with her, breaks the law in an attempt to please her and is sent to jail. On his release, he can’t find Qing Ting and looks for her desperately until he figures out that she has reinvented herself as the online celebrity Xiao Xiao. Ke Fan decides to revamp himself.

Ta Peau si Lisse | Denis Cote | Canada | 94′

Jean-François, Ronald, Alexis, Cédric, Benoit and Maxim are gladiators of modern times. From the strongman to the top-class bodybuilder, to the veteran who has become a trainer, they all share the same definition and obsession with overcoming their limitations. They are waiting for the next competition, working hard in the gym and following extreme diets.

Winter Brothers |Denmark, Iceland |Danish English | 94′

Winter Brothers follows two brothers working during a cold winter, their routines, habits, rituals and a violent feud that erupts between them and another family.

Wajib | Annenarie Jacir | Arabic | 96′

Living in Nazareth, Abu Shadi is a divorced father and a school teacher in his mid-sixties. His daughter is getting married and he has to live alone until his son – an architect that lives in Rome for many years now – arrives to help him with the wedding preparation. As the local Palestinian tradition requires, they have to hand-deliver the invitation to each guest personally. As the estranged pair spends days together, their fragile relationship is being challenged.

9 Fingers | F J Ossang | French | 99′ | B&W

In the middle of the night, Magloire smokes a cigarette in an abandoned train station when the police show up for an identity check. He starts running with no luggage and no future until he meets a dying man from whom he inherits a fortune. Subsequently, Magloire is chased by a gang and – having nothing to lose – he becomes not only their hostage, but also their accomplice.

GOLIATH | Dominik Locher | Switzerland | 85′

A modest young couple’s relationship is put to the test when Jessy’s unplanned pregnancy causes David to question his feelings of masculinity and identity in contemporary Switzerland.

DID YOU WONDER WHO FIRED THE GUN? | Travis Wilkerson | US | 90′

When Wilkerson sets out to explores the mystery surrounding the murder of a black man by his great-grandfather in 1940s Alabama, he discovers something he hadn’t bargained for.

FREIHEIT | Jan Speckenbach | Slovakia/German/English | 100′

A mother goes away, leaving her husband and their two children in limbo. She is driven by a force she cannot ignore: freedom. In Vienna, Nora wanders through a museum, succumbs to a flirtation and then thumbs a lift to Bratislava. Nora conceals her origin behind small lies, changes her appearance, finds work as a chambermaid and makes friends with the young Slovak woman Etela, a stripper, and her husband Tamás, a cook. Meanwhile in Berlin, Philip tries to keep his family and job as well as his affair with Monika going. Against his own convictions, he, a lawyer, defends a xenophobic youngster, struggles with the role of single parent. Philip finds an – albeit unconscious – ear for his worries in the figure of a coma patient… The freedom Nora is longing for becomes Philip’s chains.

PIAZZA GRANDE – all World Premieres unless stated

Amori Che Non Sanno Stare Al Mondo | Francesca Comencini (Italy)

Atomic Blonde | David Leitch (US) (Euro Premiere)

Chien | Samuel Benchetrit (France/Belgium)

Demain Et Tous Les Autres Jours | Noémie Lvovsky (France)

Drei Zinnen | Jan Zabeil

Good Time | Ben Safdie, Joshua Safdie (US) (Cannes Premiere)

Gotthard – One Life, One Soul | Kevin Merz (US)

I Walked With A Zombie | Jacques Tourneur (Classic)

Iceman | Felix Randau (Germany

Laissez Bronzer Les Cadavres | Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani

Lola Pater | Nadir Moknèche

Sicilia! | Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet

Sparring | Samuel Jouy

The Big Sick | Michael Showalter (Sundance Premiere)

The Song Of Scorpions | Anup Singh

What Happened To Monday? | Tommy Wirkola

CINEASTI DEL PRESENTE | COMPETITION | World Premieres

3/4 By Ilian Metev (Bulgaria)

Abschied Von Den Eltern | Astrid Johanna Ofner (Germany)

Beach Rats | Eliza Hittman (US) (International Premiere)

Cho-Haeng (The First Lap) | Kim Dae-Hwan (Korea) (International Premiere)

Dene Wos Guet Geit | Cyril Schäublin (Swiss German)

Distant Constellation | Shevaun Mizrahi (USA)

Easy | Andrea Magnani (Italy)

Edaha No Koto (Sweating The Small Stuff) | Ninomiya Ryutaro (Japan)

Il Monte Delle Formiche By Riccardo Palladino (Italy)

Le Fort Des Fous By Narimane Mari (France/Greece/Qatar)

Meteorlar By Gürcan Keltek (Turkey)

Milla | Valerie Massadian (France/Portugal)

Person To Person | Dustin Guy Defa (US) (International Premiere)

Sashishi Ded (Scary Mother) Georgia/Estonia)| Ana Urushadze

Severina | Felipe Hirsch (BraziL)

Verão Danado | Pedro Cabeleira (Portugal

2017 LOCARNO FESTIVAL LINEUP | AUGUST 2 -12 2017

Victim (1961) | re-release

Dir: Basil Dearden | Writers: Janet Green & John McCormick | Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Sylvia Syms, Dennis Price, Nigel Stock, Peter McEnery, Donald Churchill, Anthony Nicholls, Hilton Edwards, Norman Bird, Derren Nesbitt, Alan MacNaughton, Noel Howlett, Charles Lloyd Pack, John Barrie, John Cairney, David Evans | UK / Drama / 100min

VICTIM was the second – and achieved by far the greatest impact – of a trio of topical “problem pictures” made by the team of producer Michael Relph and director Basil Dearden from screenplays by Janet Green. Sapphire (1959) had been about race relations, and Life for Ruth (1962) about religion. Of the three, VICTIM had had the most clearly defined purpose behind it, which was the repeal of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 criminalising homosexuality – described in the film as “The Blackmailer’s Charter” – as recommended by the Wolfenden report of 1957.

Janet Green (1908-1993) had read the report, and while the government of Harold Macmillan – for reasons made only too apparent by VICTIM itself – was dragging its heels, she, with her husband and co-writer John McCormick, anticipated Costa-Gavras’s Z (1969) in employing the conventions of a fast-moving, entertaining thriller to make a serious political film that packs a lot into a trim 100 minutes; embellished by handsome London locations and noirish interiors, by veteran cameraman Otto Heller (responsible for the visual impact of other classics like Peeping Tom and The Ipcress File).

It’s easy now to mock VICTIM for being dated, but politicians and other public figures today still dread the power without responsibility triumphantly wielded by our tabloid press. The role of the redtops in the fear and paranoia depicted in VICTIM is occasionally mentioned in passing; and just two years later the field day the Sunday papers had with the revelations that came out in court about the activities of our social betters during the trial of Stephen Ward vividly convey what Melville Farr could look forward to at the conclusion of VICTIM . On 9 November 1998 – over thirty years after decriminalisation – The Sun was still stoking the flames with its classic front page headline “Are we being run by a gay Mafia?”. In the United States VICTIM was refused a seal of approval by the Production Code Administration, and this remarkable passage in Time magazine that greeted its US release in February 1962 is worth quoting at length:

“What seems at first an attack on extortion seems at last a coyly sensational exploitation of homosexuality as a theme – and, what’s more offensive, an implicit approval of homosexuality as a practice. Almost all the deviates in the film are fine fellows – well dressed, well-spoken, sensitive, kind. The only one who acts like an invert turns out to be a detective. Everybody in the picture who disapproves of homosexuals proves to be an ass, a dolt or a sadist. Nowhere does the film suggest that homosexuality is a serious (but often curable) neurosis that attacks the biological basis of life itself.”

VICTIM was released bearing an ‘X’ certificate, and the era it depicts now seems as remote as the war years: a time when the police drove Bentleys and ‘phone boxes still had a button B. But anybody who considers the issues it raises moribund should remember that as I write there are about a dozen countries in the world today where homosexuality is punishable by death. One only needs look at the debate (and the language) the film continues to provoke in forums like YouTube to be reminded of how this issue still polarizes society, and that there are plenty of bigots still out there, irately convinced that they’re being muzzled by political correctness; “our crime”, as Lord Fullbrook puts it, “damned nearly parallel with robbery with violence”. While Eddy complains that “Henry paid rates and taxes…but they knew he couldn’t go out and call the cops”, it’s interesting to be reminded that one of the blackmailers accused the police of “Protecting perverts” even when homosexuality was illegal, and back in 1961 could firmly be of the opinion that “They’re everywhere, everywhere you turn! The police do nothing. Nothing!!”.

VICTIM goes out its way to avoid sensationalism, and it is precisely because it in every other respect so resembles a conventional black & white crime film of the period that one can still feel the shock audiences must have experienced in 1961 when Inspector Harris deceptively casually asks Farr “you knew of course that he was a homosexual?”, followed by the eye-watering statistic that at the time “as many as 90% of all blackmail cases have a homosexual origin”. If it seems too genteel for 21st Century tastes, the scene in which Derren Nesbitt wrecks Charles Lloyd Pack’s shop still provides a literally shattering reminder of the barely contained physical violence always ready to rear up from behind the prejudice now known as “hate crime”.

The casting of Dirk Bogarde makes the film what it is. Several other actors (including Jack Hawkins, James Mason and Stewart Granger) had understandably already turned down the role, but Bogarde accepted without hesitation; and on so many levels the film is inconceivable without him. (Anyone who thinks it was the first time he’d played a homosexual onscreen, however, plainly hasn’t seen the film he made immediately prior to it, The Singer Not the Song.) Almost as bold on Bogarde’s part was that in VICTIM he was for the first time playing his age – 40 – although this is more than compensated for by the fact that he never looked more debonair and distinguished than he does here. The entire cast obviously cared about their roles, right down to the smallest parts (as frequently happened in those days, veteran character actor John Boxer as the amiable policeman attempting to comfort Boy Barrett in his cell, and John Bennett – who in the opening episode of ‘Porridge’ was the prison doctor who asked Fletcher if he had ever been a practising homosexual – as “the bloke in the pinstripe”, make vivid impressions without being included in the cast list at the end). Although the blackmailers themselves are often described in accounts of the film as “a ring” or “a gang”, there in fact turn out to be only two of them; a pair of bloodcurdling ghouls worthy of the Addams family – the grinning, cheerfully amoral Derren Nesbitt and his vengeful associate piously convinced that “Someone’s got to make them pay for their filthy blasphemy.” As Inspector Harris (a superb performance by John Barrie) says to his stern Scottish sergeant (John Cairney), “I can see that you’re a true puritan, Bridie…there was a time when that was against the law, you know.” Richard Chatten

VICTIM IS NOW SHOWING IN CINEMAS NATIONWIDE COURTESY OF PARK CIRCUS

The Ghoul (2016)

Dir: Gareth Tunley, Tom Meeten, Geoff McGiven, Alice Lowe | Crime Drama | UK | 81min

Actor turned director Gareth Tunley’s stylish low budget indie sees a depressed Northern homicide detective (Tom Meeten) arrive in London to investigate a supernatural kind of crime – one where the victims were fatally shot but went on ‘living’. Clearly, he’s not well, but decides to go undercover as a ‘patient’ to investigate a suspect’s psychotherapist Dr Fisher (Niamh Cusack), who chats him through his inner life and probes his dreams.

Chris spends a great deal of his time bumbling around the streets of London to some atmospheric visuals and a suitably doom-laden score, clearly he’s not in a good place. “Is there anyone in your life you have feelings for” asks the lovely and sympathetic Cusack. As a typical middle-aged British male Chris admits to having a tentative thing going with an ex Manchester University friend called Kathleen: she’s actually with his mate, so this is just a smokescreen. But Dr Fisher probes further and Chris feels uncomfortable as the crime investigation fades into the background and he himself becomes the focus of the enigmatic narrative.

As fantasy and reality gradually become one, Chris strikes up an relationship with the suspect that leads to drinks. It turns out that Dr Fisher is transferring both of them to her boss Dr Morland, a rather voluble therapist who adopts a jovial and imventive approach to his treatment with the opening gambit: “Normal tea or some sort of gay tea” but Chris goes along with it despite his misgivings and the suspect’s warnings that Dr Morland is dangerous. THE GHOUL grows increasingly mysterious as Tunley’s clever narrative has us searching for clues in a mind-boggling psycho thriller with more tricks up its sleeve than we first imagine. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 4 AUGUST 2017

Tout Va Bien (1972) | Bluray release

Dir.: Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin; Cast: Jane Fonda, Yves Montand, Vittorio Caprioli; France/Italy 1972, 95 min.

The first stage of Jean-Luc Godard’s career as a director ended in 1968 with Weekend. What followed was the period of the “Dziga Vertow” collective, starting with A Movie Like all the Others (1968) and finishing with Vladimir and Rosa in 1971. Godard’s main collaborator was Jean-Pierre Gorin, a former student activist, and like Godard, a hard-core Maoist. The films of this period were so esoteric and dogmatic, that Godard became an ‘Un-person’ forgotten but by a handful of admirers. But in 1971 Godard and Gorin were aware “that we were in a kind of ghetto, and we really wanted to go outside”. The answer was TOUT VA BIEN – which nearly didn’t get made: on his way to Rome airport on June 7th 1971 – to meet Paramount in Hollywood -, he had a near fatal motorcycle accident, suffering a skull fracture, a broken pelvis and internal injuries. He was in a coma for a month, and could only attend the shooting of TOUT VA BIEN hobbling on crutches and with a catheter.

The film starred Jane Fonda (Susanne) and Yves Montand (Jacques) and “was meant to explore the class struggle in France four years on from 1968”, and starts with the opening gambit “If you use stars, people will give you money”; followed by a flurry of checks being signed. Fonda – a radical feminist, who had to persuaded by Gorin more than once to stick with the project – plays Suzanne, an American journalist who visits a sausage factory with her boyfriend Jacques (Montand) an ex-feature filmmaker, who has turned to directing commercials, “because it is more honest”. They are supposed to do a piece on “modern management”, but soon find themselves in the middle of a wildcat strike. To make his point, Godard had the workers played not by workers, but unemployed actors. The director and the stars are locked in by the workers for a night, but released in the morning. Suzanne starts to question her relationship with Jacques, and her own identity: I am supposed to be an American correspondent in France, but I correspond to nothing”.

The actors often address the audience directly in front of the camera, achieving a ‘Brechtian’ detachment. The two-story set is open, and the resulting image are reminiscent of Jerry Lewis’ Girls School in The Ladies Man (1961). At the end there is a long, lateral tracking shot in a supermarket, when workers and students run riot and “liberate” the consumer goods.

The overbearing diagrammatical structure meant, that TOUT VA BIEN was a critical and financial failure, for which Gorin was held responsible by Godard’s (soon to be ex-wife) Anne Wiazemsky: “Gorin brought out the worst of him, dragged him towards a cinema that was not his own. He created a void around him. I left because of (Gorin), because of living with him. He was like a political commissar. All my problems with Jean-Luc date from his arrival”.

In hindsight, the truth might be different: all Cahiers du Cinema critics – with the exception of Jacques Rivette – were politically very much to the right, and Godard, as one friend remarked “was only one step away from being a Fascist”. Godard’s “change” into a Maoist revolutionary was therefore hardly surprising – Maoism offering a left wing alternative of an unreflective, inhuman ideology.

As film history goes, TOUT VA BIEN can be seen as a bridge to Passion (1982), which is a less political love story, set in a factory. As for the much-acclaimed follow-up, A Letter to Jane” (shown together with TOUT VA BIEN at the New York premiere in the autumn of 1972), where Gorin/Godard judge Fonda rather harshly after her visit to Hanoi, that film’s “success” was credited to Godard. AS

OUT ON RELEASE COURTESY OF THE CRITERION COLLECTION

Entertaining Mr Sloane (1970) | Loot (1970)

Director: Douglas Hickox |Script: Clive Exton | Cast: Beryl Reid, Harry Andrews, Peter McEnery, Alan Webb | 90min UK | Comedy

When Orton’s debut play first hit the stage in 1964, it caused quite a stir. Nothing like it had been seen, indeed, Orton recalls casting the play as quite a trial, as no actor seemed prepared to risk their reputation with such incendiary material.

It eventually went on at the New End Theatre with Dudley Sutton, Madge Ryan and Peter Vaughan. Terrence Rattigan was then instrumental in getting it transferred to the West End where it had a successful run unlike the Broadway production which closed after just 13 performances, so appalled were the New Yorkers.

McEnery plays the eponymous Mr Sloane, a sharp, conniving chancer with an unsavoury history, who meets lonely cougar Kath, floating about in a cemetery one summer’s day. On the strength of his lissom bod and incredibly smooth skin, he’s soon invited home much to the chagrin of her father, Kemp (Alan Webb). Surely then, he’ll get thrown out, once Kath’s no nonsense brother Ed turns up..?

Re-visiting the film version, scribed by Clive Exton, it’s difficult now to see what all the fuss must have been about, things having moved on so far in the intervening time; this could almost be daytime TV viewing. But programmes like Queer As Folk owe a great deal to Orton’s work, dragging British sensibilities out from under their collective Victorian mantelpiece.

The film style, the acting and the subject matter have all dated greatly. Performances are all very theatrical, everything being telegraphed and a bit leaden, as though it were a filming of the stageplay, rather than a film in its own right. Worth it just to see what all the fuss was about, for the Orton completist and ingénue alike, but prepare to be shocked more by how unshocking it all seems now. AT

LOOT (1970)

Dir: Silvio Narizzano | Cast: Richard Attenborough, Lee Remick, Hywel Bennett, Milo O’Shea & Roy Holder

Farcical comedy LOOT is a satirical look at 20^th century society with a sterling British cast. Dennis (Hywel Bennett) and his lay-about pal Hal (Roy Holder: The Taming of the Shrew) chance a robbery of the local bank. With nowhere to hide the loot, their only option is to conceal it inside Dennis’s recently deceased mother’s coffin. Once the money is concealed, they move the casket to the hotel belonging to Dennis’s father (Milo O’Shea) under the duplicitous eye of scheming Irish nurse Fay (Lee Remick). All seems well until inept Inspector Truscott (Richard Attenborough) arrives at the hotel to investigate the crime. Before long the hotel becomes the epicentre of a hilarious farce as the motley crew move the casket back and forth to avoid detection by the incompetent Inspector.

ENTERTAINING MR SLOANE | LOOT | OUT ON BLURAY FROM 2 AUGUST COURTESY OF STUDIOCANAL TO COMMEMORATE 50 YEARS OF GAY RIGHTS

Hounds of Love (2016) Arrow

Dir.: Ben Young; Cast: Emma Booth, Stephen Curry, Asleigh Cummings, Susie Porter, Damian De Montemas; Australia 2016, 108. Min

Writer/director Ben Young’s debut feature, about a real life couple who murder young women, may be gruesome but it is never speculative or voyeuristic in focusing on the psychological interaction of the murderous pair, and how their clever final victim manages to evade them.

The thriller unfolds in Perth, South Australia in 1987 where David and Catherine Birnie raped and murdered four women. Birnie came from a violently dysfunctional background and first met Catherine during their school days.

The film opens to the drone of Dan Luscombe’s electronic score with Michael McDermott’s stealthy camera trailing the suburban avenues of Perth where scantily clad schoolgirls play netball. In this neighbourhood teenager Vicki Maloney (Cummings) suffers more than her fair share of existential angst, living with her recently separated parents Maggie (Porter) and Trevor (De Montemas). Trevor is a well-off surgeon still trying to coerce his disenchanted wife back into the marriage. Vicki rebels against her mother’s regime of discipline and curfew times, and one night escapes to a party. On a lonely street she is picked up by Evelyn White (Booth), and her husband John (Curry) in a car. We have seen the couple earlier as well as posters with photos of missing girls, displayed at the police station. The Whites take Vicki to their squalid bungalow where she is chained to a bed. This is all done in a nonchalant fashion leading us to believe that it’s all happened before. But we also get the feeling that Evelyn is – perhaps for the first time – jealous of the prey.

It soon becomes clear that John has a special hold over Evelyn: she has lost her two children from another marriage, and John drives this point home again and again. White is essentially weak, killing a dog in a rage of fury, and abusing his ‘wife’ physically – for even the smallest transgression. Evelyn is in sexual thrall to John, torturing and raping Vicki, all of it off-screen, in the hope that he will stay with her, because “she is special”. Evelyn cares little for the victim and is complicit in murders simply because she fears being alone – she does not enjoy the violence, but sees it as the only way of “keeping her man”.

This is a raw and sleazy story with convincing performances, particularly from Evelyn in her ambivalent role as John’s helpmate. Curry is a pathetic character, a glib psychotic prone to episodes of disproportionate brutality: he kills the couple’s dog for fouling the kitchen and uses psychological torture and rape to spike his sexual appetite. Young directs with mature assurance, never losing control of the narrative but keeping his distance. In spite of the gruesome topic, he is more interested in asking questions than staging a sensational case – and succeeds in the unspeakable. MT

HOUNDS OF LOVE ON ARROW-player.com

The Graduate (1967) 50th Anniversary re-release

Dir: Mike Nichols | Cast: Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Katherine Ross | Drama | US |

Dustin Hoffman was so nervous in the screen test for his debut screen performance that the classic vocal tightness needed for the part came naturally and without effort. He wasn’t the only nervous one: In an interview he describes Michael Nichols’ hand as ‘so drenched in sweat’ that it slipped away from the handshake that landed him the role of Ben Braddock, a disillusioned college graduate who finds himself torn between his feelings for Berkeley classmate Elaine Robinson (Katherine Ross) and her sardonically world-weary mother played by Anne Bancroft at her most alluring.

Nichols’ seminal film went on to win him an Oscar for Best Director and launched Dustin Hoffman in a career that endures to this day: his latest performance in The Meyerowitz Stories has the same effortless charisma 50 years on.

Based on Charles Webb’s book of the same name, THE GRADUATE is an evergreen satire on privileged youth. Contemporary kids are often raised on the guilt of time-poor and overly-indulgent mums spawning a generation of ‘kidults’ propelled into the workplace by their overinflated sense of self-worth, and bewildered by a future often funded by parents they tend to regard with disdain. But back in the Sixties these kids were more in awe of their elders, and that pent up frustration is unleashed by a sense of rebellion provides the erotic charge that plays out in the final scenes. THE GRADUATE has become a classic – not only for those reasons, but for the evocative young love affair at its heart. It is a heart-thumping tribute to first love and to the rebellious abandon to the euphoria of romance. Watching it, we re-live our own experience of the rapture that blossoma under the blue skies of youth, where grey clouds never descend.

THE GRADUATE is never sentimental. Moments of searing honesty are punctuated by caustic humour – at its most biting in the poolside scene where Benjamin’s pretentious parents (William Daniels and Elizabeth Wilson) host an alfresco business lunch to hobnob with their peers and provide a soft-sell career networking opportunity for their son: (“Benjamin, I’ve got one word for you, Plastics”). Anne Bancroft smoulders as a frustrated and manipulative wife and guest, who later seduces Benjamin into an affair that provides a fraught and fractious sexual outlet for them both. Mrs Robinson then becomes highly obstructive in the tentative relationship between Benjamin and her daughter Elaine (Katherine Ross). But this only sharpens Benjamin’s resolve to have her, as he embarks on a febrile and occasionally arduous mission from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara to win his mate’s hand, turning up ‘last minute’ at her wedding ceremony for that showcase showdown.

Whether the end result leads to marital success and happiness remains in the ether as their faces reflect the aftermath of joy, elation, relief and pensiveness as the titles roll. The idyll of everlasting love is the myth that THE GRADUATE perpetuates and the reasons for its evergreen success, seared into our erotic and romantic consciousness.

Robert Surtees’ hand-held camera adds to the intensity of panic and uncertainty in scenes expertly edited by Sam O’Steen. But the score of tunes from Simon & Garfunkel, and particularly “The Sound of Silence,” are synonymous with the era, as memories of that hot summer in 1967 come flooding back 50 years later. MT

THE GRADUATE 50^THANNIVERSARY EDITION | BLU-RAY™ DVD AND DOWNLOAD
AUGUST 14 2017

Wish Upon (2017)

Dir.: John Leonetti | Cast: Joey King, Ryan Philippe, Shannon Purser, Alice Lee, Mitchell Stuggart, Josephine Langford | US 2017 | 90min.

Director John Leonetti (Annabelle) directs Barbara Marshall’s clever script about teenage angst and crass materialism as a horror flick with depth. Unfortunately, the majority of the cast lets him down badly.

Claire (King), whose mother committed suicide when she was a child, is a very unhappy teenager at High School. She simply craves male attention and female admiration – but only her two friends June (Purser) and Gina (Lee) give her any support. After a catfight with blonde school-queen Darcie (Langford) in the school cafeteria, Claire’s Dad gives her a Chinese music box he found in the rubbish bin, which turns out to fulfil the seven wishes of its owner. Spontaneously, Claire wishes that Darcie will simply “rot away”.

Strangely, Darcie wakes up with very serious health problems – then Claire’s dog dies under mysterious circumstances. The pattern repeats itself Claire whose wish for a monster-inheritance and the love of Paul (Slaggart) come true, but people close to her die gruesome deaths. With one wish left, even Claire has twigged what is going on – but just a everything seems to go back to normal, a brilliant coup-de-grace is delivered.

WISH UPON shows the majority of teenagers to be self-obsessed big spenders. And Claire, like the majority of her peer-group, goes for nothing but looks in her choice of boy-friend: Paul is as empty-headed as possible. June and Gina are only too happy to go on a spending spree with Claire after her newly found wealth, and it seems more than odd that June should ask Claire “Why did you not wish for a cure of cancer?” – even though she has a point.

DoP Michael Galbraith (My Big Fat Greek Wedding) finds original angles on death by lift and kitchen equipment – to name a few – and Leonetti manages to find the right mixture of suspense and critique. But the cast lets the whole show down: swinging arms and rolling eyes are the main forms of expression, which is a pity because it takes away an underlying seriousness to what could have been a terrific mystery horror film. AS

A LIfe in Waves (2017)

Dir.: Bradford Thomason, Brett Whitcomb; Documentary with Suzanne Ciani; USA 2017, 74 min.

Bradford Thomason and Brett Whitcomb (County Fair in Texas), share the roles of writer, producer, DoP to create this lively portrait of Suzanne Ciani, pianist, composer and electronic music innovator, who brought us New Age and influenced bands such as Roxy Music.

Encouraged by her mother to play the piano and compose, Suzanne Ciano got an MA in classical music at Wellesley College, Maryland in 1968 and found University of California, Berkeley, quite a culture shock after the sheltered years in the all-women college of Wellesley where “the appearance of a man in college grounds caused a tremor”. Berkeley was one of the main centres of the protest movement, and she was politicised; spurning a marriage proposal from a Harvard law-student when she feel in thrall to synthesiser designer and composer of electronic music, Don Buchal. He would go on to influence her chosen career as an electronic music composer, changing the face of advertising and the sounds we hear today.

For Ciani synthesisers are like living beings, you can manipulate and develop emotions from them allowing the creation of sounds. But at a certain point, she had to choose between the music business (where women were still crassly under-represented) and her life as an artist. “At a certain point I composed music for X-rated films”. A way out of this dilemma was the advertising industry, where she would revolutionise the sound effects for Coca Cola (the sound of drinking the beverage), and most ironical in hindsight – the famous “Bull in the china shop” ad for Merrill Lynch, which ends with the slogan “A brand apart”.

Ciani found she could create sound effects for everything from pinball machines to the ghostly computerised language in a GE dishwasher ad, “where the machine introduces itself like a human”. Ciani wanted “technology to be sensual”. But music was to follow and after record producers rejected her first album Seven Waves (1982) in the USA and Europe, she found success in Japan with her second album The Velocity of Love and New Age was born.

Ciani has by now recorded 21 sole albums, and five more with other artists, among them Roxy Music and Brian Ferry. Having avoided her ‘first love’ the piano, she returned to to it with Neverland (1988). During the 80s she suffered breast cancer, forcing her to take time out and move to a beach house in Bolinas in California, where she even found time for marriage, which lasted from 1994 to 2001. Having composed the music score for The incredible Shrinking Woman and two Mother Theresa documentaries, her versatility seems without borders, Suzanne Ciani is still travelling the country for exhibition concerts, explaining to young fans how it was to work with analogue material – a legend in her own time. AS

Howards End (1992) | ***** Re-release

Dir.: James Ivory; Cast: Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins, Helena Bonham-Carter, Vanessa Redgrave, Samuel West, Nicola Duffett, Jemma Rgrave, Joseph Bennett, James Wilby, Prunella Scales, Adrian Ross Magenty, Susie Lindeman; UK/Japan/USA 1992, 140 min.

Based on E.M. Forster’s classic 1910 novel, HOWARDS END is a towering achievement considering the team that made the film – apart from the actors, of course – were not British. American James Ivory got together with Indian Ismail Marchant and asked Polish Ruth Prawer Jhabvala to write the script, which won her an Oscar. Together they evoke English sensibilities to make a film that feels more English than the current state of affairs, harking back to an era of values that have now more or less disappeared. It remains the most successful Forster screen adaptation, and for quite a modest budget.

HOWARDS END is the story of three families: the Wilcox clan, a wealthy industrialist family, the (German) Schlegels, progressive Bohemians in the Bloomsbury mould and the ever so humble middle class couple Leonard and Jackie Bast, forced together through necessity rather than love. Set just before the outbreak of the First World War, which would change Europe forever, the story explores the subtleties of the English class system: a delicately balanced affair so gracefully nuanced in Prawar Jhabvala’s intelligent scirpting.

The Schlegel family meet the Wilcox’s at a party where the youngest of the three siblings, Helen (Bonham-Carter) grows close to Paul Wilcox (Bennett), exchanging a midnight kiss. Since Paul, as the youngest brother “has no money of his own”, he is set to seek his fortune in Nigeria so the engagement has no future. Later Margaret Schlegel (Thompson), the oldest and most responsible of the siblings, bonds with Ruth Wilcox (Redgrave) over the value of spirituality and the dying Ruth leaves her family home, Howards End in Hertfordshire, to Margaret. Her husband and soon to be widower Henry (Hopkins), the unchallenged patriarch of the family, incandescent with discrete rage, burns his wife’s hand-written will, with the support of his daughter Evie (Redgrave) and trumped up son Charles (Wilby) and fiancée Dolly (Lindemann). Touched by the kindness of city clerk Leonard Bast (West), who lends Helen his umbrella to shelter from the rain, a socially awkward friendship develops between Bast and the Schlegels who make an ill-advised suggestion regarding his employment, that will later regret.

Margaret is in no doubt of her position as an ageing single woman and sensibly grows closer to Henry who falls back on her stalwart emotional support soon after Ruth’s demise. The two marry and at the wedding party of Charles and Dolly, Leonard Bast and his wife Jackie (Duffett) make their presence known, in no uncertain terms. An embarrassing truth then emerges that destabilises Henry and he threatens to call his wedding off. Meanwhile Helen, frustrated and left on the sidelines when her siblings move on, unwisely takes up the Bast’s cause, queering the pitch and crossing the fine line between social milieux as the final chapter of the saga enfolds.

Forster’s novel cleverly illustrates both strong and reckless leadership: Margaret takes responsibility for her sister Helen, who is always embroiling herself in emotional battles, which Margaret has to resolve. Her brother Tibby (Magenty), is a drip, but also a narcissistic student, plagued by the same self-importance indulgence as Helen. It falls to Margaret, to keep the capricious duo afloat. In contrast, Henry Wilcox is strong and pragmatic provided he has a female partner by his side. His children are, in very different ways, countermanded by his dominating authority, having had no chance to develop on their own strength of personality. When tragedy strikes and his position in the family is at risk, Henry tries to be conciliatory. Sitting tired and broken on the lawn, is metaphor and symbolic of the endgame: the slaughterhouse of the Great War. Finally, Leonard Bast is a man of principles, but has no means to realise them. From today’s perspective, Forster’s ending, that the meek should inherit the world – in this case Howards End – is rather wishfully optimistic. Yet in a clever way, this is what eventually happens. Emma Thompson’s brilliantly elegant performance as Margaret, cleverly negotiating her way through enemy lines to victory for all concerned, while maintaining a British stiff upper lip.

DoP Tony Pierce-Roberts (The Remains of the Day), conjures up lush and languid images of the countryside, and rather more detached and austere ones in the London scenes. The countryside is shown as a refuge for a dying era; the city a dark and rather Dickensian place of torment. Emma Thompson reigns supreme, whilst Hopkins is at his acid best. The doom-laden atmosphere prevails in the soft English summer settings, and Ivory makes sure that the emphasis is always on the second word of the title. MT

HOWARDS END IS BACK IN CINEMAS FROM 28 JULY 2017 | COURTESY OF THE BFI

Five Indie Summer Sizzlers

SUMMER WITH MONICA | SOMMAREN MED MONICA | Ingmar Bergman (1953)

One of the Swedish legend’s lesser known features was considered scandalous at the time due to its graphic nudity and erotic sensuality. Two working class teenagers indulge in a highly charged sexual relationship as they steal away from the summer torpor of 1950s Stockholm and make love beneath the starry skies of the Dog Days, drifting from island to island on the family boat. But Monica (Harriet Andersson) and Harry (Lars Ekborg) are forced to face the consequences of their reckless naughtiness come Autumn. Classic Bergman and worth a watch on a steamy summer evening – or any time, for that matter.

THE LAST DAY OF SUMMER | OSTATNI DZIEN LATA | Tadeusz Konwicki (1958)

Pharoah director Tadeusz Konwicki’s black and white mood piece is an enigmatic affair that sizzles between a young man (Jan Machulski) and an older woman (Irena Laskowska) on a sugar-sanded, deserted Baltic beach in the aftermath of the War. A metaphor for the uncertainty of a Polish nation driven to its knees after 6 years of hardship, it is considered to be one of the first Polish experimental films, shot on a tiny budget by a crew of five, but none the worse for it. It is also one of Martin Scorsese’s favourite films. MT

ADRIFT | A DERIVA | Heitor Dhalia (2009)

Vincent Kassel is the brooding star of this stylish coming-of-ager from Brazilian auteur, Haitor Dhalia. It explores the relationship between a forty-something father struggling to accept his teenage daughter’s burgeoning sexuality while experiencing his own midlife crisis as he drifts into an extra-marital affair, to the disgust and fascination of the sultry siren in the making, played by Laura Neiva now a ‘Chanel’ ambassador and star of Brazilian cult TV series ‘The Party’.

UNRELATED | Joanna Hogg (2008)

An unhappy woman in a relationship crisis steps into the smug summer set-up of her girlfriend’s Tuscan villa party, in Joanna Hogg’s astonishing feature debut. It’s a social satire that absolutely nails the posh English on holiday in a way that no one has done before, or since – for that matter. In this first of Hogg’s portraits of upper middle-class isolation and inertia (Archipelago and Exhibition were to follow), Kathryn Worth’s Anna is instantly back-footed socially by her contemporaries, and drifts, for want of more exciting company, into a loose but feelgood liaison with one of the teenage boys in the group (Tom Hiddleston in his big screen debut). This causes a testosterone-fuelled dust up with his father George (David Rintoul) and awkwardness all round. The ensuing embarrassing finale is screen dynamite of the best kind and carries one of the most tragic and insightful lines in British film history for its childless female character: “I knew I was fated to spend the rest of my life as an acolyte to other women’s families”. MT

MY SUMMER OF LOVE | Pawel Pawlikovski (2004)

Before he made his Oscar-winning IDA (2010), Pawel Pawlikowski was beavering away in the background with worthwhile features that captured the zeitgeist of comtempo English life, such as Twockers (1998) and The Last Resort (2000). During his lengthy career, that started at the BBC, this intriguing Polish filmmaker, armed with English sensibilities and a bone dry sense of humour, has also tucked some amusing documentaries under his sleeve, gently ribbing his subject matter in a way that is only discernable from the outside in. Tripping with Zhironovsky is one such film, a candid, fly-on-the-wall look at the Russian Nationalist Politician of the title. Another is Serbian Epics (1972), set during the Bosnian war, in which he purports to be a specialist in ‘ethnocentricity’ researching the tribal chants of Serbians in the front line of battle, and, as such, gains unprecedented access to the powers that be. MY SUMMER OF LOVE a portrait of female obsession and deception, adapted from the novel by Helen Cross, is a drama so steeped in English summertime, that it almost drips with raspberry juice and elderflower cordial, with a subtle lesbian twist. MT

ALL TITLES AVAILABLE ON AMAZON.CO.COM | BFI.ORG.UK

Ventotene Film Festival 2017

THE VENTOTENE FILM FESTIVAL this year celebrates its 23 years anniversary bringing international film screenings, stars and filmmakers to the breathtaking Pontine island in the Tyrrhenian Sea (between Rome and Naples) where the idea of a united Europe first sprang to light with the Ventotene Manifesto.

Opening on 24 July, the 10 day programme is curated by Loredana Commonara and focuses on the spirit of a united Europe with its themes of democracy and racial integration that underpin its WIND OF EUROPE award.

This year’s award goes to actress Margherita Buy, actor/director Sergio Castellitto, and Romanian screenwriter, producer and director Cristian Mungiu, who will present their respective films ME, MYSELF AND HER; this year’s Cannes Un Certain Regard nominated LUCKY, and last year’s Cannes Best Director winner GRADUATION tied with Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper.

Other highlights of the festival include Pedro Almodovar’s JULIETA, Antonio Piazza and Fabio Grassadonia’s SICILIAN GHOST STORY and Jasmine Trinca, who won Best Actress for her role in LUCKY will receive the Julia Major Award, which is awarded to women who stand out in art and literature. MT

VENTOTENE FILM FESTIVAL | 24 JULY – 2 AUGUST 2017

The Big Sick (2017) | Sundance London Festival 2017

Dir. Michael Showalter | Cast: Holly Hunter, Kumail Nanjiani, Zoe Kazan | US, 2016, 119 mins

A thoughtful and daringly witty script with some surprising twists and turns make this cross-cultural romantic drama, based on the true life of Pakistani Muslim comedian Kumail Nanjiani and his onscreen American girlfriend, a real pleasure. Nanjiani and his wife Emily Gordon co-wrote the script that successful sends up terrorism, religion and racism. The film is given a gutsy kick up the pants by Holly Hunter, superb as Emily’s mother, sparring with onscreen husband Ray Romano.

There’s a lot going on here aside from Emily’s parents’ spicy show and Kumail’s Pakistani family backstory that plays out very much like At Home with the Kumars. The film opens as Kumail is working Chicago’s comedy standup circuit with a group of convincing and funny collaborators. Naive but well-meaning, and very much a metrosexual man, Kumail drives Uber taxis in the daytime and endures regular dinners with ‘suitable’ girls who “just stop by” the family home, courtesy of his overbearing mother. MA student Emily (Kazan) enters the picture, blond and very American, and neither wants a relationship, despite hot sex on their first date. They continue to see each other, enjoying the chemistry and growing closer each day until Emily calls time on their affair realising that Kumail must marry a Muslim woman. Clearly this is not the end – despite verbal assurances to the contrary – but Emily’s sudden illness and hospitalisation forces Kumail to reconsider his future and his life. Enter Emily’s frank and forceful parents (Hunter and Romano) who at first reject him and then recognise his dedication to their rather spoilt daughter. Kumail feels warm and comfortable in this close and protective family, not dissimilar to his own.

Despite its indie credentials this is a slick and polished affair, believable and utterly engaging from start to finish with its rich vein of humour, strong performances and timely storyline. In short, it’s a winner. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 28 JULY 2017

SHOT! The Psycho-Spiritual Mantra of Rock (2017)

Dir: Barnaby Clay | Biopic | UK | 93min

Mick Rock is a maverick English photographer best known for his work and close friendships with David Bowie and Lou Reed in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Mr. Rock features very predominantly in Barnaby Clay’s entertaining but rather hagiographic portrait of a larger than life character with a gift for the gab and an eye for capturing what Rock himself describes as “the aura” of those he photographed – who were in Bowie’s own words just ‘ghosts’.

The title of Clay’s biopic plays not only on Rock’s name but also to his classical education and yoga training setting the tone for a stylish and cinematic doc that paints him as the tortured master of his own destiny, but fails to nail the root cause behind this insecurity. Many of those emblematic album covers from the Glam Rock era were created by Rock, whose mother remains a significant figure in his psyche (he mentions her many times, but never talks of his wife), and the impetus behind his place at Cambridge where he read French literature in the early ’70s. Rock peppers his conversation with arcane pronouncements (“the lysergic experience opened up my third eye”) and flippantly quotes from Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Not only does this give him a pretentious air, it also creates an impression of a man desperate to underpin his successful career as a celebrity photographer with proof of his solid intellect.

Rock certainly emerges as a formidable creative force, and one who didn’t want to remain on the sidelines – unlike Elliott Landy or Anton Corbijn (who later turned his skills to directing) – but very much wanted to be, and be seen as a mover and shaker in the inner sanctum of Rock Glam, hanging out and forging close relationships with the likes of Queen, Iggy Pop and Debbie Harry (due to her photogenic appeal he calls her “the Marilyn Monroe of music”). Although clearly Rock was not part of the musical creative process he was very much part of the artistic one with his iconic images, the original photos now languish in storage in his New York home providing a talking point and a rich source of fascination for us viewers.

For all his soul-searching, Rock’s story is the archtypical ‘Rock story”; obsessed with the music scene and the glamour surrounding it, he became addicted to the bright lights and buzz, professing to love cocaine so much that it led to him suffering a near-fatal heart attack at the age of 42, requiring quadruple bypass surgery for which Beatles manager Klein and several others picked up the hefty US medical bills. Clay captures this recurring scene on a soundstage while an actor spins round on a gurney in the operating theatre – it almost feels like Rock’s party piece by the end of the film. Mick Rock is clearly a bit of a primadonna, but a charming, and likeable one at that. The final scenes show him photographing contemporary acts like ‘TV on the Radio’ and ‘Father John Misty’. Clearly he’s found the path to greater personal serenity, and all that it brings. MT

NOW ON RELEASE FROM FRIDAY 21 JULY 2017

Westfront 1918 (1930)| Comradeship (1931) | Bluray DVD release

WESTFRONT 1918 (VIER VON DER INFANTRIE)

Dir.: Georg Wilhelm Pabst: Cast: Gustav Dießl, Fritz Kampers, Hans-Joachim Moebis, Jackie Mounier; Germany 1930, 75 min.

KAMERADESHIP (KAMERADSCHAFT)

Dir.: George Wilhelm Pabst; Cast: Fritz Kampers, Alexander Granach, Ernst Busch, Elisabeth Wendt; Deutschland 1931, 93 min.

Austrian director Georg Wilhelm Pabst (1885-1967) was at the time of the transition between silent and sound film perhaps the leading European filmmaker: from 1925 (The Joyless Street) to 1931 (Comradeship), his silent classics included Pandoras’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl, followed by Westfront 1918 and The 3 Penny Opera, where he introduced sound in a very imaginative way.

It seems nearly incomprehensible then that the rest of his output of 23 films – shot between 1932 and 1956 – gwould merit only a comment regarding the waste of this great talent. He went to France in 1932 to direct Don Quixote, had a disappointing time in Hollywood with A modern Hero (1934), before settling again in France until the outbreak of WWII, when he returned to Austria – by now part of the Third Reich – where he directed three mediocre films, before producing the worst of the “light entertainment” in post-war Austria and West Germany. Just “The Trial” (1946) can be seen as an apology for having worked for the Goebbels controlled film industry which, after all, forbid any showing of Westfront 1918 when the Nazis came to power in 1933.

Kracauer is only too ready to concede “that Pabst took the lead in films of the pre-Hitler period, which overtly indulged in social criticism and belonged among the top-ranking artistic achievements of the time. Aesthetic quality and leftist sympathies seemed to coincide”. But he followed with an important caveat: “His [Pabst’s] pre-occupation with social problems outweighed the melodramatic characteristics of his ‘New Objectivity period”. Based on a novel by Ernst Johannsen, WESTFRONT shows war as inhuman on all levels: the anti-hero Karl (Dießl) literally goes mad under the pressure. His friend, a young student-soldier (Moebis) spends the first (and only night) with a French woman, but volunteers to serve for a particularly dangerous part of the Front. Here he meets Karl, who has just returned from a vacation at home experiencing food shortages in all the shops. He has also surprised his wife with the son of the local butcher – selling herself for extra-meat rations. When Karl re-joins his comrades on the front, he learns that the student has been killed by a French soldier who himself now lies wounded in no-mans land, screaming for help. Karl, suicidal, takes part in a relief operation, where a German lieutenant goes mad, shouting “Hurrah, hurrah”, whilst Carl, wounded, also loses his mind. He is transported to a hospital where he dies in a delirium, images of his wife dominating his final moments.

Whilst Kracauer might have a point in claiming that “ WESTFRONT 1918 is an outright pacifist document going, as such, beyond the scope of New Objectivity, its fundamental weakness consists in not transgressing the limits of pacifism itself. The film tends to demonstrate that war is intrinsically monstrous and senseless, but this indictment is not supported by the slightest hint of causes”. This may be so, but the Nazis seemed to have got the message. Undeterred, Pabst went on fighting against the rise of the Nazis, he even became president of Dacho, the top organisation of German film workers, succeeding the late Lupo Pick.

KAMERADSCHAFT, is based on an idea by Karl Otten that follows a real event which happened before WWI in the Courriers, near the French/German border, where German miners were helping in the rescue of their French counterparts. Pabst sets the narrative after the signing of the Versailles treaty. Unemployment in Germany was rising, and many miners were trying to cross the border to work in French mines, which upset the local population. In a scene at the beginning, a young French woman declines to dance with a German miner, making her feelings very clear. Nevertheless, when the news of the explosion in the French mine reaches Germany, the miners spontaneously cross the border assist in the rescue operation. A contemporary critic commented: “Nothing seems staged in the episodes of the rescue operation. The mine had been rebuilt in the studio, and DoP Fritz Arno Wagner (who was also co-DoP in Westfront), re-created a claustrophobic world. Kracauer saw progress since his criticism of WESTFRONT: “Pabst’s mining film progresses his theoretical thought: for he now tries to make his pacifist leanings invulnerable by endorsing the socialist doctrine. Comradeship advocates the international solidarity of the workers, characterising them as the pioneers of a society where national egoism, the eternal source of wars, is abolished. It is the German miners, not their superiors, who conceive the idea of the rescue action. But whist Kracauer lauds Pabst for showing that “the passages dealing with the management of the French and German mines subtly imply the alliance between capitalists and nationalists” he follows that with the comment: “even though the socialist pacifism of Comradeship was better founded than the humanitarian pacifism of WESTFRONT, it does not justify the assumption that it was more substantial. Pabst penetrates reality visually, but leaves its intellectual core shrouded”. It should be said, that the huge majority of reviewers disagreed with Kracauer – but COMRADESHIP was not a success at the box-office.

The real question still remains: What really happened to Pabst after COMRADESHIP his most substantial film. We know that he settled in France to direct and supervise bland and unconvincing melodrama, returned to Nazi Germany in 1939 and served “Papas Kino” (Dad’s Cinema) in Germany after 1946 – but the data alone does not explain where his talent went. AS

OUT ON BLURAY/DVD COURTESY OF MASTERS OF CINEMA EUREKA 24 JULY 2017

Water and Sugar: Carlo Di Palma, the Colours of Life (2016)

Dir.: Fariborz Kamkari; Documentary with Carlo Di Palma, Woody Allen, Vittoria De Sica, Wim Wenders, Ken Loach; Italy 2017, 90 min.

Director of Photography Carlo Di Palma (1925-2004) was one of the most influential DoPs of the second half of the 20th century, and instrumental in the careers of Michelangelo Antonioni and Woody Allen. His story is told in this compelling documentary from Fariborz Kamkari and Adriana Chiesi-Di Palma, who married the photographer in the mid-1980s, and conducts the interviews with Woody Allen and Ken Loach about their time with Carlo, making the tribute feel all the more intimate and personal.

Di Palma spent his early days in Rome where his mother, a flower-seller, popped him on the tram when it rained, and the drivers would give him water and sugar to cheer him up. Opposite his primary school was a film studio where his brother worked as a focus operator and Carlo joined him, as a teenager, working on Visconti’s first feature Ossessione. His job was to get the film stock from an allied soldier – a certain Sven Nykist, and later he joined the crew on Rossellini’s Rome, Open City as the most junior of all the camera assistants”.

Apart from the talking heads: Allen, Loach, Bertolucci et al, WATER AND SUGAR is enriched with excerpts from Di Palma’s many films, starting with De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, where he worked as a camera operator and assistant, until he was finally promoted to DoP in Lauta Mancia in 1957, directed by Fabio de Agostini. His first success was It happened in ’43, a WWII drama, directed by Florestano Vancini. In 1964, he shot the first of three films for Michelangelo Antonioni: Red Desert with Monica Vitti; Blow Up (1966); Identification of a Woman (1982) would follow. The two first two features were very much known for their stunning colour photography. “Black and white is a transformation of reality. But in colour the reality became too realistic, so we, like painters, have to cut the colours, to try and let them not dominate the technique”. But it was for Di Carlo’s personal touch that he was unique and special. Ken Loach tells how Di Palma and his contemporary DoPs all started with monochrome, so using colour was very exciting, “and this excitement could be felt in the images”. When shooting Blow Up in the summer of 1965, the grass turned yellow and had to be repainted green every day. Di Palma remembers:“Everybody in England looked at us as if we were mad”. But for Wim Wenders, Blow Up was a seminal experience: “Blow Up showed me how important colours were, because he showed them in an innovative way. He dealt with the essence of taking a picture”.

Between 1973 and 1976 Carlo Di Palma directed three feature films: one of them, Theresa the Thief, starring Monica Vitti, run into difficulties because Di Palma and Vitti’s relationship was coming to an end. In 1981 Di Palma would photograph Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man for Bernardo Bertolucci. Interviewed about their relationship, Bertolucci amusingly recalls: “Vittorio Storaro is my wife, Carlo Di Palma is my lover. The only time I did not work with Storaro, was when I worked with Di Palma. So this work is like the memory of falling in love”.

When Woody Allen was shooting his first film Take the Money and Run, he had just seen Blow Up and desperately wanted Di Palma to shoot it, but he wasn’t available. Nearly ten years later, in 1986, Allen and Di Palma finally got together in a collaboration marked by its easy friendship and camaraderie – they lived their whole lives together: “We worked and then had lunch; worked more and then had dinner”. Their first film together was Hannah and her Sisters in a collaboration that would last until 1997 (Reconstructing Harry). Allen was exuberant after their cooperation: “Carlo lived up to all our expectations.” Di Palma was also happy in New York: “it is a city where I can live like in Rome. But Los Angeles and New York are totally different. I could never work in Hollywood. You only use a storyboard as a tool there – the only creativity in Hollywood happens on the drawing board”.

Di Palma “loved warm colours, like the paintings in Italy”. He went to the Sistine Chapel as a boy, and later filmed the restoration of the place. But he was foremost a poet who filmed like a painter, yet always subjugating himself to the director and the script, “because some directors shoot their own film, not the one which is scripted. But it will be always the same film, perhaps even extraordinary, but the photography will always be the same”. Nobody could ever say this about Carlo Di Palma’s work: this documentary is a remarkable portrait not only of his monumental output but also his genuine warmness as a human being that made all who worked with him even better. AS

NOW ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 21 JULY 2017

https://vimeo.com/202017377

The Music Room (1958) | Criterion Bluray release

Dir:. Saryajit Ray | India | Drama | 99min | B&W

THE MUSIC ROOM (Jalsaghar) is probably the most exotically opulent of Satyajit Ray’s films, sumptuously showcasing the traditional cultural references of his native Bengal.

Based on a short story by Tarasankar Banerjee, it tells of a rather arrogant 1920s Bengali aristocrat, Roy, who rides on his enormous ceremonial elephant, called Moti, and lives a closeted life during in his rambling palace overrun with bats and threadbare treasures, and determined to keep up appearances despite his gradually dwindling financial resources. Married to the graceful and long-suffering Mahamaya (Padmadevi), he intends to offer the finest tradional religious and cultural education to his son Khoka, mortgaging his wife’s precious jewels in the process. He is played with elegant restraint by Chhabi Biswas, who was to die several years later.

In the vast and crumbling music room of the palace, surrounded by portraits of his illustrious ancestors, he organises one last musical soiree serenaded by Calcutta’s most prestigious and sought after players, while he swallows his pride and drowns his sorrows in his servant’s handmade cocktails – a fly symbolically drowns in his glass as he stares mesmerised by the memories of his more illustrious past.

Meanwhile, his chief guest, Mahim Ganguli “I’m a self-made man, no pedigree” who has arrived for the evening in a car with a screeching horn, stretches out to throw the dancer Krishna Bai (exquisitely played by Rushan Kumari) a tip, but his arm is caught by the zeminder’s walking stick, reminding him of the protocol that his arriviste credentials have failed to recognise.

Subrata Mitra’s delicate lighting captures the joy and despair on the faces of Roy and his servant and evokes the magical riverside landscapes. And the music is evocative in recalling the ancient traditions of the aristocrat’s cultural heritage, offering fabulous entertainment in the process.

And although Ray seems in awe of his central character, what really comes across is their mutual respect, admiration and sadness for the death of this rich cultural past, and ultimately commanding our acceptance and sympathy for his pathetic but endearingly tragic hero. MT

OUT ON CRITERION NEW DIGITAL TRANSFER WITH UNCOMPRESSED MONAURAL SOUNDTRACK | INTERVIEW WITH SATYAJIT RAY (1984)

City of Ghosts (2017)

Dir. Matthew Heineman. Doc | US, 2017 | 90 mins

City Of Ghosts is Raqqa, where a group of citizen journalists risked their lives to report the reality of their home town in thrall to ISIS which had seized power in 2014 during the vacuum left when the people rose up in the Arab Spring, particularly- in this case, against 40 years of control by Syrian dictator Bashar Al Assad.

Heinemann’s documentary portrait follows similar lines to his award-winning Cartel Land (2015) which explored the troubled Mexican Border of the US. Meanwhile, back in Syria, these middle-class and well-funded young men: campaigner and self-confessed troublemaker Aziz; Hamoud; Hussam and Mohamed set up RBSS or Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently to report live events going on in a city where official journalists are banned, unlike in Aleppo and Mosul. Sadly, they are all now in exile, if they haven’t already lost their lives.

The film takes us through chronological events with photos, footage and phonecalls to paint a picture of horrific violence, disease – caused by hospital shutdowns and food shortages – and general mayhem as ISIS reduce the quiet and beloved hometown to disaster and poverty.

Heineman reveals the astonishing phenomenon of the ‘Caliphate Cubs’ – kids trained to kill in the name of ISIS – one alarming scene shows a tot ‘cutting the throat’ of a soft toy – and there is also disturbing footage of beheading and crucifixions, and worse still, ‘Hollywood-style’ sensationalised footage recorded by ISIS of slaughter and shootings staged in the city centre nearby desert settings.

Despite its modest running time, it feels churlish to admit that the documentary often drags when following the mens’ undercover activities in ‘safe houses’ in Turkey and Germany, and although their plight is clearly mortifying, there is a tendency to over-egg their emotional reactions behind the scenes. The group finds that the countries of self-imposed exile are not always as sympathetic to their cause as they had hoped, given the associated atrocities caused by ISIS in Germany and France.

Clearly RBSS are a laudable organisation and Aziz makes it clear in the final scene that while ISIS has currently been defeated, the situation is unlikely to change while the fundamentals remain the same, and the power that be fail to recognise that democracy and not despotism is the way forward in the Middle East. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 21 JULY 2017

David Lynch The Art Life (2016) Mubi

Dir/Writers: Jon Nguyen, Olivia Neergaard-Holm, Rick Barnes | 90min | Doc

“Sometimes you have to make a big mess to get to where you want to be”

David Lynch tells the strange story of his unorthodox and fascinating life in this intimate documentary. Memories of an idyllic childhood in Montana and Idaho lead to a dark episode in Philadelphia and finally through to the present day where his time is spent painting and enjoying contentment of creative expression- ‘the art life’ – in his studio in the Hollywood hills. It’s an existence that contrasts with the unsettling quality of his films.

It emerges that Lynch drew compulsively as a child, and this film is all about his development as an artist that led to his successful career in filmmaking. Even if you don’t know his films, Lynch is a witty and engaging racconteur, recalling with often minute detail, the feelings and sensations that inform and shape his creative impulses.

Working again with the team behind his 2007 documentary Lynch, which was filmed during the making of Inland Empire, THE ART LIFE offers compelling insight into his past, fleshed out with photographs and personal footage which is cleverly edited by Olivia Neergaard-Holm.

Early life seemed quite ordinary for David, growing up in a sheltered rural bliss of Missoula, Montana and then Boise, Idaho with his ‘perfect’ parents. The eldest of three children, he enjoyed a close friendship with best friend Dickie Smith and his mother encouraged his pencil drawing talents by not providing a colouring book. Unsettling incidents involving Dickie’s father (which he can’t bring himself to recount) and a naked woman wandering around in the street, crying and bleeding from the mouth, were pivotal moments in Lynch’s adolescence which seem to spark a dark introspective quality that later found its way into his films, Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive.

Moves to Spokane, Virginia and DC followed due to his father’s job as a research scientist. He described him as “his own man” who would “always meet him halfway”. But in his late teens David got in with the wrong crowd and fell short of his mother’s expectations. It was as if she had hoped for something special from David that he had not delivered. And from then on she was “disappointed” in him.

David clearly loved his parents but it was his friendship with Toby Keeler that led to his obsession with ‘the art life”. Toby’s father Bushnell was a professional painter and offered to let part of his studio to David for a small fee. From then on, David painted until well into the evening, and fell out with his father who wanted him home by 11pm. But when Keeler Snr telephoned his father to tell him that his son was actually working seriously on his painting, Lynch Snr acquiesced. From then on David’s free spirit soared.

Boston Museum school got the thumbs down because he refused to comply with the restrictive teaching methods there. David craved the freedom to express his creativity often if that meant sitting and listening to his radio until the battery ran flat. The film brings out a solitary stillness to him that indicates a deep inner life, yet he is by no means a loner. His first marriage to fellow art student Peggy Reavey led to Jennifer, the first of his four children. His toddler daughter from his fourth wife joins him in his California studio.

Like many people, David compartmentalised his life to reflect his varying interests and the friends who share these different parts of his existence and are never introduced to each other. But when he got a place at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, his creative talents flourished despite the grimness of the broken down part of Philadelphia that became his home. It was here that he made his first “paintings that moved, with sound”. often featuring Peggy his girlfriend and mother of daughter Jennifer. In 1972 during the making of Eraserhead, David describes receiving a grant to study filmmaking at AFI Conservatory as one of the happiest moments of his life. It gave him creative and financial freedom to explore his craft, and he continues to this day, working intensively at home. Long periods of contemplative silence are punctuated by Philip Nicolai Flindt’s dense percussive sound design and an atmospheric score by Jonatan Bengta. MT

NOW ON MUBI

Dries (2017)

Dir.: Reiner Holzemer; Documentary with Dries Van Noten; Belgium/Germany 2017, 90 min.

Reiner Holzemer is best known for his work as a cinematographer and here turns his camera on Belgian’s most celebrated fashion designer proving without a doubt, that Dries Van Noten is really a cerebral artist, as attested by fashion icon Iris Apple, one of many insiders who sing his praises.

Holzemer follows the designer for a whole year documenting the precise steps he takes to conceive his collections known for their rich fabrics, embroidery and prints exclusive to his designs. Van Noten (*1958), one of the group called ‘The Antwerp Six’, faced a problem at the outset of his career: “It was strange, that fashion should come from Belgium, the most unfashionable country possible. We wanted to change our names to something more French or Italian”, he remembers, but is glad in hindsight that he stuck with his Belgian identity. His parents both had fashion shops, but Van Noten thought it would be more interesting, to create instead of selling. After over thirty years in the business, entailing four Fashion Shows a year, Van Noten is still the enthusiast. The devil, as always, lies in the detail: “It is difficult to shock. What is important, how you do it.” He believes in neutral garments, so that the women who wear them “can adjust to them”, and was one of the first to use photo images (like Marilyn Monroe) for his creations. But he is also open to influences from Baroque, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in his styling. His colourful and outrageous ‘Bollywood’ collection was a standout success, whilst the rest of his competitors choose modest outfits, with grey and skin colours predominating. Madonna, at the height of her popularity, also endorsed his brand offering world fame.

Patrick Vangheluwe is Dries’ partner in life and business for the last 25 years. We watch them in the huge grounds of their villa outside Antwerp, where they pick flowers to decorate their rooms. Dries is seen re-adjusting the figurines on his desk, showing a certain pedantry. He confesses, that “on holidays, I make a timetable for every event – exact to the minute”. But their collaboration is successful, because “we live intensely, are maniacs for detail; but when we talk about ourselves, everybody tells only half of the story”.

Dries’ career has not always plain-sailing: the 2001 collection was a flop. “The models were not smiling any more. My business partner died, I could have sold. My output was too cold, romance was dead. And the public responded – they told me that they did not want this style – it did not sell”. But he is glad to have succeeded in turning the business around. He praises his co-workers, many of them are “like a family around me at work – I only need to say half a word, and they understand what I mean”. Ending on a high note, a fashion show at the Paris Opera Garnier, Van Noten can look back on 96 fashion shows “full of surprises; but I am a perfectionist, always seeing my mistakes. That makes me not the happiest of persons, but that’s the person I am”.

DRIES is well-structured, Holzemer always playing the role of the fly on the wall, observing, without putting his agenda first. And the filmmaker is lucky to have found a collaborator like Van Noten, who – obsessive about everything – is still open to the weirdest ideas, like copying ’60s San Francisco fashion with psychedelic post-Vietnam hippy outfits. AS

ON DVD and on demand on 17 July 2017 courtesy of Dogwoof.

Julius Caesar at the Donmar Warehouse (2017)

Dir: Phyllida Lloyd | 120min | UK | Drama

Phyllida Lloyd’s rises to the challenge of filming The Donmar Warehouse’s all-female Julius Caesar production and she certainly pulls it off, allowing audiences everywhere to enjoy this audacious Shakespeare production. Not only only do we enjoy a ringside seat, but Lloyd ingeniously arms her cast with iPhones and adds her own inventive twists in the form of a drone that allows the action to be viewed from overhead, adding a touch of stealth and intrigue to the live event not only only making it feel as fierce and real as it did on the night, but dding value into the bargain – at half the price.

The film benefits from world class actors: Harriet Walter never shrinks from being gutsy in her performances and manages again here to evoke the butch manliness of Brutus,; Jade Anouka’s Mark Antony is restless and mercurial and Claire Dunne’s Octavius stands her ground in a powerful turn.

As the production reaches the final scenes, the camera draws us to the betrayal and deceit and Walter proves to be a fiery foil for Martina Laird’s Cassius, helped by the intimate stage lighting and the close proximity to their facial contortions reflecting exhilaration, anguish and the touching vulnerability of disappointment. Shakespeare fans and the arthouse crowd will certainly relish this inventive and cinematic version of the play. MT

OUT ON WEDNESDAY 12 JULY | FOR MORE INFORMATION FOLLOW THE LINK

A Royal Affair (2012) En Kongelig Affaere

Director: Nikolaj Arcel | Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, Trine Dyrholm, Alicia Vikander | 133mins | Historical Drama

The Danes are best known for their gritty contemporary urban thrillers and dogma realism so this sumptuous romantic drama gives a refreshing insight into a little known episode in the their cultural heritage. Starring Danish man of the moment Mads Mikkelsen it delivers just the right amount of bodice ripping and sexual frisson to keep it intelligent and upmarket.

Gorgeous to look at, impeccably casted and well-served by the director/writer duo who adapted the original “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” it opens with the marriage of bright teenage princess Caroline, a playful Alicia Vikander, to the insane and sexually incompetent King Christian VII (Mikke Boe Folsgaard) who won a Silver Bear for Best Actor at Berlin 2012 for his performance. Mads comes to her rescue as the free-thinking intellectual Johann Friedrich Struensee when he is appointed the King’s private physician. Gradually the pair embark on an illicit love-fest of the mind and body as they take over the reins and lead Denmark into an enlightened renaissance of political and social reform at the end of the eighteenth century.

There’s plenty of historical relevance to keep the highbrows happy and Struensee’s skill in fast-tracking himself into political power and the Queen’s bed make him the perfect maverick for the romantically inclined. This deliciously potent cocktail has just the right blend of social comment, sexual scandal and political intrigue to keep us entertained for two hours until the final denouement, exquisitely delivered by the hero of the piece. Meredith Taylor ©

NOW ON BLURAY/DVD

[youtube id=”9AA458TgJqA” width=”600″ height=”350″]

Genocidal Organ (2017)

Dir.: Shuko Murase; Animation; Voices of Yuichi Nakamura, Sanae Kobayashi, Takahiro Sakurai; USA/Japan 2017, 115 min.

This screen adaptation of Project Ito’s cult novel is a puzzling and often violent animation. Shuko Murase’s film is part Jason Bourne spy thriller and part video game with countless casualties, Murase questions not only government policies, but also how human memory works.

Set in 2022, after the Bosnian capital Sarajevo was victim of a nuclear attack, the US government creates a special force to deal with genocidal tyrants, whose wars are proliferating outside the ‘safe’ world of the fully industrialised nations. This squad is led by Clavis Shepherd (Nakamura), hunting John Paul (Sakurai), an enigmatic American, who is suspected to be the ringleader of the warlords.

In Prague, Shepherd meets Lucia (Kobayashi), Paul’s ex-girl friend. We learn, that he was with her, when his wife and children were killed in the Sarajevo attack. Later Paul explains: “he does not want to be grieving again”, and therefore will keep all terrorist attacks outside the territory of the major powers. Lucia shows Clavis Kafka’s grave, and explains that Paul was working at MIT, finding a language pattern of dictators, prone to suicide. As it turns out, Paul is still in Prague, and has Clavis drugged in a seedy nightclub, where no fingerprint scans exist, which are usually needed, even if one buys a pizza. Travis escapes Paul’s clutches, and hunts him down in Africa, with a crew which is “emotionally optimised” – meaning that they do not feel any pain or regret for their mass killings. The leading trio finally assembles for the statutory show-down.

Project Ito (Satoshi Ito) published Genocidal Organ in 2007, followed by Harmony (a novelisation of Metal Gear soldiers 4), before he died of cancer aged only thirty-four in 2009. His status in SF animation circles is unrivalled, and Murase had a monumental task of keeping Ito’s followers happy. Whilst he clearly succeeds with the fan group, it’s unclear if a wider audience will share this enthusiasm for a near two-hour bombardment of half baked philosophies and gruelling mass murder. Whilst the colours are often muted, the violence is very graphic. Somehow numbness soon sets in and what seems original at the beginning, is less and less exciting as the narrative unspools. All said and done, the two hour running time does nothing to make this attack of explosions and sound effects user friendly for a larger audience. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 12 July 2017

https://youtu.be/gypF8vDPpg4

Tommy’s Honour (2017)

Dir: Jason Connery | Cast: Sam Neill, Peter Mullan, Jack Lowden | Drama | 111min | UK

Even if you feel that golf is ‘a good walk spoilt’ – as the saying goes, TOMMYS HONOUR is a surprisingly moving biopic about the game’s Scottish founding father and his champion son (both called Thomas Morris) who was the youngest player to win the Golf Open in 1868, aged just 17, and played here with cocky charm by Jack Lowden.

TOMMY’S HONOUR is the fifth feature of Jason Connery, the son of another famous Scottish legend and Bond, Sean. The film works both as a historical tribute to the popular sport and as a coming of age portrayal of rebellious youth versus experience that plays out through the feisty relationship between the quietly deferential old school caddie Peter Mullan – whose ginger beard is almost a character in itself – and his confident blue-eyed maverick son.

Fortunately, golf takes a back seat after the rather stolid male-dominated opening scenes, and just as we’re hoping for some intrigue it arrives in the shape of a flirtation between sparky Edinburgh waitress Meg, played by Ophelia Lovibond and young Tom, who eventually becomes his wife amid controversy about her dubious background. From then on, Tom’s rise to fame plays out against the glorious Highland settings of St Andrews, and seaside skyscapes of Musselborough, just outside Edinburgh. The most we get to see of the actual game is through the on-course confrontations between Morris and his rivals, as young Tom gets ‘a hole in one’ in all weathers.

TOMMY’S HONOUR succeeds largely for its cleverly paced tension as Lowden’s swaggering confidence is challenged by Mullan’s thoughtful dominance as a father whose mild-mannered influence quietly wanes. Together they bring flair to a film that otherwise might have been too clubby. MT

OUT ON 7 JULY 2017

Sage Femme | The Midwife (2017)

Dir: Martin Provost | France / Belgium 2017 | French | Drama | 117 min · Colour

Auteur Martin Provost is known for beautifully-crafted classically-styled dramas specialising in the intricate interplay between his female characters in Cesar-awarded Séraphine and Violette (who was a pupil of Simon de Beauvoir).

Catherine Frot and Catherine Deneuve are the stars of SAGE FEMME – a more personal project for Martin Provost and a tribute to the women who brought him into the world after a difficult birth. As well as referring to a midwife, a ‘sage femme’ is also taken to mean one who is well-behaved and wise: Frot’s Claire is such a woman: dedicated, kind and no-nonsense, she comes up against Catherine Deneuve’s self-centred, frivolous, bonne viveuse Béatrice who has always got her own way in life, and is also Claire’s stepmother, whose erratic nature resulted in her husband’s suicide.

This is meat and bread and familiar territory for sophisticated viewers who will savour the delicious friction between the two women that has a surprisingly favourable outcome for them both. THE MIDWIFE also ventures into the less appealing genre of social realism in too many ‘too much information’ birth scenes: Provost would have been better focusing on the fluctuating dynamic between the witty and watchable Deneuve, Frot and her love interest, Olivier Gourmet’s gourmet truck driver. Béatrice initially emerges as a wealthy benefactor who has appeared on the scene to apologise to Claire for her behaviour back in the day, but it soon comes to light that the 70-something Béatrice has been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and is on her last legs. And soon she is also homeless. And guess who picks up the pieces?

There is a serious message here: that bringing the next generation into the world deserves calm, personal care rather than hightec machinery but the fun lies in the story of the older generation and here Provost successfully mines the rich dramatic treasures of this ménage à trois with perceptive characterisations complimented by Gregoire Hertzel’s breezily romantic compositions and the lush local scenery of the Il-de-France in early summer. THE MIDWIFE is less formal than his previous work but equally affecting as intelligent arthouse goes, capturing the rich and sensual pleasures of traditional France MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE | REVIEWED AT BERLINALE 9-19 FEBRUARY 2017 | IN COMPETITION (OUT OF COMPETITION

The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) | Bluray/DVD release

Dir: Marcel Ophuls | 265min | Doc | French |

The Nazi occupation of France went on for nearly five years and Marcel Ophuls’ seminal documentary brings the era to life in an absorbing and contemplative afternoon’s viewing (265min). Well-paced, lavish and convincing, THE SORROW AND THE PITY is set in Clermont-Ferrand, 20 miles from Vichy, and unfolds through a series of newly-shot interviews, original footage and political propaganda material to provide a historical testament to the suffering of a nation under the Nazi cosh, under the leadership of Marshal Pétain.

Ophuls sets the tone with a note of menace as France falls victim to the German overlords. Maurice Chevalier’s mellow music add a poignancy to the images of Hitler swanning round the streets of a Paris back-footed by the invasion of its enemy and often betrayed by its own bourgeoisie, desperate to save their own skins. Stories of collaboration sit alongside those of un-patriotic cowardliness and cold-blooded deceit that will be justified and dusted under the carpet decades later. Bizarre recollections sit alongside banal ones: an upmarket gentleman recalls the excellent hunting season of 1942, whilst a shopkeeper called Klein took out announcement in the small ads to assert his non-Jewishness.

Originally made for television, the film was banned by the French authorities for obvious reasons that will rapidly become clear: This complex and nuanced tribute rather blows the myth of Vichy’s proud Patriotism out of the water with the middle classes denouncing their working class countryman. The film also showcases the heroes of the Resistance offering vivid snapshots of their personal stories: high-school students who naively and courageously gave their lives and the legendary Maquis represented by stocky French gang leader Gaspar still embittered by his memories of the era. Then there are the ordinary French citizens just making the best of a bad situation in recollections that will remain seared to the collective memory. MT

ON BLURAY AND DVD FROM 26 JUNE COURTESY OF ARROW ACADEMY | ARROWVIDEO@FETCH.FM

Karlovy Vary Film Festival 2017 |

Fans of Eastern European films should head to Karlovy Vary this summer where the 52nd film festival has the best and latest in Eastern European cinema in its East of the West strand. This year’s main competition line-up includes an international premiere of Polish director Krzysztof Krauze’s swanson Birds are Singing in Kigali which was recently completed by his wife and explores the aftermath of the mass genocide in Rwanda.

Other features competing for the CRYSTAL GLOBE include Boris Khlebnikov’s new drama Arrhythmia, Václav Kadrnka’s Little Crusader, Peter Bebjak’s criminal thriller The Line and Giorgi Ovashvili’s Georgian historical drama Khibula. Ovashvili returns after winning the main prize in 2014 for his touching drama Corn Island nominated for an Oscar the following year.

KVIFF 2017 OFFICIAL COMPETITION LINE-UP

Arrhythmia

Director: Boris Khlebnikov Russia, Finland, Germany, 2017, 90 min, International premiere

Oleg is heading for his thirties. He works as a paramedic and, after a hard shift, he likes to take a few swigs. His wife Katya is also a doctor, working in the hospital’s emergency department. But her patience with Oleg is running thin, so she announces one day that she wants a divorce… One of the most intriguing filmmakers on the Russian scene today, Boris Khlebnikov returns to the big screen with a meticulous piece of direction. Along with precise performances from the cast, the film examines a relationship experiencing an arrhythmia similar to that affecting the hearts of the patients Oleg treats in his job as a paramedic.

Breaking News

Director: Iulia Rugină
Romania, 2017, 81 min, International premiere

A difficult assignment awaits TV reporter Alex. He must film a memorial portrait for a coworker who died in a tragic accident they both experienced but that only he survived. His colleague’s daughter becomes his guide, although her relationship to her father was more than complicated. Alex becomes an involuntary witness to the girl’s handling of her father’s death, and he also comes to believe that chronicling a person’s life involves more than just a short news report…

The Cakemaker (Cukrář)
Director: Ofir Raul Graizer
Israel, Germany, 2017, 104 min, World premiere

After the death of his lover, Thomas heads to Israel – the birthplace of the man he adored. Despite prejudice at his German origins he becomes the pastry chef at a local café owned by the widow of the deceased Oran. Yet she hardly suspects that the unnamed sorrow that connects her to the stranger is for one and the same man.

The Line (Čiara)
Director: Peter Bebjak
Slovak Republic, Ukraine, 2017, 108 min, World premiere

Adam Krajňák is head of the family and also boss of a gang of criminals smuggling cigarettes across the Slovak-Ukrainian border. The failure of one of the transports triggers an avalanche of consequences that compels him to question his own boundaries, none of which he had planned on crossing until now.

Corporate (Korporace)
Director: Nicolas Silhol
France, 2016, 95 min, International premiere

The life of an uncompromising HR manager named Emilie changes the instant she witnesses the suicide of one of the staff. The investigation of the case becomes a moral test for a woman whose actions, although motivated by her unlimited devotion to work, have caused grief for many an employee.

More (Daha)
Director: Onur Saylak
Turkey, 2017, 115 min, World premiere

Fourteen-year-old Gaza lives with his father Ahad on the shores of the Aegean Sea. The intelligent kid would like to continue his studies, but Ahad sees his son’s future differently. He gets Gaza to help with his side business – smuggling refugees from the Mideast. A directing tour de force, this disturbing psychological study of an adolescent boy’s transformation under the influence of those around him bears dark tidings about the contemporary world.

Keep The Change (Drobné si nechte)
Director: Rachel Israel
USA, 2017, 94 min, International premiere

Stylish but apathetic, David meets bundle of energy Sarah at a support group. While he’s just fulfilling a court-ordered obligation, she is thrilled to be there. But as they move past their initial conflicts, they become participants in an uncommon romance that won’t yield to convention. Keep the Change is a different kind of romantic comedy about people who are not the same – like most of us.

Khibula (Chibula)
Director: George Ovashvili
Georgia, Germany, France, 2017, 98 min, World premiere

Shortly after the first democratically elected president of Georgia came to power he was ousted in a military coup. He sets out for the mountains with a group of loyalists to regroup with his supporters. Set against an imposing Caucasus backdrop, we witness a man fighting for power while waging an internal struggle as he heads to meet his fate. The winner of KVIFF 2014 returns with an archetypal story told with light melancholy and an unmistakable visual poetic.

Little Crusader (Křižáček)
Director: Václav Kadrnka
Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Italy, 2017, 90 min, World premiere

Little Jan, the only descendant of the knight Bořek (Karel Roden), has run away from home. His anxious father sets out to find him but his despair at the fruitless search gradually starts to overpower him. Václav Kadrnka has turned out a stylistically well-contoured adaptation of the poem by Jaroslav Vrchlický, where he employs a taciturn film form in order to encourage our imagination to engage in a poetic, cinematic pilgrimage.

Men Don’t Cry (Muškarci ne plaču)
Director: Alen Drljević
Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Croatia, Germany, 2017, 98 min, World premiere

When a diverse group of veterans gathers at a remote mountain hotel to undergo days of therapy less than two decades since the war ended in Yugoslavia, it’s hard to expect absolute harmony. This brilliantly directed drama, about the ability to forgive others only after we have forgiven ourselves, presents the pinnacle of the Balkan male acting scene.

Birds Are Singing in Kigali (Ptaki śpiewają w Kigali)
Director: Joanna Kos-Krauze, Krzysztof Krauze
Poland, 2017, 120 min, World premiere

We meet ornithologist Anne in 1994 just as genocide is raging in Rwanda, perpetrated by the majority Hutus against the Tutsis. Anne manages to save the daughter of a colleague whose family has been murdered, and she takes her to Poland. But the woman returns to Rwanda to visit the graves of her loved ones. The director originally worked on the movie with her husband Krzysztof Krauze (My Nikifor – Crystal Globe, KVIFF 2004), but after his death in 2014 she eventually finished this challenging picture alone.

Ralang Road (Cesta do Ralangu)
Director: Karma Takapa
India, 2017, 112 min, World premiere

The stories of four individuals intertwine in a maze of Himalayan countryside, village buildings, and the local social microcosm. With a captivating internal rhythm and the stylistic elements taken firmly in hand, the film presents a narratively courageous look at the region’s social web and the influence of cultural immigration on local life.

EAST OF THE WEST – COMPETITION | HIGHLIGHTS

The East of the West strand will open with Ilgar Najaf’s Azerbaijani drama Pomegranate Orchard. Marina Stepanska’s Ukraine-set love story Falling and Mariam Khatchvani’s Dede are amongst the the outings from female film directors. Juraj Lehotský returns to the festival after his debut Miracle with Slovak-Czech drama Nina.

Absence of Closeness (Absence blízkosti)
Director: Josef Tuka
Czech Republic, 2017, 65 min, World premiere

After another failed relationship Hedvika takes her three-month-old daughter Adélka and her dog to stay with her mother and her mum’s boyfriend. Hedvika doesn’t get on all that well with her mother, nor are her feelings towards Adélka as maternal as they could be. One day she finds some diaries that her late father left behind… This small-scale psychological drama by debutant Josef Tuka is shored up by its realistic characters, an understated performance from Jana Plodková, and perceptive, discreet lensing.

Blue Silence (Modré ticho)
Director: Bülent Öztürk
Turkey, Belgium, 2017, 93 min, International premiere

After his release from the military hospital where he was receiving treatment for a past trauma, Hakan tries to resume a normal life and form a proper relationship with his daughter. Excelling for its mature performances and its stylisation of image and sound, the film foregrounds Hakan’s wounded soul and underlines his vehement efforts to break free from his own private prison.

Dede
Director: Mariam Khatchvani
Georgia, United Kingdom, 2017, 97 min, World premiere

It’s 1992. Young Dina lives in a remote mountain village where life is strictly governed by centuries of tradition. Is it possible to defy the firmly established order? And, if it is, what price must a person pay for doing so? Debut director Mariam Khatchvani set her first film in Svaneti, the stark mountainous region in northwestern Georgia where she herself was born, and she presents us with an authentic portrayal of a number of customs and traditions associated with this province.

How Viktor “the Garlic” took Alexey “the Stud” to the Nursing Home
Director: Alexander Hant
Russia, 2017, 90 min, World premiere

This inventive road movie about a son and father finding their way to one another has none of the sentiment normally associated with this kind of subject matter. The film introduces an ensemble of wild characters from the lowest social strata, viewed through a lens that finds a balance between the work’s profoundly human dimension and its stylishly ironic commentary on contemporary society.

The End of The Chain (Keti lõpp)
Director: Priit Pääsuke
Estonia, 2017, 81 min, World premiere

Have you ever had a bad day? Well, it would be difficult to top the catastrophe facing a waitress at a fast-food outlet, where people come not for a quick meal but simply to have a good cry. This high-spirited comedy, about the worst that can happen when you’re slaving from dawn to dusk, also examines existential dilemmas, unconcealed selfishness, and the essential desire for compassion.

Mariţa
Director: Cristi Iftime
Romania, 2017, 100 min, World premiere

Thirty-year-old Costi decides to spend a few days with his family. His parents have long since divorced, but Costi thinks it would be a great idea to arrange a surprise reunion, and he persuades his father to travel with him to meet up with his mother and siblings. Taking the old family car, affectionately known as Mariţa, they head out on a journey that will ultimately help to heal past wounds and allow Costi to finally understand not only his parents, but also himself.

The Man Who Looks Like (Me Minu näoga onu)
Director: Katrin Maimik, Andres Maimik
Estonia, 2017, 100 min, World premiere

Music critic Hugo is going through a post-divorce crisis and just wants some peace to finish writing his book. When his bohemian father suddenly appears on his doorstep, it becomes clear that the new life he has chosen for himself is about to go in quite a different direction. A tragicomic tale about parents and children and their shared mistakes and complexes.

Pomegranate Orchard (Nar baği)
Director: Ilgar Najaf
Azerbaijan, 2017, 90 min, World premiere

Gabil returns home to the humble family farmstead, surrounded by an orchard of venerable pomegranate trees; since his sudden departure twelve years ago he was never once in contact. However, the deep emotional scars he left behind cannot be erased from one day to the next. A private drama set in a picturesque landscape which tells of wrongdoings simmering below the surface of seeming innocence.

Nina
Director: Juraj Lehotský
Slovak Republic, Czech Republic, 2017, 86 min, World premiere

Nina is twelve years old and her world has just been shattered to smithereens: Her parents’ marriage has broken down and they are getting a divorce. After his internationally successful debut Miracle Juraj Lehotský now brings us an intimate drama in which the viewer looks upon the world and the selfish, visionless behaviour of adults through the eyes of a 12-year-old girl. A girl who is resilient and belligerent, but also vulnerable and just as fragile as the miniature world she creates for herself in the garden shed.

Falling (Strimholov)
Director: Marina Stepanska
Ukraine, 2017, 105 min, World premiere

Anton and Katia happen upon one another in night-time Kiev. Both are trying to find their bearings in life, and their encounter changes everything… This psychological drama by debuting Marina Stepanska offers up both a fragile love story and a strong statement on the current young generation as it searches for its place in post-revolutionary Ukraine.

Unwanted (T’padashtun)
Director: Edon Rizvanolli
Kosovo, Netherlands, 2017, 85 min, World premiere

Teenager Alban lives in Amsterdam with his mother Zana, who left Kosovo during the war in the Balkans. When he starts going out with the sensitive Ana, neither of them has any idea that unresolved injustices and shadows from the past will make their way to the surface. This insightful, mature debut by a Kosovan director reminds us how difficult forgiveness and reconciliation can be.

The Stone (Taş)
Director: Orhan Eskiköy
Turkey, 2017, 96 min, International premiere

Emete would swear that the young man seeking refuge in her home is the son she lost long ago. But in her isolated, wasteland village it’s almost impossible to differentiate real hope from self-delusion. Especially since the only way to survive is to throw in with the collective myths and seek comfort in cold stone.

DOCUMENTARY FILMS – COMPETITION

The 11-strong documentary strand features three world premieres: The White World According To Daliborekby Vít Klusák, Lots Of Kids, A Monkey And A Castle by Gustavo Salmerón and Another News Story by Orban Wallace.

Another News Story (Další čerstvá zpráva)
Director: Orban Wallace
United Kingdom, 2017, 90 min, World premiere

In today’s chaotic era, what is the “who, how, and why” of news spewed forth on world conflicts and crises? A young British director turns his camera lens on the journalists sent by their employers to the Mediterranean to cover the unfolding humanitarian tragedy. When faced with immeasurable suffering, do they maintain a fundamental sensitivity or do they fall back on sensationalized treatments of human misfortune?

Atelier de conversation
Director: Bernhard Braunstein
Austria, France, Lichtenstein, 2017, 72 min, International premiere

One room, twelve red chairs, and a common language. Foreigners from all corners of the world meet each week for free lessons to hone their French. This formally minimalist documentary captures the fleeting moments in which grammatical fumblings or the painstaking search for the right word inadvertently open a window into the human soul.

Before Summer Ends (Avant la fin de l’été)
Director: Maryam Goormaghtigh
Switzerland, France, 2017, 80 min, International premiere

Even after studying in France for five years, Arash hasn’t completely gotten used to the place, so he decides to return home to Iran. But friends Hossein and Ashkan are determined not to accept the loss of their closest pal. This documentary comedy, about a goodbye road trip across France, boasts beer chugging and French girls, but it’s also about cultural differences and the natural need to find and hold onto kindred spirits when living in a foreign land.

A Campaign of Their Own (Kampaň)
Director: Lionel Rupp
Switzerland, 2017, 74 min, International premiere

Partaking of the Direct Cinema documentary style, A Campaign of Their Own tells the story of the loyal supporters of democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, who lost to Clinton in the Democratic primaries. Subtly engagé and skillfully incorporated into a stylistic frame, the film lifts the lid on a newly-inflamed radical skepticism towards political representation in the United States and the general frustration at the breakdown of representative democracy itself.

Land of the Free (Země svobodných)
Director: Camilla Magid
Denmark, Finland, 2017, 95 min, International premiere

In the economically depressed neighborhoods of South Central Los Angeles it’s far too easy to get on the wrong side of the law. One fateful day 42-year-old Brian, who has just been released from serving a long prison sentence, experiences it firsthand. The vicious cycle of social determination, however, also begins to effect the lives of teenager Juan and seven-year-old Gianni. The debuting director immerses herself in the depths of human vulnerability in order to draw out fragments of hope.

A Memory in Khaki (Vzpomínky v barvě khaki)
Director: Alfoz Tanjour
Qatar, 2016, 108 min, European premiere

A Syrian director dusts off memories of the past, when people were persecuted for their political beliefs. A poetic portrait of people whose homes have been turned to rubble, and a story that tells us that a free life can never be monochromatic, let alone khaki.

My Life without Air (Moj život bez zraka)
Director: Bojana Burnać
Croatia, 2017, 72 min, European premiere

The most important moments in the life of Goran, a Croatian free diving record-holder, take place exclusively underwater. This portrait of an extreme athlete features intentional dramatic minimalism in order to guide the viewer toward a shared physical experience of performances that push the boundaries of what is humanly possible. Between each inhalation and exhalation we experience an endless emotional fall into the depths of the deep blue sea.

Lots of Kids, a Monkey and a Castle (Muchos hijos, un mono y un Castillo)
Director: Gustavo Salmerón
Spain, 2017, 90 min, World premiere

Julita always wanted lots of kids, a monkey, and a castle. After finally realizing these wishes, however, her family loses their property in the economic crisis. But they have not lost the disarming ease and kindheartedness that mark their domestic squabbling. A film chronicle with elements of absurd humor that serves as a madcap allegory for the contemporary situation in Spain.

Tarzan’s Testicles (Ouăle lui Tarzan)
Director: Alexandru Solomon
Romania, France, 2017, 105 min, International premiere

A research center in Sukhumi, the capital of today’s Abkhazia. Legend has it that it was built at the end of the 1920s to create a hybrid between man and monkey. The hypothetical creature never saw the light of day, but people and primates, like sad relics of the past, live together in the derelict wings of the medical institute to this very day.

Richard Müller: Unknown (Richard Müller: Nespoznaný)
Director: Miro Remo
Slovak Republic, Czech Republic, 2016, 90 min, International premiere

This uncompromising, sometimes painfully revealing but always deeply insightful portrait presents the life of Richard Müller from a fresh perspective. We get to know the famous Slovak singer as a still uncommonly charismatic man who has become exhausted by his struggles with addiction, mental illness, and the demands of show business.

The White World According to Daliborek (Svět podle Daliborka)
Director: Vít Klusák
Czech Republic, Poland, Slovak Republic, United Kingdom, 2017, 105 min, World premiere

A stylized portrait of an authentic Czech neo-Nazi, who hates his life but doesn’t know what to change. Corrosively absurd and starkly chilling in equal measure, this tragicomedy investigates the radical worldview of “decent, ordinary people.” And just when it seems that its message can’t get any more urgent, the film culminates in a totally uncompromising way.

KARLOVY VARY INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 30 JUNE-8 JULY 2017 | FESTIVAL SYNOPSES

A Change in the Weather (2017)

Dir.: Jon Sanders; Cast: Emma Garden, Bob Goody, Meret Becker, Anna Mottram; UK 2016, 98 min.

Jon Sanders (Back to the Garden) gets to grips with the meaning of love for a close-knit group of luvvies in this low-budget indie set deep in Cathar country, in the mountains of South West France.

Usin WH Auden’s quote “Will it come like a change in the weather…O tell me the truth about love” as a starting point ageing theatre director Dan (Goody), insecure about his feelings, invites a cast of three actresses to discuss their relationships with him: there is Jo (Garden), his real life wife; Lydia (Mottram) who is supposed to play his wife age forty-eight; and Kalle (Becker) who represents his wife age twenty-one, a year before they married.

Family members of Dan and Jo also play small parts, but the action centres around Dan and his three ‘wives’. When Jo wants the discussion to focus on marriage, it becomes clear that she is not amused by the proceedings. She is edgy, and cuts off after questions about birthday presents. Kalle is somehow written out during the process, whilst Lydia (Mottram, co-writer with the director) prefers to toy with the subject, like Dan’s puppet. When life and play-acting eventually converge, the exercise feels rather predictable.

Interactions between theatre and life are quiet common in feature films, most notable the great Jaques Rivette (Noli Me tangere, La Bande des Quatre) has excelled in this subject. But Sanders lacks discipline and structure to succeed, A Change is simply too tepid and spineless, and apart from the ending: its all rather too acquiescent, with everyone delivering their monologues. DoP David Scott, long time collaborator of Sanders, fits in with simple, but uninspiring images. Whilst Back to the Garden had some underlying tension to give it some dramatic heft, this project is still-born from the start because, apart from Dan and Jo, the other character have no axe to grind with each other. One can somehow imagine what Sanders had in mind, but the end result is bland and uninspiring. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 7 JULY 2017

Destiny (1921) | DER MÜDE TOD | Eureka Masters of Cinema

Dir.: Fritz Lang, Cast: Lil Dagover, Walter Janssen, Bernhard Goetzke; Germany 1921; 114 min; (Silent)

DESTINY is the first “real” Fritz Lang film: early films such as Die Spinnen, were still serial-cinema – but DESTINY was high drama with death as the focus – and the audience had to overcome fear before they could enjoy the lust for the dark netherworld: the Germans preferred death to life in the aftermath of WWI. Death was their destiny – or, as Kracauer put it, “the will of tyrants is fate”, not to be challenged.

In the prologue, a couple visits a small inn in an old town. The fiancé (Janssen) gets mysteriously lost, and the woman (Dagover), starts looking for him, but instead finds Death (Goetzke), who offers her three chances to be re-united with her lover in this life. In the first trial, set in Bagdad, Zobeide (Dagover), the sister of the Caliph, is in love with a commoner (Janssen), and her brother is so enraged by this, that he buries the suitor alive. In the second attempt, Dagover plays Monna, a Venetian noble woman who is in love with a middleclass merchant (Jannsen), but her jealous fiancée Gianfrancesco wants to kill the rival. Monna schemes to kill her fiancée instead, but at the Carnival, Gianfrancesco swaps costumes with Monna’s lover, and Mona kills him, instead of her fiancée. Finally, the third episode is set in Imperial China, where the Emperor asks the magician A Hi, to perform tricks for his birthday – warning him that he will be beheaded, if he, the Emperor, is bored by the performance. A Hi conjures up a miniature army, but the Emperor, though amused, wants to sleep with Tsien (Dagover), the magician’s female assistant. A Hi conjures up next a magical horse, but the Emperor wants to do away with Liang (Janssen), A Hi’s other assistant, who is Tsien’s lover. The two escape, but the Emperor has them caught and brought to his palace. Tsien repels the advances of the Emperor, and when A Hi arrives, she takes away the magic wand from him, and turns the guards into pigs. She than creates an elephant, freeing Liang from his cell, but the Emperor sets his archers on the fleeing couple, killing Liang, but sparing Tsien. In the epilogue, the young woman saves a baby, and Death would accept this life for the one of her fiancée, but the woman rather gives the baby back to her mother, not wanting somebody else to grieve like herself about the death of a loved one. Death takes her life, and she is reunited with her fiancée in the afterlife, after three failed attempts to save him
.
In “From Caligari to Hitler”, Kracauer devotes a whole chapter to DESTINY, and Lang’s next project DIE (1924). Fate, according Kracauer, has replaced any rational dealings with tyranny in Germany after 1918, and the work of Lang, particularly the Mabuse films and M, are symptomatic of this tendency to give in to suicidal/ homicidal tendencies. It should not be forgotten, that Lang’s co-writer, Thea von Harbou, had been a member of the NSDAP since the late 1920s and whilst not everything could be blamed on her (after all, Lang knew of her political standpoint – they were married), her influence did shape Lang’s films until his emigration in 1933. Kracauer saw how the tenets of German fascism could be detected in many of Lang’s films: the sub-conscious was much more powerful than any political organisation, because “the intrinsic action does not coincide with the succession of treacheries and murders, but is to be found in the development of smoldering instincts and I perceptibly growing passion. It is an all but vegetative process, through which Fate realises itself”.

A stylish silent film told with flair and a considerable amount of visual ambition thanks to the wizardary of Fritz Arno Wagner, Bruno Mondi and Bruno Timm. AS

DER MÜDE TOD (AKA Destiny) is as part of the Masters of Cinema Series in a definitive Dual Format (Blu-ray & DVD) edition on 17 July 2017.

Star Boys (2017) | Moscow International Film Festival 2017

STAR BOYS | KAIKEN SE KESTÄÄ)

Dir : Visa Koiso-Kanttila | Cast: Vili Saarela, Olavi Angervo, Antti Luusuaniemi, Pihla Viitala, Tomi Enbuska, Malla Malmivaara, Risto Tuorila | Finland 2017 | Drama | 81 min.

Visa Koiso-Kanttlila is best known for his long career as a documentary filmmaker and his debut feature STAR BOYS is a bittersweet reworking of his teenage years where two worlds collide but love survives in his small Finnish seaside home of Oulu.

Set in the late 1970s, Vesa (Saarela) and his best friend Kaarlo (Angervo) appear to be ordinary teenage boys, growing up in a conservative town that provides the stable backdrop for their angst-ridden puberty. But when the Sixties sexual revolution arrives late to their neck of the woods, this stable existence – and that of their parents, threatens to implode. First of all, Vesa’s architect father Tapio (Luusuaniemi) and his wife Marje (Viitala) host a divisive Swingers party where the boy becomes eyewitness to some rather sordid goings on. But the gulf between Tapio and Marje is to widen further after the architect hatches a get rich quick plan to demolish Marje’s familly home and build a block of flats, much to the chagrin of Marje’s parents. Meanwhile Kaarlo is indirectly involved in the crisis, because his sculpture fanatic father Antero (Enbuska) is not willing to sign his name to a project that would most likely secure their financial future. Antero is punished for his nobleness, because his wife Ulla (Malmivara) leaves him and moves Kaarlo to Helsinki. The well-paced and drama eventually comes to a head on the local beach. Ulla has come down from Helsinki with Kaarlo, and the grown-ups stage another sex-party – which the boys fight – literally – with fire.

This is a darkly drawn coming of age story with a difference because the narrative is driven forward by the parents’ irresponsible actions rather than those of the teenagers, which would normally be the case. Their social milieu could not be more sedate and conventional – but this lot behave like students at the height of the 1968 student liberation. Vesa and Kaarlo, like most young adults, want their parents to provide an emotional bedrock to withstand their own teenage insecurities. But the only stable element here is Vesa’s grandfather Olavi (Tuorila) who introduces his grandson to astronomy. So when he is turfed-out by his financially greedy son-in-law, Vesa is left alone, bewildered and hell-bound on revenge.

Made on a shoestring budget but none the worse for it, Koiso-Kantilla directs the ensemble with sure-footed confidence, and the boys are well cast and – not overly cute – and deserving of a special mention. Jarkko T. Laine’s camerawork provides an evocative sense of place for the glorious settings: calming images for the Hailuoto summer seascapes and the bleached out winter scenes. STAR BOYS often feels like a Finnish version of Les Enfants Terrribles but its heartfelt narrative still feels intimate and personal.

STAR BOYS | 39TH MOSCOW FILM FESTIVAL 2017

https://youtu.be/yvYrNh6sB0w

Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (2017)

Dir.: Steve James; Documentary; USA 2016, 88 min.

Steve James’ documentary portrait from the mortgage fraud episode of 2009 is both moving and informative. It follows a Chinese family, who run a community bank, Abacus Federal Savings Bank in Manhattan, and whose life is turned upside down after an over-eager District Attorney accuses the founder and his daughters of mortgage fraud.

Thomas Sung was born in Shanghai in 1935 and emigrated to the USA, where he became a lawyer. He had four daughters with his wife Hwei Lin, three are lawyers like their father, another is a doctor. In December 2012, New York District attorney Cyrus Vance swooped on Abacus, accusing them of mortgage fraud on a grand scale. Considering the Abacus Bank was number 2651 in volume in the USA, this is rather surprising, even more so, when you consider that Abacus’ default rate on its mortgages was 0.3%. This was just four years after the banking crisis in the USA had caused losses of around 22$ trillion, after bad mortgages to the tune of five trillion$ had (nearly) caused the collapse of the whole banking system, had the government not bailed out the leading banks.

Until today, Abacus Federal Savings Bank is the only US banking institution to be charged for fraud in connection with Fannie Mae and the associated crisis. Sung had founded Abacus in 1984 as a community bank for the Chinese minority and Vance’s only ‘trump’ was his star witness of the prosecution, Abacus employee Ken Lu, who had been found out by Sung and his daughters of defrauding the company and had been sacked, before Vance had Sung and fifteen employers of the bank handcuffed, and let to the police vehicles in the glare of the TV camera lights. This was a breach of law in itself, since five of the handcuffed had already been released on bail. So began a five-year long ordeal for the Sung family, who were joined in their legal fight by Chanterelle Sung, who had worked before for the DA’s office in New York. The trial began in February 2015 and ended in June. Interviews with some jury members are particularly interesting, since the jury was split at the beginning of the fortnight long deliberations.

James shows the family not only during their discussions involved in their legal defence, but also follows the clan through the Chinese community; taking in some mouth-watering restaurant visits. Thomas Sung, whose favourite film is It’s a Wonderful Life, identifies very much with the James Stewart character. Even after the ordeal, he still believes in the American dream, of which the film is, in equal parts, a verification and repudiation. AS

NOW OUT ON RELEASE

Chubby Funny (2017)

Nonchalamtly dovetailing humour with pathos, Harry Mitchell’s low budget comedy is indie filmmaking at its best. With naturalistic performances thrown in for good measure, CHUBBY FUNNY follows the freewheeling but not always light-hearted days of two aspiring actor/flatmates in London’s Primrose Hill. Oscar – played by Mitchell, who also directs – has an easygoing girlfriend (Laughland), works for a charity where he takes regular abuse on his door to door fundraising grind, while doing ridiculous chocolate adverts on the side (his agent has classified him as ‘Chubby Funny’). Meanwhile, Charlie (Augustus Prew) pays their rent and has just landed his first real acting part, paving the way for jealousy and resentment to infiltrate their relationship. As the onesie-wearing Oscar, Mitchell is a comedy natural with his slapstick insouciance and witty take on life, and there’s convincing support from Laughland, Asim Choudary’s razor-sharp shopkeeper and David Bamber as his cynical former teacher. Despite its slim storyline – nothing really happens – but somehow it all slips down rather enjoyably. With its occasional classical score, this is perceptively written, well-crafted and amusing stuff. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE

A Man Called Ove | En Man Som Heter Over (2016)

Dir.: Hannes Holm; Cast: Rolf Lassgard, Bahar Pars, Ida Engvoll, Filip Berg, Chatarina Larsson, Börje Lundberg; Sweden 2015, 116 min.

Veteran director/writer Hannes Holm (Adam and Eve) offers up an thoughtful but contradictory portrait of old age. His central character is a bitter widower unable to adjust to life alone. His wife was clearly the guiding light in their lives, but further relationships seem fated in this well-meaning but ultimately crowd-pleasing drama that ends up trying our patience.

Adapted from Swedish bestseller by Fredrik Backman, the film starts off on a pleasingly droll note but long extended flashbacks take the pleasure and tension out of a storyline where the main-protagonist is either a curmudgeonly bastard, shouting at people and animals all day while his partner looks smiling radiant, or a beacon of tolerance – taking in a gay young man who has been disowned by this father. Somehow there are too many contradictions. Ove (like the director) is stuck in a Sweden of the 70s, when things were (outwardly) more simple, and he and his close friend Rune (Lundberg) could have fun competing which each with cars from Volvo and Saab.

The same messages are put forward in a much more convincing film The Happiest Day in the Life of Oli Mäki, that won last year’s Certain Regard Prize at Cannes. If you have a choice, this is the one to go for.

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE

https://youtu.be/rNe371HykY8

Stalker (1979) | Criterion Bluray release

Dir.: Andrej Tarkovsky | Cast: Alexander Kaidanovski, Alisa Fejndlik, Natasha Abramova, Anatoli Solonitsyn, Nikolai Grinko | USSR 1979 | 163 min.

STALKER based on the novel ‘Roadside Picnic’ by Arkadi and Boris Strugatsky, was Andrej Tarkovsky’s fifth feature and imagines a mystical and enigmatic journey. Open to all kinds of interpretation, the production itself and the aftermath was fraught with strange incidents and tragic deaths. After filming the exterior scenes for over a year, it emerged that Tarkovsky wanted to re-shoot with a new cameraman Alexander Knyazhinsky, after falling out with his original DoP Gregory Rerbery (Mirror). But the controversy didn’t end there. It was also rumoured that much of the footage was actually lost. This was due to processing problems in the Moscow film laboratories who were not used to dealing with Kodak products. The shoot itself took place near Tallinn, Estonia (then part of the USSR), in a chemical plant that pumped poisonous liquids into the air that could well have contributed to the death of the actor Anatoli Solonitsyn from lung cancer. Tarkovsky himself died only seven years later in Paris, aged 54, of the same bronchial cancer as his wife Larisa Tarkovskaya – twelve years later.

STALKER has much in common with Solaris and although both portray a dystopian version of the future, STALKER is not an apocalyptic one. The camera introduces us to a room where a family of three are lying on a bed: Stalker (Kaidanovski), his wife (Fejndlik) and his legless daughter Martha (Abramova). This takes the form of a tableau vivant where the figures move. Stalker is a scout who leads visitors into ’The Zone’, an eerie moonscape of horror and beauty where something otherworldly has clearly happened. This could have been the result of a meteor, or the presence of Aliens, or simply natural forces requiring it to be cordoned off by police and soldiers. Whilst his wife does not want him to return to the Zone, Stalker is fascinated by the area and drawn involuntarily to it. His next two ‘clients’ are a writer (Solonitsyn) and a scientist (Grinko). They set out from a hostelry, and are nearly gunned down by police. By the time they enter the Zone, the black-and-white images are replaced by colour, but only for trees, fields and flowers, in contrast to the litter of an industrial wasteland ruining Nature’s beauty.

The trio’s odyssey could be termed a “journey of souls”, because Tarkovsky makes no difference between the inner and outer world of his protagonists. Whilst Stalker is obsessed by individuality, the Zone being the only reflection for his yearning for spiritual purity, the writer is full of nihilism and sees mankind from a cynical perspective. He has lost faith in himself, in his writings and is depressed because of his writer’s block. The scientist only wants to destroy what they are all looking for: A room, where the darkest wishes come true. Stalker and the writer are able to overpower the scientist, who wanted to make sure, that nobody could use the ‘Room of wishes’ for evil purposes. None of the three will enter the room after all. When they return, they seem to have not changed much: the three are the archetypes of the 20th century: the nihilist, the man of science and Stalker, the (lost) individualist.

At the end, Stalker’s wife raises a the question:“How would a life without any suffering work out? A life without suffering would also be one without happiness and hope.” This is as close as we come to an answer: an existence without highs or lows, based on technology, materialism or belief in scientific progress is doomed to an utter mediocrity. To be unreasonable, is to be alive. The myriad symbols of STALKER leave just one interpretation given by Tarkovsky himself: “In the end, everything can be reduced to one single element, which is all a person can count upon in his existence: the capacity to love”.

STALKER – available to buy on Blu-ray from 24th July 2017.
Credit: The Criterion Collection UK | @Criterion | #CriterionUK

Alone in Berlin (2016)

Director: Vincent Perez |Cast: Brendan Gleeson, Emma Thompson, Daniel Brühl, Mikael Persbrandt |Germany|France| UK

Brendan Gleeson and Emma Thompson make this rather plodding wartime drama watchable. They play the unhappy married couple at the centre of a piece of German wartime subversion in a flawed adaptation of Hans Fallada’s postwar novel set in Berlin.

This is Vincent Perez’ third film as a director. His ambitious but cinematically lacklustre piece explores how the tragic death of a child can turn an ordinary couple against the state with a petty crime involving the publication of anti-government slogans, printed on postcards and randomly left in public places. “Hitler’s war is the worker’s death”. Whereas nowadays this kind of detritus would be swept away into the trash (or recycling), Surprisingly in 1940 Berlin, due to the powerful grip that Nazism exerted on wartime Germany, most of the cards were actually handed into the authorities and the couple are arrested in a narrative that reflects on the moral and political intricacies of the postwar blame game.

Gleeson and Thompson have German accents – as does German born Daniel Brühl, who plays the most complex character in the film as Escherich, an ardent Nazi police inspector whose fierce doggedness is crushed after he falls foul of an SS officer during the investigation. Initially the whole thing feels forced and unconvincing despite the combined talents of Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson who do their best to deliver some really clunky lines and manage gradually to thaw their characters’ failing relationship through the conspiratorial brio of their joint endeavour, eventually breathing life into a bland but intriguing wartime drama that shines another spotlight on Nazi Germany. MT

NOW ON RELEASE | BERLINALE REVIEW 2016

The Girl for Recife (2016) | Bluray release

Writer-director: Kleber Mendonca Filho

Cast: Sonia Braga, Julia Bernat, Humberto Carrao, Paula De Renor, Maeve Jinkings

140min | Drama | Brazil

Brazilian writer and director Kleber Mendonca Filho rose to fame with his debut Neighbouring Sounds. His second feature is a feisty character study that again takes place in a Recife apartment building and stars the famous Brazilian actress Sonia Braga.

Clara is an elegant and single-minded woman (Braga) and the only resident left in an upmarket seaside apartment in the coastal town in North Eastern Brazil. In flashback we see her surrounded by an extended family celebrating her recovery from breast cancer and madly in love with her husband, who has long since died. The developers want her out that they can refurbish the block and offer an attractive price. But Clare has no intention of leaving.

THE GIRL FOR RECIFE feels like a classic throw-back to boom times of the ’70s and there are faint echoes of Sebastian Lelio’s Santiago-set Gloria to this light-footed family drama. Intimate in scale and languorous in pacing, the story is driven forward by the verve and charisma of Braga’s prima donna performance – in the best possible way. Clara is a retired journalist and still firing on all cylinders when she comes up against a young and hungry developer, Diego (Humberto Carrao), who has plans to make some money out of the building, offering her well in excess of the market price but Clara is a lady not for moving as her home means everything to her with its nostalgic links to the past. She has clearly not lost her mojo where men are concerned and this is shown in rather awkward scenes where she seduces a much younger man and also manages to meet someone of her own age in a nightclub.

Once can’t help feeling the director is slightly in awe of Braga’s Clara (and Braga herself) as she hold centre stage in every scene sometimes misjudging the extent of her popularity and considerable craftiness. Meanwhile, she continues to fight the last stand against the developers with the support of her longterm cleaning woman in scenes that not only give Diego a run for his money but also seemingly the Brazilian government. AQUARIUS is a watchable and more gently amusing than Filho’s ambitious Sounds, but nevertheless serious in its message, although overlong in its running time. MT

NOW ON BLURAY|DVD | COURTESY OF ARROW ACADEMY

Hampstead (2017)

Dir. Joel Hopkins. UK, 2017, 103 mins | Cast: Diane Keaton, Brendan Gleeson | US | Romcom | 104min

HAMPSTEAD is one of London’s oldest villages where ‘quaint’ boutiques (think Foxtons and Oxfam?) thrive a stone’s throw from Dickensian cottages and palatial mansions cushioned in the verdant lushness of the Heath. Joel Hopkins’ romcom follow-up to Last Chance Harvey (2008) is based on the true story of a modern day hermit (Harry Hallowes) who gained legal entitlement to his self-built hovel between Hampstead’s Kenwood House and The Ponds. But that’s where reality ends.

Hopkins’ fluffy film is full of middle-aged cyphers floating around in a fantasy world of the Seventies where they meet for coffee mornings and discuss worthy causes. But in the real place, this lot passed on decades ago to be replaced by the likes of Hugh Skinner’s fundraising nerd or smiling Romanians selling the Big Issue. Despite its champagne socialist credentials the village is now mostly home to wealthy Oligarchs, chic Chinese diplomats and suave Italian bankers, a place where blacked-out Range Rovers jossle with builders’ lorries narrowly – avoiding the double Bugaboo prams.

But back to the film, which has Diane Keaton’s awkward American widow spying Brendan Gleeson’s grizzly bohemian gent in his shack moments from her Heath-side home. Although the chemistry here is seriously lacking, Hopkins persuades us that the shabby chic Donald fancies Keaton as she scuttles around in her charity shop like a ditzy Victorian street urchin on speed. Lesley Manville is hilarious as her bossy neighbour Fiona, tasked with organising neighbourhood affairs. She is a character straight out of Country Casuals in Tewksbury or Harrogate – not Hampstead, I’m afraid.

The narrative torpor plods on as our twee ‘lovers’ fight for Donald’s right to stay in his home, keeping those nasty developers at bay. Meanwhile, Keaton’s financial woes are being sweatily massaged by Jason Watkins’ obsequious ginger accountant who would be more at home in a market town like Utoxeter than this savvy North London corner. The third ginger character here is Keaton’s son Philip (James Norton), who has no personality whatsoever despite being rather pleased with himself.

Poetic licence apart – and watching this is like sharing your home with a bunch of weird aliens – HAMPSTEAD could be forgiven if it were funny. But Robert Festinger’s script teeters from crass to cringeworthy, with no laughs to be had at all and a score that jars. The filmmakers have captured the rural idyll of the location: Parrokeets chirrup and roses bloom in the perpetual sunshine that beams, between cloudbursts, through the Oak tree’d lanes.

Will the ‘Notting Hill’ affect come to Hampstead as a result of this jaunty romcom? This American treatment will probably have the reverse effect on the village, sending potential buyers desperately in the other direction, amid cries let’s get out of this hellhole. MT

NOW OUT ON RELEASE FROM 23 JUNE 2017

Edith Walks (2017) | East End Film Festival 2017

Dir: Andrew Kötting | Doc | UK | 60min | with Claurdia Barton, David Aylward, Anonymous Bosch, Jem Finer

Andrew Kötting is celebrated for his quintessentially English films that capture the idiosyncratic British humour and the beauty of the countryside. Gallivant explores the Sussex coastline in 1996, while Swandown took a trip from the coastal resort of Hastings upstream to Hackney on board a Swan-styled pedalo, and By Our Selves explores the Epping forest wanderings of a ‘mad’ poet John Clare (Toby Jones).

Edith Walks is intended as another light-hearted tribute to English King Harold Godwinson’s wife Edith Swanneck and is inspired by another walk – from Waltham Abbey in Essex via Battle Abbey to St Leonards-On-Sea, where the ‘queen’ took the remains of King Harold’s body to Waltham for burial near the High Altar after the Battle of Hastings in 1066, where he was defeated by William the Conquerer. She is seen cradling him in a statue at Grosvenor Gardens on the sea front in St Leonards.

Blending the banal and with the spectral, the dreamlike narrative opens with Edith lying on the grass bedecked in white robes and wearing regal jewellery and body markings appropriate for the era. The film The 108 mile journey, as the crow flies, allows the audience to reflect upon all things Edith. A conversation in Northampton between Alan Moore, Iain Sinclair and Edith Swan-Neck is also a key element to the unfolding ‘story’. With images shot using digital super 8 iphones and sound recorded using a specially constructed music box with a boom microphone the film unfolds chronologically but in a completely unpredictable way. The numerous encounters and impromptu performances en route are proof, as if needed, that the angels of happenstance were to looking down upon the troop, with Edith as their hallucination.

Eden Kötting’s short film Forgotten the Queen, a 10 minute and 66 second film made in collaboration with Andrew Kötting and Glenn Whiting with music by Jem Finer. Forgotten the Queen is a short animated film that digs into themes inspired by the life of Edith Swanneck. Eden’s drawings and collages are brought to life by Glenn Whiting and tossed into the time-line like flotsam from a demented passion. Meantime Edith’s eyes fix on the man-shadows overhead, resplendent in their didactic belief systems and stupid hats, which seem to have blighted women since the beginning of time. King Harold would not have approved because despite the fact that time itself can touch you like a feather, stupid men keep firing their bloody arrows.

ON RELEASE NATIONWIDE FROM 23 JUNE 2017 | EAST END FILM FESTIVAL JUNE-JULY 2017 | CURZON

Souvenir (2016)

Dir: Bavo Defurne | Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Kevin Azais | Drama | Belgium | 92min

Isabelle Huppert plays a chanteuse emerging from a long retirement in this slim but delightful musical romance from Belgium director Bavo Defurne.

Huppert holds our attention in a lightweight affair that conjures up the pleasure of this autumn/spring love story between Liliane a former Eurovision runner up and Jean (Kevin Azais) her 21-year old colleague at a pate factory where she gracefully manages to make her daily grind look satisfying, after a singing career that ended with the marriage and manager.

But Jean (Kevin Azais), who predictably still lives with his parents, has always held a candle for her and gently perseveres in in his romantic gestures, convincing her to sing at his boxing club knees-up. So convinced is he of her talents that he throws all his energy behind managing her come-back.

Defurne and his screenwriters craft an appealing show business drama with some poignant highs and lows as the Huppert and Azais manage a convincing chemistry – and we feel for them when Liliane’s old husband (Johan Leysen) makes a re-appearance on the scene. Perhaps Liliane was right to find another day job but Huppert’s perky rendition of Pink Martini’s Joli Garcon certainly deserves a toast.MT

ON RELEASE FROM 23 JUNE 2017

https://vimeo.com/217201831

Edinburgh International Film Festival 2017 | 21 June – 2 July 2017

Cannes was not the only film festival celebrating its 70th birthday in 2017. Edinburgh International Film Festival is the same shares the same anniversary and takes place from 21 June to 2 July, showcasing a total of 151 features from 46 countries including: 17 World Premieres, 12 International Premieres, 9 European Premieres and 69 UK Premieres.

Highlights include the Opening and Closing Gala premieres of Yorkshire-set God’s Own Country and England Is Mine a biopic of Morrissey’s early life in 1970s Manchester before becoming the lead singer in seminal band The Smiths.

Kyra Sedgwick will attend the Festival with her screen debut Story of a Girl, along with the film’s star Kevin Bacon. And Stanley Tucci’s Berlinale drama Final Portrait, is also a highlight of this year’s celebration.

Whilst Cannes celebrated by inviting those having won the Palme D’Or to a lavish evening reception, Edinburth with mark the occasion with a retrospective entitled THE FUTURE IS HISTORY attracting guests including Richard E Grant, Peter Ferdinando, Steven Mackintosh, Kate Dickie, Tam Dean Burn, Bernard Hill, Matt Johnson, Gerard Johnson and Polly Maberly to support and deliver a range of exclusive events and film screenings.

This year’s BEST OF BRITISH strand includes exclusive world premieres of Bryn Higgins’ Access All Areas, featuring Jordan Stephens – one half of hip-hop duo Rizzle Kicks – on a group road trip to the Isle of Wight’s Bestival music Festival; Simon Hunter’s Edie, starring Sheila Hancock as an elderly woman who aims to climb a Scottish mountain; the Donmar Warehouse’s critically acclaimed all-female adaptation of Julius Caesar; and Danny Huston’s The Last Photograph. Audiences can also look forward to London based filmmaker Alex Barrett’s modern silent film London Symphony; an UK response to Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera and filmmaker Justin Edgar’s noir British thriller The Marker; Daniel Jerome Gill’s look at the perils of modern-day relationships in Modern Life Is Rubbish; Sarmad Masud’s My Pure Land, about a mother and daughter’s fight to protect their home; searing abuse drama Romans, starring Orlando Bloom; and moving family drama That Good Night, starring Charles Dance and the late, great John Hurt. Toby Jones stars in a psychological thriller Kaleidoscope; taut mother-daughter drama Let Me Go; the emotionally raw The Pugilist; Taiwanese drama The Receptionist; and This Beautiful Fantastic, starring Tom Wilkinson and Jessica Brown Findlay. Renowned Scottish author Ian Rankin who will present captivating crime drama Reichenbach Falls.

This year’s EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVES strand brings the latest from the continent in the shape of WWII drama 1945, Russian sci- fi Attraction; revenge drama Darkland; Nazi-euthanasia drama Fog in August that stars the Ivo Pietzcker who made his debut in Jack; and darkly humorous corruption drama Glory. There is also visceral Irish Medieval thriller Pilgrimage; Arctic Circle drama Sami Blood; stylish Spanish drama Sister of Mine; and the long-anticipated LGBT art biopic Tom of Finland; Fatih Akin’s roadie Goodbye Berlin; Norway’s Oscar foreign language entry: The King’s Choice; Catherine Deneuve’s latest drama The Midwife; and taut Icelandic thriller The Oath.

The WORLD PERSPECTIVES strand will feature Bong Joon Ho’s latest offering Okja, hot off the Cannes red carpet and starring EIFF honorary patron Tilda Swinton, and Indian road movie Sexy Durga; and the Sundance awarded: I Dream in Another Language – a moving study of language, heritage and hidden pasts;

DOCUMENTARY wise there is the enthralling Becoming Cary Grant, The Challenge – a look at the extravagant pastimes of the fabulously wealthy during one sporting desert weekend; Leaning Into The Wind the sequel to documentary hit River and Tides; Pecking Order that explores the world of chicken breeders; Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World, that studies the role of native Americans in popular music history.

A special FOCUS ON POLAND will present a snapshot of one of the most vibrant cinematic landscapes in the world. An International Premiere of Katarzyna Adamik’s thriller Amok. Additional notable films will include: Andrzej Wajda’s final feature Afterimage; psychological horror Animals; coming-of-age fantasy The Erlprince; Łukasz Ronduda’s A Heart of Love; the colourful Satan Said Dance; the extraordinary The Sun, The Sun Blinded Me; You Have No Idea How Much I Love You – the film that questions what love really means; and the gut- wrenching Volhynia. The strand will also showcase Polish Shorts: Perspectives; Polish Shorts: 15 Years of Wajda School; and a free lecture by Rohan Crickmar on post-war Polish cinema – Diamonds Out of the Ashes: A Brief Survey of Polish Cinema 1946 to Present.

If the weather is kind to Edinburgh, there is also the Outdoor Cinema strand to look forward to, cashmere at the ready. MT

EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | 21 JUNE UNTIL 2 JULY 2017

Churchill (2017)

CHURCHILL is a commanding film of majestic images and thoughtful performances that seeks to imagine the man behind the legendary colossus and succeeds. This is a magnificent tribute to one of the greatest Britons of all time, Sir Winston Churchill.

Jonathan Teplitzky directs Alex von Tunzelmann’s sleek script that chronicles the tense twenty four hours before D-Day. Although the outcome is well known the tension is palpable in a moving biopic that honours the protagonists involved in an epic interlude of wartime strategy and political manoeuvring that concluded the Second World War.

Brian Cox plays Churchill as a consummate politician; a humanistic man of the people; a respectful husband and ultimately a towering hero in a performance that occasionally feels like a caricature of the cigar-chomping, whisky drinking bulldog of a man who, despite bouts of arrogance, is not too vain to stand corrected. The only gripe here is his way of referring to ‘the Narsies’. We were at war with the Germans and that’s a fact, so let’s not get all politically correct about it in retrospect. As his wife Clementine Miranda Richardson is gracefully immaculate: an imperious English Rose as sharp as cut-crystal, and as inscrutable as sterling silver, she is his anchor and his rudder at times of crisis, while remaining cool as a quintessential cucumber. John Slattery (Man Men) plays an impressively masterful Eisenhower and Julian Wadham exudes class and integrity as Field Marshall Montgomery although James Purefoy is a little too fey as King George VI.

The story opens in June 1944 as the Allied Forces stand on the brink: a massive army is secretly assembled on the South Coast ready to cross the Channel and re-claim France under German occupation. Churchill tries to resist the D-Day plan, mindful of the errors of the Great War, the slaughter of Passchendaele, the Somme and Gallipoli, and – although he would go on to live another 20 years – is exhausted and overweight. Luckily Clemmie intervenes and the rest, as they say, is history. The only slight criticism of the film lies in the inclusion of a slight subplot which not only feels redundant -there is enough here to keep us absorbed – but also feels rather like melodramatic contrivance. Epic in scale and convincing in narrative CHURCHILL is a possibly the most memorable Briitsh film of the year. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 16 JUNE 2017

Stockholm My Love (2016)

Best known for his 15-hour documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Cousins describes his debut musical feature STOCKHOLM MY LOVE as a city symphony. It is also the acting debut of Neneh Cherry who appears in every frame as Alva, an architect interested in the way our environment effects us – Also known as psychogeography. Cousins has superimposed Alva’s tragic narrative onto her psychogeographic exploration of Sweden’s capital, giving this paean an elegaic and rather mournful feel until the sun eventually comes out and the colours brighten from wintery greys to limpid shades of blue and green, reflecting Alva’s more positive mood.

Neneh Cherry was born in Stockholm in the mid sixties, the daughter of a Swedish textile designer and a Sierra Leonean student who had come to study engineering. Drifting aimlessly through the pallid streets as Alva, memories of her trauma resurface as she tells her (absent) father about the fateful day her car hit and killed an old Swedish man called Gunnar whose dog had slipped its leash and ran into the main road. This terrible event colours her life: “killing you is killing me” she laments. Luckily the dog escaped and is re-imagined eating a ham sandwich on the tarmac.

Alva spends the first hour of the film emoting cathartically to her father as she recollects the sequence of events that lead to Gunnar’s death. And here we are reminded of the unsolved murder of Sweden’s social democrat premier Olof Palme who was gunned down outside a cinema in 1986. Walking down a road of simple two-story houses built in the western suburb of Vällingby (in the late 1940s) Alva explains that Olaf lived amongst the people, and this gives Cousins an opportunity to show where many of Stockholm’s immigrant community also thrive.

Compared to London’s streets these are sparsely populated. Attractive low rise buildings with large windows and balconies, often facing a green space, make some of our own council houses look grim in comparison – especially in the light of the grim events of June 2017. The sunless climate rather than the architecture is really to blame for making this place look miserable in Winter, especially for people who have come from much sunnier climes.

Sweden is known for its design excellence enriched by the finance from the Hanseatic League, and Stockholm is one of the few European capitals that avoided bombing during the 20th century’s wars. Contemporary buildings and those dating back to the 13th century associate well in their locations between Lake Malaren and the Baltic sea. Cousins tells how architects returned from abroad armed with ideas from the Islamic world and this is reflected in Ferdinand Boberg’s airy central mosque which has an Art Nouveau flavour and glass chandeliers dating back to its original shell built in 1903.

But what about Alva lifting her mood by wandering round Vallingby’s stunning shopping centre Kfem; the renovated historical brewery now housing Octapharma; Sweden’s very own Flat iron building at Central Station; the light-filled Waterfront conference halls; or the gleaming public swimming and sports facilities at Ericsdalbadet. All of these are fine examples of how public urban spaces can uplift and energise those who use them.

After a hour of Cherry’s ramblings, occasionally enlivened by a soundtrack of classical Swedish music by Franz Berwald, songs by ABBA’s Benny Andersson and five of Cherry’s own tunes, this soul-searching love letter feels somehow spartan and incomplete as a mood-reflecting exercise. STOCKHOLM MY LOVE is watchable but never really satisfies as a psychogeographic study nor as a musical drama. What it provides is a snapshot of a point in time in a road less travelled but as a symphony to the great Nordic town it feels somehow inadequate. There is much more to Stockholm than this bird’s eye view. MT

REMEMBERING OLOF PALME | 28 February 1986, Stockholm, Sweden

Weirdos (2016)

Dir: Bruce McDonald | Cast: Dylan Authors, Julia Sarah Stone, Molly Parker, Allan Hawco, Cathy Jones, Rhys Bevan-John, Vi Tang, Gary Levert, Stephen McHattie, Max Humphreys, Alex Purdy | Canada | Drama | 93min

Bruce McDonald’s fresh and tender indie is suffused with the foot-loose charm of the ’70s and a freewheeling score from . It follows a couple of young teenagers who take off across Nova Scotia to the coastal town of Sydney during one breezy Canadian summer.

This may not be Bruce McDonald’s most oustanding piece but it’s certainly an endearing one where Daniel MacIvor’s 1976 script captures the zeitgeist of a gentle era where teens were still innocent and squeaky clean but ripe for self-discovery. Kit (Dylan Authors) is fifteen and still seems unsure of his sexuality despite declaring himself openly “a fag” and “a weirdo” he clearly still has some issues to deal with. His grounded bestie Alice (Julia Sarah Stone) is also a budding girlfriend who has the upper hand emotionally speaking, along with his Andy Warhol like ‘spirit guide who appears from time to time, like a jester in a

The two rub along quite easily until it starts to dawn on that Kit is clearly gay. He’s an appealingly decent youngster who is kind but never sappy, offering Alice his hairdryer and looking genuinely crestfallen when she snogs a guy they meet on the beach.

When they eventually fetch up at Kit’s mother’s house the mood turns more serious as it emerges that clearly there are family issues at stake that explain why Kit is living with his father (an appealing macho Allan Hawco) and his strict but open-minded grandmother (Cathy Jones) rather than with his bipolar mother played Molly Parker in a reliably charming and volatile turn.

As the leads Authors Stone are brilliantly mismatched in their peachy-faced cuteness underpinned by a burgeoning realisation of their slightly dysfunctional families – Alice’s parents are separated, while it’s unsure what’s really going on with his. Although he’s unhappy living with his dad, the extent of his mother’s emotional issues indicate that his tricky adolescent state is probably still too fragile to cope with his mother and give her the support that she needs. WEIRDOS is a gently nostalgic coming of age drama that really conjures up the thrilling excitement and gut-churning bewilderment of adoleschence. MT

CANADA NOW FILM SERIES IS SHOWING AT CURZON CINEMAS beginning with a weekend programme from 15th to 18th June at the Curzon Soho. From Saturday July 1st 2017, in celebration of Canada Day, the films will begin a nation–wide tour of cinemas and become available to stream on Curzon Home Cinema.

Brexitannia (2017) | East End Film Festival 2017

Dir.: Timothy George Kelly; Documentary with Noam Chomsky, Saskia Sassen, Heidi Mirza; UK 2017, 80 min.

It takes a Canadian Timothy George Kelly (A City is An Island) to tackle the emotional division lines of the Brexit decision from June 2016 head-one. Last weeks General Election only reinforced the chasm between the ‘Leavers’ and ‘Remainers’ – and throwing up new electoral alliances hitherto unheard of: The Conservatives losing Canterbury and Kensington to Labour, but gaining Mansfield and County Durham from their opponents. It is, for the first time perhaps, not any more a question of class, but of education. But most of all, Brexitannia shows a nation split right down the middle – and no compromises in sight.

Divided in two parts the so-called traditionalists and the adventurers Brexitannia shows the former in nostalgic black-and-white, interviewed on their home ground: pubs, sports fields and bingo halls, remaining anonymous for reasons of privacy. Immediately emotions take over. “I think Remain voters are cleverer than Leave voters” contrasts with “I voted Brexit, because most Muslims value Death not Life”. Implacable. Illusions regarding past and present run through the Brexit arguments. A middle-aged man, hoping for a quick pay rise argues that “When I go for a job in two years, they will say at the job agency that they can only pay the minimum wage. I say no, and they give the job to a Pole – but hey, there are no Poles here any more. So they pay me what I want”. Another man, sitting with his friend in a pub, sees greatness for his country, because ”we deserve to be that great nation, that’s why we are called Great Britain, because we are that great nation. And we don’t want to give it up too easily”. Contrast this with a young man’s statement “Britain was, through its history, an aggressor”. The general feeling on the Brexit side is ”No empire, no jobs, we are no longer a strong nation”. But even though she supported Brexit, one young woman is to be lauded for openly defending her membership of UkiP: “I don’t believe in the mass media, like the ‘Sun’ any more”. Another woman from Newcastle confronted the friends of her father who complained about immigrants taking their jobs. She asks a candid question: “How many immigrants do you know” –to which the answer was embarrassed silence. But there were more serious experiences, like a home-grown Muslim woman, who was accosted on the streets by strangers the day after the referendum to be told “We have voted ‘out’, and you are still here”. She is saddened and her daughter traumatised, and had nightmares for weeks. Finally there is a resigned man from Northern England, whose comment is perhaps the most quietly devastating: “Brexit doesn’t really matter here, because we’ve got nothing anyway”.

The experts, like Noam Chomsky explain their well known thesis’ about neo-liberalism and corporations, but somehow, even though their comments are well informed, they seem so much less engaging than ordinary citizens – whatever their opinion on Brexit. Just one example by Saskia Sassen is worth mentioning: “Companies, like Nestle and others, who sell bottled water and soft drinks in developed countries all over the world, steal the water from the soils of the under-developed world, were inhabitants grew their fresh vegetables. And more and more have less land to grow their products, so that we can have bottled water. And these citizens, who are expelled from their countries, because they can’t feed themselves any more, come to our shores”.

Brexitannia takes no sides in this very sad document of our once great nation: it is the emotional chasm that is still growing and which leaves very little hope of reconciliation. It is far beyond rational arguments; to paraphrase Fassbinder “Fear is eating the soul”. AS

BREXITANNIA IS SCREENING AT THE EAST END FILM FESTIVAL | 23 June RIO CINEMA | EVERY WEEKEND UNTIL JULY

Papagajka (2017) The Parrot | East End Film Festival

Dir.: Emma Razinski; Cast: Adnan Omerovic, Susanna Capellaro, Tina Keserovic; UK/Bosnia and Herzegovina 2016, 82 min.

Australian born Filmmaker and writer Emma Razinski is the first MA student to come out of Bela Tarr’s film factory in Sarajevo. The impressive upshot of the master’s extensive mentoring is a study of apathy, in which the real Sarajevo building of the title actually has a character role.

Damir (Omerovic) is the security guard in Papagajka, spending his days in the glass cage, observing more or less nothing. In the evening he takes the lift up to his flat where he meets another (silent) inhabitant of he building for a rooftop smoke. Damir plays ‘Noughts and Crosses’ in his cage, using the dirty glass walls as a blackboard. The only contact to the outside world is his sister Kamala (Keserovic), who encourages him (in vain) to meet family and friends. Then one day, an enigmatic woman, calling herself Tasva (even though we learn later that he real name is Benedetta), appears at his door, claiming that she has been robbed and needs a place to sleep. Damir, pathologically shy, gives in, against his instinct. Soon the stranger takes over his place: changing the lock to the front door, redecorating the flat, throwing his stuff out, and finally taking over his bedroom, relegating him to the makeshift bed he had made for her in the kitchen. Their contact is minimal: they play cards, eat and drink. Only once do we see them in an – awkward – embrace. When Damir falls ill, he suspects that the mysterious lodger is to blame.

Long, stationary shots dominate Papagajka, the building provides a claustrophobic microcosm of contemporary Hungary, even the roof scenes induce paranoia. Damir communicates by way of numbers and figures: besides the ‘Noughts and Crosses’ he plays Sudoku. He is a man who has slipped through the cracks of time, writing him name on the dusty windowpane, to remind himself of his banal existence. A low level obsessive-compulsive, he channels his angst into dream sequences, while enduring everyday life and Tasvas’s presence in a silent scream.

Rozanski financed the film partly through crowd-funding but is as uncompromising as her mentor: she insists on telling the – not very elaborate – narrative in images, reducing her protagonists to the occasional sentences, letting their actions talk on their behalf. There a penumbral and eerie charm to the Papagajka building – it could very well be a submarine on the bottom of the sea. DoP Malte Rosenfeld (graduate of the Lodz Film School) uses sparse lighting to enhance the woozy atmosphere. Papagajka might not be for everyone, Rozanski style is an unique and talented new voice.

EAST END FILM FESTIVAL | 17 JUNE 2017 | EVERY WEEKEND UNTIL JULY 2017 AS

Provenance (2017) | East End Film Festival

Ben Hecking’s feature debut is not the usual second rate UK crime thriller nor is it set on another sink estate. Delightfully, it’s a compact and suggestive love story that takes place in sun-drenched Provence, where a classical pianist in his early forties has left his career and marriage to start a new life in France.

This languorously enjoyable drama keeps its cards close to its chest and is also beautiful to look at: Hecking made his name as a cinematographer winning the Michael Powell Award in 2014 (for Hide & Seek). He directs his regular collaborators McKay who plays Jon Finch (and co-directs) and Macqueen who plays the man who threatens his peaceful existence in the village where his much younger lover Sophia (Vega) has just returned after a brief time away. We’re not told where or how they met or where’s she’s been for the past five months but that’s all part of the mystery that gradually unfolds as leisurely as a torrid summer afternoon with a nasty sting served with the sundowners. MT

EAST END FILM FESTIVAL | 17 JUNE | CONTINUES EVERY WEEKEND UNTIL JULY 2017

Dying Laughing (2016)

Dirs: Lloyd Stanton, Paul Toogood | Doc | 89min

Well-known stand-up comedians share their insights and experience in this occasionally amusing compendium. DYING LAUGHING is not a funny film but there are moments of humour in the British-produced documentary dedicated to Garry Shandling, a comedian who died last year.

You may not recognise all the 50 comics who take part in rolling snapshot interviews, but all convey the dreadful awkwardness and moments of embarrassment when no one laughs in a venue sucked dry of all positive vibes. The film conjures up the hit and miss nature of being a stand-up; the harrowing stage fright and elation of success. The overall tone is rather downbeat and introspective; the humour drole or dark rather than laugh out loud. Jamie Foxx talks of money cushioning the blow of a bad gig, and seasoned pro Jerry Seinfeld describes “a dead-silent room full of unhappy people”.

There’s no narrative as such, although clearly these guys are responding to a question we’re not aware of as viewers, but pick up the drift as the diatribes roll on. Sarah Silverman describes the loneliness of life on the road, and it’s clear that this is a vocation for the emotionally robust and thick-skinned. Not a choice but an unavoidable calling.

Eventually the agony and the ecstasy becomes routine as each one replaces the other in a string of personal reflections. A more condensed and better edited version would have made for a more impactful, and ultimately more entertaining watch. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 16 JUNE 2017

Journey to the South (2017) | Creature of the Estuary | East End Film Festival

Dir: Jill Daniels | Doc | UK | 51min

Documentary award winner Jill Daniel’s poetic and often banal voyage of discovery takes her south to the French Riviera where in Menton and Castellar she discovers the villa used by writer Katherine Mansfield and kicks over the traces of a mysterious unsolved murder.

Very much in tune with Agnes Varda’s Cannes outing Faces, Places (2017), Daniel’s leisurely piece randomly engages with the French inhabitants she meets along the way. The photos and diary recollections of Katherine Mansfield give this piece a rewarding historical context as she alights upon ordinary life in rural France. Journey to the South is an artist’s meditation on life and death, on creativity and carving out a more satisfying future away from the gilded trappings of the past. MT

‘Exploring themes of displacement, migration and change, Creature of the Estuary takes us on an entirely different poetic journey, through the muddy netherworld of the Thames Estuary. This new work by Eelyn Lee evokes a creature made of fragments of memory and fear: a montage, part fantasy, part travelogue and part requiem’.

EAST END FILM FESTIVAL \ 18 JUNE | RICH MIX | WEEKENDS IN JUNE AND JUNE 2017

By the Time it Gets Dark (2017)

Dir: Anocha Suwichakornpong | Cast: Arak Amornsupasiri, Apinya Sakuljaroensuk, Achtara Suwan, Visra Vichit-Vadakan | Drama | Thai | 105min

Thai director Anocha Suwichakornpong’s latest film is a magical mood piece that calmly explores the nature of memory through lives traumatised by the government’s military-led massacre of student demonstrators in 1976 Bangkok.

Her characters are so deeply affected by the past that their bid to re-discover themselves in the present often skews their recollections as they grapple to find the truth and explore the nature of identity in a world floundering in sensory overload and media intervention. Often silent and meditative, Suwichakornpong’s film makes judicious use of a recurring musical motif that punctuates the often bewildering narrative that unfolds in three settings.

The story opens as a group arrives to pray and meditate in a large room with panoramic views of the surrounding verdant landscapes. In monochrome flashback, armed soldiers hold sway over their prone captives in a brightly staged setting that could be a prison or a memory of the massacre. The scene that follows pictures a couple strolling calmly in a woodland setting, the hostilities still fresh in their minds as they calmly discuss political activism.

Meanwhile her alter ego filmmaker Ann (Vichit-Vadakan) is preparing to make a feature film of the University massacre that took place nearly forty years previously. In the same rural house she prepares to interview her character Taew (Rassami Paoluengton) about her experiences during the fateful onslaught. But Taew sharply criticises Ann’s approach as lacking gravitas surrounded, as she is, by the trappings of her serene life in contemporary Thailand.

Ann realises she is totally ill-equipped to-create the trauma and her mind starts to wander off into a reverie, and at this point the narrative becomes increasingly surreal with images of fast-growing vegetation marking the shift to another character Peter (Arak Amornsupasiri) a popstar and actor who is seen taking a flight to Bangkok where he settles down to read a film script in his modern condo. Then we are back to another glimpse of Ann (Inthira Charoenpura) and Taew (Penpak Sirikul) in more glamorous circumstances in the same country house, with the same film project.

The only character who connects these disparate scenes is Atchara Suwan’s unnamed worker, who variously plays a chambermaid, waitress, cleaner and monastery employee completing this surreal and enigmatic rumination. Suwichakornpong handles the ever-shifting form with consummate deftness while Ming Kai Leung’s camerawork moves seemlessly through the diverse sequences to capture the ethereal beauty of the verdant settings and swirling citiscapes. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 16 JUNE 2017

One-Eyed Jacks (1961) | Dual format release

ONE-EYED JACKS Marlon Brando’s directorial debut – in which he also stars – has a moody sensuous Baroque appeal thanks to a superb and sultry-looking superb Mexican female cast and Charles Lang’s burnished visuals and magnificent Monterey ‘mises en scene’. It was also nearly Stanley Kubrick’s only Western until Brando took over the controls. He plays Rio, an exotic-looking outlaw who was double-crossed his partner in crime, Dad Longworth (Malden), after the two robbed a bank. Some years later he emerges to avenge Dad who has now become a respectable pillar of the community. Based on the novel by Charles Neider, which was a re-telling of the story of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Brando made further changes to the script with Rio now killing Dad rather than the other way round. The crashing waves and wild coastlines seem to echo the restless imagery and complex inter-personal conflicts and Brando himself smoulders as a cowboy who’s not only easy on the eye but intriguing as a Romantic hero. MT

OUT ON 12 JUNE 2017 | COURTESY OF ARROW ACADEMY | SPECIAL EDITION CONTENTS

New 4K restoration by Universal Pictures and The Film Foundation, in consultation with Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg
High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) and Standard Definition DVD presentations
Uncompressed Mono 1.0 PCM Audio
Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
Brand new audio commentary by Stephen Prince, author of Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies, recorded exclusively for this release
Introduction by Martin Scorsese
Marlon Brando: The Wild One, Paul Joyce’s 1996 documentary on the actor, featuring interviews with Dennis Hopper, Shelley Winters, Martin Sheen and Anthony Hopkins
Additional, previously unseen interview material from Marlon Brando: The Wild One with Francis Ford Coppola and Arthur Penn
Theatrical trailer
Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Jacob Phillips

Death in the Garden (1956) | Bluray/DVD release

Dir.: Luis Bunuel; Cast: Simone Signoret, Charles Vanel, George Marchal, Michel Piccoli, Michele Girardon, Jorge Martinez; France/Mexico 1956, 104 min.

Filmed completely on location in Mexico, the film version of Jose-Andre Lacour’s novel – with additional dialogue by Raymond Queneau – was an expensive production, shot in Eastman Colour and with echoes of Herzog’s Aguirre. Bunuel never attempted to shoot a pure adventure film, but stayed true to himself in relying heavily on religious symbolism and surrealism.

In an unnamed South American country, the adventurer Chark (Marchal) is accused of a bank robbery, but the real reason for his arrest is his support for the miners, who are digging for gold. After Captain Ferrero (Martinez) has successfully suppressed the uprising, the survivors take a ship and escape to Brazil. There are Father Lizardi (Michel Piccoli in his debut), the ageing miner Castin (Vanel) and his deaf-mute daughter Maria (Girardon and the prostitute Djin (Signoret). In the jungle (the titular garden of Eden), they stumble about a plane, which has crashed, full of gourmet food and other luxury items. Father Lizardi is excited, and thanks God for the discovery, but is reminded that around fifty people had died. In spite of this reprieve, the group soon develops a sort of madness, two members are shot: everyone, who had plans for the future will die, only the most innocent will survive.

Bunuel, who also had a hand in the adaption of the novel, began the film with a revolution, a storybook event, which is quickly put down. In the second part, religion and madness (Bunuel’s favourite topics) take over. Symbolism is also present: after the fugitives have killed a large python, they want to eat it, but suddenly, it seems, that the beast is still alive – the humans nearly flee the scene, whilst an army of ants attacks the python. Death in the Garden is a sort of halfway house in Bunuel’s development as a filmmaker: it is the link between his Mexican phase of commercially orientated relationship films like La hija del Engano (1951) and masterpieces like Viridiana (1961). The images of Jorge Stahl jr, (Garden of Evil) who shot 176 films in a long career, are breathtaking, the use of early colour film is masterful, and the jungle scenes are seriously creepy. Signoret dominates the proceedings, even though she was homesick for France and her husband Yves Montand, and Bunuel had to coax her every day into staying on board. DEATH IN THE GARDEN has all the hallmarks of the subversiveness of Bunuel’s early work and the “organised anarchism” of his later period. But apart from this, it is also extremely enjoyable to watch. AS

ON BLURAY AND DVD FROM 25 JUNE | ARROW ACADEMY

Slack Bay (2016) |Ma Loute

Director/Writer: Bruno Dumont

Cast: Juliette Binoche, Fabrice Luchini, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Jean Luc Vincent, Brandon Lavieville, Cyril Riguax

122min | Comedy | France

After success with P’tit Quinquin, Bruno Dumont is back with comedy of a different kind, an absurdist often grotesque turn of the 20th century melodrama which combines moments of poetic realism and is certain to divide audiences with its quirky brand of charm.

On a swampy coastal stretch of Britany a rotund police inspector (Cyril Rigaux) is investigating a spate of ‘mysterious’ disappearances possibly connected to a carnivorous local fisherman and his family of four kids, the eldest of whom is the titular Ma Loute (Brandon Lavieville). The arrival of the Van Peteghem family from Tourcoing signals the start of the summer holidays as the mannered aristrocratic family gain their family seat – a strangely 1930s style cement contruction called The Tymphonium – amid cries of euphoria over every aspect of local nature and particularly the splendid views. They are soon joined by Andre’s cousin Aude (a gloriously over the top Juliette Binoche), her cross-dressing son Billie (Raph) and her cousin or possibly second cousin as they seem to be an interbred lot – apparently quite common amongst the ‘grand old families of Northern France’ – which would explain the weird paternity that later emerges in the final scenes.

This is a charismatic and inventive curio of a film which will either delight you with its quirky humour and performances or send you home underwhelmed. The humour is very French and the best part is undeniably Guillaume Deffontaines’ perfect lensing and the magnificent seascapes which echo and re-create the lush vibrancy of those of Manet, Monet and Cezanne. Costume-wise too this is a sumptuous affair with perfect attention to detail both in the domestic settings on the resplendent beaches making this a visual feast not to be missed. Performances too are really outstanding. Fabrice Luchini ponces about with a contorted limp; Juliette Binoche faints and swoons with delight and horror and Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi is simply graceful and restrained with an expression of discrete ecstacy that often dissolves in tender tears. It would be a shame to spoil the entire plot which reveals itself with delicous coyness. Suffice to say, there’s no director like Dumont for creating such a fabulous stillness and sense of place in his glowing compositions of the Brittany scenery and his deftness for combining period touches with elegant framing and a sense of magic and delicate poetry even in the more mordid aspects of this inspired comedy drama. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 16 JUNE 2017

Gifted (2017)

Dir.: Marc Webb; Cast: Chris Evans, McKenna Grace, Jenny Slate, Lindsay Duncan, Octavia Spencer; USA 2017, 101 min.

Spiderman director Marc Webb and Captain America hero Chris Evans team up for a well-meaning but utterly predictable custody fight story, which is saved from mediocrity by McKenna Grace, as seven-year old Mary, breathing some life into the soppy and sometimes downright embarrassing project.

Boston philosophy lecturer Frank Adler (Evans) is guilt-ridden after the death of his sister, a mathematical genius who committed suicide due to pressure from their over-bearing mother Evelyn (Duncan). Frank feels partly for her death and decides to takes her six-month-old daughter Mary to Florida to raise her away from his mother’s influence. Seven years on, whilst Mary is impressing her school with her math prowess, the condescending Evelyn turns up and starts a custody battle, claiming that Frank is neglects his niece’s talents and, as a mere boat repairman, cannot give Mary the resources she deserves. Despite support from Mary’s teacher Bonnie (Slater) and a helpful neighbour Roberta (Spencer) Frank has to give in, and his fears come true: Mary is taken in by downright evil foster parents, who together with Evelyn, give Mary home schooling centred around developing her mathematical genius. When Frank learns that Fred, Mary’s eyed-cat, has been abandoned by the foster-parents to a home for stray animals and is in danger of being put down he dreams up a far-fetched plot to save Mary.

Everyone on board this project gives their professional best – with the exception of scriptwriter Tom Flynn, who comes up with some really cringeworthy moments, like Mary finding her teacher Bonnie half-naked in Frank’s apartment, after a drunken one-night stand. DoP Stuart Dryburgh (The Great Wall) doesn’t have a great deal to work with as the characters are one-dimensional in this rather torpid affair that aims to pull at our heart-strings but only succeeds in numbing our brain cells. Luckily, McKenna Grace is unperturbed by the adult mediocrity around her, proving that she is the only one deserving the film’s title. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 16 June 2017

Those Who Make Revolution Halfway only Dig their Own Graves (2016) |Transylvania Film Festival | 2-11 June 2017

Dir.: Mathieu Denis, Simon Lavoie | Cast: Charlotte Aubin, Laurent Belanger, Emmanuelle Lussier Martinez, Gabrielle Tremblay | Canada | 183 min.

Directors/writers Mathieu Denis and Simon Lavoie (Laurentia) have created a daring and innovative portrait of four self-appointed revolutionaries in Quebec, unable to come to terms with the outcome of the ‘Maple Spring’ of 2012, when students striked and protested for months after the government hiked up tuition fees – but returned to studies and their mostly privileged life after the climb down of the authorities. These four mistook the uprising for the first step of a popular revolution, and barricaded themselves into a dingy bungalow, covering all windows hermetically.

Whilst fictional in its approach, the unfolding narrative stays true to real events. After the end of the 1968 uprising in Europe, both Germany (Baader-Meinhof Group) and Italy (Red Brigades) witnessed what a small group of committed urban guerrillas could achieve: although neither movement reached a membership of treble figures, it created a hostile atmosphere that affected whole countries and had, like the abduction and killing of the Italian Premier Aldo Moro, political repercussions for decades to come.

The directors develop their characters slowly: what starts with long speeches and walls full of revolutionary slogans (“Revolutionaries believe in people – what a flaw!), clearly shades of Godard’s La Chinoise, escalates into confrontations with friends and families. Roxanne (Aubin), who calls herself Giustizia, knifes her father during a family dinner, after he has given her another lecture on how they all had great ideas when they were young, but that hard work and reality put pay to their illusions. It emerges that Tumolto (Belanger), the only male of the group, is also clearly intellectually at odds with his own father. Asking about his health, Tumolto is greeting with a barrage of bleats about work, which clearly stresses him out.

Karine (Lussier Martinez) adopts the grandiose ‘nom de guerre’ Ordine Nuovo, and is saved by her mother from prison, but, petulantly goes on to mock her in court, and later, when the ‘revolutionary’ cell has run out of money, robs her of her savings with the support of the three others. Thea (Tremblay), re-named Klas batalo (Class Fight), is a transgender prostitute, from whose earnings the comrades live, and has a client who finds a Rosa Luxemburg text in the room. Thea disowns the ownership of the book, but the client is insistent, quoting from the book (“a revolutionary should also love the beauty of the clouds”), and confesses to having been in love with these ideals – after which Thea breaks down in tears, resigns from her job and participates in the robbery of Karine’s mother.

The four of them spend their days mooching around naked – but denying themselves sex, since they are ‘at war’ – with the world, their aggression turning inward. Tumolto has been discovered watching a video from previous political demonstrations, where police brutality is evident. In reaction to watching this ‘nostalgic’ fare, Tumolto throws a Molotov cocktail into a restaurant. He will never know that his actions killed a family of four, who lived about the restaurant, since Karine is the only one who checks news on the Internet (the hide-out has no phone or TV) and withholds the news from the group. Finally Karine decides on the ultimate self-punishment at the doorstep of her mother’s house.

The atmosphere in the bungalow is claustrophobic with undertones of a fascist death cult. Despite all the revolutionary rhetoric on display, the salient fact is that the four people are really using the political background as an excuse to inflict sadistic pain: mainly on each other. Clearly their profile and approach is infantile. Desperate to ‘get back into the womb’, they have re-created it in the penumbral gloom, where their ‘wailing’ wall is the only significant piece of substance.

DoP Nicolas Canniccioni (Gerantophilia) creates a maudlin atmosphere of negativity and self-destruction and there are some brilliant performances from the ensemble quartet. The film takes its title from a Saint-Just quote, and is a brilliant study of a collective rush into psychosis, where the Real Self is deprived of any contact with reality, leaving only (self)destruction as a solution. A brave and singularly unique effort. AS

BEST CANADIAN FILM TIFF 2016 | SCREENING DURING BERLINALE 9-19 FEBRUARY 2017 |

Destination Unknown (2016)

Dir.: Claire Ferguson; Documentary; UK/Austria/Poland/USA 2016, 78 min.

Between 2003 and 2016, producer Llion Roberts travelled the world to interview survivors of the Shoah. In 2014 he collaborated with director Claire Ferguson (Concert for Bangladesh Revisited) on a collection of interviews for Destination Unknown, a living testimony of twelve survivors – five are no long with us, making this documentary even more salient.

Relying on the testimony of the witnesses alone, and archive films from before and after the war – as well as harrowing newsreels from the liberation of the camps – it becomes clear that the survivors faced their ‘Destination unknown’ twice: when arrested and transported in overcrowded cattle trains, they had no idea where there were heading. And after their liberation from the Camps, fresh anxiety over their future must have overwhelmed them again. It’s impossible to imagine more disparate entities in comparing the archive clips of ghetto life before 1939, with the inhuman conditions of the camps, and the secure middle-class environment in the USA, Canada, Israel or other countries, captured on 8mm films. These women and men have faced different universes in one lifetimes. Clearly, all survivors should have their harrowing life stories told, and while words mean so little from the safety of our own perspective, watching the film help to brings to life their courage and suffering.

Edward Mosberg, born 1926, regularly visits Concentration Camps, together with his wife Cecile, another survivor. Both lived in the Krakow ghetto, after which Cecile was imprisoned in the camps of Plaszow, Auschwitz-Birkenau (surviving two death-marches), Bergen-Belsen, Gelenau and Mauthausen, where she was liberated. Edward Mosberg survived the Plaszow, Mauthausen and Linz camps. In Mauthausen he had to carry heavy stones up stairs, if he’d have stopped or fallen, the Germans would have pushed him to his death over the cliffs, or shot him. He is the sole survivor of a family of 26; his mother was gassed in Auschwitz, his two sisters were shot – together with 7000 young women, their bodies thrown into the Baltic Sea by the Germans a day before Stutthof Concentration Camp was liberated. Edward and Cecile were married in Belgium in 1951 and emigrated to the USA shortly afterwards. They have three daughters.

Marsha Kreuzman was born in Krakow in 1923. In 1940, her family was transported to the Majdanek Camp, her mother was shot and killed. Marsha had promised her to look after her father and brother. After that, the Kreuzmans were moved to the Plaszow camp, and Marsha remembers “that it was the only camp without a crematorium. They had other ways to kill us.” In 1943 Kreuzman’s father was found in a ditch, and she had to watch, as he and other prisoners were lined up and shot. In May 1944, her brother did not pass the ‘selection’ and was sent to Auschwitz, where he was murdered. Early in 1945, Marsha Kreuzman and other survivors were marched to Auschwitz, the march took five days and four night under brutal conditions. After Auschwitz, she survived another ‘death march’, this time to the Bergen-Belsen camp. Of the over 5000 inmates, who set out in Auschwitz, only 100 survived – Marsha was one of them. But her ordeal was not over: she was sent to the Camps of Flossenburg and finally Mauthausen, until she was liberated on May 5th 1945 by the US army: near death, she was weighing 34 kg.

Stanley Glogauer, who died in 2013, was taken from the ghetto to Auschwitz and separated from his mother and sisters. Later he learned from an uncle, that they had been murdered. When Stanley’s father broke a leg, he was sent to the infirmary, which was more or less the same as a death sentence. Stanley himself was very fit, and caught the attention of Dr. Josef Mengele. On Mengele’s order, his skull was opened with a chisel, without anaesthetic – to test if such operation were possible on the battlefield. Whilst he was still conscious, they sewed the skull up over the perforated skull and declared “the operation a success”. Asking the orderly, Bruno, to dispose of Stanley’s body, the “man of science and culture left, to listen to Wagner”. Bruno, a Czech, who was probably in the camp for being a homosexual, nursed Stanley back to health and helped to get him job, which made his eventual survival possible. Stanley had to ‘greet’ the newly arrived camp inmates, and take their possessions from them. He also told the mothers, to give their babies to the older women of the camp staff, since they would otherwise be killed immediately. Some mothers held on to their babies and died with them, others, chose a deadly lottery, leaving their children with Stanley and his fellow inmates, giving them a glimmer of hope.

The last word should go to Helena Sternlicht, one of the survivors of the famous Schindler list. “Everybody had a choice. Amon Göth [the commander of the Plaszow Camp, who was executed in 1946] chose to kill, Oskar Schindler chose to save lives”. Sternlicht is one of those survivors who continued to fight to keep the memory of the Shoah victims alive. Others did not want to “burden their families with their sadness, and kept quiet.” But none of them could ever sleep soundly at night and be sure of what would await them on the morrow. AS

ON RELEASE AT SELECTED CINEMAS FROM 15 JUNE 2017

East End Film Festival 2017 |

The 16th EAST END FILM FESTIVAL takes place in London’s East End EVERY WEEKEND in June 2017, and there are 5 epics to look forward to celebrating a different focus and making the most of non-cinema venues premiering an exciting array of bold and challenging feature films and documentaries from new and emerging new talent. Next year the festival plans a move to Spring slot.

HIGHLIGHTS

There will be a chance to see two recent biopics: Benny Boom’s on the multi-talented cult figure Tupac Shakur, ALL EYEZ ON ME and Dome Karukoski’s biodrama on legendary gay icon TOM OF FINLAND. Other documentaries cover topics as contraversial as Brexit BREXITANNIA and America’s Death Penalty THE PENALTY (Dir: Will Francome).

SCREENINGS UNDER THE STARS | WEEKEND ONE

The 16th edition of East End Film Festival commences with EAST END OUTDOORS (Fri 2 & Sat 3 June). This weekend of FREE outdoor screenings at Old Spitalfields Market is themed around iconic musicals including a family-friendly matinee of the 1968 British musical classic CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG, and an East End screening of WEST SIDE STORY.

COMMUNITY & HERITAGE | WEEKEND TWO

Reflecting the energy and cultural mix of London’s East End, the second weekend (Thu 8 – Sun 11 June) focuses on films and events with local resonance. The World Premiere of MY NAME IS LENNY (dir: Ron Scalpello, UK) covering the life of the Britain’s famous bare-knuckle fighter Lenny McLean aka ‘the Guv’nor – interesting to compare this with Walter Hill’s Charles Bronson starrer HARD TIMES (1975) – it also has John Hurt in one of his final acting roles. A duet of female films OFTEN DURING THE DAY (directed by Joanna Davis, 16 mins, 1979) is a closely mapped investigation of a kitchen, and women’s relationship to the domestic sphere. And BRED AND BORN (directed by Joanna Davis and Mary Pat Leece, 75 mins, 1983) is an experimental documentary, produced over four years, which interweaves two parallel strands: a women’s discussion group on mother-daughter relationships, and interviews with four generations of women from an East End family. There is also the UK Premiere of A CARIBBEAN DREAM (dir: Shakirah Bourne, UK/Barbados), a Barbados-set re-imagining of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Nights Dream, starring Susannah Harker as Titania.

THE BEST NEW UNSIGNED FILMS – Looking for Distribution | WEEKEND THREE

The EAST END DISCOVERY (Thu 15 – Sun 18 June) weekend showcases features and documentaries currently looking for UK distribution: and offers the chance to see quality films looking for general release and the best new and unsigned films from emerging directors. Following his role in Oscar-winning The Salesman, Iranian actor Shahab Hosseini takes the title role in the European Premiere of GHOLAM (dir: Mitra Tabrizian, UK) as a man haunted by his past and depressed by his uncertain future. Canadian director Arran Shearing presents FORGOTTEN MAN, a black and white romantic comedy that follows a young actor with an East End theatre company for the homeless, who falls for a wealthy out-of-towner. The World Premiere of S|T|R|A|Y|S (dir: Barnaby Miller, UK) is an unflinching depiction of modern London that blurs the lines between real life and animation. Also worth a watch is the debut thriller from Bela Tarr protegee Emma Rozanski’s edgy horror sci-fi thriller PAPAGAJKA- a cautionary tale about strange characters in inner city Sarejevo and PROVENANCE that sees a mysterious stranger threaten the new start in life for a classical musician and his girlfriend when they move to Provence (17 June 18.30)

Oscar-nominated filmmaker David France (How To Survive A Plague from EEFF2012) documents a legendary fixture of New York’s gay ghetto in the London Premiere of THE DEATH AND LIFE OF MARSHA P. JOHNSON (dir: David France, USA) – structured as a whodunit, it celebrates Marsha’s lasting political legacy while seeking to solve the mystery of her unexplained death.

The London Premiere of fiction/documentary hybrid DRIB (dir: Kristoffer Borgli, Norway) re-enacts the story of a failed violent marketing campaign for a well-known energy drink. Three Hackney-based filmmakers follow a $10 bill as it criss-crosses the United States in the European Premiere of FOLLOW THE MONEY (dir: John Hardwick, Ben Unwin, Steve Boggan, UK), building a unique and surprising portrait of the American people.

CROSS-ARTS, CULTURE, MUSIC, MAYHEM | WEEKEND FOUR

The EAST END SUBMERGE (Thu 22 – Sun 25 June) weekend includes includes a massive costumed TWIN PEAKS BALL taking over Andaz Liverpool Street Hotel, and a programme of screenings in the hotel’s hidden Masonic Temple including an Alex Cox acid-western double bill of WALKER and STRAIGHT TO HELL

Another highlight of this weekend will be a live performance with Andrew Kötting and Iain Sinclair of experimental documentary EDITH WALKS, a programme of artists films from Bethnal Green artist collective no.w.here, a live soundtrack from East India Youth, and a female punk night raising funds for a documentary about X-Ray Spex frontwoman Poly Styrene. On 23 June, the first anniversary of the Brexit vote, EEFF present the London Premiere of BREXITANNIA (dir: Timothy George Kelly, UK/Russia), a funny, sometimes terrifying and non-judgemental look at new populist politics, followed by a panel discussion with opinions from all sides of the debate. At Castle Cinema, Hackney’s new crowdfunded community cinema, is the venue for the World Premiere of MY NAME IS SWAN (dir: Adam Carr, UK), an odyssey of loss in a shifting cityscape with music by Samuel Kilcoyne and Takatsuna Mukai.

PREMIERES OF BIG NEW INDEPENDENT FILMS | WEEKEND FIVE

The EEFF culminates with EAST END HEADLINE (Thu 29 June – Sun 2 July) a handpicked selection of titles on their way to Britain’s cinemas. Berlinale Generation Plus winner BUTTERFLY KISSES (dir: Rafael Kapelinski, UK) follows three friends battling with their own demons in a teenage world that revolves around sex and porn. Not to be missed is another standout Berlinale drama performed entirely in Yiddish, the London Premiere of MENASHE (dir: Joshua Z Weinstein, USA) explores the lonely life of a put-upon widower in Brooklyn’s ultra-orthodox Jewish community as he battle for custody of his son. And James Ball, formerly of WikiLeaks and now Buzzfeed, will be joining the festival for a special discussion around the subject of post-truth politics. MT

THE EAST END FILM FESTIVAL | JUNE 2017 | VARIOUS EAST END VENUES

Berlin Syndrome (2017) Netflix

Dir.: Cate Shortland; Cast: Teresa Palmer. Max Riemelt, Matthias Habich, Emma Bading; Australia 2017,116 min.

Even if you don’t always agree with Cate Shortland’s point of view – Lore was a case in point – she has a special style –as in this variation on John Fowles’ The Collector, filmed in 1965 by William Wyler.

Australian tourist Clare (Palmer) is somehow lost in Berlin, and when she meets handsome Andi (Riemelt), an English teacher, she abandons her journey to Dresden, and stays with him. The sex is satisfying, but Clare soon finds out that Andi wants to keep her for good, as his prisoner: her Sim-Card disappears, the windows of the flat in an otherwise empty apartment block don’t open, and the door is double-bolted.

Andi is a lonely person, his only real contact is his father Erich (Habich), a university lecturer, who, contrary to his son, has some positive feelings about living in the old GDR. Andi’s mother ‘defected’ to the West when he was a child, something he will never forget or forgive.

Clare oscillates between fighting (both are seriously injured) and trying to coax Andi to release her. After Erich dies, the two even spend a rather harmonious Christmas together in the dead man’s house. Andi adopts his father’s dog, and Clare is happy to have some company, when Andi is at work. But Andi’s true nature is soon revealed. A chance encounter with Franka (Bading) – one of Andi’s female students – who turns up on the doorstep, leads to a surprising, but well constructed, original conclusion.

The title refers to the claustrophobic atmosphere, which to this day, hangs over a united Berlin. Neither the neon-glitz of the western part of the city, nor the much less kempt part of the old east, lets us forget what happened here between 1933 and 1945. The fate of over 300 000 Berlin Jews, who were first excluded from public life and had to hide in their flats, before being deported from Grunewald Station to the extermination camps, still hangs over the city. And an involuntary wall the GDR rulers then erected, showed that Germans, whatever the ideology, are very good at creating a Huis-clos state of affairs.

When it becomes clear that Clare is not the first of Andi’s victims, she even allows him to use her more and more as a sexual object: he is more interested in taking photos of the helpless woman than having sex with her. He can only function if there is a woman substitute for the mother who abandoned him.

Palmer and Riemelt are convincing, both Erich and Franka seem to be only there to drive the plot forward. This is a shame, because we would have liked to learn more about Andi. The length of nearly two hours is also problematic: the tighter structure adopted by writer Shuan Grant in Melenie Joosten’s novel, would have kept the audience more engaged. DoP Germain McMicking’s images are most imaginative in the indoor scenes, the Berlin panorama is a little too idyllic. This is a provocative, but authentic production.

NOW ON NETFLIX

My Cousin Rachel (2017)

Writer|Dir: Roger Michell | Cast: Rachel Weisz, Sam Claflin, Holliday Grainger, Iain Glen, Pierfrancesco Favino, Simon Russell Beale, Vicki Pepperdine, Poppy Lee Friar, Katherine Pearce, Tim Barlow | 110min | Drama

Rachel Weisz plays the enigmatic heroine in this rather subdued adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic romance, with Sam Claflin as the naive country boy who falls under her power, completely misjudging the mood. The 1951 novel was first adapted for the big screen a year after its completion with Nunnally Johnson and Henry Koster brilliantly capturing the sinuous mystery, and giving a chilling sense of spiteful danger that this version fails to convey, despite its lavishly atmospheric mise-en-scene and an unsettling denouement for the impressive cast. Performance-wise, Olivia de Havilland and Richard Burton were always going to be a hard act to follow but chemistry certainly smoulders between Claflin and Weisz’s Rachel, although she comes across as coldly reticent rather than alluringly mysterious, and by the end we are glad to be done with her.

In 1830s England, Sam Claflin is warm and exuberant as Philip Ashley, the fresh-faced orphan who “knows nothing of women”, growing up in his cousin Ambrose’s Cornish manor. Unsophisticated and puppyish, he is close to his godfather’s English rose of a daughter Louise (Holliday Grainger) but they lack the erotic charge to be more than friends. Philip idolises Ambrose (who he also plays) and compressed opening scenes show them enjoying outdoor pursuits, in shades of Schlesinger’s Far From The Madding Crowd. Come the winter, Ambrose heads for Italy for his health and finds love with his cousin Rachel, extolling their happiness and marriage in letters back home. But clouds soon gather over their idyll as a note of suspicion, then terror, enters his correspondence, and his “kindest companion” soon becomes “my torment”. And when Philip arrives in Florence to offer support, the mysterious Rainaldi is waiting to tell him that Ambrose is dead from a brain tumour, and Rachel is heading for Cornwall.

Devastated and angered, Philip hot foots it home on a mission of revenge. There, Rachel’s urbane grace disarms him, inviting him to tea, demurely dressed in black, eyelashes ‘a flutter. She is captivated by his strong resemblance to her dead husband, but after a tepid boudoir encounter, he clearly proves to be a pale imitation of the real man, both in and out of the bedroom. From then on Rachel turns to mind games rather than sexual ones, becoming the châtelaine and ordering refurbishments to the shabby decor. This is a household devoid of women so naturally Rachel goes down a treat, even the crusty old retainer Seecombe (Tim Barlow) fumbles more that usual over the tea things. There are open references to Rachel’s ‘unlimited appetite’ from her snivelling house guest Rainaldi, but the only appetite in evidence is her profligacy as a black hole appears in the family finances, and she comes across as simpering, inscrutable and histrionic when challenged, rather than bewitching or seductive. Philip enters a vortex of jealous obsession over Rainaldi (who is later revealed as gay) and rashly signs over his entire inheritance to the object of his desire in a wonderfully played cameo by Simon Russell Beale as his stickler of a lawyer (It’s my job, to stickle”) and rather a twee scene where his godfather (a dignified Iain Glen) plays the harpsichord, on the verge of tears.

Our trust lies in these erudite elders to save the day, but the recalcitrant Philip will have none of it, as the post-coital narrative gains melodramatic momentum driven forward by his stonking lust, Rachel’s ambiguity, and the legal twists and turns. Ambrose’ letters hinted at Rachel poisoning him and Philip discovers laburnum seeds amongst her possessions, while her specially brewed twig teas drive him, quite literally, to delirium, in scenes of woozy magic realism. During a bosky interlude in the bluebells, she again grimly tolerates Philip’s sexual advances, while later claiming to be a liberated female whose emancipation has somehow been challenged by his prescient announcement of their betrothal. It’s clear as the family crystal that Philip has been making advances, so why was she unable, despite her feminist pretensions, to signal her feelings of doubt – or distaste – before his clumsy announcement. Eventually we too become confused by their dalliance. She owns the house, so what is her game plan, if not marriage? She clearly doesn’t appreciate his lovemaking and yet continues to hang around the house titivating and forcing toxic tisanes on the reluctant household, and makes flirtatious sorties to see her Italian friend. Clearly the film’s feminist agenda has been lost in translation somewhere between the 19th and the 21st century. But still our heroine continues to exert a subtle suspense. A very timely film for today where certain women seem stuck in the dark ages while desperate to enjoy the privileges offered by the modern world. MT

OUT ON 9 JUNE 2017

Christopher Nolan Presents | BFI

To showcase DUNKIRK British director Christopher Nolan has curated a series of films that inspired his new feature. title. CHRISTOPHER NOLAN PRESENTS has been personally curated by the award-winning director and will offer audiences unique insight into the films which influenced his hotly anticipated take on one of the key moments of WWII.

Preview: Dunkirk + intro by director Christopher Nolan

Netherlands-UK-France-USA 2017. Dir Christopher Nolan. With Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Mark Rylance, Kenneth Branagh. RT and cert TBC. 70mm. Courtesy of Warner Brothers

Dunkirk opens as hundreds of thousands of British and Allied troops are surrounded by enemy forces. Trapped on the beach with their backs to the sea they face an impossible situation as the enemy closes in. We’re delighted to screen Nolan’s much anticipated vision of an event that shaped our world.

Tickets £24, concs £19.20 (Members pay £2 less)

THU 13 JUL 20:15 NFT1

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GREED

USA 1924. Dir Erich von Stroheim. With Gibson Gowland, Zasu Pitts, Jean Hersholt. 132min. 35mm. PG. With live piano accompaniment

Hollywood’s more serious stabs at realist fiction emulate the social and psychological nuances of the 19th-century novel, and no one has taken American film further down that road than Stroheim. Shot on location in San Francisco and Death Valley, the film was cut to less than a third of its original nine hours, but remains extraordinary for its unflinching vision of the corrosive power of money.

SUN 2 JUL 15:10 NFT1 / SUN 9 JUL 14:15 NFT3

SUNRISE: A Song of Two Humans

USA 1927. Dir FW Murnau. With George O’Brien, Janet Gaynor, Margaret Livingston. 94min. 35mm. With score. U

Murnau’s foray into American cinema sees him construct a world free of geographic and social specifics – a dreamlike rural landscape and a brash cityscape that is everywhere and nowhere. Made at the end of the silent era, it pioneered the use of synchronous sound on film, for Reisenfeld’s score as well as such sound effects as traffic, whistles and church bells. Sunrise stands as a haunting fable – a dream of crime, love, loss and redemption.

MON 3 JUL 20:40 NFT2 / SAT 8 JUL 18:20 NFT2 / WED 12 JUL 20:50 NFT2

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

USA 1930. Dir Lewis Milestone. With Lew Ayres, Louis Wolheim, John Wray. 133min with restored soundtrack. 35mm. PG

All Quiet on the Western Front is rightly recognised as one of cinema’s most enduring and emotive portrayals of the tragedy of the Great War. This epic film concerns a generation of German schoolboys who – exhorted by their patriotic teacher – enlist enthusiastically but are ultimately destroyed in the war. Based on Erich Maria Remarque’s classic novel, the film proved highly controversial and was banned in many countries. Review

SUN 2 JUL 17:20 NFT3 / THU 6 JUL 18:00 NFT3

Considering All Quiet on the Western Front

TRT 90min

During WWI, Lewis Milestone, a recent Russian émigré to the US, made films for the Signal Corp, and this experience undoubtedly informed his 1930 Hollywood masterpiece, All Quiet on the Western Front. Film historian Kevin Brownlow (who interviewed Milestone about his film career in the 1960s) will be joined by film professional Mamoun Hassan to discuss – alongside film clips and a rare trailer – the history and achievement of what is considered to be the greatest anti-war film of all time.

Tickets £6.50

THU 6 JUL 20:40 NFT3

FOREIGN CORRESPONDANT

USA 1940. Dir Alfred Hitchcock. With Laraine Day, George Sanders, Joel McCrea. 119min. 35mm. PG

Made partly to raise the American public’s awareness of the Nazi threat, this picaresque espionage adventure follows a US journalist to London and Holland to cover a mooted peace treaty; instead, with the help of a diplomat’s daughter, he uncovers a conspiracy. Set pieces abound, including one at Westminster Cathedral and a windmill that conceals a sinister secret.

SAT 1 JUL 15:20 NFT1 / SUN 22 JUL 15:10 NFT3

THE WAGES OF FEAR Le salaire de la peur

France-Italy 1953. Dir Henri-Georges Clouzot. With Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Véra Clouzot. 147min. 35mm. EST. PG

Watched by a hungry vulture, a child plays with cockroaches in the dusty street of a South American shantytown. So begins one of the most nerve-wrackingly suspenseful films ever made, as four desperados take on a suicidal mission to drive two trucks full of nitro-glycerine along precipitous, pot-holed roads. As the tension mounts, this journey to hell is propelled to its misanthropic conclusion by a truly unsettling score.

SAT 15 JUL 18:00 NFT1 / SAT 22 JUL 17:40 NFT3

THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS La battaglia di Algeri

Algeria-Italy 1966. Dir Gillo Pontecorvo. With Jean Martin, Yacef Saadi, Brahim Hadjadj. 121min. 35mm. EST. 15

Algiers functions as both the site and symbol of struggle in this dazzling reconstruction of nationalist opposition to French occupation during the 1950s. The Old City nurtures and shelters the guerrilla fighters who, despite brutal reprisals, repeatedly venture from it to attack the colonial might of the new ‘European’ city.Battle of Algiers is an award-winning masterpiece of political cinema. Full review

TUE 4 JUL 18:15 NFT3 / SUN 9 JUL 20:10 NFT1

RYAN’S DAUGHTER

UK 1970. Dir David Lean. With John Mills, Sarah Miles, Robert Mitchum. 194min (+ interval). 70mm. 15

With a harsh critical response at the time of its release, Ryan’s Daughter is a triumph of sensual storytelling for David Lean. Robert Bolt’s script reworks Hardy-esque formulae into a story about romantic excess and moral cowardice, set during the Troubles of 1916, woven into a vision of damnation. Freddie Young and John Mills won Oscars®, and deservedly so.

SUN 16 JUL 15:15 NFT1 / WED 19 JUL 19:00 NFT1

ALIEN

UK-USA 1979. Dir Ridley Scott. With Sigourney Weaver, John Hurt, Ian Holm. 116min. 35mm. 15

The Alien phenomenon began here as the crew of the Nostromo are woken from stasis by the ship’s computer and grudgingly sent to investigate a transmission of unknown origin. They discover a deadly alien species and as the crew are picked off one by one, Ripley takes her place as the ultimate sci-fi heroine. This iconic classic features designs from HR Giger and a brilliant script by Dan O’Bannon.

SUN 23 JUL 20:15 NFT1 / SAT 29 JUL 20:45 NFT1

CHARIOTS OF FIRE

UK 1981. Dir Hugh Hudson. With Ben Cross, Ian Charleson, Ian Holm, Nicholas Farrell. 123min. 35mm. PG

Hugh Hudson’s visually magnificent, emotionally exhilarating account of the struggle by Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell to compete on their own terms at the 1924 Olympics seemed to herald a new highpoint in British cinema and was a hit at the Oscars®. With fine use of slow motion, Chariots of Fire tugged at the heartstrings of a nation. Interview with film’s producer Mr Al Fayed

SAT 15 JUL 15:20 NFT3 / SUN 23 JUL 17:40 NFT1

SPEED

USA 1994. Dir Jan de Bont. With Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, Dennis Hopper. 116min. 35mm. 15

This blockbuster hit has non-stop, edge of the seat thrills and spills. Reeves turns in a strong performance as the hero, a SWAT cop dealing with a crazed bomber who has wired up a bus to explode if the speed drops below 50mph. Bullock shines as the feisty passenger at the steering wheel. A thoroughly enjoyable roller-coaster ride of a movie.

TUE 25 JUL 20:50 NFT1 / SUN 30 JUL 17:20 NFT3

UNSTOPPABLE

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USA 2010. Dir Tony Scott. With Denzel Washington, Chris Pine, Rosario Dawson. 98min. 35mm. 12A

With the poster tag line reading ‘1 million tonnes of steel, 100,000 lives at stake, 100 minutes to impact’, Tony Scott’s final film as a director is about a runaway freight train, a retired railroad engineer and a rookie conductor who must figure out a way of trying to avert disaster. It’s a well-made, suspenseful thriller that works as a great companion piece to Speed.

SAT 29 JUL 17:50 NFT3 / MON 31 JUL 20:45 NFT1

From the Land of the Moon | Mal de Pierres (2016)

Director: Nicole Garcia Writers: Nicole Garcia, Jacques Fieschi, based on a novel by Milena Agus

Cast: Marion Cotillard, Louis Garrel, Alex Brendemuhl, Brigitte Rouan, Victoire Du Bois, Aloise Sauvage, Daniel Para, Jihwan Kim, Victor Quilichini

Marion Cotillard is back with another intense character study that haunts this otrtured love story. In actor turned filmmaker Nicole Garcia’s eighth film FROM THE LAND OF THE MOON she plays Gabrielle a woman from a bourgeois background who is desperate to find fulfilment in romantic love. Based on a best seller by Italian writer Milena Agus, the story opens in 1950s France where Gabrielle is driving her family to distraction with her violent and quixotic temperament. Fortunately beauty and money are on her side in an era where arranged marriages were still commonplace, so her mother organises a match with a penniless but decent Spanish builder, Jose (Alex Brendemuhl from Wakolda), who knuckles down to taking Gabrielle respectably off their hands and making an honest Catholic woman of her. From the outset, Gabrielle makes it clear that she will not be having sex with Jose and he takes this calmly knowing full well that his bedroom skills could potentially change her mind on the subject.

And Jose’s straightforward, kind and stable nature soon calms Gabrielle’s flighty temperament and emerges as one of the more sympathetic characters in the film and a counterpoint to Gabrielle’s selfish and wayward character. Garcia and Jacques Fieschi’s script also emphasises Gabrielle’s desperate need of sexual fulfilment as we seen her standing in the cool river on a hot day trying to achieve the same sexual relief as men did during the war with the use of bromide. Obviously this is a sotry that will draw comparisons with Madame Bovary, although Gabrielle is not constrained by her social, moral or religious scruples and her husband is kind and supportive. After a miscarriage, Jose sends her off to an expensive Swiss clinic for treatment and once again her febrile sexual imagination gets the better of her. Here she meet Louis Garrel as the dashing lieutenant Andre Sauvage and is immediately smitten, especially as his keyboard skills playing Tchaikovsky are to become a leitmotif for the piece in the whimsical closing scenes.

Cotillard’s is the driving force behind this visually ravishing drama. She illuminates every scene with her serene beauty and elegance instilling calm and grace despite her brooding unhappiness which morphs into euphoria when she meets Sauvage. As Gabrielle, she struggles to find contentment upsetting everyone else into the bargain with her toxic personality and meanness. This is a fabulously crafted classic drama that is both absorbing and intensely enjoyable. MT

IN CINEMAS FROM 8 JUNE 2017

Icarus | Sundance London (2017)

Dir.: Bryan Fogel; Documentary with Gregory Rodchenkov; USA 2017, 120 min.

It started out more like a prank: amateur cyclist and filmmaker Bryan Fogel (Jewtown) wanted to take performance enhancing drugs to get into the top ten of the best amateur cyclists at the Haute Route mountain tour in Switzerland, having finished 14th the year before. When he contacted the Russian Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov (*1958), head of the Russian branch of WADA (World Anti-Doing Agency), to deliver said forbidden drugs, Rodchenkov was only to happy to deliver and monitor Fogel’s performance. Ironically the Fogel actually did worse on the drugs, so the filmmaker had a stunning success on his hands.

At the winter and summer Olympics in Vancouver (2010) and Beijing (2012) Russia fared very badly, and Vladimir Putin ordered “success”, particularly for the Winter Games in Sochi (2014). And results improved magically: whilst the Russian team finished sixth in Vancouver, on home soil Russia won 33 medals, including 13 Gold – coming first in the overall result. As it turned out, Dr. Rodchenkov had a big part to play. After being caught with his sister (also an ex-athlete like himself) dealing drugs in Moscow, he was sent into one of the horrendous “psychiatric” hospitals in 2011. His “redemption” on his release was to help the FSB (formerly KGB) to overcome the controls of the worldwide WADA organisation, in charge of monitoring and controlling the athletes. It helped, that the good doctor would be director of WADA in Sochi. There, he and his team collected and froze urine samples of Russian competitors before they started their steroid regime and human growth hormone injections, which Rodchenkov and his team later substituted for the contaminated samples taken officially by WADA at the time of the competition. They used a crude system of ‘re-distribution’, including the use of backdoors and hidden portals in the walls of the WADA facility.

Rodchenkov claims: “I don’t believe the Olympic Games could be won without any kind of pharmacological support”. And Don Catlin, former director of the UCLA Olympic facility, tested Lance Armstrong 50 (!) times during the latter’s career: his findings were always negative, before Armstrong confessed in 1913. Whilst Vitaly Mutko, who served eight years as Minister for Sport under Putin, was promoted to Deputy Prime Minister, another college of Rodchenkov died of a “sudden heart attack”. Luckily for Dr. Rodchenkov he had fled to the USA, and now lives under cover in the Witness Protection Programme, after The New York Times run his full confession.

ICARUS runs like a thriller: the charming Rodchenkov is first one to help Fogel to cheat, before investigations lead to the death of his friend and college – and threatens his own into the bargain. Fogel follows his every move, putting himself in a dangerous position. Whilst Rodchenkov had to leave his family behind, he at least got away alive. But it should not be forgotten that Russia is staging the Football World Cup next year, and that, after the majority of Russian competitors were banned at the Rio Olympics, these Russian track and field athletes will compete in London in August at the World Championships in front of a paying public. AS

SUNDANCE LONDON 1-4 JUNE 2017

Diabolique (1955) | Criterion Special Edition Bluray

Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot | Cast: Simone Signoret, Paul Meurisse, Charles Vanel, Véra Clouzot | Thriller | French | 117min

Hitchcock considered Henri-Georges Clouzot his arch enemy in the world of suspense, and Psycho was deliberately made to outdo this gripping thriller about two women love rivals who conspire to murder a sadistic headmaster, played smoulderingly by Paul Meurisse. Simone Signoret is the harder-edged of the two as a calculating bleached blonde in chilling contrast to Véra Clouzot’s rather twee and simpering brunette. Charles Vanel plays the Devil’s advocate as a Boris Johnson’s stye detective, who is clearly not as dumb as he looks. DIABOLIQUE is as demonic as the name suggests and its dazzling finale promises a devlish twist – although the lesbian relationship that exists in the novel is sadly edited out. Well it was 1955. MT

ON BLURAY SPECIAL EDITION COURTESY OF CRITERION COLLECTION

My Life as a Courgette (2016) | Ma Vie de Courgette

Dir.: Claude Barras | Animation | Switzerland/France | 66 min.

Claude Barras’ stop-motion animation is a tender tale probing life’s saddest moment: not a kid’s film but one that resonates with the kid inside us – Heart-breaking and uplifting at the same time. Celine Scammia (Water Lilies, Girlhood) an expert on juvenile psyches, has cleverly scripted Gilles Paris’ autobiographical novel Ma Vie de Courgette, and although the film is not as dark as the book, Barras’ characters have to deal with considerable trauma, making it only suitable for the over-tens.

The story of nine-year old orphan Courgette (his real name is Icare, i.e. Icarus) is completely different from other child-themed animations Mathilda or Annie. Courgette himself has killed his alcoholic mother accidentally; he keeps one of her empty beer cans as the only memento of her life. A friendly policeman Raymond takes him to an orphanage where he meets look-alikes, who share his displacement: the faces of all the children seem to be made out of plasticine, they have a mop of coloured hair – in Courgette’s case – huge blue hands, and golf-ball sized eyes, with the iris looking as if it was stuck on. These eyes really are mirrors of their souls, pictures of their state of mind. And despite the slender running time, David Toutevoix’ delicately rendered images convey the passing years as the orphans develop seamlessly from children to gawky pre-teens. Initially the colours are muted, particularly in Courgette’s flat, where he hides in the attic to avoid his dipsy mother. But as life improves the visuals lighten and colours become more vibrant.

When Courgette enters the orphanage he is immediately accosted by the loutish leader of the pack, Simon, who calls him ‘potatoes’; whilst the dinosaur-obsessed Ahmed becomes more of a soul mate. Alice, always shy, hides behind her hair which she parts like two curtains over her face, when embarrassed. But Courgette falls for Camille. When Raymond re-appears, he takes the two children to his flat cacti-ridden flat. But then Camille’s money-grabbing aunt takes over: she feels nothing for her niece but wants to collect the grant for raising her. But Camille and Courgette find a way of being together.

Courgette is a sensitive study in grief, but also an authentic portrait of children growing up, coming to terms with their sadness and becoming sociable beings who have learned to look out for each other, like Simon who encourages Courgette and Camille to live with Raymond, even though they are sad to leave him behind. Barras and Sciammia create a wonderful cosmos of healing: symbolised by the children using a weatherboard for their moods: ‘Cloudy’ turning more often to ‘sunny’ than not. AS

OUT ON MUBI

Wonder Woman (2017)

Dir: Patty Jenkins | Cast: Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Robin Wright, Connie Nielsen, David Thewlis | US | Adventure Drama

That sound you can hear right now is hundreds, if not thousands, of film writers and critics breathing a huge sigh of relief that they won’t need to think too hard about the positives in DC’s newest reboot of Wonder Woman. With a cast straight out any fanboy and girl’s dreams and more roles for women over 40 than you can shake a stick at, WONDER WOMAN is not only a welcome break from the usual male-centric superhero movies, but it also presents its audience with a truly engaging and thoroughly enjoyable storyline. Staring Israeli actress Gal Gadot and directed by the excellent Patty Jenkins (Monster, 2003), the film manages to cleverly avoid the usual pitfalls of big summer blockbusters by offering up a plethora of very likeable characters and a wonderfully engaging plot. Fans and foes alike will have to admit that DC has finally got a big hit on its hands, and the fact that this was a female lead superhero movie is even sweeter for some.

Diana (Gadot) lives on a mythical island inhabited by beautiful Amazonian warrior women, which has for centuries been hidden away from the prying eyes of the modern world. When American pilot Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) crash-lands on the island with tens of German soldier in his pursuit, Diana goes to his rescue and helps free him from the wreckage of his war plane. Together, they hatch a plan to leave the island, him to go back to his top secret mission and her in search of Ares God of war, whom she believes is responsible for the current World War. Staring Robin Wright as the Amazonian warrior Antiope and Connie Nielsen as Diana’s mother Hippolyta, the film spends a rather unnecessary amount of time setting up the mythical story behind our heroine, but once it gets going, there’s no stopping it. Chris Pine manages to be both charming and insufferably smug, his performance is beautifully nuanced and commendably comedic at his own character’s expense.
Whether WONDER WOMAN is, as some have said, a feminist treatment of a classic story, remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure, Gal Gadot not only puts in a brilliant performance, but also presents a whole new generation of little girls and boys with a badass alternative to the usual male counterparts. On the whole, the film is very silly in parts, but this does nothing to put a dampener on the proceedings. I would dare anyone not to be entertained, at least by its witty dialogue and touching storyline. A sure hit for DC and Warner Brothers. LINDA MARRIC.

WONDER WOMAN IS ON GENERAL RELEASE 1 JUNE

Chasing Coral (2017) | Sundance London 2017

Dir. Jeff Orlowski. US, 2017, 91 minutes

After his resounding success with Chasing Ice (2012) that examines the dwindling state of arctic glaciers, CHASING CORAL is another resonant and vital eco-documentary that tracks the destruction of the ocean’s most vital ecosystem due to the warming effect of climate change.

Coral is a not just underwater flora undulating in beautiful gardens on the ocean bed, it is a complex organism that serves both as a food factory and a habitat for all marine life. Without coral the oceans will die: it is as important as bees and trees on dry land. Building a solid skeleton structure, coral creates its own architectural environment, attracting fish and orgnanisms to live there, much in the same way as our towns provide the infrastructure for human existence. Coral also provides the basis for many life-saving drugs – but all this could come to an end if the sea temperature keeps rising, even by one or two degrees. The ocean needs to maintain a regular temperature or, just like the human body, it will become sick and eventually die.

A team set up by former adman Richard Vevers begins an earnest attempt to chart the ailing coral reefs, eventually hiring professional cinematographers to chart the extent of the problem, monitoring the alarming rate at which the coral is affected by warmer temperatures. Brightly coloured coral reefs turn a ghostly white, known as bleaching, then rapidly decay to a dullish brown mush strewn with algae. So dramatic is this state of affairs that the Great Barrier Reef will be a thing of the past within less than two decades. Occasionally, the coral takes on a fluorescent hue of bright green, purple or blue. This is coral’s attempt to produce its own sunscreen, and signals the desperate last stages before inevitable death and decay.

Despite its tragic message – that coral could be wiped out within 30 years – this is filmic and beautifully made documentary that tracks the disappearance of coral all over the world, thanks to a team of keen volunteers. We also meet Australian biologist and photographer John “Charlie” Veron, who has been filming coral since the 1970s, when it was still flourishing all over the world. In order to save the planet Humans need to stop burning fossil fuels that provide heat that the earth and oceans reabsorb. MT

SUNDANCE LONDON 1-4 JUNE 2017 | TO LEARN MORE ABOUT HOW TO HELP VISIT

Spotlight on a Murderer (1961) | Mubi

Dir: Georges Franju | French | Mystery | 92min

SPOTLIGHT ON A MURDERER takes place in one of those quaint, quintessential French chateaux that you may have visited with its medieval interiors and evocative turrets and tapestries hanging on the stone walls. Gaumont too is a classic studio one of the oldest in the world. The star of Georges Franju’s Gothic murder mystery is also a veteran: Jean-Louis Trintignant, who has just appeared in Michael Haneke’s latest film Happy End, at the age of 89. He plays Jean-Marie whose elderly relative Count Hervé de Kerloquen (Pierre Brasseur) has completely disappeared leaving Jean-Marie and his family members responsible for its upkeep while waiting five years until they can become benefactors of the estate. Along with his girlfriend, Micheline (Dany Saval), they conconct a plan to open the place to visitors while uncovering his whereabouts and discovering the truth.

This atmospheric thriller is scripted by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac whose books were also adapted for Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Les Diaboliques. Franju keeps the tension taut with fine performances from the ensemble in a rare and intriguing mystery thriller that keeps you guessing right until the very end. MT

On MUBI and ON BLURAY DUAL FORMAT COURTESY OF ARROW ACADEMY

In Spring (1929)

Dir: Mikhail Kaufman | Doc | 54min | Ukraine

Mikhail Kaufman’s 1929 silent documentary IN SPRING (Ukrainian: Навесні, translit. Navesni, Russian: Весной, translit. Vesnoi) is Soviet Ukraine’s answer to Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera. The two brothers and regular collaborators had fallen out over artistic differences in their approach to filmmaking. Strongly rhythmic and stylishly symmetrical, IN SPRING was made in accordance with the ideas of the avant-garde manifesto Kinoks and was Kaufman’s directorial debut.

Much in the same way as Man With a Movie Camera, the experimental film explores the gradual awakening of a new spring day after the snowy rigours of winter. The film opens in the countryside, as opposed to the urban setting of Man With A Movie Camera, and as ice begins to thaw, illustrated by a humorous image of a snowman’s black eyes streaming down his melting face, people, horses and carts begins to emerge as people preparing for a sunny day as one of the shops lays out the newspaper “Socialist emulation Bulletin” for the year 1929. Agricultural activities give way to the pounding of machines in an industrial landscape. In the city parks and gardens, trees are sprouting leaves and in the branches birds build nests, bees swarm around flowers, buds bloom directly beforre our eyes. People walk freely unencumbered by heavy winter clothing. Soviet sportsmanship features again with a May Day demonstration with flags, competitions, a football match at a packed stadium. Daredevil-bicyclist rides on a street while playing the harmonica; girls are dancing and children excising in regimented rows.

This event is made possible in partnership with the Ukrainian Institute in London and the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre, Ukraine.

Walking Out (2017) |Sundance 2017

Directors|writers: Alex Smith, Andrew Smith Cast: Josh Wiggins, Matt Bomer, Bill Pullman | 91min | US | Adventure Drama

Directors Alex and Andrew Smith make a welcome return to Sundance 15 years after The Slaughter Rule, with an auteurish inter-generational hunting adventure that is spare on narrative but long on macho bonding and wild grunting from its rather one-dimentional male leads.

With the cherished memory of hunting with his traditional father (Bill Pullman) echoing in the snowbound landscapes and mountain streams of Montana, hard-bitten dad Cal (Matt Bomer) takes his own teenage son Ted (Josh Wiggins) on an adventure that serves both as an iniation into the world of big game hunting and a rites of passage endurance test that will see their roles reversed and their lives changed forever.

Ted is a rather introspective Texas teenager attached to his mobile phone and his life in the city. Although he baulks at the idea of spending time out with his spiky father Cal, who loves nothing more than to track a moose or a stag, once Ted gets a taste for hunting and shooting, he starts to enjoy the wilds of nature until an accident forces him to dig deep into his inner reserves of stamina, courage and mental resiliance. WALKING OUT is a predictable but well-crafted drama enriched by Todd McMullen’s magnificent widescreen retro-style photography that gives the piece an almost poetic and transcendent feel. MT

SUNDANCE LONDON 1-4 JUNE 2017 | PICTUREHOUSE CENTRAL

The Fisher King (1991) | Criterion Bluray Release

Dir: Terry Gilliam | Cast: Mercedes Ruehl, Robin Williams, Jeff Bridges, David Hyde Pierce | 137min | Comedy | US

When New York radio DJ Jack Lucas (Bridges) causes a listener to commit mass murder after a throwaway exchange on his programme, his life starts to implode. But the husband of a woman who died in the tragedy ends up being his guardian angel, three years on, rescuing him from his emotional abyss. Professor of medieval history and professional drop-out Parry (Williams) is also a free-thinking maverick who is inspired by the thought of finding the Holy Grail and claiming Lydia (Amanda Plummer) as his prize. In order to assuage his feelings of guilt, Jack sets out on a mission to help Parry achieve his dream. Funny in parts but far too long, Gilliam’s fantasy is part poetic drama, part inventive comedy swinging around deliriously in its spectacular Manhattan locations. Sprawling with wild and ridiculous antics this is an entertaining spectacle enriched by playful performances from Bridges, Williams and Ruehl who won an Oscar in the role of Jack’s lover Anne. Gilliam directs Richard LaGravenese’s witty script, creating a magical modern fairytale for all to enjoy. MT.

CRITERION BLURAY RELEASE 19 JUNE 2017

Lily Lane (2016) |

Director | Bence Fliegauf | Cast Angéla Stefanovics, Bálint Sótonyi, Miklós Székely, Mária Gindert,, Maja Balogh

90mins Fantasy Drama Hungary

Hungarian filmmaker Bence Fliegauf creates a world of fantasy based in the reality of a divorcing couple and their small son. With a few simple devices: a ghostly original score, technical effects such as slo-mo and extreme close-ups as the camera glides over his toys and giving them a otherworldly appeal, while a young woman slowly spins a fairy story. Bence Fliegauf’s mesmerising debut drama slowly emerges like an enigmatic crystalis from its cocoon. By associating simple objects and images – a broken toy, a stuffed animal, a mask, a stormy skyline: a suggestive narrative emerges connecting with our own childhood experiences of fear. Rebeka and Dani face these fears head on – embracing them to create their own fantasy world that drives the narrative forward.

In flashback, Rebeka (Angéla Stefanovics) casts back to happy times when her son was born. Clearly she was loved but now wants a separation from his father, but not a divorce on paper. LILY LANE shifts backwards and forwards; a stream of consciousness that sparks subconscious fears and memories of childhood, life and love.

The story unravels in black-and-white photos, snapshots of the physical intimacy and unique bond between mother and child. Often the camera creeps around at strange angles, giving a voyeurish feel of impending and oppressive doom and building palpable suspense. Angela Stefanovics is well cast: her dark looks are bewitching and she gives the impression of a being a soul from a bygone era. Her sudden emotional outbursts evoke impending tragedy or mental instability brought on by post traumatic stress. Her son asks simple questions: “what happens when we die” yet in the film’s context they often appear ghoulish. Fliegauf’s cognitive dissonance technique is similarly used by Veronika Franz in her debut Goodnight Mommy. Based on montage made with cleverly edited mixed technology LILY LANE is a simple yet highly effective fantasy drama that plays on the senses and remains in the memory. MT

NOW ON RELEASE AT THE BARBICAN | 31 MAY 2017

Cannes Film Festival Awards 2017

COMPETITION

Palme d’Or: THE SQUARE (Ruben Östlund) – main pic

70th Anniversary Award: Nicole Kidman

Grand Prix: BPM (Robin Campillo)

Director: Sofia Coppola, THE BEGUILED

Actor: Joaquin Phoenix, YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE

Actress: Diane Kruger, IN THE FADE

Jury Prize: LOVELESS (Andrey Zvyagintsev)

Screenplay — THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER (Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthimis Filippou) and YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE (Lynne Ramsay)

SIDEBARS

Camera d’Or: JEUNE FEMME Montparnasse-Bienvenüe) (Léonor Serraille)

Golden Eye Documentary Prize: FACES, PLACES (Visages Villages) (Agnès Varda, JR)

Ecumenical Jury Prize: RADIANCE Naomi Kawase)

UN CERTAIN REGARD

Un Certain Regard Award: A MAN OF INTEGRITY/ Mohammad Rasoulof

Best Director: Taylor Sheridan, WIND RIVER

Jury Prize: Michel Franco, APRIL’S DAUGHTER

Best Performance: Jasmine Trinca, FORTUNATA

Award for Poetry of Cinema: Mathieu Amalric, BARBARA

DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT | QUINZAINE

Art Cinema Award: THE RIDER (Chloe Zhao)

Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers Prize — TIE: LOVER FOR A DAY Philippe Garrel) and LET THE SUNSHINE IN (Claire Denis)

Europa Cinemas Label: A CIAMBRA Jonas Carpignano)

CRITICS’ WEEK | SEMAINE DE LA CRITIQUE

Grand Prize: MAKALA Emmanuel Gras)

Visionary Prize: GABRIEL AND THE MOUNTAINS (Fellipe Barbosa)

Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers Prize: AVA (Léa Mysius)

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 17-28 MAY | AWARD WINNERS | LIST BY VARIETY

Based on a True Story (2017)

Dir Roman Polanski | Writer: Roman Polanski, Olivier Assayas | Cast: Emmanuelle Seigner, Eva Green

Unusually, there’s a happy ending to this traditionally styled film from Roman Polanski.

Emmanuelle Seigner and Eva Green go tete a tete in a tongue in cheek psychological drama adapted by Polanski and Olivier Assayas from Delphine de Vigan’s story about an author and her envious admirer (D’Apres un Histoire Vrai).

There are shades here of the director’s award-winning 2010 thriller The Ghost Writer, not least because Green’s feisty character pens books for well-known people. That said AFTER A TRUE STORY wears its heart more playfully in a formidly-crafted thriller that inhabits a chic quarter of Paris and a Normandy farmhouse where Seigner’s divorced Delfine spends weekends with her part time lover Francois (played insipidly by Vincent Perez/La Reine Margot) and host of book programme.

We first meet Delphine at a signing for her latest bestseller as adoring fans extoll the virtues of her literary genius. But Delphine is now struck by writers-block in a period of anxious navel-gazing, and this is where Elle comes into the story.

At first we get the impression that the two are going to be romantically involved as they kiss warmly but this is all part of Polanski’s teasing style. Delphine exuding an air of confidence that Delphine seems to be lacking in her current state of flux but Alexandre Desplat’s unsettling score signals a warning of danger.

Alarmingly Elle soon takes over the writer’s life advising Delphine’s contacts to give her space and strangely she acquiesces. Meanwhile, Francois has dropped out of the story on a name-dropping tour to the US (Bret Easton Ellis and Cormac McCarthy, don’t you know!) and soon the women are living together in Delphine’s flat – apparently sharing their life together, with Elle even impersonating her at a student lecture.

Green and Seigner are convincing in their roles, as the sassy Elle and more laid-back – almost submissive – Delphine, but there’s no mistaking a steely side to the author who looks like she’s just rolled out of bed. DP Pawel Edelman’s confident lensing and Jean Rabasse’s sophisticated set design ensure a enjoable watch in this sophisticated game of wits that, unlike Polanski’s usual fare, has a happy outcome leaving us pondering whether the Polish born filmmaker was softening in his dotage. Luckily, as we now know, this was just a blip in the 90 year old director’s landscape. MT

AN OLIVIER ASSAYAS RETRO IS NOW ON MUBI

The Desert Bride (2017) | Cannes Film Festival | Un Certain Regard 2017

Dir/scr Cecilia Atán & Valeria Pivato. Argentina/Chile. 2017. 78mins.

This painterly portrait of late-life love provides a subtle and gently humorous focus on contemporary Argentina. Atan and Pivato’s feature debut screened in the Cannes auteurs sidebar, Un Certain Regard, and stars Gloria’s Paulina Garcia as a woman in domestic service who gradually takes back the reigns of her single life and opens her heart to love. The desert road movie serves both as a voyage of self-realisation and female empowerment. Bearing its heart on its delicate sleeve the film interweaves the past and present and is graced by sumptuous cinematography from NO and NERUDA’s Sergio Lawrence. It’s a sweet slip of a film and utterly adorable.

Teresa is leaving her current home for a spell in San Juan in the desert region of Cuyo. Getting there involves a laborious bus journey where the vehicle breaks down leaving Teresa in the pilgrimage town of La Difunta. Here she comes across a kindly market trader in the shape of Gringo (Claudio Rossi). A storm imterupts their innocent encounter but Teresa realises her bag has been left in his trailer. After caching him up they embark on a mission to find the missing luggage as Teresa gradually warms to Gringo’s kindness and easy-going bonhomie: something she could get used to.

Garcia’s portrayal of Teresa’s understated emotional awakening is one of the pleasures of this pastel-hued slow-burner, providing a filmic focus on first love in the autumn of life. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 17-28 MAY 2017 | UN CERTAIN REGARD

Djam (2017) | Cannes Film Festival 2017

Dir: Tony Gatlif | Drama | French |

Tony Gatlif makes films about gypsy cultures from India to the near East and DJAM is his latest, although not his best, it offers something slightly off the beaten track: a female-centric road movie where his feisty belly-dancing heroine embarks on an adventure from Lesbos, to Greece and Turkey. There’s never a dull moment in this exotic musical odyssey that captures the contempo socio-economic zeitgeist of the near Middle East (immigration, female liberation etc) and celebrates rebetiko, an ancient blend of Greek and Turkish tradional folkmusic.

After leaving her uncle (Simon Albekian) on the quayside Djam (Patakia) uses her cheeky charm to blaise a trail through a variety of hurdles she meets along the way, the first is securing a passport for a naive girl called Avril (Maryan Canon) who has been robbed. From then on the two become travelling companions.

Vibrant and lushly atmospheric this verite-style drama is carried along by Daphné Patakia’s earthy exhuberant chutzpah in the title role (for which she wears no undies), although her minxy coquettishness may be irritating for some, others may find the film a breath of fresh air, with its melodramatic and musical interludes.

Cannes this year has been remarkable for a blatant over-sharing of female issues: from Francois Ozon’s opening shot of a close quarter vaginal examination; to endless open discussions about menstruation; Diane Kruger examining her menstrual blood and here – Patakia’s Djam forcing her friend to shave off her pubic hair on the open road. None of this has particularly enriched the stories concerned, begging the question – what happened to feminine mystique?

Gatlif’s narrative plays as fast as loose as Djam and her copine as they sing and dance around like a couple of lascivious troubadours, seemingly high on their own brand of goofy naughtiness. Although Gatlif seems to be making it all up as he goes along, this is a fresh and impressively-crafted snapshot. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 17-28 MAY 2017

A Gentle Creature (2017) | Cannes Film Festival | In Competition

Dir: Sergei Loznitsa | Cast: Vasilina Makovtseva |143min | Russian | Drama

A GENTLE CREATURE is based on a short story by Dostoevsky, narrated by a middle-aged pawnbroker whose wife kills herself. The story was first adapted by Robert Bresson in 1969 as his first film in colour but its subject matter differs from its title, drawing comparisons with several other recent fraught psychodramas such as A Happy End and The Square

Sergei Loznitsa imagines a dark descent into Hell in his follow up to My Joy and In the Fog. A GENTLE CREATURE is a film about the frustration of its central character: an earnest young woman whose husband has disappeared into the intractable Russian prison system. This parable about contemporary bureaucracy and human rights it is also a cynical takedown of our fellow man. The woman, played thoughtfully by Vasilina Makovtseva, has decent intentions that lead her into a never-ending nightmare, in a story that works on two levels: as a Kafkaesque psychological thriller and a brazen indictment of Russian society.

From her ramshakle cottage in the middle of nowhere, she sets off to personally deliver a parcel of food and clothing that has been returned to her by the prison authorities. The claustrophobic bus journey is a microcosm of Russia itself, beset with vile and unhelpful characters who bicker and bait each other, spouting vile opinions that provide rich insight into the country’s social politics.

When the woman arrives at her destination, a mesmerising dream sequence then ensues, glistening with shades of Kubrick s Eyes Wide Shut where a powerful elite of assembled guests at a dinner have the opportunity to expound on the greatness of Mother Russia, but this all culminates with a brutal rape scene as the woman is driven away in a van, hopes of visiting her husband dashed by the iron fist of the authorities who she thought were taking her to her husband. Often feeling like a contemporary version of Dante’s Inferno A GENTLE CREATURE has no happy end, reflecting on the mournful misery of mankind and the unkindness of strangers in a broken and demoralised world. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 16 APRIL 2018

Promised Land (2017) | Cannes Film Festival 2017

Dir.: Eugene Jarecki | Documentary | USA 2017 | 117′

Director/writer Eugene Jarecki (Reagan) has managed to cramp three different films into PROMISED LAND: whilst driving through the southern States of the USA in Elvis’ Rolls Royce Phantom V, retelling the story of the King, numerous singers (among them M. Ward and Emmylou Harris) play music on the backseats of the car, and celebrities like Mike Myers, Alec Baldwin and Ethan Hawke give their opinions. Finally, Jarecki catches the last months of the Democratic Primaries in 2016, culminating in Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 – being described as the death of the American Dream: the promised land is no more.

Or, to be precise, it has never existed: just for a few decades after WWII, preceded by the Great Depression and followed by the slow death of the lower middle classes in the last twenty odd years. Trump voters are not the only ones who are no longer upwardly mobile, and their children are poorer than their parents. Jarecki gives no reasons for the downturn: but the images shot on the road show a country whose infrastructure has been neglected for decades: apart from in the big cities, the last improvements seemed to have happened in the late 6os. Somehow, the lost dream has turned much of the country into a stagnant backwater.

The director is equally critical about Elvis: “He went into the army as James Dean in 1958 and returned as John Wayne two years later”. And there is the not so small matter of his future wife Priscilla Beaulieu, whom he met in Germany when she was just fourteen. And whilst Mohammed Ali (then Cassius Clay) preferred to go to jail, than to fight for his country in the Vietnam War, Elvis met with Richard Nixon in 1970, spurning the possibility of bringing his popularity on the side of the Anti-War and Civil Rights movement.

Somehow, Jarecki keeps everything together and delivers an informative film: a mix of Showbiz and nostalgia. One can’t help liking this documentary which unfurls with ease and panache. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | 17 -28 MAY 2017

The Desert Bride (2017) | Cannes Film Festival | Un Certain Regard

Dir:

Paulina Garcia (Gloria) as a fiftysomething housekeeper whose life changes dramatically turn when she travels across Argentina to take up a new post.

La Familia (2017) | Semaine de la Critique | Cannes 2017

Dir: GUSTAVO RONDON CORDOVA | Cast: Giovanny Garcia Reggie Ryes | 2017 VENEZUELA-CHILE-NORWAY || 82 MINS || IN SPANISH || FEATURE

Twelve-year-old Pedro roams the streets with his friends in the violent atmosphere of working class Caracas. A serious street fight leads to him fatally wounding another another boy, so single father Andrés decides they must leave the city in an adventure that will leave them closer than they have ever been.

Gustavo Rondon Cordova’s debut as director and writer is a dark and pessimistic portrait of working class Venezuela. Father and son find themselves on the run from a vengeful mob – and even though we never see the pursuers – which strangely makes the threat feel more menacing, the title is ironic – rather like Michael Haneke’s Happy End.

The absence of women in the mens’ life is key in informing the storyline: Andres’ girl-friend, Zoreida, has been a casual affair, and we only learn about Pedro’s mother because she liked swimming with him. Having to work day and night, Andres had no time to be a proper father, and Pedro resists authority in every way. The two are like hunters, fighting for a living, always confronted with the comstant threat of violence. Their flight is a metaphor: it is not just the vengeful mob they are fleeing, it is a whole way of life. The narrative unfolds episodically, to show the transient nature of their life. The unrest created leads always to more abrupt change. Both seem self-destructive: a clear sign of the lack of female input.

LA FAMILIA is always understated, even the chase lacks any sensationalist angle. Well-paced and impressively photographed: DoP Luis Armando Artega evokes a lush and magical sense of place in contrast to the their raggedness of their rat race. A really imaginative debut. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | 17-28 MAY 2017 | SEMAINE DE LA CRITIQUE

Michelangelo: Love and Death (2016)

Dir: David Bickerstaff | Biopic | 89min

Director and cinematographer David Bickerstaff is back with the final part of his illuminating series Exhibition on Screen that offers an armchair view of current worldwide art shows, this time tracing the life and work of Michelangelo from his birth in Arezzo to his final days in Florence. Bickerstaff acts as his own cinematographer in this rather dry but learned documentary that may have enthused better had it made more of the human story behind the artist, such as Michelangelo’s relationship with Florentine despot Lorenzo de Medici, or his well-known ‘terribilita’ a sense of awe-inspiring grandeur often remarked upon by his contemporaries. Recent outings Goya: Visions of Flesh and Blood (2015); Vincent Van Gogh: a New Way (2015) and Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse (2016) are particularly exciting for this reason alone – the art treasures provide the icing of the cake.

Michelangelo, along with Leonardo di Vinci is considered one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance, a virtuoso craftsman, he was not only a sculptor but also a painter, architect, poet and spiritualist creating magnificent and diverse works such as the towering statue of David, the deeply moving Pietà in the Papal Basilica of St. Peter and his tour-de-force, the Sistine Chapel ceiling still leave us in awe of his skill, even today.

Spanning his 89 years (1475-1564), Michelangelo – Love and Death, takes a cinematic journey from the print and drawing rooms of Europe, through the great chapels and museums of Florence, Rome and the Vatican to explore the tempestuous life of Michelangelo. great deal of his work was commissioned and influenced by the Florentine Medici family who held sway in fifteenth century Florence. Bickerstaff’s pristine camerawork examines his work in minute detail with informed commentary particularly rom art critic Martin Hayford and various Italian curators and experts (including Francesca Nicoli who explains how carrera marble was the best medium for fine sculpture of the Renaissance style). The film delves deep – perhaps too deep for mainstream audiences – and features close-ups of the Rothschild Bronzes which were positively attributed to Michelangelo in 2015. It emerges that Michelangelo preferred men to women, but not in a sexual sense; more in the way that he worshipped the physicality of the male form, although he often endowed his male figures with more rounded thighs and buttocks, normally associated with Amazonian women, rather than the plump fulsomeness of women of his era. Highlighting the fact that sculptors of the day were given permission and access to study human corpses by the Church, in return for creating religious works on their behalf, the film also stresses how this experience made them more knowledgeable about human anatomy than their medical contemporaries.

Accompanied by an atmospheric score of lute music and enriched by its glorious Italian locations including Casa Buonarroti in Florence and the Medici Chapel and the Vatican, Michelangelo – Love and Death perfectly captures Michelangelo’s environment, and in turn, delivers a greater understanding of the artist and his work.

SCREENING NATIONWIDE from 14 JUNE 2017 | EXHIBITION ON SCREEN

This documentary complements the current Michelangelo event at London’s National Gallery.

Thr Defence of the Dragon (2017)| Cannes Film Festival | Quinzaine des Realisateurs

Dir.: Natalia Santa; Cast: Gonzalo Sagarminaga, Hernan Mendez, Manuel Navarro; France/Columbia 2017, 79 min.

Natalia Santa’s debut is a brilliantly acted tragi-comedy, full of innovative ideas and told with great aplomb. With shades of Pablo Stoll’s Whisky (2004), it follows three desperate, ageing men, who have great difficulty surviving in 21st century downtown Bogota, for different reasons.

Samuel (Sagarminaga) is a fifty-three year old professional chess player and private tutor, divorced with a young daughter – whom he neglects like all the women in his life. Joaquin (Mendez) is a watchmaker in his mid sixties, not earning enough to pay the rent, Marcos (Navarro) a 70 something homeopath completes the trio whose regular hangout is the local dilapidated Lasker Chess Club and the Normanda Café.

Samuel is gloomy and resigned, only coming alive when chess is involved. His male company is much desired, not only by his landlady’s young daughter, who tries her best to seduce him – in vain – but also by the mother of his young maths student, an illustrator adamant to set up a private meeting with Samuel. Joaquin is the most likeable of the three: He can empathise with his friends, but he is really a prisoner of times gone by – the word digital makes him feel uneasy. Marcos is really a user, exploiting his assistant not only on a professional level, but also in the bedroom. Worse of all, he is a homophobic estranged from his gay son who has been killed in a bear attack. When two of the men find themselves homeless, clearly they have to change.

Santa always keeps a certain distance from her characters: they are analysed, but never denounced. The humour is deadpan, bleak and always carries a certain undertone of mournfulness. Santa paints them as dinosaurs who have maintained a strong macho identity: silent and withdrawn. They make their way though life like little boys lost in the woods, whistling to overcome their fear and loneliness, which they naturally deny. Rarely leaving their homes, and barricading themselves in, they are characters from a bygone era in the streets of Bogota. Samuel and Joaquin live in reduced circumstances, whilst Marcos’ house is full of ornaments and paintings: he pretends to be upper-class, but is as broke as his friends and even more unwilling to change. The visuals match the narrative in their love of small details. Intricate medium shots show the inner shabbiness of these men. Santa skilfully controls her narrative keeping the tension just right in this well-paced and engrossing drama. An astonishing masterclass on a micro-budget filmaking.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | 17-28 MAY 2017

The Beguiled (2017 | Cannes Film Festival 2017

Dir: Sophie Coppola | Cast: Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, Elle Fanning, Kirsten Dunst, Oona Laurence | 91min | Thriller | US

Set in Louisiana and shot in 35mm THE BEGUILED is Sophie Coppola’s re-telling of Thomas Cullinan’s original 1966 novel that explores the powerplay and sexual tension that erupts between a group of differently-aged nubile females and an attractive male forced into their midst during the American Civil War.

Luminously mounted (the operative word – as the movie reveals!), THE BEGUILED sizzles swelteringly in its Southern Gothic aesthetic while remaining as delicate as a starched doily. Colin Farrell is dashingly seductive as the union soldier McBurney transported to this prim and proper confederate ladies’ school when he is rescued, wounded, in nearby woods by one of the youngest girls. Presided over by Nicole Kidman’s prickly Madame Martha who disapproves of the enemy element but secretly joins the innocent ladies’ lustful queue in the shape of Kirsten Dunst’ glacial French mistress Edwina, and Elle Fanning’s disruptive teenager Alicia with an eye for the main chance, the film works as a psychological thriller and a historical drama.

Sophie Coppola makes a dramatic reverse thrust in her clever narrative once Alicia’s cat has been let out of the bag transforming the dynamic of the entire household and transferring the power from a female perspective to a rugged male one, thus unleashing anger, fear and pent up longing all round, although we are never quite sure who is ultimately in control. As McBurney gets to know Martha’s pupils, it’s unsure whether he is trustworthy or a snake in the grass with lascivious intentions. And his masculine vulnerability sparks both desire and inquietude in the young women. He also has a cunning male knack of making them all feel intimate with him showering praise and compliments, individually, in an obsequiously sincere way. Competing with each other covertly for his affections, the girls try to maintain their ladylike behaviour but on an animal level their instincts lead them in a different direction.

Philippe Le Sourd’s hazy visuals give the film a dreamlike quality as if the college is caught in a time-warp from which there is no escape, and yet a drousy longing to remain. The film also has a timeless nature dealing with evergreen themes which could easily translate to a comtemporary setting. Don Siegel made a 1971 version of the story starring Clint Eastwood as the soldier who seduces the women, gradually turning them against each other and eventually himself.

Performances are superlative especially from Nicole Kidman as the cocquettish but buttoned-up Marsha, and Elle Fanning Alicia in the first flush of burgeoning sexuality. Both manage vague flirtatiousness while keeping their upper lips stiff. But Farrell is the standout in a complex portrait that feels ambiguous but retains an intruiging tension throughout. This is Coppola’s most absorbing and accomplished work so far. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 17-28 MAY 2017 | IN COMPETITION

Rodin (2017| Cannes Film Festival 2017

Dir: Jacques Doillon, Vincent Lindon, Izia Higelin, Severine Caneele | Biopic Drama | 119min | France

Jacques Doillon has demeaned a French national treasure with a film about Auguste Rodin that will disappoint those whose evocative takeaway of the sculptor’s work is his erotically-charged The Kiss.

Rodin’s work is the epitome of passion but this film coneys none of it. Cliched and bogged down with tedious scenes and boring exchanges, any vestige of joy instilled by the oeuvre of this great master will have left you by the end.

Vincent Lindon won best actor in Cannes 2015 for his honest portrait of a man at the end his tether. You will be at the end of yours at this second rate biopic. As Rodin he is a laborious, lumbering, grizzled, gruffalo lusting after his models as he copes with the derision of patrons and press. The public appalud him but he handles his newfound fame with glowering gloom.

His wife Rose (Séverine Caneele) is unimpressed with him; his lover Camille Claudel (Izïa Higelin) is left coping with her own flagging career. Doillon has sucked the life out of his characters and with the luminous memory of Juliette Binoche in Bruno Dumont’s Camille Claudel 1915 still hanging in the air, Higelin’s portrait struggles in a morass of mediocrity. If RODIN comes to a cinema near you, run straight in the other direction. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 17-28 MAY | IN COMPETITION

The Meyerowitz Stories (2017) | Cannes Film Festival | In Competition

Baumbach’s latest serio-comedy THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES asks the question: how do you manage a creative father who constantly puts you down?

Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler deal with their own neuroses while managing a creative father who puts them all down. Stiller is well-off LA lawyer Matthew Meyerowitz, a half- brother to failed musician Danny (Sandler) and non-entity Jean (Elizabeth Marvel) who live close by to their sculptor father (Hoffman) whose party piece is bringing the conversation back to himself. Harold’s retrospective show brings the family back together in the Brooklyn home he shares with his fourth wife Maureen, a scatty alcoholic played amusingly by Emma Thompson. But the show is put in jeopardy when Dad suffers a brain trauma that makes his narcissism worse.
The siblings find a certain love-hate solidarity as they struggle with the inevitable fallout, all operating from a position of shame; Danny feels a failure as an artist, although he’s a good father. Matthew fails by not being an artist, despite being a financial success; Jean has emerged from Harold’s negligent parenting never achieving anything, in act of self-sabotage; and they’re all latently angry with each other. Baumbach’s clever script ensures there’s plenty of dry humour, and even open wrestling, to lighten things up. With entertaining turns from Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson and a soulful Adam Sandler as the underdog, this is a film that will feel poignantly personal for many.

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | 17 – 27 MAY 2017 | IN COMPETITION

24 Frames (2017) | Cannes Film Festival | Special Screening

Dir: Abbas Kiarostami | Experimental | Iran | 120min

A final experimental film from Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami, who died last year at 76, is a tribute made especially poignant in the Festival’s 70th Anniversary. Abbas Kiarostami started life as an artist and also worked as a photographer and this clearly informs this series of delicately rendered vignettes that depict scenes from a mostly wintery nature seen from the POV of the animals. These started as photographic stills taken by Kiarostami in Tehran by the Caspian Sea. He then imagines these pictures coming to life with the action continuing for around four minutes. The result is enchanting, uplifting and poignant this experimental film has no dialogue or narrative but occasional scored by popular music and may also be viewed as an art installation rather than a film with appeal to the arthouse crowd rather than mainstream audiences.

Apart from being a visual record of his personal experiences this meditative and meaningful film offers insight into animal behaviour when seen in isolation. A seagull mourning its mate, a cat pursuing its prey and lion seduces a lioness feature in these tableaux vivants. But film opens with Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1565 oil painting entitled The Hunters in the Snow. Slowly the picture comes to life as a chimney starts smoking and birds flutter from the bare trees. What remains uncertain is how he has created these moving images but it’s clear that he was intrigued by animals and particularly birds. There is even humour in one frame taken against a turquoise blue sky: a tiny bird chirps away on a pile of logs while trees are gradually felled in the background. With the final tree falling he flies away. Another depicts a herd of cows strolling along a beach while one lies on the sand, clearly breathing. When the tide threatens to cover the animal, it ups and moves away. This all sounds simplistic but somehow can move you to tears. Another endearing scene involves a young guard dog protecting a flock of goats from the prowling wolves. Tunes accompanying are as sublime as a choral Ave Maria and as cheesy and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music, but somehow it works.

The final 24th frame seems to echo Kiarostami’s romantic nature. In the early hours of the morning a girl is asleep by her computer where an old film is playing on slow-mo. The woman in the picture sings the Lloyd Webber hit “love will still remain.”. Somehow at the end Kiarostami breaks with his country’s strict taboos: the film contains a unveiled woman, kissing a man and singing about it alone. What a brave goodbye. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | 17-28 MAY 2017 | SPECIAL SCREENINGS.

Radiance (2017) | Cannes Film Festival | In Competition

Dir: Naomi Kawase | Drama | Japan | 89min |

Despite her detractors, and there are many, Naomi Kawase is a seasoned director and her latest film here at Cannes is testament to her often unappreciated talent. RADIANCE showcases her skills in this tender and charmingly observed film about a famous visually impaired photographer (Mayasa/Masatoshi Nagase), who is gradually losing his sight. At a workshop he meets Misako (Ayame Misaki) who writes spoken commentaries for films for the enjoyment of the visually impaired.

Upset by Mayasa’s criticism about one of her commentaries, Misako gently objects accusing him of lacking imagination, but when she discovers his own wonderful talent she reflects on her error and the two grow closer.

RADIANCE is a slim but delightful story that reflects on themes that may be oblique to the unaffected. Amongst the stark psychodramas in this year’s competition, it offers a restorative tonic to human goodness. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 17-28 MAY 2017 | IN COMPETITION

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) | Cannes Film Festival | In Competition

Dir: Yorgos Lanthimos | Cast: Colin Farell, Nicole Kidman, Barry Keoghan | Drama | Greece | 101min

Has Greek New Wave director Yorgos Lanthimos gone too far in The Killing of a Sacred Deer. A film that would have us believe that all families are essentially dysfunctional, and all men psychopaths. His latest is set in a sleek but soulless Cincinnati, Ohio in the run up to Christmas. Colin Farrell is an Irish heart surgeon who performs, as many do, to soaring choral music, adding a Kubrickian touch to the film’s bleak opening scene where open heart surgery is being wound up before blood-stained gloves and garb are then thrown into a bin. This sets the tone for a disquieting and starkly alienating parable that examines the human drive to escape death.

Farrell plays Steven Murphy, on the surface a loving husband and family man who has developed a weird friendship with a teenage boy that grows more bizarre as the film unfolds. It soon emerges the boy’s father died on the operating table when Murphy was the surgeon. Left with his unemployed mother, Martin is a young man with a grudge. Later in a speech Murphy tells how the doctor involved in the first heart transplant, Andreas Gruentzig, died in a plane crash: “The operation was successful, but the doctor didn’t make it”.

There’s a horrible feeling throughout the film that the Sword of Damocles is going to fall on Steven, (to use an apposite anecdote from Greek mythology) and all because of Martin (Barry Keoghan) who feels resentful and envious, and puts a curse on the family. Keoghan is a particularly chilling psychopath, but so is Farrell when he puts his mind to it in the final scenes. MT

Denial (2016) | DVD release

DENIAL is a court procedural that examines the case of Holocaust denier David Irving, who took USA historian Deborah Lipstadt and her British publishers Penguin to court for defamation in 2000. Directed by Mick Jackson (The Bodyguard) and written by David Hare, it tries to please a mainstream audience, without losing substance – a exacting undertaking which, for the most part, results in a lacklustre piece of entertainment.

Lipstadt (Weisz) had written Denying the Holocaust in 1993. Three years later, the historian and Holocaust Denier David Irving (Spall) sued Penguin for defamation. The libel case was heard in 2000 by Mr. Justice Gray, after Irving and Penguin had agreed not to go for a jury trial. Lipstadt was surprised that in English law the defendant has to present proof, and not the plaintiff – as in US law. Penguin and Lipstadt hired Richard Rampton QC (Wilkinson) and Anthony Julius (Scott) to lead their legal team, whilst Irving represented himself in court, having aquired much experience in this role.

Before the trial, Lipstadt and the team went to Auschwitz to see evidence; during the visit, Rampton is very detached and Lipstadt accuses him of being blasé in the face of such horror, due to his aimless meandering around the Camp. But during the trial, Rampton can convince the judge that Irvine’s assertion that the gas chambers were not used for killing, but as bunkers for the SS guards, was wrong, since the living quarters of the guards were three miles away. Lipstadt very much wants some concentration camps survivors to testify against Irving – meeting one of them, Vera Reich (Walter) during the trial. But Julius argues, that Irving would just humiliate the witnesses, as he has done in former trials. When Lipstadt visits Jewish organisations in London for financial help, she is given the cold shoulder: the Jewish leaders would rather have no trial and pay Irving off. In April 2000 Judge Gray delivers his verdict – 333 pages – that clears Lipstadt. Irving has to pay the costs of the trial and is declared bankrupt in 2002.

Based on Lipstadt’s book My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier, it is hard to argue with the content, but the choice of DoP Haris Zambarloukos (responsible for productions like Thor) shows the intent of the filmmakers. The Auschwitz sequence is very much Hollywood at its worst. Perhaps it is best to close on David Irving in his own words, speaking with his baby daughter in a pram “When half-bred children are wheeled past: I am a Baby Aryan/Not Jewish or sectarian/I have no plans to marry an/Ape or Rastafarian.” AS

AVAILABLE ON DOWNLOAD FROM 22 MAY | DVD 5 JUNE 2017 FROM AMAZON

Happy End (2017) | Cannes Film Festival | In Competition

Dir: Michael Haneke | Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Jean-louis Trintignant, Toby Jones, Mathieu Kassovitz, Fantine Harduin Drama | 110min

HAPPY END is Michael Haneke’s satirical exploration of a rich family of industrialists whose dysfunctional daily lives become linked to the turbulent ongoing immigration nightmare that is Calais, thanks to the son and putative heir of the family building business.

This year’s Cannes Competition line-up is fraught with startling dramas and the intriguingly entitled HAPPY END joins the list with its impeccable production values, sophisticated interiors and top-drawer performances from a starry ensemble cast, including veteran Louis Trintignant and, of course, Isabelle Huppert.

This is a typical Haneke film: all his classics themes coalesce in a slow-burning treat, at times a tad too much so. These include family guilt, shame, revenge where social media and onscreen messaging enlightens the narrative adding to a gritty subtext behind the beautifully manicured domestic scenes. In one involving an impromptu moment musicale for the scion’s 85th birthday (Trintignant as Georges Laurent), the musician, a chelloist, is conducting a covert porn exchange with Thomas Laurent – revealed only to ourselves scrolling down on his onscreen messenger).

Isabelle Huppert plays Anne Laurent, the doyenne of the family’s Belle Epoque villa (with Moroccan staff) who has recently taken over the construction business from her ageing father Georges, who is stumbling on the foothills of dementia. Recently engaged to Toby Jones’ English lawyer, tasked with handling a UK deal involving the business, her son son Pierre is a non-starter prone to drunken outbursts, and her brother Thomas (Kassovitz) has a new wife and baby and a smart little daughter (Harduin) from a previous marriage (and has broken into his computer and sussed his game). So far, so dysfunctional. Meanwhile, we are treated to glimpses of the migrant crisis on the streets of the city.

This is a malevolent movie that wears its unsettling undercurrent discretely hidden under its haute couture outerwear, and as in all Haneke’s fare, we know that the ending will be far from happy. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 17-28 MAY 2017 | IN COMPETITION

The Shepherd | El Pastor (2016)

Dir.: Jonathan Cenzual Burley; Cast: Miguel Martin, Alfonso Mendiguchia, Juan Luis Sara, Maribel Iglesias; Spain 2016, 98 min.

The harsh rural landscape of Central Spain is the backdrop to this story about what money (the lack of it and the lack of need for it) can do to rather ordinary men. This is not so much about greed, but about what happens when the pressure to be materially successful in life collides with the traditional values of a life outside modern society.

Anselmo (Martin) is a shepherd, who lives in harmony with nature and his dog Pillo in a rundown cottage in the middle of nowhere. He, and his very modest lifestyle, are introduced in the first ten minutes; apart from a few words to Pillo, the sequence is just an introduction to the landscape, which will dominate proceedings: As in his debut The Soul of Flies, Burley is his own DoP, his pristine camerawork captures the beauty a natural workd that is never sentimentalised. Anselmo has no television, his leisure time is spent having a glass of wine in the local bodega and visits to the library in the nearby city of Salamanca (?) where he meets the librarian Concha (Iglesias), who treats him with gentle respect: most people believe he is a simpleton for eschewing a material existence. The tranquillity is undisturbed, until a developer offers Anselmo a handsome amount for his land. Anselmo refuses, he sees no need to change his modest, but meaningful life. Enter Julian (Mendiguchia), the owner of the local slaughterhouse, and Paco (Sara), another businessman, who need to sell their land to the developer – but won’t be able to make the much-needed profit, if Anselmo does not join them in the endeavour. Both men depend on the deal, because the middle class Julian, as well as the petit-bourgeois Paco, are living above their means. The pace kicks up in the last fifteen minutes, with an action-packed finale that is much in contrast to what went on before, very much action packed: a boy falls into a well, after Anselmo foresees the accident – shades of the magic realism of The Soul of Flies. But the bloody confrontation between the male trio, whilst telegraphed, somehow seems a rather simplistic solution.

Great on atmosphere, THE SHEPHERD is a brilliant explores the collision of very different lives, but the characters – apart from Anselmo – are somehow unwritten. To resolve this rather delicate story with an explosion of violence, is somehow negating everything what went before. Beautiful to look at, and directed with great panache, it is Burley the writer whose narrative fails him in the end. AS

ON RELEASE IN ARTHOUSE VENUES FROM 2 JUNE 2017

Coby (2017) | Cannes Film Festival 2017 | ACID

Dir.: Christian Sonderegger; Documentary; France/USA 2017, 78 min.

Christian Sondereggers’s feature length documentary debut COBY is not only an intimate portrait of a transgender man’s journey, but also a testimony to the support he gets from his family, who live in the small village of Chagrin Falls in Ohio.

When she was twenty-one, Suzanna Hunt decided that she would undergo a sex change process, since she “was not happy with what she saw in the mirror – it was not what I expected”. S/he took the name of Coby during the medical/psychological changing process, before settling for Jacob after the successful transformation. We meet Jacob, working as a paramedic in an ambulance, administering help to a stricken baby with his fellow workers. But more surprising than Jacob’s successful progress, is the role his family played in all the upheavels. His parents, Ellen and Williard, and his brother Andrew are interviewed at length, and it turns out that Jacob’s parents were anything but the average village people. They home-schooled their children, there was no TV, and they lived a life of tolerance as Christians. This tolerance was tested by Suzanne early on, the family had to adjust to the many stages Suzanne/Jacob went through, including a lesbian phase, which is recalled with smiles by all concerned.

Jacob is proud to be accepted as man not only by his family, but also his co-workers. But he is honest about the changes in his reactions: before he took testosterone, he would tear up in sympathy when his girl friend Sarah had emotional problems – but now he is much more reserved. ”When I have problems, I react like a gorilla”. But he still has the memories of 21 years as a woman, so he is still able to talk with female colleges in a different way as the other male workers. All in all “I don’t feel like a woman, but feel good in my femininity as a man.” As for the future, since Sarah does not want to bear children, Jacob is the only parent to be able to procreate, and he is taking all medical precautions to keep this possible open.

As for his father, the “memories of him as a girl fade slowly, being replaced by new ones of him as a man”, a process his brother agrees with. As Jacob says “I was born into the right family”. Coby is told in a simple, but not simplistic manner, somehow very close to the way the Hunt family lives: avoiding drama and ruptures, but caring for each other in a truly Christian way. They are in a way the real ‘Anti-Trump’ family: overcoming ‘otherness’ in their family with love, understanding and patience, just understanding without any dogma.

COBY IS PLAY IN THE ACID SIDEBAR | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 17-28 MAY 2017

West of the Jordan River (2017) | Cannes Film Festival | Directors’ Fortnight 2017

Dir.: Amos Gitai; Documentary; France 2017, 97 min.

It is fair to say that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has influenced the entire career of Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai: in 1973, when studying architecture, he was called up for military service during the Yom Kippur war and joined the helicopter rescue crew. He filmed some of the action with an 8mm camera, and the continuing wars (on different levels) between the two nations have been at the centre of his output, culminating in Rabin, the last Day (2015).

West of the Jordan River is, in spite of its rather poetic title, a very harsh condemnation of hard liners on both sides. More or less bookended by a 1994 interview by Gitai with the incumbent Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin – a year before his assassination by a right-wing Israeli fanatic – the documentary shows that Rabin has never found a political heir, but that the current government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is preparing to swamp the West Bank with Jewish settlements, making a two-state solution impossible. But one is still shocked, when Gitai interviews the current Deputy Foreign minister, Tzipi Hotovely (*1978), mother of two daughters and an ardent feminist. Far from even trying to show understanding, Hotovely launches into a war-mongering attack: “We are not occupying our own land. This is not a territorial war. This is a religious battle led by Islam, We can’t ignore this basic truth. This land is ours. All of it is ours. We are not apologising for that.” On the status of the Dome of Rock, the Al-Aksa Mosque and the Islamic Museum on the Temple Mount, she is even to the right of Netanyahu: “It is my dream to see the Israeli flag flying on the Temple Mount. I think it’s the centre of Israeli sovereignty. All of Judea and Samaria belong to the Jewish people”.

Gasping after such an affront, Jewish journalist Avi Shavit is well aware where the politics of young hardliners like Hotovely will lead to: “The Israel I love, if it does not make a dramatic U-turn in the next ten years, will vanish. The government is going to have 750 000 settlers on the West Bank in this period. Then you cannot share the country any more. It will be the end of democracy in Israel. Give the Palestinians full citizenship and end the State of Israel in its current borders or revoke the rights of Palestinians and end our democracy. The settlers have enacted the most Anti-Zionist policy, which is completely destroying us. We have to go back to the point, when was Rabin assassinated”.

When Gitai visits the “Parent’s Circle”, a group of Israeli and Muslim mothers who have lost their children in the war, the full cruelty of the armed conflict becomes obvious. A Jewish mother, whose son was killed, had left Iraq in 1942 as a child, states ”Israelis do not understand the Arab mentality. And we Jews always know what is good for others, we can’t let go and let others be different from us”. A right-wing journalist wants to forbid groups like the “Parent’s Circle”: “They join international groups, who want to destroy Israel”. Obviously he also means such groups like in Hebron, where Muslim women are learning to use video cameras to document the atrocities of the Israeli army. The instructor makes it clear that this is not a feature film shoot: “Zoom, but don’t forget your own life”. Another journalist agrees with the director “Netanyahu is not a religious fanatic. He sees the Arabs as a managing problem. He wants to secure the territories, which are important for Israel. But he is foremost an ideologist”. Interviews in Hebron show the total breakdown between the community and the occupiers. The story of the Bedouin School facing demolition is typical of the conflict. The school is ‘illegal’ according to Israeli settlers, “who seem to be above the law”. When Gitai interviews a young Arab boy on his balcony, he asks him about his dream for Hebron. The boy answers spontaneously “To die as a martyr.” Gitai tries in vain to convince him that to live is better, but the boy maintains his position.

The last word of this depressing documentary goes to the director: “Extremists on both side help each other to fight to the death. Nothing is more solid than the coalition between the two sides [Hamas and the Israeli government] who do NOT want peace”. AS

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 17-28 MAY 2017 | DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT 2017

Alive in France (2017) | Cannes Film Festival 2017

Dir: Abel Ferrara | Cast: Abel Ferrara, Joe Delia, Paul Hipp, Cristina Chiriac, Dounia Sichov, PJ Delia, Laurent Bechad | 79mins | Rockumentary

Cult film director Abel Ferrara turns the camera on himself in the role of raddled rock star in this self-indulgent concert documentary premiering here at Cannes Film Festival.

Ferrara joins a long list of filmmakers who have morphed into their own musical subjects but the others have done so with considerably more flare and elan particularly David Lynch and Woody Allen. Strutting and staggering about on stage like a dishevelled hippy, Ferrara doesn’t exactly strike a pose in the way that Madonna did for her Blond Ambition Tour. Better described as a poor man’s Keith Richard. his musical ravings are at best forgettable, at worst shambolic and meandering.

The director of classics Bad Lieutenant and The King of New York embarks on a tour that plays out in Paris and Toulouse during October 2016 with his musical collaborators Joe Delia and Paul Hipp. Described as a friends and family affair, maybe it should be kept that way, while his film fans look forward to the next film SIBERIA with Willem Dafoe. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | 17-28 MAY 2017 | SPECIAL SCREENING.

Alive in France (2017) | Directors’ Fortnight 2017

Dir: ABEL FERRARA | 2017 || DOCUMENTARY | Cast: Joe Delia, Paul Hipp, Cristina Chiriac

Abel Ferrara headlines a film retrospective and a series of concerts in France dedicated to songs and music from his films. Preparations with his family and friends will form the material of this self portrait, showing another side of the director of legendary films BAD LIEUTENANT, THE KING OF NEW YORK and THE ADDICTION. Ferrara is joined on stage by past collaborators, including composer Joe Delia, actor-singer Paul Hipp and his wife actress Cristina Chiriac for concerts at the Metronum in Toulouse and the Salo Club in Paris in October 2016.

The Entity (1982) | Eureka Bluray release

Dir: Sidney J Furie | Cast: Barbara Hershey, Ron Silver, David Labiosa, George Coe, Cindy Nash | Horror | 125min | US

Barbara Hershey plays the convincing heroine of Sidney Furie’s aptly-named THE ENTITY. Seduced, abandoned, widowed and unemployed (it could only happen to a woman, naturally) the mother of three then becomes the victim of a poltergeist-like malign spirit who repeatedly mugs and rapes her in the privacy of her own bedroom, and later further afield. The saturnine figure of Ron Silver’s bearded psychiatrist then steps in to save her but his professional balm fails to sooth troubled waters and soon he becomes emotionally involved in the story.

Based on a book by Frank DeFelitta – who also writes the script – THE ENTITY is inspired by apparently ‘real events’ that happened in mid Seventies Los Angeles, calling into question an ordinary woman’s dodgy state of mind until it eventually admits defeat in this line of reasoning. Pity rather than horror is the overriding feeling as the tedium starts to grow during the second hour. Although the tropes are effective THE ENTITY is not a particularly scary horror film, an erotic thriller or a satisfying psychiatric procedural but it’s well made – if overlong. And Hershey is remarkably convincing and watchable. MT

OUT ON DUAL FORMAT DVD FROM 15 MAY 2017

The Other Side of Hope (2017)

Dir: Aki Kaurismäki | Finland / Germany | Finnish, English, Arabic | Drama | 98 min · Colour · 35 mm, 2K DCP

The grass is always greener on the other side especially when your business is failing or you live in a war zone. Aki Kurismaki’s latest film is an unapologetically upbeat story of dystopia in modern day Helsinski where two lives converge – that of Khaled, a Syrian refugee and stowaway on a coal freighter and Wikström, a Finnish travelling salesman peddling ties and men’s shirts. Treating his characters with even-handed sympathy and understanding Kurismaki evokes a realistic picture of the local refugee crisis as well as the economic malaise affecting contemporary Finland.

When Khaled claims asylum at the government offices, he is bathetically told: “you are not the first”. This is the start of many telling observations that give THE OTHER SIDE OF HOPE its spry and ironic humour. Meanwhile Witstrom leaves his wife and his business and, after a win at the poker tables, buys a local restaurant business. When the authorities turn down Khaled’s application, he decides to remain, going underground in the Finnish capital where he gets duffed up by the ‘Finnish Freedom League’ before some friendly street musicians offer support. And soon Wikstrom offers him a job in his new concern where the classic Kaurismaki community muddle along with the waitress, the chef and his friendly Jack Russell.

Starring regular collaborators Sakari Kuosmanen, Kati Outinnen and Ilkka Koivula, THE OTHER SIDE OF HOPE is witty and watchable and never takes itself too seriously in showing how the kindness of strangers goes along way to making the world a better place. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE 26 MAY | SILVER BEAR WINNER BERLINALE 2017| BEST DIRECTOR

Jupiter’s Moon | Cannes Film Festival 2017 | Competition

After his UCR hit White God (2013) Hungarian auteur Kornel Mundruczo makes it into the main competition line-up with this sci-fi thriller about a young immigrant who is shot down while illegally crossing the border into Hungary. Terrified and in shock Aryan finds his life has mysteriously been transformed by the gift of levitation.

Clearly the director has honed his craft since his breakout arthouse piece White God, that had so mqny pleasing elements. JUPITER is visually more ambitious and technically brilliant but narratively a complete mess. The bewildering storyline starts off with a great premise – a Syrian refugee becomes an angel in one of Jupiter’s Moon’s where a cold ocean known as Europa spawns new forms of life. The metaphor is clear and cleverly thought out yet the film tries to be too many things, a political commentary and an action thriller: less would have been far more effective than more. After a blindingly intriguing opening scene, the shaky handheld camera continues in a tonally uniform almost continuous take that eventually feels exhausting, and hardly ever gives up, detracting from the enjoyment of the stunning set pieces.

Zsombor Jéger is the central character but not a sympathetic or particularly engaging one as Aryan, the Syrian refugee who is gunned down by László (György Cserhalmi), the nasty leader of a refugee camp in Budapest. Aryan survives his injuries and then discovers an uncanny ability to float, and from on desperately tries to find his father with the help of a nefarious doctor, Stern (Merab Ninidze), who has been struck off for medical malpractice. Aryan is inveigled into a plan to defraud Stern’s rich patients into believing he has faith healing properties, but this is a tenuous ploy that again feels too gimmicky.

White God had a believable plot with engaging characters but Jupiter’s Moon, although a far more technically skilful film, feels hollow, glib and also frankly quite boring despite its arresting visual wizardry from White God cinematographer Marcell Rév. Ninidze’s Stern Gabor is a quixotic and cunning rogue and far and away the most exciting character in an ensemble of cardboard characterisations. Along with the visual mastery there is an impressive atmospheric score that helps to ramp up the tension and also adds a certain gravitas. A shame then that the whole things feels so underwhelming and unwieldy as a story. Clearly the director is trying to up his game but needs to establish whether he wants to go for arthouse audiences or the mainstream crowd. White God was starting to build him a fanbase but this seems like a step backwards. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | COMPETITION 2017

L’Amant d’Un Jour (2017) | Cannes Film Festival 2017

Dir: Philippe Garrel | Cast: Eric Caravaca, Esther Garrel | 77min | Drama | French

Philippe Garrel is back in Cannes with another family affair that brings to a close his trilogy this started with Jealousy. This grainy black and white Parisian story is as sweet and light as a mini croissant and just as innocuous, showing little insight into womens’ minds despite the collaboration of four writers, including the veteran Garrel. If you enjoy his work it’s watchable enough, otherwise too slim and generic to have much appeal. Daughter Jeanne (Esther Garrel) finds herself at home again with Papa (Caravaca) as her first love affair with ends abruptly. But family life is interupted by her father’s young lover Ariane who is a philandering part-time porn model. The intimate domestic trio discuss love, fidelity and friendship and Arianne frequently becomes jealous when father and daughter spend the evening together. There is a candour to the dialogue but it all feels rather trite. Esther is a natural as is Caravaca but Chevillotte’s Arianne struggles to feel authentic and her story is largely hollow and implausible. Even with a running time of 77 minutes L’AMANT fails to absorb our attention often feeling like an amateur college piece; well-crafted but threadbare in its storyline. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT

Loveless (2017) | Cannes Film Festival 2017

Dir: Andrei Zvyagintsev | 127min |Drama | Russia

Zvyagintsev’s long-awaited followup to Leviathan is the story of a divorcing couple forced back together again to search for their missing son. LOVELESS is scripted by Oleg Negin who also wrote The Banishment, Leviathan and Elena but the only similarities lie in the alienation of the characters: here Zvyagintsev would have us believe that the Grim Reaper has finally visited Russia and stolen its human soul and spirit. What remains is a collection of spiteful, self-seeking, sociopathic types whose only pleasure is shopping, selfies and social media due to a culture that breeds indifference by forcing them into loveless marriages to procreate and conform.

In Moscow a young couple have already been through a bitter divorce but are still sharing a home. Their young son Alexsei sobs silently in his bedroom in one of the most moving scenes in this otherwise emotionally barren affair, while his parents, who never wanted him, bicker about how best to sell the family flat. Boris (Alexei Rozin) is a tubby, pasty-faced office worker whose new girlfriend, an aquisitive blond, is needy and close to her conniving mother. His soon-to-be-ex-wife Zhenya (Maryana Spivak) is hostile towards her son and husband. A beautician, she is now dating a rich and cold-eyed man twice her age with a pristine appartment in an upmarket part of town. There is nothing to recommend any of them: physically and spiritually they represent the worse form of life, alive and kicking – not just in Moscow – but in much of the civilised world.

When Alexsei disappears during his parents’ separate date nights, the film becomes a police procedural of utter desperation. Moscow feels like a frozen forest filled with creatures from another planet: these s0-called parents are merely psychopaths and narcissists going through their vacuous routine, their only despair is for themselves rather than the loss of their son. This is a bitterly depressing film but visually impressive and inventively framed.

If you’re looking for two hours of utter desperation and frightening emptiness. LOVELESS is the film to watch and it’s coming to a cinema near you. Be warned. MT

NOW ON GENERA RELEASE | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW | IN COMPETITION 2017

Wind River (2016) | Cannes Film Festival 2017

Dir: Taylor Sheridan | Cast: Elizabeth Olsen, Jeremy Renner | US | Thriller | 111min

Taylor Sheridan is the writer behind Cannes UCR 2016 breakout hit Hell or High Water and scripted the competition title Sicario in 2015. He returns to Cannes this year with his own mystery thriller set in Wyoming and starring Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen.

Shedding more troubling light on American contempo society this action thriller explores events surrounding the violent murder of a teenage girl found in a snowy corner of Wyoming and its investigation by Renner Cory Lambert, a thoughtful and sensitive wildlife ranger who clearly has some issues relating to the recent loss of his own teenage daughter and breakdown in his marriage. Joining him in the investigation (Sicario-style in black SUV) is Olsen’s rather green FBI sidekick, Jane Banner. Clearly Cory is a hands-on type who is used to the territory, whereas she is not.

It also emerges that the dead girl has a brother whose sidekick Pete (James Jordan) seems to have some past connection with the oil company located on the Native American land, and although her father (Gil Birmingham) offers little insight into possible perpetrators, clues start to reveal that Pete is in some way connected.

Their inquiries lead them to an alarming confrontation with a group of Mexican oil-workers and this rather melodramatic second act sits uncomfortably with what has gone before. But Sheridan makes this good in the final denouement which brings us to an impressive close in this enjoyable thriller with its twists and dramatic turns. Clearly Sheridan is still learning but his directorial debut lacks the dialogue finesse of his former outings. WIND RIVER is solid entertainment showing Sheridan to be honing his skills as a consummate talent in the making. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2017 | 17-28 MAY 2017 | UN CERTAIN REGARD

The Goose Steps Out (1940) | 75th Anniversary Restoration Bluray

Basil Dearden’s directorial debut was this slapstick comedy from Ealing Studios. Will Hay plays a bumbling schoolteacher William Potts who doubles as a German general for the British Intelligence during the Second World War. Once in Germany he causes chaos in a Hitler Youth college where he is tasked with finding about the latest weapons of mass destruction, 1940s style. Naturally being Will Hay this turns into a hilarious affair where he cleverly masquerades as a teacher, taking the Micky out of the enemy and generally raising national morale with the assistance of college attendees Peter Ustinov and Charles Hawtrey.

Snappily paced and lushly filmed in pristine black and white, the GOOSE is accompanied by British-Gaumont composer Bretton Byrd’s dynamic score. Following on from his role in Marcel Varnel’s comedy The Ghost of St Michael’s (1941) where he plays a teacher hired by a grim school in Scotland, Hay makes brilliant use of his fast-witted comedy skills, ducking and diving between his characters and manipulating the situation to his advantage with a range of funny facial expressions and different accents and illiteration. This is Vintage Ealing at its best and worth adding to the collection. MT

THIS BRAND NEW RESTORATION COMES TO BLURAY AND DVD COURTESY OF STUDIOCANAL AS PART OF THE VINTAGE CLASSICS COLLECTION IN COLLABORATION WITH THE BFI’S UNLOCKING FILM HERITAGE PROGRAMME TO CELEBRATE THE 75TH ANNIVERSARY | 15 MAY 2017

Sundance London 1-4 June 2017

SUNDANCE LONDON kicks off on 1st JUNE for a whole weekend of American independent narrative and documentary films that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, U.S.A this January.

THE BIG SICK Director: Michael Showalter, Screenwriters: Emily V. Gordon, Kumail NanjianiBased on the real-life courtship: Pakistan-born comedian Kumail and grad student Emily fall in love, but they struggle as their cultures clash. When Emily contracts a mysterious illness, Kumail must navigate the crisis with her parents and the emotional tug-of-war between his family and his heart.

Principal cast: Kumail Nanjiani, Zoe Kazan, Holly Hunter, Ray Romano, Anupam Kher International premiere.

BITCH

Director/Screenwriter: Marianna Palka– A woman snaps under crushing life pressures and assumes the psyche of a vicious dog. Her philandering, absentee husband is forced to become reacquainted with his four children and sister-in-law as they attempt to keep the family together during this bizarre crisis.

Principal cast: Jason Ritter, Jaime King, Marianna Palka, Brighton Sharbino, Rio Mangini, Kingston Foster International premiere

BUSHWICK

Directors: Cary Murnion, Jonathan Millot, Screenwriters: Nick Damici, Graham Reznick – Lucy emerges from a Brooklyn subway to find that her neighborhood is under attack by black-clad military soldiers. An ex-Marine corpsman, Stupe, reluctantly helps her fight for survival through a civil war, as Texas attempts to secede from the United States of America.

Principal cast: Dave Bautista, Brittany Snow, Angelic Zambrana, Jeremie Harris, Myra Lucretia Taylor, Arturo Castro. UK premiere

CROWN HEIGHTS

Director/Screenwriter: Matt Ruskin– When Colin Warner is wrongfully convicted of murder, his best friend, Carl King, devotes his life to proving Colin’s innocence. Adapted from This American Life, this is the incredible true story of their harrowing quest for justice.

Principal cast: Lakeith Stanfield, Nnamdi Asomugha, Natalie Paul, Bill Camp, Nestor Carbonell, Amari Cheatom

Winner of Audience Award: US Dramatic

DINA

Directors: Dan Sickles, Antonio Santini – An eccentric suburban woman and a Walmart door greeter navigate their evolving relationship in this unconventional love story. (Documentary) Special preview screening

Winner of the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary

A GHOST STORY

Director/screenwriter: David Lowery– This is the story of a ghost and the house he haunts.

Principal cast: Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara, Will Oldham, Sonia Acevedo, Rob Zabrecky, Liz Franke

THE INCREDIBLE JESSICA JAMES

Director/Screenwriter: Jim Strouse

Jessica James, an aspiring NYC playwright, is struggling to get over a recent breakup. She sees a light at the end of the tunnel when she meets the recently divorced Boone. Together, they discover how to make it through the tough times while realizing they like each other—a lot.

Principal cast: Jessica Williams, Chris O’Dowd, Lakeith Stanfield, Noël Wells

MARJORIE PRIME

Director/Screenwriter: Michael Almereyda

In the near future—a time of artificial intelligence—86-year-old Marjorie has a handsome new companion who looks like her deceased husband and is programmed to feed the story of her life back to her. What would we remember, and what would we forget, if given the chance?

Principal cast: Jon Hamm, Geena Davis, Lois Smith, Tim Robbins UK premiere | Winner of the Alfred P Sloan Feature Film Prize

WALKING OUT

Directors/Screenwriters: Alex Smith, Adam Smith)

A teenager journeys to Montana to hunt big game with his estranged father. The two struggle to connect, until a brutal encounter in the heart of the wilderness changes everything.

Principal cast: Matt Bomer, Josh Wiggins, Bill Pullman, Alex Neustaedter, Lily Gladstone

WILSON

Director: Craig Johnson, Screenwriter: Daniel Clowes

Wilson, a lonely, neurotic, and hilariously honest middle-aged misanthrope, reunites with his estranged wife and gets a shot at happiness when he learns he has a teenage daughter he has never met. In his uniquely outrageous and slightly twisted way, he sets out to connect with her.

Principal cast: Woody Harrelson, Laura Dern, Judy Greer, Cheryl Hines UK premiere

Winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize

D O C U M E N T A R I E S

ICARUS

Director: Bryan Fogel – When Bryan Fogel sets out to uncover the truth about doping in sports, a chance meeting with a Russian scientist transforms his story from a personal experiment into a geopolitical thriller involving dirty urine, unexplained death, and Olympic Gold—exposing the biggest scandal in sports history.

Winner of the US Documentary Special Jury Award

CHASING CORAL

Director: Jeff Orlowski

Coral reefs around the world are vanishing at an unprecedented rate. A team of divers, photographers, and scientists set out on a thrilling ocean adventure to discover why and to reveal the underwater mystery to the world. This is Orlowski’s follow up to his standout eco-doc CHASING CORAL (2012) (Documentary) Special preview screening

Winner of the Audience Award: U.S. Documentary

SURPRISE FILM! – For the first time this year the Sundance Film Festival: London will feature a surprise film. We can’t say too much, but it was a favourite among audiences in Utah, and with just one screening this will be among the hottest of the hot tickets. The title will be revealed only when the opening credits roll. By our reckoning it will either be I DREAM IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE or JOSHUA.

SUNDANCE LONDON | 1-4 JUNE 2017 | PICTUREHOUSE CENTRAL

I Am Not Madame Bovary (2016)

Dir.: Feng Xiaogang; Cast: Fan Bingbing, Guo Tao, Da Peng Zhang Jiayi; China 2016, 138 min.

Director Feng Xiaogang (Back to 1942) and writer Zhenyun mock the Party bureaucrats but fail to give justice to the main character Li Xuelian, a woman fighting the law of an entire country, when she is wronged by her ex-husband.

Ten years ago Li Xuelian (Bingbing) and her husband Qin Yuhe got a fake divorce, the plan was to obtain another property. But after the divorce, Qin fell in love with another woman, and Li took him to court, to have the divorce annulled. But Judge Wang Gongdao (Peng) rules that the divorce stands; later Qin Yuhe calls Li a whore in front of his friends. A decade later, Wang is Chief Justice of the country, whilst Li is still protesting the court ruling at the Party Congress in Beijing. Wang asks the chef Zhao Datou (Tao), who had a crush on the young Li at school, to keep the woman away from the Congress. After raping Li, who tells him, “in spite of the rape this was the best sex I ever had”, she nevertheless leaves him when it emerges that he is spying on her on Wangs’s behalf. Much too late we learn at the end that the first divorce caused Li to have a miscarriage, and that she is fighting the courts on behalf of her unborn child.

Overlong and openly misogynist, the only saving grace is the innovative camerawork of DoP Pan Luo (Old Fish), whose circular images are a joyful reminder of silent films. But this does not compensate for the many issues director and writer have with women and their representation. AS

I AM NOT MADAME BOVARY (WO BU SHI PAN JIN LIAN) RELEASE ON 26 MAY 2017

The Naked Civil Servant (1975)

“Never Keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level, it’s cheaper”

Adapted for the TV by Philip Mackie this biopic of Quentin Crisp is based on his autobiography of the same name and successfully captures the flamboyant spirit of a man who openly flouted his homosexuality in an era where gaydom was not only frowned upon, but only just legal.

Born with the rather less glamorous name of Denis Pratt in 1908, Crisp became an ageing poster boy for a style of effete homosexuality. And although society failed to espouse his gay status, his bid to raise its awareness made him the sexual equivalent of the suffragettes, suffering daily verbal abuse and discrimination for his cause. Crisp decided late in life to write his autobiography: it it hardly flew off the press, with only 3500 copies sold. But this Thames TV 1975 outing was a resounding success finally giving Crisp the celebrity and personal endorsement he had always craved.

John Hurt gives extraordinary performance of style and panache winning him a BAFTA for Best Actor, while director Jack Gold won the Academy’s highest commendation, The Desmond Davies Award, for outstanding creative contribution to television. The narrative is episodic in nature and deals with its subject matter in a down to earth fashion, refusing to sensationalise what was clearly a time of personal difficulty and great sadness, despite Crisp’s great courage and perseverance which he bears with wit, verve and considerable aplomb. Crisp makes a cameo appearance at the end. MT

A SPECIAL CINEMA SCREENING ON 28 MAY 2017 | BLURAY/DVD RELEASE 5 JUNE 2017 COURTESY OF NETWORK.

Mandy (1952) | Bluray, DVD and EST release

Alexander Mackendrick’s Ealing classic MANDY is much a love story as an inspiring study of perseverance and courage set in London in the early 1950s. Based on Hilda Lewis’ The Days Is Ours, originally serialised on Woman’s Hour, the book captured the imagination of Mackendrick (Whisky Galore!) whose adaptation went on to win the Special Jury Prize at Venice in 1952.

Born deaf, Mandy is mute for most of her childhood, causing her parents tremendous sadness and a rift in their marriage. Her mother Christine(Phyllis Calvert /Mr. Denning Drives North), moves on her own to be near Mandy’s residential remedial school where she grows close to Jack Hawkins’ dynamic teacher Searle whose positive influence brings out the best in Mandy, encouraging her first words. Meanwhile Christine’s husband Harry (Terence Morgan) becomes increasingly jealous threatening to divorce her and take Mandy away.

Hearthrob of the day Jack Hawkins’ gives a warm and thoughtful performance as the gallant Searle who has Mandy’s best interests at heart in contrast to her self-centred and impulsive father. Phyllis Calvert brings to mind another quietly selfless ’50s heroine Celia Johnson in her portrayal of Christine, desperate to save her marriage but wanting to do the best for her little girl. Mackendrick’s crisp direction is enhanced by a very sensitive and insightful script that never sentimentalises Mandy’s plight but garners appeal for the adult love story as much as the child’s suffering. The final scenes are surprisingly moving. MT

CELEBRATING 65TH ANNIVERSARY OF MANDY | VINTAGE CLASSICS COLLECTION SHOWCASING ICONIC BRITISH FILMS | RESTORATION FUNDED BY PARK CIRCUS | 12 JUNE

Spaceship (2017)

Dir.: Alex Taylor | Cast: Alexa Davies, Antti Reini, Tallulah Rose Haddon, Lara Peake, Lucian Charles Collier | Drama | UK 86 min.

First time filmmaker Alex Taylor tries to evoke an alternative teenage world of alien abduction and unicorns in a dull corner of English suburbia. The result is a pretentious cocktail of pseudo-philosophy borrowing hopelessly from masters Gregg Araki and Guy Maddin.

Lucidia (Davies) is one of a bunch of teenagers who mistake their boredom for a creative impulse: popping pills and drinking whisky, they dress in psychedelic garb, trumping it up to be ‘avant-garde’. Lucidia’s mother died years ago under mysterious circumstances in her swimming pool, and her father Gabriel (Reini), an archaeologist of some sorts, has not come to terms with the loss. Feeling abandoned, Lucidia stages her own alien abduction. Her friends, stoned and/or role-playing, support this event: it gives them a credibility they have longed for. Gabriel now decides to get to know his daughters peers: there is Alice (Haddon), who drags her leather-clad boyfriend along on a leash like a dog, is supposed to be a vampire; Tegan (Peake) wants to be saved by Gabriel, but is happy spending her time being high, and Luke (Collier) who rides around on his motorbike, a tame imitation of Slater/Dean, eventually getting attached to a crashed helicopter. We never see the unicorns and black hole, but when Lucidia returns with a lame reason for her disappearance, the relief of cast and audience is mutual.

SPACESHIP looks like college cocktail of weird ideas, but rather than abandon the project, Taylor states in an interview that this improvised script was re-edited, and it shows: much of the senselessness of the narrative comes from the residue of another script version. To confuse matters even more, Taylor changes the POV structure of story-telling half-way through, to take an omniscient overview. DoP Liam Iandoli, also a debutant, tries to adjust to the spontaneous changes, without finding his own style in the process. The best part of SPACESHIP is its young ‘cast’, who just had fun. Most of the time, SPACESHIP is a bit of reverie for a middle-aged man surrounded by a group of sparsely clad teenage girls. AS

ON RELEASE AT SELECTED CINEMAS FROM 19 May 2017

https://youtu.be/sByUkR4sw-U

Machines (2016)

Dir.: Rahul Jain | Documentary | India/Germany/Finland | 75 min.

Originally ‘just’ a midterm project for debuting director/co-editor/co-DoP Rahul Jain at Cal Arts, his ‘student film’ MACHINES found its way into Sundance. Whilst describing the hell of working in a textile plant in Surat, with 4.5 million inhabitants India’s eighth largest city and economical capital of Gujarat, Jain chose to film the hellish environment in an extravagant, visually beautiful style.

Like a flies on the wall, Jain and his crew are invisible: the machines – running for 24 hours – churn out spools of fabric, dyed in sumptuously imaginative patterns, as young children, teenagers and older workers shuffle around their twelve hour shifts, looking like hunted animals in the dark sweltering jungle of this material world. “There are machines and then there are humans that are machines. My main focus was on humans who have ben dehumanised by labour to the point of losing their identities”.

Workers are aware of the trap they find themselves in: “Nobody makes me to work here, I travel 1600 km, 36 hours to get to this place”. Whilst they can stop working at any time, there is no guarantee that they will be re-employed. This is underlined by the sadly astonishing fact that all those interviewed, apart from the managers, had been replaced by the end of the shoot. Only 95% of the state’s workplaces are unionised and more than one labourer states, “When we unite, the leader of the union is usually killed”. Health and security issues are ignored, considering the huge cascades of chemicals and sludge-dumping, one wonders about the long-term health issues of the workforce. At one point, the director is directly questioned about his intentions – and he is compared, not favourably, to politicians who engage with the workers ‘ plight at election times, but disappear quickly after polling day. The textile plant looks like a re-incarnation of a Dickensian nightmare, yet it has been in operation for just twelve years.
Since the 1960, India has undergone a massive, unregulated industrialisation. In the textile industry alone, 45 million workers are employed, just under a third of which are children. Overtime work means a working week of 70 to 80 hours, the weekly wage is between $US 90 and $US150 a month in an industry with a turnover of $US 40 billion.

When asked, why he made such an aesthetically beautiful film of a nightmarish situation, Jain is adamant that “if it weren’t so beautiful, it would be easy to look away. There is something that you cannot ignore about beauty. I wanted the audience to be hypnotised and lulled defencelessly into submission when the images enter their brains”.

Helped by a sound design team led by Susmit ‘Bob’ Nath, MACHINES is a cacophony of noises, where the camera prowls in search of human life, a life with which fades in front of our eyes. The mainstream media is afraid of humans becoming more and more like computers, and Jain pictures an atavistic battle field where workers are left with just one, somehow medieval hope: “My only satisfaction is that everyone dies. Even when the rich go, they leave the world with nothing”. AS

MACHINES IN ON RELEASE FROM 19 MAY 2017 | SUNDANCE WORLD DOC WINNER 2017

Whisky Galore! (2016)

Dir: Gilles MacKinnon | Cast: Eddie Izzard, James Cosmo | Drama | UK

Alexander McKendrick’s 1949 screen adaptation of Compton McKenzie’s true story is an Ealing classic fondly remembered for its feisty depiction of the fearless folks of Todday Island in the Scottish Outer Hebrides and their attempts to recover the whisky cargo from a shipwrecked boat.

Quite why Gilles MacKinnon has decided on a remake of this popular arthouse gem is questionable given the high status it holds in the collective memory and the lacklustre cast he has selected to replace the originals: Basil Radford, Joan Greenwood, Gordon Jackson and James Robertson Justice.

The film is set during the Second World War when the Scottish Islands were a reasonably tranquil outpost in the war effort but impacted nevertheless by a serious dearth of whisky brought on by a breakdown of supplies. When a ship runs aground on a rocky outcrop, the residents club together to relieve the vessel of its precious liquid cargo. Hampered by a slowdown due to the Sabbath Sunday, the islanders are forced into ingenious ways of overcoming strict religious observances enforced by the local minister Macalister (James Cosmo). The only other spanner in the works is – naturally an Englishman – Captain Wagget (Eddie Izzard), who is tasked with maintaining order as Head of the Home Guard.

MacKinnon’s film beautifully evokes this period in history with painterly set design and some magnificent local scenery of the glorious location. Nigel Willoughby captures summer on the island which glows with lush landscapes and wonderfully vibrant seascapes, clouds scudding by. Patrick Doyle’s original score compliments the narrative but the witty script falls flat on mediocre performances that lack the star quality needed to lift the film in Mackendrick’s brilliant 1949 league. The Home Guard appears to be modelled on the characters from Dad’s Army and are a pale imitation, borrowed again from another inimitable national treasure and cannot compete with Arthur Lowe, John Le Mesurier or Arnold Ridley. Some viewers may also be offended by the indelicate racial subtext that creeps into some of the dialogue and feels out of place for modern audiences.

That said, this is a decent if rather tame period piece, totally lacking drama but hopefully instrumental in reviving the treasured forties classic original. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 19 MAY 2017

The Secret Scripture (2016)

Dir.: Jim Sheridan | Cast: Rooney Mara, Vanessa Redgrave, Theo James, Aidan Turner, Eric Bana, Susan Lynch | ROI 2016, 108 min | Drama

After some Hollywood mediocrities such as Brothers, director|co-writer Jim Sheridan has tried to recapture his breakout success with My Left Foot by adapting Sebastian Barry’s artful novel The Secret Scriptures. The result is an uneven and often bewildering melodrama, but a moving one that is certainly worth seeing.

Set in the early 1940s and at the end of the 1990s, the drama tells the story of Roseanne McNulty who spent nearly all her adult life in a prisonlike psychiatric ward in Ireland where the film opens showing Vanessa Redgrave as an emotionally distraught elderly Roseanne whose future in the home is threatened due to plans for an upmarket Spa. In flashback the story retraces her young days in Sligo where Rooney Mara is captivating as the young Roseanne who clearly “has power over men”, as the town’s priest Father Gaunt (James), puts it. The Second World War has just started, with Southern Ireland staying neutral but actually supporting Nazi Germany in a clandestine way. Roseanne is marked by the priest as a ‘dangerous’ influence, and soon moved to a dilapidated cottage by her aunt, having worked in her shop and turned too many heads. After rescuing RAF pilot Jack McNulty (Reynor) on the beach one day, she hides him from the paramilitary forces acting on behalf of the Government. The two have a whirlwind affair and marry in haste, but McNulty is captured by his pursuers and executed. Roseanne, pregnant, is send to a horrific church institution for “fallen Women” and gives birth to a son. Learning that the nuns will take her child away and sell it to rich US-citizens, she flees with her baby into the sea.

The narrative is interlaced with Roseanne (Redgrave) telling her story to psychiatrist Dr. Grene (a thoughtfully appealing Eric Bana) and a sympathetic nurse (Lynch). Veering wildly between flash backs and Roseanne’s more contemporary narrative (including her diary, written into a bible), does not help the creation of a dramatic arc: it creates an episodic structure, which not only reduces the emotional impact but also skips over vital clues that muddle and fail to serve what could have been a spectacular denouement.

Whilst Mara, Redgrave and Bana are brilliantly believable, overcoming the shortcoming of Sheridan (both as director and co-writer), the rest of the ensemble is reduced to clichéd cardboard figures despite best efforts from Aidan Turner, Jack Reynor and a mesmerising Theo James as Father Gaunt. But ultimately it is the clumsily-handled finale that robs the film of the glory of its early scenes. Leviathan DoP Mikhail Krichman’s sumptuous camerawork and set pieces of the Irish countryside and interiors are really stunning in conjuring up the romantic past, and the miserably grim atmosphere in the hospital. But Jim Sheridan wastes all this for a sentimental TV melodrama retelling a story which has been told in a much better ways since the original true events. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 19 MAY 2017 NATIONWIDE

Madame de… (1953) | Bluray release

Director: Max Ophüls | Cast: Charles Boyer, Danielle Darrieux, Vittorio De Sica | 105mins | Drama

As she gracefully riffles through her worldly possessions: her jewels, her furs, her fancy gowns, Danielle Darrieux as Comtesse Louis de.. has shades of an upmarket Madame Bovary about her in Max Ophül’s (La Ronde) sumptuous fin de siècle saga of a beguiling but frivolous noblewoman who appears to have status but whose existence is totally predetermined by the men in her life, her husband General André de.. played with masterful magnetism by Charles Boyer and her lover played with rakish charm by Vittorio De Sica.

But this is not the doom-laden, intellectual fare of Flaubert but a feather-light and humorously romantic concoction that encapsulates the height of Belle Epoque grandeur with its distinctive visual style and central drama surrounding a pair of fabulous diamond earrings.

Max Ophuls based his feature on Louise de Vilmorin’s novella but transposed it to a Parisian setting, where it is elegantly shot in black and white by Christian Matras and opens with the wonderful sequence in Madame’s boudoir. Tracking through her gorgeous residence it follows the earrings to their globe-spinning destiny as the camera swirls endlessly gracefully through a succession of ballrooms in pursuit of the Countess, her adventures and her sparkling jewels. If you’re looking for a touch of glamour and romance and a snapshot of a bygone era, Madame D is now available in the comfort of your own home so why not put the champagne on ice… MT

OUT ON DVD/BLURAY FROM 22 MAY 2017 |

Manhattan (1979)

Woody Allen’s witty and insightful New York satire is a seamless pleasure. Scenes in the life of a divorced writer are accompanied by George Gershwin’s music and Gordon Willis legendary camerawork. MANHATTAN captures the essence of 1970s cinema serving as a tribute to an era where friends talked in person on a regular basis and people met face to face and fell in and out of love in before the advent of social media and mobile phones.

Allen plays Isaac the neurotic central character attempting to find the perfect start to his novel about New York, a city that unfolds in black and white splendour against the iconic score (Rhapsody in Blue) and snapshots of Times Square, Broadway and Central Park. What follows is a sinuous story of Isaac’s studious teenage girlfriend (Mariel Hemingway), his second ex-wife (Meryl Streep) and her lesbian lover, his close friend and confident Yale (Michael Murphy), and wife and spiky journalist lover Mary (Diane Keaton).

The performances are peerlessly natural yet preternaturally witty. Beautifully framed and edited, Gordon Willis will forever be remembered for his shots of the Manhattan skyline that bookcase each scene. Mariel Hemingway gives an open and honest portrayal of first love and captures with poignancy what every girl should say when her lover comes back to acknowledge he can’t live without her.

Another classic New York comedy Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale followed 16 years later. This heavier and more tortured film showed us that the world was already a much darker place. MT

MANHATTAN RETURNS TO CINEMAS NATIONWIDE FROM 12 MAY 2017 COURTESY OF PARK CIRCUS

Tomcat (2016)

Dir: Handl Klaus | Cast: Kater Moses, Lukas Turtur, Philipp Hochmair, Sebastian Loschberger | Drama | Austria | 123min

Klaus Handl is an Austrian filmmaker known for his Locarno prize-winning debut March. His second feature – Berlinale Teddy winner TOMCAT – is a finely crafted piece that pictures the soigné existence of two loved up classical musicians and their handsome tomcat Moses. The trio enjoy a peaceful existence in a leafy upmarket suburb of Vienna and they are not wafting around naked petting each others’ penises and plucking their home grown plums, the couple a enjoy a varied social life and regularly have great sex that sometimes includes their timid clarinetist friend Andreas (Philipp Hochmair).

But Moses isn’t so sociable and their domestic harmony is ruptured one night when the cat gets involved in a territorial scrap and comes off the worse for wear. Stroking him the following morning, Moses snaps back at Stefan, who breaks the poor cat’s neck in retaliation. Life will never be the same again. But this tragedy comes as a distinct relief after over thirty minutes of rather twee domestic bliss now ruptured by a welcome undercurrent of conjugal conflict. While Stefan sobs emotionally in the bedroom, Andreas descends into a deep sulk as the pair engage tight-lipped – and now fully clothed – in a peevish passive aggressive bout of soul-searching. Also gone is the mincing classical music score and we’re left with brooding silence. Then the violence starts with a short sharp cat fight initiated by aggrieved and angry Andreas. Enter screechy violins and more tight-lipped bottom clenching silence and an angst ridden outbreak of tears from Stephan after a football match, where he is soothed and pacified by another male player.

Clearly nothing in this Garden of Eden will ever be as it was and the narrative unravels in a prolonged bout of Andreas sulking petulantly and Stefan trying to appease him until an accident in the plum tree, once again shifts the status quo. What starts out as an enticing Austrian arthouse drama ultimately offers little more than narrative torpor for the remaining hour, as TOMCAT pussyfoots around some resonant relationship issues, instead of bringing something real and resonant to the party. Although pristinely crafted and earnestly performed by Hochmair and Turner, ultimately TOMCAT is just another mediocre domestic drama. MT

OUT ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 12 MAY 2017

The Last Face (2016)

Director: Sean Penn

Cast: Charlize Theron, Olivier Bardem, Jean Reno

117min | Action Drama | US

Actor turned director Sean Penn brought his well-crafted but empty action film to the competition line-up in Cannes Film Festival. Many booed and there was slow clapping. Charlize Theron leads and partly narrates this wartorn saga which has not yet been picked up leaving us in no doubt at to its popularity in the harsh world of the film market where the best films are either pre-sold or snapped up within minutes of their press screening in a voraciously competitive marketplace, where the Hollywood eye is on the money. And this is a Hollywood-style movie.

Unspooling in just under two hours THE LAST FACE throw us into the harsh realities of civil war in Africa where Theron plays well-respected Doctor Wren Petersen who divides her time between her office at the UN Human Rights Department and the killing fields of Liberia where the love of her life Dr Love (Javier Bardem) slaves overtime to patch up and save broken bodies in his work for a NGO relief agency. With its melodramatic score and bleeding heart overtones THE LAST FACE is the last word in worthiness with a capital W. That these high-minded and privileged white people should be seen falling in love while they dedicate their lives to ‘poor black people’ is a premise that is both condescending and hackneyed and explicit references to female injuries, rape and pillage (“she was ripped from her vagina to her anus and yet she’s still dancing) feel both crass and strangely misogynistic, reducing women to the level of animal specimens and robbing them of the little dignity they undoubtedly deserve in this humiliating scenario where refugees merely exist to serve the narrative as the inevitable casualities of war, rather than real people with backstories.

Javier Bardem and Jean Reno give their utmost along with a quality ensemble cast, but there is nevertheless an undertow of male superiority in the film’s blatant denegration of Dr Petersens’s character which comes in the opening scenes where, in voiceover, she admits to being the daughter of a man who desperately wanted a male heir, and never felt she existed until endorsed by the love of a ‘good’ man. Whatever happens next brings nothing original to the party and the patent lack of interest in this overblown gorefest – that poses as entertainment – should send Penn sculttling back to the drawing board for some new ideas. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM FRIDAY 12 MAY 2017

Redoutable (2017)

Dir: Michel Hazanavicious | Cast: Louis Garrel, Stacy Martin, Berenice Bejo, Micha Lescot, Gregory Gadebois, Felix Kysel | French | Biopic Drama

Agnes Varda showed us the borish side of Jean-Luc Godard in her Cannes film Visages, Villages and in REDOUTABLE, his Palme d’Or 2017 hopeful, Michel Hazanavicius shed light on the narcissistic introvert he eventually became in the late 60s, away from the bright lights and adoration of the French film industry that made him a legend.

Played here with sardonic insouciance by a balding Louis Garrel, this is an enjoyable biopic that sees Godard withdraw from society to experiment with radical filmmaking and political activism. Refusing to except that his big time was over – he is seen reliquishing control of Wind from the East, a notion that might prove controversial to some viewers. Also he has started to resent his wife Anne Wiazemsky (played by Stacy Martin) on whose memoirs the film is based, she is spending less time with him and away on location – but the pair still generate a pleasurable chemistry. And although his career and marriage are clearly unravelling, Anne still seems an important part of his life.

Naturally the film was going to be a pastiche – this was Godard’s raison d’etre and fittingly Hazanavicious makes extensive use of Godard’s visual and stylistic gimmicks and the famous intertitles in his film’s primary-coloured 60s aesthetic. The famous dark glasses are there, even if he continually breaks them. Godard himself is naturally not keen on REDOUTABLE which makes him out to be a ‘has been’ when clearly he feels he is still a happening director, capturing his audience’s imagination to this day.

There’s plenty of action and debate in REDOUTABLE but strangely played down are the riots of 1968 which affected that year’s Cannes film festival, and seem to be particularly relevant at this time. An interesting watch for his fanbase and the arthouse crowd , but not possibly one for mainstream audiences. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 11 MAY 2018

Frantz (2016)

Director: François Ozon

Cast: Paula Beer, Pierre Niney, Ernst Stoetzner, Marie Gruber, Johann von Buelow, Anton von Lucke, Cyrielle Clair, Alice de Lenquesaing

Drama | France | 112min

With the theme of guilt firmly at the forefront, François Ozon takes his inspiration from Ernst Lubitsch’s ‘Broken Lullaby,’ in his first black and white film – a gloriously imagined postwar drama that flips fluidly from French to German.

The First World War changed everything – not only from a political point of view but also from a societal one. European countries were left reeling from the devastation but Ozon focuses here on the bitterness and remorse ordinary people felt at losing their dear ones to the war effort and the enemy, both from the German and French perspective.

After a lightweight dramady The New Girlfriend, Ozon is back on form with this lusciously filmed magnificently mounted masterpiece that takes place in the immediate aftermath to the Great War in a small village in rural Saxony (with echoes of Haneke’s The White Ribbon) and slowly builds to a powerful bodyblow in its emotive final scenes set in Paris and provincial France before returned to Germany. Basing his premise on a series of blatant lies, albeit white ones, the inventive French filmmaker tells a story of guilt and loss – where a young man (Pierre Niney plays Adrien) is driven to protect an old couple (the Hoffmeisters) and their daughter-in-law Anna (Paula Beer), in order to assuage his own actions in the trenches of Verdun, where Anna lost her lover in the slaughter that wiped out thousands and divided Europe in a way that many of our own relatives can still remember (beware Brexit!).

Paula Beer radiates a tragic sadness here as the complex heroine who gradually falls for Pierre Ninney’s fragile yet hopelessly handsome French soldier who manages to conceal his secret for most of the film, spinning her tortuously into a spiral of mixed emotions ranging from longing to anger, hatred and gradually, love and acceptance.

Ozon’s cinematographer Pascal Marti crafts velvety images 35mm in black-and-white. His regular composer Philippe Rombi crafts a atmospheric soundtrack of orchestral splendour that seems to continually presage doom in judiciously chosen moments, and there is an enchanting scene in Adrien’s family chateau where an impromptu piano and violin recital takes place between Anna, Adrien and Fanny (du Lenquesaing). Ozon’s theme of art as a potential healer and inspirer once again appears with Manet’s painting Le Suicide representing a potent motif. This is an accomplished and immersive period drama that will resonate with arthouse audiences and is certainly Ozon’s most mature and accomplished film so far. MT

NOW OUT ON RELEASE FROM 12 MAY 2017 at selected arthouse cinemas including CURZON | BEST EMERGING ACTOR SOPHIE BEER | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2016

The Levelling (2016) Bfi player

Dir: Hope Dixon Leach | Ellie Kendrick, David Troughton, Jack Holden, Joe Blakemore | 83min | UK | Drama

English filmmaker Hope Dixon Leach explores some thorny contemporary themes in her assured directorial debut. The Levelling deals with intergenerational conflicts, suicide and the plight of UK dairy farming in a moving family drama that sees a girl forced to return home from college to face her troubled past and the unexpected death of her younger brother

Creating just the right mood of sadness and brooding tension, Ellie Kendrick plays Clover, a recently qualified vet who is now back home on the dairy farm in Somerset after leaving her family in a mood of unresolved tension after the sudden death of her mother. Her father Aubrey (David Troughton) is an old school army type who believes in duty though somehow resents his daughter’s reappearance, not least because of her disappearance at a difficult time during the devastating floods of 2014. As is often the case, father and daughter are driven apart by a tragedy that should have united them in their grief.

The storyline is fraught with enigma and unanswered questions as to why Clover (Ellie Kendrick) was not invited to her mother’s funeral; why she calls her father by his Christian name, and whether her brother Charlie committed suicide or died in an accident. None of this is revealed adding to the sense of mounting introspection in this often gruelling story. But daily life must go on where the farm is concerned, and despite her professional credentials, Clover finds it difficult to kill a recently born male calf, adding to her own sense of misery and anguish.

Somerset is a sorry sight as a backdrop: waterlogged fields awash with mud; her father has been forced to leave the flooded farmhouse and retreat to a sordid caravan. The motif of a hare swimming along the riverbed is redolent of the gloomy state of affairs where even animals seem dejected as they fight for survival in the uncertain climate. Clover bickers with her father as they wallow in sadness, her dog Milo offering the only affection and respite from the unremitting sense of doom.

Kendrick’s thoughtful performance carries the film supported by an otherwise all male cast of Jack Holden as Charlie’s friend James, as David Troughton as her father Aubrey, a man unused to sharing his feelings of emotional despair yet desperately needing to do so. The Levelling is a grim but promising debut from a fresh British talent. MT

NOW ON BFI PLAYER

Cannes Film Festival 2017 | Preview

The 70th Cannes Film Festival starts on the 17th May with an Official Selection full of established directors and some newcomers competing for the coveted Palme D’Or. Pedro Almodovar is president of a Jury with Jessica Chastain a notable member and with legendary directors turning to TV and special eps of Twin Peaks and Top of the Lake and a VR slot for Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu with Carne y Arena to show just how far we’ve come since 1947 in a festival where TV is now acknowledged along with the Big Screen for filmmakers who have already made their mark.

Filmmakers at the top of their game will be gracing the Croisette: Michael Haneke, Todd Haynes, Roman Polanski, Hong Sangsoo, Yorgos Lanthimos and Sophie Coppola. Cannes artistic director Thierry Fremaux assures there will be additions to the 18 films in the main line-up and more surprises in the pipe-line.

ISMAEL’S GHOSTS | FESTIVAL OPENER | Arnaud Desplechin (France)

The opening film is supposed to be rousing but is often raffling and second rate. Last year’s Woody Allen was festive and funny so Arnaud Desplechin’s starry opener may surprise us all with its solid and celebrated French including Marion Cotillard, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Louis Garrel and Matheiu Amalric.

JUPITER’S MOON | Kornel Mundruczo | Hungary

After his UCR hit White God (2013) the Hungarian auteur makes it to the main competition line-up with a sci-fi thriller about a young immigrant who is shot down while illegally crossing the border. Terrified and in shock, wounded Aryan can now mysteriously levitate at will. Thrown into a refugee camp, he is smuggled out by a doctor intent on exploiting his extraordinary secret. Pursued by enraged camp director Laszlo, Aryan and other fugitives remain on the move in search of safety and money, inspired by his amazing powers. A cautionary thriller about disillusionment and faith from the director of the award-winning WHITE GOD.

THE DAY AFTER | Hong Sangsoo | Korea

Hong Sangsoo has been a busy man of late with his Berlinale feature On the Beach at Night hotly followed by this Palme d’Or hopeful that looks like being another intense drama full of tortured souls in Seoul. Meanwhile his second collaboration with Isabelle Huppert CLAIRE’S CAMERA (shot in Cannes) is to screen in the UCR sidebar. Three films so far in 2017 and it’s only April!

GOOD TIME | The Safdie Brothers | US

This US crime thriller from the Safdie brothers follows onscreen siblings Robert Pattinson and mentally-challenged Benny Safdie during a criminally-charged nocturnal escapade into New York. Jennifer Jason Leigh also stars.

LOVELESS | Andrei Zvyagintsev | USSR

Zvyagintsev’s s long-awaited followup to LEVIATHAN is the story a divorcing couple forced back together again to search for their missing son. LOVELESS is scripted by Oleg Negin who also wrote The Banishment, Leviathan and Elena.

THE SQUARE | Ruben Ostlund | Sweden

The Square is Ostlund’s English language debut and stars Dominic West and Elisabeth Moss in another satirical drama that derives dark comedy from human behaviour in a crisis. Sounds very similar to his Cannes awarded Force Majeure.

12o BEATS A MINUTE | Robin Campillo | France

Eastern Boys was one of the most memorable and timely thrillers of 2013 with its immigration backstory. 120 BEATS A MINUTE looks like being another politically-charged affair that follows AIDS activist group ACT UP in the early nineties. It’s great to see Campillo finally in the competition line-up with his own film after he wrote the screenplay for Palme d’Or-winner The Class. His two earlier films didn’t play in competition.

THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES (New and Selected) | Noah Baumbach | US

The Brookyn-based filmmaker’s latest comedy centres on the tricky situation that develops between an ageing artist, played by Dustin Hoffmann, and his estranged grown-up children – one of whom is British actress Emma Thompson – during a get-together to celebrate his achievements. Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler also star.

IN THE FADE | Fatih Akin | Germany Turkey

Akin’s debut HEAD-ON is still his best and most fervent work so let’s hope his Palme D’Or hopeful will be another standout in this year’s Cannes competition. It’s billed to a revenge thriller set in Turkish community in Germany where Diane Kruger stars as Katja a woman who loses her son and husband in a bomb blast.

RODIN | Jacques Doillon | France

Vincent Lindon was an instant hit in The Measure of a Man which won him best actor in the 2015 competition. In this heavyweight drama (121min) he stars as the legendary French sculptor married to Izia Higelin’s Camille Claudel, who was last played by Juliette Binoche in Camille Claudel 1913, It remains to see how Higelin will compete after Binoche’s multi-layered portrayal of the French artist. There again, Toby Jones and Philip Seymour Hoffmann both brought their own complexity to the tough role of Truman Capote so there’s almost room for a new twist.

OKJA | Bong Joon-ho (South Korea)

The Korean director last came to Cannes with Mother which played in the UCR sidebar back in 2009. This is the story of an otherworldly being that becomes the target of a large corporation headed by Tilda Swinton’s Lucy Mirando.

YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE | Lynne Ramsay (UK)

Disaster strikes when Joaquin Phoenix’ ex soldier tries to save a young woman from a sex trafficking ring (Ekaterina Samsonov, also in Wonderstruck).

RADIANCE | Naomi Kawase (Japan)

Cannes regular Naomi Kawase will be back again, like Isabelle Huppert she is a constance presence at Cannes and always seems to have film in competition although not all are picked up for release. During a film shoot the audioscripter (Ayame Misaki) falls for a photographer (Masatoshi Nagase) who’s losing his sight.

THE BEGUILED | Sophie Coppola (US)

Westerns are very much macho fare so a female-centric erotic thriller based on Thomas Cullinan’s novel set in a girls’ school in Virginia during the Civil War offers a welcome twist to the genre, particularly when it stars Elle Fanning, Kirsten Dunst, Nicole Kidman with Colin Farrell as the token male element.

A GENTLE CREATURE | Sergei Loznitsa (Ukraine|France)

Sergei Loznitsa’s documentary AUSTERLITZ slipped under the radar at Venice last year but was nonetheless extraordinary and transcendent. The Ukrainian auteur’s latest film is set in Latvia and should be ready to grace the Croisette in time for the festival. Inspired by a short story from Russian author Dostoyevsky, it follows a woman who decides to track down her innocent husband held captive in prison, against his will.

THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER | Yorgos Lanthimos (Greece)

The Greek New Wave director’s latest is another dysfunctional domestic drama set in Ohio where Barry Keoghan (’71) is a teenager who attempts to bring Colin Farrell’s talented surgeon into his family. Alicia Silverstone and Nicole Kidman also star.

WONDERSTRUCK | Todd Haynes (US)

After success with CAROL, Haynes adapts a Brian Selznick novel about two lives with a mysterious connection across America. Set during parallel time periods 1927 and 1977 it starsJulianne Moore, Toby Jones and Michelle Williams.

HAPPY END | Michael Haneke (Austria)

Michael Haneke won the Palme D’Or in 2012 for his resplendent study of lasting love AMOUR. Five years later, Emmanuelle Riva is no longer around but Jean-Louis Trintignant will be on the Red Carpet as the star of this latest family drama set in the refugee town of Calais. Isabelle Huppert and Mathieu Kassovitz complete the sterling cast.

LE REDOUTABLE | Michel Hazanavicius (France)

Louis Garrel plays a young Jean-Luc Godard in the Lithuanian born filmmakers’ comedy biopic charting Godard’s love and marriage to Stacy Martin’s Anne Wiazemsky, 20 years his junior. A starry French ensemble is primped by Berenice Bejo and Gregory Gadebois.

L’AMANT DOUBLE | Francois Ozon (France)

After the delicately rendered black and white war-themed drama FRANTZ that premiered at last year’s Venice, the prolific Francois Ozon has been hard at work to bring his latest in time for Cannes. And yet he always looks so charming and dapper on the Red Carpet! In L’Amant Double a young girl suffering from depression falls in love with her psychiatrist only to discover his other life.

O U T O F C O M P E T I T I O N

BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL directed by Takashi Miike

HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS AT PARTIES directed by John Cameron Mitchell

VISAGES, VILLAGES directed by Agnès Varda is a documentary that chronicles the friendship that develops between Varda and DoP JR when they embark on a photography trip through the French countryside in his magic bus.

D’APRES UNE HISTOIRE VRAI by Roman Polanski and Olivier Assayas adapt Delphine de Vigan’s book a stalker (Eva Green) who becomes obsessed with an author (Emmanuelle Seigner) suffering from writer’s block after publishing her latest novel.

S P E C I A L S C R E E N I N G S

NOS ANNEES FOLLES directed by Andre Techine

Le VENERABLE W directed by Barbet Schroeder

CARRE 35 directed by d’Eric Caravaca – the director goes back to his childhood to discover more about his little sister who died aged 3.

12 JOURS directed by Raymond Depardon

THEY directed by Anahita Ghazvinizadeh

AN INCONVENIENT SEQUEL directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk

TOP OF THE LAKE: China Girl” directed by Jane Campion & Ariel Kleiman

PROMISED LAND directed by Eugene Jarecki

24 FRAMES directed by Abbas Kiarostami

NAPALM directed by Claude Lanzmann

COME SWIM directed by Kristen Stewart

DEMONS IN PARADISE directed by Jude Ratman

SEA SORROW directed by Vanessa Redgrave

CLAIRE’S CAMERA directed by Hong Sangsoo

TWIN PEAKS directed by David Lynch

Midnight Screenings

THE VILLAINES directed by Jung Byung Gil

THE MERCILESS directed by Byun Sung-Hyun

PRAYER BEFORE DAWN directed by Jean Stephane Sauvaire

THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL TAKES PLACE FROM 18 UNTIL 28 MAY 2017

Un Certain Regard 2017 | Cannes Film Festival

UMA THURMAN will lead the jury to select the winning film in the Un Certain Regard sidebar at Cannes this year.

16 Films have been short-listed so far but this is not the defnitive list as Thierry Fremaux may well add two or three before the festival kicks off on the 17 May. Un Certain Regard betokens a certain auteurish feel to the features selected and this year’s list is no different with seasoned player Laurent Cantet presenting L’ATELIER, films from two new Bulgarian directors Stephan Komandarev and Katemir Balagov and a debut from US filmmaker Taylor Sheridan. The bare bones are here and will be fleshed out as more details emerge. The section opens with BARBARA another drama from Cannes darling Mathieu Amalric.

APRIL’S DAUGHTER directed by Michel Franco | Mexico

Mexican director Michel Franco won Best Script for his 2015 competition thriller Chronic. His latest is a female-centric drama that explores the relationship between a mother and her pregnant teenage daughter. Emma Suarez stars.

LUCKY directed by Sergio Castellitto | Italy | Jasmine Trinca and Stefano Accorsi star in this Rome set thriller that revolves around a divorced hairdresser is dreaming of opening her own salon so she can do the best for her only son.

WESTERN directed by Valeska Grisebach | Germany

A group of German construction workers start a tough job at a remote site in the Bulgarian countryside. The foreign land awakens the men’s sense of adventure, but they are also confronted with their own prejudice and mistrust due to the language barrier and cultural differences. The stage is quickly set for a showdown when men begin to compete for recognition and favor from the local villagers. From the director of the acclaimed SEHNSUCHT aka Désir(s).

DIRECTIONS directed by Stephan Komandarev | Bulgaria

AFTER THE WAR directed by Annarita Zambrano

A convicted Italian war veteran living in France is threatened with extradition after he becomes linked to the assassination of a judge in the politically febrile city of Bologna. Fleeing France with his teenage daughter, his family in Italy face the consequences of his past misdemeanours.

LA CORDILLERA directed by Santiago Mitre | Argentina

Ricardo Darin, Christian Slater and Dolores Fonzi team up for this political thriller centred on events surrounding the Argentine president’s visit to a Summit in Chilean capital of Santiago.

DREGS (Lerd) directed by Mohammad Rasoulof | Iran

OUT by György Kristóf | Slovakia

A Slovakian engineer in his fifties is forced to take up an alluring offer of work in a Latvian shipyard in György Kristóf’s migration thriller debut.

THE NATURE OF TIME directed by Karim Moussaoui

In modern day Algeria three lives come together as the past and present collide for a wealthy property developer, an ambitious neurotic, and a young woman who must make a decision between love and reason.

BEFORE WE VANISH directed by Kurosawa Kiyoshi | Japan

A mystery Sci-fi thriller surrounding a young couple in a crisis. The husband disappears only to come home several days later a changed man – tender and loving. Strange events seems to be linked to his absence including the brutal murder of a local family, sending the local reporter and the police out to investigate the possible presence of aliens.

L’ATELIER by Laurent Cantet | France

Antoine is taking part in a summer writing school in La Ciotat, where he hopes to write a crime thriller novel with the help of Olivia, a well-known author. But the region’s working class past comes back to haunt the instability of the present providing an intoxicating mix of emotions in the writing worshop.

WALKING PAST THE FUTURE by Li Ruijun | Chinese filmmaker returns to Cannes with his latest drama.

BEAUTY AND THE DOGS by Kaouther Ben Hania | Tunisia

CLOSENESS directed by Kantemir Balagov | Bulgaria

THE DESERT BRIDE directed by Cecilia Atan and Valeria Pivato | Spain

Stars Paulina Garcia (Gloria) as a fiftysomething housekeeper whose life changes dramatically turn when she travels across Argentina to take up a new post.

WIND RIVER | Taylor Sheridan (US) Debut

Sicario scripter Sheridan struck gold with this his directorial debut at Sundance in January 2017. The plot revolves around the discovery of a body on a Native American reservation in Wyoming. Jeremy Renner, Elizabeth Olsen and Kelsey Asbille star.

JEUNE FEMME | Léonor Serraille (France) Debut

This is Serraille’s feature debut developed from her graduation film at the Femis in 2013. It revolves around jilted lover Laëtitia Dosch who is abandoned by her beau when she arrive in Paris to join him.

The CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | UN CERTAIN REGARD | May 17-28 2017

Requiem for Mrs J (2017) | Berlinale 2017

Dir: Bojan Vuletić | Drama | Serbia / Bulg/Mac/ Russ Fed/France | 94 min · Colour

Living in a state of flux is complicated, but dying is even harder, as Mrs J finds out when she tries to commit suicide, in this dark but beautifully captured comedy from Serbian New Wave filmmaker Bojan Vuletić (Practical Guide to Belgrade)

Jelena has reached her early fifties with nothing to look forward to. The loneliness of her newly widowed state is amplified by her selfish daughter’s active sex life with her fiancé Milan, who shares their comfortable suburban flat along with Jelena’s elderly mother-in-law. We first meet Mrs J nonchalantly assembling a gun and silencer at the dining room table in a scene that is not only shockingly deadpan but also mildly hilarious. The whole film is embued with ironic moments like this, where gentle humour comes from the Kafkaesque task of simply sorting out her affairs, before she pulls the trigger and ends the abject pointlessness of it all.

Many will empathise with this universal portrait of a woman who is resigned to die, simply because the rest of her life seems to stretch before her as an emotionally arid desert, where her own modest but worthwhile life experience is regarded and reflected back on her as superfluous and even downright irritating by the younger generation, compounding even further the dejection she already feels. This is an incredibly difficult role played with nuanced subtlety by Mirjana Karanovic (When Father Was Away on Business) who captures without rancour or bitterness the utter despondency of a woman’s middle-age cast adrift in a country that offers no certainty, swinging back and forth between torment and transition. The authorities are unable to cope, Jelena’s former employers are now bankrupt and the remaining staff are just killing time.

Expertly framed and filmed by Jelena Stankovic; this is a quiet gem of a film that carries a small but delightful message of hope in the final scenes proving that nothing is ever quite as bad as it seems when family and friends rally in support. MT

BERLINALE FILM FESTIVAL 9 -19 FEBRUARY 2017 | PANORAMA SECTION

Burden (2017)

Dir: Directors: Timothy Marrinan, Richard Dewey | 89min | Biopic Doc | US

Often known as the Evil Knevil of performance art, the charismatic sculptor Chris Burden emerges as the ultimate control freak in this entertaining documentary by co-directers Dewey and Marrinan that will interest art-lovers and cineastes alike. Burden burst on to the art scene in early 1970s California and seemed to derive most of his satisfaction from the dynamic behaviour (and often angst) provoked by his outlandish ‘pieces’ which often involved violence and danger – mostly to himself, although he did once pull a dagger in a TV interview “for the sake of art”.

Rejecting the Evil Knevil tag, claiming he was certainly not a trickster, Burden was interested in creating art that couldn’t be bought or sold thereby gaining control of his own work as a reaction to the inflated art scene of the 1970s. Chris Burden died in 2015 just five days before the opening of his final peaceful ‘Ode to Santos Dumont’ a motorised illuminated balloon, he is probably best remembered for having a friend graze his arm with a rifle, in the name of art, although when asked about the piece he states “the public still talk about ‘Shoot’. It’s like a very old girlfriend – you remember but you don’t think about every day”. ‘Making ‘Shoot’ turned out to be dangerously thrilling but also involved the Police – as a matter of procedure – but this did not put an end to Burden’s daredevil creative antics – for other installations he had himself nailed semi-naked to a Volkswagen and covered by a tarpaulin as he lay on the roadside tarmac by a Saab – again the Police attended the scene.

The youngest of three kids Burden enjoyed a cultured and peripatetic childhood mostly in Europe where his father was a big cheese at MIT; Burden himself later went on to be a professor at UCLA. Thoughtful and quietly spoken, he clearly possessed a rich inner life and was fascinated by the energy generated around creating a piece, but this energy often caused great pain to himself and those involved and after his first marriage broke down – after an affair confessed publicly during one of his performances pieces – Burden experienced a phase of down-spiralling depression that caused his work to become even more dangerous and obsessed by guns and firearms. In one piece, Burden was bolted to the floor near two electrically-wired buckets of water; his survival depended on the buckets not being kicked over by visitors.

Burden had his critics: Brian Sewell essentially called his work “rubbish” and Roger Ebert said: “If this is Art, it’s World War II”. But Burden was always quick to point out that he was driven to minimalism in order to expose essential meaning in his art. In his sculpture ‘Urban Light’, which is now the most photographed site in LA alongside the ‘Hollywood’ sign, street lamps have been honed to the highest degree of uniformity (by sandblasting) in order that they are absorbed and dominated by the essential idea of the piece. This is most effective when experienced at night.

His last years were spent seemingly at peace with himself creating immense artworks in his estate in Topanga Canyon, where his carefully curated team transform collected stray objects into works of art and his very satisfying sculpture cum model Metropolis II, an immense microcosm of the city of LA city, complete with toy cars. Burden ended his days a contemplative soul happy in the company of his dogs and his objets in the California countryside. MT

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 5 MAY 2017 COURTESY OF DOGWOOF

Directors’ Fortnight 2017 | Cannes Film Festival 2017

Claire Denis, Abel Ferrara and Bruno Dumont will be included in this year’s buzzy Quinzaine Selection introducing some new names and some established auteurs to the party which runs from 18-28 May 2017. Nigerian British filmmaker Rungano Nyoni is also amongst the chosen few in a line-up which is always eclectic and inventive in its choice of indie film.

Denis opens the festival with UN BEAU SOLEIL INTERIEUR starring Juliette Binoche, Gerard Depardieu and Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi. Previously known at Des Lunettes Noires, a more edgy and memorable title, this is a film about love inspired by French philisopher Roland Barthe’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. The festival will close with Sundance standout debut PATTI CAKE$ from US director Geremy Jasper.

Leonardo Di Costanzo follows up his brilliant two-hander THE INTERVAL (shot by The Great Beauty’s Luca Bigazzi) with THE INTRUDER (L’Intrusa) a Naples-set immigration thriller infiltrated by an outsider linked to the Camorra and Bruno Dumont brings his long-awaited musical JEANETTE: THE CHILDHOOD OF JOAN OF ARC adapted from Charles Peguy’s work and featured a techno score from Igor. Also there will be Abel Ferrara with a documentary ALIVE IN FRANCE, his follow-up to Pasolini starring Willem Defoe who is also attached to his next dram Siberia. In the autobiographical title Ferrara headlines a film retrospective and a series of concerts in France dedicated to songs and music from his films. Preparations with his family and friends will form the material of this self portrait, showing another side of the director of legendary films BAD LIEUTENANT, THE KING OF NEW YORK and THE ADDICTION. Ferrara is joined on stage by past collaborators, including composer Joe Delia, actor-singer Paul Hipp and his wife actress Cristina Chiriac for concerts at the Metronum in Toulouse and the Salo Club in Paris in October 2016.

CAST

And where would the festival be without veteran Philippe Garrel. His son Louis is in the main competition line-up but father will be there with the Jean-Claude Carriere scripted L’AMANT D’UN JOUR which stars another member of the family Esther (Jealousy). Israeli author and filmmaker Amos Gitai’s WEST OF THE JORDAN RIVER compares contempo life in occupied Palestine with his memories of making his 1982 documentary Field Diary, Yoman Sadeh. Gitai (RABIN, FREE ZONE) describes the efforts of citizens, Israelis and Palestinians, who are trying to overcome the consequences of occupation. Gitai’s film shows the human ties woven by the military, human rights activists, journalists, mourning mothers and even Jewish settlers. Faced with the failure of politics to solve the occupation issue, these men and women rise and act in the name of their civic consciousness. This human energy is a proposal for long overdue change.

The List in Full so far:

Un Beau Soleil a l’Interieur (Dark Glasses)– Claire Denis

A Ciambra directed by Jonas Carpignano
Bushwick directed by Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott
Patti Cake$ directed by Geremy Jasper
Alive in France directed by Abel Ferrara
L’amant d’un Jour directed by Philippe Garrel
Cuori Puri directed by Roberto De Paolis
The Florida Project directed by Sean Baker
Frost directed by Sharunas Bartas
I Am Not a Witch directed by Rungano Nyoni
Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc directed by Bruno Dumont (main pic)
L’intrusa directed by Leonardo Di Costanzo
La Defensa del Dragon directed by Natalia Santa
Marlina Si Pembunuh Dalam Empat Babak directed by Mouly Surya
Mobile Homes directed by Vladimir de Fontenay
Nothingwood directed by Sonia Kronlund
Ôtez-moi d’un Doute directed by Carine Tardieu
The Rider directed by Chloé Zhao
West of the Jordan River (Field Diary Revisited) directed by Amos Gitai

THE DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT | CANNES 18-28 MAY 2017

Tribeca Film Festival | New York | 2017

Founded by Robert De Niro in the spirit of independent cinema, The Tribeca Film Festival takes place around New York Greenwich Village every Spring and this announced its award winners on Thursday, giving top honors to three features directed by women. An additional prize went to an Iranian short film.

Best American Narrative Feature

KEEP THE CHANGE Christina Brucato (The Intern), Jessica Walter (Play Misty for Me) and Johnathan Tchaikovsky (Reservation Road) are the stars of writer-director Rachel Israel’s comedy debut which explores the unlikely romantance that develops between a high-functioning couple who meet in a New York City support group for adults with autism.

Best International Narrative Feature

SON OF SOFIA; Greek director Elina Psykou’s darkly imaginative and claustrophobic fable revolving around a 11-year-old who leaves Russia during the 2004 Olympics to live with his mother in Athens as a new life beckons. A surprise awaits him in the shape of a new father making him retreat into the fantasy of a disturbing inner world of his own.

Best Documentary Feature

BOBBI JENE Elvira Lind’s gorgeously photographed love story also won awards for cinematography and editing. It explores the nature of ambition through its central character’s fight for independence and success in the highly competitive field of dance after leaving Israel to return to her native San Francisco.

TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL 2017 | 19- 30 APRIL 2017 | NEW YORK CITY

My Life as a Dog (1985) | Arrow Blu/DVD Release

Dir: Lasse Hallstrom | Cast: Anton Glanzelius, Tomas von Bromssen, Ing-Marie Carlsson, Anki Liden | 101min | Sweden | Drama

A coming of story told with sensitivity but never sentimentality. MY LIFE AS A DOG (Mitt Liv Som Hund) is based on the autobiographical novel by Reidar Jonsson. In 1959 Sweden, 10 year old Ingemar (Anton Glanzelius) lives with his dying mother and his older brother. To keep himself cheerful he thinks of all those worse off – such as Laika, the Russian dog who was sent to Space in a Sputnik where he died of starvation. Laika becomes a metaphor for all his suffering, as he reflects on happy memories of summertime by the lake where he made his mother laugh. Anton Glanzelius gives a magical performance for a little boy. Brimming with cheekiness but also quietly reflective, he shows tremendous forbearance given his sad circumstances until it all becomes too much in the poignant final scenes.

The Swedish countryside where he’s sent to live with his uncle is a lush green paradise where the night is full of stars and everyone seems friendly and cheerful. Even when the snow falls there is plenty to do, but thoughts of his mother continually drift into his mind, along with those of his pet dog who he yearns for as a soulmate, but who mysteriously never returns. This is a film suffused the silent worries of childhood and early puberty, the subtle bodily changes that occur and fears that remain unexplained often lead to burning and unspoken anxieties.

MY LIFE AS A DOG is a deeply impressionistic film delivered with a lightness of touch, profoundly moving and suggestive in nature rather than over-talkie and intrusive. It leaves a space for our own reflections and recollections making it all the more powerful allowing soulful empathy with Ingemar as he constantly comes to terms with disappointments beyond his comprehension; those that we may have suffered too. There’s a resilience and a starry-eyed optimism here and a touching vulnerability – particularly in the scene where Ingemar spends the night in the Wendy house in his uncle’s garden. This is one of the most insightful and delicately drawn portraits of childhood, but also of being a child in the late fifties. Hallström seamlessly evokes sadness, hope and joy in a young life touched by tragedy. MT

OUT ON ARROW ACADEMY UK BLURAY|DVD | 8 MAY 2017 | ARROWVIDEO@fetch.fm

https://vimeo.com/79632525

Twelve Angry Men (1957) | Criterion Bluray Release

Dir.: Sidney Lumet; Cast: Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, Ed Begley, Jack Klugman, Martin Balsam, E.G. Marshall; USA 1957, 96 min.

Filmed for a mere $ 350 000 and shot in 19 days, Sidney Lumet’s first feature film was destined to become a classic, even though it was a commercial flop. Lumet had directed Reginald Rose’ play of the same name already for Television, and the theatrical nature of the set up – a single room where the Jury deliberates the case of a Puerto Rican teenager, who stabbed his abusive father to death – run against the current wave of widescreen, TechniColour movies that were in vogue at the time.

Even though the advertisement headline was as lurid as possible: “Life in their hands – Death on their minds. It explodes like 12 sticks of dynamite!” Surely, this sort of sensationalism was attracting the wrong target group: TWELVE ANGRY MEN, shot in black and white by DoP Boris Kaufman (Baby Doll) – is a didactic exercise on the thesis “Prejudice always obscures the truth”. The twelve jurors have the life of the teenager in their hands, but their reasons for their verdict turn out mostly to be personal. Eleven of them are clear at the beginning, that the accused is guilty – they want to get it over with as quick as possible, to return to their ordinary lives. Only Henry Fonda (this being his only producer’s credit) as Juror 8, has doubts. After he is joined by another juror – who wants to give him a chance to elaborate his doubts – Fonda is able to get more and more of the all white, middle aged men jury on his side. Some are simply insecure (Juror 8), or not up to the task, like Juror 1, the foreman (Balsam). Then there is the arrogant stockbroker (Juror 4), E.G. Marshall, who believes in “methodical” thinking, and sees himself far superior to all others. Juror 10, is a great performance by Ed Begley, who plays the out-ant-out racist brilliantly. Finally, Lee J Cobb (Juror 3), who hates his son, after being left by him: he holds out the longest, having a clear personal motive. Others, like Juror 7, simply want to shorten the process, to see a “ballgame”; the man changes his verdict with the majority, whichever outcome is more likely to end the process the quickest. But Fonda also points out structural elements of the court process: the publicly appointed defence lawyer did not challenge the witnesses enough, he was defeatist from the start: “No money, no glory, not even much chance of winning”.

TWELVE ANGRY MEN has aged well, particularly the racist angle is very much part of contemporary live in the USA – from the top down. Also, the obsession with sport in society is hardly reduced: the foreman is a college coach, and he sees the whole jury process like a sporting contest, whilst on juror as mentioned before, would send the accused to the electric chair, if it would allow him to see a game. Kaufman usually uses well thought-out medium shots, and his close-ups are very emotional. Sidney Lumet (1924-2011) would become one of the few intellectually charged Hollywood directors in a career of more than fifty features. AS

The Criterion Collection UK | @Criterion | #CriterionUK

Mulholland Drive (2001) | Bfi Player

Writer| Dir: David Lynch | Cast: Justin Theroux, Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, Ann Miller | US Mystery Thriller |

“One night, I sat down, the ideas came in, and it was a most beautiful experience. Everything was seen from a different angle…Now, looking back, I see that (the film) always wanted to be this way. It just took this strange beginning to cause it to be what it was.” David Lynch.

David Lynch’s neo-noir existential thriller is dreamily weird and strangely intoxicating to watch. Themes of denial, aspiration and unrequited love coalesce in a cryptic psychological thriller whose apparent normality mingles with a surreal and darkly comic speculative storyline unfolding when a wannabe actress arrives in Los Angeles and befriends a semi-amnesiac woman she finds hiding in her family apartment.

Now regarded as one of of Lynch’s best films it launched the career of Welsh actress Naomi Watts who has gone from strength to strength as the vulnerable figure of hope who finds rejection and disillusionment in the city of dreams. David Lynch reinvented postmodernism making it edgy and fashionable again. Mulholland Drive was original devised as a TV series after Twin Peaks was rejected for TV, so here Lynch gave it an ending.

It also starts with a car crash the beguiling sole survivor Laura (Elena Harring) staggering disorientated from a stretch limo onto LA’s Mulholland Drive. She fetches up in a nearby apartment where wannabe actress Betty (Watts) later arrives after a long flight from Canada. So vulnerable and lost is Laura that Betty develops a strange and sympathetic attraction to her that eventually morphs into attraction and love in scenes of a graphic sexual nature.

Betty is an entirely straightforward and fresh-faced ingenue at the start of film – much in the same vein as Kyle MacLaclan’s Jeffrey in Blue Velvet (where Isabella Rossellini plays Dorothy, the equivalent of Laura). It seems that this dazed and confused female image could come from Lynch’s recurring teenage memory of a neighbour who appeared semi-naked and bleeding on the driveway of his family home, as discussed in David Lynch – The Art Life (2017). All this feels plausible and yet imbued with a hypnotic sense of disorientation where ‘Rita’ (from a poster of Rita Hayworth) and Betty’s dark persona’s appear as Diane and Camilla. Diane is also a struggling actress and Camilla’s lesbian lover. Successful star Camilla is swept away by Justin Theroux’s film director Adam, and the jealous Diane has her killed in the ‘car crash’.

Confused? The reality depends on which side of the looking glass we are standing. Looking forward, “Betty” is vouchsafed a vision of where infatuation and professional failure could lead. Looking backward, the drama’s first part is the final anguished, transfiguring dream of “Diane”. All this is open to interpretation but in such a way as the reverie is pleasurable as well as intoxicating – like tripping on medazolam. There is a weirdly authentic cameo from Maya Bond as Aunt Ruth, and Monty Montgomery as a cowboy cum Diddy man.

Angelo Badalamenti’s languorous score washes over the feature that glows in Peter Deming’s sumptuous visuals (Peter provided the vibrant images on Oz the Great and the Powerful and Twin Peaks). MULHOLLAND DRIVE is a sensual experience, unforgettable and alluring. MT

Latest digital restoration of a 4k transfer now on BFI Player | DVD, Blu-ray & EST

Citizen Jane: Battle for the City (2016)

Dir.: Matt Tyrnauer; Documentary; USA 2016, 92 min.

Director/producer Matt Tyrnauer (Valentino: The Last Emperor) has created the model documentary: his portrait of city planning and environmental activist, author and journalist Janet Jacobs (1917-2006) and her fight against the might of New York City’s political bureaucracy, spearheaded by ‘Planning Czar’ Robert Moses (1888-1981), unfurls like a thriller. It examines the consequences of failed urban planning and how it impacts on lives all over the World.

Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford led the New Urban Movement in the 1960, pioneering the fight against modern planners and architects, not only in the built environment, but also as a theorist: her ground breaking book, The Death and the Life of Great American Cities (Random House,1961), was a battle cry to repudiate the destruction of urban centres, where under the slogan of “Slum clearance” whole neighbourhoods were destroyed. Jacobs, journalist and researcher, had first hand experience of this fight, before writing her book – which was belittled by the male-dominated architectural world, with critics describing it as “housewife’s remedies”.

In the mid-fifties Robert Moses proposed the demolition of Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, to build the Lower Manhattan Express Way (LOMEX). Moses, who at one time held twelve titles simultaneously, among them NYC Parks Commissioner and Chairman of Long Island Park Commission, was never elected but appointed as a result of political patronage, mostly by successive NYC mayors. Jacobs had lived with her family in Greenwich Village and had seen the disastrous results of the super-highways of the Cross Bronx Expressway and Brooklyn Queens Express Way; the former destroyed large parts of ‘Little Italy’. The original ‘battle’ against the building of LOMEX was won in 1958 – due to the support of Eleanor Roosevelt and other politicians and celebrities – but Moses did not give up. During the 1960 he attempted thrice to resurrect his plan. At a public hearing in 1968, when it looked like the State Authorities would give in to the “Master Builder”, Jacobs collected the records of the hearing, which had fallen out of the stenographer’s machine. “No record, no LOMEX “ she exclaimed. Jacobs was arrested by a plain-clothes policeman, and charged with three felonies. She moved to Toronto the same year and continued her planning battles and campaigned until the charges were reduced to misdemeanours.

LOMEX was never built, and Moses’ influence waned, although the automobile was always considered more important than the inhabitants of the city. Public transport was neglected: the huge, costly Express Way schemes were built, but public subway and EL travel was neglected. Moses’ final disgrace was his (abandoned) plan, to demolish a playground in Central Park, to make space for a parking lot for an expensive restaurant.

We witness the demolition of so many high rise blocks in urban centres of the USA in the late 90s, which had become much more un-inhabitable than the ‘slums’ they replaced, we watch the same type of high rise blocks being built in India and China: “Moses on steroids, building the slums of tomorrow today”.
CITIZEN JANE is a near perfect piece of history, the struggle for control over the way we live, and the story of an intelligent and brave woman, who took on the male establishment at time when few dared. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 29 APRIL 2017

The Pyramid Texts (2015) | Digital release

Dir.: The Shammasian Brothers (Ludwig and Paul Shammasian) Writer: Geoff Thompson | Cast: James Cosmo, Ethan Cosmo | UK 2015 | 97 min.

In their debut feature, the Shammasian Brothers focus on a lonely and embittered ex-boxer and coach as he recalls a life of repressing his emotions, leading to the death of his only son.

Ray (James Cosmo) sits alone in a boxing ring, sharing his life story – a mixture of regret and pseudo-philosophical meanderings – into a video camera on tripod. Crucially, it centres around his inability to come to turn with his own fears – drowned mostly in alcohol – and his failure to empathise with his son Bomber (named after Joe Louis), who ran away from what looked like a great boxing career. There are very short flashbacks featuring Bomber, but apart from these, Ray pontificates in absolute loneliness.

More of a one-man stage-play than a film, The Pyramid Texts feels aesthetically like a re-run of the grainy black-and-white world of the British cinema of the early 60s, with shades of Karel Reisz’ Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, where sporting heroes from the working class bemoan their fate. Whilst being behind the times with its raving monologue embodying clichéd male excuses, the Shammasian Brothers also abstain from building a dramatic arc: this is unadulterated, repetitive ‘pub talk’ dressed as soul searching. All credit goes to James Cosmo who keeps the film together with an emotional performance of raw intensity, but even he struggles sometimes with the sheer banality of his lines. A tacky ending makes matters worse for a production which does not suffer from the restraints of its mini-budget, but the lack of insight and imagination of its writers/directors. AS

NOW ON Digital Release from April 28th

Lady MacBeth (2016)

Dir: William Oldroyd | Cast: Florence Pugh, Christopher Fairbank, cosmos Jarvis, Bill Fellows, Naomi Ackie | drama | 89min | UK

British director William Oldroyd transports Nikolai Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk to the wilds of 19th century Northumberland in his standout Gothic horror debut, served with a dash of noirish melodrama.

How male authors love to punish their female heroines, particularly the attractive ones. The main character in Leskov’s 1865 novella follows a long line of leading ladies such as Madame Bovary, Therese Raquin and Therese Desqueyroux. And Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned particularly when she is a young wife married to an impotent middle-aged psycho who comes (not) and goes of his own accord, leaving her locked in a stone mansion. Oldroyd adds modern flavour to the brew with a feminist, racial and gender subtext but the narrative retains a distinct whiff of Victorian starchiness from the tight bodices to the gracefully austere set design. We first meet Katherine (played by Florence Pugh) as a nervous teenage bride joining the household of Alexander (Paul Hilton) a wealthy but dysfunctional mining boss with brutish manners and a bedside manner to startle Jack the Ripper.

His lack of bedroom skills and frequent absences leave her craving companionship, sharing the house with her timid housemaid Anna (Naomi Ackie) and tight-lipped father-in-law Boris (Christopher Fairbank). But cocky stable groom Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis) soon steps in to warm her wintery solitude and eventually the two find themselves locked in lust unable to keep their love a secret from the household staff and Alexander himself. Murder and mayhem ensue in the devilish denouement.

Performances here are astonishing particularly from Pugh in her first major role, mastering a decent Northumberland accent and a minxy sparkle in her eye to boot. While Oldroyd and screenwriter Alice Birch stay true to the pages of the original, the finale is more in line with Polanski than Leskov intended.

Shot on a tight budget but none the worse for it, Lady Macbeth was made for under £500,000 as part of a regional film-funding programme supported by BBC Films and the British Film Institute. Sometimes the film feels claustrophobic trapped in its country house setting and Lady Macbeth makes a pretty swift descent into Hell given the scant running time of 89 minutes. That said, this is an enjoyably gruesome romp that remains top drawer (particularly in the dress and lingerie department) and true to its literary pretensions never sinking into tawdriness as it unleashes a gripping tale of male oppression and female fury in a remarkable debut. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 25 APRIL 2017

Réparer les Vivants (2016) | Heal the Living

Dir: Katell Quillevéré

103min | Drama | France

Best known for her feature debut Love Like Poison, Abidjan born Katell Quillevere’s third feature is an ambitious but tonally uneven drama that brings together the lives of two French families through an extraordinary gift.

Featuring an eclectic cast from Canada, Belgium and France, and based on Maylis de Kerangal’s novel Mend the Living, the narrative is told in two parts, the second half linked to a tragedy that unfolds in the first. The film opens with a thrilling Dardennesque escapade of surfing and skateboarding for a young French boy (a spirited debut for Gabin Verdet), and develops into a nerve-shredding struggle for survival after a spectacular accident leaves him with life-limiting injuries. Without revealing the entire story suffice to say that the final segment is a sluggish study of a ciggie puffing bisexual middle-aged woman (a thoughtful Anne Duval) who suffers degenerative heart failure culminating in a plodding medical procedural.

Although the plot is an inspiring one, the characters involved are singularly less so apart from Simon, who has the winning charisma and ebullient energy to carry the first act forward giving it considerable dramatic heft and one of the best surfing scenes ever – followed by his subsequent tragic death. There is a delightful scene, told in flashback, where we see him flirting with his girlfriend Juliette who then takes the funicular to the top of the hill, and Simon follows her on his bike, appearing at the summit to give her a romantic surprise and a really passionate kiss. His parents – played by Emmanuelle Seigner and Kool Shen – are understandably devastated by the accident but act with tremendous courage in the aftermath. After that we never see them again. Tahar Rahim plays an amiable hospital assistant who is responsible for organising the aftercare, he is also a bird fancier (or the feathered variety) who is prepared to pay over 1000 euros for a goldfinch, adding his tousled-haired charm to the otherwise bland medical staff. After the hero of the piece is killed off, the second segment feels comes as a crashing disappointment. Anne Duval fails to generate any sympathy for her character who is a one a dimensional mother who lives for her two teenage kids (Oldfield and Cholbi) and – in a bizarre twist – is also attempting to have an affair with a concert pianist (Alice Taglioni) but is perpetually too out of breath. Apart from being less dynamic or resonant, this second part is also more pedestrian with its needlessly graphic scenes of prolonged surgery feeling a little ‘de trop’ in what is essentially a drama. If you’re squeamish or anti-smoking, it’s prabablu time to call it a day at this point . MT

ON RELEASE FROM 29 APRIL | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 10 SEPTEMBER 2016

The Zookeeper’s Wife (2017)

Dir: Niki Caro | Screenwriter: Angela Workman (based on the book by Diane Ackerman | Cast: Jessica Chastain, Johan Heldenbergh, Daniel Bruhl, Timothy Radford, Efrat Dor, Iddo Goldberg, Shira Haas, Michael McElhatton, Vad Maloku | 127min | Drama

The most poignant aspect of THE ZOOKEEPER’S WIFE is the non-human story. But sadly the animals concerned are not the main focus in this Holocaust tale about a woman who sheltered Jews in her Zoo in Warsaw. Niki Caro’s drama is a variation on the The Diary of Anne Frank with exotic beasts thrown in – and this time getting the short straw – most of them being slaughtered by the Germans during bomb raids over the Polish city. The commendable but controlled drama film is also a showcase for Jessica Chastain’s talents as Antonina a gentle Polish woman whose guile and courage helped save a group of Jews who were banished to the Warsaw ghetto towards the end of the Second World War and escaped with their lives.

THE ZOOKEEPER’S WIFE faces stiff competition with Polanski’s Warsaw epic The Pianist and Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness, where a Polish World War Hero, Leopold Socha, hid a group of Jews. But the human element here is far less memorable than the story of the Zoo. Antonina Zabinska and her husband Jan , sheltered 300 Polish Jews at the Warsaw Zoo during World War II. The story opens cosily in the balmy summer of 1939 with Chastain waking her son and two lion cubs that share the family home. Her husband is a Prof and together they’ve nurtured the Zoo and its impressive menagerie of animals and are now basking in the afterglow of their hard work, blessed with a young son Ryszard (Timothy Radford) and an active sex life. The characterisation is all rather predictable. Prof is a masculine protector (The Broken Circle Breakdown‘s Johan Heldenbergh, Chastain as Antonina exudes feminine wholesomeness from her bouncy curls to her curvaceous figure and rocks a rather good Polish accent. Then it all goes pear-shaped when Germany invades Poland. The Nazis are nasty and shouty and their commandant Lutz Heck (Daniel Bruhl)- who we first meet as a German zoologist from Berlin Zoo – rapidly turns callous at the outbreak of hostilities informing the couple that their Zoo is to be ‘liquidated’. The animals are then mostly shot or slaughtered – one of the worst scenes involves the shooting of an elephant and a prize golden eagle who Bruhl orders to be ‘stuffed and mounted’. It later appears in his private office as he announces his plans for a selective breeding programme. At this point Antonina uses her feminine wiles to persuade Heck to run their Zoo as a pig farm providing fodder for German soldiers. The pigs will be fed vegetable waste that Jan will collect daily from the Ghetto. But the two plan to secrete Jews onto his truck, hiding them under the litter.

Although awful things happen to the Jewish hostages here we remain mostly unaffected by their plight largely due to a lack of complexity. The underwritten characters are like cyphers so we fail to feel their pain – or their joy and Antonina and Jan Zabinski – despite their bravery – emerge as martyred victims rather than shining heroes. Adapting Diane Ackerman’s best-selling book, Caro and screenwriter Angela Workman portray their protagonists as endlessly virtuous saviours and the enemy as vicious and venal. The only flicker of naughtiness comes when Antonina willingly submits herself to Heck’s blandishments- to save her husband, Jewish friends and cherished Zoo.

As Holocaust film go this is a safe bet, yet also a unexpected tear-jerker. It has cuddly bunny scenes (where the CGI is barely distinguishable) and cuddly conjugal scenes showing how men very much had the traditional upper hand in wartime. DoP Andrij Parekh camerawork is skilful and Daniel Bruhl breaks out of his usual buttoned-up roles in a scene of surprising passion which adds to his repertoire and his allure. The most disappointing aspect here is tragically the human story. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 21 APRIL 2017

Five Foodie Films about Love

FRANK AND LOLA (2016)

What starts out as a seductive love story develops into a peripatetic psychological thriller well served by a witty script and infused with an intriguing menu of subplots that lead us into the bizarre world of the superrich – with lashings of food and property porn.

Shannon’s Frank is the kind of man most women desire: strong and masculine yet sensuous and vulnerable, his desire and protective obsession for Lola resonates in every scene. As Frank bears his soul for Lola without ego or rancour from his romantic past, he channels his masculine jealousy into a passion that ultimately makes him excel in the bedroom – and in the kitchen, as one of Las Vegas’s top chefs. And soon he’s much in demand as his culinary skills give him the edge in a game of intrigue. Poots’ Lola is a flighty and fluffy female who remains an elusive dark horse right until the final denouement, and even then we’re unsure of her motives. Matthew Ross cooks up a set of authentic characters in this exciting and unpredictable feature debut.

BABETTE’S FEAST (1987)

Based on Karen Blixen’s 1950 short story, originally set in Norway, but transposed here to 19th Century Jutland by Franco-Danish director Gabriel Axel explores the relationship between spirituality and sensuality, in the microcosm of a small, windswept coastal village, governed in totality by a stern Lutheran pastor and father to two beautiful women; the quintessence of stifled austerity.

But Axel’s austere, minimalist, and exquisitely beautiful piece is set in a time and a place where there was little to get excited about- yet the responses and reactions feel real. It’s another film about frustrated lives – and family restrictions, where preparing food becomes both a loving act and an outlet for repressed feelings. Nothing is forced by plot. It all unfolds naturally and unhurriedly, but so juicily until the final denouement.

LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE (1991)

Frustrated love is also the theme of Alfonso Arau’s romantic drama. Based on Laura Esquivel’s debut novel the film explores how a young girl channels her pent up desire into food. Unable to marry her lover Pedro, due to family pressure, cooking literally becomes a labour of love for a woman unable to escape her emotionally fraught life.

Mexican cinema is unique in melding a quirky supernatural playfulness with burning carnal desire, seen recently in Rocha Minter’s Tenemos La Carne (out next month) and Amat Escalante’s La Region Selvaje (The Untamed). Here Esquivel uses magical realism to suffuse to ordinary with the outlandish in a love story inflamed by painful passion.

THE LUNCHBOX (2014)

After the pent-up passion of LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE Ritesh Batra’s debut feature is a feelgood riff on neglected love. That of a housewife in modern Mumbai, where the well known ‘dabba’ or lunchbox courier system is legendary for its reliability in delivering the midday meal. With echoes of The Go Between, a punka walla’s mistake results in a sweet-hearted romance that ignites when lonely wife Ila’s lunchbox for her husband ends up on another man’s desk. Exploring a range of nuanced emotions, Batra’s elegantly-paced and often humorous narrative unfolds at leisure, suffused with charm and well-observed detail of its contemporary Indian setting. THE LUNCHBOX showcases some of India’s finest contemporary acting talent in delightful performances from Irrfan Khan (Life of Pi) and Nawazuddin Siddiqui (Gangs of Wasseypur) not to mention a luminous Nimrat Kaur.

I AM LOVE (2010)

Tilda Swinton plays another frustrated housewife – although she’s extravagantly glamorous and elegantly discrete here in Luca Guadagnini’s deliciously sumptuous gastro porn hit I AM LOVE. As Emma, a Russian aristocrat who has married into a family of rich Italian industrialists, she somehow feels like a bystander in a parallel universe of wealthy Milan. Her son Edo (Flavio Parenti) wants to set up a restaurant with Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), a talented young chef. His delicious cuisine reawakens Emma’s senses until she falls for Antonio when he cooks her a delicious al fresco lunch. This is a stylishly sensual romance where Guadagnino employs the same delicious technique in upmarket settings as Matthew Ross in FRANK AND LOLA – trading the slick splendour of contempo Las Vegas for the chic retro charm of Milan. MT

FRANK AND LOLA IS NOW OUT ON DVD AND DIGITAL DOWNLOAD COURTESY OF UNIVERSAL PICTURES

7th London Spanish Film Festival |21-23 April 2017

The 7TH LONDON SPANISH FILM FESTIVAL SPRING WEEKEND

London Spanish film festival is back again for a Spring weekend celebrating the latest in independent Spanish cinema.

KIKI, EL AMOR SE HACE | Kiki, Love to Love

Paco León (Carmina and Carmina y Amén), returns with another comedy, a remake of Josh Lawson’s 2014 feature A Funny Kind of Love, interweaving five stories riffing on the fetishes and frustrations of his well-drawn and amusing characters. Working with an excellent cast León retains the tension throughout in this light-hearted satire that explores and the do’s and don’ts of Sex.

Friday 21 April | 8.40pm | £12, conc. £10 | Ciné Lumière

Saturday 22 April | 8.30pm | £12, conc. £11, University of Westminster Students, £8 | Regent Street Cinema

JOTA DE SAURA | Beyond Flamenco

Visually stunning, Jota de Saura captures the vivacity and charm of the jota, a traditional Spanish dance often accompanied by the use of castanets, from Saura’s birthplace of Aragon. Music and dance has always played an important role throughout his extensive repertoire, and here he takes us from dance classes to studios where illuminated screens with his own paintings provide a magic backdrop to the dancers performances. This a wonderful trip to the world of the jota and its many variations that works towards safeguarding a very special tradition.

sat 22 apr | 4.30pm | £12, conc. £11, University of Westminster students £8 | Regent Street Cinema

LA PUNTA DEL ICEBERG | The Tip of the Iceberg

Cánovas’ debut feature is a stylish satirical thriller that examines how surveillance cameras recording every moment of our working lives as employees runs contrary to the equally omnipresent data protection culture. Maribel Verdú plays the central character investigating a series of suicides in a large corporation.

Followed by a Q&A with the director

sat 22 apr | 6.30pm | £12, conc. £11, University of Westminster students £8 | Regent Street Cinema

LA CORONA PARTIDA | The Broken Crown

Following the death of his wife Isabella, Ferdinand of Aragon (known collectively as the Catholic Kings) goes to war with his son-in-law Philip, over the kingdom of Castille, which has fallen into the hands of Ferdinand’s daughter Joan. The Broken Crown brings in a new perspective to this episode of 16 century Spanish history by focusing on the unscrupulous lust for power of two men and the fragility of a woman who never wanted to be Queen and who was devastated when betrayed by her husband and her own father.

sun 23 apr | 5.00pm | £12, conc. £10 | Ciné Lumière

LAS FURIAS | The Furies

70-something Marga faces an unexpected backlash from her children when she announces her intention to sell the family house and travel the world. Miguel de Arco, one of Spain’s most popular theatre directors, casts a solid Spanish ensemble in his first feature film, a family tale full of big egos and surprising twists that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

sun 23 apr | 8.00pm | £12, conc. £10 | Ciné Lumière

London Spanish Film Festival | 21-23 April 2017 | Regent Street Cinema | Cine Lumiere.

Tampopo (1985) | Criterion UK release

Dir: Juzo Itami | 114min | Drama | Japan

TAMPOPO celebrates the joy of eating and sensual nourishment with an offbeat and amusingly sensuous clutch of ramen-Western style foodie vignettes that showcase the art of cuisine and how close it is to the art of carnal delight. Juzo Itami lovingly links these stories together with inspiration and a generous dollop of fun: a slow-cooked lesson in how to celebrate pork knoodles; a hint at how to spice up your love life and an inspired idea about the role of yam sausages in your final hours. A watchable and inventive cult classic and one of the most entertaining foodie films ever made. MT

THE CRITERION COLLECTION UK | BLURAY OUT ON 1 MAY 2017

Letters from Baghdad (2016)

Dir.: Sabine Krayenbühl, Zeva Oelbaum | Cast: Eric Lohscheider, Rachael Sterling, Andrew Havill and the voice of Tilda Swinton | USA/UK/France 2016, 95 min.

Sabine Krayenbühl and Zeva Oelbaum convey the pioneering spirit of Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), an archeologist, spy, political bureaucrat and explorer at a time were women simply did not feature in public life. Featuring Bell’s letters, mainly to her father, complemented by “comments” made by dignitaries like T.E. Lawrence – this structurally uneven documentary feels more authentic than Werner Herzog’s overwrought imagined drama Queen of the Desert, starring Nicole Kidman.

Gertrude Bell was bon in 1868 in the stately family home in County Durham. Her father, Sir Hugh Bell, was a wealthy landowner and industrialist and the two formed a close bond after Gertrude’s mother died giving birth to her brother. Even though Sir Hugh later re-married, and Gertrude got on well with Lady Florence Bell, she was closest to her for the rest of her life. At Oxford in 1886 she obtained a first in Modern History; one of the few subjects women were allowed to study. And later travelled to Tehran in Persia where her uncle, Sir Frank Lascelles, was the British ambassador. In common with many British citizens of her class, she fell in love with the region and soon embarked on countless arduous expeditions around the Middle East. In 1909 she met T.E. Lawrence (Lohscheider) for the first time, their paths would cross again later, after the end of the Great War. Bell was doing “research” for the government, even before the Admiralty officially employed her. But her knowledge of the language and customs of the different tribes would serve them well during and after WWI.

The war itself became a personal tragedy for Bell, because her closest confidant, Major Charles Doughty-Wyllie, a married man, with whom she had an unconsummated affair, was killed at Gallipoli, with Bell hearing about his death in a restaurant in 1915. From now on, she would only live for her work. Vita-Sackville West (Sterling) comments on the lack of private fulfillment in Bell’s life – as far as we know, she only had one passionate love affair with Sir Frank Swattenham, which was short-lived. After the war, Bell was instrumental in drawing up the borders of the new state of Iraq, which would be ruled by Prince Feisul, the latter being very close to Bell. But Gertrude Bell was unhappy with the British Forces’ treatment of the locals: whole villages were punished because taxes had not been paid – even places of worship were destroyed. Bell wrote to her father “We are an immense failure. We wanted to set up a Arab government with British advisers, but we ended up with a British government with Arab advisers”. In another letter in 1921 she states her sorrow of “not having been home for Christmas for the last eight years”. In the same year she met T.E.Lawrence again, when she was working for Sir Perry Cox (Havill) at the Arab Bureau. But when Cox left in 1923, she was pushed aside by the Civil Service. Two years later, she visited her home in England for the last time, her family had fallen on hard times. Back in Baghdad, she helped to set up the Archeological Museum, which was opened a few weeks before her death from an overdose of sleeping pills in July of 1926.

Whilst the rich information about the life of this extraordinary woman is only too welcome – particularly after the superficial Herzog approach – perhaps a radio play would have not been a better way of telling this impressive story. Still, the newsreel clips and photos conjure up certain historical impressions. And it is particularly interesting to discover that Bell was not a friend of Standard Oil and other companies who exploited the region of Mesopotamia, the then British Mandate, where colonial rule would later cause even more havoc – until this very day. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 21 APRIL 2017

Ludwig (1971/2) | Dual Format release

Dir.: Luchino Visconti | Cast: Helmut Berger, Romy Schneider, Trevor Howard, Silvana Mangano, Helmut Griem, John Moulder-Brown, Sonia Petrovna, Gerd Froebe | Italy/France/W. Germany 1971/2, 235 min.

Luchino Visconti finished Death in Venice in 1970 and had actually planned a film adaptation of Marcel Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdus – a long-planned project he would never realise in the end. LUDWIG, based on the live and death of the Bavarian King Ludwig, turned out to be also a mammoth undertaking. The shooting took nearly a year, from July 1971 to June of 1972, and Visconti would suffer a major stroke a month into filming which saw him hospitalised in the same Zurich hospital where Thomas Mann died, on whose novella of the same name Visconti’s Death in Venice was based.

LUDWIG is like a slow waltz of self-destruction: crowned at 18, Ludwig II of Bavaria (Helmut Berger) is narcissistic and a repressed homosexual. His great love is Elizabeth of Austria (Schneider), the married Empress, who is unattainable. The two meet in Bad Ischl and Possenhofen, where they use the night to escape from court rituals. For Elizabeth Ludwig is just another escape, but he is attracted to her because she is his mirror image – she is the love of his life. Ludwig is not interested in fulfilling his duties as regent, he sees himself as a patron of arts, particularly music. When war breaks out, Ludwig, having fought against it, leaves his generals to themselves. But his brother Otto (Moulder-Brown), who is fighting at the front, is traumatised and Ludwig is only too happy, to see the end of the military conflict, even though Bavaria is on the loosing side. Otto is another person Ludwig cares for: Ludwig – again – sees himself in the hyper-sensitive young man. When Elizabeth asks him to marry their cousin princess Sophie (Petrovna), he only agrees, because the court chaplain Hoffmann (Froebe) has come to suspect him of homosexual activities. The courtiers even pay an ‘actress’ to sleep with Ludwig, but he rejects her and throws her, laughing hysterically, into a swimming pool.

The film’s main narrative centres around the king’s relationship with Richard Wagner (Howard), who is fleeing from his creditors from all over Europe. Wagner lives with Cosima von Bülow (Mangano), Franz Liszt’s daughter, who is still married to the conductor Hans von Bülow, who does not want to lose his well paid job as Wagner’s ‘house’ conductor, and pretends even to Ludwig, that he knows nothing about the relationship between his wife and the composer. Ludwig is not only paying Wagner’s enormous debts, but also builds him a music-theatre in Bayreuth. Together with the building work for the outrageous castles in Neuschwanstein, Linderhof and Herrenchiemsee, Ludwig’s extravagant lifestyle – he also gave fortunes to a actors and other artists – ruined the kingdom. The ministers, who had been quiet happy to rule without much supervision, suddenly decided to commit the King to a psychiatric institution. Just Major Duerkheim (Griem) stays loyal to the king, who has by now given in to his homosexuality and sleeps with his servants and workers, whom he picks up in local hostelries. The long goodbye to life is near, when Ludwig refuses to see Elizabeth, who is touring his castles, laughing uncontrollably at the kitsch design.

Visconti was well known for his work as an opera director at the Scala and other major opera houses. LUDWIG, very much like Senso before, is structured like a tragic 19th century opera where the hero slides slowly into madness and death. DoP Armando Nannuzzi, who worked with Visconti for The Damned, uses sumptuous colours and panoramic shots to illuminate a world of decay, in which Ludwig is sinking. By the end of his life, LUDWIG was a lounge lizard who liked to live at night, Nannuzzi’s colour scheme gets darker and darker: red, at the beginning so glittering, becomes a near black. Berger is brilliant and a great ensemble helps Visconti to realize this ‘Totentanz’. AS

NOW AVAILABLE on ARROW FILMS | LUDWIG | Dual Format DVD + Blu-ray on 27 March 2017

The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki (2016)

The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki is Finnish filmmaker’s Juho Kuosmanen’s dynamite debut, a black and white retro-flic based on the true story of the Finnish boxer Olli Mäki and his 1962 championship match against the American featherweight champion Davey Moore (who died shortly afterwards). As much a poignant love story as a raw and visceral sketch of pre-match preparation involving gruelling training sessions, this impressive debut also reflects the quiet pensive moments in the run-up to Maki’s happiest day in August 17th, 1962, as he determines what he really wants out of life.

With hand held camera in high contrast 16mm and cinema verite style the film captures the febrile intensity and gruelling pain of day to day match preparation for the legendary episode in Finnish sporting history and the euphoric national pride and excitement of a country on the crest of international sporting fame.

As the unassuming amateur boxer, known as the “Baker of Kokkola”, trains for his first world class fight he is also falling in love with Raija, a local country girl (Oona Airola), and their romance blossoms distracting him but also grounding him as to his true ambitions while he competes in the world of professional boxing amid the glamour, bright lights, sponsors and press.

Kuosmanen also captures the contrast between the sophistication of Helsinki’s elite and the wholesome country folk, the art nouveau splendour of the maritime capital and the open skies of the countryside where vast pine forests and lakes provide a lush setting for the romantic scenes and spartan training hours, in and out of wooden saunas and snowy woods.The film’s grainy black and white freshness and glowing fervour capture our imagination and conveys the heart-pumping joy of first love and thr the simplicity of the sixties when sport was simply about talent. Peter von Bagh would be proud. MT

OUT ON 21 APRIL 2017.| Winner Prix Un Certain Regard

Clash | Esthebak (2016)

Dir.: Mohamed Diab; Cast: Nelly Karim, Hany Adel, Mohamed El Sebaey, Ahmed Dash, Mai El Ghaity, Ahmed Abdel Hameed; Egypt/France 2016, 98 min.

CLASH is a visual tour-de-force that occasionally loses the big picture in exploring the aftermath of the Muslim Brotherhood’s surge to power after Mubarek’s reign in Egypt. The action is literally crammed into a police prison van, where supporters of the just deposed president Mohamed Morsi and the Army generals who toppled him, go on fighting their street battles in this confined area, often resembling a crowded boxing ring, with hysteria and chaos the ruling elements.

In 2011 the regime of president Hosni Mubarek was swept aside, and a year later, Mohamed Morsi, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, was elected as his successor. But by 2013, Morsi himself has been overthrown by an Army under the current president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. CLASH is set in the immediate aftermath of Morsi’s arrest, when his supporters still had a viable organisation to fight the new regime. Military police is unable to keep law and order, emotions are running high, and the MPs throw everyone suspect into the van, measuring eight square meters. First to go are the AP journalist Adam (Adel) and his photographer Zein (El Sebaey), who protest in vain their right to report and photograph the street fighting. But the mayhem escalates, and the MPs loose their cool, imprisoning right, left and centre, including their own supporters, who are celebrating Morsi’s overthrow. Nurse Nagwa (Karim) is the only one keeping a cool head, even though some men reject her help in the sweltering heat, not wanting to be touched by a woman. Nagwa’s teenage son Fares (Dash) is much more of a rabble-rouser, and joins the fray to the chagrin of his mother. A’isha (El Ghaity), an adolescent girl in a hijab, is very vociferous, but still cares for her elderly father who is suffering extremely from the heat. And there is even a good cop, Awad (Hameed), who tries to get as much water for the prisoners as possible. But it is impossible to cater for around 25 people, when the MPs also have to deal with the rioters outside who often outnumber them. The prison van is trying to get away from the riots, but in vain: soon it is questionable whether it’s safer inside or outside; particularly as laser beams are used by both rioting factions to unsettle the opponents, creating further havoc in the mobile prison.

DoP Ahmend Gabr (Asmaa) really conveys the escalating pandemonium, as fear takes over all sections in the van, and very soon engulfing the MPs too. The cast is equally admirable, the sheer force of their engagement is always visible. What is missing is a clear distinction between the factions: after all, people die, but we never learn the reasons for the overthrow of Morsi, nor do we get any insight in the ambivalent feelings of the demonstrators on both sides for each other: because only two years ago, the majority of them were fighting on the same side to do topple Mubarak. We only get a few dark hints, when Morsi supports talk about discipline in their own ranks, but apart from that, CLASH sometimes degenerates into a battle between two clans of football supporters, with petty and personal issues surging to the fore. But the bedlam we witness is symptomatic of the widespread internecine chaos that runs through Egyptian society – surely we deserve a more detailed explanation of. AS

ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 21 April 2017

God Knows Where I Am (2016) Prime Video

Dir.: Jedd Wider, Todd Wider; documentary with voice-over by Lori Singer; USA 2016, 97 min.

The directing debut of producers Jedd and Todd Wider, credited for many Alex Gibney documentaries, is a melancholic and visually stunning portrait of the life and death of Linda Bishop, whose decomposed body was found in an abandoned farmhouse in rural New Hampshire in May 2008.

Linda left two notebooks describing her final few months which are narrated by Lori Singer. Born in 1956, Linda was nature-loving and gentle, a joyful child and teenager – according to home videos. After the birth of her daughter Caitlin in 1985 and a subsequent divorce, Linda’s mental health deteriorated. She told friends she was being hunted down by the Chinese Mafia through her job in a local Chinese restaurant. Her sister Joan, and Caitlin talk at length about Linda inventing a male figure, a ‘knight in shining armour’ “who was going to save her”. This man was Keith, who was actually married and working in the same restaurant as Linda. Her diary states she had high hopes about him in the lonely cold winter in 2007/2008.

Linda had been in and out of residential psychiatric care for over a decade, her diagnosis was Paranoid Schizophrenia: A classification recently removed by the American Psychiatric Association, who eliminated all sub-types of Schizophrenia as a diagnostic tool, because “of their limited diagnostic stability, low reliance and poor validity”. But the failure of Linda’s doctors went much further than a muddled diagnosis: after Joan was named her guardian Linda repeatedly refused to take her medication over long periods of time, the hospital simply let her go. And a court, in a very short session, declared her sane enough to live on her own. Without notifying Joan, Linda was set free: in her notebooks she describes the elation of this freedom, and how she found the farmhouse in 393 Mountain Road.

The winter of 2007/8 was one of the harshest in history. Linda arrived in Autumn and collected apples from a nearby orchard. She lived on these apples and snow water until she died of starvation in January 2008. In her diary, she counts the remaining number of apples meticulously. But in her delirium, she also expects to be alternatively saved by the “Keith” figure, or killed by “domestic violence, because she cannot go to a home for battered women, as the ‘evil’ is everywhere.” In the end she turned to God, whom she asked to save her “I am trying, but I don’t know what to do”. And “It is so sad, that I am dying, when I have so much to look forward to”. Finally, she asks to be buried in the nearby cemetery, “where I have friends”.

DoP Gerardo Puglia shoots mainly on 35mm, and the depth of the film is apparent in these images: nature is shown as a refuge for Linda. The farmhouse where she took refuge was not a place of horror, but a sanctuary where she found a certain peace, particularly in the attic. Another sad story of how her family failed to be there for her, and a system that let her down. It did not help her to connect the two different parts of herself, as best described by her daughter Caitlin: “There was my mother, and there was Linda Bishop”. An elegiac swansong for a lost soul. AS

NOW ON Prime Video

The Transfiguration (2016)

Director/Writer: Michael O’Shea

Cast: Eric Ruffin, Chloe Levine, Aaron Clifton Moten

97min | Drama | US

Eric Ruffin (Nature Calls) plays a dark horse called Milo in Michael O’Shea’s pseudo vampire flick that premiered at Un Certain Regard Cannes side-bar last year. This low-budget indie follows the teenage African-American orphan in his freewheeling daily grind in a story that generates a palpable tension but never seems to know where it’s going.

Although O’Shea splatters his downbeat narrative with numerous vampire tropes in this impressive first feature that takes place in the backwaters and beaches of New York’s Rockaway Boulevard, the horror element is lowkey and is most distinguished by the atmosphere of alienation and loneliness generating in a desolate urban milieu.

Grieving Milo lives a solitary existence with his brother Lewis (Aaron Clifton Moten) in a flat they once shared with their mother who appears, in flashbacks, to have commited suicide. Plagued by a crew of gangland heavies, who call him ‘the freak’ on account of his tiny stature, Milo strikes up a tentative friendship with a white girl called Sophie (Chloe Levine) who moves into his housing block but who we later see being abused by the gang in nearby grassy wasteland.

With his vacant stare, Milo strikes a melancholy figure tramping silently through the streets, clearly still traumatised by his mother’s death and withdrawing into himself while attempting to build an impenetrable poker-faced facade to the outside world. In his bedroom he watches youtube footage of animals being slaughtered and has also experimented with drinking the blood of solitary warefarers who approach him in the subway, although there is no rhyme or reason to these desultory and unprovoked attacks.

Although it feels as if Milo’s budding romantic relationship with Sophie is heading the same way as that of Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One, with roles reversed: the slightly older girl’s affection for him appears to act as a calmative influence on Milo and he soon backs off emotionally, freezing Sophie out of his life for her own salvation and ultimately his own tragic demise. THE TRANSFIGURATION eschews schlockiness to focus on building a potent sense of malevolent stillness ably assisted by a droning occasional electronic score composed by Margaret Chardiet. This is a promising debut from Michael O’Shea and his young cast but the dread of the enigmatic early scenes never really transmutes into anything meaningful. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE | Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard) 12-22 MAY 2016

We are the Flesh | Tenemos la Carne (2016)

Dir.: Emiliano Rocha Minter | Cast: Noe Hernandez, Maria Evoli, Diego Gamaliel, Gabino Rodriguez; Mexico/France 2016, 79min.

Director/writer Emiliano Rocha Minter has certainly learnt a great deal from producer Carlos Reygadas (Silent Light): his debut feature is a darkly subversive and enigmatic sexual tour-de-force with shades of Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room and even fellow Mexican Amat Escalante’s The Untamed. Teenage siblings Fauna (Evoli) and Lucio (Gamaliel) looking for a place to stay in post-apocalyptic Mexico City find refuge with the rather demonic Mariano (Hernandez), who lives in a derelict and dark cellar apartment. He offers them drinks laced with mind-enhances, and encourages them to build a womb-structure from wood and masking tape. Then, out of the blue, Mariano makes the siblings sleep which each other, much against Lucio’s. Watching and masturbating, Mariano suddenly dies. The intercourse awakens Fauna’s sexuality, but her brother wants nothing to do with it. Turned on by it all, Fauna has sex with Mariano’s body. Somehow, a Mexican soldier finds his way into the place and is killed by the siblings, to the tune of the National anthem of Mexico. But the main theme of the film is illicit sex and, Fauna soon finds a willing female partner, passing her over to her brother and writhing in ecstasy whilst watching the two. As a grand finale, Minter serves up a phenomenal sex orgy, leaving us in no doubt that he is the Wilhelm Reich of filmmaking.

Shame then that this short version of the narrative fails to give Minter’s films the credit deserves, it is an illuminating exploration of sexuality serving as a coda to the nuclear family, which is finally destroyed by the chaos brought from the outside. There are echo’s of Bataille; and certainly Gaspar Noé, but Minter also captures a certain opaque quality which is very much his own style: the roving camera of DoP Yollitl Gomez Alvarado roams around 360 degrees finding new angles to explore the escalating sexual frenzy. Switching from almost colourless black and white to luminous primary colours, Minter develops a permanently changing environment where Fauna staggers wildly like a huntress in search of pray. Bach’s harpsichord concerto has never been heard in a less peaceful place; and exclamations like “Neither the Sun, nor Death can be looked at steadily” suddenly make sense in this context. Minter somehow pulls it off: WE ARE THE FLESH is certainly one of the most innovative and original debuts of recent years. AS

COMES TO SHUDDER ON 20 APRIL 2017 | THE FILM HAS BEEN BANNED BY OTHER STREAMING PLATFORMS IN THE UK

Cézanne et Moi (2016)

Dir/Writer: Danièle Thompson | Cast: Guillaume Canet, Guillaume Gallienne, Alice Pol, Deborah Francois, Sabinz Azema | Drama

Emile Zola might have written some desolate novels but his private life appears to be rather pleasant according to CÉZANNE AND I exploring the close friendship between two of France’s most famous 19th century cultural geniuses: the titular novelist and the impressionist painter Cézanne. Unlike Gilles Bourdos’ tepid Rénoir (2012), there is plenty of drama here, as befits the subject-matter.

Writer and director Danièle Thompson’s painterly period piece imagines the two enjoying a beautiful bromance that lasted from childhood until their deaths, although it wasn’t without its tiffs and rivalries as the strong creative personalities often clashed giving rise to some moments of drama and even tears, and the racy often lyrical dialogue doesn’t hold back in expressing the deep intimacy of their conversations about the pleasure and pain of creativity (“do you still get a hard on from your writing?” asks Cézanne of his mate).

Starring Guillaume Gallienne (Yves Saint Laurent) as Cézanne and Guillaume Canet (Tell No One) as Zola this is a spirited and enjoyable – if occasionally soapy – affair with its sumptuous settings making great use of the gloriously lush and sun-drenched scenery of Provence and elegant boulevards of Paris and the Louvre, where the Salon de Réfusés episode descends into a brawl .

Eric Neveux’s intrusive score primps up moments of sauciness by a lakeside as Cézanne executes his’ plein air’ canvasses, and Jean-Marie Dreujou cleverly evokes some of the artist’s outdoor compositions with limpid camerawork and a fabulous choice of settings. While the painter comes across as the more louche of the pair, with his wealthy background and family funding; Zola is a more sober character and Canet plays him as a rather buttoned up and inaccessible, growing up a penniless orphan until he joins the successful bourgeoisie, as captured in the final scenes. The narrative unfolds from 1888, when Cézanne accuses Zola of writing a novel whose central character – a striving but unsuccessul painter – feels too near the bone for his liking. But Zola assures him that the novel in question ‘L’Oeuvre’ is not about his close friend. Most of the scenes involves tête à tête set-toos between the pair highlighting their creative differences and expressing their feelings about sex and women. According to Thompson, they both fell in love with the same person, Alexandrine (Alice Pol), who would eventually become Zola’s wife. While Cézanne is restlessly married to his muse Hortense (Deborah François) there appear to be issues with his sexual performance, and she complains that “I fuck her too quickly and paint her too slowly.” The two debate Zola’s theatrical naturalist style that today feels stuffy and dated as opposed to Cézanne’s impressionism which proved the more universally evocative form of expression due to its avant-garde appeal that gave birth to modernism. Zola resents Cézanne’s monthly income that allows him freedom to explore, while the writer is hampered by his lack of funds. Meanwhile, Cezanne calls him a “a violeur et un voyeur”, somehow implying that his ideas were not original.

Artistic context of the era is further provided in the shape of fellow impressionists Edouard Manet (Nicolas Gob), Auguste Renoir (Alexandre Kouchner) and Camille Pissaro (Romain Cottard). This is a watchable and vivacious drama that paints an absorbing picture of two driven men but despite Thompson’s learned research CÉZANNE AND I comes across as a lightweight drama rather than a resonant biopic of the creative duo. MT

Cézanne et Moi will be released on Friday 14th April at Ciné Lumière, find out more here: http://www.institut-francais.org.uk/cine-lumiere/whats-on/new-releases/cezanne-et-moi/

The Handmaiden (2016) | Agassi

Director: Park Chan-wook

Cast: Kim Min-hee, Kim Tae-ri, Ha Jung-woo, Cho Jin-woong, Kim Hae-sook

Writers: Chung Seo-kyung, Park Chan-wook, Novel by Sarah Waters

The Handmaiden (Agassi) is a sumptuously mounted and kinky erotic love story set in the 1930s Orient. Neatly sidestepping tawdriness the writer take the original text and flip it over into a tale of three parts, told from differing viewpoints that gradually morph into the realms of fantasy in a challenging re-telling.

Sarah Waters’ original novel Fingersmith tells the story of a girl who leaves poverty in Victorian England using her skills as an expert pickpocket to gain fame and fortune, eventually getting her comeuppance at the hands of a wealthy swindler after serving in the household of a Japanese heiress. We first get a glimpse of young Sookee (played by newcomer Kim Tae-ri) in the slums where she grew up surrounded by unwanted babies. Korea is under Japanese rule and she is sent to the mansion of Kouzuki (Cho Jin-woong), a black-tongued old man who specialises in book dealing. It soon becomes clear that she is to be the maid of his niece, Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee – Right Now, Wrong Then). In truth, Sookee is a crafty petty thief sent by a pimp-style gangster called The Count (Ha Jung-woo) to help him marry the young heiress and gain control of her fortune. This is all revealed in a series of fast-moving scenes while we’re still reading the subtitles. Hideko seems to be a naive, virginal orphan who knows nothing of the real world outside her sheltered kingdom. But it soon emerges that her nonce of an uncle has groomed her from childhood to be his companion after driving her aunt (Moon So-ri) insane and later hanging herself from a cherry tree and haunting the mansion. But the Count suddenly appears presenting himself as a putative suitor from a noble family who is to add value to Kouzuki’s book collection with illustrations.

There is great deal of languorous heavy petting here between both men and women in scenes reminiscent of the Marquis de Sade’s “Crimes of Love” and this is all cleverly achieved by filming the sequences from different angles. The denouement is a complex affair in this lavish epic which is mostly filmed in the dark interiors of the mansion, although it occasionally breaks out in to some glorious surroundings of a nearby lake and shimmering landscapes. A real arthouse treat that needs to be seen again to fully appreciate the intricate plotting. MT

NOW ON RELEASE FROM 14 APRIL 2017

Drunken Master (1978) | Eureka Dual format release

Dir: Woo-Ping Yuen | Writers: Lung Hsaio, See-Yuen Ng | Action Comedy | 111min |

Cult classic DRUNKEN MASTER is possibly Jackie’s Chan’s finest film bringing him fame on the international stage and reinvents the genre with a comedy twist as Kung Fu’s answer to Bruce Lee’s more serious player. As the lewd Hellraiser Freddy Wong he is out of order until his father hires Sam Seed’s ‘Drunken Master’ to pull him into shape teaching him a secret fighting style and some impressively exuberant moves – the restaurant scene showcasing the most hilarious. After a tricky start the two find mutual respect and common ground against the Tae Kwando arch villain Hwang Jan Lee or “Thunderfoot” as he’s known in the criminal Martial Arts fraternity. At the end of the day it’s all good fung. MT

The Masters of Cinema DRUNKEN MASTER from 24 April 2017.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder | BFI Retrospective | Classics now on Dual Format

Fassbinder’s LOVE IS COLDER THAN DEATH | LIEBE IST KÄLTER ALS DER TOD made a low-key feature debut at Berlinale Film Festival in 1969, heralding the prolific career of one of Germany’s greatest auteurs of the second half of the 20th century. Critics talked about the stylish black and white aesthetics of DOP Dietrich Lohmann (who would go on and shoot ten more Fassbinder films); were puzzled by the rather simplistic but enigmatic storyline and liked the performances including the director’s turn playing his own fallen hero Franz, a pimp, who does not want to cooperate with the Mafia and falls in the love with Joanna (Hanna Schygulla), who works for him. Ulli Lommel is the killer Bruno, a sort of German version of Alain Delon in Melville’s Le Samurai, complete with sunglasses. Fassbinder commented at the Festival “I want the audience to formulate their own personal take on the film. That’s all I’m interested in. That’s much more political than forcing them to believe that the police are the worst aggressors. I am not interested in that sort of cinema, I am against the idea of people marrying and producing children without thinking or having any idea why they love each other”. His statements were as enigmatic as his film, and one Berlin critic wrote “Fassbinder does not care if he makes another film, he just wanted to make statement”. How wrong he turned out to be.

KATZELMACHER was shot in only nine days during August 1969, just four months after Love is colder than Death. Based on Fassbinder’s play of the same name. Fassbinder against the central protagonist, Jorgos, a Greek ‘guest-worker,’ who falls foul of the youthful German machos, living a desperate existence in the backstreets of Munich. In much the same way as Fear Eats the Soul, (which he could go on to make in 1974), the drama uses Jorgos’ romantic encounters in the city to evidence the political undercurrent of racism, particularly amongst the sub-proletariat. Love and money dominate this male world where men have to buy their women, because of their inability to love. Katzelmacher – again shot by Lohmann in stunning black and white – is just a variation of Fassbinder’s debut, but shows the role of the immigrant worker, a theme that would dominate many of his films.

BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE (WARNUNG VOR EINER HEILIGEN NUTTE) Fassbinder turns the camera on himself in this semi-autobiographical feature about filmmaking. Shot in 22 days in Sorrento, Italy, during September 1970, the film had his premiere at the Venice Film Festival a year later, where no “Lions” were awarded. For no obvious reasons the narrative is set in Spain where a film team is waiting for the director and the subsidy money from the Federal Government. When the director Jeff (Lou Castel) arrives, he immediately becomes the centre of total chaos. The ageing star of the production (Eddie Constantine as himself) seems lost in the much younger crowd and starts a relationship with the actress Hanna (Schygulla). Jeff explains a very tricky shot to the cinematographer, and the simple idea of the film to Constantine: “Patria o muerte” is about the government’s brutality, which is legitimised by the state. But crew and cast are still fighting arguing, drinking and Jeff is beaten up. But in spite of everything, the shoot finally gets underway. Michael Ballhaus’ widescreen images echo Raul Coutard’s work for Godard’s Le Mépris, and Fassbinder’s own lousy, little line producer Sasha could have been equally at home in Godard drama. For Fassbinder, BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE was a good-bye to collective filmmaking: “The film is about the production of a film, but it is much more about how a group works, and how the leading status of the director develops and is used by crew and cast. I am not sure, if the film was a new beginning, but it was a surely an endpoint. With this film, we have buried our idea of collective work which we started [before filming] with the Anti-Theatre group in Munich. I did not know, how we would go on in future, but I knew we could not go back. This film is about what happened in Whitty (1970), when too many people relied on me, and I had to take on more and more responsibilities. During the shooting of Whity, everything collapsed: BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE is a about what happened on the set of Whity.”

By 1971 Fassbinder had a prodigious oeuvre to his name and THE MERCHANT OF FOUR SEASONS (HÄNDLER DER VIER JAHRESZEITEN) was his twelfth feature film, a tragic melodrama shot in eleven days in August of that year. Set in the ’50s, like many of his later films, The Merchant is a story of a loser during West Germany Economic Miracle. Hans Epp (Hans Hirschmuller) has been a soldier in Foreign Legion, and a policeman. But now he is reduced to selling fruit and vegetables in a street market – in a country where wealth and prosperity is an easy game. His wife Irmgard (Irm Herrmann), is financially aspirational, pushing her husband to the limits with emotional coldness. He suffers a heart attack and afterwards employs an old army friend Harry, to do the physical work. But Hans does not give up on Irmgard, he wants to be loved. The triangle becomes a trap for Hans. Fassbinder was impressed by the films of his fellow German director Douglas Sirk, and admitted that he integrated some elements of Sirk’s Hollywood melodramas into The Merchant. “In the beginning, I Ioved to create cool, detached films. Then I got interested in dramatic films, now I prefer melodrama.”

THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT (Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant), a psychological drama, followed in the wake of The Merchant and was shot in ten days during January 1972. Control-freak fashion designer Petra von Kant (Margit Carstensen) lives with her servant and assistant Marlene (Hermann) in a symbiotic relationship: Petra uses Marlene in every way, but Marlene takes this all on board, feeling a masochistic pride in her subservient status. When Petra falls in love with the much younger Karin (Schygulla), she soon finds out that the young woman is only after her money. When Karin’s husband returns from Australia, Karin leaves Petra and returns to her husband. Petra admits she only wanted to possess Karin, as she does Marlene. She is contrite, and offers Marlene a position of equal rights in her business, but Marlene simply packs her suitcase and leaves. Suffering and subservience is her raison d’être – She did not want equality. Fassbinder later commented “Marlene leaves Petra because there is a certain power in being subservient: being in charge herself involves a degree of risk and responsibility. Many interpreted the outcome as a liberation for Marlene, but that is not the case: those who have willingly accepted the yoke of subservience for 30 years, often find total freedom and the responsibility it entails, a poisoned challice

CHINESE ROULETTE (CHINESISCHES ROULETTE) By the summer of 1976, Fassbinder was taking more time to direct. 1976 also saw the making of Satansbraten and Bolwieser and he took over a month to shoot this thriller in Beyreuth and Thurnau Castle in Bavaria. CHINESE ROULETTE is the nearest Fassbinder would get to Claude Chabrol, one of his early heroes. Ariane (Carstensen) and her husband Gerhard (Alexander Allerson) pretend to leave Munich for separate destinations for the weekend, but they soon reunite in their Bavarian castle. Ariane meets her lover Kolbe (Lommel), while Gerhard is looking forward to seeing his lover Irene (Anna Karina). Their handicapped daughter Angela also turns up with with her teacher Traunitz (Macha Meril), who is seemingly unable to speak. When Angela starts to play a kind of truth game called Chinese Roulette, the adults fear and mistrust of each other suddenly becomes palpable. For Fassbinder, it was a new beginning: “This is the first film where I don’t use the actors to tell the story. The main theme is ‘better the devil you know’: the protagonists all cling to their relationships, even though these are dysfunctional. There is a certain comfort in routine and core misery, which in itself is a kind of happiness.

THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN (DIE EHE DER MARIA BRAUN) Shot in just over a month during the winter of 1978, this tragic love story was rejected by Cannes Film Festival but premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February 1979, where it won a Silver Bear, and Hanna Schygulla Best Actress. Maria (Schygulla) has married Hermann (Klaus Lowitsch) during WWII but he fails to return after the war. Working in an American bar, Maria discovers her husband is dead and she falls in love with the much older American GI Oswald (Ivan Disney). Out of blue, her husband turns up when she is about to go to bed with Oswald, forcing her to make a difficult decision. In the interim, she has discovered personal freedom but Herrmann simply wants to control ‘the old’ Maria. Marriage is perhaps Fassbinder’s most mature film, influenced mainly by Godard, Brecht and Wedekind, it is poetic realism on an epic scale. Fassbinder’s critique of the crass materialism in West Germany after WWII is again a strong component. Schygulla had obviously matured very well since 1969, and became an international star. Fassbinder was emphatic about his latest outing: “It is a multi-layered film, much is hidden beneath the simple storyline. The audience has the chance to enjoy a love story, or something much more complex”. AS/MT

NOW SCREENING AS A MAJOR RESPECTIVE AT THE BFI DURING APRIL- MAY 2017 AVAILABLE AS A SELECTION OF TEN CULT CLASSICS on DUAL FORMAT BLU-RAY AND DVD FROM 28 MARCH and 4TH APRIL 2016

Melody | S.W.A.L.K. (1971) | Home Ent release

BAFTA Award-winning director Alan Parker started out as an advertising copywriter before moving on to shooting commercials and then directing his own scripts for hits such as Bugsy Malone, The Commitments, Midnight Express and Angel Heart. SWALK (later renamed Melody) was his first ever script, directed by Warris Hussein. A modern answer to Romeo and Juliet, SWALK went on to be one of the 70s best-loved childhood rom-coms with its nostalgic tale of first love and teenage rebellion in a London comprehensive. Co-stars Mark Lester (Latimer) and Jack Wild (Ornshaw) had already worked together on the 1968 musical film adaptation of Oliver! and love interest Tracy Hyde (Melody) was only 11 at the time.

The chalk and cheese bromance at the film’s core is threatened when Latimer falls for Melody Perkins at a school disco. But when they announce their wish to get married (as you do at 14!) their parents’ and teachers’ efforts to dissuade them only make the two more keen on the idea – so much so that Ornshaw decides to facilitate the union by staging a ‘wedding’ in a secret hideout, leading to an riotous finale.

Alan Parker’s script shows how it was to be a child in the early ’70s in the same spirit as did Ken Loach in Kes . An atmospheric soundtrack from the Bee Gees and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Legendary DoP completes the era complementing Peter Suschitzky’s striking visuals in and around the Brompton Cemetery, Battersea Funfair, Trafalgar Square and Soho. MT

OUT ON BLURAY|DVD COURTESY OF STUDIOCANAL | THE VINTAGE CLASSICS COLLECTION FROM 8TH MAY 2017

https://youtu.be/BcztTjiYKB0

Masaan | BFI INDIA Celebration

DIrector: Neeraj Ghaywan

Writer: Varun Grover| Neeraj Ghaywan

MASAAN enchants Un Certain Regard audiences with a painterly modern love story set in the holy city of Benares (Varanasi).

With his co-writer Varun Grover, Ghaywan creates a sure-footed character-driven debut that has all the intensity of a Bollywood drama but is told with a delicacy of touch similar to recent Indian dramas The Lunchbox and Udaan.

The three-stranded lyrical drama is essentially a coming of age affair where we first meet Devi (Richa Chadda) and her student friend Piyush checking into a hotel for an afternoon of sexual discovery. Both virgins, they are piqued to explore forbidden pleasures but Police break into the room before they have a chance to consummate matters. Piyush tries to kills himself during the onslaught and is rushed to hospital and the scandal brings shame on Devi and her father Pathak (Sanjay Mishra).

Meanwhile, in another part of the riverbank, Deepak (Vicky Kaushal) works at the funeral pyres of the ghats but his dream is to become to become an engineer. Shy yet stunningly attractive, he has set his heart on a Shaalu (Sheta Tripathi), who he meets on Facebook, but her higher caste means that their love affair is doomed before it begins.

This is a sweetly romantic and endearingly old-fashioned film that avoids sentimentality but finds a satisfying conclusion with some moving moments along the way. Although some of the musical choices feel slightly out of place – more locally-rooted music would have better captured the mood – Avinash Arun Dhaware’s visuals of the exotic landscapes and rose-tinted sun-sets are amongst the most gorgeous of this year’s Un Certain Regard section, creating a real sense of place and transforming this beguiling drama into a memorial tribute to the people of Varanasi. MT

NIW SHOWING AT BFI AS PART OF THE INDIA SERIES

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 13 – 24 May 2015 | UN CERTAIN REGARD

The Tenderness of Wolves (1973) Blu-ray | Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Director: Ulli Lommel Producer: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Cast: Kurt Raab (who also wrote the script), Jeff Roden, Margit Castensen, Ingrid Craven, Rainer Werner Fassbinder

82min Thriller Horror Germany

The Tenderness of Wolves is not an enjoyable film but a grisly depiction of depravity. This collaboration between Fassbinder, Lommel and Raab created a seedy and often gruesome melodrama telling the true and horrific tale of the “Butcher of Hanover” aka Fritz Haarmann. And as producer and editor (an actor), Fassbinder gives full throttle to his macabre sense of humour in his vibrant 1940s styling that explores, in often explicit detail, the 1920s life and times of the gay serial killer and his dystopian world of cannibalism with a sideline as a vampire.

Fassbinder was too busy with The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Fear Eats the Soul to direct so he enlisted the help of his protege Ulli Lommel, who had a few films under his belt and went on to make the “Bogeyman” hits. Kurt Raab wrote the script and takes the part of Haarmann, looking seriously wan and ungumütlich with his pallid, shaved head adding to his scary appearance, unlike that of Klaus Kinski in Nosferatu.

Kurt Raab, wrote the script and also plays Harrmann and has embellished the story to have the killer selling his victims to restaurants and offering them to his unsavoury circle of cannibal friends. A neighbour remarks to the Police:”He’s always leaving the house with large parcels, the funny thing is, he never enters the house with large parcels . . .”

Jürgen Jürges cinematography is suitably sombre and shady garishly coloured interiors, shabby lodgings and gunmetal streets dank with rain. Raab’s script is non-judgemental, the moral message stands for itself: he merely tells the story as it is in cold-edged and often lurid detail reflecting the sad times of a Germany brought to its knees after a severe drubbing in the Second World War where young men were only too happy to earn a bob or two and restaurants only too happy to procure meat from untraced origins: his vile circle of lowlife cannibal friends were fully aware of what they were doing. Setting the film during the 192os would have been too expensive but the conditions echoed a similar aftermath to that of Germany in the mid forties.

The sight of Haarmann seducing his victims and dragging them to their deaths is repulsive enough, but your heart goes out to his victims and sinks with sadness at the depravity of it all.MT

NOW OUT ON BLU-RAY COURTESY OF ARROW FILMS | A MAJOR FASSBINDER RETROSPECTIVE IS UNDERWAY AT THE BFI LONDON

Effi Briest (1974) Dvd release | Rainer Werner Fassbinder

FONTANE EFFI BRIEST

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Cast: Hanna Schygulla, Wolfgang Schenck, Ulli Lommel

West Germany 1972/3, 141 min.

When Rainer Werner Fassbinder embarked on his screen adaptation of Theodor Fontane’s novel Effi Briest (1884/5) in the autumn of 1972, he wanted the script to stay as close as possible to the original text, hence the title. Theodor Fontane (1819-1898) developed the style of German poetic realism during the 19th century. And whilst critical of certain aspects of society, he was anything but a Dickens: he represented the “Biedermeier” attitude of the cultured German middle class citizen of his time, which Fassbinder recreated lovingly in the sets of the film.

Fassbinder and his contemporary directors of the “New German Film” school had set out to make films with a programmatic approach, often explaining their intentions in longwinded title texts; in this case: Fontane Effie Briest or many like her, who are well aware of their potential but still accept the ideology of the ruling system in their heads, and therefore in their deeds, and so cement and affirm the ruling ideology.

Seventeen year old Effie (Schygulla) is living a very sheltered life with her parents in the small German town of Brandenburg. Her mother arranges a marriage to Baron Von Instetten (Schenck), a highly ranked civil servant who is twenty years older than his bride. The couple move to Kessin, a seaside resort at the Baltic Sea but Effie is bored, her husband often absent, making a career for himself. When Effie meets Major Crampas (Lommel), a superficial seducer, their relationship is not so much passionate, but rather indolent. Six years later, Effi and von Instetten now live in Berlin, and he discovers some old letters which disclose his wife’s affair. He challenges Crampas to a duel and kills him. Then he divorces Effi, keeping their daughter with him. Effi ‘retires’ to her parent’s home and dies soonafter – not so much of a physical ailment, but a broken heart.

Aesthetically Effi is the exception in Fassbinder’s work. His cinematic style usually veers towards highly emotional settings with the cinematography reflecting the passion and action with abandon. But Effie is austere, clinging closely to the tone of the book and the performances echo this stiff quality. Shooting in black and white and using inserts (black on white background) and circular fade-outs, Jurgen Jurgers (Christiane F) evokes an 19th century atmosphere of elegant discretion that only comes to life during the outside carriage scenes, making the drama feel like a silent movie with dialogue. Mirrors in the rooms reduce the usual shot-counter shots and cuts, this way, the close-ups are very intense. The performances are buttoned down emotionally frustrated by the claustrophobic, soulless atmosphere.

Fassbinder (who narrates the voice-over) explains his concept of a ‘film to be read’: “I wanted to make sure that the audience does not experiences this film like others, which reach heart and soul, but this is only a film for the head; a film, where the audience does not stop reflecting, and like reading a book, where the letters and sentences become the narrative, the images here would tell the story.”AS

SCREENING AS PART OF A MAJOR BFI RETROSPECTIVE | MAY 2017 | NOW AVAILABLE ON DVD

https://youtu.be/fJp4hMpl5DY

Death by a Thousand Cuts (2016)

Dir.: Juan Mejia Botero, Jake Kheel; Documentary; USA/Dominican Republic 2016, 75 min.

Haiti and the Dominican Republic (DR) share the Caribbean island of Hispaniola: they also share a long colonial past and brutal dictatorships during the 50s and 60s, when “Papa Doc” Duvalier in Haiti and Rafael Trujillo in the DR reigned supreme. But here all similarities end: whilst Haiti is one of the poorest nations on this planet, the DR on the other hand is one of richest countries in Central America.

Juan Mejia Botero’s ravishing documentary examines the main reason for the divergence: the near total deforestation in Haiti, where just 2% of the rain forest remains, whilst the DR thrives economically thanks to their preservation of its woods. Haiti’s population in the border region has taken to transgress into the forests of their neighbours, to cut trees down and produce charcoal, which they transport back into Haiti. The DR employs rangers who try and catch the Haitians, often beating them up and destroying the charcoal produced. In 2012, one of these rangers, Elisio Eloy Vargas, also known as Melaneo, was killed by the Haitian intruder Pablo Tipal. Vargas’ widow Calina suffers most from his death: she is from Haiti, and does not have the citizenship of the DR. Melaneo’s family, his mother and brother Chichi ostracise her, and the six children, three of whom had been fathered by Melaneo.

As the environmentalist Dr. Yolanda Leon drives through the boarder section, she discovers an increasingly presence of DR citizens breaking the law by cutting down trees and producing charcoal to transport via HGVs into Haiti. Big profits (dwarfing the amount of the illegal Haitians charcoal producers), are made by the HGV owners and bribes are made to the upper echelon of the DR administration. At the same time, there is a growing anti-Haitian feeling in the DR. Haitians are called ‘lazy’, and many are expelled. Even Calina is lucky to gain at least a provisional residence permit. Two years after the Melaneo murder, the son and cousin of Pablo Tipal are found dead: their throats are cut in the same way as Melaneo’s. As one citizen of the DR remarks: “To live at the boarder, you have to have a hard heart”.

Sumptuously photographed by DoP Juan Carlos Castaneda, this documentary illuminates many problems faced all over the world: the inequality of bordering countries, class diversions, corruption, legal and illegal emigration, ecological catastrophes and a growing hatred of all foreigners. This micro cosmos is superbly analysed by the directors – the personal and the political are always intertwined. An impressively, but sad study of human nature. AS

ON RELEASE AT BERTHA DOCHOUSE FROM 14 APRIL 2017

I am Not Your Negro (2016)

Director: Raoul Peck | Writers: Raoul Peck, James Baldwin | With Samuel L Jackson | 93min | US | Doc

Black activist and writer James Baldwin once said: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced”: Writer and socal critic Baldwin was an highly intellectual thinker who explored the unspoken intricacies of racial tension, and here illuminates the lives of three American civil rights campaigners in Raoul Peck’s immersive and meaty biopic, narrated by by Samuel L. Jackson.

Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are the focus of I Am Not Your Negro (also the title of , an unflinching study of flagrant prejudice in 1960s America. It sometimes feels pretty close to the bone in its stark exposé of white supremacy and the apathy of ignorance.

When invited by literary agent Jay Acton to pen a book on the three, Baldwin’s turned him in the form of a slim yet pithy manuscript entitled Remember This House. And this became the basis for Raoul Peck’s film. Baldwin comes across as a calm and appealingly reflective man in television interviews and chat programmes. The film is fleshed with excerpts from classics such as In the Heat of the Night; Stagecoach; Dance, Fools, Dance and Elephant that feature Black actors portraying America’s cultural background in controversial settings or positions of inferiority.

Saliently shot in black and white and cleverly edited by Alexandra Strauss, the doc also includes topical posters. The occasional inter-titles, flagging up various ideas and headings, feel superfluous in a film that tells its own story evocatively and engagingly without a need for introduction.

Honourable and important in its subject matter, the only criticism of I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO is its lack of a cohesive narrative. Freewheeling between themes and ideas, the underlying thrust is one of social unease and violence, wherein the White man exploits the Black man feeling threatened by him, for reasons that never become entirely justifiable to modern audiences. Such is the nature of prejudice.

Baldwin, who was born in the Bronx and eventually died in Saint-Paul de Vence in 1987, commented that the history of America was a Black one, but he never comes across as vehemently racist or angry despite his background of poverty and deprivation, always peddling a reasonable and contemplative agenda that nevertheless maintained that racism was the source of America’s social divide. This is an enjoyable and edifying experience. MT

NOW ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS APRIL 2017

https://youtu.be/ORpBbu04iEE

The Olive Tree (2016) | Eureka Dual Format release

Dir.: Iciar Bollain | Cast: Anna Castillo, Javier Gutierrez, Pep Ambros, Manuel Cucala, Miguel Aladren | Drama | Spain/Germany | 100 min.

The third collaboration between Madrileno director Iciar Bollain and British scriptwriter (and Loach regular) Paul Laverty is far more successful than Katmandu and Even the Rain: The Olive Tree not only combines themes of ecology and economic hardship, but also weaves together the personal with the political in a story that centres on a headstrong but vulnerable heroine (Alma played by Castillo) in the midst of a family conflict, played out against a backdrop of disturbed rural tranquillity in rural Castellon, Spain.

Alma’s family is in disarray because her father has sold their pride and joy, a thousand-year old olive tree of to an energy company in Düsseldorf, West Germany in order to finance his new concern – a restaurant and poultry farm poultry farm. Anna is very close to her grandfather Ramon, and in flashbacks, we witness Ramon and the young Alma bonding over the love for the famed old olive tree, before it is forcible removed by her father Luis (Aladren). His brother Arti (Gutierrez) is equally guilty in Alma’s eyes, since he invested his part of the deal in a business which has since gone bankrupt, with his wife leaving him into the bargain: “you, like the whole country, are lying to yourself”. The conflict escalates when Ramon grows despondent, sinking into a near catatonic state. The penniless Alma is convinced that the retrieval of the fabled tree will restore Ramon’s physical and psychological health, so she hatches a cunning plan to bring it back to the farm in Canet, talking uncle Arti and his co-worker Rafa (Ambros) into driving to Germany with a huge transporter, to fetch the tree back. During the journey, Alma finesses her tree re-patriation project that involves recruiting the help of a womens’ environmental group in Germany, but soon turns into a wild goose chase for all concerned. Bollain’s intricate script and superb cast, lead by the eloquent and graceful Castillo.. The men characters lack integrity (apart from Ramon), and are certainly no match for Alma or her girl friends. DoP Sergi Gallardi’s visuals conjure up the sun-drenched Autumnal beauty of the rural setting contrasting the steely German locations. Iciar Bollain avoids cloying sentimentality and a pseudo happy end in this stirring portrait of a modern woman, giving modern man as run for his money. AS

ON BLURAY AND DVD DUAL FORMAT | 15 MAY 2017

City of Tiny Lights (2016)

Dir.: Pete Travis; Cast: Riz Ahmed, Billie Piper, Roshan Seth, James Floyd, Mohamed Al Amiri, Cush Jumbo, Hanna Rae, Alexander Siddig; UK 2017, 110 min.

With Raymond Chandler in mind, director Pete Travis (Dredd) and writer Patrick Neate, on whose 2006 novel of the same name the film is based, paint a dark picture of London, in this British Neo Noir, where Private Eye Tommy Akhtar stumbles around finding new violent connections, whilst searching for closure on his own troubled past.

Tommy (Ahmed) runs a seedy detective agency called TA – in his own words, he “discovers and buries secrets”. One day, the prostitute Melody (Jumbo) asks him to search for her co-worker Natasha who has gone missing. Tommy can’t find her but he traces Natasha’s last client: a Pakistani business man, murdered in his hotel bed. Enter Lovely Ansari’, a property developer and pillar of the community who is also a good old friend of Tommy. Soon it becomes clear, that many people are interested in the victim: American agent Regan (Schaefter), the leader of Islamic Youth Centre Al Dabaran (Siddig), and the local cops ever ready to give Tommy a hard time. Not that his life is a bed of roses: his cricket obsessed father Farzad (Seth) never lets him forget that he wants a much straighter lifestyle for his son, and Shelley (Piper) and her daughter Emma (Rae) share a bond from a past trauma with Tommy. The plot is not much more than a McGuffin, and the all-around happy-ending rings false.

Where it not be for the excellent work of DoP Christopher Ross (Detour), we could dismiss Tiny Lights simply as TV pilot. But the nightime images, mostly shot with natural light, are vey invocative: shadows lurk everywhere, and Tommy stumbles through a urban nightmare like the heroes of Cornel Woolrich, with all the implications of a cliff hangar depending on the exact timing.

Pete Travis tries to refresh the genre with the introduction of an Asian lead and his Bangladeshi father, as the shadow of Islam creeps in with shady clerical activity, the film feels much more at home with Akhtar being clubbed over the head by hired thugs, in the best Robert Mitchum tradition, than it ever does with reflecting the complexities of modern Britain.

Unfortunately, unlike Woolrich, Travis/Neate do not care much for an authentic narrative, and are content with a loose, episodic shape. Full points for atmosphere, but the strong cast could have done with some more structure. AS

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 31 MARCH 2017

The Last Stage | Ostatni etap (1948) Mubi

Director: Wanda Jakubowska | Scr: Wanda Jakubowska, Gerda Schneider | Cast: Tatjana Gorecka, Antonina Górecka, Barbara Drapinska, Aleksandra Śląska | Drama / Poland / 110 minutes

Wanda Jakubowska (1907-1998) and her scriptwriter Gerda Schneider were themselves both inmates of Auschwitz; and Jakubowska’s determination to remember what she was witnessing in order to make a film about it helped keep her alive. In the summer of 1947 she duly returned to Auschwitz to film the exteriors of ‘The Last Stage’, with former inmates among the supporting cast. (The fact that it was shot in summer already sets it apart from most other films set in the camps, which usually find winter more atmospheric). Much of the imagery of later reenactments like ‘Schindler’s List’ – including the famous orchestra – can be found here; while the fact that the events it reenacts were only a couple of years previously gives it an immediacy and visual authenticity no later reenactments could hope to match. (One tends to think of Auschwitz as just a collection of huts, but seeing the real thing in this film you realise how enormous it was).

‘The Last Stage’ is not strictly speaking about The Holocaust, but is more an anti-fascist document of the rape of Poland by its occupiers; and we actually see Polish women protesting at their incarceration and rough treatment on the grounds that they’re not Jewish. Jakubowksa herself was there because of her activity in the resistance, while the onscreen introduction lists the many different nationalities held in Auschwitz. We see Frenchwoman singing the Marseilleise and Russian women dancing to celebrate Stalingrad (although it is sobering to reflect that at this stage liberation will still be two very long years away); and one prominent character is a gypsy.

Jakubowska’s film is organised as an ensemble piece which flits from group to group, the most prominent character being Barbara Drapinska as Martha Weiss, a young Jewish woman whose ability to speak German result in her life being spared (for the time being) to function as an interpreter. The actress who actually heads the cast list is Tatjana Gorecka as Eugenia, a Russian doctor ultimately tortured to death for attempting to tell the truth to members of an international commission who visit the camp to observe the conditions. (The fact that outside observers were allowed into some of the camps, where they were successfully lied to about what was actually going on, remains little known).

The chimneys perpetually belching smoke are frequently remarked upon throughout the film; and although the actual mass extermination programme is not depicted there are harrowing scenes involving the murder of a baby and the withholding of medicine. The cruelty of the guards and the kapos is depicted as a routine matter and the camp administration as unimaginative jobsworths. But Jakubowska is more concerned with making an uplifting socialist tribute to comradeship in adversity than a recitation of Nazi atrocities. Everyone in ‘The Last Stage’ is an individual, even the administrators (who get a surprising amount of screen time). Despite the characters all speaking in their native languages, the cast are all Polish (some of those playing Germans obviously dubbed), and with their handsome Polish faces look far too healthy and well nourished to dispel memories of the damning newsreel footage of starved and broken human beings that shocked the world in 1945. Even Aleksandra Śląska as the camp overseer is ironically much prettier than any of the actual women guards we see in contemporary newsreels.

‘The Last Stage’ could only have been made with Russian approval (Stalin, apparently actually approved the script personally), the excellent photography is by a veteran Russian cameraman, Bentsion Monastyrsky, and the Red Army are portrayed as saviours. Although stills from ‘The Last Stage’ regularly appear in film histories, the film itself (along with the rest of postwar Polish cinema) is little seen today. That Jakubowska remained an ardant communist until the very end of her long life, as well as enthusiastically wedded to socialist realist aesthetics, led to her own work ironically being sidelined as “politically incorrect” in post-communist Poland. RICHARD CHATTEN

ON MUBI

A Quiet Passion (2016) Viennale 2021

After his sober portrait of Scottish life during wartime, Terence Davies turns his camera back to American life, and particularly that of the reclusive 19th century poet Emily Dickinson, played sensitively here in this illuminating aptly claustrophobic biopic, by Cynthia Nixon. Jennifer Ehle plays Emily’s sister and Keith Carradine her strict but loving Victorian father in an attempt to explore and open up an introspective but hopeful young woman whose poor health saw her gradually regressing into her bedroom as a frustrated spinster. Dickinson had some success at being published at a time when women of her background were considered ill-suited to writing or any other kind of creative pursuit.

Her poetry is sometimes described as elliptical; it is certainly avantgarde but she never blossomed personally or professionally, opting for the closeted atmosphere of her close family rather than one of emotional fulfilment in household of her own. Highly self-critical, Nixon cleverly portrays her own worst enemy, whose inner monologues and negative overthinking continually self-sabotage her success: despite a prodigious output of nearly 2,000 poems, only 11 were published.

Dying from kidney failure at 55, Dickinson endured a maudlin household where, despite Vinnie’s uplifting support and love, the women seemed to teeter perpetually on the bring of anxiety-induced poor health. Her mother can barely get to the end of the day without dissolving into tears of melancholy (often looking like Stanley Baxter in drag).

Shot almost entirely indoors, within the confines of her luxuriously decorated home and flower-filled garden in Amherst, Massachusetts, Davies’ script is suitably coy and wittily crafted; guaranteed to elicit a tittering response of pleasure from its litterary-minded devotees. Played briefly as a young woman by Emma Bell, Dickinson is a sparky and sharp-tongued virago whose pluckiness turns to bitterness in the fullness of time as Dixon takes over the role.

Her God-fearing family is headed by her father who allows her to write at night time and to receive visits from her canny, Dorothy Parker-like friend, Vryling Buffom (Catherine Bailey) who eventually marries. But Emily’s ardour burns only for the unobtainable in the shape of Rev. Wadsworth (Eric Loren). When a good-looking admirer visits one day Emily rebuffs him with vituperative conversation while hiding behind her bedroom door. He never comes again, yet Emily remains desperate to be ravaged by a midnight guest – seen only in profile in a dimly lit fantasy scene. Best known for her antics in Sex and the City, Nixon plays Jane as plain and scathing in contrast to her sister Vinnie’s electrifying smile and brother Austin’s dark good looks.

Terence Davies’ mise en scene is fastidiously crafted as his camera glides stealthily through each shot. Delicate flower arrangement bring freshness to the otherwise crustily powdered and heavily wigged look of the cast whose superb but mannered performances evoke the stiff propriety of the day. A score of appropriate music selections from Schubert to Chopin adds to final touches to this rather twee but beautifully rendered arthouse piece than never quite reaches the emotional heights of House of Mirth or Deep Blue Sea but is nevertheless moving as a portrait of female endeavour and longing. MT

TERENCE DAVIES RETROSPECTIVE | VIENNALE 21-31 OCTOBER 2021

Graduation | Bacalaureat (2016) | DVD release

Dir.: Cristian Mungiu | Cast: Adrian Titieni, Maria-Victoria Dragus, Lia Bugnar, Malina Manovici, Vlad Ivanov, Petre Ciubotaru | Romania 2016, 128min.

Director/writer Cristian Mungiu’s third film, which won him the Best Director’s Prize at Cannes last year, is a bleak picture of contemporary Romania where the dark shadow of the Ceausescu still haunts those who grew up during a regime.

Dr. Romeo Aldea (Titieni) wants to make sure that his daughter Eliza (Dragus) leaves Romania as soon as possible for a scholarship at a British university. He and his wife Magda (Bugnar) returned to the country from the West in 1991, after the fall of Stalinism, but Aldea has no illusions about the place: living in the city of Cluj and working at the local hospital he is part of a system where bribery , cheating and corruption is a matter of survival. When Eliza is sexually attacked the day before the final examines, she fights off the attacker but injures her arm, which is put in plaster. But the real wounds are psychological: Eliza does not really want to leave for London, she is in love with her boyfriend, a motorbike fanatic, doubling at night as a DJ. Needless to say, that he is seen as very unsuitable husband material by Romeo. Since Eliza needs an average ‘A’ for the results to gain her scholarship, Dr. Aldea is afraid that the incident and the arm injury will put her grades at risk and so hatches a plan to ensure her success but those involved are not as loyal as he hoped, sending his world into meltdown.

This is all as sombre as it sounds with DoP Tudor Vladimir Panduru’s washed-out colours infusing every scene with bleakness, and long, mournful travelling shots in the streets and the run-down estates show the decay. But the real poverty is not just much visible in the environment, but in the souls of the represented by Dr. Aldea. Graduation is, in spite of its length, absorbing with ensemble acting of the highest standard.

Dr. Aldea emerges as a selfish victim, sacrificing himself for goals that are not shared by those around him. He disregards his daughter, belittles her boyfriend, betrays his wife. He sees himself as the loser, but not the perpetrator. GRADUATION is a fascinating indictment of contempo Romania locked in the past, still run by the ‘players’ of the establishment rather than ordinary people. Justifying every move as love for his daughter (who is just a pawn in his strategy), he is very much like the great majority of Romanians ((and many parents of the era), who failed to find a new spiritual beginning after the end of the dictatorship. AS

OUT ON DVD 15 MAY 2017 | REVIEWED AT CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2016

https://youtu.be/oCJCDF4h8Zg

After the Fall | Cinema in the 1930s

“The content of the motion picture still was designed for escape, the majority reflecting the tastes of tired or jaded adults seeking a never-never la-Dixton Wector, stories of luxury and melodrama, sex and sentiment.“

America in the 1930s was a nation in flux. Ravaged by political turmoil and economic uncertainty of the Great Depression; filmmakers responded to rapid social change with some of the 20th century’s most escapist and outlandish cinema that saw the birth and rise of truly legendary stars, some of whom are still alive today. The early 1930s ushered in the ‘golden age’ of Hollywood’ an era that was to continue well into the 1940s. Despite financial anxiety and unemployment affecting 25 percent of the population, movie theatres across the nation saw almost 70 million Americans stump up their hard-earned cash to get away from the doom and gloom and seek adventure, fantasy, glamour and even horror in their spare time.

After the stock market crash of 1929, the American economy never recovered fully before the USA entered WWII in 1941, when the efforts to win the war guaranteed full employment for the first time in 1942. The worldwide recession had hit the USA the hardest: between 1929 and 1932 unemployment rose by a staggering 607%. But in 1935, Hollywood could breathe easy again: 80 million cinema tickets had been sold, only ten million less than before the depression. The fact that sound technology had been introduced in nearly all cinemas nationwide during this period – and the entrance fee of a mere 15 Cent – had certainly contributed to this trend.

Genre-wise, gangster films (with some of the late 1930s movies being more than precursor to the Film Noir) were highly popular, and a new sub-genre: the Screwball Comedy. The 1930s also was a heyday for musicals. Often theming hard times, these captured the imagination of depressed audiences and boosted morale with a positive outcome or happy ending. The Silent era was slowly fading replaced by the ‘talkies’ – many classic films were lushly remade and would be re-adapted over and over again – The Prisoner of Zenda and Cleopatra, several times. At the same time the studio system roared into action with the Hay’s Code, an wide scale attempt at organized censorship of Hollywood films. Sensationalist films such as King Kong (1933) and The Invisible Man (1933) were all the rage and the first sound action par b&w film Hell’s Angels (1930) starring Jean Harlow (in her only colour film) was made by Howard Hughes. The Horror genre was developed with more Dracula films: Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Dracula’s Daughter (1936), The Mummy (1932), Vampyr (1932) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939). Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi are household names whose careers were forged in Horror. And the 1930s also saw the rise to fame of The Marx Brothers, who made their debut at the end of the silent era, in Comedy.

But the Great Depression did have an impact on Hollywood studios where the public still mattered. In the words of Herbert Gans “The audience is obviously limited by what it is offered but what is offered to it depends a great deal on what it has accepted previously.” Since the industrial boom of the 1890s society saw an increase in commercialism with many people moving from a simple rural existence to the big metropolis, as the population continued to grow – with over three million migrating to the West Coast with the droughts of the Great Plains causing further economic hardship and inspiring John Steinbeck to write The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

The choreographer Busby Berkeley directed the dance numbers in classics like Gold Digger, 42nd Street and Top Hat (1935), whilst stars like Judy Garland, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers were positive role models; also the child star Shirley Temple (Our Little Girl), who embodied a new optimism in time of hardship. The Gay Divorce (1934) and Top Hat (1935) were also Screwball comedies, a new sub-genre dominated by director Howard Hawks. But it was Lewis Milestone, who directed the newspaper satire The Front Page in 1931, to start it all – not by accident, it was Howard Hawks who re-made the film as His Girl Friday in 1940 (left). Frank Capra, who later became the chronicler of the “New Deal”, President Roosevelt’s economic recovery plan, followed in 1934 with It Happened One Night. Hawks than directed Bringing Up Baby in 1938: a flop, when it was released, the classic of the genre today. The screwball comedies had to be careful: most of them were set in a very up-market environment – and the cinema audience had an ambiguous relationship with the upper class: one he one hand, there was envy, but since the films often mad fun of the protagonists, they were forgiven. In George Cukor’s Philadelphia Story from 1940, James Stewart’s Mike Connor, an ordinary man, who has ‘fallen’ into high society, embodies this conflict: in the end he is quiet glad, that he is spared a marriage with socialite Catherine Hepburn, who remarries her social equal, the playboy Gary Grant.

Whilst John Huston’s remake of Roy de Ruth’s The Maltese Falcon from 1931 is the official’ birthday’ of American Film Noir in 1941, throughout the 1930s examples of noir elements infiltrated film, led by German emigrant directors, among them Fritz Land and John Brahm (1893-1982), the latter, like Lang, a re-emigrant, who returned to his homeland for two films in the mid-1950s, only (unlike Lang) to finish his career in Hollywood. Brahm’s Let us Live, wit Henry Fonda, and Rio (with Basil Rathbone), both from 1939, where certainly fully fledged film noirs, as was his Hangover Square from 1945. But there is more than one example for every year of the 1930s for a noirish crime film: City Streets (1931) by Rouben Mamoulian, Scarface (Howard Hawks 1932), Glass Key (Frank Tuttle, 1935), Fury (1936) and You Only Live Once (1937) by Lang. In 1936, William Dieterle, another Berlin director who came to Hollywood, directed Satan Met a Lady with Betty Davis. And there is Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), by Michael Curtiz, a Hungarian émigré. It was left to Robert Siodmak (1900-1973), another ex-UFA director from Berlin (and another re-emigrant), to become the “Prince of the Film Noir”: in 1942 he would direct Fly by Night, a thriller cum screwball comedy, before he made the classic trio of The Spiral Staircase, The Killers and Criss Cross between 1945-1948.

Meanwhile in France, the 1930s were characterised by the lyrical style of poetic realism particularly pioneered by Jean Renoir, Julien Duvivier and Marcel Carné. Often melancholy or fatalistic in tone, these films were rather stylised and centred on unfortunate characters stuck in the margins of society or disillusioned with life and love. Simon Signoret and Jean Gabin frequently starred in these films with regular scriptwriters Charles Spaak and Jacques Prévert. The style went on to influence Italian Neorealism and eventually the French New Wave. Germany started the 1930s still under the influence by the Weimar Republic which had been going since 1919 but eventually gave way to Nazism which exerted a strong artistic control over German cinema. The dark elements of German Expressionism during the 1920s were eventually taken to America by emigrés such as Robert Siodmak, Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock whose style and repertoire had a profound impact on Hollywood particularly as regards film Noir, Horror and the subsequent Monster movies. AS/MT

Inspired by AFTER THE FALL: AMERICAN PAINTING DURING THE DEPRESSION | RA.ORG

Mad to be Normal (2017)

Dir. Robert Mullan | Cast: David Tennant, Elisabeth Moss, Michael Gambon, Gabriel Byrne, David Bamber UK | 106 mins

You may not learn a great deal about Sixties psychiatry in Robert Mullan’s impressive biopic of the maverick Scots mind doctor RD Laing, but after Dr Who David Tennant plays him with a stunning magnetic charisma that captures our imagination and goes along way towards helping us understand why he was successful in treating patients who had often been failed by the conventional medicine of the day.

Dubbed ‘the acid Marxist’, RD Laing is certainly an elusive and highly complex character to pin down. Like many dedicated to their cause, he is portrayed as often failing his nearest and dearest in his attempts to be all things to all people, and in particular his patients. But while being intense and empathetic and vulnerable, he comes across as an arrogant narcissist in respect to his avant-garde professional methods.

Robert Mullan has hired himself a splendid cast – Michael Gambon and Gabriel Byrne are impressively convincing as patients afflicted by mental illness, and the narrative in seen through Laing’s relationship with Angie Wood (Elizabeth Moss to appeal to US audiences) – a psychology graduate who comes to meet him for lunch one day, and ends up staying and having his baby, losing her own way and self-respect in the process. Clearly Laing was not a complete cad, acquiescing to all her demands in the East London alternative centre Kingsley Hall; where they live with his medication-free patients in a care in the micro-community-style environment, but he is not prepared to set up home with her when she insists on having a child, despite the threatening behaviour of those in his care who want his continued and undivided attention. Their relationship is often tested, when he own family of four children make themselves known, but Laing always makes it clear what he is about, in a charm offence. The film suffers from some tonal unevenness in the scenes changes: it’s not sure whether it wants to be a straight-up biopic or a dreamy dark comedy, shot in a smoky pot-fuelled haze of pastel peach hues.

MAD TO BE NORMAL makes much of its Sixties sensibilities, the score includes The Kinks “You Really Got Me” and Donovan’s Season of the Witch” and Laing struts his stuff in Beatle boots, besuited in bottle green velvet and Sargent Pepper style patterned tunics. This is a captivating film largely because of Tennant and his memorable portrayal of a man who, like many psychiatrists, might just have been slightly deranged himself in order to enter the minds of his patients. As the saying goes: You don’t have to be made to live here, but it helps”. MT

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 6 APRIL 2017

User Friendly Death (2007) | Kinoteka Film Festival 2017

Dir: Marcin Koszałka | Doc | Poland | 69min

With 28 credits to his name since starting out in 2000, Marcin Koszałka is easily one of the most successful Polish cinematographers working today. Known within the industry for his interest in difficult subjects his full-length documentary revolves around the people who work at a funeral parlour at Kedzierzyn-Kozle and a body incineration centre in Czech Ostrava. The film shows what happens to human bodies after death and how the employees in these places go about their business inured to the macabre nature of their work. Koszałka’s illustrates how it is possible to become disaffected by death and dealing with the dead once we have become accustomed to it, now matter how grim. In a dispassionate and matter of fact treatment Koszałka shows how even the smell of the formaldehyde starts to become almost unnoticeable as the workers go about their daily business in the morgue.

Koszałka is known as a hands on filmmaker, often credited as writer and director, and at times editor. His meticulous attention to detail have made him a highly sought after collaborator working with Borys Lankosz on The Reverse (2009), Jacek Bromski on Entanglement (2011) and most recently with Michał Rosa on Happiness Of The World (2016). So far in his career most of his auteur work has been short and full length documentaries, all of which, to at least a certain extent, deal with the sad truths of life, and learning to live with them. His three shorts including Such A Nice Boy I Gave Birth To (2000) about his relationship with his parents as well as Till IT Hurts (2008) concern themselves with one of his recurring themes: the often irreparable damage that an upbringing can have on a person. His main subject however is death and its omnipresence within life, highlighted here in Declaration Of Immortality (2010) and User-Friendly Death (2007). His latest film The Red Spider which he directed, wrote, photographed and edited is also screening during Kinoteka 2017.

KINOTEKA POLISH FILM FESTIVAL 2017 | 17 MARCH – 5 APRIL 2017

Neruda (2016) ****

Dir.: Pablo Larrain; Cast: Luis Gnecco, Mercedes Moran, Gael Gabriel Bernal, Alfredo Castro; Chile/Argentina/France/Spain/USA, 107 min.

Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain has immersed himself in two iconic figures of the 20th Century to bring us films about Jacqueline Onassis and his fellow countryman Pablo Neruda, premiering at Venice and Cannes this year, respectively. NERUDA is not so much a biopic of the Nobel Prize winning poet, more a noirish character study of the man himself, in the format of a deconstructed detective novel.

In Chile 1948, President Videla (Castro) has joined the Cold War hysteria by arresting communists and putting them into concentration camps – one run by a certain Augusto Pinochet. Fleeing the police forces with his Argentine wife Delia del Carril, poet and Senator of the Republic, Pablo Neruda (Gnecco), is being hotly pursued by a part-factual and part-fictional detective Oscar Peluchonneau (Bernal), the putative son of a late police chief and a prostitute.

Aided and abetted by national sympathisers, Neruda enjoys a lifestyle which is anything but spartan: he and his wealthy wife are fond of the good life: but it does not detract him from writing his radical poems. Oscar belittles Neruda in his off-screen commentary, but at the same time he is in awe of him. The longer Neruda continues to evade him, the more Oscar becomes a pure invention of the writer who increasingly sees himself in a central role, everything revolving around him. In the third act, when Neruda escapes via the snowy Andes to Argentina, the duel between the poet and his creation becomes almost satirical.

Neruda was – like his Chilean compatriot Robert Bolano – an admirer of the detective novel, and Larrain plays the genre to perfection. The name Peluchonneau is a dead give-a-way: ‘peluche’ or a ‘stuffed toy animal’. The director weaves Guillermo Caldron’s script into a new form of magical realism: a form of noir, in which Neruda directs his own world, sometimes making fun of himself to deflect from the deadly game of reality. Oscar is somehow his alter-ego, very much an outsider, like himself: but the difference between them is that Neruda has never forgotten his impoverished childhood, he walked barefoot until the age of 12. Meanwhile Oscar is desperate to be the son of his father, who never really acknowledged him. Both men are pompous at times – pretenders; but Oscar lacks Neruda’s genius, and perhaps, more importantly, his courage to rebel.

Gnecco, a real look-alike, plays Neruda in the style of Cervantes, larger-than-life and always careful with his words in recording the most banal events for posterity. DoP Sergio Armstrong (The Maid) creates sumptuous, flowing images, the camera rolling over wild landscapes, starry skies and dark streets full of hidden danger, blacker than black. Chile is the 1940s is shown as a treacherous and exotic badland. The scenes in the brothel, where Neruda holds court, are reminiscent of early Renoir paintings. Larrain directs not so much with anger, as he did in The Club, but with a mischievous playfulness, never letting the audience forget the dangerous path the fearless poet is treading. Neruda’s works of art live on, giving voice to the fight against Fascism that engulfed his sub-continent for so long.

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 6 APRIL 2017

Fear Eats the Soul (1974) | Angst essen Seele auf | Dual Format release

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Brigitte Mira, El Hedi ben Salem, Barbara Valentin, Irm Hermann

94min | Drama | Germany

Long before Ulrich Seidl (Paradise Love) or Laurent Cantet (Vers le Sud) captured transracial intergenerational love on the screen, Fassbinder exposes the xenophobic underbelly of ’70s West German society through a surprising romance between a Polish German cleaner in her sixties and a Moroccan Berber immigrant twenty years her junior.

Arabs are family loving-people and, far away from home and lonely in a foreign country, Ali (ben Salem) finds the comforting presence of a mature and modest woman attractive. Emmi Kurowski (Mira) clearly adores him, flattering his ego with her subtle brand of charm. The two strike up an uncomplicated relationship in the confines of her small flat and the local restaurant where Ali works, and soon decide to get married. Ali is fascinated by Emmi’s calm self-assurance and her love of food and good coffee. Their simple wedding takes place against the rainy backdrop of a grim Munich and afterwards they enjoy dinner in a local gourmet restaurant. Emmi’s family regard Ali with savage mistrust, her son kicking in the television in anger before walking they all walk out. It gradually emerges that the local community are also scandalised by the marriage; shops often refusing to serve Ali.

Brigitte Mira and El Hedi ben Salem give sombre yet affecting turns as the doomed romantic couple: Fassbinder accentuates the disapproving visual expressions and hostile body language of his support cast to reflect their feelings of disdain, pushing this ordinary social realist drama into the realms of melodrama on occasion, as in the cafe scene where Mira breaks down sobbing as the staff look on, standing in pseudo military formation. Wildly prolific in his output, Fassbinder was a fan of his compatriot Douglas Sirk and this is in some ways a tribute to Sirk’s Hollywood-style melodrama. Fassbinder shot the political and social statement in only 15 days and also appears in cameo as Emmi’s weasel-like son-in-law. MT

SHOWING AT PART OF A BFI FASSBINDER RETROSPECTIVE | OUT ON BLU-RAY COURTESY OF ARROW FILM AND VIDEO

Paula Rego, Secrets & Stories (2017) | Tribute to Paula Rego

Dir: Nick Willing | With Paula Rego | UK | Doc | 92min

“Just take of your knickers” said Victor Willing to Paula Rego and thus began a love story that was to dominate the life and work of a talented but timid Portuguese painter who arrived in London in 1950 leaving the comfort of a middle class home and a country in thrall to Salazar’s misogynist dictatorship. Salazar was to die after falling off a canvas deckchair, but Paula Rego fought manic depression and the male-centric art world to achieve international success painting canvasses that left Charles Saatchi gobsmacked.

This unique insight into the celebrated artist, who has died at the age of 87, is pictured above with her her son and film-maker Nick Willing, was brought up in Portugal and in Camden in a house bought by her father, where Paula and her husband the artist Vic Willing, arrived penniless after he was struck with multiple schlerosis, having lost the business left by Paula’s father. Notoriously private and guarded, Rego opens up for the first time, revealing how she channeled her shyness into her art with extraordinary results, using her powerful pictures as a therapy for her own demons, difficulties and personal tragedy. Through painting she continued to raise awareness of female issues and animal rights (her personal favourite charity is Dogs of Barcelona. Nick Willing enriches the film with a fascinating archive of home movies, family photographs and interviews spanning 60 years, describing the evolution of Rego’s work from early days at the Slade to the present day. What emerges is a deeply personal and intimate portrait of an artist whose legacy will survive the years, graphically illustrated in her preferred pastel, charcoal and oil paint. Poignantly, Willing asks his mother about her most proud achievement: “Winning the Slade Summer Prize when I was 19”. MT

PAUL REGO: STORIES & SECRETS IS AVAILABLE On BBCIPLAYER

The Quiller Memorandum (1966) | DVD

Dir: Michael Anderson | Cast: George Segal, Alex Guinness, Senta Berger, Max von Sydow, George Sanders | Thriller | 114min | UK

On the crest of the commercial wave of the Bond spy movies of the 1960s came a plethora of espionage dramas of varying quality – from the trenchant realism of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold via the cool adventures of The Ipcress File to the spoof mad antics of In Like Flint, spies and Cold War machinations were potent box office. Michael Anderson’s The Quiller Memorandum is one of the oddest and most pleasing of these products. Paranoia about who knows what you’re actually thinking is nakedly emphasised. Not because of Anderson’s direction – which was efficient and workmanlike – but through the agency of a fine cast who deliver the cryptic menace of its Harold Pinter script.

Twenty minutes into The Quiller Memorandum we depart Fleming land, lean on Le Carre territory then fully enter a Pinter Picture Playhouse. Take the film’s main interrogation scene. Quiller (George Segal) is a spy in Berlin sent to discover the headquarters of a neo- Nazi organisation that have just killed two British operatives. Quiller is captured by the group and secretly taken to the basement of their building. Their leader Oktober (Max von Sydow) instructs a colleague to inject Quiller with a truth serum. During the interrogation Quiller keeps fracturing his truthful replies as he stares at a painting of a naked woman on a couch. Quiller recalls yesterday and his sexual liaison with a schoolteacher Inge Lindt (Senta Berger). At every question about the name of Quiller’s boss, he replies Inge. To which Oktober taunts him about the woman. Here the manner of the writing very much recalls Stanley Webber’s interrogation by the two gangsters in Pinter’s play The Birthday Party (interestingly Pinter once said (a South Bank Show interview) how much the stress of the WW2 and Nazism had been an element to surface obliquely in his work.)

Pinter’s script continually drives and dominates The Quiller Memorandum, so as to become the film’s real auteur. In exchanges between Gibbs (George Sanders) and Rushington (Robert Flemying) at their London Club we’re introduced to the MI6 puppet-masters. The absurdity of their exchanges has less to do with Quiller: it’s about the quality of their lunch and envy about who is going to attend the Lord Mayor’s banquet. Pinter exhibits a darkly comic spin on some favourite themes of class and power. Along with the arrogant assertions of spy boss Pol (Alec Guinness) they’re brilliantly delivered asides, appearing more important than Pinter’s job in writing a spy thriller plot. What happens in The Quiller Memorandum is not so much Cold War trickery and betrayal but a psychological cold war of provocation and response made amoral and apolitical. Paranoia becomes a natural state of being and surveillance feels as normal as breathing.

In the last half hour we return to thriller conventions with an exciting chase on the metro. But even its resolution is intentionally anti-climactic. In Pinter’s private spying world people just watch, watch again and suspect. John Barry supplies some fine atmospheric music and the wide screen is effectively employed by Anderson – always kept second in command to Pinter. The dialogue’s delivered perfectly clearly by a sound recording not intended (as later on) in the spy genre to emphasise mumbling and incomprehensible facts. I think Fox should really re-title this movie as The Pinter Memorandum. Alan Price

https://youtu.be/iveB1P_FPT0

The Blue Lagoon (1980) | Eureka Bluray release

Dir: Randal Kleiser Cast: Brooke Shields, Leo McKern, Chris Atkins | 104min | US | Drama

Randal Kleiser, still only 70, is the creator of GREASE, the most successful musical drama ever made. Among his repertoire are also ‘household name’ outings such as HONEY I BLEW UP THE KID, GETTING IT RIGHT, and AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN (which directed to Elizabeth Jane Howard’s script). For some reason, he decided to re-make Frank Launder’s 1949 adventure with two teenage actors apparently for their looks rather than their star quality. Child star Brooke Shields had been known for her TV work as the murdered pre-teen Karen Spages in the 1976 cult horror film Communion. Chris Atkins was teaching sailing in NY state at the time of his casting, as Richard Lestrange the brother of Emmeline (Shields) who makes a life with his sister after a shipwreck lands them on a desert island in the South Pacific, with no adults to guide them.

The premise, taken from Henry De Vere Stacpoole’s novel and adapted for the screen by Douglas Day Stewart – is an interesting foray into human behaviour. Left to their own devices, it’s quite possible and indeed probable the segregated from civilised society, a male and siblings will act of their natural instincts, once puberty arrives. And this is exactly what happens in this beautifully filmed remake, that is easy on the eye and inoffensive in a saccharine sort of way (Nestor Almendro’s photography was nominated for an Oscar). Leo McKern makes a brief appearance as the kid’s guardian, who drowns early on in the story after a drinking session. MT

BLURAY IS AVAILABLE COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA | 10 APRIL 2017

Ashes and Diamonds | Popiol i Diament (1958) | Kinoteka 2017

Dir: Andrzej Wajda | Poland | Wartime Drama | 103MIN

ASHES AND DIAMONDS is undoubtedly a film noir. Not only has Wajda borrowed the sinister shadows and the black and white aesthetic from the masters of the genre, but he has given the film a hero who is already as good as dead from the outset. Maciek Chelmicki (Zbigniew Cybulski) and his friend Andrzej are fighters for the Polish Home Army, which battled against the Germans for the Government in Exile in London. Now, on May 8th 1945, their new enemies are the Communists. The men receive an order to kill the party secretary Szczuka. But they fail, and kill two civilians instead. After spending the night with the bar maid Krystyna, Maciek shoots the party secretary the next day, and escapes with Andrzej on a lorry. They meet Drewnowski, a Communist functionary, who is working for Home Army, and warns the two. Maciek, who does not know that Drewnowski is on his side, runs away, is shot and dies on a rubbish dump.

The greatest irony is that Wajda’s interpretation of the film differs diametrical from the production studio ‘Kadr’ and indeed the whole Stalinist state apparatus, which obviously saw the two assassins as counter-revolutionaries, coming to an deserved end. For Wajda, and some of the cast and crew, the opposite was true. But even with a pro-communist interpretation, ASHES AND DIAMONDS is a deeply nihilistic film: even though the war is won, destruction is absolute, and the future looms grey and unwelcoming. The film was shot in a small town where nearly everybody knew each other. Nobody trusts their neighbours: be it for collaboration with the Germans, or the competition for a place in the new order – this is a fearful town. The fireworks, which celebrates the end of the war, and masks the shots fired by Maciek, is anything but a signal for peace. Dark and foreboding, ASHES AND DIAMONDS is not so much the final chapter of WWII, but the first skirmish of an occupation. AS

KINOTEKA 2017 | 4 APRIL 18.30 | BARBICAN

The Age of Shadows (2016) | Miljeong

Dir.: Kim Jee Woon

Cast: Song Kang-ho, Gong Yoo, Um tae-goo, Han Ji-min

South Korea 2016, 139 min.

The original Korean title in translation means Secret Agent, and writer/director Kim Jee Woon (The last Stand) offers us a dazzling spy story, set in Seoul as well as Shanghai during the 1920s when large parts of South East Asia were occupied by the Japanese. Kim gets very near to the spirit of Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent: double crossing, based on ambivalent interests, dominates this sumptuous ballet of shadow fights played out against the alluring background of twenties architecture, lovingly recreated.

The first ten minutes set the tone: Kim Jan-ok, a leading personality of the Korean resistance movement in Seoul is chased by Japanese soldiers, led by Captain Lee Jung-Chool (Song), who once was himself a resistance fighter, before changing sides in Seoul. Cornered, Kim Jan kills himself. The whole sequence is filmed like a ballet: the soldiers jumping from rooftop to rooftop, whilst Kim tries to loose them in the narrow alleyways. Lee is truly sad about Kim’s death, and when he is ordered by his Japanese superior Chief Higashi to catch the leader of the resistance Kim Woo-jin (Gong), he remembers the time spent with Kim Woo and the beautiful Yeon Gye-soon (Han) in the underground movement.

In Shanghai, Lee meets up again with Kim-Woo, who is buying TNT from Hungarian anarchists, to use it against the Japanese in Seoul. On the train journey to the Korean capital, Lee has to kill his nemesis, Hashimoto (Um), to save Kim Woo’s life and that of the other resistance leaders. When they arrive in Seoul station, the police have surrounded the concourse, and one of the most memorable fighting sequence is set in motion – whilst Lee is still able to hide his true conviction to his Japanese superiors.

The true star of the film is DoP Kim Ji-jong, who effortlessly conjures up images of a bygone era: everything glitters in fragmented lights, cars roaming the streets, casting frightening shadows at night where the protagonists look very much like marionettes, pulled along in their own dangerous ways. The vibrant colour schemes are permanently changing, melting into each other, creating prisms and a dreamlike atmosphere. Even the violence takes place in an elegant way – apart from the torture scene with Yeon, which seems out of place. The sequences in the train feel seemless – an endless chase in a labyrinth. Song brilliantly evokes his character: a tormented man whose past eradicates his present. Kim Jee Woon directs with great sensibility, avoiding cliches as much as possible. The Age of Shadows is a real masterpiece: a paean to a people lost in the chaos of events well beyond their control, with images of true magic. AS

NOW SHOWING AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL UNTIL 10 SEPTEMBER 2016

Faberge : A Life of its Own (2014) | Dvd

Director: Patrick Mark

Patrick Mark’s documentary FABERGÉ: A LIFE OF ITS OWN is another in a recent series bringing art and culture events to life on the big screen. Narrated in the reverential tones of Samuel West, FABERGÉ explores the colourful history of the famous Russian jewellers, first founded in 1842, through archive footage, specialist curators and family members.

In St Petersburg, German immigré Gustav Faberge founded and founded a lucrative business by supplying the Russian Royal family with thousands of gifts to offer on their extensive trips abroad or when entertaining visiting dignatories. Designed by Carl Gustav himself but crafted by his prized Finnish and Scandinavian craftsmen, the docs shows how the family name gradually became a byword for opulence of the highest order. In contrast to the sprawling poverty of early 20th century St Petersburg, Fabergé workers were given their own personal trademarks and well-looked after with medical care and even a canteen.

Inspired by nature, animals or significant events, the pieces were intricately crafted using precious stones, gold and the trademark ‘guillochet’ enamel that glowed with an alluring lumiscence evocative of the sunlight reflecting on St Petersburg’s stately buildings and palaces. The first egg appeared in 1885, fashioned in gold and white enamel, an Easter gift from Tzarevitch Nicholas to his wife.

Loosely linked to World historical events and enlivened by remarkable footage of the era, Patrick Mark shows how the business nearly crumbled during the war years, leaving Gustav to move to Lausanne where he died broken-hearted. His son Carl Gustav took over the firm as Lenin rose to power and in the ensuing devastation of the city opportunist and businessman Armand Hammer was able to acquire many Fabergé items at cut price. But returning to a depression-hit America, his goods are declared almost worthless as “nobody wants a Tsarina’s ruby-studded swizzle stick” during the crisis ridden twenties. His luck changes when wealth returns in the more prosperous 1930s and the pieces garnered prestige from their royal connection. In a fascinating twist, many of the jewels served to ‘bullet-proof’ the garments of the besieged Russian royal family: they had been carefully stitched into the fabric and their owners survived the re-cocheting bullets.

Of those interviewed, Tatiana Faberge is the most interesting as she recounts her sadness at the family name becoming synonymous with bleach and cheap perfume during the sixties but the family are currently involved in trying to resurrect the Fabergé to its original cachet. Craftsmanship has moved on and new materials and more modern styles are refreshing the Fabergé look. At times a commercial edge seeps in to the film making this feel like an extended advertisement for the brand – particularly in these final scenes. That said, this is a well-made and engrossing piece of filmmaking with some fascinating archive footage of the Romanovs and Russia during the First World War making you want to revisit Franklin Schaffner’s epic 1971 drama Nicholas and Alexandra. MT

NOW ON DVD

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The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin (2017) | Bfi Flare 2017

Dir: Jennifer M Kroot | Doc | US/UK | 91min

Armistead Maupin churned out copy like a demon according to his editor at the San Francisco Chronicle where he worked as a regualr columnist. His prodigious talent and remarkable work ethic was possibly due to his strict upbringing by a father whom he admits to hating, according to Jennifer Kroots informative biopic of the writer and longtime advocacy for queer civil rights, and creator of the popular Tales of the City franchise.

Enriched with a commentary from talking heads Sir Ian McKellen, Laura Linney and Amy Tan, Kroot’s documentary is the first to chart the life of a writer who has known success and personal tragedy and now seems to have largely vanished from the scene, so the film will certainly be greeted with warmth and appreciation by his fans and those who have enjoyed his work, whatever the critical appraisal.

Kroot covers Maupin’s career as a journalist right through to his status as a US household name with an impressive array of photographs and archive footage showing how the he struggled to come out, as the son of a white supremacist father, and ended up with a series of gay lovers, one of whom had partnered Rock Hudson, eventually emerging as an avant-garde figure of his generation, or so the luminaries would have us believe. Rather a shame then that the film has a rather lightweight quality with cartoonish 1970s visuals in the style of Monty Python or TV’s Magpie, and unimaginative and lacklustre format. MT

BFI FLARE FILM FESTIVAL 16-26 MARCH 2017

Holy Motors (2012) Arrow online

Director: Leos Carax | Cast: Denis Lavant, Eva Mendes, Kylie Minogue | 120mins. Drama

Leos Carax is always full of surprises and Holy Motors is no exception. Weird and beguiling, it’s another fantasy trip into the unknown from the Cinema de Look movement focusing on style over narrative with a dynamite Denis Lavant as the central character Mr Oscar.

From the opening titles this darkly comic kaleidoscope fires up our imagination – how can a respectable business man start the day in suit, tie and City mode and then morph into a series of different guises arriving home in the back of a limo .

As Mr Oscar, Denis has fun with wigs, make-up and special effects costumes that transform him into many weird guises: a street beggar, a performance artist and a graveyard ghoul, to name but a few. During this nocturnal reverie a frisky Eva Mendes is carried off on his shoulders and there’s an impromptu turn by Kylie Minogue who bursts into song on the Pont Neuf and then throws herself off the roof of a disused Parisian clothing store in an odyssey of bizarre and outlandish antics. Suspend your disbelief, sit back and just let the whole thing wash over you. MT.

ARROW ONLINE in March 2021 | CANNES PREMIERE 2012

Happiness of the World | Szczescie Swiata (2016) | Kinoteka Film Festival 2017

Dir.: Michal Rosa | Cast: Karolina Gruszka, Dariusz Chojnacki, Agata Kulesza, Dorothea Segda, Andrzej Konopka, Krzysztof Stroinski | Poland 2016, 98 min

Best known for his Karlovy Vary winner Silence, Michal Rosa’s latest drama is set in the Southern Polish region of Silesia where the male occupants of a block of flats are obsessed by the charms of a beautiful Jewish woman. This is an enigmatic tragi-comedy that takes place in two parts: the first opens shortly before the outbreak of the Second World in the Summer of 1939, and the second, after the War is over.

Roza (Gruszka) is no femme fatale: she unwittingly becomes the focus of the sexual longings of her male neighbours; her only wish is to make men happy. The elderly neighbour downstairs hangs on her every word, when he is not tending to his orchids. He will later move into Roza’s flat, to be close to her in spirit. Then there is Rufin (Chojnacki), a mathematical genius, who works as a liftboy in a hotel, but has a very limited imagination: he tells everybody, including his wife Klara (Segda) and sons Emil and Kamil, that life is simple, just a question of ‘getting from A to B’. Later Kamil will have a fatal bike accident, and Klara will punish him forever. When he first sets eyes on Roza, who introduces him to dancing, he is positively enchanted to discover that you don’t always have to go from A to B to achieve success. Gertruda (Kulesza/IDA) keeps her family’s Jewish identity under wraps, along with that of her son Tomasz (Stroinski). But her husband Konrad (Konopka) has gone a step further: he lives and works in Germany, pretending to be of Aryan descent. His sister Gertruda is in a psychiatric hospital – and he has plans for her to be put to death: “The time has come, to decide who should live, and who is only a burden.” Tomasz is forbidden to speak Jiddish, but when he meets Roza, he suddenly remembers his identity, making his mother furious. After the invasion of Poland by the Germans, Roza is summoned to the Gestapo Office, but now none of the tenants want to help her – apart from a man living in the basement, who has written a famous (imagined) Baedeker guide, describing places all over the world he has never visited.

HAPPINESS OF THE WORLD is sometimes is too opaque for its own good, so just sit back and enjoy the madcap story with its endless twists and turns. Marcin Koszalka (The Red Spider) serves as the film’s DoP evoking a stunning world of sumptuous visual images where Katowice is one of the main characters, along with a brilliant ensemble cast. AS

KINOTEKA POLISH FILM FESTIVAL 17 MARCH UNTIL 5 APRIL 2017

Solaris (1972) | Criterion UK bluray release

DIR: Andrei Tarkovsky | Visuals: Vadim Yusov | Prod Designer: Mikhail Romadin | 167min | Russia

SOLARIS is Tarkovsky’s only love story, based on the Sci-Fi novel of Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, it explores the baffling nature of alien intelligence back in the days where space travel still captured our imagination with an alluring power. As Hoberman pointed out, Solaris has distinct echoes of Hitchcock’s Vertigo yet unlike most Sci-fi films, there are no gadgets or special effects making the film feel strangely more resonant and engaging with its dazzling camerawork and avant-garde production values akin to Kubrick’s 2001. The eerie and unsettling story follows a psychologist Kelvin who arrives at the space station of a distant ocean planet called Solaris to replace one of the three scientists who has mysteriously died. There he finds an artificial manifestation of his dead wife Hari, who killed herself ten years ago. Feeling guilty about her death, Kelvin is only too happy to relate to the ‘new’ Hari, even though he fears that she is just a machine. But her second suicide is harrowing, sending Kelvin literally fleeing back into his childhood. Despite its subject matter SOLARIS is by far the most emotional of all Tarkovskij’s films questioning the nature and reality of the human personality in a sumptuously beautiful, richly sensual and deeply affecting way. MT

AVAILABLE FROM CRITERION UK ON BLURAY from 3 APRIL 2017

The life of Oharu (1952)| Saikaku Ichidai Onna | Criterion bluray release

Dir.: Kenji Mizoguchi; Cast: Kinuyo Tanaka, Tsukie Matsuura, Ichiro Sugai, Toshio Mifune, Toshihaki Konoe | Japan | 133 min.

Kenji Mizoguchi, who together with Yasujiro Ozo and Akira Kurosawa was mainly responsible for the introduction of Japanese cinema in post-war Europe, has filmed Saikaku Ihara’s novel ”The Life of a Woman after Saikaku”. This poetic epic explores the tragic life of the 17th century heroine, whose life is destroyed by men.

Oharu (Tanaka) grows up as a handmaiden at the Imperial Palace in Kyoto, where she falls in love with Katsunosuke (Mifune), a Samurai who belongs to a lower cast. They are severely punished: Katsunosuke is beheaded, Oharu is sent back to her parents in disgrace. Her father Shinzaemon (Sugai), a rich merchant, loses prestige and clients, but soon compensates for it, selling his daughter to Lord Matsudaira (Konoe) as a concubine. Oharu is going to have his baby, since his wife is unable to have children after an illness. After the birth of her son, Oharu, is once again sent back to her parents since the Lord has fallen in love with her, and his wife is jealous. Her father, very much in debt, had counted on a fortune from the dishonourable Lord, but only gets a pittance. Against the will of his wife Tomo (Matsuura), he sells Oharu to work as a geisha. A client wants to “buy” her, but he turns out to be forger and Oharu has to return to her parents again. Soon they sell her again, this time to a rich merchant, whose wife has lost her hair after an illness. Sadly this is not the end for Oharu whose life goes on to be touched by tragedy yet Mizoguchi’s avoids melodrama in his delicate and utterly beguiling adaptation of the novel

Shot in soft black and white by DoP Yoshimi Hirano (Depth), Mizoguchi uses all shades of grey to compose a dreamlike environment where Oharu is literally sucked in: it is an emotional tour-de-force. Mizoguchi preferring – unlike Ozo, who was the master of the medium-shot – overhead shots, gives the spectator a birds-eye view of the proceedings. Oharu is a commodity for men: she is used as a pawn, in which ever game men play. Alone Katsunosuke is her equal in wanting an emotional relationship, not a trade-off. Tanaka gives a gracefully restrained performance, always using small gestures. Mizoguchi, had to leave Shochiku Studio after many years for Toho Productions to realise this very expensive project, which won him the International Prize at the Venice Film Festival. Even today its originality and deeply felt sensitivity is overwhelming – in the early 1950s it established Mizoguchi as one of the greatest directors worldwide. AS

AVAILABLE ON 24 APRIL VIA CRITERION UK

The Lost City of Z (2016)

Dir: James Gray | Cast: Charlie Hunnam, Sienna Miller, Robert Pattinson, Angus Macfadyen, Tom Holland | US | 140 min.

Director James Gray, who based this biopic of Army officer/explorer Percival Fawcett on the non-fiction book by David Grann, delivers an un-ashamedly old-fashioned and linear boys-own-adventure, shot on grainy 35 mm, making The Lost City a stunning visual adventure spoilt by its overlong running time and regurgitation of the well documented stifling ideology of the Edwardian era which detracts substantially from the film’s enjoyment.

We first meet Major Percival Fawcett (Hunnam) in his late thirties, during a hunt staged for foreign dignitaries, where Fawcett distinguishes himself by killing a deer. But praise, in the form of an invitation for a formal dinner, will not come his way: his commanding officer explains, that “he choose the wrong ancestry” – meaning, that Percival’s father disgraced himself by alcoholism and gambling. But soon afterwards, there is a chance of redemption: The Royal Geological Society (RGS), of whom Percival’s father had been a member, offers Percival a tricky job in the Brazilian jungle where he has the thankless task of establishing a border between Brazil and Bolivia, rendered indistinct by newly installed profitable rubber plantations. Between 1906 and 1924 Fawcett would undertake seven more expeditions into the Brazilian jungle where he became obsessed by the idea of the lost city of Z, located somewhere in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil. Often clashing with James Murray (Macfadyen) an obese and unsuitable head of the rather reactionary RSG, who could not stomach the fact that the indigenous population had established a culture long before Great Britain, Fawcett is accompanied on all but his last trip by Henry Costin (Pattinson), who served him faithfully, backing him up in the dispute with Murray.

Fawcett joined the Army at the outbreak of WW1 in spite of his advanced age and he was injured and temporarily blinded at the battle of the Somme. His relationship with his wife Nina (Miller) was marked by his permanent absences: she had the burden of bringing up the children, whilst he followed his obsession. When Nina rebelled, wanting to accompany her husband on one of the expeditions (she was certainly fitter than Murray), Fawcett denied her vehemently, claiming “the different roles of males and females are the cornerstone of our culture”. In 1925 Fawcett made a final trip to the Brazilian jungle with his oldest son Jack (Holland): they were presumably killed by Indians along with around a hundred would-be-rescuers.

Percival Fawcett was a certainly a colourful character: he was befriended by Rider Haggard and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who used Fawcett’s exploits as material for his books: ‘The Lost World’. Fawcett was very much a one-dimensional man of his time: unable to settle down to family life, he searched for a holy grail, always preferring physical exhortations to reflective patience. He had an anti-authoritarian streak, in reaction to his father’s reputation, but was a male-chauvinist when it came to his relationship with Nina. James Gray (The Immigrant), reiterates the clichés of the era and Fawcett’s part in it over and over again, in a linear narrative that is as conventional and bloated as the characters themselves. A more contemporary approach, such as Pablo Lorrain’s deconstructed approach for Neruda, could have offered a tighter and more engaging watch, The overriding entertainment comes from DoP Darious Khondji (Amour, Seven) sumptuous jungle scenes, the opera house in the middle of the wilderness, the serenity of the natives and the attacking animals which are captured in magnificent lighting. Contrapuntal to the lush jungle landscapes, England is pictured as cold, artificial light dominates in the scenes shot at the RGS. The Lost City of Z is a visual masterpiece, if you can forgive the rather stolid narrative. AS

IN CINEMAS FROM FRIDAY 24 MARCH 2017

All this Panic (2016)

Dir. Jenny Gage. US | 79 mins.

What is it like to be a teenager girl today? The adolescent time in a girl’s life has always been the focus of Jenny Gage’s work as a filmmaker and photographer. With ALL THIS PANIC she offers up a female answer to Richard Linklater’s Boyhood in a fresh and effervescent vérité portrait of Brooklyn’s magical youth from teen to young adulthood. Despite its title, this is an uplifting and positive portrait of puberty – a time that seems much the same today as is did 40 years ago – in far less permissive days.

Gage has known some of their girls in her documentary since they were only little (6-8 in the case of Dusty and Ginger) and growing up in her neighbourhood. The film begins around a decade later and takes place over three years. We first meet the crop-haired and delicately gamine Lena while she’s still at school – by the end she’s in college, with her hair tipped in sky blue. Despite her broken family – who love her to bits – she’s sensible and engagingly courageous about her hopes for the future which include a boyfriend and travel. Her father is mentally unstable and her mother is open with about their limited resources – but this could be the making of Lena, just going to show how parental love and security is far more important for kids than money.

Ginger is unsettled and less sure of her direction. A tiff with Dusty sees them heading out for the city – both wearing headphones in protest, yet travelling together. Having decided not to go to college Ginger debates dreams of becoming an actor with her father – who appears unorthodox, English and covered in tattoos – and is not impressed with Ginger’s lack of effort in this endeavour. Little sister Dusty and her best friend the freckled Delia, listen carefully to the discussion and try to fathom out their less ambitious yearnings that include losing their virginity and having kids.

Sage is an articulate and strong-willed black girl who has recently lost her father. Attending a private school in Manhattan, she has won a coveted scholarship to Howard University. Squabbling with her mother over the household chores, she seems the most driven of the group. Olivia is introspective and softly spoken, with the most beautiful eyes – by the end of the film she is in love with another girl. And lastly, Ivy – the most streetwise – is in a committed relationship but unsure about the future without strong support from her parents.

Delicately captured in Tom Betterton’s limpid visuals this is impressionistic snapshot of blossoming womanhood explores intimate moments as the girls share their expectations of sex, studying and financial independence. Gage presents an encouraging picture of the next female generation, as giggly young things become the next generation of leaders, mothers, wives and partners. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 24 MARCH 2017

Playground |Plac zbaw (2016) | Kinoteka 2017

Dir: Bartosz M. Kowalski | Screenwriters: Bartosz M. Kowalski, Stanislaw Warwas

Cast: Michalina Swistun, Nicolas Przygoda, Przemek Balinski, Patryk Swiderski, Pawel Brandys, Anita Jancia-Prokopowicz, Pawel Karolak, Malgorzata Olczyk

88min | Thriller | Poland

From a country known for its strong family values and staunch Catholicism comes PLAYGROUND, the debut feature of Bartosz M Kowalski who slowly constructs a story so doom-laden and harrowing it will stay will you for a very long time. It brings to mind the tragedy of 3 year old toddler Jamie Bulger who disappeared from a Liverpool shopping centre in 1993, never to be seen again.

Kowalski’s minimal approach to his co-scripted and produced subject matter is laudable as he explores, in a rather ominous tone, the early days of summer for a couple of pubescent boys as they kick over the traces of dwindling boyhood in the final term at junior school. Impressively performed by a trio of newcomers, this brutally stark thriller throws up a number of question marks about the future of an underprivileged youth in Poland who have have clearly not benefited from the spoils of post EU enrichment, whilst growing up untrammeled by the stern regime of the post communist years, of which their parents still bear the legacy from their own upbringing. This regime inculcated discipline, commitment and obedience to their elders. And although the privations are still present, these youngsters are from the internet generation which has allowed them to access unsuitable material and resulted in a dumbed down and casual attitude to violence and pornography before their own moral compass has had a chance to healthily be set.

Szymek (Nicolas Pryzgoda) lives in a broken down apartment block and is part-time carer for his physically handicapped father who is spends his time listening to classical music in bed, causing the boy to punch him up in unbridled frustration. His schoolfriend Czarek (Przemek Balinski) lives nearby in a squalid tenement where he shares a bedroom with his much younger brother who cries all time. “He’s still a child, and so are you, only much older” chides his mother (a hagard and harried Malgorzata Olczyk). Meanwhile, his older brother jeers at him when asked for some spare cash. None of this justifies delinquency but a toxic dynamic develops when he gets together with his mate. We see them secretly taunting plump school girl Gabrysia, on account of her puppy fat, and she mistakes their attentions for romantic interest, led on by another girl in her form: Children can be so mean. Plucking up courage, Gabrysia asks Szymek to meet her in a remote farm-building with the idea of asking him for a date. But when he turns up with Czarek, the two humiliate her, recording the footage on mobiles until she runs away, driven to tears.

The final scenes take place in silence, apart from some distant chatter and ambient birdsong, as we see Czarek and Szymek walking a gleeful toddler out of a shopping-mall. Clearly they have tempted him away with the promise of sweets or a treat. Straining to make out what happens next is an eye-bleedingly horrific experience as the images blur and fade into the distance, but never seem to end. MT

KINOTEKA 2017 | 19 MARCH 15.00 | REGENT STREET CINEMA

Quand on a 17 ans (Being 17) | BFI Flare Film Festival

Director: André Téchiné (Les Témoins) Writers: André Téchiné, Céline Sciamma

With Sandrine Kiberlain, Kacey Mottet Klein, Corentin Fila, Alexis Loret

Drama | World premiere | France

Revered writer|director André Téchiné portrays adolescent sexual awakening, loss and love in the snowy landscapes of the French Pyrenees. Wild Reeds will spring to mind here, as will his co-writer Celine Sciamma’s rites of passage films Tomboy and Girlhood. But this is a work of multi-layered subtlety that pictures two rival teenagers at loggerheads in a close-knit community where change comes slowly and in unexpected ways

Poignant upbeat but always real BEING 17 has a searing sense of place and of the local traditions in this farming community as it moves through three seasons winter, spring and summer. Stunningly captured by cinematographer Julien Hirsch’s spectacularly scenic shots of vermillion sunsets and icy mountain vistas, the story opens at the cattle farm where teenage Thomas (Corentin Fila), the bi-racially adopted son of Christine (Mama Prassinos) and Jacques (Jean Fornerod) helps out with the animals while studying at the main lycée several hours ride away in the valley. A loner, he resents the more intelligent Damien (Kacey Mottet Klein), a gawky but sensitive kid who doesn’t hide his talent in the classroom. That prompts Tom to beat him up after school, but Damien is too tough let it worry him. Living in the lcoal town with his doctor mother Marianne (Sandrine Kiberlain) he also enjoys boxing, training locally with old family friend Paulo (Jean Corso).

Damien’s father, Nathan (Alexis Loret), is in the French airforce stationed oversees. Marianne treats Thomas’ mother Christine one day and discovers she’s pregnant. Marianne invites Thomas to stay while his mother is resting, unaware that the two boys are sworn enemies and she secretly quite fancies Thomas. The boys’ animosity is pictured in frequent punch ups that somehow start to spark feelings of another nature between them. Klein was pictured in the equally snowy Sister (2012) and has since blossomed developing an raw and piercing sensitivity in his acting which he brings to his role as Damien. As Thomas, Corentin Fila has his own fawn-like sensuously tempered with impetuousness. The genesis of their relationship is so subtle as to be imperceptable but gradually manifests itself from close contact during their tussles. Drawn together from lonliness and, to a degree, isolation it is bred from a mutual longing for emotional and physical closeness but is conveyed in bewildered feelings of insecurity and is tenderly moving to watch. There are so many strands here interacting and evolving, yet Téchiné blends them seemlessly together to create a dynamic that feels natural and inevitable as life in village moves on. For her part, Kiberlain lights every scene as a warm and loving mother who is also intuitive, kind and completely natural.

The occasional score is judiciously sparing at just a few points and the tone natural throughout, this is an immersive and satisfying French drama which, along with Things to Come, is sure to go down well with the arthouse crowd.

BFI FLARE FILM FESTIVAL 16-26 MARCH 2017

It’s only the End of the World | BFI FLARE Film Festival

Director: Xavier Dolan Writer: Xavier Dolan based on a play by Jean-Luc Lagarce

97min | Drama | Canada

At 27, Canadian maverick Xavier Dolan has made six good features in eight years. So eventually there had to be an exception and it premiered here at Cannes Film Festival in the main competition.

Innovative and always inventive Dolan’s films all driven by a passionate energy and incredible insight as he strives for unusual angles and plot twists in his ambitious narratives and impressive visual style. But here’s the kicker, IT’S ONLY THE END OF THE WORLD is not his original source material and that is possible why it’s his least enjoyable feature to date.

Beautifully shot with some outstanding climaxes and lows, the drama is adapted for the screen by Jean-Luc Lagarce with some intense turns from its French cast: Gaspard Ulliel (making his second appearance at the festival this year) plays Louis, a gay man returning home to his family after over a decade, to reveal his terminal illness and to deal with another thorny issue: “the illusion that I am the master of my life,” which he explains in an opening voiceover.

His dominating mother Martine (Nathalie Baye); his mixed up sister Suzanne (Léa Seydoux); and older brother Antoine (Vincent Cassel), who brings his delightful wife (Marion Cotillard, in an underutilized role), to meet Louis for the first time in his return home after 12 years absence. Antoine is the antagonistic link is the otherwise delighted family circle, and he reacts with Cassel’s trademark belligerence which is intolerable in the car scene where is driving Louis to see his childhood home.

Intimate in setting yet far-reaching in its scope and resonance, those familiar with family disarray will find the film disturbing and disruptive but it never feels claustrophobic despite its domestic confines thanks to Dolan’s visual inventiveness, clever lighting techniques and use of occasional flashbacks to a golden past that fills Louis with nostalgia. Along with Marion Cotillard’s character, Louis emerges the most sympathetic character: softly-spoken and placcid, his eyes well up frequently at the heart-breaking scenario which all feels so familiar to his past strife and his quiet disappointment and hurt is palpably expressed in a subtle facial expressions. Realising he is better off on his own he abruptly leaves. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 11-22 MAY 2016 | COMPETITION ENTRY

The Eyes of My Mother (2016)

Writer|Dir: Nicolas Pesce Cast: Kika Magalhaes, Will Brill, Olivia Bond, Paul Nazak, Diana Agostini, Clara Wong

Nicolas Pesce cut his teeth in the world of music videos and his feature debut – an intense and stylish psychological thriller – is embued with the melancholy moodiness of Portuguese Fado laced with macabre American Gothic.

Set in a remote forested backwater THE EYES OF MY MOTHER could easily have lost its way but a clever script never allows the film to wander too far off the beaten track, eventually reaching a rather satisfying ending, while keeping our attention fixed on its mesmerising central character Francisca, played with captivating nonchalence by Kika Magalhaes. We first meet Francisca as a little girl (played by Olivia Bond) who whose slightly bohemian mother (Diana Agostini) has fetched up in a cattle farm in the wilds of New York State with her strong but silent husband after a lifetime’s practising eye surgery in her native Portugal.

Nicolas Pesce could be the US answer to Jonathan Glazer in his stylish ‘less is more’ approach to directing with a slowly mounting atmosphere of dread deftly complimenting the pristine look of the film. Zach Kuperstein’s elegantly composed black-and-white visuals turn what could have been a gory film into a gracefully poetic arthouse chiller: blood and bodily fluids ooze like obsidian ink and a chiaroscuro aesthetic transform the story into a modern classic with the same unsettling dread of The Night of the Hunter with Magalhaes’ subtle psychopath replacing Robert Mitchum’s Harry Powell, and a switcheroo male/female dynamic that appears in third act. Apart from the film’s strong visual appeal, the paucity of dialogue allows us to retreat into the deepest corners of the psyche to ponder over the implications and possibilities of a narrative that leaves so many questioned unanswered.

Bilingual Francisca is extremely close to her mother who has taught her all about anatomy and surgery not only leaving her skilfully au fait with dissection, but also making the process of carving up bodies completely natural. This will be crucial when her mother is murdered by a creepy stranger (Will Brill), not only leaving Francisca unfazed by her brutal death but also seemingly untraumatised in the aftermath (where he father keeps the man chained up in the barn), allowing Francisca to practise her surgical skills.

Her distant but respectful relationship with her father seems to have unleashed some kind of attachment anxiety in Francisca when she becomes an adult. Clearly she aches with loneliness, but rather than seek out an amorous encounter to avoid being alone, Francisca uses her talents to make sure nobody ever leaves her.

Most of the violence is tactfully alluded to rather than overt, and where brutality does occur it is often in silent scenes where Francisca demonstrates a tender and almost religious devotion. Ariel Loh’s atmospheric occasional score makes unsettling intrusions into the quiet moments without disturbing the sinister sense of terror. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE from 24 MARCH 2017

https://youtu.be/njmsLCn3JVY

Afterimage | Powidoki (2016) | Kinoteka Polish Film Festival

Dir.: Andrzej Wajda | Cast: Boguslaw Linda, Zofia Wichlacz, Bronislawa Zamachowska, Aleksandra Justa | Poland | 98 min.

Andrzej Wajda’s final film, an unsentimental bio-pic covering the last years of the avant-garde painter Wladyslaw Strzeminski (1893-1952), is the opposite of a melancholic swansong: AFTERIMAGE is a vicious attack on Stalinist repression and censorship, filmed by a man still young at heart, who never gave up the fight against an inhuman dictatorship regime which perverted the idea of equality.

Despite losing a leg and an arm in active service during WWI, Strzemisnki (a magnificent turn by Linda) led a vibrant life, shown in the opening sequence, when he rolls down a grassy hill with his students of the State Higher School of Arts in Lodz, which he had founded in 1945. A popular lecturer, all his students stood by him when he was dismissed from his post in 1950 for refusing to submit to the doctrine of Socialist Realism. One of his students, Hania (Wichlacz), eventually fell in love with him, but was rebuffed by the artist, because he knew he was dying of tuberculosis. But there was still time for a family drama: Strzeminski had left his wife, the famous sculptor Katarzyna Kobro (Justa), whom he had married in 1920, and who lived with their young daughter Nika (Zamachowska – in a case of life copying art, Justa’s Kobra is Zamachowska’s real life mother). Despite the family’s creative talents, resources were tight. Zamachowska has an other-worldly screen presence: she stands out as a fearless and self-possessed child. particularly in the scene where she walks alone behind the coffin in her broken down shoes and only coat (which she turns inside out after chastisement from a passer-by for its bright colour). After Kobra’s death, Nika moves in with her father and tenderly cares for his needs while lecturing him to eat more and smoke less. But when Hania appears on the scene, on the crafty pretext of recording “The Theory of Vision” on a typewriter stolen from the Art School, Nika makes no bones about moving into the local childrens’ home, where at least she gets a free uniform and new footwear.

The bureaucratic authorities gave Strzeminski a final warning after he damaged a street banner bearing a picture of Stalin, because it cut out the natural from his studio window. It counted for nothing that the painter was the co-founder of the world-famous BLOK group in 1924, a loose association of Cubists, Constructivists and Suprematists, including Malevich (whose students Kobra and Strzeminski had been), as well as El Lissitzky. After Strzemisnki’s dismissal from the Higher Art School, two events followed: firstly, his students’ exhibition was destroyed by hooligans hired by the State Authorities; then came the enforced closure of the Neoplastic Room in the Museum in Lodz, which Strzemisnki had opened in 1948 (and included five Spatial Compositions by Kobro, who nevertheless was not invite to the opening). Further humiliation followed: he was thrown out of the Artists Union, barring him from buying any more painting materials. Since food was only obtainable on ration cards for the employed, his status as unemployed meant that he was reduced to starving. Although his students tried to find odd jobs for him, Hania even getting arrested, Strzeminski’s body eventually gave up just after Christmas 1952. Whilst Wajda concentrates on the last years of Strzeminski’s life, there is certainly another story to be told: daughter Nika has published a memoir of her parents “Love, Art and Hatred” in 1991.

César-winning (The Pianist) DoP Pawel Edelman’s resplendent visual style records the hardship of the post-war years, and the bitter hounding of a great artist by a posse of petit-bourgeois functionaries, who hide behind their orders from above. The Stalinist regime robs everything from Strzemisnki: even his love for the cinema, which he leaves with his daughter, after having to watch an infuriating propaganda newsreel. An Afterimage is the visual impression that remains on the retina after viewing an image: what will be remembered from Andrzej Wajda’s work is not the narratives that cleverly navigate through Stalinist restrictions and bans, but the memory of his fight to record the truth behind the events in over fifty films that he made from the 1950s onwards. In AFTERIMAGE Wajda drives his last spear into the heart of the Stalinist monster. AS

SCREENING DURING KINOTEKA POLISH FILM FESTIVAL | 17 MARCH TO 5 APRIL 2017

Another Mother’s Son (2017)

Best known for her TV work and the dire docudrama Diana: Last Days of a Princess, writer Jenny Lecoat unearthes another wartime story and this time one close to her own heart. Set on the island of Jersey in 1940 it explores the life of her great aunt and war widow Louisa Gould (Jenny Seagrove) who took in a young Russian prisoner of war in the final days of the Second World War.

Directed for the big screen by Christopher Menaul (Summer in February) with a decent British cast this painterly period piece conveys the community spirit of the islanders who were forced to live in reduced circumstances in the only part of the British Isles occupied by the Nazis. The wartime storyline lends itself to some rich moments of drama and gentle comedy but tension soon mounts in the third act when reality bites in a shocking denouement where the tone suddenly shifts to melodrama as Jenny Seagrove rather hams it up as she is overtaken by unexpected events.

ANOTHER MOTHER’S SON would work really well as a TV drama so it’s unclear why the producers have decided to give it a theatrical release but the significance of the true story, set to Mario Grigorov’s rousing original score; the lushly verdant landscapes of Jersey and some quietly moving performances from Seagrove (as the resourceful but cavalier Gould ), Julian Kostov (the impetuous Russian POV known as Bill), and Ronan Keating (rather appealing as Louisa’s brother Harold) give this tale of love, loyalty and betrayal a resonance that many may find deeply affecting. MT

ANOTHER MOTHER’S SON IS ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 24 MARCH 2017.

After Louie (2016) | BFi Flare

Dir.: Vincent Gagliostro | Cast: Alan Cumming, Zachary Booth, Sarita Chadhury, Everett Quinton | USA | 100 min.

First time director/co-writer Vincent Gagliostro explores the current LGTB scene in New York, with this rather episodic yet unsentimental portrait of three different generations of gay men.

Centred around painter turned video filmmaker Sam Cooper (Cumming), has recently made a film about his dying friend, an important campaigner in the 80s and 90s. At the age of 55, Cooper’s apparent midlife crisis leads him to embark on an affair with the much younger Braeden (Booth), who is living with a boyfriend who is HIV positive. After a night of passionate sex, Braeden is very surprised to find 500$ in his trainers: he was in it for the fun, whilst the older man, rather cynically, saw it as a transaction. Cooper the hearts of the audience, when he criticises a couple of recently married friends, for their “white middle-class values, being traitors to the gay men who died in the last century” – this is particularly offensive, since one of them is black – and Sam is the stereotypical white, wealthy middle-class artist. Meanwhile, Cooper continues to pay Braeden for his sexual favours – a moot point with his live-in boyfriend – he meets up with his ex-college teacher Julian (Quinton), who is trying hard to age gracefully. The only voice of reason in this mayhem of contradictory emotions comes from Maggie (Chadbury) a black mother.

AFTER LOUIE doesn’t quite hang together despite some insightful moments. Visually weak and weighed down with verbose dialogue, it comes across more like a work in progress than the finished article. AS

BFI FLARE FILM FESTIVAL | 17 MARCH – 27 MARCH 2017

Kinoteka Polish Film Festival 2017 | 17 March – 5 April

KINOTEKA POLISH FILM FESTIVAL is back for its 15th Edition showcasing the latest films from Poland in an enticing programme that includes a tribute to the late and great post-war legend ANDRZEJ WAJDA and a celebration of 70 YEARS OF POLISH ANIMATION

During his impressive career spanning 7 decades and 56 films, Andrzej Wajda achieved international critical acclaim, winning a BAFTA and César Award (for Danton), both a Palme D’Or (Man of Iron) and Jury prize (Kanal) at Cannes, a Fipresci Prize at Venice (Ashes & Diamonds) a silver bear at Berlin for his lifetime contribution to cinema plus multiple lifetime achievement awards including Camerimage and the European Film Awards as well as winning Best Film at the Polish Film Awards (Katyn). He directly influenced a generation of filmmakers including Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, Francis Ford Coppola and Agnieszka Holland (who assisted him on Man of Marble). His final film Afterimage (2016) has been chosen as Poland’s official nominee for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award, a fitting tribute to the most revered Polish filmmaker (above left).

The Barbican Cinema and Close Up Cinema screening two complementary short retrospective seasons of Wajda’s films including rarely screened titles such as A Generation (1955), The Promised Land (1975) and Danton (1983) as well as iconic classics including Ashes and Diamonds (1958) (left) and his late masterpiece Katyn (2007).

In the New Polish Cinema Strand KINOTEKA will show the UK premiere of Marcin Koszalka’s psychological thriller The Red Spider (2015), described in the Karlovy Vary programme as “an intricate story of the fascination with evil that hides in places we would never expect, and there will be an opportunity to see Koszalka’s short documentary films including the autobiographical: Such a Nice Boy I Gave Birth To; about living with his verbally abusive parents. An in-depth exploration of the relationship between a 53 year old man and his mother; Til It Hurts (2008). And a long short documentary User Friendly Death (2007) that examines what actually happens after death, in a Polish funeral parlour and crematorium.

There will be another chance to see one of the most shocking teenage thriller’s of 2016 Playground that echoes the tragic tale of Jamie Bulger in a rural Poland, and captured critics’ attention at last year’s London Film Festival. Don’t miss Jan P Matuszynski’s Locarno festival debut The Last Family that tells the real-life story of a fractious, dysfunctional family living on a bleak Warsaw housing estate and depicts the physical and emotional claustrophobia of their family dynamic. Michal Rosa’s multi-awarded Happiness of the World, a painterly comedy portrait of a journalist’s experiences in 1940s Silesia (main picture).

In this year’s Polish Masters Rediscovered strand KINOTEKA shines the spotlight on the incredible story of Polish filmmaker Wanda Jakubowska, the first prominent female figure in Polish film history. Jakubowska started her film career in the 1930s, during the war she was arrested in 1942 for being an active member of the Polish Resistance and imprisoned at Auschwitz for the rest of the war. The ICA will screen her landmark 1948 film, The Last Stage, which won the Crystal Globe at Karlovy Vary. Based on her experiences at Auschwitz and in part shot on location, it is considered one of the most harrowing and immediate holocaust films ever made. The retrospective programme will also screen her post-war East German/DEFA production of Encounter at Twilight (1960). An expressionistic drama about a Polish pianist returning to the West German town where she had previously lived as a ‘forced labourer’ after the war, Jakubowska’s film was one of the highlights of the Post-war German Cinema retrospective programme screened this year at Locarno.

Before the Second World War, animated cinema was practically unknown in Poland until Zenon Wasilewski emerged as the pioneer of animated films. Best remembered for the groundbreaking animated puppet film In the Time of King Krakus (1947), now recognised as the first animated film in the history of the Polish School of Animation. KINOTEKA will be celebrating 70 years of Polish Animation with an extra special Closing Night Gala event at the Barbican Hall with a programme of classic films from the Polish School of Animation set to a specially commissioned live score, performed by leftfield indie band British Sea Power who have been previously responsible for a series of acclaimed film scores including Robert J Flaherty’s classic Man of Aran and Penny Woolcock’s From The Sea To The Land Beyond.

KINOTEKA POLISH FILM FESTIVAL | 17 MARCH – 5 APRIL 2017

A Date for Mad Mary (2016) | BFi Flare

Dir.: Darren Thornton; Cast: Seana Kerslake, Tara Lee, Charleigh Baily; ROI 2016, 82 min.

The feature made for TV debut of director/co-writer Darren Thornton, is a lively but somehow implausible story about a young girl suffering from arrested development. Conventional camerawork doesn’t help with DoP Ole Bratt Birkeland’s images looking tired along with the very clichéd casting.

Mary (Kerslake) has just left prison after a six-month stretch for disfiguring another inmate’s face. In her late teens, Mary, wearing her working class background on her sleeve, doesn’t want to grow up but she has outgrown her role of the rough Tom-Boy ‘in Perpetua’. Her best friend Charlene (Bailey), is about to get married to an older, middle-class man. In spite of many denials, Mary is jealous of Charlene and somehow dreads the wedding in which she is one of the bridesmaids, having to give a speech. More and more isolated, at odds with her self as much her environment, Mary manages to ostracise nearly everyone – except for Jess (Lee), the wedding photographer, who is also a talented singer. After a passionate night, the two very different women deal in their own way with their relationship: Jess, introvert and sensitive, questions Mary’s adoration for Charlene, telling her that she is just competing with her friend, whilst Mary, in her very abrasive way, soon manages to alienate Jess with her loutish behaviour.

Despite of being a decent stab at a Lesbian romance, the drama’s lack of authenticity lets it down: Mary is shown as being so relentlessly awful it’s impossible to imagine that anybody would like her, let alone fall in love with her and the telegraphed happy-ending not helping matters, A Date for Mad Mary is often very embarrassing, and much less funny than the filmmakers imagined. AS

SCREENING DURING BFI FLARE FILM FESTIVAL 17-27 MARCH 2017

Bfi Flare Film Festival 2017 | 16-26 March 2017

The 31st Edition of BFI Flare is back on 16th March. This year once again promises to be provocative, playful and politically engaged – appealing to both straight and LGBT audiences – a number of World, International and European Premieres are on offer. BFI Flare is absolutely the place to see the best new LGBT cinema first.”

Opening with the World Premiere of Fergus O’Brien’s BBC Production AGAINST THE LAW (left) at BFI Southbank. The Festival closes with the International Premiere of Jennifer Reeder’s SIGNATURE MOVE at BFI Southbank. The Centrepiece Screening of the 2017 Festival is the European Premiere of TORREY PINES, a psychedelic stop-motion animation about a child grappling with gender identity and a schizophrenic mother. And there will be two World Premieres on offer as Special Presentations: the new UK web series, DIFFERENT FOR GIRLS, a smart, sassy, sexy multi-layered lesbian drama, directed by award-winning Festival alumni Campbell X and AFTER LOUIE starring Alan Cumming as a New York artist whose life is turned upside down by an encounter with a much younger man.

LGBT still people struggle for basic human rights in many countries, so BFI Flare presents a selection of films and events which explore their experiences around the world.

OUT OF IRAQ (dirs. Eva Orner and Chris McKim) is an outstanding documentary about the forbidden relationship of two Iraqi young soldiers at the height of the Iraq war.

THE PEARL OF AFRICA (dir. Jonny von Wallström) follows the story of Cleopatra Kambugu, the first out transgender woman in Uganda (left).

As part of the UK/INDIA 2017 Sridhar Rangayan, the Director of Kashish Mumbai International Queer Film Festival will attend BFI Flare and take part in an event exploring LGBT film and television culture in India, Once again the festival is divided into a trio of strands for ease of reference

BFI FLARE: LONDON LGBT FILM FESTIVAL, 2017 FULL PROGRAMME

H E A R T S includes films about love, romance and friendship. We recommend:

HANDSOME DEVIL, fresh from Sundance comes John Butler’s drama which has Andrew Scott as a witty Irish charmer which charts the unlikely friendship between an isolated gay teen and his hunky rugby playing roommate.

HEARTLAND, Maura Anderson’s elegant and assured debut is a powerful examination of love and loss and tells the tale of Lauren, who is forced to return to live in rural Oklahoma following the death of her girlfriend.

DEAR DAD: (dir. Tanuj Bhramar) in India-set a father and son move closer in a bittersweet road movie.

BEING 17: André Techiné’s powerful and affecting tale of two young boys in their last year of high school, co-written by Celine Sciamma (Tomboy, Girlhood) – review

SEVENTEEN: the pain and heartache of young love is laid bare in Monja Art’s hugely accomplished second feature.

B O D I E S – features stories of sex, identity and transformation.

THE UNTAMED: see review

MILES : Nathan Adloff’s winning gay teen movie.

HANDMAIDEN: Park Chan Wook’s ravishing oriental upstairs/downstairs tale of deception inspired by Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith

BODY ELECTRIC (left). Marcelo Caetano explores the casual encounters of a handsome young man in contemporary Brazil.

THE ORNITHOLOGIST – see review

BELOW HER MOUTH; an entirely female crew create a no holds-barred depiction of what happens in the first few days of two women falling in love.

RAISING ZOEY; Dante Alencastre’s documentary follows a strong family who demonstrate how open mindedness and love can pave the way for a joyful transition for their 13-year-old Zoey.

IT’S ONLY THE END OF THE WORLD – review

THE TRANS LIST; Timothy Greenfield Sanders returns to BFI Flare with The Trans List, in which some of the world’s most prominent transpeople, including Caitlin Jenner and Laverne Cox, tell their stories.

M I N D S features reflections on art, politics and community.

THE SLIPPERS: Morgan White chronicles the world’s most recognisable pair of shoes in this documentary about Dorothy’s iconic ruby footwear in The Wizard of Oz.

TWO SOFT THINGS, TWO HARD THINGS; Mark Kenneth Woods sensitively observes the complexities of LGBT life in Canada’s remote Arctic Inuit population.

LAST MAN STANDING (dir. Erin Brethauer) is a beautifully made documentary charting the life of eight long-term survivors who live with AIDS.

THE UNTOLD TALES OF ARMISTEAD MAUPIN: a documentary about the much-loved author of Tales of the City

ORLANDO: THE QUEER ELEMENT: Sally Potter’s delicious visual feast adapted from Virginia Woolf’s tale of gender identity through the ages

BFI Flare also includes a wide range of events, talks and debates.

And music-wise the BFI Flare joins forces with interactive theatre company Clay & Diamonds for Orlando: The Queer Element, an education event which uses Sally Potter’s film and Virginia Woolf’s text to allow audiences to step inside a world that breaks apart traditional boundaries between science and art and explore notions of gender and sex from the Elizabethans through to 2017.

Tickets NOW ON SALE | 16 -26 MARCH 2017

The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism (2016)

Dir: Phil Grabsky | Narrator: Gillian Anderson | US | Art Biopic |

After a look at French Impressionism, director and producer Phil Grabsky takes his camera across the Atlantic to explore the American Impressionist movement in a study that follows on from Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse (2o16). Once again, Grabsky explores galleries and gardens up and down the US, France and Britain to offer insight and enrich his film with sumptuous visuals. But although resplendent in its subject matter, this doesn’t quite live up to his previous documentary both from the quality of the narrative and in the commentary provided by curators and talking heads.

In America the Impressionist movement covered almost four decades and was rooted in a deep held desire to preserve nature by a largely rural nation that underwent rapid industrialisation towards the end of the 19th Century.

Grabsky shows how the origins of American Impressionist can be traced back to France, and, in particular, to French art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel who arrived in New York at the end of the 1880s with a massive stock of impressionist works which he had not been able to sell back home where their counter cultural nature faced harsh opposition to conventional art community. The avant-garde canvasses provided inspiration and captured the imagination of American artists who beat a path back to Europe and the home of Monet in Giverny where they developed a new strain of Impressionism, changing the course of American art forever.

Impressionism had been met with ridicule in the salons and galleries of France but American dealers were now rich on the profits of industrialisation and snapped up the works in a buying frenzy. This all coincided with a time of urban renewal and regeneration when horticulture and landscape design lead a drive to improve the amenity value of the built environment in the form of parks and gardens that provided green spaces and fresh air to the new cities and towns. These in turn provided inspiration for the middle classes who were keen to re-create a ‘rus in urbis’ that reminded them of their rural past and provided inspiration for the future. Women were becoming highly educated and increasingly independent and sought to copy the fashionable ideas of Gertrude Jekyll, Lawrence Weaver and William Robinson in their homes, gardens designs and their painting, not only as a recreational activity but also as a pathway to spiritual renewal. MT

The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism features the sell-out exhibition The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism and the Garden Movement, 1887–1920 that began at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and ended at the Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, Connecticut.

ON RELEASE FROM 23 MARCH 2017 | FOR TICKETS TO A SCREENING NEAR YOU, CLICK HERE OR SELECT YOUR LOCATION ON THE MAP

Fashion In Film Festival 2017 | 11 – 26 March

Fashion In Film celebrates its Tenth Anniversary throughout London with a selection of rare and exciting screenings, talks and an exhibition exploring the potent visual means through which film can break away from known reality and herald new worlds of the future or conjure up and celebrate a sumptuous visual past.

The programme showcases an eclectic array of well-loved and neglected features, documentaries and shorts. Discover or revisit Alain Resnais’ LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD, Richard Massingham’s wartime propaganda IN WHICH WE LIVE, Nick Knight’s early fashion film SLEEP.

TONY TAKITANI (2004) The Hoxton, Holborn 18.30, Monday 13 March

BLACK TIE The Hoxton, Holborn, 18.30 + AS DREAMS ARE MADE OF – Tuesday 14 March

IKARIE XB-1 (1963) Prince Charles 20.45 + EVERYTHING BUT EVERYTHING IN BRI-NYLON – 14 March

THINGS TO COME (2016), Prince Charles Cinema, 20.45 – 15 March

DON’T LOOK NOW (1973) Picturehouse Central, 18.30 + CHILDHOOD STORAGE, 16 March

LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD (1961), Picturehouse Central, 21.00, 16 March

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2001) Curzon Soho, 18.00 – 17 March

CLEO FROM 5 – 7 (1962) The Hoxton, Holborn, 20.45 – 17 March

VERTIGO (1958) Curzon Soho, 15.00 + THE PERFECT EMBRACE – 18 March

BEYOND THE ROCKS (1922), Rio Cinema, 13.00 – 19 March

SOLARIS (1972) Curzon Bloomsbury, 20.30 – 19 March

THE COLOUR OF POMEGRANATES (1969) Curzon WC1, 18.30 – 20 March

AELITA: QUEEN OF MARS (1924) Genesis Cinema, 20.30 – Tuesday, 21 MARCH

PRINCESS RACOON (2005), Curzon Soho, 20.30

TALES OF MANHATTAN (1942), 20.30 Genesis Cinema + In Which We Live – 24 March

BARBARELLA (1968), Barbican Centre, 14.00 – 25 March

HOLY MOTORS (2012) Barbican Centre, 16.00 (right) – 25 March

THE INFERNO UNSEEN Henri-Georges Clusot’s unfinished last film Barbican Centre, 16.00 – 26 March

FASHION ON FILM | 11 – 26 MARCH 2017 full programme AND TICKETS

The Good Postman (2016) | Human Rights Watch Film Festival

Dir. Tonislav Hristov | Finland/Bulgaria 2016, | Doc | 82 mins.

In a remote village deep in the Bulgarian countryside only 36 people turned up to vote in the local elections. Great Dervent is crumbling to the ground and clearly on its last legs but resourceful local postman Ivan has a regeneration plan. Wealthy Syrian refugees have left traces in the decrepit school building in their search for a new home, and Ivan suggests to the villagers that they all gather round and welcome the newcomers into their community. Some agree but some are sceptical that the refugees will take over the few remaining jobs and prove a threat with their ‘criminal’ ways. And who can blame these hospitable and decent people who are used to their own kind and unaccustomed to outside influences?. There is no internet here but the media has not helped matters, whipping up a sentiment of zenophobia with negative TV reportage that fuels the growing climate of ultra-right nationalism.

Glowing with the bucolic splendour of this lush land in the extreme South on the border with Turkey, Tonislav Hristov’s documentary is cinematic and soulful in tone, but very much along similar lines as the recent Ukrainian Cowboys (2016). Ivan the postman does not only deliver letters but also tea and sympathy to the ageing villagers, even doling out advice on water bills and medical help, he fervently believes the Syrians are a good thing: “Together, between us, we’ll create a good environment in the village”, “there will be children and they will laugh”.

Typically it is the latest immigrants to the village who are the most hostile about Syrians and other newcomers. Ukrainian wayfarer and recent arrival Halachev has taken a strident anti-immigration stance, considering his own credentials. Setting up a cranky electric organ on the common he preaches a negative diatribe: “Bulgaria for Bulgarians, the Syrians are worse than Gypsies”.

Hristov’s rather rambling but watchable documentary is accompanied by a mournful occasional score of folkmusic. It is a sad and rather pitiful story that contrasts sharply with the region’s peaceful and gently rolling countryside. As Ivan’s kindly wife sighs: “you remember a man for his goodness. People danced. Now nothing”. And clearly Ivan is a good and persevering man who will be remembered for his generosity of spirit in a fight that very much connects to a global narrative of survival for small communities all over the world. MT

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH FESTIVAL | 6 – 17 March 2017

In the Mood for Love (2000) |Faa yeung nin wa | Fashion in Film Festival

Dir: Wong Kar-Wai | Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung | Romantic Drama | 98min

Wong Kar-Wai’s subtle (and only) masterpiece is a paean to disillusioned romantics everywhere. The mournfully reflective mood piece riffs movingly on what should have been or what could have been for two loves in 1960s Hong Kong. Tony Leung’s quietly seductive Chow Mo-wan is a journalist who moves into the same cramped apartment building as Maggie Cheung’s elegantly graceful personal assistant, Su Li-zhen. Attraction is mutual but tentatively discrete allowing us to reflect and muse on our own romantic encounters: deception, loneliness, loss and heartache. And as the two tease out the barest details of each other’s existence it emerges that their respective spouses are possibly having an affair. But the overarching theme of the film lies in the suggestive longing of love rather than its lustful consummation.

Maggie Cheung sashays seductively in beautifully cut cheongsams, her coal black hairdo caressing her high-cut collars. Tony Leung is a dreamy matinee idol with soulfully suggestive eyes and hand tailored suits. Sensuality smoulders as Christopher Doyles’ voyeuristic camera lingers on them longingly in chiaroscuro shadows and hues of crimson, lime and turquoise. Their sylph-like bodies caress the dimly lit corridors yet they glide past each other – oceans apart, their longing palpable. So much is left unsaid in a film that speaks volumes with its cinematic language and its elegaic cello score. And Nat King Cole croons cruelly with his Spanish words “Quizas, quizas, quizas”. Only perhaps.

The support characters are sketched out in deliberate crudeness leaving the central couple cocooned in their unfulfilled desire: the landlady Mrs Suen plays mahjong-mad all afternoon oblivious to Su’s predicament, her boss is occupied with his own affair. Chow’s crass colleague at work Ah Ping is lost in his own troubles. Are they too polite; bound up in old school etiquette – or simply too unsure of each other’s feelings to take things further?.

The Fado-esque finale is both heart-rending and, in part, revealing, as Chow whispers his unexpressed desires and regrets into a stone oracle at Cambodia’s Angkor Wat temple. Sadly, the film’s sequel 2046 fails to develop the narrative in any satisfactory form. MT

CURZON SOHO | FRIDAY 17 MARCH 2017 | FASHION IN FILM FESTIVAL

The Red Spider|Czerwony Pajak (2015) | Kinoteka 2017 | 17 March – 5 April

With a quiver of macabre shorts and documentaries under his belt, Krakow-born filmmaker Marcin Koszalka is one of contemporary Poland’s most interesting talents and gathers around him an award-winning design crew.. Inspired by real events, his first fiction feature is a stylishly pristine and cryptic affair that delivers its sinuous storyline in a tightly-paced 90 minutes.

There are sinister things going on in communist Krakow in 1967. In a snowbound park, champion diver, medical student and dutiful son Karol Kremer discovers the multilated body of a teenage boy on his way home. In the shadows, lurks a man in a beret and Karol follows him home to discover he is the local vet, Lutek. The nightly news announces the 11th victim of a serial killer, a young boy. But Karol (Filip Plawiak) is hardly a straightforward chap himself and clearly a fantasist who becomes obsessed with the murders, visiting Lutek (Adam Woronowicz) with his ailing pet terrier (who he has pre-poisoned), and cross-examining him over the murders, which the vet doesn’t deny. Meanwhile, Karol is also conducting a slow-burning seduction of female photographer Danka who soon becomes the killer’s next victim in a frenzied hammer attack. Kremer is arrested as the prime suspect and bizarrely goes along with police inquiries, relishing the opportunity of becoming the centre of attention yet oblivious to the consequences.

More than just a film about serial killing, THE RED SPIDER is very much an evocative mood piece echoing unsettling political events of the time of widespread student protests with the government in disarray in the run-up to the Prague Spring in neighbouring Czechoslovakia. Koszalka’s immaculate camerawork echoes the chilly climate of sexual repression and uncertainty of the strictly Catholic country. Magdalena Dipont’s sets evoke the sleek minimalism of Sixties design in the interiors and street scenes. Although much of the narrative remains fairly enigmatic, Koszalka constructs a spider web of plausibilities that are not beyond reasonable doubt, and the froideur of perfectly-pitched performances adds allure to this his frigid thriller. MT

KINOTEKA 2017 | 17 MARCH 5 APRIL 2017

Beyond Words (2017)

Dir.: Urszula Antoniak; Cast: Jacub Gierszal, Stanislaw Chyra, Christian Löber, Justyna, Wasilewska; Netherlands/Poland 2017, 97 min.

Urszula Antoniak’s (Code Blue) fourth feature is a melancholic and moody portrait of Michael, a young, Polish born lawyer in contemporary Berlin who, in spite of his German citizenship, feels alienated in the superficially glamorous German capital. Luminously captured in ice-cold black-and-white by Dutch DoP Lennert Hillege, this is a modern version of Musil’s Man without Attributes.

Michael (Gierszal), blond and blue-eyed like a Napola graduate, is asked by his boss Franz (Löber) to take the pro-bono case of an African poet claiming asylum in Germany. But it turns out that the pair have met before and Franz has turned into a proud philosopher questioning the right of nationality with Michael who rejects the case when Franz reminds him of his own origins, commenting “You are very different when you talk Polish. Like a little boy”.

Out of the blue, Michael’s father Stanislaw (Chyra) appears at his doorstep. Stanislaw has been in hiding after some trouble with the authorities in Poland (it is not clear if these were pre-or past 1989), he doesn’t stay for long but his visit leaves his son more insecure than beforehand. Franz emerges an isolated and avoidant figure with few friends apart from a Polish waitress, Alina (Wasilewska from Ida) who, in vain, wants some commitment from him. His dilemma is perfectly illustrated in a short exchange with his father who asks if he feels accepted: “They can’t ignore me”, comes Michael’s reply. “But is that enough?” says the father. “For a start, yes”.

Antoniak emigrated from Poland to the Netherlands, and her own background obviously comes into play with her character Michael – who takes a while getting used to his father calling him by his given name of Michal. Clearly he is trying to bury his past, and apart from a yearly visit to his mother’s grave, he obliterates his Polish identity. But in spite of being a qualified lawyer, he remains an outsider, his friendship with Franz is very one-sided: Michael tries to copy him like a chameleon, without really liking what he sees. Franz, ironically, treats Michael like an exotic animal but never as an equal. Apart from a sequence towards the end, Michael controls himself rigidly, he treats himself like a work in process. In spite of a weak ending, Beyond Words is a fascinating study of estrangement in a place where the past is barely concealed under a forced modernity. Michael lives an a-historical life in Berlin, ignoring his roots, not wanting to be reminded that he too was once an immigrant. His brittle personality allows him to function in his job; but he is indifference personified.

KINOTEKA FILM FESTIVAL 2018 | LONDON

The Salesman (2016) | Cannes Winner: Best script and Actor

Director/Script: Asghar Farhadi | Drama | Iran | 127min

Asghar Farhadi is best known for his enigmatic drama A Separation (2011). This was a film that impressed the arthouse crowd with its slowburn intensity gradually building to a shocking final. About Elly (2009) followed with slightly less acclaim and The Salesman fits comfortably into the Farhadi groove. It’s a good film but not a great one. Starring the same lead as his Fireworks Wednesday (2006) the superb Taraneh Alidoosti, it explores a similar premise and now universal theme: that something familiar and safe is now fraught with uncertainty and the resulting chaos provides the testing ground for the protagonist’s integrity, or lack of it.

There’s an artificial and rather forced quality to The Salesman, a tale of Tehrani bourgeoisie: Rana (Alidoosti) is a housewife and Emad (Shahab Hosseini who won Best Actor) teaches at the University. They both enjoy the theatre and have joined an acting group staging Arthur Miller’s ‘American Dream’ play Death of a Salesman when the film opens. Emad gets the lead part of failed salesman Willy Loman and Rana – his wife -Linda. But events are waylaid by an horrific structural collapse at the couple’s apartment block and they are forced to move out into alternative accommodation, provided by another member of their group. The previous occupier has been involved with some unsavoury characters who swing by regularly at all hours of the day and night. And one day Rana accidently opens the door to one such individual. This paves the way for some startling unpleasantness as Farhardi mixes scenes from the American play with the couple’s sombre reality. The normally restrained Emad starts to take on a rather self-congratulatory grandiosity as his masculinity is challenged, much as Willy Loman’s salesmanship is when he fails in his sales efforts- the similarities emerge between the two man, albeit in a rather fatuous way in the final twist.

Although The Salesman has possibly more mainstream appeal it lacks the subtle quality of A Separation. That said, this is an intelligent and watchable drama that provides a great deal to reflect on, winning the Best Script award at Cannes Film Festival 2016. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 11-22 MAY 2016 | Winner Best Script and Best Actor

Planet Single (2016) | Kinoteka 2017 | 17 March – 26 April

Dir.: Mitja Okorn; Cast: Agnieszka Wiedlocla, Maciej Suhr, Piotr Glowacki, Weronika Ksiezkiewicz, Tomasz Karolak, Michel Czernek, Danuta Stenka; Poland 2016, 136 min.

Director Mitja Okorn’s portrait of contemporary Polish society is a bitter farce about a nation in the grip of media mania, where everybody lives on their smartphones scrambling for public success.

Ania (Wiedlocla), a timid music teacher, and TV host Tomek (Suhr) could not be much more different at the outset. Fighting for a place in the sun on all levels: at school she has to share the gymnasium with boisterous boys, who drown out her class with their ball games, and at home, she is repressed by her mother (Stenka), who has not to come to terms with the death of her husband, and is needy for attention despite Ania sacrificing a career as a concert pianist to look after her.

Tomek is cocksure to begin with, but his bravado – usually in form of obnoxious, misogynist remarks in front of the camera – is hollow. The TV presenter relies totally on his producer Marcel (Glowacki), who he has copied since secondary school. Tomek picks Ania as one of his contestants for his TV Internet dating show, where he uses a puppet to represent the put-upon music teacher. Meanwhile, Ania’s best friend Ola (Ksiazkiewicz), married to the bone-headed Bogdan (Karolak), is set up by her step daughter, the teenager hoping to get rid of Ola. Ania ends up falling for Antoni (Czerneck), a grieving widower with a little daughter, who joins Ania’s class. But Tomek becomes jealous and wants to sabotage their relationship.

Just when the story is heading for happy-endings all around, destroying everything shown before, a surprising turn of events proves the shallowness of the characters who, sadly, prove to be as shallow and self-seeking as the premise suggests. Below the saccharine coating of the jokes and over-the-top gags THE SINGLE LIFE is suffused with bitterness, and there is a palpable sense of disillusionment with a society that encourages personal and professional success to be played out to the greatest possible audience. DoP Tomasz Madejski (The mighty Angel) conjures up brilliant images at TV the Station (with a viciously ruthless station boss), and behind closed doors, where people imitate their professional counterparts desperately searching for recognition and positive ratings, spinning their own stories with great aplomb. Enjoyable and illuminating, but at 136 minutes far too self-indulgent.

SCREENING AT KINOTEKA POLISH FILM FESTIVAL 2017

Personal Shopper (2016) | Cannes 2016 | Best Director 2016

Director: Olivier Assayas

Cast: Kristen Stewart, Nora vonWaltstätten, Anders Danielsen Lie

101mins | Fantasy drama | France

Paris has always had a sinister side inspiring Poe’s Murders in The Rue Morgue and Balzac’s Pere Goriot, a story of social realism set near the Pierre Lachaise Cemetery: French literature is redolent with macabre stories conjured up by the dark side of the capital. So it seems somehow feels fitting that Olivier Assayas should add other chilling chapter to this spectrally charged city with his ghost-themed story PERSONAL SHOPPER.

The film is creepy, charismatic and as quirkily inventive as Olivier Assayas who has explored differnet genres in his consummate career but never a ghost story. And Kristen Stewart its star shimmers here in a sombrely subtle turns that is as dark as its subject matter. She plays the unlikely named Maureen Cartwright, a 27 year old American girl who is bored with life and living out a meaningingless few months as a personal shopper to bitchy German media figure Kyra (Nora vonWaltstätten), while she mourns the death of her twin brother Lewis.

Paris is the capital of the fashion world and Assayas works this elegantly into the plot as Maureen glides through a series of glitzy ateliers garnering hand-styled garments for her boss and jewelled accoutrements from Chanel and Cartier. This is work that fills Maureen with ennui as she considers herself worthy of better things and idly sketches and researches her yen for the supernatural and the psychic experiments of Victor Hugo and the avant garde Swedish artist Hilma af Klint. On the sly, she guiltily slips into Kyra’s couturier gowns and fetishistic footwear before pleasuring herself on Kyra’s bed during her trips abroad. Kristen Stewart brings a gamine insouciant sensuality to her role that feels both menacing and intriguing in its sexual ambivalence.

Maureen is also developing her psychic skills in trying to contact her brother Lewis who died of a congenital heart condition in a dreary nearby fin de siecle mansion where they both grew up. Spending several spooky nights there a ghostly presence is felt as Maureen whispers inaudibly in scenes that are genuinely scary and entirely plausible given the undercurrent of glowering spitefulness that vibes through the increasingly dark narrative. This leads us to believe that Maureen is herself conjuring up the devil’s work. Olivier Assayas’s wickedly inventive vision is the most exciting thing so far at Cannes 2016. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE 17 March | CANNES FIL FESTIVAL 11-22 MAY 2016 | Best Director for Olivier Assayas

The Love Witch (2016)

Dir/Writer: Anna Biller | Cast: Samantha Robinson, Jeffrey Vincent Parise, Laura Waddell, Jared Sanford, Robert Seeley | US | Fantasy Drama | 118min

Anyone who enjoyed TVs Bewitched will appreciate this hyperrealist technicolour drama where the harmless Elizabeth Montgomery is replaced by a mysterious modern day minx who mixes potions and plots to make men fall in love with her, forever. Elaine (Samantha Robinson) is gorgeously winsome and perfectly poised until she retreats behind closed doors to a boudoir bursting with lurid love games and sexy underwear and where she shamelessly seduces her prey leaving a trail of dying and distraught menfolk wondering what on earth happened. Anna Biller’s clever script has nailed men’s egos to a cross and brazenly exposed their deepest anxieties of losing control, falling in love and ‘drowning in the oestrogen’ of their new found perfect playmate. Set in an imagined kitsch community in 1960s California, there’s also a whiff of Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale and Polanski’s Fearless Vampire Killers to Biller’s dark and mocking humour which also has a pop at women folk and their machiavellian ways when it comes to romance. Weird and possibly the most watchable satire you’ll see this week. A cameo from the wonderful Agnes Moorehead would have been the icing on the cake. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM FRIDAY, 10 MARCH 2017.

Lone Wolf and Cub series (1972-74) | Criterion UK Collection

The cult series of six films based on the internationally best-selling Japanese Manga Comics explore the vengeful antics of the shogun’s executioner Itto Ogami (Tomisaburo Wakayama) who is Japan’s answer to Charles Bronson. Roaming the countryside with his beloved boy offspring Daigoro (Akihiro Tomikawa) this is a chanbara sword and blood fest par excellence, delivering stylish thrills and a body count that beggars belief, played out in searingly violent and gracefully choreographed action sequences contrasting with tender moments between father and son. A must for collectors.

Sword of Vengeance; Baby Cart and the River Styx; Baby Cart to Hades; Baby Cart in Peril; Baby Cart in the Land of Demons; White Heaven in Hell have been impressively remastered for bluray in sparkling 2k restorations.

AVAILABLE ON 27 MARCH 2017 | COURTESY OF CRITERION UK

Elle (2016) |

Dir: Paul Verhoeven | Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Anne Consigny, Laurent Lafitte | Drama | 130min |

Dutch auteur Paul Verhoeven’s first French-language feature came to the Cannes Competition with magnificent Isabelle Huppert in a star turn that has just won her a Golden Globe for Best Actress. Slick and seductive, when it isn’t being violent in its glossy arthouse depiction of rape and twisted mysogyny, this is an upbeat, almost chipper tale of contemporary life, piqued with mordant humour. But what else would you expect from a director who brought us Basic Instinct and Showgirls?

ELLE features several strong female characters who are well-equipped to deal with their lives with sophistication and a certain élan. Wittily adapted from Betty Blue writer Philippe Djian’s novelIa, Isabelle Huppert plays Michele Blanc, a sexy and savvy businesswoman who is stylish and perfectly in control of her faculties. A leader in her field of video games, she deals with a masked intruder, who rapes her viciously in her sumptuous Parisian house, by bouncing back with disdain and aplomb – despite some serious injuries – not least to her self esteem. Brushing herself down and disposing of her elegant black decolté she gets back to work immediately with a mission to uncover her assailant. But the incident has sparked a surprising change in the way she responds sexually to the men around her. In the Cannes Film Festival press conference, the cast and directors refused to be drawn into a discussions concerning the controversial implications of the rape scenes. Ms Huppert said her character responded in a way that served the film’s narrative, and the work was purely fiction.

Verhoeven keeps the tension taut throughout the film’s running time – just proud of two hours. And the suspects are diverse but don’t intrude into the other themes of this intelligent comedy thriller. There is her suave neighbour Patrick (Laurent Lafitte) a banker whose marriage to his devout Catholic wife (Virginie Efira) provides some grounds for humour; ex husband Richard (Charles Berling), a wannabe novelist; Robert (Christian Berkel), the husband of her best friend and business partner, Anna (Anne Consigny) who both have sexual dalliances with her during the course of this entertaining drama – even her petulant son Vincent (Jonas Bloquet), who is dating Josie (Alice Isaac) a minx with whom he is expecting another man’s child, falls under the spotlight.

Perversely, the film’s comedy surfaces from incidents that could be perceived as troubling or negative in misogynist terms, yet the female leads respond with such self-possession and insight that the rape brings out greater weaknesses in the male characters rather than the female ones and Michele choses to pluck success and inner strength from the jaws of possible failure. This is very much a French film with its exuberant family crises, sexual complexity in the way the sparky characters treat each other with an attitude that many many consider rude or offensive.

Visually the film is a delight with Isabelle Huppert sporting a sumptuous couture wardrobe ranging from classy elegance to raunchy vamp. Academy award winner Anne Dudley’s original score pumps up the suspense adds gravitas but never detracting from the provocative atmosphere. MT

ON RELEASE AT PICTURESHOUSE FROM 10 MARCH 2017 | PREMIERED CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 11-22 MAY 2016

The Eccentrics: The Sunny Side of the Street (2015) | Kinoteka 2017

Dir: Janusz Majewski | Musical Drama | Poland | 112min

Janusz Majewski’s stylish musical drama sees a former soldier and jazz fan return to Poland after the Second World War where he forms a swing band striking a chord of optimism in dreary fifties Warsaw. The venture is a roaring success and soon Fabian (Maciej Stuhr) is dating Modesta (Natalia Rybicka), a beautiful and mysterious fellow musician who joins the players as a vocalist. Intoxicated by their newfound freedom and excited about the future, the two lovers are the talk of the town but Poland is changing as positive and negative influences from the West make their lives more complicated. Although slightly bogged down by its superfluous subplots, ECCENTRICS is well worth seeing for its exuberant jazz numbers sung in perfect tune by the leads (unlike the lovers in La La Land) and for its stunning period set design and costumes. MT

SUNDAY 26 MARCH 19.30 REGENT STREET CINEMA | KINOTEKA POLISH FILM FESTIVAL 2017

Two Rode Together (1961) | Eureka Masters of Cinema bluray release

Dir: John Ford | Writer: Frank S Nugent : Cast: James Stewart, Richard Widmark, Linda Cristal, Paul Birch, Henry Brandon, Ken Curtis, Annelle Hayes | 109min | Western | US

John Ford’s sagebrush Western stars James Stewart as a fierce but practical marshal who sets out with Richard Widmark’s hard-bitten cavalry officer to rescue and repatriate pioneer children captured a decade previously by the Comanche Indians. The straight-talking film pits ‘Cowboys’, Indians and Mexicans together in an 1880s frontier debacle that is a pale rider in comparison to Ford’s previous outing The Searchers (1956) but important in highlighting a little known period of American history, although the thrust of the narrative is more about the psychological impact on the captives rather than on their discovery and ‘liberation’. Based on the novel by Will Cook, and adapted for the screen by Frank S Nugent, TWO RODE TOGETHER shows how the original families miss their loved ones, whereas the captives have experienced ‘Stockholm syndrome’ and adapted to their new lives despite the hardships involved – particularly for the women. Re-integration proves problematic particularly for a beautiful Mexican woman, Elena de la Madriaga, played by Linda Cristal (best remembered for her role in High Chaparral) who is faced with discrimination and hostility on her return to the White community.

There are some pithy exchanges between Widmark and Stewart, and his lover Belle Aragon gives as good as she gets: “How many times do I have to tell you that I don’t want to even look at a man before five.” There is also much to enjoy in Charles Lawton Jr’s widescreen photography although some of the scenes feel a little too stagey. No classic, but well worth a watch for its storyline and central performances. MT

AVAILABLE ON BLURAY COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA | 13 MARCH 2017

Jacques Becker (1906-1960) Retrospective

Jacques Becker, who was born and died in Paris (1906-1960), only made thirteen feature films in a relatively short period of time, between 1942 and 1960. His legacy was small but perfectly-formed and rich in important titles such as Casque d’Or (Golden Helmet, 1952), Touchez pas au grisbi (Hands Off the Loot, 1954) and Le Trou (The Hole, 1960) more than enough to earn Becker consideration as one of the essential names of French cinema, who work was often classified as ‘transcendent realism’.

Becker eventually became a Communist, although he never made social cinema in the strict sense of the word, training in the cinema of the Popular Front and worked as an assistant to Jean Renoir.

His influences came both from the work of the author of La grande illusion (Grand Illusion, 1937), one of the eight films by Renoir on which Becker worked as an assistant, and from the classic North American movies made prior to World War II.He was a huge fan of King Vidor and Howard Hawks, for example. Hisstyle stemmed from a sort of classicism, soon moving into modernity, refining itself at neck-breaking speed during the Occupation and post-war period.

It comes as no surprise that the majority of the influential Cahiers du cinéma critics always defended him as being one of the few directors saved from the generalised attack on French post-war cinema: for Truffaut, Godard and company, enemies of academicism, Becker was always on a par with his mentor Renoir, with Jean Cocteau, Jean-Pierre Melville, Max Ophüls, Robert Bresson and Jacques Tati.

A lover of detail and meticulous both when recreating periods in the studio or shooting outdoors, stylist of the mise-en-scène and creator of unrepeatable atmospheres such as the romantic and violent Casque d’Or (Golden Helmet), Becker practiced impressionism and realism equally, paying as much attention to the historical periods of his tales as he did to the psychology of his characters. The “Cahiers du cinéma” critics saw in him the modernity that they themselves would put into practice on moving into production as part of the Nouvelle vague.

LE COMMISSAIRE EST BON ENFANT, LE GENDARME EST SANS PITIÉ / PITILESS GENDARME | JACQUES BECKER, PIERRE PRÉVERT (FRANCE) 1935

The police superintendent may be good-natured but he has got a lot on his plate with all the witnesses that come to make a statement before him. They are all crazier than the others and although the superintendent is not too bad at keeping his self-control, he might well go nuts after all with this bunch of lunatics.

LA VIE EST À NOUS

JACQUES BECKER, JEAN RENOIR, JACQUES B. BRUNIUS, HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON, ANDRÉ ZWOBADA, JEAN-PAUL LE CHANOIS (FRANCE) 1936

The film, shot at the initiative of the French Communist Party, mixes documentary with fiction. A Board of Directors is preparing a mass layoff; in a factory, a strike prevents the dismissal of the older workers; some peasants prevent the auction of the possessions of a poor farmer with the help of political activists; a young man out of work who cannot even eat receives the help of a group of communist young men.

DERNIER ATOUT

JACQUES BECKER (FRANCE) 1942
A man is murdered in an imaginary South American city. Two young detectives, Clarence and Montes, on a level pegging in their wrangle to see which of them will graduate as best student from police academy, are given the job of investigating the case. The deadlock will be broken once and for all.

GOUPI MAINS ROUGES / IT HAPPENED AT THE INN (1943)

In a small French village a woman is killed and her money stolen. Several members of her family, the Goupis, are suspected. In addition, the family is looking for the gold of its older member, who is about to die.

FALBALAS / PARIS FRILLS | Jacques Becker France 1945

Micheline arrives in Paris to prepare her marriage to Daniel Rousseau. There she falls in love with her fiancé’s best friend, dress designer Philippe Clarence, an impenitent ladies’ man who seduces and then leaves her, although he later finds out that he is deeply in love with her. (Available on Studiocanal later in 2017).

ANTOINE ET ANTOINETTE / ANTOINE AND ANTOINETTE (1946)

Antoine, who works in a printing house, and Antoinette, an employee at Prisunic, buy a winning lottery ticket. When they lose said ticket, their dreams seem to fade away.

RENDEZ-VOUS DE JUILLET / RENDEZVOUS IN JULY (1949)

Lucien is a young Parisian boy who dreams of becoming an explorer, but his parents expect him to lead a conventional life. After an argument with his father, Lucien leaves home with his friends; aspiring actors and jazz lovers, writers and film directors. Together they will hatch a plan to break free.

ÉDOUARD ET CAROLINE / EDWARD AND CAROLINE

Jacques Becker (France) 1950

Edouard is a poor pianist married to Caroline, a beautiful girl from a middle-class family who don’t approve of their marriage. Caroline’s uncle invites the couple to a party at which Edouard is to play the piano… a situation that will have them arguing before they know it.

CASQUE D’ OR | JACQUES BECKER (FRANCE) 1952

The members of Leca’s gang go to an open-air dance hall with their ladies. One of them, Marie (Signoret) meets Manda, a carpenter and friend of one of the members of the gang, with whom she falls in love. Her man Roland is jealous and Leca has also set his eyes on her.

ALI BABA ET LES 40 VOLEURS / ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES | Jacques Becker (France) 1953

Ali Baba, one of Cassim’s servants, is sent to buy a slave for his master. On the way back he falls in love with Morgiane, the slave. The caravan is attacked and this allows him to discover the cave of the forty thieves and the secret word to enter it.

RUE DE L’ESTRAPADE | Jacques (FRANCE) 1953

Although Françoise and Henri have a happy marriage, he is caught having an affair by one of his wife’s friends. Furious that he cheated on her, Françoise moves into the Rue de l’Estrapade, a district of bohemian artists. There she succumbs to the charms of Robert, a young and down-at-the-heel existentialist musician strapped for cash.

TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBi | Jacques Becker (France/Italy) 1954

Max, an ageing gangster, has come up with a master plan for a heist involving 50 million francs. His ex-girlfriend, who left him for Angelo, the head honcho of a rival gang, schemes to get her hands on the details of the plan and swipe the 50 million haul for herself. But Max is so discreet and impassive that it is impossible to get the information the easy way, so they decide to kidnap his sidekick and demand a ransom.

LES AVENTURES D’ARSÈNE LUPIN / THE ADVENTURES OF ARSÈNE LUPIN Jacques Becker (France/Italy)1956

Arsène Lupin, the gentleman thief, steals two masterpieces by Leonardo and Botticelli from the home of the President of the Council. Some time later, he tricks several jewelers to come to his house and then steals their gems. His next victims are a Maharajah and Kaiser William II.

LES AMANTS DE MONTPARNASSE / MODIGLIANI OF MONTPARNASSE | Jacques Becker (France/Italy) 1958
The film portrays the last years in the life of painter Amedeo Modigliani, his artistic peak, but marked also by alcohol and his love for Jeanne Hébuterne.

LE TROU | Jacques Becker (1960)

In prison, four inmates serving life sentences run into unknown territory when they involve a new prisoner in their elaborate escape plan plan. Becker collaborated with real life La Sante prisoners to add authenticity to his last film and died several weeks after completing the romantic drama.

JACQUES BECKER | BFI player | STUDIOCANAL Blu-ray release.

Human Rights Watch Film Festival | London 6-17 March 2017

Human Rights Watch Film Festival is thundering back to the BARBICAN, BRITISH MUSEUM and PICTUREHOUSE CENTRAL with a fresh and resonant array of award-winning features and documentaries that showcase shifting attitudes to Human Rights around the world today. In a programme that highlights “courageous resilience in challenging times” we hear from Chinese migrant workers; a teenager from Hong Kong; internet sleuths; the indigenous Mayan population in Guatemala; elderly women revealing historic sexual exploitation; a female squash player from Pakistan. All these films celebrate collective action and revolutionary voices, and activists’ triumph over oppression.

The Festival will open on 9 March at Picturehouse Central with Raoul Peck’s powerful I Am Not Your Negro and close on 17 March at the Barbican, with Zaradasht Ahmed’s immersive and uncompromising Nowhere to Hide, a first person account from a male nurse in one of the world’s most dangerous and inaccessible areas, Jalawla in Iraq.

Ivan is The Good Postman who is running for mayor and campaigning to bring life to his ageing and increasingly deserted Bulgarian village, by welcoming refugees and their families to settle there. With warmth, humour and humanity, the filmmaker Tonislav Hristov’s often surreal documentary, set in a forgotten village on a route for asylum seekers making their way through Europe, provides valuable insight into the evolving discussions that dominate international politics.

With uninhibited access Shimon Dotan’s The Settlers cracks open the world of Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank: their daily lives, their worldviews, and their position within Israel. The film captures the casual zealotry, racism, and untroubled certainty of many settlers in this contentious and controversial space. Dotan lays out the facts with extraordinary care and lucidity, allowing viewers to see the progression of actions and reactions that have led to the current volatile situation.

Two festival titles give pause for thought regarding the human cost of people’s dependence on electronic devices and the Internet. Heather White and Lynn Zhang will present the world premiere of their film Complicit, which follows factory workers harmed by exposure to chemicals in their work as they fight the Chinese electronics giant Foxconn. Led by migrant worker, Yi Yeting, who is struggling to survive his own work-induced leukaemia, he equips and empowers other sick factory workers to try to save lives and improve working conditions for millions of Chinese people, in the process confronting some of the world’s most profitable and recognised brands, among them Apple and Samsung.

Ideas of citizenship, privacy, and democracy are challenged to the very core in Nicholas de Pencier’s gripping Black Code. Based on Ronald Deibert’s book of the same name, the film follows international cyber stewards from the Toronto-based group Citizen Lab, who have documented how exiled Tibetan monks are attempting to circumvent China’s surveillance apparatus; Syrian citizens have been tortured for Facebook posts; Brazilian activists are using social media to livestream police abuses; and Pakistani activists have opposed online campaigns for violence against women.

Individual and collective voices are heard in three documentaries from Hong Kong, Guatemala and Egypt. Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower, which just won the audience award for World Cinema documentary at Sundance 2017 – follows Hong Kong’s most dissident teenager, Joshua Wong, now 20-years-old. Since 2011, Wong has rallied thousands of students to occupy the streets. Following teargas attacks, multiple arrests and an exhausting 79-day campaign to shut down Hong Kong’s financial district, Joshua moves on to the next phase of the movement – facing down the superpower from inside the government itself.

Pamela Yates’ gripping 500 Years documents the first trial in the history of the Americas to prosecute the genocide of an indigenous people, in this instance the majority Mayan population of Guatemala. Threatening the powerful and empowering the dispossessed, the trial exposed a world of brutality, entrenched racism and impunity, subverting the historical narrative of Guatemala.

In Tickling Giants, the director Sara Taksler follows Bassem Youssef (known as “the Egyptian Jon Stewart”) who in the midst of the Egyptian Arab Spring changed his career path from heart surgeon to full-time comedian. In a country where freedom of speech is becoming increasingly restricted with each regime change, Youssef and his courageous staff of young writers develop creative methods to non-violently challenge abuses of power. Enduring physical threats, protests, and legal action, the team members test how far they can take the joke.

In Ben Lear’s powerful documentary They Call Us Monsters, Juan, Jarad and Antonio, ages 14-16, face decades in prison in California, where juveniles older than 14 can be tried as adults for violent crimes. While incarcerated, they sign up for a screenwriting class and collaborate on a short film that collectively fictionalises their lives and dreams, allowing a remarkable insight into their minds and experiences.

The director Alexander Kuznetsov’s photographer’s eye and immense sensitivity for his subjects are beautifully evident in We’ll Be Alright, which reveals life inside Russian care and court systems. Yulia and Katia, now both adults, have lived their entire lives in care institutions in Siberia. Based on reports written when they were children living in orphanages, they had been labelled as unfit for life in the real world. Their dreams are simple – to gain independence and leave the neuropsychiatric institution that has become their prison – but a long and painful bureaucratic process forces them to meet nearly impossibly high standards for release.

The voices of women young and old are cause for celebration, inspiration and admiration in another three festival titles. In Erin Heidenreich’s Girl Unbound, the squash player Maria Toorpakai disguises herself as a boy in defiance of a Taliban law forbidding women to play sport. But when she hits puberty her gender is revealed, forcing her to leave her home after repeated death threats to herself and her family. The film follows Maria over several months as she represents Pakistan on the national team standing firm in her mission to carve her own identity and destiny with the support of her progressive father and family.

In The Apology and Child Mother we hear from the largely unheard voices of elderly women who share hidden stories of past exploitations.

In Tiffany Hsiung’s The Apology, the courageous resolve of Grandma Gil in South Korea, Grandma Cao in China, and Grandma Adela in the Philippines moves them to seize their last chance to share with their families and the world their first-hand accounts of the truth about theirs and others sexual exploitation and imprisonment as so-called “comfort women” by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. Despite multiple formal apologies from the Japanese government issued since the early 1990s, there has been little justice. These women seize their last chance to share first-hand accounts of the truth to ensure that this horrific chapter of history is neither repeated nor forgotten.

In Ronen Zaretzky and Yael Kipper’s Child Mother, conversations between mothers and their families reveal haunting histories of women forced into marriage as young children. Born into Jewish communities in Yemen and Morocco where child marriage was a culturally sanctioned custom, they were married as young as 12 and began to have babies of their own, often working day and night to support growing families and aging husbands. Through their children’s difficult but enlightening questions, the film exposes an aspect of child marriage and trauma that is rarely discussed: the impact on the family as a whole, an open wound passed on to subsequent generations.

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH FESTIVAL | Tickets go on sale Friday, 10 February 2017 | @hrwfilmfestival

The Creeping Garden (2015)

Dir: Jasper Sharp and Tim Grabham | Nature Doc | 84min | UK

“Being Slime Mould” a workshop where participants are actively encouraged to engage with this baffling organism and transform themselves into a ‘human’ slime mold”

THE CREEPING GARDEN is a feature length documentary exploring the work of fringe scientists, mycologists and artists who explore the extraordinary world of plasmodial slime mold, a single cell organism that has the ability to form into armies in search of nourishment. The slime mould is being used to explore biological-inspired design, emergence theory, unconventional computing and robot controllers and a chap called F. Percy Smith who pioneered the use of time lapse (or time magnification) photography to make a series of instructional films such as his 1931 masterpiece Magic Myxies (that followed The Bedtime Stories of Archie the Ant (1925).

Entirely learned while also being ironically ominous in tone, in a way that scratches at the realms of Sci-Fi, THE CREEPING GARDEN is geekdom at its best in completely avoiding a user friendly approach to its subject matter. Earnestly scientific in its approach, with a bizarrely tonic score (by Grizzly Man’s Jim O’Rourke), it endows the slime with human qualities, claiming that the impressively versatile organisms are capable of “emotional responses” and have been able to reanimate even after long periods of inactively due to unfavourable growth conditions.

International scientists are fascinated by the mould and its capabilities, but are singularly unable to convey this fascination to the viewer, who is unable to appreciate the weird beauty of the species, deriving only humour from the extreme intensity of the scientists’ fervour. Mark Pragnell spends many hours searching a forest for slime mold, occasionally taking photos to prevent people from thinking he is doing something strange – in his own words – when actually he is. Meanwhile, the experiment encouraging participants to engage with the organism: ‘Being Slime Mould’ was unable to gain critical mass for its experiment to be seriously considered groundbreaking. But the handful of participants did bond together in a way that was similar to that of slime mold behaviour, so it was not a complete waste of time. And the organism’s behaviour was also likened to a motorway network according to a Russian study.

Arcane and at times uneven, THE CREEPING GARDEN may not be everyone’s cup of tea but as far as slime mold documentaries go, this is unique and compelling, possibly providing hours of entertainment for afficionados and scf-fi enthusiasts or those of a nerdy persuasion. MT

AVAILABLE AT ARROWVIDEO@FETCH.FM | 13 MARCH 2017|

A SELECTION OF F. PERCY SMITH’S FILMS ARE AVAILABLE ON DVD THROUGH THE BFI

Uncertain (2016)

Dir.: Anna Sandilands, Ewan McNicol; Documentary; USA 2015, 82 min.

Uncertain is a town of 94 inhabitants that lies on the Texas side of the border with Louisiana. The Sheriff jokes:“You’ve got to be lost to find it.” Rumour has it that the only reason for its existence is that a surveyor made a mistake on the map. But debut directors Anna Sandilands and Ewan McNicol get the most of the gloomy atmosphere of the Bayonne – a heaven for lost souls.

The lake, which supports the town’s fishing industry, has an eerie quality: Southern Gothic, mysteries and forgotten crimes haunt the murky waters. McNicol says “we spent time with the lake like as we would with another character”. But the lake is in peril; it is being invaded by a species of parasitic waterweed, salvinia, which covers the whole water surface, killing the fish and blocking oxygen and light and doubling its surface area every two days. Scientists have found a way to eradicate the prolific weed by introducing weevils but anticipate it will cost the authorities a pretty penny.

The filmmakers follow three Uncertain denizens, all with a skeleton in their cupboard. They seem fitting protagonists in this atmosphere lingering doom. Henry, a man in his seventies, has been coming to terms with getting older and losing his wife. In his hot-tempered youth he killed a man in an interracial contretemps. Like many, Henry relies on the lake for his liveliehood, and a friend states categorically “if the lake dies, the town dies.” Wayne is also a killer who caused the death of a young man while under the influence and is now trying to put the past behind him by going back to his native roots, hunting the local wild boar. His prime target is the leader of the herd, a bull Wayne has christened ‘Mr Ed’. He becomes obsessed with the hog, treating him like a warrior. Zach is perhaps the saddest of the trio: a young man, anorexic, diabetic and alcohol dependent, he dreams about a future in Austin, but his poverty is keeping him in Uncertain. Even when he finally gets away, we see him in hospital being told that he will not see thirty-five if he goes on drinking. Traumatised by a mother who had to be incarcerated in a psychiatric ward, he has even lost any illusions about his future: ”Don’t dream, that’s not how you’re gonna be happy in life. I kinda pushed my dreams aside”.

UNCERTAIN is a respectful non-judgemental study of people living on the margins of US society and the filmmakers really convey this doleful, festering quality – synonymous with the current mood prevailing in the country. AS

UNCERTAIN is at the ICA from 10th March and On Demand from 17th March
www.uncertainfilm.com

Innocent Sorcerers | Niewinni Czarodzie (1960) | Kinoteka 2017

Dir: Andrzej Wajda | Drama | Poland | 87min

In early 1960s Warsaw, Bazyl (Tadeusz Lomnicki) is a young doctor who plays in a jazz band. He is a dreamer, not really unhappy, but indolent. His fake blond hair is one of the reasons for his popularity with women, but he is unable to commit to a relationship. At work, where he looks after the boxers of a state run club, he is equally bored. Only music seems to keep him alive, but afterwards he hangs around in the pubs, waiting for something to happen. Bazyl’s friend Edmund (Zbigniew Cybulski) hangs out with him during the long nights, hoping in vain to pick up one of Bazyl’s cast-offs. One evening, the two men set a trap for Edmund to get off with one of the girls, but the young Pelagia (Krystyna Stypolkowska) does not fall for it, and Bazyl – largely through boredom – spends the night with her. He leaves Pelagia the next morning, only to find her in his flat on his return: Bazlyl doesn’t want to acknowledge that he has fallen in love with her, neither does he want to show her any signs of affection. When she decides to leave, Bazyl lets her go against his better judgement.

Roman Polanski has a vignette in the film, playing bass. And although Wajda directed, the drama very much belongs to scripter, Jerzy Skolimowski’s; Bazyl being a prototype of Skolimowski’s hero in Walkover, who is like most of his protagonists, an outsider. INNOCENT SORCERERS is full of ironies and alienation. Bazyl and Edmund are running away from a society where they feel outsiders, but, equally, are not committed to anything else – they are directionless individuals, wasting their time. Hardly surprising, therefore, that Bazyl is no match for Pelagia, who looks through him from the start. Bazyl started out trying to manipulate Pelagia into Edmund’s arms, but ends up becoming her prey. Krzysztof Winiewicz’s camerawork shows melancholic images of a rather nondescript environment in 1960s Warsaw, the pubs are are as faceless as Bazyl’s studio flat. The characters seem to live in a void, only music keeping them alive. AS

KINOTEKA 2017 | 24 MARCH 19.30 | CLOSE-UP CINEMA

Man of Marble (1976-7) | Kinoteka 2017

Dir.: Andrzej Wajda

Cast: Jerzy Radziwilowicz, Krystyna Janda, Jacek Lomnicki

Poland 1977, 165 min.

Wajda had to wait 15 years between finishing the script with Aleksander Scibor-Rylski and the film’s production in 1976/77. Despite this, the fact that he was allowed to shot the film at all is a small miracle, considering that it is a frontal assault on the evils of Stalinism in a country still under the iron fist of Russia. MAN OF MARBLE is set on the line of Wolfgang Leonhardt’s famous book of the denunciation of Stalinism: “The revolution eats its children”. The victim in this case is a fictitious Stakhanovite worker, Mateusz Birkut, who in the early fifties laid 28,000 bricks in a shift, setting a record, which made him a (short-lived) hero. He becomes the subject of a young film student, Agnieszka, who chooses him as the subject for her diploma film. Soon it becomes apparent, that the authorities are not keen for Agnieszka to continue, and her project is stopped and the material confiscated. But the student does not give up, after finding and interviewing the ex-hero’s son Maciej (both father and son are played by the same actor, J. Radziwilowycz), she learns that Birkut senior has been dead for years, after falling from grace. Wajda wanted to end the film showing his death in the clashes in Gdansk in the early seventies, but the censors insisted on an open ending. (In MAN OF STEEL (1981) Wajda showed Birkut’s fate as he had planned for MAN OF MARBLE).

The beauty of this film lies in its complexity: Birkut is a submissive hero, believing in Stalinism, a system which would crush him. He is quite close to the young film student, who “re-discovers” him – only to be told, that her work too, is not needed. The label of “socialist hero” disguised the decency and humility of Birkut, his real qualities made him a hero, not his propaganda value for an inhuman system.

Wajda’s lucidity in making this contrast between the system and its idealistic followers, is even more valid today, because now, decades after the fall of Stalinism, it becomes clearer every day, that Stalinism had very little in common with Socialism but was just a tool of the Russian State for its expansion, in the same way, as its oligarchy today uses its economic power of capitalism, to supress and annexe its neighbouring states. AS

KINOTEKA POLISH FILM FESTIVAL 2017 | 25 March | Close-Up Cinema | 16.00

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A 2-DISC SPECIAL EDITION IS ALSO AVAILABLE AT SECONDRUNDVD.COM.

The Last Family (2016) |Ostantia Rodzina |Kinoteka 2017

Dir.: Jan. P. Matuszynski; Cast: Andrzej Seweryn; David Ogrodnik, Aleksandra Konieczna, Andrzej Chyra, Alicja Karluk, Magdalena Boczarska; Poland 2016, 122 min.

The debut feature of 32 year-old Polish director Jan P. Matuszynski is an emotionally harrowing and visually stunning tour-de-force, capturing the latter part of the life of the Polish post-surrealist painter Zdzislaw Beksinski (1929-2005). Brilliantly executed in details, in common with many biopics, it suffers from occasionally lacking cohesion in so far as that the scenes, however impressive, do not always hang together as a whole.

The most important aspect of The Last Family is the part we never get to see: Beksinski Senior actually painting (even though the flat is filled with his finished works). His art is hardly referred to, and during the lengthy episode of his life that forms the focus of this study, from 1977 to 2005, none of the Poland’s political changes are mentioned or in any way manifest themselves in the life of the family. Instead we are immediately thrown in at the deep-end: in 2005 the painter recalls disturbing phantasies in an interview, concerning a virtual reality in which he wants to have S/M games with Alicia Silverstone (artificially made taller by three inches). The narrative then flips back back to 1977 when the Beksinki parents Zdzislaw (Seweryn) and Zofia (Konieczna) take their son Tomasz (Ogrodnik) to his new flat, which is in a high-rise block opposite their own. It soon becomes clear that Tomasz keeps his parents busy: whilst professionally adapt – he is a club- and radio DJ, as well as a translator from English into Polish – his emotional growth seems to stunted, he permanently self-pities himself, relying on his parents for any domestic arrangements, and seems to be unable to love anybody but himself. He also seems unable to perform sexually, which is graphically displayed in a scene with his girl-friend Patrycja (Karluk).

His father, who obsessively tapes and videos his family, seems, in contrast, very placid and good-natured, even though, looking at his paintings we may doubt his inner peace. The family is held together by Zofia, who cares for the two men, in addition to the paternal and maternal grandmothers, both called Stanislawa. The only outside interloper is ex-pat Piotr Dmochowski (Chyra), who visits the painter from Paris, trying to sell his paintings in France. He is later banished on account of his unauthorised biography of the family, but after Zofia’s death, Zdzislaw allows him back into his life. After trying in vain to kill himself for twenty-three year, Tomasz succeeds finally at the end of millennium: his father, sitting beside his body, sarcastically congratulates his son. In a violent finale the painter becomes the victim of a young man, reminding us very much of Kieslowski’s A short film about Killing.

DoP Kacper Fertacz camera pictures the Beksinski’s through a peephole: giving us an intimate and voyeuristic view of proceedings. Tomasz’ place is shown the same claustrophobic way. Writer Robert Bolesto, basing his script on the painter’s recordings and diaries, surprises us with some unusual ideas: there is a scene where Tomasz is telling the inflight stewardess that his numerologist told him the plane would crash, but he would survive – which is shown to be true. The leading trio is brilliant, particularly Konieczna, whose Zofia is always keeping the balance of the family life and Andrzej Seweryn went on to win Best Actor at Locarno Film Festival 2016. The choice of music – among others Schnittke and Mahler at the finale – rounds up this apocalyptic and traumatic experience. AS

SCREENING SATURDAY 18 MARCH | 15.00 REGENT STREET CINEMA

KINOTEKA POLISH FILM FESTIVAL 17 MARCH – 5 APRIL 2017

500 Years (2017) | HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH FILM FESTIVAL

Dir.: Pamela Yates; Documentary, Guatemala 2017, 106 min.

500 YEARS is the final part of Pamela Yates Guatemalan trilogy, which started in 1983 with When the Mountains Tremble, followed by Granito: How to Nail a Dictator in 2011. The three chapters of 500 years explore the struggle of the indigenous Ixil Maya over the last half millennium, since South America was colonised by Spanish forces, destroying a culture much older than the one of the European barbarians.

Part one deals with the trial of General Rios Montt, which started in 2013. Montt had come to power with the help of the Reagan administration in 1982, and was responsible for the genocide in which 100 000 Maya citizens were killed and 45000 ‘disappeared’, just like in Argentina at about the same time. 626 villages were destroyed, the survivors mourn the death, often of their children, like the parents of Ines, who was killed aged 16, in combat against the military forces. Maya women were gang raped by soldiers; the filmmakers uncover the ruins of a former ‘interrogation centre’, were a special ‘Rape Room’ had been set up. The small town of Salquil Grande was burned down to the ground by the soldiers in 1982, but has been rebuilt since, and is now again a centre for resistance for Mayans. Montt, bearing an eerie resemblance to Auguste Pinochet, sits unmoved through his trial, whilst his lawyers try to sabotage the proceedings, even walking out. The witnesses, particularly the women, are heart breaking. Some can’t even look at Montt. But the general’s daughter, Zury Rios, is adamant that all witnesses are paid money to denounce her father. She soon sets herself up as the presidential candidate for the Viva Party. Interviews in the streets of Guatemala City prove her point of view: many citizens do not believe that genocide happened in their country.

Part two looks at the history of the country, starting with the foundation of a democratic Guatemala in 1944. Ten years later, Jacobo Arbenz, president of the Republic, who had instigated land reforms, was overthrown in a CIA coup, and later murdered in Mexico. An era of instability followed, escalating into a civil war, which lasted from1960 to 1996. By now, the Mayans had been forced from the most fertile land into the mountains. But since 2010, dam building and mining projects mean that they are driven from their land again with force. The gigantic infrastructure projects also threaten ecological turmoil.

Uprising’, the last chapter, is the most impressive: it shows the disposal of president Otto Perez Molina (a former Inspector General of the Armed Forces) from office, for corruption in 2014. Whilst Yates shows the Maya population, participating joyously in the demonstrations and blocking highways, the real reason for Molina’s resignation and imprisonment was that he had lost the support of the, mostly European, middle classes. They had looked on, whilst the health and education services of the Mayas had been cut by the government, but were in uproar when the same happened to them.

Nevertheless, 500 YEARS ends on an uplifting note, when the new generation of Maya fighters let fly a huge, multi-coloured kite in their mountain village: “When we die, we die in peace, because of the struggle we have been in in”. Unfortunately for them, the new president, Jimmy Morales (a former TV comedian), who was elected in 2015 with a majority of 67%, has denied that there ever was a genocide of the Mayans.
Shot mostly on eye-level by DoPs Melle van Essen and Rene Soza, 500 YEARS is a sobering history lesson. It is also a structural triumph, gathering all the information in 106 minutes. Roger C. Miller’s score is, appropriately, melancholic. A true milestone.

SCREENING DURING HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH FILM FESTIVAL |

https://youtu.be/jSZLszYAjOw

Afterimage (2016) | Kinoteka 2017 | 17 March -5 April 2017

The last work of Poland’s most revered postwar filmmaker, Andrzej Wajda (Promised Lands, Pan Tadeusz), is a fiercely committed obituary of Wladyslaw Strzeminski, one of his country’s most strikingly visionary contemporary artists, victimised by the communist regime all the way to his death in 1952. As played by Boguslaw Linda, whose features bear more than a passing resemblance to both Wajda and Strzeminski, this is a fitting end note to Wajda’s career; the filmmaker recently passed away at the age of 90, leaving a filmography largely dedicated to crucial moments and leading characters in the history of his country.

The film stands as an imposing monument to the memory of a great artist although it’s clearly a festival item per excellence – after all, no film event would want to miss the last work of a grand master. This is an essential addition to the tragic cultural history of the communist era in Eastern Europe and the disasters wrecked by this totalitarian rule. Since Wajda’s career was launched at about the same time this story takes place, his intimate knowledge of the background is not necessarily the result of thorough research but also an expression of personal frustrations and pain he experienced himself through long patches of his own artistic life.

Strzeminski, born in 1893 in Minsk, now the capital of Belarus, and educated in St. Petersburg, lost an arm and a leg in WW1, despite which he attended the First Free State Workshops in Moscow and was close to such ground- breaking avant-garde artists of that period as Malevich and Chagall. In 1923 he moved to Warsaw to become one of founders of the constructivist group Blok.

A scholar, theoretician and art historian, Strzeminski formulated the Unism theory, an artistic conception based on the integrity of the universe which considers the levels of artistic, scientific and cultural achievements as an indication of social development. Most of his ideas about art in general and visual arts in particular are to be found in his posthumous Theory of Vision, published by his students after his death.

Wajda’s film, written by Andrzej Mularczyk, picks Strzeminski up in 1949, when he is about to be fired from his teaching job at the Higher School of Visual Arts in Lodz over preaching a modernity strictly opposed to the populist demands of the Communist Party.

The film’s plot follows the regime’s systematic efforts to break down this headstrong, unbending artist who refused to compromise on any artistic grounds whatsoever. A chain smoker and man of great personal charm, exclusively dedicated to his art who, notwithstanding his disabilities, was living on his own at the time – apart from irregular visits from his teenage daughter – he carried on teaching his devoted students in as much as was tenable.

With his work systematically destroyed and obliterated, Strzeminski was gradually deprived of any income, fired from the Artists Union and even denied the right to buy paints. Pushed into utter misery and forced to accept degrading jobs, only to be kicked out of them as well, he collapsed one day on the street, was taken to a hospital where he died of tuberculosis in 1952.

Wajda, whose early films (Generation, Kanal, Ashes and Diamonds) are considered definitive portraits of Poland of that period and who clashed often throughout his long career with the Polish communist regime (on films such as Man of Marble), evidently felt strongly for Strzemynski and his fate, seeing in him a symbol of the creative artist crushed down by a narrow-minded, ferociously dictatorial regime which allows no digression.

Lynda, one of his country’s leading actors, who was associated with most of the great films coming out of Poland in the 80’s and 90’s – including Wajda’s own Man of Iron – is probably the perfect fit for the role, not only because of his obvious thespian gifts but also his physiognomy.

A remarkably neat, correct, and historically faithful picture, Wajda’s passionate veneration for Strzeminski clearly led to a rather didactic approach. Characters are not too deeply probed, there are heroes we admire, villains we detest and nothing much in between, but some scenes, such as the funeral of Strzeminski’s estranged wife, the sculptor Katarzyna Kobro, and the moment when he finds out about her death, a few days later, are truly moving.

DoP Pawel Edelman are, as always, exquisite, but the art direction fills the screen with freshly made, antiseptically clean sets, seemingly never lived-in before. This may be rather out of tune, but despite it, the film still stands as an imposing monument to the memory of a great artist. AS

Oscars 2017 | Best Foreign Language Film

In the super-sized build up to next year’s 89th Academy Awards – the following titles have been selected in the short-list for 2017. The winner was, of course, THE SALESMAN

TANNA – (Australia) is a tragic and magical love story whose implications ripple out into the wider world and connect us with the narrative of disappearing communities and remote tribes. Australian helmers Bentley Dean and Martin Butler make their first foray into narrative features in a stunningly cinematic film set in Vanuatu in the South Pacific and starring real villagers.

LAND OF MINE – (Denmark) Martin Zandvliet writes and directs this moving anti-war treatise that follows a young group of German POWs made the enemy of a nation, where they are forced to unearth two million landmines with their bare hands (Main image).

TONI ERDMANN – (Germany) The toast of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Maren Ade’s hilariously irreverent comedy has a bittersweet heart of gold – thanks to its tour de force performance from Austrian maverick Peter Simonischek who is made poignantly aware of the tragic legacy of his misjudged parenting skills by uptight daughter Ines (Sandra Huller).

THE SALESMAN – Asghar Farhadi tells a grim story of a couple’s deteriorating relationship in contemporary Teheran.

A MAN CALLED OVE – Swedish director Hannes Holm’s literary-based dark comedy explores themes of immigration, loneliness and old age in exploring the world of an desperate man whose life is given meaning by his new neighbours from abroad. MT

THE 89TH ACADEMY AWARDS TOOK PLACE IN LOS ANGELES IN JANUARY 2017

Viceroy’s House (2017)

Dir.: Gurinder Chadha | Cast: Gillian Anderson, Hugh Bonneville, Michael Gambon, Manish Dayal, Huma Qureshi, Simon Callow, Om Puri, Neeraj Kabi, Tanveer Ghani, Denzil Smith | UK/India, 106 min.

Director/co-writer Gurinder Chadha creates a true epic inspired by her own life story in this magnificent Upstairs Downstairs version of the events leading to the independence of India and Pakistan from British rule in August 1947. Seven years in the making, Viceroy’s House benefits from a tight and imaginatively witty script, as well as stellar performances from an international cast crowned by Hugh Bonneville and Gillian Anderson.

When Earl Mountbatten (Bonneville) and his wife Lady Edwina (Anderson) land in India at the beginning of 1947, their role is clear: they have to give India Independence. The Earl is to be the last Viceroy, who will live in the splendid palace, where the family inhabits the whole upper floor, serviced by a staff of 500 servants on the ground floor. But the situation soon gets out of hand: all over the country Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs are jostling for position in the future independent state, the Muslims under the leadership of Muhammed Ali Jinnah (Smith) hell bent on having their own state, Pakistan. The Hindu leaders Mahatma Gandhi (Kabi) and Jawaharial Nehru (Ghani) are fighting the partition of their country vehemently, finding an ally in the Earl and his wife. Whilst the tension increases, all over the country, violent clashes between the fractions grow into a near civil-war, and Mountbatten has to bring forward the independence date – and submit to the partition he has fought against for so long, “because otherwise, there is nothing to be handed over any more”.

Chadha shows the machinations between the British diplomats: General Hastings Ismail (Gambon), is fighting for the partition (which was planned by Churchill during WWII, who wanted the oil refineries not to fall into the hand of the Hindus, which he regarded as unreliable and left-leading), without telling the Earl about his devious manipulations. Then there is Cyril Radcliffe (Callow) a civil servant who, on his first visit to India, is supposed to draw up the new border between India and Pakistan – on the lines of the Churchill plan – without having set foot in the country before. Huge areas, like the Punjab, where Muslim and Hindus were living in near equal numbers, had to be divided.

On the ‘Downstairs’ level, the ‘forbidden’ love affair between Jeet (Dayal), a Hindu working as a valet for Mountbatten, and the clerk Aalia (Qureshi), daughter of the Muslim politician Rahamnoor (Puri) doesn’t quite ring true. We learn how he was greatly helped by Jeet during his imprisonment, which cost him his eyesight – and this strand serves as a reminder of the personal sacrifices of ordinary citizens. The great strength of Viceroy’s House is in showing how far removed the participants were from the people they pretended to represent. The Earl and his wife, full of good will and decency but naïve in their dealings with politicians, stand no chance as their aristocratic bonhomie is not match for the ‘Real-Politik’ of political advisers, who do not care about status. At the same time, the three leading Indian politicians – Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah – are much closer to the British establishment than their own citizens. After all, they were all educated at British universities – resistance against, and imprisonment by the British ruling class, with which they shared an upbringing in their formative years – was more like a game of chess in which they tried to outwit their former masters. But they were as detached from the Jeet’s and Aalia’s they to represented as their British counterparts.

DoP Ben Smithard (Belle) is a true heir to Freddie Young, who shot the David Lean treble of Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and Ryan’s Daughter. He often switches to black and white, creating authentic newsreel-look-alike images. The mass scenes of destruction sweeping the country are brilliantly executed. And although the romantic sub-plot is too far-fetched to be plausible, the triumph of Viceroy’s House is its stance denouncing any political class: be they British “stiff upper lip”, or crafty Indian politicians. Despite the rather convenient denouement between Aalia and Jeet, their genuine emotional suffering and upheaval represents the real human trauma behind the statesmen-like façade of political turmoil.

NOW ON NETFLIX

Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1973)

Dir: D A Pennebaker | Musical Biopic | US | 90min

July the 3rd, 1973 was Ziggy Stardust’s last night on planet Earth. It took place in the Hammersmith Odeon where Bowie as Ziggy seared his indelible persona into the public consciousness for the final time. The mesmerised audience projected their wildest fantasies onto the psychedelic troubadour, and the event was captured for all to remember in D A Pennebaker’s intimate cinema vérité concert film.

This is a first hand experience, close up and personal, and one of most inventive concert films ever made. Bowie, an otherworldly legend in the making, chats mundanely to his mates Ringo Star and Marc Bolan in the privacy of a down to earth dressing room. An ordinary bloke takes off his trousers and is then transformed into a lithe and shimmering chameleon sensuously girating to the rhythms of his magical music. Pennebaker’s grainy portrait communicates the casual switch between the actor and the ordinary man. While Bowie is full of gamine grace, guitarist Mick Ronson (who, like Bowie, was to die of liver cancer at the much earlier age of 46) takes himself a tad too seriously appearing to be grimacing in pain, his jutting chin and thrusting pelvis throbbing down at the camera. There are no guts or glory behind the scenes, just ‘business as usual’ as the tight performance schedule neatly dovetails into the splendour of the stage appearance where a sweaty clutch of febrile females strew their adulations at the feet of their sexually ambivalent superstar .

Mesmerisingly bold and beguiling, Bowie still seems endearingly vulnerable at a time where his creative juices were flowing and impressively diverse. As he sashays seamlessly through his songs – from Suffragette City, Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud and Rock N’ Roll Suicide, All the Young Dudes to Oh! You Pretty Things, he fires on all cylinders still on an upward flight to the height of his powers, where things would grow more intriguing and innovative for the following three decades. This concert was not the end; just an extraordinary beginning. MT

FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY ON 7TH MARCH 2017 WITH A NEW EXCLUSIVE FILMED INTERVIEW WITH SPIDERS DRUMMER, WOODY WOODMANSEY. TICKETS AND VENUES HERE

Certain Women (2016) | Best Film | LFF 2016

Director: Kelly Riechardt

Cast: Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart, Jared Harris, James Le Gros

107mins | Drama | US

Auteur Kelly Reichardt’s latest film is a humane and poignant story capturing the isolation and quiet devastation of loneliness. Following her noirish eco-thriller Night Moves, CERTAIN WOMEN feels even more prescient, yet low key and leisurely as it reveals with startling vulnerability the lives of three women in contemporary America.

Adapted from short stories by Maile Meloy and set around the trendy mountain outpost of Livingston, Montana (Michael Keaton, Dennis Quaid and David Lettleman have places nearby), this female-themed drama initially feels understated but eventually resonates as its gently calibrated rhythm echoes through the wide open landscapes of the northwest Pacific and the close reliance between people, animals and nature.

Casting stars alongside newcomers, regular collaborator Michelle Williams (Meek’s Cutoff) joins Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart and a welcome discovery in the shape of Lily Gladstone. These women play characters who could be you or me. And their daily lives strike a knowing chord as they trip lightly through our own experiences, in the capable hands of Reichardt and Meloy.

The opening scene is one that springs to mind as local lawyer Laura Wells (Dern) lies pensively in bed after a brief encounter with her lover Ryan (James Le Gros), who we later discover is married to another member of the trio. Pulling on his thermal underwear he goes back to his roost with wife Gina, Michelle Williams’ spiky mother of sulky teenager Guthrie (Sara Rodier). Turns out he also shares a close bond with Guthrie as the family camps on a piece of land where they plan to build themselves a house. Gina and Ryan hope to get elderly Albert (Rene Auberjonois) to sell them some local sandstone so that their house will have a touch of the vernacular. This is the only scene where Gina cracks a disingenuous smile as her assertive qualities comes across as machiavellian manipulativeness.

Laura Wells, meanwhile, is tasked with defending local chippie Fuller (Jared Harris), who is proving to be an irritating client fighting an un-winnable compensation claim over an accident at work. Taking liberties and turning up in unexpected places, Fuller seems to think he has the upper hand because Laura is a woman, and a sympathetic one at that.

The third strand is an enigmatic encounter with a twinge of l’esprit d’escalier where Kristen Stewart’s legal graduate Elizabeth travels thousands of miles each day to teach teachers education law. Attending the classes is Jamie (Lily Gladstone) a groom from a nearby ranch who seems drawn to Elizabeth, but whether this is a schoolgirl crush or nascent lesbian longing is wisely never examined, giving the story delicious depth and mystery. Jamie’s days are spent in the company of horses and her trusty mutt (Reichardt’s own corgi cross), but she seems ready to spread her wings although her direction never quite unravels. The two grow strangely close – emotionally and physically – as they share evenings together in the diner and a horseback ride back to Elizabeth’s car.

CERTAIN WOMEN is both pleasurable to watch and enjoyable to contemplate, It probes the lives of intelligent women whose longings never quite materialise, remaining inchoate and undefined but instilled with the growing melancholy of possibilities untrammelled and romantic disillusionment. DoP Christopher Blauvelt adds a grainy, indie feel to his glistening 16mm camerawork, and the tone that is subdued and introspective, enhanced by Jeff Grace’s atmospheric score. These are women who seem to know themselves but are somehow back-footed by their circumstances, being too empathetic with their fellow humans to boldly make a stand in raw emotional scenes that communicate more in visuals than they ever could in words. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 3 MARCH 2017 | BEST FILM BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2016

7 Minutes (2016) | Cinema Made in Italy

Veteran Italian director Michele Placido’s grainy slice of social realism is a timely and engrossing character drama that succeeds despite its low budget credentials and grainy feel. Based on real events, 7 MINUTES is told in intimate close-up from the POV of its female characters who all work in a textile factory in the outskirts of Rome.

Very much along the lines of the Dardennes Brothers’ Two Days, One Night (2014) this is a much more intense and angry affair but its feisty authenticity conveys the feeling of betrayal and bitterness that the women feel when they are given two hours to decide the fate of 300 of their colleagues facing redundancy in an increasingly hostile and stressful urban environment where they are all struggling to make ends meet.

Impassioned performances by Clémence Poésy and Karen Di Porto (in debut) the standouts. Anne Consigny plays the factory boss with sensitive grace in this intelligent and believable story based on a play by Stefano Massini . MT

CINEMA MADE IN ITALY | 1-5 MARCH 2017

Finding Forrester (2000) | Eureka Dual format release

FINDING FORRESTER is a confident and complex character-driven drama that explores the story of two New Yorkers who couldn’t be more different. At opposite ends of the social scale they are drawn together by an intellectual pursuit; that of writing. As William Forrester, Sean Connery gives one of his finest performances never overplaying the tightly-scripted narrative. Rob Brown’s Jamal is impressive in a big-screen debut that resonates with its strength and authenticity.

In the Bronx, Jamal is a typical black teenager who lives for basketball and sleeps in late. William Forrester is an eccentric much older man, now a recluse he who once wrote a Pulitzer prize-winning novel and takes an interest in Jamal’s literary aspirations. After a chance meeting the two men gradually enhance each other’s existence in ways that are full of humanity and dark humour in a friendship that will prove beneficial to both. But first must kill their own demons in order to find their dreams. With a triumphant score and New York very much the third character this is an immersive and life-affirming watch. MT

OUT ON DUAL FORMAT BLURAY COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA | 20 FEBRUARY 2017

Pericle Il Nero (2016) | Cinema Made in Italy 1-5 March 2017

Director: Stefano Mordini

Cast: Riccardo Scamarcio, Marina Fois, Valentina Acca

104min | Thriller | Italy

Stefano Mordini’s noirish thriller has Riccardo Scamarcio as a hard-bitten hitman on the run from the Camorra in Belgium. Based on the ’90s novel by Giuseppe Ferrandino and adapted for the screen by Francesca Marciano this is the one of the best crime dramas showing in the Un Certain Regard strand at Cannes this year.

It probes the seething underworld of the ultra-violent Belgian branch of the Camorra where a low-life from the coalface of the organisation comes up against his boss and is forced to leave his Brussels home and flee to Calais to avoid death.

And nobody seethes like Bari-born Riccardo Scamarcio in a role that suits his brooding sensuality and superb acting chops – he switches from seedy serial killer to suave seducer in the flick of a bag of coins – his preferred method of coshing his victims. Narrated in a voice-over by Pericle (Scamarcio), who is under the control of Don Luigi Pizza (Gigio Morra) a small-time gangster who transferred his operation from Naples to Brussels in the aim of taking over pizzerias for as little as he can, Mordini’s film feels alienating and melancholy. Any resistance from the pizzeria owners leads to a bash over the head from Pericle. But when Don Luigi falls out with a local priest, Pericle – sent is punish him – finds he has a witness in the shape of a female camorra boss, Signorinella, and in order to cover up his attack on the priest he has to kill her.

In Scamarcio’s hands Pericle is a likeable rogue who is adept at avoiding danger and skilled at getting on with strangers. Homeless and friendless when he gets to Calais he charms a sales assistant (Marina Fois) into offering him bed and board in a slightly meaningless subplot. But soon it’s time to move on and meet his destiny as the tension builds for the cold-blooded finale. MT

CINEMA MADE IN ITALY 1-5 MARCH 2017

Through the Wall | Laa Vor et Hakir (2016) | Home Ent release

Dir.: Rama Burshtein | Cast: Noa Kooler, Irit Sheleg, Dafi Alpheon, Odelia Morteh, Amos Tamam, Oz Zehavi, Erez Drigues | Israel 2016 | 110 min.

Director/writer Rama Bursthein (Fill the Void) has created a very single-minded heroine, who after eleven years of waiting in vain to get married, simply puts her faith in God and books a hall for her wedding on the Eighth Day of Hanukah – leaving her with the task to find a husband in a matter of weeks.

It all starts for Michal (Kooler) a few days before the planned wedding to Gidi (Drigues): he simply declares that he does not love Michal and cancels the ceremony. Unperturbed, Michal, 32, seeks the help of a Jewish “witch doctor” and matchmaker – Hulda (Morteh), who promises success, and helps Michal to book a hall for her wedding, catering for 200 guests. The venue is owned by her son Shimi (Tamam), whose own marriage is on the rocks. Michal’s family is of no great help: her mother (Irit Sheleg) is not religious and does not share her daughter’s Hasidic faith, which dictates that that true happiness for a woman can only be found in marriage. Her sister (Alpheon) is equally cynical about Michal’s chances of finding a husband in time – and with Gidi marrying Michal’s friend Ziva, the voices of doubt have their point. Next, Michal undertakes a pilgrimage to the shrine of Rabbi Nachman, one of the founders of the ultra-orthodox Hasidic movement. Apart from meeting the rock star Yoss (Zehavi) – she is told by the long queue of waiting groupies to ‘get in line’ – nothing gives in this adventure either. When the wedding day arrives, Michal, still without a husband, really needs a miracle.

THROUGH THE WALL suffers from its tortuous pacing which destroys any tension in the storyline. As the owner of Mobile Petting Zoo (she performs for children’s birthday parties), Michal gives the audience much more entertainment and Kooler is full of energy, and lovable in spite of herself, but the orthodox marriage dogma somehow reduces the drama to a question of faith: and it’s difficult to believe that such an inflexible, self-centred woman will sacrifice her independence for any man – let alone a last minute stand-in.

The ensemble acting is admirable, and DoP Amit Yasur (Next to Her) conjures up wonderful images of the Petting Zoo travels, and equally finds always new angles for the close-ups of the storming heroine. Apart from being too long, the film suffers from a rather uncritical acceptance of orthodox faith. AS

NOW OUT ON 20 FEBRUARY 2017 | CURZON ARTIFICIAL EYE

NOW ON DVD COURTESY OF CURZON CINEMAS

Bitter Harvest (2016)

Dir.: George Mendeluk; Cast: Max Irons, Samantha Barks, Terence Stamp, Gary Oliver, Tamar Hassan; Canada 2016, 103 min.

Veteran auteur George Mendeluk was born of Ukrainian descent in Germany and emigrated to Canada where he worked in television and the US (Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Miami Vice). BITTER HARVEST recreates one of the most dramatic episodes of the 20th century where in early 1930s Ukraine, Joseph Stalin caused mass starvation with an economic policy of collectivisation which led to his man-made famine of ‘Holodomor’.

After the idyllic opening scenes in a Ukrainian village where schoolboy Yuri (Irons) battles to save his childhood love Natalka, comes the Russian October revolution and the death of Tsar and his family, an event that is celebrated by the Ukrainians. For a few years Lenin has his hands full with the Civil War, and the country enjoys freedom and prosperity. But this would change dramatically when Stalin came to power forcing collectivization on all the farmers in the Soviet Union. Ukraine was then the “bread basket of Europe”, and suffered horrendously from the results of this policy. By the mid 1920s, before Stalin had killed or exiled his political enemies and established his dictatorship, Yuri (Irons) has grown up into a handsome young man, but contrary to his father and grandfather Ivan (Stamp), who were warmongers, Yuri is only interested in painting and Natalka (Barks). His friends leave for Kiev, to take part in the a new revolutionary art movement. When Yuri later joins them at the art academy – Natalka stays in the village to look after his sick mother. But the wind is changing: Stalin policies not only mean the end of any independence for the Ukraine, but also the death of a true revolutionary, modern art: in painting this is replaced by a drab soviet-style-realism. At the beginning of 1932 Stalin (Oliver), has decided to destroy the “Kulak class” – in reality independent farmers, not rich feudal lords, as Stalin called them. With Yuri in prison in Kiev, and one of his friends, a leader of the Ukrainian Communist Party, commits suicide and his family and Natalka are brutally repressed: they are led by the sadistic Sergei (Hassan), who fancies Natalka, and humiliates her. Yuri has escaped from prison, joining his family in the bloody uprising against the Russian troops. Whilst his father and grandfather are killed, Yuri and Natalka, who has lost her baby, escape with a young boy, they have adopted, trying to escape, they flee to the Polish border.

BITTER HARVEST tells it like it is without pulling any punches in recounting the harsh realities. DoP Douglas Milsome are very much in line with his work on Full Metal Jacket, but the narrative is full of plotholes. Although a more measured approach occasionally would be preferable, the rawness of the unflinching confrontation between good and evil, is perhaps the only way to tackle this genocide. After all, when Stalin was warned by Bukharin that his policy would cost millions of lives, Stalin answered “And who will know?”In spite of all its shortcomings, BITTER HARVEST is perhaps the only way to bring these atrocities to a wider contemporary public, not only just an arthouse-audience. Considering the recent invasion of large parts of Ukraine by Russia, we need to learn more about the history of Russia’s ongoing subjugation of an independent country: there is a clear line from the feudal imperialistic empire of the Romanovs, the genocide of the Stalinists and Putin’s unpunished invasion of today. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM FEBRUARY 27

The Confessions | Le Confessioni (2016) | Cinema Made in Italy 1-5 March 2017

Dir: Roberto Ando | Cast: Toni Servillo, Daniel Auteuil, Pierfrancesco Favino, Moritz Bleibtreu, Connie Nielsen, Mari-Josee Croze, Lambert Wilson, Richard Sammel, Johan Heldenbergh, Togo Igawa | 103min | Thriller | Italy

Toni Servillo and Daniel Auteuil star in Roberto Ando’s slick and timely political thriller that follows the exploits of a savvy monk who attempts to outmanoeuvre the European delegates at a fictional G8 summit.

Sadly lacking the delicious dark humour of Ando’s breakthrough Viva la Liberta that screened during last year’s festival, this is an intelligent and self-assured affair occasionally spiced with irony and graced with a starry international arthouse cast including Connie Nielsen, Lambert Wilson and Moritz Bleibtreu.

Invited to the IMF summit by one of the other delegates – from countries that represent 50% of the World’s wealth – Roberto Salus, a monk and writer, adds a touch of calm integrity but also a twist of tension to the top secret Monetary Fund get together in his chaste alabaster garb and sincere gaze that contrasts amusingly with the less than trustworthy-looking official attendees (particularly Bleibtrau’s Mark Klein) gathered together in the secluded spendour of a luxury German resort. Two other ousiders are also there to monitor the talks: a musician, and Connie Nielsen’s glamorous author of children’s books, complete the trio.

Auteuil plays the strung out, suicidal master of ceremonies, Daniel Roche, who has summoned the Monk to hear his confession before he pops his clogs, to the annoyance and suspicion of the assembled crew and who wonder what was said by Roche to Salus in his final hour, and whether he alluded to their secret scheme to bankrupt the world’s poorer economies. His tête à têtes with the monk unfold in flashback adding a frisson of insight as the political narrative progresses.

Although there are overtones that something greater and more powerful may be at work here, Ando and co-scripter Angelo Pasquini fail to develop this supernatrual strand to the film’s slight detriment making the political story less resonant than it could have been. That said, LE CONFESSIONI remains an intriguing and enjoyable watch, largely due to the strength of its performances – particularly from Toni Servillo – Maurizio Calvesi’s arresting cinematography and Nicola Piovani’s atmospheric and stately occasional score. MT

CINEMA MADE IN ITALY 1-5 MARCH 2017

Berlinale 2017 | Competition WINNERS

ON THE BEACH AT NIGHT ALONE | BEST ACTRESS
South Korea
By Hong Sangsoo (Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, Right Now, Wrong Then)
With Kim Minhee, Seo Younghwa, Jung Jaeyoung, Moon Sungkeun, Kwon Haehyo, Song Seonmi, Ahn Jaehong, Park Yeaju
World premiere

EL BAR (The Bar) | Spain
By Álex de la Iglesia (Mad Circus, The Day of the Beast, The Oxford Murders)
With Blanca Suárez, Mario Casas, Carmen Machi, Terele Pávez, Secun de la Rosa, Alejandro Awada, Joaquín Climent, Jaime Ordóñez
World premiere – Out of competition

HELLE NACHTE (Bright Nights) | Germany / Norway
By Thomas Arslan (Dealer, Vacation, In the Shadows, Gold)
With Georg Friedrich, Tristan Göbel, Marie Leuenberger, Hanna Karlberg
World premiere

JOAQUIM | Brazil / Portugal
By Marcelo Gomes (Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures, The Man of the Crowd, I Travel Because I Have to, I Come Back Because I Love You)
With Julio Machado, Isabél Zuaa, Nuno Lopes, Rômulo Braga, Welket Bungué, Karay Rya Pua
World premiere

MR LONG / Germany / Hong Kong, China / Taiwan
By Sabu (Monday, Chasuke’s Journey)
With Chen Chang, Sho Aoyagi, Yiti Yao, Junyin Bai
World premiere

RETURN TO MONTAUK | Germany / France / Ireland
By Volker Schlöndorff (The Tin Drum, Diplomatie)
With Stellan Skarsgård, Nina Hoss, Susanne Wolff, Niels Arestrup
World premiere

WILDE MAUSS | Wild Mouse) | Austria | BEST ACTOR
By Josef Hader
With Josef Hader, Pia Hierzegger, Georg Friedrich, Jörg Hartmann, Denis Moschitto
World premiere – First Feature

A teströl és a lélekröl (ON BODY AND SOUL) Hungary | GOLDEN BEAR WINNER

Hungarian director Ildiko Enyedi gained international recognition winning the Golden Camera at Cannes (1989) for her debut My 20th Century. Since then she has won a clutch of minor awards and here she is at Berlinale for the first time in competition with World premiere drama with an all Hungarian cast of Géza Morcsányi, Alexandra Borbély, Zoltán Schneider

ANA, MON AMOUR | BEST ARTISTIC CONTRIBUTION
Romania / Germany / France
Romanian filmmaker Călin Peter Netzer was the surprise winner of the Golden Bear in 2013 with his impressive psychological drama exploring just how far a professional woman will go to protect her adult son in Child‘s Pose. His latest drama in competition at Berlinale stars Mircea Postelnicu, Diana Cavallioti, Carmen Tănase, Adrian Titieni, Vlad Ivanov
World premiere

BEUYS – Documentary

Last year’s Golden Bear winner was an Italian documentary Fire At Sea. This year German director Andres Veiel (Black Box Germany, Addicted To Acting, If not us, Who) will show his latest documentary, a World premiere in competition. In 2011 he won the Alfred Bauer Award with If Not Us, Who? a biopic of the Baader-Meinhof Group.

COLO
Portugal / France
Portuguese director Teresa Villaverde is much celebrated in her own country and has won prizes at Venice, Lecce and Ankara for her films (The Major Age, The Mutants, Trance). With João Pedro Vaz, Alice Albergaria Borges, Beatriz Batarda, Clara Jost. She is in the competition line-up for the first time with her drama COLO

THE DINNER

US director Oren Moverman is best known for his writing talents scripting Love & Mercy, The Messenger and Rampart
His latest film is a mystery thriller based on Dutch writer Herman Koch’s novel with echoes of Roman Polanski’s Carnage (2011) where two well-to-do couples discuss the misdemeanours of their teenage children. Stars Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Steve Coogan, Rebecca Hall, Chloë Sevigny | World premiere

Félicité | GRAND JURY PRIZE

Back in 2012 Senegalese auteur Alain Gomis gave us one of the most moving and life-affirming films about death: TEY
In his latest, a World premiere in Competition at Berlin, he casts Véro Tshanda Beya, Gaetan Claudia, Papi Mpaka his latest drama set in the former French colony.

THE PARTY
United Kingdom
Famous for the stylishly inventive curio Orlando, British director Sally Potter is back with a tragicomedy that sounds a lot like Festen where a much hyped party ends in tears. A glittering cast of Patricia Clarkson, Bruno Ganz, Cherry Jones, Emily Mortimer, Cillian Murphy, Kristin Scott Thomas, Timothy Spall. World premiere

POKOT (Spoor) | ALFRED BAUER PRIZE

is billed as a mystery crime drama from Polish Great Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa, Bitter Harvest, Kobieta samotna)/ the German, Polish World Premiere has Agnieszka Mandat, Wiktor Zborowski, Miroslav Krobot, Jakub Gierszał, Patricia Volny, Borys Szyc

TOIVEN TUOLLA PUOLEN (The Other Side of Hope) | BEST DIRECTOR
Another Helsinki-set dark comedy from the Finnish maverick Aki Kaurismäki (The Match Factory Girl, Juha, Le Havre) kicks the year off to a great start. Regular collaborators Kati Outinen and Tommi Korpela stars alongside Sakari Kuosmanen, Sherwan Haji
in this International premiere which opens in Finland the week before.

UNA MUJER FANTASTICA | BEST SCRIPT
Chile / Germany / USA / Spain
By Sebastián Lelio (El Año del Tigre, Gloria)

Lelio gave the fabulous GLORIA that won a Silver Bear in 2013 for Paulina Garcia’s witty and wise portrait of a feisty middle-aged woman who refuses to give up on love in the riviera city of Montevideo. His latest drama stars Daniela Vega, Francisco Reyes, Luis Gnecco, Aline Küppenheim, Amparo Noguera in World premiere

BERLINALE 2017 \ COMPETITION WINNERS

A Man for All Seasons (1966) | Eureka Cinema Bluray release

Dir: Fred Zinnemann | Cast: Paul Scofield, Wendy Hiller, Leo McKern, Robert Shaw, Orson Welles

Fred Zinnemann’s Oscar-winning version of Robert Bolt’s 1960 play (set here in 1530) is fairly true to historical events that have continually captured our imagination with their rich dramatic possibilities. Here Zinnemann portrays the solicitor-general. Rich (John Hurt) as having a close and personal relationship with More, a speculative strand to the storyline, but it’s plausible, all the same. Of the starry cast, Paul Schofield, Robert Shaw and Orson Wells are the standouts, But it’s Scofield’s film and his performance is one of measured dignity with a touch of arrogance as the chancellor who wins on a moral point but ends up losing his head nevertheless.

Henry VIII is played rumbunctiously by an elegant Robert Shaw in an inspired performance that feels warm yet reverent and Orson Wells is awesome as the red-robed Cardinal Wolsey, commanding respect despite his slightly over-grown cherubic appearance, spiked by a snarling wit: “If Wolsey fell, the splash would swallow a few small boats like ours,” murmurs More. . There are some other enjoyable turns from a young John Hurt in his first major role; a striking Wendy Hiller, a glowing Susannah York, Vanessa Redgrave as Anne Boleyn (in an unpaid cameo) and Leo McKern as Cromwell.

The film opens as Henry VIII is making a furious bid to divorce Catherine of Aragon on the grounds of her inability to provide a male heir, and this leads to a clash with the Roman Catholic Church and his own lord chancellor Sir Thomas More who approval is demanded, and withheld – a move that leads to More’s eventual demise.

This film was a spectacular undertaking that was delivered – with the support of the cast taking salary cuts – at a budget of just under $2 million with locations that include Hampton Court Palace, Studley Priory, Beaulieu, Beauline Abbey and royal boat outings on the Thames. Orson Welles claimed he had Fred Zinnemann ‘removed from the set’ and directed his scenes himself and the trial and execution scenes are purportedly based on an eyewitness account, published anonymously in a Paris Newsletter of August 4, 1535. It went on to win six Oscars. Mt

OUT ON DUAL FORMAT COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA | 20 FEBRUARY 2017

Masaryk: A Prominent Patient (2017)

Dir: Julius Ševčík | Cast: Karel Roden, Hanns Zischler, Oldřich Kaiser, Arly Jover, Paul Nicholas, Dermot Crowley, Milton Welsh. Eva Herzigová, Emília Vášáryová, | Czech/Slovak Republic | Czech, English | 114 min ·

Philosopher Tomas Masaryk became the first President and founder of Czechoslovakia in 1918 and was an advocate of Czechoslovak independence during the First World War. He also championed the country’s Jewish population knowing how hard it was to build a sense of pride in a people with a history of subjugation. Of his two sons – one died of typhoid – this is the story of Jan Garrigue Masaryk (1886-1948), a mentally unstable bon viveur whose engaging cynicism served him well as Czechoslovakian Ambassador in London’s Hampstead in the run up to the Second World War.

Directed by Julius Ševčík this gripping and lushly-mounted imagined drama focuses on a tight window in wartime politics alternating between historical and fictionalised plotlines as it sashays suavely between London, Prague and a New Jersey sanatorium, where after the death of his father in 1938, Masaryk (a convincing Karel Roden) is supported by German psychiatrist Dr Stein – a saturnine Hans Zischler – and a charming American journalist Marcia Davenport (played gracefully by Arly Jover).

As a result of diplomatic tactics and the signing of the Munich Agreement, Britain and France condone Nazi Germany’s invasion of his country – bringing Europe one step closer to the Second World War. Masaryk believes he has failed as a diplomat, lost credibility in the eyes of the powers that be, and brought shame on the legacy of his father, Tomas.

A PROMINENT PATIENT follows Masaryk closely during his time as Ambassador showing how the tense political and social ambiance played tricks with his delicate mental disposition. Martin Strba’s agile camera glides impressively over Prague and London often tracking top secret negotiations in the privacy of fast moving vehicles, hurtling along the beaches of the South Coast. Ševčík plays fast and loose with the facts and political purists will no doubt throw their hands up in horror at some of the scenes, but this is nevertheless an enjoyable romp that will appeal to arthouse audiences with its elegant settings, engaging performances and terrier-like pacing contrasting with more languorous scenes such as those between Masaryk and his married English lover, Lady Anne Higgins (Gina Bramhill).

Whether or not Masaryk did indeed receive treatment in America is uncertain, but the idea that he was mentally unstable is the conceit on which Ševčík and his scripters Petr Kolečko and Alex Königsmark base their narrative. And it is certainly a ploy that serves this drama well offering a sinister and unsettling undertow to the recognised uncertainty of the political climate on the cusp of the Second World War. MT

BERLINALE 2017 PREMIERE | HISTORY TODAY

Cinema Made in Italy Festival | 1-5 March 2017

Cinema Made in Italy returns to London’s Ciné Lumière from 1 – 5 March 2017. This seventh edition of the festival brings a brand new array of exciting and inspiring films to the South Kensington cinema. Screenings are followed by Q&A sessions with the film-makers, offering audiences the opportunity to get involved in lively discussions.

This year’s line-up comprises nine new feature films, plus the recently restored version of Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 masterpiece THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (La Battaglia di Algeri), distributed in the UK byCultFilms: www.cultfilms.co.uk. It will be the very first time this restored version is shown on the big screen in the UK.

Opening night film 7 MINUTES (7 Minuti) was selected for the 29th Tokyo International Film Festival Competition, and was in the official selection at the 2016 Rome International Film Festival. The Biennale College Cinema gem EARS (Orecchie) screened at the 2016 Venice International Film Festival, as did Michele Vannucci’s I WAS A DREAMER (Il più grande sogno), Pippo Delbono’s VANGELO, and Irene Dionisio’s PAWN STREETS (Le Ultime Cose).

PERICLES THE BLACK (Pericle il Nero), starring Italy’s much-loved Riccardo Scamarcio, was in the ‘Un Certain Regard’ section at last year’s Cannes International Film Festival. Roberto Andò’s THE CONFESSIONS (Le Confessioni), starring Toni Servillo, Daniel Auteuil and Connie Nielsen, has screened at a multitude of festivals around the world, and was awarded the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the 2016 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

CINEMA MADE IN ITALY 1-5 MARCH AT VARIOUS VENUES | LONDON

Beuys (2017) Free online at the Goethe Institute

Dir: Andres Veiel Germany 2017 | German, English, Doc | 107 min: English/German

The 12th of May would have been Joseph Beuys’ 100th birthday. To mark the centenary and shed light on the German artist’s legacy The Goethe Institute is offering a free screening of Andreas Veiel’s documentary about the artist.

Beuys attempts to capture the essence of one of Germany’s most famous conceptual artists, blending previously unpublished archive footage and informative interviews with the artist and his friends and collaborators, such as British art curator Caroline Tisdall.

The artist and visionary ‘man with the hat’ was, and still is, ahead of his time – thirty years after his death in 1986. He was the first German artist to be given a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, while at home his work was often still derided as the ‘most expensive trash of all time’. Once asked if he was indifferent to such comments he retorted: ‘Yes. I want to expand people’s perceptions.’ Beuys also later reveals that his art was ‘a weapon against the enemy’; his felt piano is considered by many to be one of his most accessible pieces. But the most memorable is his dynamic living multi-location sculpture that embodies his Green credentials – 7000 oak trees with stone pillars beside them, creating a constantly evolving art piece that aimed to be an international ‘method of communication’ or ‘Gesamptkunstwerk’ – the Japanese intended to contribute financially to the project, but have sadly failed to do so, as yet.

Andres Veiel lets the artist speak for himself allowing his cheerful, warm charisma to surface, hiding a difficult traditional upbringing in a well to do industrialist background in Cleves, where he was expected to take over the family business. The secret of his hat is revealed to be the result of a war wound while parachuting from his plane. Although he is no longer with us, his expanded concept of art feeds directly into today’s social, political and moral debates. Beuys will be Beuys. MT

GOETHE INSTITUTE 12-15 MAY 2021 | BERLINALE 2017 COMPETITION

Love of My Life (2017)

Dir.: Joan Carr-Wiggin; Cast: Anna Chancellor, John Hannah, Hermione Norris, James Fleet, Katie Boland, Hannah Emily Anderson; Canada 2016, 105 min.

Writer/director Joan Carr-Wiggin (Happily ever After) has come up with a rather awkward narrative: after being told that she might only have five days to live, the heroine is forced to spend the remaining 120 hours in a déclassé rom-com with a cheating husband and an immature ex – not to mention two empty-headed daughters, who rush to find their life partners before Mum leaves this world.

Grace (Chancellor) is an architect in Toronto. Told by her doctor that her brain tumour might be inoperable, she reacts with stoicism. Not so her family: husband Tom (Fleet) cries non-stop and goes on drinking, feeling more sorry for himself than his wife. Enter Richard (Hannah, a popular author) and Grace’s ex-husband and father of their daughter Zoe (Boland). Richard suddenly realises that Grace is the love of his life, even though he left her for Tamara (Norris), who also lives in Grace’s family house.

Meanwhile, Tom goes on drinking – and sleeps with Tamara, who wants to prove that Tom is non-deserving of Grace’s love, Richard makes a play for Grace, who is already overwhelmed by the chaos of what may be her final hours. Daughter Kaitlyn (Anderson), whom Grace suspected to be a lesbian, suddenly finds “the right man”. But it turns out, that he is married, and (in one of the most embarrassing scenes) is cornered at his front door with his wife by Richard and Kaitlyn. When Richard finally gets Grace on her own for a restaurant tête à tête, a bizarre turn of events scuppers the whole affair.

You really have to feel sorry for the cast, trying their best to hold this all together without cringing. DoP Bruce Worrall, who shot the director’s previous outing: If I were You, cannot really save the day: nearly all the ‘action’ takes place in the studio, giving the feeling of filmed theatre: doors open, and people enter, speaking/shouting their lines and exit. Truly a missed opportunity to create a funny and intelligent comedy drama. AS

AT SELECTED VENUES FROM 17 FEBRUARY 2017

Return to Montauk (2017) Bergamo Film Meeting 2021

Dir: Volker Schlöndorff | Cast: Nina Hoss, Stellen Skarsgard, Niels Arestrup | Ger/France/Ire | English | 106 min · Drama

Nina Hoss and Stellan Skarsgard grace Volker Schlöndorff’s elegantly chilled cocktail of literary lives and romantic recidivism that premiered in at Berlinale several years ago, then disappeared before coming to Amazon Prime

Stellan Skarsgard is Max Korn, a seasoned writer who knows how to project romantic illusions of love in his relationships, but whose fame has taken him to a place of unreality, and who’s totally unaware of it. During his life, he has moved through a series of female conquests without really engaging with anyone. In New York to promote a book with his latest – much younger – partner (Susanne’s Woolf fawning ‘creative’ groupie), he reconnects, via a business associate (a sinister and alluring Niels Arestrup) with Nina Hoss’ glamorous Rebecca.

Rebecca is another brief fling from the past who appears aloof at Max’s reappearance, scarcely concealing a troubled secret behind her own sophisticated persona. These central characters make a fascinating couple – much in the style of After Midnight: Max is accessible yet empty inside; Rebecca’s outward frostiness conceals a romantic but disillusioned idealist . An impromptu trip to the tip of Long Island to view Rebecca’s putative holiday home is the catalyst for a tender eruption of feelings that flood back when she confesses her troubles to the now enraptured Max.

Shot on a handheld camera in the slick Manhattan venues and limpid platinum beaches of Montauk, on the tip of Long Island, this an engrossing and emotionally moving story of lost opportunities and dreams that asks the question: do we settle for the ordinary or the life less ordinary? MT

SCREENING DURING BERGAMO FILM FESTIVAL’S Volker Schlöndorff. RETROSPECTIVE | ALSO ON AMAZON PRIME

somniloquies (2017| Berlinale Forum

Dirs: Verena Paravel, Lucien Castaing-Taylor | UK,France,USA | Doc | 77 min

Songwriter Dion McGregor became famous in the 1960s for narrating his dreams in his sleep. These often amusing reveries are the focus of Leviathan directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel in a documentary that conjures up the revealing reveries of our deep subconscious that float around when we fall into dream sleep.

McGregor is so far the world’s most prolific recorded sleep talker and his dreams have long been analysed by psychiatrists who claim that he speaks from his motor cortex. His softly spoken voice invites us into his dreamscape “come-on in, I said I would grant an interview”. He talks about his imaginary town for midgets where there are baby animals too. “Did you ever sea a midget twist? It’s the cutest thing”

Some of it is gibberish but other times his monologues verge on the semi-pornographic where he talks about a rape in a hijacked ambulance and creates imagined scenarios with neighbours and acquaintances such as Mrs Evelyn Dangerfield and her “platinum bush” and her butler Carver: “deep in the bowels of his room I think he’s really a carver”; and the lady who cuts elastic out of people’s underwear. McGregor also muses over “supervised conception” that takes place in a “fuckwaggon” on Fridays and the “watchwaggon” of Wednesdays: “we’re just a nation of voyeurs”. In the final moments of this intriguing visual experience McGregor grows agitated: “let’s go to future land, the present is squalid”. And that was only the Sixties.MT

BERLINALE 9-19 FEBRUARY 2017

Avanti Popolo (1986) | Berlinale Classics 2017

Dir.: Rafi Bukai | Cast: Salim Dau, Suhei Haddad, Barry Langford | Israel | 84 min.

Rafi Bukai’s directorial debut started out as a mere graduation film from the Department of Film Studies at the University of Tel Aviv, but has become a classic: The story of two Egyptian soldiers trying to find a way home in the last days of the Six Day War, is a turning point in Israeli film history. Bukai wrote and co-produced the film which had a recent renaissance at the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2016, where its 30th anniversary was celebrated with a brand new digital restoration copy. The two main actors were in attendance, as well as DoP Yoav Kosh and the widow of the director.

Set in 1967 in an expanded Israel, the Sinai peninsula, two Egyptian soldiers, Haled el Asma (Dau) and Gassan Hamada (Haddad), are trying to find a way back to Cairo. They are tired, hungry and thirsty – the last thing on their mind is fighting. Haled, who is an actor in civil life, tries to wow the Israeli soldiers with Shakespeare: “I am a Jew!” he shouts. “Hath not a Jew eyes?”. But his Shylock speech does not cut the mustard with the Israelis: “He’s got his roles confused”, says one of them. Luckily, the two Egyptians later discover an UN jeep containing a dead soldier and two bottles of whisky – as well as an umbrella. Defying their religious laws, the two drink the alcohol and stumble on with the umbrella, holding out against the burning sun, through the desert: Becket could not have staged it better. Later, they meet a British war correspondent (Langford), who is angry that the war is as good as over. He has come for blood and action, and is adamant to succeed: “The war will be over when I say the war is over”. Finally, the duo meet three Israeli soldiers who have given up by now, shooing the Egyptian soldiers away like mangy dogs, and together they sing “Avanti Populo”, the anthem of the Italian Communist Party. None of them understand the meaning of the words.

When AVANTI POPOLO was entered as the Israeli hopeful for the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film in 1986, Ariel Sharon, ex-General and then Minister of Industry and Commerce, called it “a self-destructive portrait of inept Jews”. Sharon, like many others, obviously hankered back to the ‘good, olden days’ of Israeli cinema, when blond, blue-eyed Jews easily defeated ugly, hateful Arabs on the screen – evoking memories of the cinema of a certain Dr. Goebbels. Alas, thirty years on, AVANTI POPULO looks like Utopia: the current Israeli film landscape, like the political consciousness of the nation, is very much aligned with what went on before Bukai’s breakthrough. Isaac Zablocki, director of the Israeli Film Centre in NYC agrees: “There has been a significant drop in work which challenges the Status Quo. The tone of the current Cultural Ministry has made filmmakers, who are pitching and producing films with political content afraid. No one wants to be public enemy number One.”

DoP Yoav Kosh, debuting like Rafi Bukai, has made sure, that the images are sparse, the colours are washed out, there is little movement, everything is seen like in a feverish dream, the protagonist moving slowly forward through a mist of sand and sun. Rafi Bukai would only direct one more feature film (Marco Polo: The missing chapter, 1996), but he would produce the international success Life According to Agfa (1992), which won its director Assi Dayan (son of the general and war hero) a ‘Special Mention’ at the Berlin Film Festival. AS

SCREENING AT BERLINALE 2017 | CLASSICS SECTION | 9-19 FEBRUARY

Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) Memorias del Subdesarrollo

Dir/Writer: Tomas Gutierrez Ales (based on the novel by Edmundo Desnoes) DoP: Ramon Suarez, Editor: Nelson Rodriguez, Score: Leo Brower | Cast: Sergio Corrieri, Daisy Granados, Eslinda Nunez, Beatriz Ponchora | Docudrama | 104min

The date is 1961 and the suave figure of Sergio (Sergio Corrieri), the passionate intellectual star of Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s Cuban masterpiece, lopes like a jaguar moving through the capital of Havana, a town that is like an exotic old cougar caught in the headlights of the ‘modern’ world; world-weary, yet cannier than time. Saying ‘goodbye’ to his bourgeoise wife, bound for the delights of Miami with his parents, he returns home, a king in his own country caught between the past and the future.

MEMORIAS DEL SUBDESARROLLO is a drama about his daily life set against the backdrop of post-revolutionary Cuba, combining news footage, archive photos and a langourous romantic interlude he shares with a coquettish young woman Elena (Daisy Granados) – who later takes umbrage at his advances: “Everything happens to me too early or too late,” says Sergio, a man with European sensibilities – too soigne for Cuba yet almost too sophisticated, in every sense, for the brashness of ’60s Miami. He toys with writing a novel about the state of the country, but his ideas are too advanced. Perhaps if the revolution had happened earlier, he tells himself, he might have understood.

After attempting to civilise Elena, it emerges she is too tethered to the old world, not endowed with the faculties requisite for her desired transition to wannabe stardom. “She doesn’t relate things,” he tells himself. “It’s one of the signs of underdevelopment.” There are trips to the galleries and even to Hemingway’s house (with filmed footage from a Death in the Afternoon-style bullfight): “He said he killed so as not to kill himself,”.

Looking out over the vast port complex from a telescope in his apartment window, Sergio observes the birds eye-view of Havana, stretching out into the vastness of the ocean. The director deftly combines shocking news footage with glimpses of the current political scene in this spicy and often poignant ‘point-de-vue’ that distills the essence of the extraordinary country.

One imagines that this is a semi-autobiographical work for Tomas Gutierrez Alea, who was roughly the same age as Sergio when he shot the film, observing Fidel Castro’s political post-revolutionary machinations with an alienated eye.

This is a monumental film of great integrity: passionate and quietly moving. A testament to the ’60s with great courage and insight, skilfully edited by Nelson Rodriquez to engage and inform – without meandering or erring into the realms of small-mindedness in a small town way. Apparently, Edmundo Desnoes was positive about the film saying of Ales (according to the NY Times) that he “objectivized a world that was shapeless in my mind and still abstract in the book. He added social density. . . .” Certainly one of the most outstanding films of Cuban cinema along with Mikhail Kalatozov’s Soy Cuba | I am Cuba (1964). MT

AVAILABLE on BFI PLAYER and on bluray COURTESY OF MR BONGO FILMS

Tanna (2015)

Director: Bentley Dean | Martin Butler

99min l Drama l Australia

Dean and Butler are experienced TV documentarians whose first foray into narrative features is this stunningly cinematic tribal tale from Vanuatu in the South Pacific.

TANNA is a tragic love story whose implications ripple out into the wider world and connect us to the narrative of disappearing communities and survival of remote tribes. There is a disarming innocence and fierceness that marks the traditional tribal villagers out as philosophical and emotionally highly evolved, despite their frugal and backwood existence in the magical island set in its Pacific splendour. The Australian helmers make no attempt to trivialise these honest and gentle people, or diminish the very real threats they face from rival tribes who pose a very real danger if their customs and beliefs are not upheld. By incorporating elements of ethnography and spirituality in their storyline TANNA comes across as a serious study while cleverly also appealing to mainstream and arthouse audiences, children and adults setting the story from the young protogonist’s perspective.

The island of Vanuatu has around 30,000 inhabitants who form part of distinct tribes who embrace the Kastom system of beliefs, rejecting Colonial invasion, Christianity and the lure of 21st century economic advancement. Dean and Bentley lived amongst the islanders in a village called Yakel where they gradually put together a narrative based on tribal customs, rituals and traditional stories basing their drama on an incident that occurred during 1987.

Women play an important role in this patriarchal community and the story is seen through the eyes of a little girl called Selin who quietly observes a budding romance between her sister, Wawa and a the village chief’s orphaned grandson Dain, But Wawa is coming of age and been committed by her grandfather to an arranged marriage with a man from another tribe which will serve to heal a rift between the rival villagers. Both the sisters share a rebellious streak and Wawa has no intention of fallong in with the arranged marriage haven fallen in love with Dain. Selin’s grandfather is the village shaman, and he takes her to visit the island’s active volcano, Yahul. The vermillion sparks and fiery energy provides the focus for a spritual force that offers both comfort but commands supreme respect.

TANNA is a poetic and magical drama that also highlights the songs and music of the tribal traditions focusing on the virtues of conflict resolution, forgiveness and wisdom gained through experience. The film shows how the rival tribes are proud but deeply philosophical and always willing to ‘see another way’ in resolving their differences, and although they appear backward are highly evolved, bringing compassion and intelligent to their way they conducting inter-tribal relations.

With its tantalising score and natural performances from the villagers, Bentley and Dean have created a tense and tender drama that is instructive and dazzlingly cinematic harnessing the rain forests, colourful tribal costumes, volcanic landscapes and palm-fringed beaches of Vanuatu. MT

ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 17 FEBRUARY 2017

California Dreams (2017) | Woche der Critik 2017

Dir.: Mike Ott; Cast: Cory Zacharia, Kevin Gilger, Carolan J. Pinto, Neil Harley, Patrick Ilaguno; USA 2017, 85 min.

Director/writer Mike Ott (Lake Los Angeles) explores a personal, not to say idiosyncratic, view of actors on the (often imagined) fringe of Hollywood – always just a step away from realising their dream in Tinsel Town. Having set up auditions in a small town in California, Ott interviews them at length and discovers a great deal of sadness, but also perseverance against the odds.

First up is Cory Zacharia. The two first met working on a student film and this is now their fourth collaboration together. Cory, like all the others, has to do a scene from his favourite Hollywood film; Ott hoping to find out what makes them tick. Cory is in his late twenties with severe learning difficulties and lives with his Mum in a housing project in Lancaster/Cal. Having grown up as Jehovah’s Witness, he has difficulties regarding his sexual orientation: his mother had him locked up twice in mental institutions, after she found out that he had sex with men. His oppressive home life is reason enough to dream himself away to Hollywood. Cory also has a fixation with Finland, particularly the women there, who he imagines are waiting for him, fulfilling his dream of absolute and perfect love. But first he has to find a way to go to Berlin, to star in a film produced by a certain Herr Henning, who phones often and is angry that Cory has not found a way to pay for a plane ticket.

Next is Carolan J. Pinta who grew up in a musical family and had a career in commercials and TV as a teenager, but now lives in her car. She dreams about writing a bestseller which would be made into a big Hollywood film, finally winning her an Oscar: her acceptance speech performance is honed to perfection. Carolan takes her eighty pound boxer dog Lady Jenna Theresa where ever she goes.

Kevin Gilger aka The Dog, has been a professional actor since his childhood. For the past nine years he is impersonating Duane ‘Dog’ Chapman. Chapman plays a sheriff, who is chasing Cory all over the place, the pair are very close to the spirit of the Mike Sennett silent comedies.

And finally, Patrick Ilaguno was born in the Philippines, after emigrating to the USA he studied film at Long Beach City College, College of the Canyons and Cal State University LA. He is working at the Six Flags Magic Mountains car park, but always visits festivals in the region. Still a virgin, he hopes that a career in films will make him more acceptable to women.

In the end, Cory finds a (staged) truly Hollywood-like ending, in slow motion and with a rapturous music score. As Ott put it: ”This is a film about the dream of making it in Hollywood. That contrast between who we really are as people, and who we want to be in the hallucination that is cinema, is something I find so inspiring and at the same time heart breaking”.

DoP Mike Gloulakis finds the right images for all stages of this journey: Slapstick, Western and Romance genre photography confronts the hard, documentary style of the real life story of the protagonists. Ott carefully avoids sentimentality and judgement – he simply tells it like it is. AS

WOCHE DER CRITIK TAKES PLACE IN BERLIN DURING BERLINALE 9-19 FEBRUARY 2017 |

Loving Pia (2017) AT ELSKE PIA | Berlinale Forum

Dir.: Daniel Borgman; Cast: Pia Skovgaard, Celine Skovgaard, Jens Jensen, Putte Jensen; Denmark 2017, 100 min.

Filmmaker Daniel Borgman (The Weight of Elephants) has achieved an astonishing hybrid between documentary and feature: his portrait of Pia, an intellectually challenged woman in her sixties, is a cinematographic declaration of love, not only for Pia, but for everyone who life difficult each day without help.

Pia Skovgaard lives with her mother Guittou (Celine Skovgaard) in a farmhouse on the Danish island of Langeland. Guitto is a translator in her eighties who grew up in France. Pia is fond of their goose Lola, whom she treats like an equal. We first meet her declaring she wants to marry Jose, who lives in Lusac. Her mother later tells her that she has picked up this person from the TV, and that she should look for a real person to marry. Pia goes every day to the day centre, where she enjoys occupational therapy and gymnastics. Guittou is worried that she won’t be around for much longer and tries to prepare Pia for a life on her own. On the way to visit a care home, Pia meets Jens tending his boat in the small harbour. Jens’ wife has left him, and he only has the occasional company of his sister Putte. The two begin a tentative relationship and Guittou hopes it might work out. But after Pia talks Jens into visiting the Den Bla Planet Aquarium in Copenhagen – both of them are fascinated with fish – the relationship flounders: Jens feels that Pia’s conversation is too lightweight: “you just want to make jokes”, dumping her on their return to the island far away from her house. At home, and we leave the two women as we met them: Pia trying to keep reality and fiction apart for her daughter.

The lyrical, poetic film language is underlined by the images, which are shot on 16mm with very long and fixed shots (shades of Manoel de Oliveira), which are different from the shot/counter shot and edit of the conventional narrative film. Whilst segments of the story are fictional, they are embedded in the real life story of Pia. LOVING PIA has a languid quality, which makes the audience part of Pia’s life: it works like waves washing up to the shore, leaving strong emotions behind. AS

BERLINALE 9-19 FEBRUARY 2017

Spoor (2017) | Berlinale Competition

Agnieska Holland returns to Berlin with a harebrained environmental thriller that gets off to a glorious start but gradually wanders way off piste in the snowy mountains east of Wroclaw, on the Polish Czech border.

It follows the exploits of a retired construction engineer turned eco-warrior who has nestled down to a cosy retirement in a pretty wooden chalet where she lives with her two collies, campaigning for animal rights and teaching part-time at the local primary school. .

One day her beloved dogs disappear. On a snowy winter’s night shortly afterwards she discovers the dead body of her neighbour next to some deer tracks. More people die in a similarly mysterious way. All of them were pillars of the village community, and all were passionate hunters, so Janina turns detective to find out what happened.

Initially the kind and cuddly Janina Duszejko’s efforts are laudable but gradually we start to take her less seriously as she degenerates into a tubby troublemaking Miss Tiggywinkle whose emotional outbursts do her cause a great injustice, despite her worthy efforts to find clues. This is a society that glories in killing animals, regales in the hunting season and even celebrates it in the local church, so a careful campaign is clearly needed sensitively to get to the bottom of things.

Ms Holland has been making award-winning films since the 1970s and SPOOR is spectacularly crafted on the widescreen as the camera sweeps across snowy landscapes where scampering wild boar, deer and badgers glory in their native setting. Summery flower-filled meadows and verdant hillsides glow with lush vegetation. This is a feast for the eyes.

So why does she ruin this marvellous opportunity to support animal rights and the anti-hunting campaign with a film based on an unstable earth mother who turns into a nutter, going into battle with her fellow villagers like an unguided missile?. The locals are an unsavoury bunch who delight in skinning animals alive, hunting out of season and gamble and whore openly. To shame them would be as easy as falling off a pine log.

Holland’s script is a collaborative effort based on Olga Tokarczuk’s novel. Clearly Agnieska Mandat relishes the thorny central role and avidly conveys the deep sympathy and anguish animal lovers feel when they witness cruelty. The support cast is poorly underwritten: Boros (Miroslav Krobot) the bug-hunting wayfarer who she beds and bonks; Dyzio (Jakub Gierszal) a young computer guy who suffers from seizures, and the subplot of a girl who is clearly being abused is never explored satisfactorily. All go to make this a sadly missed opportunity for something really resonant and meaningful. What a shame the animal kingdom has been let down. Antoni Komasa-Lazarkiewicz’s sinister score attempts and succeeds in initial gravitas. MT

BERLINALE 9-19 2017 | IN COMPETITION

Just like our Parents | Como Ossos Pais (2017) | Berlinale

Dir/scr. Laís Bodanzky. Brazil. 2017. 102 mins

Brazilian director Lais Bodansky’s domestic drama is an upbeat but fraught and female-focused affair that brings nothing new to the familiar theme of mother-daughter conflict and ineffectual fathers and husbands.

In a leafy upmarket part of Sao Paulo a pleasant family lunch on the terrace ends in a tears after a devastating revelation rocks the family foundations leaving a put-upon working wife and mother to re-evaluate her marriage, her career and even her origins

There is no easy answer when Rosa (Maria Ribeiro) discovers that her father is not the man who brought her up but a key member of the Brazil’s government. Her self-centred mother Clarice delivers the brusque announcement that she conceived her only daughter during a business trip and is not about to apologise for the affair which contributed to her own marriage breakdown. Hurt and saddened, Rosa terminates all contact but soon the two are talking again with Clarice delivering another bombshell:that she has terminal cancer. Rosa reacts to all this by turning her energy inwards to examine her own situation and decides to contact her real father.

Rosa’s husband Dado (Paulo Vilhena) is a lightweight environmentalist who flirts iwth his colleagues, avoids the chores then wonders why they don’t have sex anymore when leaving Rosa to do the lion’s share of school runs and cleaning.

This is a breezy and natural film with plenty of drama and shouty scenes leavened by shrewd insights. The lighter moments emerge when Rosa becomes close to another parent, Pedro, on the school run. The love hate relationship between mother and daughter is dramatically rich and certainly more mature than the resentments that poison Rosa’s turgid marriage in this decent but unmemorable Sao Paulo snapshot. MT

BERLINALE 9-19 FEBRUARY 2017 |

Discreet (2017) | Berlinale Forum

Dir.: Travis Mathews; Cast: Jonny Mars, Atsuko Okatsaka, Bob Swaffar, Jordan Elsass; USA 2017, 80 min.

Writer/director Travis Mathews (Interior. Leather Bar) relies very much on atmosphere in this moody drifter/road movie, set in a desolate Texas, where the anti-hero is alienated and caught in a diffuse past.

DISCREET starts and ends in a setting alongside a stream where in the opening scene a black body bag is thrown into the water, but hardly moves. It is Alex (Mars), the main character, who throws the body bag into the river, and, throughout the film, he is in communication with Mandy (Okatsuka), who runs a website called ‘Gentle Rhythm’. It’s content is always introduced by image of flowery wallpaper, through which Mandy tries to communicate her peaceful mantra.

But Alex is anything but at peace: he seems to be traumatised by an enigmatic past, and is constantly driving around in his car. After we watch two men in a porn booth masturbating, Alex arranges a meeting in his bedroom between homosexual men, coaxing them into absurd sex games. But most of his time is spent with his grandfather John (Swaffar), who lives in a dilapidated cottage in a fenced in property, where Alex is questioned extensively before being allowed to enter. Soon Alex picks up the young boy Zack (Elsass), who might be his younger Alter Ego. The grandfather is suffering from Parkinsons and Alex employs Zack to feed John. Whilst Alex visits the porn booth again, Mandy declares that she “is ready for the day”. Finally we learn the secret of the body bag – but even this throws up more questions than answers.

Mathews was clearly trying to evoke alienation and displacement for an American male who has not freed himself from his childhood, reliving it is constantly whilst driving aimlessly in an hostile environment. Unable to have any meaningful relationships, he uses Mandy’s website as a form of outlet, dreaming of a better future, without being able to envisage it clearly.

But Alex’ fragmentation is duplicated in the film’s structure, which allows the audience not vey much insight. Whilst certain segments are interesting, they do not really form a cohesive narrative together. Doing away with a narrative structure is fine, but one has to replace it with something, not just impressions and repetitions. The male lead is too weak to drive proceedings forward in a meaningful way. DoP Drew Xanthopoulos has the thankless task of holding everything together. He tries his best and succeeds with some disturbing images, particularly in the claustrophobic world of the porn booth. But overall DISCREET fails to make an impression as a gay interest piece or a mainstream arthouse title – even at eighty minutes.AS

BERLINALE 9-19 FEBRUARY 2017 | Forum

Fences (2017)

Dir. Denzel Washington, USA/Canada 2016, Dur. 138 mins.
Cast: Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Jovan Adepo, Russell Hornsby, Mykelti Williamson

August Wilson wrote his play FENCES some 33 years ago. It has been on stage in England, most recently the 2013 version with Lenny Henry, who was very good as the father. Now Denzel Washington, who played the part on Broadway in 2010, along with others in the film, takes the role of Troy and also directs the movie FENCES.

Taking place in Pittsburgh in the 1950s, we gradually learn Troy’s story. Once he had aspirations to be a baseball star but was thwarted as, at that time, only white sportsmen succeeded. Now he is bitter and talks about the past as he works on a garbage truck alongside his best friend, Bono (a most sympathetic performance by Stephen Henderson). The two, in fact, met when Troy had a spell in prison. Troy is supported by his wife, Rose (Viola Davis), who attempts to get her husband to promote the ambitions of their son, Cory who wants to become a professional footballer. Troy refuses to allow him to play in the college team and wants him to get a job. Troy also argues with Lyons (Russell Hornsby), his 34 year-old son from a previous marriage. Lyons is a musician, but regularly appears at his father’s door on paydays to ask for money.

Denzel Washington plays Troy convincingly. He puts over the playwright’s tremendous dialogue with a real feeling for the words he speaks. Sometimes he sounds like a musical instrument as he gives colour to the words. He is backed by a most sympathetic performance by Stephen McKinley Henderson as his white work mate who is mostly content to sit and listen as Troy tells stories about his past.

The two sons come across well, too. Older son, Lyons – a tough role to put across well but Russell Hornsby manages it – a struggling musician who feels forced to ask his father for cash and the youngster Cory, a breakout performance by young Jovan Adepo. Mykelti Williamson is moving in the small part of Gabriel, the mentally damaged brother of Troy.

The outstanding role is played by Viola Davis as Rose – she is terrific and you can see why she is up for a Supporting Actress Oscar. In her speech telling her husband that while he regrets not having achieved much in his life, she has stood next to him all the way, she is not afraid to let mucous from her nose run down her face she confronts her husband with a few home truths.

Washington directs the movie in a workmanlike fashion. Even if there is not a lot of flair here, it is always truthful and one can believe that the characters portrayed really exist. It mostly takes place in the front yard of Troy’s home and doesn’t show much of the area around. Yes, it is stagey but it is actually very well-staged. It’s good to see that August Wilson, who wrote the screenplay of his play, got his wish for the film to be directed by a black director. It is a long film but always absorbing and one not to be missed. CARLIE NEWMAN

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE

Vazante (2017) | Berlinale Panorama Special

Dir: Daniela Thomas | Adventure Drama | Brazil / Portugal 2017 | 116 min · Black/White

This languorously seductive lush-mounted arthouse piece is the feature debut of Walter Salles’ regular collaborator Brazilian director Daniela Thomas. It explores transitional race and gender relations sixty years before the end of slavery, in 1820s Brazil, with a tantalising drama that focuses on a group of charismatic performances rather than adopting the more traditional approach of highlighting colonial myths.

composed on the widescreen and in intimate close-up in glowing black and white, her gorgeously teasing linear narrative slowly unfolds relying on atmosphere and a series of sparsely dialogued episodes which unspool against the backdrop of the glorious meadows and mountains of the Chapada Diamantina, that runs north and south through Bahia.

Mine owner Antonio has been forced to turn his back on diamond mining and switch to cattle and crops, in a remote estate where he lives with his black slaves and a group of indigenous retainers. Returning home from a trip he discovers his wife has died in childbirth, he decides to marry her pubescent niece Beatriz, who is a feisty tomboy who is unemotionally unprepared for a relationship with a man, and is still playing barefoot in the fields. Preoccupied with survival Antonio makes frequent forays to re-build his fortune and while he’s away, Beatriz is bored and lonely in their large home with only her taciturn grandmother for company with tragic results for all concerned.

Exuding a heady atmosphere of palpable racial tension intensified by its steamy steamy exotic setting VAZANTE is an impressive debut that will entrance cineastes with its gripping plotline, visual allure, feminine perception and captivating acting from a largely unknown cast. In pacing and ambience VAZANTE echoes Embrace of the Serpent. MT

BERLINALE 9-19 FEBRUARY 2017 | SPECIAL SCREENING

Barrage (2017) | Berlinale Forum

Dir: Laura Schroeder | Cast: Lolita Chammah, Thémis Pauwels, Isabelle Huppert, Charles Müller, Elsa Houben, Marja-Leena Juncker, Luc Schiltz (Pol) | Luxembourg / Belgium Franc |112 min

Three women are united in Laura Schroeder’s second feature, which is very much a family affair with Isabelle Huppert and her daughter Lolita Chammah starring in their real life roles, as Elisabeth and Catherine.

Catherine returns home to Luxembourg after a decade in Switzerland during which her daughter Alba been looked after by her own mother Elisabeth. From the side of the tennis court, she watches Elisabeth coach Alba, her face clearly showing how well she remembers this mixture of stimulus and humiliation from her own childhood but Catherine needs to reassert her motherly authority and rightful place in the heirarchy – not easy when Huppert is in charge. The dynamic between the trio constantly changes with Catherine sometimes feeling like a sister to Alba but Schroeder’s skillful narrative is underpinned by some serious undertones which the three manage deftly in their subtle and entertaining performances.

The action takes place over a few days and little is known of Catherine’s past although she has clearly got some serious issues to deal with that have left her unstable and during a day in the country with Alba events come to a head explaining the film’s rather omenous title. And although Huppert is not always present her presence is strongly felt as a dominating force to be reckoned with – perfectly suiting her profile as a powerful actor in often tricky roles.

Laura Schroeder keeps emotional distance from her characters by using the Academy ratio, used after the Silent era when synchronised sound was first introduced in 1929, and this gives this potent character study rather a formal detached feel rather than an intimate ambiance. Despite this BARRAGE offers insight into women’s minds that will resonate with audiences familiar with the territory. MT

BERLINALE 9-19 FEBRUARY 2017 | Forum Section

Django (2017) | Berlinale Competition

Dir: Etienne Comar | Cast: Reda Kateb; Cécile de France (Louise); Beata Palya, Bim Bam Merstein; Gabriel Mirété; Vincent Frade; Johnny Montreuil, Raphaël Dever | 117 min · Colour

Etienne Comar (Of Gods and Men) sadly fails in his attempt to bring the jazzy verve of Belgian-born Romany Django Rheinhardt’s music to the rescue of this rather earnest biopic, although it cleverly carries the undertone of Nazi persecution of his people during wartime France during 1943, based on the fictional novel Folles de Django by Salatko, who co-wrote the script.

After a thrilling opening in Paris where the musician entertains enraptured audiences while German officials set up a propaganda initiative against his ‘degenerate’ jazz, a narrative torpor sets in despite a game and committed lead performance from Reda Ketab as the charismatic and carefree strummer with Cecile de France seductively sinuous as his agent, who enhances his publicity value to the top brass, while remaining in cahoots with them. Django thinks his popularity will give him protection from the Nazis but wisely refuses to go on tour in Germany after pressure from the powers that be, taking refuge with his wife Naguine (the Hungarian singer Beata Palya) in a village near the Swiss border, where he reconnects with other members of his family, composes a classical work “Requiem for the Gypsy Brothers”, and makes a crafty bid for freedom via Lake Geneva into Switzerland, the Nazis hot in pursuit.

Despite its drawbacks DJANGO offers decent entertainment and is certainly worth a watch for its colourful cinematography and historic footage, but Colmar’s studious and rather stodgy narrative flies in the face of the cherished allure of the musician who captured our collective imagination and fondness with his effervescent brand of jazz. MT

BERLINALE 9-19 FEBRUARY 2017 | IN COMPETITION

P. S. Jerusalem (2016) |

Director: Danae Elon; Documentary; Canada/Israel 2015, 87 min.

Filmmaker Danae Elon offers a straightforward and very honest film diary of the three years following her return to Jerusalem. Her father Amos Elon was a writer and a fierce critic of Israel’s occupation of Palestine who advised her not to return to “this nation of thieves”, before his death in 2009. And Elon’s is a heart-breaking story of personal disappointment amid the day-to-day violence in Israel.

A child of the ’70s, Danae Elon grew up with parents who actively protested against Israel’s ‘Apartheid’ policies and the permanent violence against Palestinians. After living most of her adult life in the USA, her main motive for returning to Jerusalem was to relive her childhood, because “Jerusalem was the only place I call home”. With her two sons Tristan and Andrei – a third child, Amos, was born just after the arrival in Jerusalem – and husband Philip Touitou, a French-Algerian Jew, Danae tried in a way to recreate her own childhood, taking her children to rallies against new Jewish settlements and enrolling her oldest son Tristan in Jerusalem’s only school bi-lingual school for Arabs and Jews.

Whilst teaching her children to see Palestinians as their equals, she had not reckoned with the openly violent attitude of her fellow Israelis towards the Palestinians in the capital. At one point an enraged Israeli shouts at Danae and her son during a demonstration against an evection of an Arab family: “Your ancestors must have helped the Nazis, since you are helping the Arabs. Your father was a Kapo [in the Camps] !”. Even at home the atmosphere changed from he happy time of their arrival: Tristan exclaims “Mummy comes from here, she understands. Dad shouldn’t be here”. The oldest sons are proud “Mummy was a soldier” in the Israeli Army. Naturally, Philip, who has trouble finding a job as a photographer, feels alienated and fears for the future of their children when asking his wife: “You make the children feel different from others, they have different values. But is it good for them?” Philip feels even more isolated than he did growing up as an Arab in Paris. And he yearns to live “with normal people, without all the political barriers erected between Arabs and Jews”. Danae too starts questioning the future of her sons: “Will they be hated as members of the Peace Movement, or will they start to hate?”

Everywhere Danae starts to see contradictions when arguing with fellow Israelis: “The whole myth of the founding of the State of Israel, where the settlers build the country from ‘barren land’, whilst the reality was, that the best agricultural part of the country was taken from 700 000 Palestinians, who were displaced”. Things come to a head for Danae on “Memorial Day for Jewish Soldiers”, the only day, when the students in Tristan’s school are separated. The open contradictions of this “celebration” lead her to conclude that she wanted to bring the boys up where she was a child. “Perhaps I need to become a person away from my childhood. The only home for my children is their family”.

A tearful farewell with Tristan’s best friend, a Palestinian boy, notwithstanding, P S JERUSALEM shows that it is impossible for Danae, or anybody else, to bring up her children in a tolerant way given the violence and hatred between Jews and Arabs growing with every new Jewish settlement and every eviction of Arabs from their family home. Danae’s father, an emigrant from Austria, saw the roots of this tragedy as a journalist during the War of Independence in 1948 – his daughter had, rightly, tried to make a difference in this unequal struggle between the Have and Have-Nots. In the end, Danae did not want to pay the penalty of “a divided family as a price for being a Jew in Israel”.

Made on a shoestring budget, and no worse for it, the director was her own DOP, in what is by far the most impressive document of the seemingly unavoidable conflict between Israeli and Palestinians: Violence has become the norm, and minorities on both sides, fight a losing battle for reconciliation. Danae Elon’s truthful, unflinching account of her struggles is a milestone of personal/political filmmaking. Dedicated to her mother, who still lives and fights for reconciliation in Jerusalem, this documentary is a tribute to both her parents. AS

SCREENING AT BERTHA DOCHOUSE FROM 17 FEBRUARY 2017

Cul-de-Sac (1966) | Criterion UK | Bluray release

This cruel and dark comedy follow-up to Repulsion is supposed to be Polanski’s favourite, indulging his penchant for awkward social situations, where the underdog is pitted against the stronger personalities. It is another battle of wits fought out in the wild and remote beaches of Lindisfarne where a mismatched married couple are besieged by a couple of robbers and then forced into keeping up appearances when their weekend visitors eventually arrive.

Donald Pleasence and the exquisitely gamine Françoise Dorleac, play the couple (Dorleac was to die in a car accident for the following year at only 25), he is mesmerised by her sexual allure and obsessively in love, she ambivalent and flirtatious playing teasing games when they are interrupted by the arrival of an American crook Richard (Stander) and his mate Albie (MacGowran) whose car has been washed up on a sand dune. The third of the trio, a man called Katelbach, never appears.

The back-footed and half-dressed couple squirm and squabble as they try to get the better of the criminals – who terrorise and torment them. But when Jacqueline Bisset arrives as a glamorous guest, Richard is forced into a submissive role as a butler to maintain his cover, and this gives him a dose of his own medicine – for a while, at least. Of course, it all ends in tears but not before a witty and rather nasty and drawn out interplay between the protagonists.

With Polanski you’re never going to get harmony or a happy ending but CUL-DE-SAC‘s characters are all unlikeable and unpleasant in different ways as the toxic dynamic plays out.

As usual, Polanski surrounds himself with the creme de la creme in cast and crew: DoP Gilbert Taylor’s images gleam with a velvety lustre, Krzysztof Komeda (Rosemary’s Baby, Knife in the Water) provides a perky, score and the production design comes courtesy of Voytek. The whole lot produced by Gene Gutowski (The Pianist, Repulsion, Fearless Vampire Killers). And for once we can be proud of a British-made indie cult classic. CUL-DE-SAC really is arthouse cinema at its best. MT

ON BLURAY COURTESY OF CRITERION UK | 27 FEBRUARY 2017

Prevenge (2016)

Dir.: Alice Lowe; Cast: Alison Lowe, Kate Dickie, Tom Davis, Dan Renton, Jo Hartley, Dan Renton Skinner; UK 2016, 88 min.

Actor and writer Alice Lowe, tries her hand at directing here in Prevenge, and her script is very much inspired by her film Sightseers, in which she also starred: in both cases, the murderous actions are committed by rather ordinary people in an everyday environment. Acting in both films, Lowe makes the connection even tighter, robbing Prevenge of any originality.

Set in a charmless Cardiff, Ruth (Lowe) is pregnant with a baby girl, the child’s father having died in a climbing accident. The baby seems to have a mind of its own, talking to her mother, mostly encouraging her to commit some gruesome murders. First in line for execution is an uncouth pet show owner (Skinner), who rapidly meets his bloody end; followed by an obnoxious DJ (Davis), and a joyless career woman (Dickie). The last case robs us of any sympathy we might feel for our our heroine, and the other attacks underline the fact that Ruth is an out and out psychotic. This serious factor takes the fun out of the movie, and all that remains is an endless blood feast, and a rather botched ending. Prevenge also suffers from its one-dimensional protagonists who, with the exception of Jo Hartley’s midwife, feel utterly unconvincing.

It is ironic that film directed, written and starring a woman should be aimed at a mostly male audience. Gory repetitions aside, the endless clichés simply overwhelm any sort of attempted humour: in spite of Lowe’s stellar performance, Prevenge is just a bloody rant. DoP Ryan Eddleston’s images are as pedestrian and redundant as the whole enterprise. AS

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE \ REVIEWED DURING VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2016

Mes Nuits Feront Echo (Still Night, Still Light) | Rotterdam International Film Festival 2017

Dir.: Sophie Goyette | Cast: Eliane Prefontaine, Gerardo Trejoluna, Felipe Casanova; Canada/Mexico | Drama | 98 min | 2016

First time director/writer/editor/producer Sophie Goyette has created her own universe with this evocative feature, which is best described as a dreamy poem about love, loss, longing and music. The Canadian director, whose short films have been shown at all major film festivals, has successfully moved the boundaries: Mes Nuits allows us to see through the cracks of human nature in a reverie that is half dream, half reality.

The characters linger, we only get glimpses of them, but music, in many forms, is the connecting element. Debut DoP Lena Mill-Reulliard’s images heighten an atmosphere of yearning; colours dissolve delicately as tunnels and railways link the transience of the narrative. The nature scenes have a strong link to the poetry of Hermann Hesse. But the overall impression is elusive: Goyette has developed a film language which feels quite unique and unlike more conventional films.

Set in Montreal and Mexico, the film is divided into three chapters, in the first we meet Eliane (Préfontaine, who also composed the score), sitting in a Montreal garden in a ‘princess’ costume, entertaining a group of young girls at a birthday party. The atmosphere is somewhat unreal, the staging feels like we are watching a dream: this is the consistent element through the whole film. But after the ‘performance’, when talking to the host of the birthday party, Eliane gives us clues about herself: she wanted to go to the conservatoire to study singing but although her voice was up to the challenge she had never learnt how to read music, never mind score a melody played by a pianist during the examination. “I gave in an empty sheet with my name on it”. Clearly there are reasons for this : Eliane has lost her parents in an accident, and she has not come to terms with it. To put some distance between herself and the trauma she travels to Mexico where she takes up residence in a house owned by the middle- aged Romes (Trejoluna), whose son she is teaching piano.

Once in Mexico, Eliane feels threatened by her new surroundings: “Mexico is hot, dangerous”. But she stays, and visits an open-air concert with Romes, where music by the German Baroque composer Johann Pachelbel transports her to another level – a fairy tale featuring an ancient dog. Romes has learned his English from watching American TV, and their communication is often difficult. Nevertheless, they seem to be at peace with each other. Elaine then talks about Chopin’s lifelong depression, and we learn that he dedicated his last composition to his doctor. Eliane and Romes visit a mystical place called Cutemaco, where Romes has spent magical holidays as a child.

The focus then switches to Romes, who has lost his mother two years previously and still yearns for her. They talk on the phone together, but we don’t know if this is Romes’ dream or past reality. Romes is married, but we never see his wife, as he grows more and more morose. He is also troubled by the relationship with his father Pablo (Casanova), whom he accuses of having been cold towards his mother. He visits the old man in a care home, and they suddenly decide to visit China, “because we don’t have much time left”. In an unnamed metropolis in China, Pablo then becomes the central figure of the third chapter and as the denouement unspools, Romes’ story becomes clearer. Utterly unique and spellbinding. AS

MES NUITS FERONT ÉCHO by Sophie Goyette wins Impact Cinema Bright Future Award

SCREENING AS PART OF THE CINEMA BRIGHT FUTURE STRAND | INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM | 25 JANUARY – 5 FEBRUARY 2017

Lies We Tell * * * (2017)

Dir.: Mitu Misra; Cast: Gabriel Bryne, Sibylla Deen, Jn Uddin, Harvey Keitel,Mark Addy, Reece Ritchie, Emily Atack, Danica Johnson, Harish Patel, Harvey Virdi; UK 2017, 109′.

First time director Mitu Misra tries, perhaps too hard, to construct a complex narrative that leaves too many loose ends to be convincing.. On the other hand, Misra offers a vey honest portrait of the underbelly of the Pakistani Muslim community in Bradford.

When crime lord Demi Lamprose (Keitel) dies, his chauffeur and general dogsbody Donald (Bryne) has to clear his luxury flat, forcing his fledgling solicitor lover Amber (Deen) to move out immediately. As Donald, Byrne rocks his signature hangdog look: estranged from his wife after the death of their daughter Amy, he gets involved with Amber, who has a troubled past -and present, for that matter. At sixteen she was forced to marry her cousin KD (Uddin) in Pakistan, and he is now a high profile gangster in Bradford. Having raped Amber, he tries to marry her 16 year old sister Miriam (Johnson), whose parents are only too willing to give her away, since the bounty from the marriage will cover their debts. It also emerges that Amber was pimped out to by her father to Lamprose for the same reason. When Lamprose’s son Nathan (Ritchie) wants to ‘inherit’ Amber from his father, Amber’s troubles get out of hand. She successfully disrupts KD and Miriam’s marriage – and KD goes on to marry his pregnant girl friend Emily (Atack), whom he abuses, bloody revenge killings conclude this saga.

DoP Santos Sivan steers clear of bleak social realism and instead uses shadows and innovative angles for his noir images. The nightlife, ‘sponsored’ by KD is from another planet compared with the tradition of Amber’s family, both parents clinging to a religion they have great difficulty in following. Ambers’ workplace is cold, clean and white, a place she somehow finds comforting. Perhaps seedy KD is a little bit over the top in his nastiness, but Misra coruscating portrait of organised crime and this male-dominated culture, fed from both second-hand western macho images and Muslim religiously motivated misogynist ideology, feels very real. There are some great performances, particularly from the reliable Bryne and Deen, and in spite of structural difficulties, LIES WE TELL is always gripping. In the end, the brutal honesty of Misra’s arguments outweigh the flaws of this convoluted chronicle. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 2 FEBRUARY 2018

City of the Sun (2017) ****

Dir: Rati Oneli | Georgia / USA / Qatar / Netherlands 2017 | Georgian | Doc | 104 min · Colour

Up to 50 percent of the world’s manganese, a vital metal across the globe, used to be mined in Chiatura, in western Georgia. Today, it resembles an apocalyptic ghost town. Mzis qalaqi portrays a few of the remaining inhabitants. Music teacher Zurab dismantles ramshackle concrete buildings and sells the iron girders to make some money on the side. Archil still works in the mine but his real passion is the local amateur theatre group. Despite being malnourished, two young female athletes still train stoically for the next Olympic Games.

In his documentary debut, director Rati Oneli provides fascinating insights into a living environment whose bleak industrial ruins appear at once colossal almost like a film set. A jumble of clapped out electric wires and ageing cable cars runs through the city like the clogged-up arteries of an ailing organism that resists the flow of life in untiring fashion. Mzis qalaqi brings home the ephemeral nature. In a city where the sun never shines, only the inhabitants generate warmth. Oneli succeeds in achieving far more than the mining companies are capable of: His camera brings that most valuable of resources to the surface – humanity.

SCREENING DURING BERLINALE 2017 | Panorama section.

In the Intense Now (2017) | Berlinale Forum

Dir: João Moreira Salles | Doc | Brazil | 127 min · Black/White & Colour

In 1966, whilst on a cultural tour of China, the director’s mother captured on film her impressions of the country and its people. Forty years later, her son discovered her material. He comments on the images taken by his enthusiastic mother by quoting the impressions of Italian author Alberto Moravia, who also travelled through China and was able to closely observe Maoist policies. His mother’s journey during the first year of the Cultural Revolution also provides a starting point for João Moreira Salles’ exploration of other societies in the midst of upheaval. Making use of archive images, he dissects and analyses the Brazilian coup of 1964 and the end of the Prague Spring in August 1968. He also returns – repeatedly – to the Parisian riots in May which found a ‘star’ revolutionary and mediator between Paris and Berlin in the shape of Daniel Cohn-Bendit. An essayistic and at the same time personal exploration of the parallel stories of revolution in Prague, France and Brazil – and their failure. By juxtaposing amateur footage and archive material the film succeeds in pointing out connections between the sources of these images and their political contexts. Mind-blowing stuff and recommended viewing.

SCREENING DURING BERLINALE 2017 |

Toni Erdmann (2016) |

Director: Maren Ade

Cast: Peter Simonischek, Sandra Huller, Michael Wittenborn, Thomas Loibl, Trystan Putter

142min | Comedy | Germany

Following in the wake of some quirky and enjoyable comedies at Cannes Film Festival this year was German filmmaker Maren Ade’s TONI ERDMANN, a European arthouse drama that celebrates the intergenerational gap between parents and children with humour rather than strife.

Maren Ade explores whether comedy is the right way to fix family issues or whether we should just try to be more sympathetic and understanding. In a film that runs just short of three hours, she achieves a blend of situational comedy, embarrassing incidents, pervy sex scenes and even a good old German nudist party in the style of an Ulrich Seidl film.

And in fact TONI ERDMANN‘s hero is Austrian: Peter Simonichek plays Winifried, a divorced German music teacher who loves playing inappropriate practical jokes on his friends and colleagues, with whoopee cushions and the like. We first meet Winifried in the throes of arranging a surprise musical tribute to an old colleague’s retirement. But not everyone likes surprises or to be part of this harmless fun, least of all his serious-minded daughter Ines (Sandra Hüller), a top management consultant in Romania. When she realises that her father has been up to his tricks in a bid to poke fun at her childless state and perceived loneliness, it’s already too late to block his impromptu visit in Bucharest, after the death of his dog Willi leaves him footloose and a bit down in the dumps. As a little girl she loved his pranks, but his casual arrival at her offices in fancy dress, makes her extremely irritated. Rejecting his bid to offer fatherly appreciation, Winifried then starts to behave like a stalker, popping up at Ines’ dinner dates pretending to be his alter ego ‘Toni Erdmann’ complete with wig and grotesque false teeth which he claims are from cosmetic dentistry “I wanted something different – fiercer”.

Only a woman can appreciate the intricacies of life in the competitive corporate world where women are supposed to “go on shopping trips” when they travel with their CEO husbands. Rather than hanging with the guys after work, poor Ines is forced to show the women round the shops while the men ‘kick back’ over drinks. Extremely galling! At one point she tells her boss “if I was a feminist, I wouldn’t tolerate guys like you”. Ade’s script is really spot on, brilliantly manipulating this father daughter relationship and drawing some subtle and intricately-played performances from Simonischek and Huller, who start as polar opposites in their frosty stand-off but gradually grow more sympathetic and human during the course of the film. Beneath Winifried’s silliness lies a heart of gold, he appreciates the real world but has withdrawn from it to reflect and his daughter emerges to be far more caring and worldly than he gives her credit for.

Winifried’s old dog Willi sets the furry leitmotive for rest of the film, and he pops up in various shaggy wigs and even a full blown Bulgarian scarecrow outfit. The irony comes from the way Ines intuitively manages her difficult colleagues and local friends; her secretary Anca is the only sympathetic female character and there are some really poignant scenes at the end where Ines and her father finally let their guards down to acknowledge that blood really is thicker than water. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 12-22 MAY 2016 | WINNER OF THE FIPRESCI AWARD 2016

Strike a Pose (2016)

Director-writers: Ester Gould, Reijer Zwaan | Cast: Luis Camacho, Oliver Crumes III, Salim Gauwloos, Jose Gutierez, Kevin Stea, Carlton Wilborn | Doc | US |

Revisiting Madonna’s 1990 Blond Ambition gig, 25 dancers reflect on their experience in a very different world, a quarter of a century ago. This Dutch documentary looks at what happens once the performance high is over and the champagne glasses are washed and back on the shelf.

1990 felt feisty and fresh and so was Madonna and her dancers. Breaking onto a music scene that still seemed rather touching and naive, the quaint newness of ‘nautifying’ religion now seems very dated and tame in its way, and Gould and Zwaan successfully capture the zeitgeist of those ‘ground-breaking’ moments, with the usual talking heads, clips and footage format. But STRIKE A POSE is rather top heavy on sentimental family stories and light on entertainment, music and Madonna herself. So don’t go expecting a toe-tapping cheer-filled shindig; this really should be classified as an LGBT interest documentary rather than music biopic, per se. None of the dancers stands out as a personality with any particularly charisma. That said, this low-key indie makes some salient points about the cult of celebrity and its often catastrophic consequences for delicate egos and sensitive types, many of whom were still really kids when they took part, and there are some sincere revelations about what it feels like to be gay, then and now: “We carried our flamboyance as a warning,” says Camacho. “Yes, we have earrings on, we have eyeliner on, but don’t mistake any of this for weakness.”

So STRIKE A POSE is certainly worth a watch if you’re in the mood for a human interest story about the soulful introspection of gay men in the entertainment business and their melancholy reflections on the past, and of the first great arena spectacle that now is very much the way to go. MT

NOW ON RELEASE FROM 3 FEBRUARY 2017 AT BERTHA DOCHOUSE

Tower (2016)

Dir.: Keith Maitland | Cast: Violette Bean, Josephine McAdam, Louie Arnett, Chris Doubeck, Blair Jackson; USA | 96 min.

Using archive material and interviews with survivors, a dramatic reconstruction that is presented as a black-and-white rotoscoped animation, director Keith Maitland (The Eyes of Me) creates a haunting portrait of the first mass killing in US history: 25 year old ex-Marine Charles Whitman, shooting from the tower of the University of Texas Austin’ building, killed 15 people on August 1st 1966 and severely injured 34.

Maitland stays – almost literally – very much on the ground: this is the story of individuals who were victims, survivors or police officers, who finally killed Whitman. The documentary is not focused on focused on Whitman, or his troubled upbringing and or medical issues, nor does Maitland mention that Whitman killed his mother and wife before turning his gun on strangers. TOWER is about the individual terror, the bravery and the sheer randomness of the incident.

The surreal, chaotic and absurd atmosphere is enhanced by actors much younger than the survivors, telling the story in the words of the actual individuals themselves. Brief flashbacks are in Day-Glo; and whenever somebody is hit by Whitman’s bullets, the background turns red. Two women are in the centre of this reconstruction: Claire Wilson (Bean) who was eight months pregnant and Rita Starpattern (McAdam). Claire was hit by a bullet, which killed her baby, and her boyfriend, when her tried to help her. Claire lay in 100+ degrees on the cement, knowing that her baby and boyfriend were dead. But Rita Starpattern, a student, crawled to her in full view of the tower from which Whitman was shooting. Rita comforted Claire and kept her awake, trying to speak to her as casually as possible. Finally, when Claire was giving up, a man cowering nearby risked his life and helped to carry Claire to safety into one of the ambulances. Particularly moving is a scene from the aftermath, when Rita (who passed away in1996) presented Claire with one of her pictures, visiting her in hospital. Claire, who adopted an Ethiopian boy, the two are seen sitting beaming together on a sofa, has forgiven Whitman “because I have been forgiven myself so much”.

The senseless mayhem was all the more tragic when it emerges that many ordinary Austiners came with their rifles to the campus, attempting to shoot Whiteman without success. But as officer Martinez (Arnett) rightly pointed out, their efforts were not in vain. Although he and his fellow policeman Houston McCoy (Jackson) and civilian Allen Crum (Doubek), finally managed to kill the shooter. “these men shooting, saved lives, since Whitman had to take cover all the time, and could not move as freely as he wanted”.

So TOWER is an abstract reconstruction of the first mass shooting, a true horror story, which has been repeated all over again in places like Columbine High School and the Primary School in Newton/Conn. Maitland is not interested in guilt or explanations, he shows the raw reactions of people suddenly confronted with death, their exceptional bravery and courage in saving others, whilst the majority stayed in safe places. But TOWER also points out that the free availability of weapons – and here the focus is guns – is the main facilitator of these massacres. The fact that the president-elect is sponsored by the NRA gives little hope that this will change. AS

REVIEWED AT LFF WHERE IT COMPETED FOR THE GRIERSON DOC AWARD | TOWER IS ON RELEASE FROM MARCH 2017

Sundance Film Festival | Awards | 2017

THE US GRAND JURY PRIZE: DOCUMENTARY

DINA U.S.A. (Directors: Dan Sickles, Antonio Santini)

An eccentric suburban woman and a Walmart door-greeter navigate their evolving relationship in this unconventional love story.

THE US JURY PRIZE: DRAMATIC

I DON’T FEEL AT HOME IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE. / U.S.A. (Director/: Macon Blair) —

When a depressed woman is has a burglary, she finds a new sense of purpose by tracking down the thieves, alongside her obnoxious neighbour. But they soon find themselves dangerously out of their depth against a pack of degenerate criminals. Cast: Melanie Lynskey, Elijah Wood, David Yow, Jane Levy, Devon Graye.

THE WORLD GRAND JURY PRIZE: DOCUMENTARY

LAST MEN IN ALEPPO / Denmark, Syria (Director: Feras Fayyad)

After five years of war in Syria, Aleppo’s remaining residents prepare themselves for a siege. Khalid, Subhi and Mahmoud, founding members of The White Helmets, have remained in the city to help their fellow citizens—and experience daily life, death, struggle and triumph in a city under fire.

THE WORLD CINEMA GRAND JURY PRIZE:DRAMATIC

THE NILE HILTON INCIDENT / Sweden, Germany, Denmark (Dir/Writer: Tarik Saleh)

In Cairo, weeks before the 2011 revolution, Police Detective Noredin is working in the infamous Kasr el-Nil Police Station when he is handed the case of a murdered singer. He soon realizes that the investigation concerns the power elite, close to the President’s inner circle. Cast: Fares Fares, Mari Malek, Mohamed Yousry, Yasser Ali Maher, Ahmed Selim, Hania Amar.

THE AUDIENCE AWARD US: DOCUMENTARY

CHASING CORAL / U.S.A. (Director: Jeff Orlowski) main picture

Coral reefs around the world are vanishing at an unprecedented rate. A team of divers, photographers and scientists set out on a thrilling ocean adventure to discover why and to reveal the underwater mystery to the world.

THE AUDIENCE AWARD: US DRAMATIC

CROWN HEIGHTS / U.S.A. (Dir/Writer: Matt Ruskin)

When Colin Warner is wrongfully convicted of murder, his best friend, Carl King, devotes his life to proving Colin’s innocence. Adapted from This American Life, this is the incredible true story of their harrowing quest for justice. Cast: Lakeith Stanfield, Nnamdi Asomugha, Natalie Paul, Bill Camp, Nestor Carbonell, Amari Cheatom.

THE AUDIENCE AWARD: WORLD CINEMA DOCUMENTARY

JOSHUA: Teenager vs. Superpower / U.S.A. (Director: Joe Piscatella)

When the Chinese Communist Party backtracks on its promise of autonomy to Hong Kong, teenager Joshua Wong decides to save his city. Rallying thousands of kids to skip school and occupy the streets, Joshua becomes an unlikely leader in Hong Kong and one of China’s most notorious dissidents.

THE AUDIENCE AWARD: WORLD CINEMA DRAMATIC

SUENO EN OTRA IDIOMA (I Dream in Another Language) / Mexico, Netherlands (Dir: Ernesto Contreras, Writer: Carlos Contreras)

The last two speakers of a millennia-old language haven’t spoken for 50 years, when a young linguist tries to bring them together. Yet hidden in the past, in the heart of the jungle, lies a secret concerning the fate of the Zikril language. Cast: Fernando Álvarez Rebeil, Eligio Meléndez, Manuel Poncelis, Fátima Molina, Juan Pablo de Santiago, Hoze Meléndez.

THE DIRECTING AWARD : U.S. DOCUMENTARY

Peter Nicks for his film THE FORCE / U.S.A. (Director: Peter Nicks)

This cinema verité look at the long-troubled Oakland Police Department goes deep inside their struggles to confront federal demands for reform, a popular uprising following events in Ferguson and an explosive scandal.

THE DIRECTING AWARD: U.S. Dramatic

Eliza Hittman for her film BEACH RATS / U.S.A. (Dir/Writer Eliza Hittman)

A dudebro on the outer edges of Brooklyn struggles to escape his bleak home life and navigate questions of self-identity, as he balances his time between his delinquent friends, a potential new girlfriend, and older men he meets online. Cast: Harris Dickinson, Madeline Weinstein, Kate Hodge.

THE DIRECTING AWARD: World Cinema Documentary

Pascale Lamche, for her film WINNIE / France (Director: Pascale Lamche)

While her husband served a life sentence, paradoxically kept safe and morally uncontaminated, Winnie Mandela rode the raw violence of apartheid, fighting on the front line and underground. This is the untold story of the mysterious forces that combined to take her down, labeling him a saint, her, a sinner.

THE DIRECTING AWARD: World Cinema Dramatic

Francis Lee, for his film GOD’S OWN COUNTRY / UK: Francis Lee)

Springtime in Yorkshire: isolated young sheep farmer Johnny Saxby numbs his daily frustrations with binge drinking and casual sex, until the arrival of a Romanian migrant worker, employed for the lambing season, ignites an intense relationship that sets Johnny on a new path. Cast: Josh O’Connor, Alec Secareanu, Ian Hart, Gemma Jones.

THE WALDO SALT SCREENWRITING AWARD: U.S. Dramatic

Matt Spicer and David Branson Smith, for their film INGRID GOES WEST U.S.A.

A young woman becomes obsessed with an Instagram “influencer” and moves to Los Angeles to try and befriend her in real life. Cast: Aubrey Plaza, Elizabeth Olsen, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Wyatt Russell, Billy Magnussen.

OTHER AWARDS

A U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Inspirational Filmmaking

STEP / U.S.A. (Director: Amanda Lipitz) — With dreams of becoming the first in their families to attend college, a group of seniors from an inner-city Baltimore girls high school strives to make their step dance team a success against a backdrop of social unrest in a troubled city.

A U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Storytelling

STRONG ISLAND / U.S.A., Denmark (Director: Yance Ford) — Examining the violent death of the filmmaker’s brother and the judicial system that allowed his killer to go free, this documentary interrogates murderous fear and racialized perception, and re-imagines the wreckage in catastrophe’s wake, challenging us to change.

A U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Editing

Editors Kim Roberts and Emiliano Battista for UNREST: U.S.A. (Director: Jennifer Brea)

When Harvard PhD student Jennifer Brea is struck down at 28 by a fever that leaves her bedridden, doctors tell her it’s “all in her head.” Determined to live, she sets out on a virtual journey to document her story—and four other families’ stories—fighting a disease medicine forgot.

A U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award:

ICARUS / U.S.A. (Director: Bryan Fogel)

When Bryan Fogel sets out to uncover the truth about doping in sports, a chance meeting with a Russian scientist transforms his story from a personal experiment into a geopolitical thriller involving dirty urine, unexplained death and Olympic Gold—exposing the biggest scandal in sports history.

A U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Best Cinematography to:

Director of Photography Daniel Landin for THE YELLOW BIRDS / U.S.A. (Director: Alexandre Moors, Writers: David Lowery, R.F.I. Porto)

Two young men enlist in the army and are deployed to fight in the Iraq War. After an unthinkable tragedy, the returning soldier struggles to balance his promise of silence with the truth and a mourning mother’s search for peace. Cast: Tye Sheridan, Jack Huston, Alden Ehrenreich, Jason Patric, Toni Collette, Jennifer Aniston.

A U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Breakthrough Performance

Chanté Adams, in ROXANNE, ROXANNE / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Michael Larnell)

The most feared battle MC in early-’80s NYC was a fierce teenager from the Queensbridge projects with the weight of the world on her shoulders. At age 14, hustling the streets to provide for her family, Roxanne Shanté was well on her way to becoming a hip-hop legend. Cast: Chanté Adams, Mahershala Ali, Nia Long, Elvis Nolasco, Kevin Phillips, Shenell Edmonds.

A U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Breakthrough Director

Maggie Betts, for her film NOVITIATE: U.S.A. (Dir/Writer: Maggie Betts)

In the early 1960s, during the Vatican II era, a young woman training to become a nun struggles with issues of faith, sexuality and the changing church. Cast: Margaret Qualley, Melissa Leo, Julianne Nicholson, Dianna Agron, Morgan Saylor.

A World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Excellence in Cinematography

Cinematographer Rodrigo Trejo Villanueva for MACHINES / India, Germany, Finland (Director: Rahul Jain) — This intimate, observant portrayal of the rhythm of life and work in a gigantic textile factory in Gujarat, India, moves through the corridors and bowels of the enormously disorienting structure—taking the viewer on a journey of dehumanizing physical labour and intense hardship.

A World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Commanding Vision

MOTHERLAND / U.S.A., Philippines (Director: Ramona S. Diaz) — Taking us into the heart of the planet’s busiest maternity hospital, the viewer is dropped like an unseen outsider into the hospital’s stream of activity. At first, the people are strangers. As the film continues, it’s absorbingly intimate, rendering the women at the heart of the story increasingly familiar.

A World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Masterful Storytelling

RUMBLE: The Indians Who Rocked The World / Canada (Directors: Catherine Bainbridge, Alfonso Maiorana) — This powerful documentary about the role of Native Americans in contemporary music history—featuring some of the greatest music stars of our time—exposes a critical missing chapter, revealing how indigenous musicians helped shape the soundtracks of our lives and, through their contributions, influenced popular culture. Cast: Robbie Robertson, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Martin Scorsese, Tony Bennett, Steven Tyler, Iggy Pop.

A World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Cinematography

Cinematographer Manu Dacosse for Axolotl Overkill / Germany (Director and screenwriter: Helene Hegemann) — Mifti, age 16, lives in Berlin with a cast of characters including her half-siblings; their rich, self-involved father; and her junkie friend Ophelia. As she mourns her recently deceased mother, she begins to develop an obsession with Alice, an enigmatic, and much older, white-collar criminal. Cast: Jasna Fritzi Bauer, Arly Jover, Mavie Hörbiger, Laura Tonke, Hans Löw, Bernhard Schütz.

A World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Cinematic Vision

Free and Easy / Hong Kong (Director: Jun Geng, Screenwriters: Jun Geng, Yuhua Feng, Bing Liu) — When a traveling soap salesman arrives in a desolate Chinese town, a crime occurs, and sets the strange residents against each other with tragicomic results. Cast: Xu Gang, Zhang Zhiyong, Xue Baohe, Gu Benbin, Zhang Xun, Yuan Liguo.

A World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Screenplay

Screenwriter Kirsten Tan for Pop Aye / Singapore, Thailand (Director and screenwriter: Kirsten Tan) — On a chance encounter, a disenchanted architect bumps into his long-lost elephant on the streets of Bangkok. Excited, he takes his elephant on a journey across Thailand in search of the farm where they grew up together. Cast: Thaneth Warakulnukroh, Penpak Sirikul, Bong.

SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 2017 | 19-29 JANUARY

The Promise (2016) Das Versprechen

Dir.: Marcus Vettel, Karin Steinberger; Documentary; Germany/Denmark/Sweden/ Netherlands, 130 min.

Directors Marcus Vettel and Karin Steinberger (The Forecaster) have documented the circumstances of the gruesome murder of Derek and Nancy Haysom in Virginia in March 1985, and the subsequent trials of their daughter Elizabeth and her lover Jens Söring, who were both convicted of their murder. But far from illuminating events, THE PROMISE tries to absolve Söring from all guilt, with the premise that there was a judicial conspiracy to convict him.

When the bodies of wealthy retired industrialist Derek Haysom and his wife Nancy, an artist, were found by friends in their house in their Bedford County/Virginia on March 30th 1985, this upmarket neighbourhood feared that a serial killer was on the loose. Nobody suspected either Elizabeth or Jens – only their disappearance to Asia and Europe (they were arrested months later in London for cheque fraud) led the police to them. They were a weird couple: Jens, the son of a German diplomat was only 18 years old; Elizabeth, who had been educated in boarding schools in Switzerland and the UK, was not only over two years his senior, but had run away from home and had dabbled with drugs. Jens was obviously very much in love with her, and after their arrest, he confessed to the murders, knowing full well that he would be tried in Germany, where there was no death penalty; whilst Elizabeth, if found guilty, could face the Electric Chair.

The couple had created an alibi for the weekend of the murders – a double bill at a Washington cinema – which became the point of contention between the two, after Elizabeth decided to plead guilty to being an accessory to murder. She claimed, that she knew, that Jens was setting out to kill her parents, whilst she stayed in Washington. Elizabeth was given a 90 years sentence, she is eligible for parole at the earliest in 2032, when she would be 68 years old. After Jens was extradited to the USA in 1990 – the Virginia court had promised not to go for death the penalty – he withdrew his confession. Elizabeth who was a witness for the prosecution, again accused him to have murdered his parents. Jens was given two life sentences, running consecutively. In an interview with the filmmakers, Jens (with Daniel Brühl voicing his statement, just as Imogen Poots voiced Elizabeth’s statements in the court recording of her trial), explained that he sacrificed himself and confessed in the first place out of love for Elizabeth.

Then THE PROMISE takes a strange turn: the filmmakers start interviewing experts, who come to the conclusion that a third person (Elizabeth’s drug dealer, since deceased) has helped Elizabeth to kill her parents. Elizabeth is called “a practiced liar”, whilst Jens is made out to be the naïve victim of the older woman. This biased ending – basically, one has to believe either Jens or Elizabeth – somehow contributes to make this bizarre case, which was the first televised trial in US TV history, even more compelling, particularly since Elizabeth had at first accused her mother of sexually abusing her, an accusation she later withdrew.

THE PROMISE is not so much a documentary, but an attempt to construct a case against Haysom for the murders, whilst white-washing Jens Söring. It is left to the audience to make up their mind. But in spite of the bias, the Haysom trials are one of the most peculiar and enigmatic court cases of modern times. The filmmakers, not withstanding their interference and a very unimaginative title, have contributed to a compelling viewing. AS

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE AT ARTHOUSE CINEMAS | BERTHA DOCHOUSE

Variete (Vaudeville) 1925

Dir.: E.A. Dupont | Cast: Emil Jannings, Lya de Putti, Maly Delschaft, Warwick Ward | Germany | 72 min. (Silent)

German born director and writer Ewald Andre Dupont (1891-1956) was a true film pioneer whose career stretched from the end of WWI to Hollywood and US TV series in the mid ’50s. His greatest success was VARIETÉ, which gained him a contract in Hollywood at Carl Laemmle’s Universal, even though Love Me and the World is Mine (1926) run over budget and was unsuccessful at the box office. Dupont then went to England, where he directed Piccadilly and Atlantic, both critically acclaimed. After a brief return to Germany, the Jewish filmmaker finally emigrated in 1933 back to America where he made a series of mostly B-pictures before ending his career with the highly popular TV series “Big Town” (1950-56).

VARIETÉ, tells the tae of prisoner No. 28, ‘Boss’ Huller (Emil Jannings), who recounts his tragic life story to the prison governer. Once famous as a trapeze artist, Huller runs a shabby attraction on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn, the Red Light district of St. Pauli. Living in the past, he meets up with an exotic young woman, Bertha-Marie (de Putti), whose mother had died on board a ship bound for home. Huller falls madly in love with her, and leaves his wife (Delschaft) and his child. Thanks to a lucky break with world-famous trapeze artist Artinelli (Ward), who is looking for a new partner, Huller becomes the ‘catcher’ in a new act, performing a triple somersault whilst blindfolded. After a short spell of the good life, the ‘Boss’ finds out that Bertha-Marie is having an affair with Artinelli and he kills his rival with a knife. Even when his jail term is over, Huller is still a prisoner of his own mind.

For Kracauer VARIETÉ was the end point of a series of films which sprang from The Last Laugh, where the hero fights back before he submitting to his fate. Based on a novel by Felix Holländer, VARIETÉ could have easily been written by Carl Mayer (who scripted Dr. Caligari and The Last Laugh among others). Whilst Dupont was perhaps not an innovator, he was “a brilliant adapter” (Kracauer). With the support of DoP Karl Freund, who also shot The Last Laugh, Dumont realised a concept, “in which the camera penetrates the outer reality by means of devices used originally in the outward projection of inner reality”. His technique resulted in astonishing results. The actors seemed unaware of the camera, and in this way, Janning’s bulky back (with the number 28 written on in chalk, very much like Peter Lorre would be later marked in Lang’s M) is as impressive as his face.

The camera movements are rapid, the multiple exposures and unusual angles giving the audience the impression that they are taking part in the film. In one famous sequence, where the whole of the ménage-à-trois is revealed in purely visual form, we watch Artnielli looking longingly at the departing Bertha, whilst she ‘repairs’ her make-up, before joining the ‘Boss’ again. But whilst Kracauer called VARIETÉ “a derivative of The Last Laugh”, it should be said that it was successful in a realistic setting, whilst The Last Laugh was a product of German “Innerlichkeit” (Introspection). AS

BLURAY RELEASE COURTESY OF EUREKA \ MASTERS OF CINEMA ON 23 JANUARY

Cameraperson (2016)

Director/DoP: Kirsten Johnson Editor: Nels Bangerter | Doc | 103min | US

Seasoned cinematographer Kirsten Johnson has worked in all corners of the globe on documentaries with the likes of Laura Poitras and Michael Moore. CAMERAPERSON is a raw and deeply-affecting patchwork of photo-memories that serves as visual autobiography of her life.

This essay film has no narrative as such but works its way towards a gradually more involving story from a recurring set of themes and locations. Reportage blends with personal footage of her own life in Beaux Arts Washington and Brooklyn; sorties to the former war zones of Bosnia, Dafur and Rwanda and closer to home, an electric storm in a Southern State, a field of wild flowers recording the memory of Wounded Knee; and the dreadful murder of James Byrd, Jr, dragged to death behind a pick-up truck. Each vignette is introduced with its location, making it all the more satisfying and resonant.

Never showy or sensationalist but always beguiling, her snapshots swoop silently into everyday life: a Bosnian re-settler bakes bread in her humble shack and there are incandescent moments where a boxer bitterly rages against his failure in Brooklyn, and a newborn baby is brought back to life by a midwife in a spartan Nigerian clinic; his tiny bewildered eyes meet ours as he desperately gasps for his first breath. In perfect English, a little Afghan boy talks tearfully but candidly about losing his eye and his older brother in a bomb blast. The tragic faces of the living are so much affecting than gory bodies of the dead.

Then there is the recognisable footage of Happy Valley and Citizenfour and glimpses of Michael Moore laughing on set. These makes the viewer realise that the ‘objective reality’ of freewheeling documentary relies on clever staging and editing to enhance our experience of factual filmmaking. Simple family moments can be surprisingly moving: Johnson’s mother (in the final stages of Alzheimer’s) points to a photo of her husband with the comment: “oh really, you knew him too?”

But Africa offers the most compelling footage: in barren wastelands women work with humour and forebearance in heart-warming testament to the human condition. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 27 JANUARY 2017

Christine (2016)

Dir.: Antonio Campos; Cast: Rebecca Hall, Michael C. Hall, J. Smith Cameron; Tracy Letts; USA 2016, 119 min.

After his superb thriller, Simon Killer, Director Antonio Campos goes on to murder his biopic on newscaster Christine Chubbock, who killed herself on air in July 1974, aged just 29. This is an uneven production that doesn’t do justice to Craig Shilowich’s decent script and, despite a resonant turn from Rebecca Hall in the lead, the film is often shot like a parody of a 70s horror outing.

Christine Chubbuck (R. Hall) worked for the ABC affiliated WXLT-TV channel in Sarasota, Florida and suffered a depressive personality disorder brought on by illness and an unsuccessful love life. Living with her mother Peg (Smith Cameron), she developed strong feelings for co-worker George Peter Ryan (M.C. Hall), an Anchor at the TV station and was given the plumb job in Baltimore that Christine had yearned for. When Ryan told Christine that he was leaving Sarasota, taking with him her close friend and sports reporter of WXLT, this was the final straw for the unhappy journalist. On July 15th 1974, she read the news (even though she was employed to present her own show ‘Suncoast Digest’), and when the item about a local restaurant shooting jammed, she calmly announced “we are bringing you the latest in blood and guts and in living colour –you are going to see another first – attempted suicide”. Taking a handgun out of her bag, she calmly shot herself behind the ear. On her desk, police later found a manuscript of her last TV appearance, including a third-person account of her suicide.

Christine Chubbuck died 14 hours later in hospital. Shilowich’s narrative includes many highlights of her career, such as Chubbuck’s constant run-ins with new-director Mike Simmons (Letts), who accused her of “being a feminist, always being too loud, to drown out others”. But the way women in the workplace are treated makes Chubbuck’s point crystal clear: far from being too loud, the female employees were always at pains to soft-pedal the males, who went on to get the promotions, with Ryan a good example of macho posturing with deals were concluded over a glass of beer at the bar.

The scenes between Christine and her mother are very emotive: whilst daughter criticises mother for her flings with younger men, she still dreams of being taken out. Whilst Christine Chubbock was intellectually and professionally ahead of her times, her lack of emotional satisfaction made her fight even harder for recognition at work. So the problems at WXLT snowballed, and when she feared that she would lose even her professional identity, she gave up.

Why director Antonio Campos and DoP Joe Anderson decided on a near gothic treatment, with shadows dominating even the sober atmosphere of the TV studio, is inexplicable – surely the story of Christine Chubbuck has enough dramatic impact on its own. PD Scott Kuzio recreates the 70s communication world to a tee – with manual typewriters and huge, handheld cameras. He and lead actress, a superbly convincing Rebecca Hall, have to overcome the director’s penchant for stylistic indulgence, which takes so much away from an otherwise perfect basic concept. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 27 JANUARY 2017

London Critics Film Awards 2017 | The Mayfair Hotel W1

In an evening glittering with frost and freezing temperatures, the stars turned out to receive well-deserved prizes at the London Critics’ Circle Awards (image courtesy of the London Critics’ Circle).

WINNERS

FILM OF THE YEAR
La La Land

FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILM OF THE YEAR (left)
Toni Erdmann

DOCUMENTARY OF THE YEAR (right)
Fire at Sea

BRITISH/IRISH FILM OF THE YEAR

I, Daniel Blake

ACTOR OF THE YEAR Casey Affleck – Manchester by the Sea

ACTRESS OF THE YEAR presented by Suqqu
Isabelle Huppert – Things to Come

SUPPORTING ACTOR OF THE YEAR (tie)
Mahershala Ali – Moonlight
Tom Bennett – Love & Friendship

SUPPORTING ACTRESS OF THE YEAR presented by Cameo
Naomie Harris – Moonlight

DIRECTOR OF THE YEAR
László Nemes – Son of Saul

SCREENWRITER OF THE YEAR
Kenneth Lonergan – Manchester by the Sea

BRITISH/IRISH ACTOR
Andrew Garfield – Hacksaw Ridge, Silence

BRITISH/IRISH ACTRESS
Kate Beckinsale – Love & Friendship

YOUNG BRITISH/IRISH PERFORMER presented by The May Fair Hotel
Lewis MacDougall – A Monster Calls

BREAKTHROUGH BRITISH/IRISH FILMMAKER
Babak Anvari – Under the Shadow

BRITISH/IRISH SHORT FILM
Sweet Maddie Stone – Brady Hood

TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT
Victoria – Sturla Brandth Grovlen, cinematography

DILYS POWELL AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN FILM
Isabelle Huppert

THE AWARDS CEREMONY TOOK PLACE AT THE MAYFAIR HOTEL W1

Berlinale Forum | The daring and the avant-garde

FORUM: REALISTIC AND SURREAL

The 47th Berlinale Forum strand allegedly offers the most daring and challenging fare of the festival often featuring films that are ethnographic, political and experimental in nature and where the landscape frequently takes on a leading role.

This year focuses on South and Latin American films. Davi Pretto’s narrative feature Rifle sets out for the endless plains of the Brazilian south to stage a modern Western there. A taciturn former soldier is employed to guard a small landholder’s estate. But when an agricultural company seeks to buy up the land, he reacts in truly drastic fashion.

Peruvian brothers Alvaro und Diego Sarmiento find stunning images to convey the leisurely flow of life in a verdant river landscape in Río Verde. El tiempo de los Yakurunas (Green River. The Time of the Yakurunas) exploring the daily routines of the indigenous inhabitants of Peru’s Amazon region.

In Casa Roshell, Chilean director Camila José Donoso assembles a portrait of a most unusual institution in the Mexican capital, a place where men learn to be women during the day, before the parties get going at night. All manner of boundaries blur in this tiny utopia: between gay, straight and bi, male and female, past and present, reality and fiction.

Vladimir Durán’s debut feature Adiós entusiasmo (So Long Enthusiasm) is at once realistic and surreal and one of three Argentinian films showing in the main programme. Ten-year-old Axel lives with his mother and three sisters in a flat in Buenos Aires. They’d be a perfectly normal family if only the mother weren’t imprisoned in one of the rooms.

El teatro de la desaparición (The Theatre of Disappearance) by sculptor and installation artist Adrián Villar Rojas presents a hypnotic triptych which depicts latent states of war, drawing on sensual images seemingly only tenuously connected that employ disparate styles and jump freely from continent to continent.

Albertina Carri’s Cuatreros (Rustlers) examines Argentina’s complex recent past: Isidro Velázquez was a bandit and dissident active in the 1960s whose story formed both the basis for a sociology book by her father Roberto Carri and a feature film that is now lost. The director draws on archive images to bring her own biography into alignment with wider historical events.

https://vimeo.com/199577914

The Sensory Ethnographic Lab has already been well-represented at the Forum and Forum Expanded in the form of Sweetgrass, Leviathan and Yumen and several of its key figures now return to this year’s programme. Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s Somniloquies works with sound recordings of Dion McGregor, who became famous for talking in his sleep. In El mar la mar, J.P. Sniadecki and Joshua Bonnetta dissect the Sonoran Desert – a landscape marked by the border between the United States and Mexico.

North American cinema once again forms a strong presence at this year’s Forum. Golden Exits by Alex Ross Perry tells the story of a young Australian woman who comes to New York for a few months and unwittingly throws the lives of two couples into disarray.

Menashe, the feature debut by Joshua Z Weinstein, is set in Borough Park, Brooklyn and is almost entirely in Yiddish. The titular Menashe fights to keep custody of his son following the death of his wife. Yet the Hasidic community demands he lead a more ordered life and find a new spouse, neither of which come easy to this kind, but awkward loner.

Amman Abbasi is also showing his debut feature at the Forum. It tells the story of a thirteen-year-old who has lost direction following the death of his brother, meaning that being initiated into a local gang now appears a necessary step towards becoming a man. Dayveon is a search for brotherhood in an African American community in the rural South.

Jeremy Levine and Landon Van Soest’s sensitive long-term documentary For Ahkeem was shot in Missouri, and follows Daje, who lives with her single mother in St. Louis. Like many black teenagers in the neighbourhood, she has problems at school, while her everyday life is shaken again and again by the violent deaths of her friends.

There is a strong German element to the documentaries this year. Ann Carolin Renninger and René Frölke’s Aus einem Jahr der Nichtereignisse (From a Year of Non-Events) follows a year in the life of a 90-year-old north German farmer, who lives alone on a rural farmstead.

Heinz Emigholz, a familiar Forum guest for many years now (and a verbose talker), returns to the programme with his “Streetscapes” series, which loosely links together four separate films. 2+2=22 [The Alphabet] documents the recording sessions for the album “ABC” by electronic music group Kreidler in Tbilisi, Georgia. Bickels [Socialism] examines the architecture of Samuel Bickels, who created numerous kibbutz buildings and museums in Israel. Streetscapes [Dialogue] is a fictionalised dialogue about filmmaking based on the protocols of a mammoth psychoanalysis session and was shot in buildings by Julio Vilamajó, Eladio Dieste and Arno Brandlhuber in Uruguay and Berlin, some of which then pop up again in the final chapter Dieste [Uruguay].

Nicolas Wackerbarth’s feature Casting is also dedicated to the process of filmmaking. Director Vera is unwilling to compromise when it comes to finding the right lead actress for a Fassbinder remake for television. Acting assistant Gerwin delivers dialogues with a bevy of famous actresses and soon realises that this could be his big chance. The film’s starry cast includes Ursina Lardi, Andrea Sawatzki, Corinna Kirchhoff, Judith Engel, Marie-Lou Sellem and many more.

The films of the 47th Forum

2+2=22 [The Alphabet] by Heinz Emigholz, Germany – WP

Adiós entusiasmo (So Long Enthusiasm) by Vladimir Durán, Argentina / Colombia – WP

At Elske Pia (Loving Pia) by Daniel Joseph Borgmann, Denmark – WP

Aus einem Jahr der Nichtereignisse (From a Year of Non-Events) by Ann Carolin Renninger, René Frölke, Germany – WP

Autumn, Autumn by Jang Woo-jin, Republic of Korea – IP

Barrage by Laura Schroeder, Luxembourg / Belgium / France – WP

Bickels [Socialism] by Heinz Emigholz, Germany / Israel – WP

Casa Roshell by Camila José Donoso, Mexico / Chile – WP

Casting by Nicolas Wackerbarth, Germany – WP

Chemi bednieri ojakhi (My Happy Family) by Nana & Simon, Germany / Georgia/France

Cuatreros (Rustlers) by Albertina Carri, Argentina – IP

Dayveon by Amman Abbasi, USA – IP

Dieste [Uruguay] by Heinz Emigholz, Germany – WP

Drôles d’oiseaux (Strange Birds) by Elise Girard, France – IP
For Ahkeem by Jeremy Levine, Landon Van Soest, USA – WP

Golden Exits by Alex Ross Perry, USA – IP

Jassad gharib (Foreign Body) by Raja Amari, Tunisia / France

Loktak Lairembee (Lady of the Lake) by Haobam Paban Kumar, India

Maman Colonelle (Mama Colonel) by Dieudo Hamadi, Democratic Republic of Congo / France – WP

El mar la mar by J.P. Sniadecki, Joshua Bonnetta, USA – WP

El mar nos mira de lejos (The Sea Stares at Us from Afar) by Manuel Muñoz Rivas, Spain / The Netherlands – WP

Menashe by Joshua Z Weinstein, USA / Israel – IP

Mittsu no hikari (Three Lights) by Kohki Yoshida, Japan – WP

Mon rot fai (Railway Sleepers) by Sompot Chidgasornpongse, Thailand

Motherland (Bayang Ina Mo) by Ramona S. Diaz, USA / The Philippines – IP

Motza el hayam (Low Tide) by Daniel Mann, Israel / France – WP

Mzis qalaqi (City of the Sun) by Rati Oneli, Georgia / USA / The Netherlands / Qatar / USA – WP

Newton by Amit V Masurkar, India – WP

Occidental by Neïl Beloufa, France – IP

Qiu (Inmates) by Ma Li, People’s Republic of China – WP

Rifle by Davi Pretto, Brazil / Germany – IP

Río Verde. El tiempo de los Yakurunas (Green River. The Time of the Yakurunas) by Alvaro Sarmiento, Diego Sarmiento, Peru – WP

Shu’our akbar min el hob (A Feeling Greater than Love) by Mary Jirmanus Saba, Lebanon – WP

somniloquies by Verena Paravel, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, France / USA – WP
Spell Reel by Filipa César, Germany / Portugal / France / Guinea-Bissau – WP

Streetscapes [Dialogue] by Heinz Emigholz, Germany – WP

Tamaroz (Simulation) by Abed Abest, Iran – WP

El teatro de la desaparición (The Theatre of Disappearance) by Adrián Villar Rojas, Argentina – WP

Tiere (Animals) by Greg Zglinski, Switzerland / Austria / Poland – WP

Tigmi n Igren (House in the Fields) by Tala Hadid, Morocco / Qatar – WP

Tinselwood by Marie Voignier, France – WP

Werewolf by Ashley McKenzie, Canada – IP

Yozora ha itsu demo saikou mitsudo no aoiro da (The Tokyo Night Sky Is Always the Densest Shade of Blue) by Yuya Ishii, Japan – WP

BERLINALE FILM FESTVAL | FORUM | 9-19 FEBRUARY 2017

Lion (2016)

Dir: Garth Davis; Cast: Dev Patel, Rooney Mara, Sunny Pawar, Nicole Kidman, David Wenham, Abhishek Bharate, Divian Ladwa, Priyanka Bose | Australia | drama | 118 min.

Garth Davis co-directed the TV-Miniseries Top of the Lake with Jane Champion and now turns his hand to Saroo Brierley’s autobiography A Long Way home with Luke Davies adapting it for the screen as a sprawling emotional drama that sometimes crosses into soap-opera territory. Davis’ advertising background – among his credits the Toyota “Ninja Kittens” – makes this a slick and visually ravishing watch with DoP Greig Fraser (Foxcatcher) conjuring up amazing images, particularly in Calcutta.

Newcomer Sunna Pawar (young Saroo) is spellbindingly gorgeous as the young boy who in 1986 is separated from his mother Kamla (Bose) and sister Shekila, after talking his older brother Guddu (Bharate) into taking him away from their rural home to help on a building site. But Saroo falls asleep at the station and wakes up in a decommissioned train, taking him 1000 miles away to Calcutta. There he avoids child-snatchers and ends up in an orphanage. Saroo cannot speak the local Bengali, and his Hindi dialect is insufficient to express the name of his village or his mother. Roughly half-way into the film, Saroo ends up in Tasmania, Australia, where Sue Brierley (Kidman) and her husband John (Wenham) adopted him. Saroo is an exemplary son, relieved to find a home of emotional and material wealth after his traumatic time in Calcutta. But Mantosh, the second boy adopted by the Brierleys, is unable to cope with his past and is proving a handful.

The plot skips forward about 20 years to when Saroo (Patel, star of Slumdog Millionaire) has left the home where Mantosh (Ladwa) is now self-harming and troublesome. Saroo takes a course in hotel-management in Melbourne where he meets Lucy (Carol co-star R. Mara) a lover of Indian food. Tasting a childhood sweet one day he realises that his hometown is not Calcutta. His search for his hometown is the weak link in the narrative, his traumatic experience is seen as an hero’s adventure, rather than an ordeal. Although this is underlined by the breathtaking images, showing Calcutta in high-resolution fly-over shots, the emphasis is on the thrills, rather than the terrible danger Saroo experiences there.

There is simply not enough darkness in Saroo’s Calcutta abandonment years – and when he finally enters the Brierley’s home in Tasmania, he appears blasé about the sensational new home comforts – such as the ‘fridge and television, rather than awestruck. He also seems to lack an inner life whereas Mantosh is a far more believable character. Apart from skimming over this relationship with Mara, it is never explained Saroo waits so long to look for his birth mother – the sweet he remembers from his childhood can hardly be the first or sole reminder? It is stringent – and rather lazy – in this context, that Google Earth is just another star in the visual high-tech extravaganza. It would have been more interesting and convincing to show the search for her son from Kamla’s perspective, without the intrusion of computers. LION triumphs despite these plot-holes: a powerful and sumptuously photographed tear-jerker with a happy ending, despite its lack of teeth. AS

NOW OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM FRIDAY 20 2017 | VUE, PICTUREHOUSE, EVERYMAN, CINEWORLD NATIONWIDE

Sundance Film 2017 | 19-29 January 2017

In Park City Utah, the SUNDANCE INSTITUTE sets the indie film agenda for 2017 with a slew of provocative new titles for this year’s festival which runs from 19-29 January. These will take part in the U.S. Competition, World Competition and NEXT strands, and an environmentally focused programme entitled New Climate.

Robert Redford, President and Founder of Sundance, is joined by chief programmer John Copper programmer for 2017’s theme: climate change and environmental preservation. The New Climate program builds on the Institute’s longstanding commitment to showcasing environmental films and projects, that in the past have included An Inconvenient Truth, Blackfish, The Cove, Gasland, Chasing Ice, Racing Extinction and Collisions. This year’s programme includes Jeff Orlowski’s follow up to his coruscating documentary Chasing Ice, with Chasing Coral, which follows a team of divers, photographers and scientists exploring the world’s changing coral reefs; Trophy, an in-depth look at the controversial, multi-billion-dollar big-game hunting industry; Water & Power: A California Heist, an investigation of California’s convoluted water system; Plastic China an examination of employee life at a Chinese recycling plant; and Machines, (above) a portrait of the rhythm of life and work in a gigantic textile factory in Gujarat, India.

U.S. D R A M A T I C C O M P E T I T I O N

Presenting the world premieres of 16 narrative feature films, the Dramatic Competition offers Festivalgoers a first look at groundbreaking new voices in American independent film.

BAND AID / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Zoe Lister-Jones) — A couple who can’t stop arguing embark on a last-ditch effort to save their marriage: by turning their strife into songs and starting a band. Cast: Zoe Lister-Jones, Adam Pally, Fred Armisen, Susie Essman, Hannah Simone, Ravi Patel. World Premiere

BEACH RATS/ U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Eliza Hittman) — An aimless teenager on the outer edges of Brooklyn struggles to escape his bleak home life and navigate questions of self-identity, as he balances his time between his delinquent friends, a potential new girlfriend, and older men he meets online. Cast: Harris Dickinson, Madeline Weinstein, Kate Hodge, Neal Huff. World Premiere

BRIGSBY BEAR/ U.S.A. (Director: Dave McCary, Screenwriters: Kevin Costello, Kyle Mooney) — Brigsby Bear Adventures is a children’s TV show produced for an audience of one: James. When the show abruptly ends, James’s life changes forever, and he sets out to finish the story himself. Cast: Kyle Mooney, Claire Danes, Mark Hamill, Greg Kinnear, Matt Walsh, Michaela Watkins. World Premiere

BURNING SANDS / U.S.A. (Director: Gerard McMurray, Screenwriters: Christine Berg, Gerard McMurray) — Deep into a fraternity’s Hell Week, a favoured pledge is torn between honouring a code of silence or standing up against the intensifying violence of underground hazing. Cast: Trevor Jackson, Alfre Woodard, Steve Harris, Tosin Cole, DeRon Horton, Trevante Rhodes. World Premiere

CROWN HEIGHTS / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Matt Ruskin) — When Colin Warner is wrongfully convicted of murder, his best friend, Carl King, devotes his life to proving Colin’s innocence. Adapted from This American Life, this is the incredible true story of their harrowing quest for justice. Cast: Keith Stanfield, Nnamdi Asomugha, Natalie Paul, Bill Camp, Nestor Carbonell, Amari Cheatom. World Premiere

GOLDEN EXITS/ U.S.A. left (Director and screenwriter: Alex Ross Perry) — The arrival of a young foreign girl disrupts the lives and emotional balances of two Brooklyn families. Cast: Emily Browning, Adam Horovitz, Mary-Louise Parker, Lily Rabe, Jason Schwartzman, Chloë Sevigny. World Premiere

THE HERO / U.S.A. (Director: Brett Haley, Screenwriters: Brett Haley, Marc Basch) — Lee, a former Western film icon, is living a comfortable existence lending his golden voice to advertisements and smoking weed. After receiving a lifetime achievement award and unexpected news, Lee re-examines his past, while a chance meeting with a sardonic comic has him looking to the future. Cast: Sam Elliott, Laura Prepon, Krysten Ritter, Nick Offerman, Katherine Ross. World Premiere

I DON’T FEEL AT HOME IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE / U.S.A. left (Director and screenwriter: Macon Blair) — When a depressed woman is burgled, she finds a new sense of purpose by tracking down the thieves, alongside her obnoxious neighbour. But they soon find themselves dangerously out of their depth against a pack of degenerate criminals. Cast: Melanie Lynskey, Elijah Wood, David Yow, Jane Levy, Devon Graye. World Premiere. DAY ONE

INGRID GOES WEST / U.S.A. (Director: Matt Spicer, Screenwriters: Matt Spicer, David Branson Smith) — A young woman becomes obsessed with an Instagram lifestyle blogger and moves to Los Angeles to try and befriend her in real life. Cast: Aubrey Plaza, Elizabeth Olsen, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Wyatt Russell, Billy Magnussen. World Premiere

LANDLINE/ U.S.A.- left (Director: Gillian Robespierre, Screenwriters: Elisabeth Holm, Gillian Robespierre) — Two sisters come of age in ’90s New York when they discover their dad’s affair—and it turns out he’s not the only cheater in the family. Everyone still smokes inside, no one has a cell phone and the Jacobs finally connect through lying, cheating and hibachi. Cast: Jenny Slate, John Turturro, Edie Falco, Abby Quinn, Jay Duplass, Finn Wittrock. World Premiere

NOVITIATE / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Maggie Betts) — In the early 1960s, during the Vatican II era, a young woman training to become a nun struggles with issues of faith, sexuality and the changing church. Cast: Margaret Qualley, Melissa Leo, Julianne Nicholson, Dianna Agron, Morgan Saylor. World Premiere

PATTI CAKE$ / U.S.A – left -. (Director and screenwriter: Geremy Jasper) — Straight out of Jersey comes Patricia Dombrowski, a.k.a. Killa P, a.k.a. Patti Cake$, an aspiring rapper fighting through a world of strip malls and strip clubs on an unlikely quest for glory. Cast: Danielle Macdonald, Bridget Everett, Siddharth Dhananjay, Mamoudou Athie, Cathy Moriarty. World Premiere

ROXANNE ROXANNE / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Michael Larnell) — The most feared battle emcee in early-’80s NYC was a fierce teenager from the Queensbridge projects with the weight of the world on her shoulders. At age 14, hustling the streets to provide for her family, Roxanne Shanté was well on her way to becoming a hip-hop legend. Cast: Chanté Adams, Mahershala Ali, Nia Long, Elvis Nolasco, Kevin Phillips, Shenell Edmonds. World Premiere

TO THE BONE / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Marti Noxon) — In a last-ditch effort to battle her severe anorexia, 20-year-old Ellen enters a group recovery home. With the help of an unconventional doctor, Ellen and the other residents go on a sometimes-funny, sometimes-harrowing journey that leads to the ultimate question—is life worth living? Cast: Lily Collins, Keanu Reeves, Carrie Preston, Lili Taylor, Alex Sharp, Liana Liberato. World Premiere

WALKING OUT / U.S.A. (Directors and screenwriters: Alex Smith, Andrew Smith) — A father and son struggle to connect on any level until a brutal encounter with a predator in the heart of the wilderness leaves them both seriously injured. If they are to survive, the boy must carry his father to safety. Cast: Matt Bomer, Josh Wiggins, Bill Pullman, Alex Neustaedter, Lily Gladstone. World Premiere

THE YELLOW BIRDS/ U.S.A.- left- (Director: Alexandre Moors, Screenwriter: David Lowery) — Two young men enlist in the army and are deployed to fight in the Gulf War. After an unthinkable tragedy, the surviving soldier struggles to balance his promise of silence with the truth and a mourning mother’s search for peace. Cast: Tye Sheridan, Jack Huston, Alden Ehrenreich, Jason Patric, Toni Collette, Jennifer Aniston. World Premiere

U. S. D O C U M E N T A R Y C O M P E T I T I O N

Sixteen world-premiere American documentaries that illuminate the ideas, people and events that shape the present day.

CASTING JONBENET / U.S.A., Australia (Director: Kitty Green) — The unsolved death of six-year-old American beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey remains the world’s most sensational child murder case. Over 15 months, responses, reflections and performances were elicited from the Ramsey’s Colorado hometown community, creating a bold work of art from the collective memories and mythologies the crime inspired. World Premiere

CHASING CORAL/ U.S.A. (Director: Jeff Orlowski) — Coral reefs around the world are vanishing at an unprecedented rate. A team of divers, photographers and scientists set out on a thrilling ocean adventure to discover why and to reveal the underwater mystery to the world. World Premiere. NEW CLIMATE

CITY OF GHOSTS/ U.S.A. (Director: Matthew Heineman) — With unprecedented access, this documentary follows the extraordinary journey of “Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently”—a group of anonymous citizen journalists who banded together after their homeland was overtaken by ISIS—as they risk their lives to stand up against one of the greatest evils in the world today. World PremiereD

DINA/ U.S.A. (Directors: Dan Sickles, Antonio Santini) — An eccentric suburban woman and a Walmart door-greeter navigate their evolving relationship in this unconventional love story. World Premiere

DOLORES/ U.S.A – left – (Director: Peter Bratt) — Dolores Huerta bucks 1950s gender conventions by co-founding the country’s first farmworkers’ union. Wrestling with raising 11 children, gender bias, union defeat and victory, and nearly dying after a San Francisco Police beating, Dolores emerges with a vision that connects her newfound feminism with racial and class justice. World Premiere

THE FORCE / U.S.A. (Director: Pete Nicks) — This cinema vérité look at the long-troubled Oakland Police Department goes deep inside their struggles to confront federal demands for reform, a popular uprising following events in Ferguson and an explosive scandal. World Premiere

ICARUS / U.S.A. (Director: Bryan Fogel) — When Bryan Fogel sets out to uncover the truth about doping in sports, a chance meeting with a Russian scientist transforms his story from a personal experiment into a geopolitical thriller involving dirty urine, unexplained death and Olympic Gold—exposing the biggest scandal in sports history. World Premiere

THE NEW RADICAL / U.S.A. (Director: Adam Bhala Lough) — Uncompromising millennial radicals from the United States and the United Kingdom attack the system through dangerous technological means, which evolves into a high-stakes game with world authorities in the midst of a dramatically changing political landscape. World Premiere

NOBODY SPEAK: Hulk Hogan, Gawker and Trials of a Free Press / U.S.A. (Director: Brian Knappenberger) — The trial between Hulk Hogan and Gawker Media pitted privacy rights against freedom of the press, and raised important questions about how big money can silence media. This film is an examination of the perils and duties of the free press in an age of inequality. World Premiere

QUEST / U.S.A. (Director: Jonathan Olshefski) — For over a decade, this portrait of a North Philadelphia family and the creative sanctuary offered by their home music studio was filmed with vérité intimacy. The family’s 10-year journey is an illumination of race and class in America, and it’s a testament to love, healing and hope. World Premiere

STEP / U.S.A. (Director: Amanda Lipitz) — The senior year of a girls’ high school step team in inner-city Baltimore is documented, as they try to become the first in their families to attend college. The girls strive to make their dancing a success against the backdrop of social unrest in their troubled city. World Premiere

TROPHY / U.S.A.- left- (Director: Shaul Schwarz, Co-Director: Christina Clusiau) — This in-depth look into the powerhouse industries of big-game hunting, breeding and wildlife conservation in the U.S. and Africa unravels the complex consequences of treating animals as commodities. World Premiere. NEW CLIMATE

UNREST / U.S.A. (Director: Jennifer Brea) — When Harvard PhD student Jennifer Brea is struck down at 28 by a fever that leaves her bedridden, doctors tell her it’s “all in her head.” Determined to live, she sets out on a virtual journey to document her story—and four other families’ stories—fighting a disease medicine forgot. World Premiere

Water & Power: A California Heist / U.S.A. (Director: Marina Zenovich) — In California’s convoluted water system, notorious water barons find ways to structure a state-engineered system to their own advantage. This examination into their centers of power shows small farmers and everyday citizens facing drought and a new, debilitating groundwater crisis. World Premiere. NEW CLIMATE

WHOSE STREETS? / U.S.A. (Director: Sabaah Folayan, Co-Director: Damon Davis) — A nonfiction account of the Ferguson uprising told by the people who lived it, this is an unflinching look at how the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown inspired a community to fight back—and sparked a global movement. World Premiere. DAY ONE

W O R L D C I N E M A D R A M A T I C C O M P E T I T I O N

Twelve films from emerging filmmaking talents around the world offer fresh perspectives and inventive styles.

AXOLOT! OVERKILL/ Germany (Director and screenwriter: Helene Hegemann) — Mifti, age 16, lives in Berlin with a cast of characters including her half-siblings; their rich, self-involved father; and her junkie friend Ophelia. As she mourns her recently deceased mother, she begins to develop an obsession with Alice, an enigmatic, and much older, white-collar criminal. Cast: Jasna Fritzi Bauer, Arly Jover, Mavie Hörbiger, Laura Tonke, Hans Löw, Bernhard Schütz. World Premiere

BERLIN SYNDROME/ Australia (Director: Cate Shortland, Screenwriter: Shaun Grant) — A passionate holiday romance takes an unexpected and sinister turn when an Australian photographer wakes one morning in a Berlin apartment and is unable to leave. Cast: Teresa Palmer, Max Riemelt. World Premiere

CARPINTEROS (Woodpeckers) / Dominican Republic (Director and screenwriter: José María Cabral) — Julián finds love and a reason for living in the last place imaginable: the Dominican Republic’s Najayo Prison. His romance with fellow prisoner Yanelly must develop through sign language and without the knowledge of dozens of guards. Cast: Jean Jean, Judith Rodriguez Perez, Ramón Emilio Candelario. World Premiere

DON’T SWALLOW MY HEART, ALLIGATOR GIRL!/ Brazil, Netherlands, France, Paraguay (Director and screenwriter: Felipe Bragança) — In this fable about love and memories, Joca is a 13-year-old Brazilian boy in love with an indigenous Paraguayan girl. To conquer her love, he must face the violent region’s war-torn past and the secrets of his elder brother, Fernando, a motorcycle cowboy. Cast: Cauã Reymond, Eduardo Macedo, Adeli Gonzales, Zahy Guajajara, Claudia Assunção, Ney Matogrosso. World Premiere

FAMILY LIFE/ Chile (Directors: Alicia Scherson, Cristián Jiménez, Screenwriter: Alejandro Zambra) — While house-sitting for a distant cousin, a lonely man fabricates the existence of a vindictive ex-wife withholding his daughter, in order to gain the sympathy of the single mother he has just met. Cast: Jorge Becker, Gabriela Arancibia, Blanca Lewin, Cristián Carvajal. World Premiere

FREE AND EASY / Hong Kong (Director: Jun Geng, Screenwriters: Jun Geng, Yuhua Feng, Bing Liu) — When a traveling soap salesman arrives in a desolate Chinese town, a crime occurs, and sets the strange residents against each other with tragicomic results. Cast: Gang Xu, Zhiyong Zhang, Baohe Xue, Benshan Gu, Xun Zhang. World Premiere

GOD’S OWN COUNTRY / United Kingdom (Director and screenwriter: Francis Lee) — Springtime in Yorkshire: isolated young sheep farmer Johnny Saxby numbs his daily frustrations with binge drinking and casual sex, until the arrival of a Romanian migrant worker, employed for the lambing season, ignites an intense relationship that sets Johnny on a new path. Cast: Josh O’Connor, Alec Secareanu, Ian Hart, Gemma Jones. World Premiere

MY HAPPY FAMILY / Georgia (Directors: Nana & Simon, Screenwriter: Nana Ekvtimishvili) — Tbilisi, Georgia, 2016: In a patriarchal society, an ordinary Georgian family lives with three generations under one roof. All are shocked when 52-year-old Manana decides to move out from her parents’ home and live alone. Without her family and her husband, a journey into the unknown begins. Cast: Ia Shugliashvili, Merab Ninidze, Berta Khapava, Tsisia Qumsishvili, Giorgi Tabidze, Dimitri Oragvelidze. World Premiere

THE NILE HILTON INCIDENT / Sweden (Director and screenwriter: Tarik Saleh) — In Cairo, weeks before the 2011 revolution, Police Detective Noredin is working in the infamous Kasr el-Nil Police Station when he is handed the case of a murdered singer. He soon realizes that the investigation concerns the power elite, close to the President’s inner circle. Cast: Fares Fares, Mari Malek, Mohamed Yousry, Yasser Ali Maher, Ahmed Selim, Hania Amar. World Premiere

POP EYE / Singapore, Thailand (Director and screenwriter: Kirsten Tan) — On a chance encounter, a disenchanted architect bumps into his long-lost elephant on the streets of Bangkok. Excited, he takes his elephant on a journey across Thailand in search of the farm where they grew up together. Cast: Thaneth Warakulnukroh, Penpak Sirikul, Bong. World Premiere. DAY ONE

SUENO EN OTRO IDIOMA (I Dream in Another Language) / Mexico (Director: Ernesto Contreras, Screenwriter: Carlos Contreras) — The last two speakers of a millennia-old language haven’t spoken in 50 years, when a young linguist tries to bring them together. Yet hidden in the past, in the heart of the jungle, lies a secret concerning the fate of the Zikril language. Cast: Fernando Álvarez Rebeil, Eligio Meléndez, Manuel Poncelis, Fátima Molina, Juan Pablo de Santiago, Hoze Meléndez. World Premiere

THE WOUND / South Africa (Director: John Trengove, Screenwriters: John Trengove, Thando Mgqolozana, Malusi Bengu) — Xolani, a lonely factory worker, travels to the rural mountains with the men of his community to initiate a group of teenage boys into manhood. When a defiant initiate from the city discovers his best-kept secret, a forbidden love, Xolani’s entire existence begins to unravel. Cast: Nakhane Touré, Bongile Mantsai, Niza Jay Ncoyini. World Premiere

W O R L D C I N E M A D O C U M E N T A R Y C O M P E T I T I O N
Twelve documentaries by some of the most courageous and extraordinary international filmmakers working today.

THE GOOD POSTMAN / Finland, Bulgaria (Director: Tonislav Hristov) — In a small Bulgarian village troubled by the ongoing refugee crisis, a local postman runs for mayor—and learns that even minor deeds can outweigh good intentions. North American Premiere

IN LOCO PARENTIS / Ireland, Spain (Directors: Neasa Ní Chianáin, David Rane) — John and Amanda teach Latin, English and guitar at a fantastical, stately home-turned-school. Nearly 50-year careers are drawing to a close for the pair who have become legends with the mantra: “Reading! ’Rithmetic! Rock ’n’ roll!” But for pupil and teacher alike, leaving is the hardest lesson. North American Premiere

IT’S NOT DARK YET / Ireland (Director: Frankie Fenton) — This is the incredible story of Simon Fitzmaurice, a young filmmaker who becomes completely paralyzed from motor neurone disease but goes on to direct an award-winning feature film through the use of his eyes. International Premiere

JOSHUA: TEENAGE VRS SUPERPOWER / U.S.A. (Director: Joe Piscatella) — When the Chinese Communist Party backtracks on its promise of autonomy to Hong Kong, teenager Joshua Wong decides to save his city. Rallying thousands of kids to skip school and occupy the streets, Joshua becomes an unlikely leader in Hong Kong and one of China’s most notorious dissidents. World Premiere

LAST MEN IN ALEPPO/ Denmark (Directors: Feras Fayyad, Steen Johannessen) — After five years of war in Syria, Aleppo’s remaining residents prepare themselves for a siege. Khalid, Subhi and Mahmoud, founding members of The White Helmets, have remained in the city to help their fellow citizens—and experience daily life, death, struggle and triumph in a city under fire. World Premiere

MACHINES / India, Germany, Finland (Director: Rahul Jain) — This intimate, observant portrayal of the rhythm of life and work in a gigantic textile factory in Gujarat, India, moves through the corridors and bowels of the enormously disorienting structure—taking the viewer on a journey of dehumanizing physical labor and intense hardship. North American Premiere. NEW CLIMATE

MOTHERLAND/ U.S.A., Philippines (Director: Ramona Diaz) — The planet’s busiest maternity hospital is located in one of its poorest and most populous countries: the Philippines. There, poor women face devastating consequences as their country struggles with reproductive health policy and the politics of conservative Catholic ideologies. World Premiere

PLASTIC CHINA/ China (Director: Jiu-liang Wang) — Yi-Jie, an 11-year-old girl, works alongside her parents in a recycling facility while dreaming of attending school. Kun, the facility’s ambitious foreman, dreams of a better life. Through the eyes and hands of those who handle its refuse, comes an examination of global consumption and culture. International Premiere. NEW CLIMATE

RUMBLE: The Indians Who Rocked The World / Canada (Director: Catherine Bainbridge) — This powerful documentary about the role of Native Americans in contemporary music history—featuring some of the greatest music stars of our time—exposes a critical missing chapter, revealing how indigenous musicians helped shape the soundtracks of our lives and, through their contributions, influenced popular culture. World Premiere

TOKYO IDOLS / United Kingdom, Canada (Director: Kyoko Miyake) — This exploration of Japan’s fascination with girl bands and their music follows an aspiring pop singer and her fans, delving into the cultural obsession with young female sexuality and the growing disconnect between men and women in hypermodern societies. World Premiere

WINNIE / France (Director: Pascale Lamche) — While her husband served a life sentence, paradoxically kept safe and morally uncontaminated, Winnie Mandela rode the raw violence of apartheid, fighting on the front line and underground. This is the untold story of the mysterious forces that combined to take her down, labeling him a saint, her, a sinner. World Premiere

THE WORKERS CUP / United Kingdom (Director: Adam Sobel) — Inside Qatar’s labour camps, African and Asian migrant workers building the facilities of the 2022 World Cup compete in a football tournament of their own. World Premiere. DAY ONE

N E X T

Pure, bold works distinguished by an innovative, forward-thinking approach to storytelling populate this programme. Digital technology paired with unfettered creativity promises that the films in this section will shape a “greater” next wave in American cinema. Presented by Adobe.

COLUMBUS / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Kogonada) — Casey lives with her mother in a little-known Midwestern town haunted by the promise of modernism. Jin, a visitor from the other side of the world, attends to his dying father. Burdened by the future, they find respite in one another and the architecture that surrounds them. Cast: John Cho, Haley Lu Richardson, Parker Posey, Rory Culkin, Michelle Forbes. World Premiere

DAYVEON/ U.S.A. (Director: Amman Abbasi, Screenwriters: Amman Abbasi, Steven Reneau) — In the wake of his older brother’s death, 13-year-old Dayveon spends the sweltering summer days roaming his rural Arkansas town. When he falls in with a local gang, he becomes drawn to the camaraderie and violence of their world. Cast: Devin Blackmon, Kordell “KD” Johnson, Dontrell Bright, Chasity Moore, Lachion Buckingham, Marquell Manning. World Premiere. DAY ONE

DEIDRA & LANEY ROB A TRAIN / U.S.A. (Director: Sydney Freeland, Screenwriter: Shelby Farrell) — Two teenage sisters start robbing trains to make ends meet after their single mother’s emotional meltdown in an electronics store lands her in jail. Cast: Ashleigh Murray, Rachel Crow, Tim Blake Nelson, David Sullivan, Danielle Nicolet, Sasheer Zamata. World Premiere

A GHOST STORY / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: David Lowery) — This is the story of a ghost and the house he haunts. Cast: Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara, Will Oldham, Sonia Acevedo, Rob Zabrecky, Liz Franke. World Premiere

GOOK / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Justin Chon) — Eli and Daniel, two Korean American brothers who own a struggling women’s shoe store, have an unlikely friendship with 11-year-old Kamilla. On the first day of the 1992 L.A. riots, the trio must defend their store—and contemplate the meaning of family, their personal dreams and the future. Cast: Justin Chon, Simone Baker, David So, Curtiss Cook Jr., Sang Chon, Ben Munoz. World Premiere

L.A. TIMES / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Michelle Morgan) — In this classically styled comedy of manners set in Los Angeles, sophisticated thirtysomethings try to determine whether ideal happiness exists in coupledom or if the perfectly suited couple is actually just an urban myth. Cast: Michelle Morgan, Dree Hemingway, Jorma Taccone, Kentucker Audley, Margarita Levieva, Adam Shapiro. World Premiere

LEMON/ U.S.A. (Director: Janicza Bravo, Screenwriters: Janicza Bravo, Brett Gelman) — A man watches his life unravel after he is left by his blind girlfriend. Cast: Brett Gelman, Judy Greer, Michael Cera, Nia Long, Shiri Appleby, Fred Melamed. World Premiere

MENASHE / U.S.A. (Director: Joshua Z Weinstein, Screenwriters: Joshua Z Weinstein, Alex Lipschultz, Musa Syeed) — Within Brooklyn’s ultra-orthodox Jewish community, a widower battles for custody of his son. A tender drama performed entirely in Yiddish, the film intimately explores the nature of faith and the price of parenthood. Cast: Menashe Lustig. World Premiere

PERSON TO PERSON / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Dustin Guy Defa) — A record collector hustles for a big score while his heartbroken roommate tries to erase a terrible mistake, a teenager bears witness to her best friend’s new relationship and a rookie reporter, alongside her demanding supervisor, chases the clues of a murder case involving a life-weary clock shop owner. Cast: Abbi Jacobson, Michael Cera, Tavi Gevinson, Philip Baker Hall, Bene Coopersmith, George Sample III. World Premiere

THOROUGHBRED / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Cory Finley) — Two teenage girls in suburban Connecticut rekindle their unlikely friendship after years of growing apart. In the process, they learn that neither is what she seems to be—and that a murder might solve both of their problems. Cast: Olivia Cooke, Anya Taylor-Joy, Anton Yelchin, Paul Sparks, Francie Swift, Kaili Vernoff. World Premiere

SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL \ 19-29 JANUARY 2017

Films from the Magnetic North | Berlinale 2017

Cinema Born of the Icy Cold is the feature of the Berlinale NATIVe 2017 strand that highlights ten features from Indigenous Films from the Arctic Circle, and nine shorts.

The Sámi are Europe’s only Indigenous people and 2016’s Kuun metsän Kaisa (Kaisa’s Enchanted Forest), by Finnish Skolt Sámi director Katja Gauriloff, explores the story of Gauriloff’s charismatic great-grandmother Kaisa. This personal and poetic documentary film effortlessly weaves original film and sound recordings from the 1930s to the 1970s together with animated sequences and folk tales of the Skolt Sámi. It stands as a testament to the eventful history of the Skolt Sámi and their struggle to preserve their unique culture in the wake of resettlements brought about by shifting borders throughout the course of the 20th century.

The narrative of surviving communities under pressure to assimilate social change also influences other Indigenous people of the area around the Arctic Circle home: these include the Inuit of Canada; the Greenlanders; the communities in Russia’s Kola Peninsula as well as the Yakuts and Chukchi of the Russian Federation’s Eastern Siberian region.

Sustainability, climate change, delocalisation and questions of Indigenous rights and self-empowerment are further themes addressed in this year’s featured films. “Climate change in the Arctic and the economic machinations of the industrialised nations of the West represent serious impositions in the everyday lives of the Indigenous communities which still inhabit the region.

For the first time, NATIVe will also be represented in the special series Berlinale Goes Kiez with an additional screening of the documentary film Angry Inuk, which provides insight into the Inuit perspective on the heated international debate surrounding seal hunting.

Feature Films at NATIVe:

24 Snega (24 Snow)
By Mikhail Barynin, Russian Federation 2016 | Documentary form

Despite the sacrifices it entails, Sergei passionately devotes his life to traditional horse breeding, toughing out the winter in the taiga like a lone cowboy hero. Spectacular cinematography conveys the biting cold feeling of nomadic life in Sakha. (International Prem).

Angry Inuk
By Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, Canada 2016 | Documentary form

A vivid depiction of the quiet anger of a people whose very subsistence is being threatened from many angles. An outcry to reassess the preconceptions around commercial seal-hunting, while illustrating the role of global sealskin trade for Inuit.

Johogoi Aiyy (God Johogoi)
By Sergei Potapov, Russian Federation 2016 | Documentary form

The young horse herder Johogoi feels summoned by the equine deity to attend the celebrated summer festival of Sakha. His excitement radiates through his smile as he participates in the rituals, believing he will find the woman who appears in his dreams. (International premiere)

Jumalan morsian (A Bride of the Seventh Heaven)
By Anastasia Lapsui, Markku Lehmuskallio, Finland 2003
With Angelina Saraleta, Viktoria Hudi, Ljuba Filipova, Jevgeni Hudi

At birth, Syarda was promised as a bride to Num, the highest god of the Nenets. Now an elderly lady, still bound to this fate, she tells the story of her wistful, yet self-determined life to a blind young girl who alleviates her loneliness.

Kniga Tundry. Povest’ o Vukvukaye – Malen’kom Kamne. (The Tundra Book. A Tale of Vukvuka – the Little Rock.)
By Aleksei Vakhrushev, Russian Federation 2011 | Documentary form

Jovial and as energetic as a teenager, the wise Vukvukai guides his nomadic Chukchi community. These tough reindeer herders survive in their snowy wonderland despite the harsh threats posed by the weather and Russian politics.

Kuun metsän Kaisa (Kaisa’s Enchanted Forest)

By Katja Gauriloff, Finland 2016 | Documentary form
The Swiss author Robert Crottet visits the Skolt Sámi and records spirited Kaisa’s unique storytelling gift. Handmade animation and rare archival footage illustrate the full world of the Skolt Sámi, from magical moments to the hardships of war.

Maliglutit (Searchers)
By Zacharias Kunuk, Canada 2016
With Benjamin Kunuk, Jocelyne Immaroitok, Karen Ivalu, Joseph Uttak

The tranquil life of a nomadic family in Nunavut is torn apart by a marauding gang of hunters looking for wives. Kuanana, the head of the family, goes out for revenge. A poetic Inuit Western. European premiere

Sameblod (Sami Blood)
By Amanda Kernell, Sweden 2016

With Lene Cecilia Sparrok, Mia Erika Sparrok, Maj Doris Rimpi, Julius Fleischanderl
Another chance to see the story of a teenage girl from a traditional Sámi family who yearns to be accepted by the Swedish society of the 1930s, a society full of prejudice and discrimination against her people. A shrewd commentary on institutionalised abuse and its consequences.

Seitsemän laulua tundralta (Seven Songs from the Tundra)
By Anastasia Lapsui, Markku Lehmuskallio, Finland 2000

With Vitalina Hudi, Hatjako Yzangi, Gregory Anaguritsi, Nadezhda Volodeeva
A rich contemplation of the Nenets in a seven-part chronicle, each guided by a meaningful song. Once a free people, the Soviet rule arrives to infringe upon their culture, affecting their identity irreversibly. An emotional political statement.

SUME – Mumisitsinerup Nipaa (SUMÉ – The Sound of a Revolution)
By Inuk Silis Høegh, Greenland / Denmark / Norway 2014 | Documentary form

For the Greenlanders of the 1970s, the surge of the progressive rock band SUME was mind-blowing: lyrics in their own language, inspiring them to act against the repression of their people. This is the compelling testimony to their revolution.

BERLINALE 2017 | 9 – 19 FEBUARY 2017

Metropolis (2001) | Eureka Bluray release

Directed by Rintaro, written by Katsuhiro Otomo and produced by Madhouse with conceptual support from Tezuka Productions, this science-fiction anime action is loosely based on the 1949 Metropolis manga created by Osamu Tezuka, itself inspired by Fritz Lang’s 1927 German silent film of the same name, though the two do not share plot elements. The anime, however, does draw aspects of its storyline directly from the 1927 film. METROPOLIS pictures an imagined future where humans and robots coexist in a city where robots are the underdogs forced to live in the city’s backstreets. This evergreen masterpiece mirrors our own contemporary society where the indigenous population is often unemployed and feels disenfranchised, blaming the immigrants (here robots) for taking their jobs. But Rintaro’s Japanese dystopia also fetishises technology. The narrative centres around Japanese detective Shunsaku Ban who arrives in Metropolis with his nephew Kenichi, hot on the tail of a corrupt scientist Dr Laughton. During their investigations they uncover Laughton’s secret creation: an ethereal robot called Tima who has an agenda that belies her often coy demeanour. Like an exotic TinTin on speed METROPOLIS‘ Art Deco aesthetic is visually lush and incandescent, dissolving and fizzing in a sparking psychedelic spectrum of colours. Otomo’s poetic script drives the story forward combining moments of terror with touching sadness set against at atmospheric ambient soundtrack of vintage jazz. Literally out of this world. MT

BLURAY RELEASE COURTESY OF EUREKA, MASTERS OF CINEMA in a limited edition Dual-Format SteelBook on 16 January 2017, and a Special Dual-Format edition on 13 March 2017.

Close Relations (Rodnye) (2016)

Dir: Vitaly Mansky | 112min | Documentary | Ukraine | Russia

Chatting to his mother in the opening scenes of RODNYE, Ukrainian director Vitaly Mansky (Pipeline) discovers for the first time that his background is mainly Russian and that one of his grandmothers was Polish Lithuanian (Babushka Sonya), indicating that Ukraine was at one point, part of Poland. Pictured sitting in the modest flat where he grew up, and where his mother still lives in Lvov, Mansky’s relishes his humble beginnings. After leaving to study filmmaking in Moscow, he is back again due to the recent upheavals in the eegion. RODNYE explores the current climate through a series of informal vists to his close family members in Lvov, Odessa and Sevastopol (Crimea). What unfolds from their differing perspectives is a fascinating potted political history of this part of the world during the period May 2014 to October 2015. Mansky brings his usual brand of black humour to the film, and some poignant family moments into the bargain.

Juxtaposing often feisty debate with low-key domestic scenes (a stray dog adopted by his sister wanders into the picture at one point and listens intently) and personal reflections (that echo Jem Cohen’s style), Mansky offers up something much more illucidating and profound than could ever be gleaned from newspapers or TV. This multi-faceted and nuanced analysis of national identity comes with some impressive footage of everyday life along with family photos from the album.

In Sevastopol New Year’s Eve is being celebrated in Russian and Ukrainian styles. In common with most of Eastern Europe, borders have been a moveable feast since time immemorial and Mansky’s birthplace Lvov used to be Polish and before that, Lemberg, part of the Hapsburg Empire. An irrestible documentary for those interested in poltical history RODNYE offers arresting scenes of the Black Sea port of Odessa; a bride and groom floating down the famous steps that featured in Battleship Potemkin; a funeral cortege complete with Ukrainian millitary in official regalia; Spring in Kiev and Donbas in Eastern Ukraine (“Ukraine has chosen the European path at last” sighs one of his sisters); and finally – a trip to the ballet. Describing the film as his “personal tragedy” Mansky offers a moving but often conflicted portrait of contemporary life amid crisis. MT

SCREENING AT BERTHA DOCHOUSE from 20 JANUARY | LFF REVIEW

La La Land (2016)

Dir: Damien Chazelle : Cast: Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone | US | Musical Drama | 129min

The 73rd Venice Film Festival opened with the razzmatazz of a rousing Hollywood musical, that is sadly not as good a film as it thinks it is, despite the much hyped critical acclaim that has it scoring more points on Imdb than some real classic masterpieces. Damien Chazelle’s much anticipated follow-up to Whiplash is a musical by theme and content and breaks into song during a title sequence that feels rather awkward and amateurish with most of the songs sung off- key, when you consider the wealth of US musical talent available.

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone star as LA wannabes at the bottom rung of the creative careers: he is Jazz pianist Sebastian, she as aspiring actor Mia. Gosling and Stone have worked together before with writer-director Damien Chazelle and both are decent enough dancers even if they do not have perfect pitch. They share a sparky onscreen chemistry from the outset when they first fall out during a mini fracas from their respective cars while driving into LA, and then later when their paths cross again just after Sebastian (Gosling) has been fired for playing his own tunes during his nightime gig at a fancy restaurant. LA LA LAND would work just as well, in fact better, as a straightforward drama – the banal script and musical elements sometime feel forced and unnatural although Seb does compose one catchy tune (from original composer Justin Hurwitz) which becomes ‘their’ song in an fluffy leitmotif that runs through the rest of the movie – at it is very much a movie: and boy can Gosling move.

This is a lively and entertaining film that make the mainstream crowd happy – it could be anybody’s story and resonates with most of us, whether we are working in creative fields or not, with its ‘reach for the stars premise’ of following your dream rather than settling for a safe and comfortable existence. Stone is the most vulnerable of the two as she finds the constant rejection of screen tests and auditions difficult to deal with but eventually gets into her groove. Gosling is more punchy and down to earth. Obsessed by trad jazz rather than the meandering self-indulgent kind, he eventually lands up with a well paid job playing the latter before setting up his own club which allows him to play the stuff he really enjoys. Falling in love comes naturally to them both but the road is rather rocky and involves the less travelled one on the way.

Gosling gives a suave and seductive turn throughout, never doubting himself for a moment. Stone – who won the Volpi Cup at Venice 2016 – feels more brittle and spiky, although she really puts her heart and soul into singing, dancing and acting. Damien Chazelle has a film grasp of the dark and dangerous nature of showbusiness and brings this to LA LA LAND as he did to his debut Whiplash. The final ‘what might have been’ montage works well enough to send to you off with a spring in your step. It’s a good film – but not a great one. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 13 JANUARY | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL UNTIL 10 SEPTEMBER 2016 | Best Actress Emma Stone

Jackie (2016)| Best Script | Venice 2016

Dir.: Pablo Larrain; Cast: Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Greta Gerwig, Max Castella, John Hurt; USA/Chile 2016, 91 min.

Director Pablo Larrain (Neruda) films Noah Oppenheim’s intricate script of JACKIE, covering four days in the life of first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy that opens on her arrival in Dallas on that fateful day in November 1963. Roaming ecliptically, the film de-constructs the tragic and delivers a moving portrait of trauma and grief that turns into a media event.

Even though politics are always present, this is never a political film. Jackie (Portman) has to deal with the sudden wrecking ball of her husband’s death followed immediately by the loss of her family home in the Whitehouse. The presidential successor Lyndon B Johnson, follows hot on her heels, chasing her out to move in with his own family, just as Jackie has restored the place to reflect the legacy of Abraham Lincoln. With the move, shown in great detail, comes the realisation of her loss in status: Jackie is quickly becoming a ‘has-been’, her husband’s funeral arrangement are her last official occasion.

Suffering from survivor’s guilt, Jackie argues with her brother-in law, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (Sarsgaard), about marching behind her husband’s coffin from the Capitol to Arlington cemetery – which is seen as a security risk by the new administration and foreign dignitories such as General de Gaulle. Changing her mind more than once, Jackie finally decides to risk of walking alongside the cortege – as did De Gaulle. Having no illusions about her late husband’s excessive philandering, she nevertheless wants to write a final chapter to his presidency, “something the world will remember”.

The losses mount up: Jackie decides to re-bury her two lost children the next to their father’s grave in Arlington, whilst dealing with her official assistant Pamela Turnure (Gerwig), who was one of her husband’s mistresses. The awkwardness is obvious, Nathalie Portman’s performance resonates with subtle complexity in her leading role. Only in an interview with Jack Valenti , (Castella), a PR man working for Johnson, do we get a glimpse of the real Jacqueline Kennedy, who after all worked as journalist before her marriage. Acutely aware of the difference between public perception and the truth: she is not willing to give an inch in her battle to canonise her husband as a great president.

The film flashes back to a black and white re-created TV clip, shot at beginning of her reign as First Lady, explaining to the public the redecorations she had made in the White House. Here, we see Jackie, fragile and vulnerable, before she enters public office, part of the illusion played out for the adoring public. And finally we learn about the legendary “Camelot” reference which is always associated with JFK’s presidency. It turns out to the name of his favourite musical – the vinyl was on the turntable before the couple left for Dallas. JACKIE is not so much history biopic as a case study of a courageous woman who was loyal to her husband, even after his death and despite his utter contempt of her: “we did not spend many nights together, not even the [last] one in Forth Worth”

Larrain directs with great sensitivity and a good eye for detail. Only the scene with a cleric (John Hurt) come over as stilted, the rest is perfect detachment and observation. DoP Stephane Fontaine finds a perfect style for all occasions: the Dallas shooting is tense and realistic, the White House sequences show not so much glitter but a film-studio like appearance. The close-ups are always telling, separating lies from truth. Natalie Portman gives the performance of a lifetime, as a intelligent woman, adored by the public for her innate style and elan as ‘sold’ by the media. AS

NOW ON RELEASE FROM 20 January 2017 | BEST SCRIPT WINNER NOAH OPPENHEIM

Urban Hymn (2016) | Home Ent release

Dir.: Michael Caton-Jones; Cast: Shirley Henderson, Letitia Wright, Isabella Laughland, Ian Hart; UK 2015, 114 min.

Director Michael Caton-Jones has returned to serious filmmaking after his disastrous Basic Instinct 2 (2006). Urban Hymn has much in common with This Boy’s Life from 1993: in his latest film, the director successfully tries to paint a truthful picture of British society where tragedy strikes when a bereaved middle-class lecturer tries to save a multi-delinquent teenager, orphaned at a young age.

We meet Jamie Harrison (Wright) and Leanne Dixon (Laughland) looting at the Tottenham riots in August 2011, provoked after a black man was shot under suspicious circumstances by the police. Both young women were orphaned at a young age and they live in Alpha House, a correctional institution for delinquent teenagers. Jamie and Leanne have a near symbiotic relationship, they represent to each other the family they never had. But soon, they will be eighteen, and the comparable mild juvenile law will not be applied to them anymore.

When middle aged, ex-sociologist lecturer Kate Linton (Henderson) applies for a job at Alpha House, she is asked by Ian Wilson (Hart), boss of the institution, why she wants to leave the security of the university halls. Her answer is evasive but we soon learn that she recently lost her 13 year-old son Ben, who was knifed to death. Kate has to save somebody, and she chooses Jamie, much more malleable than Leanne, who is the toughie of the couple. Via a neighbourhood choir in which she sings, Kate gives Jamie the chance to be, for the first time in her life, part of something. Leanne tries to sabotage the relationship between Kate and Jamie, fearing – rightfully – that she will lose Jamie, who starts to study at a music academy, falling in love with a fellow student and living in a flat which Kate has procured for her. When Jamie throws Leanne and her drinking, crack-taking friends out of her house, she is unaware what she has set in motion.

The characters are drawn as realistically as possible. Unfortunately, writer Nick Moorcroft too often choses cloying and sentimental turns of events; when a little more detachment would have saved some embarrassment. DoP Denis Crossan captured London authentically, particularly the street scenes at night are impressive: this is a dangerous city, where violence contrasts with the Linton’s middle class environment. The cast is brilliant, particularly Henderson and Laughland, as the polar opposites. Henderson’s Kate is full of guilt and has the need to do good for personal reasons and needs to ‘protect’ Jamie – even against her will. Despite these flaws URBAN HYMN has an emotional impact that carries it forward as a welcome British drama. AS

Bulldog Film Distribution is pleased to announce the UK release of URBAN HYMN, available on DVD and Digital HD from 30 January 2017.

Endless Poetry (2016)

Dir: Alejandro Jodorowsky | 128min | Fantasy Biopic drama | Cast: Adan Jodorowsky, Brontis Jodorowsky, Leandro Taub, Pamela Flores, Jeremias Herskovits

Chilean Maverick Alejandro Jodorowsky was back at the Quinzaine this year with another riotous family affair, this time starring his sons Brontis and Adan, and shot by multi-award winning DoP Christopher Doyle (In the Mood for Love).

A follow up to The Dance of Reality, ENDLESS POETRY is an episodic but spectacular affair and one of his most accessible outings to date, filmed in Santiago de Chile – dressed up in its original 1930s look – and recording his early rebellious years in 1940s Chile where he alienated himself from his Eastern European Jewish family background to mix in a bohemian circle of artists such as Stella Diaz Varin and Enrique Lihn (Leandro Taub) – with whom he marches through the city in defence of artistic freedom and defiance of the establishment. Using a familiar cocktail of magical realism and surreal mysticism, the film serves as a philosophical celebration of life that echoes The Holy Mountain and El Topo.

After moving from Tocopilla to Santiago de Chile with his family: a loving mother who sings her lines and a strict salesman father, it emerges that although Alejandrito (played as a child by Herskovits) is light on his loafers and highly artistic – he is not infact gay. This is shown in a touching scene where his cousin Ricardo tries to hit on him and is gently enlightened to the fact that Alejandro is not that way inclined. The film then flips forward nearly a decade to Alejandro (as played by his actual son Adan) as he falls in love for the first time with a poet Stella Diaz and tries to ‘find himself’ as a poet, despite his father’s plans for him to train as a doctor. In reality he was to find his way to Paris to study mime before getting involved in filmmaking – but that’s for later.

The film rambles slightly in the second act and feels a tad long at over two hours running time, but this is a visually striking fantasy drama with its street scenes featuring crowds dressed as black and white skeletons and red devils and his trademark nudity . There are some political undercurrents and nods towards the hardline dictator President Ibanez (1927-1931 & 1952-1958) and Jodorowsky himself narrates from time to time with his son Adam composing an evocative original score.

The final denouement with his father is impressive, where he makes the salient and ground breaking declaration that informs his life: “by not loving me you revealed to me that love is all-important”. Clearly his father inadvertently did him a favour. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM FRIDAY 6 JANUARY 2017 | ICA | CURZON HOME ENT

The Long Hot Summer (1958) | DVD release

Dir.: Martin Ritt; Cast: Orson Welles, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Anthony Franciosa, Lee Remick; USA 1958, min.

The Long, Hot Summer re-established director Martin Ritt (Norma Rae) again in Hollywood, after he was black-listed for nearly ten years for alleged communist activities. The film is based on three works by William Faulkner: Spotted Horses, Barn Burning and The Hamlet, the script written by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank jr. Shot in Baton Rougue, Louisiana, Ritt creates true Southern Gothic, very much comparable with Cat on the Hot Tin Roof (directed by Richard Brooks), which was released in the same year, also starring Paul Newman.

Ageing and in ill-health, family patriarch Will Varner (Welles), part owner of Bend, Mississippi, is disappointed with his children: his son Jody (Franciosa) has no ambition and is bone idle, spending most of his time with his alluring wife Eula (Remick). His daughter Clara, a teacher, is intelligent but Will would love it if she would pursue less contemplative activities. Clara is dating Alan Stewart – a coward in Will’s eyes, unable to ask for Clara’s hand in marriage. Into this dysfunctional family arrives Ben Quick (Newman), who has run away from his home town after a barn fire. Will is impressed by Ben, and hopes that he will marry Clara and bring some fresh blood into the decadent family. Jody is more and more frustrated, and after Ben is promoted to chief clerk by his father, he threatens the ‘intruder’ with a gun.

Ritt develops the story as a passionate conflict: repressed emotions coming to the fore threatening an old, established family. DoP Joseph LaShelle (River of no Return), is adept at panoramic scenes and intimate close-ups. One year later, Ritt would film one of Faulkner’s greatest novel’s, The Sound and the Fury, again scripted by Ravetch and Frank, and starring Woodward at the side of Yul Brynner; but not before Woodward and Newman tied the knot, with him going on to win Best Actor award at Cannes Film Festival. AS

AVAILABLE ON DVD FROM 26 SEPTEMBER 2016 COURTESY OF ODESSEY FILMS | AMAZON.CO.UK

100 Streets (2016) | Home Ent release

Dir: Jim O’Hanlon | Writer: Idris Elba, Gemma Arterton, Tom Cullen, Charlie Creed-Miles

93min | Drama | UK

Dir: Jim Hanlon A trio of family stories run side by side in Jim Hanlon’s clichéd contemporary drama that has its heart in the right place: a cosy corner of South West London where tower blocks rub shoulders with sophisticated squares. But whilst Hanlon’s British drama feels predictable, it also feels quite real: the rich are having plenty of sex, the middle class are striving, the poor are forced to resort to crime – and the intelligentsia are sitting back and analysing it all. 100 STREETS has Idris Elba as a bored rugby star cheating on his yummy mummy wife Gemma Arterton who gets her own back (with Tom Cullen) – while rushing around John Lewis with the kids. He claims to ‘work hard’ but there’s absolutely no evidence of this in his days spent snorting coke, drinking and appearing on TV. The second strand sees earnest cabbie Charlie Creed-Miles going through a gruelling adoption process with his modest charity-worker wife (Kierston Wareing) before a fatal road accident takes away his confidence, but strengthens his marriage. And finally, drug-dealing Black teenager Franz Drameh finds inspiration and redemption through Ken Stott’s philosophical retired actor, who he meets while doing community service in a graveyard . These characters are all well-fleshed in their everyday predictability, and what is entirely predictable too is that this British indie drama will end in meltdown melodrama. Ken Stott and Franz Drameh give the most enjoyable performances in a film that is watchable enough while it lasts, but instantly forgettable as you leave the cinema. MT

RELEASED ON ITUNES AND SKY FROM 2ND JANUARY 2017
& ON DVD FROM 23RD JANUARY 2017

Silence (2016)

SILENCE is an impassioned labour of love and a testament to the religious fervour and devotion of two 17th century Portuguese Jesuit priests who undertake a gruelling spiritual mission to the wilds of Japan to spread their faith. Light years away from Goodfellas and Casino, this is a diligent and earnest passion project and the result of 28 years of grafting for Martin Scorsese, a devout Catholic, and his scripter Jay Cocks. Scholars of Divinity and faithful Catholics will find it an immersive experience, for others the dynamite central performance from English actor Andrew Garfield (as Father Rodrigues) together with Dante Ferretti and Rodrigo Pieto’s magnificent mise-en-scènes will compensate for the demanding nature of the subject matter and its near three hour running time.

Background-wise, it’s worth remembering that 17th Portugal was a force to be reckoned with for the Japanese, and a towering trading power controlling the region’s Spice trade through the country’s domination of economic pinch points of Goa and Malucca. Shinto Buddhism was the prevailing religion and the Japanese rulers – the Shogunate – did not take kindly to Catholic proselytising at a time when the country already felt engulfed by Portuguese economic might. Based on Shusaku Endo’s ’60s novel, the local Catholic population had recently come under a period of heavy persecution due to their failed rebellion against the Tokogawa Shogunate – the Shimabara Uprising – and so any further Catholic missionaries were firmly stamped upon and uprooted before they could take hold of the population, particularly in remote regions such as the Goto Islands (Nagasaki) in the East China Sea where the missionaries land (filming actually took place in Taiwan).

Back home in Portugal at the time, the Catholic Inquisition was well underway, burning fiercely since the 1536 in its job of exterminating those who had rapidly converted to Catholicism, particularly from Judaism, while still covertly practising their own faiths. So this was a time of strong religious feeling and affiliations, not unlike today. The Jesuits, a Catholic order co-founded by Ignatius of Loyola, were stalwart missionaries known for their strong belief in education and whose motto is the famous chestnut: “Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man”.

In the opening scenes, Padres Sebastiao Rodrigues and Francisco Garrpe (Adam Driver) discover that their mentor Padre Ferreira (Neeson), who has been in Japan for some time, has been forced to renounce his faith by committing apostasy and stepping on a fumie, a bronze image of Jesus used as a test of faith. The Japanese had their own religious inquisition, and suspected Christians were made to trample on the fumie or face horrific torture or imprisonment. Arriving by boat on the treacherous shoreline of one of the islands, the intrepid pair fortuitously fall in with an uncover Christian community who shelter them in shacks in the lush vegetation, but the cruel and wily local inquisitor (a foppishly whimsical Issei Ogata) has offered a silver-coined ransom for their capture, and they are soon turned in by their faithless, feral-eyed translator Kichijiro (Kubozuka), and go their separate ways in desperation.

A fork in the fractured narrative then follows the wide-eyed, tousled-haired Rodrigues – played by Garfield as a deeply troubled, gibbering wreck, praying and sobbing incessantly as he tries to come to terms with why his mentor Ferreira has become a heretic as he faces his own dilemma: denouncement or death.

Amid much wailing and gnashing of teeth, this is a gritty and mournful affair where scenes of torture by crucifixion, burning and drowning offer little relief from the grinding misery of religious conviction. Spiritual succour has fallen by the wayside, and the only scene where we feel the comfort of ‘our Saviour Jesus Christ’ is when Rodrigues is encouraged by a kindly voiceover exhorting him to step on the fumie without fear of divine retribution, and momentarily denounce his religion in order to save a group of his followers from being hung upside down and bled to death, like cows in an Halal abattoir. Rodrigues’ character would have made a more appealing priest had his faith and prayers endowed him with a greater sense of composure, but here he plays a mere mortal. Liam Neeson gives a canny twist to his opportunistic Father Ferriera, who choses an easy life of compliance with his Japanese hosts rather than the designated path of religious rectitude – giving the impression, in the glint of an eye, that he has made his peace with God despite his outward transformation into a Judas.

There are echoes here of Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ but this is an altogether more doom-laden and tortured saga and more like Roland Joffe’s The Mission (1986), not least for its focus. Prieto’s painterly tableaux evoke the style and chiaroscuro lighting of Caravaggio, illuminating the cast as if by candlelight. Prieto also conveys the stark religious purity of El Greco, particularly in the scene where Rodrigues imagines the face of Christ appearing to him, while washing his face in a pool of water. And while the missionaries are portrayed as squeaky clean, the Japanese come across as conniving and merciless monsters who embody nothing of own their Buddhist or Animist references in their vicious regimes of torture. Certainly a film that will appeal to the American Christian heartland and devout Catholics, SILENCE is a timely story that has come full circle in the past 400 years. The fact that Religious conflict still divides and tortures our contemporary world is a sobering thought to take into 2017. MT

OUT ON NEW YEAR’S DAY 2017 | Picturehouses | Gate Cinema | NATIONWIDE

The Young Pope (2016) | Bluray release

Writer|Dir: Paolo Sorrentino, DoP: Luca Bigazzi | Cast: Jude Law (Pope Pius XIII Lenny Belardo), Diane Keaton (Sister Mary);, Silvio Orlando (Cardinal Angelo Voiello); Chloe Sevigny (Ether); Cecile de France (Sofia), Javier Camarra (The Rt Rev Monsignor Bernardo Gutierrez); Scott Shepherd (Cardinal Andrew Dussolier).

The most gorgeous bauble on the Christmas tree this year is THE YOUNG POPE. Oscar-winner Paolo Sorrentino’s most triumphant imagining so far sees Jude Law as Pope Pius XIII, born Lenny Belardo in a children’s home and brought up by Diane Keaton’s Sister Mary, an American nun an private secretary is also responsible for the religious education of the Pope, along with his childhood friend Cardinal Andrew Dussolier (Scott Shepherd).

Starting as a hard-line pontiff, but gradually morphing into a more sympathetic and liberal, Lenny Belardo is somewhat of an ingenue in all areas of life but he is quick to learn and Law endows him with an innate sense of ‘street cred’ which eventually sees him appearing on the Papal balcony like an ecumenical superstar spouting the kind of silvered soundbites that his believers really want to hear: “We have forgotten to masturbate; we have forgotten to be happy”. This is a Pope who is buffed and beautifully accoutred, drinks cherry coke for breakfast and has a fag (of the cigarette kind) in moments of severe stress. Paolo Sorrentino’s creation is fun and flirty, but also pithy and highly-satirical, served up on a plushly padded velvet cushion of hushed and lush tones, thanks to the drowsy staccato legato electronic score by award winning composer Lele Marchitelli and sumptuously photographed by ace DoP Luca Bigazzi (The Great Beauty). Cleverly scripted for US the market, its wit and intelligence will leave you breathless and dazzle even the most exacting audience: dumbed down it ain’t.

After banishing a cardinal who openly admits he is gay (due to Catholic inconsistencies) Pius emerges as a deeply human leader who grapples with his own parental issues, his own feelings about sex and God. He grows close to Cardinal Gutierrez (the wonderfully cast Javier Camara) and closer to Dussolier who both offer their advice and support on homosexuality. As while Sister Mary is despatched on a mission to help children in Africa, Pius heads off on the road to Venice to retrace his own roots and his parents.

Since premiering at Venice Film Festival, the series has gone directly onto HBO courtesy of Sony Studios, but is here to enjoy on Bluray, as a seamless continuum, or in 12 hour-long episodes . THE YOUNG POPE is an inspired re-imagining of the papacy has the same tongue in cheek charm as Nanni Moretti’s Habemus Papam and is laced with furtively dark undertones that is beguiling to the final denouement, There is an awe and majesty to its assured and intriguingly subversive narrative. Full of exquisite vignettes delivered by Diane Keaton as Sister Mary; Cecile de France as the scarlet- lipped tousled haired marketing maven and a tour de force by Silvio Orlando as Cardinal Voiello. MT

THE YOUNG POPE | UK DVD, BLURAY AND DIGITAL RELEASE 26 DECEMBER 2016

Reset (2015)

DIR: Thierry Demaiziere, Alban Teurlai | Doc | France | 107min

Despite a nondescript and bland title – RESET turns out to be a fascinating documentary about the oldest national ballet company the the world: the Paris Opera Ballet. Thierry Demaizière and Alban Teurlai explore a new chapter for this prestigious organisation with the visionary appointment of dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied – best known for his work on the Black Swan – and his marriage to Nathalie Portman.

This is a more fluid and unstructured affair in comparison with Frederick Wiseman’s impressive film La Danse which captured the austere and highly traditional set-up before Millepied took over. If anything, RESET has the same charismatic gusto of Nick Read’s highly enjoyable Bolshoi Babylon (2015) that captured the zeitgeist of recent upheavals at Moscow’s famous ballet company. There is a great deal of talky behind the scenes politics which may not appeal so much to general non-French speaking audiences but devotees will lap this up and find Millepied’s unorthodox approach and political machinations enthralling. Alban Teurlai’s expert camerawork conveys the ethereal bliss of the mise-en-scènes and dancing routines and those bored with the politics will soon be entranced when things lighten up after the initial preamble where the likeable maverick Millepied gets his knees firmly under the table blowing the cobwebs away in the darkest corners of this maze-like institution, with the help of his stressed-out assistant Virginia.

The film divides its study into brisk chapters but could have made more of the corps de ballet’s more of Millepied’s electrifying affect on the individual performer with his Millepied’s charisma shining as an an exciting beacon of hope and innovation for the Paris Ballet’s future. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 26 DECEMBER 2016

Creepy (2016) | Dual format Bluray | Eureka

Dir: Kiyoshi Kurosawa | Cast: Hidetoshi Nishijima, Teruyuki Kagawa, Haruna Kawaguchi | Thriller |130min | Japan

Kiyoshi Kurosawa adopts a soft and deadly approach to creep you out in his latest, a psychological thriller where Hidetoshi Nishijima’s criminologist Takakura looks back into a cold case that involves the disappearance of a local family in the vicinity of a place where he has moved to seek some well-earned peace and quiet. CREEPY gropes its way tentatively through a procedural that sometimes feels like a crime by numbers affair, but the tension slowly mounts its seething attack on the subconscious, as the elements gradually fall into place. This slow-burn technique pays off eventually, drawing you in so that there is nowhere left to hide. A dynamite Japanese cast ensures in a toxic brew of Japanese horror and American chiller. MT

OUT ON 23 JANUARY COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA

Uncle Howard (2016)

Dir.: Aaron Brookner; Documentary with Jim Jarmush, Tom DiCillo, Sara Driver; UK/US 2016, 96 min.

Filmmaker Aaron Brookner (The Silver Goat) has not only rescued his uncle’s Howard most famous documentary Burroughs: The Movie (1983), but also created a moving portrait of the late director, who died of Aids in 1989, just 34 years old.

UNCLE HOWARD is not just a trip down memory lane or a hagiography shown through poignant home movies of Aaron and Howard, it is very much a research document, however loving. To start with, it took quite a while to get to “Burroughs Bunker”, at 222 Bowery in New York, a windowless flat in New York, where the late writer and provocateur worked until his death in 1997, when the place was taken over by his friend, the poet John Giorno. He was reluctant to allow Aaron access to the archive, which included positive and negatives of the Burroughs film. But finally, with the help of Jim Jarmush – co-producer of Uncle Howard and sound technician on the Burroughs film – Aaron rescued the film from oblivion. What Aaron found, was not only the documentary itself, but also shots of its making. Apart from Burroughs and Ginsberg, many of the ‘underground’ artists of the New York scene can be seen in action: Frank Zappa and Andy Warhol amongst them, as well as filmmaker Tom DiCillo, Howard Brookner’s DoP, and director and actor Sara Driver, one of the co-producers of UNCLE HOWARD. Interviews with the theatre director Robert Wilson, subject of Howard’s second documentary Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars (1987), shed further light on Howard Brookner’s working method. When Howard was negotiating with Columbia about the contract for his first feature film Bloodhounds of Broadway with Madonna and Matt Dillon, one of the studio executives remembers, that the director mentioned this could be his first and only film – not taking this literally. But Howard died in April 1989, before the premiere of Bloodhounds.

UNCLE HOWARD visits favourite artist haunts such as the Chelsea Hotel, and the St. Vincent hospital in New York – “the Ground Zero” for New York’s Aids victims of the Eighties and Nineties – which today is a luxury apartment block. DoPs Gregg De Domenico and Andre Döbert thoughtfully select styles to show how much the city has changed – for the better, and how much it has lost in the last 25 years. UNCLE HOWARD is a Trauerarbeit, but also a celebration of the life and work of Howard Brookner.

ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS INCLUDING CURZON FROM 16 DECEMBER 2016

The Eagle Huntress (2016)

Dir: Otto Bell | With: Aisholpan Nurgaiv, Daisy Ridley | Doc | UK | 87min

The Kazakhs are a fiesty lot and their kids are no exception, growing up in the hostile terrain of the Steppes with its perishingly cold winters and scorching summers. With echoes of Sergei Dvortsevoy’s drama Tulpan (2008) THE EAGLE HUNTRESS explores the life of a young Kazakh girl who grows up in the remote Altai mountains of Mongolia (west of Ulan Bator) where she has made her mind up to become the first female eagle hunter in twelve generations of her Kazakh family. Theirs is a nomadic lifestyle that very much connects to a global narrative of survival for small communities all over the world.

The feature debut of filmmaker Otto Bell, this is an informative piece of cinema vérité that unfolds in the snug interiors of Kazakh family yurts (with solar panels!) and offers some dizzying, often slow-mo, widescreen aerial shots of this vast and inhospitable region between Russia and China. We first meet the rosy-cheeked 13 year old as she starts her training with golden eagles under the auspices of her father – who looks about 50 but is feasibly in his early 30s.

As you can imagine, this is no cuddly animal story, once trained in the art of – what amounts to falconry – Aisholpan has to descend on ropes down a vertiginous rockface to steal a baby eagle from under its mother’s nose in a nest hundreds of feet above the valley. The eaglet is just old enough to fly but young enough to get accustomed to its new form of captivity where it will help in hunting foxes, before eventually being returned to the wild, according to Kazakh tradition.

The rest of the community is dubious about their women going out to hunt. The elders, in particular, think their females should stay at home and cook and are not adapted to the fierce outdoor conditions – especially during the winter months. But Aisholpan is undeterred and goes on to prove them all wrong in both her competitive skills – where she gets all dolled up with nail varnish and a fancy fur hat – and in endurance tests where she accompanies her father in a gruelling fox hunt that leads them on horseback into deep snow drifts, carrying their eagles aloft.

Daisy Ridley’s accompanying narrative doesn’t quite have the Attenborough touch, making you wish for more salient facts about the Kazakhs and their daredevil lifestyle, but all said and done this is an impressive film, and an ambitious one at that! Wishing Otto Bell the very best of luck his documentary and may he make many more along these lines. MT

ON RELEASE AT PICTUREHOUSES AND CURZON CINEMAS FROM 16 DECEMBER

Gimme Danger (2016) | Bluray release

Dir: Jim Jarmusch | With Iggy Pop, Ron Asheton, Scott Asheton, James Williamson, Steve Mackay, Mike Watt, Kathy Asheton, Danny Fields |Doc | US | 108min

You might expect Jarmusch’s portrait of wild child Iggy Pop to be idiosyncratic; but it is also witty, inventive and affectionate in showing how Pop’s rock band The Stooges went on to influence popular music in the four decades that have followed his often shambolic rise to fame with a brand of music that burst onto the scene in mid-sixties Michigan. On stage Iggy Pop bops and writhes around, occasionally lurching forward into the crowd like a king cobra on cocaine, but in private he is an articulate and engaging raconteur who flashes a row of even white teeth with every outrageous revelation as he wriggles around on a Louis XV gold chair in his yellow caravan. Clearly Pop’s a maverick in the music star firmament: “I don’t wanna be part of the punk crowd, the glam crowd or the TV crowd, I just wanna be”.

A long term friend of Pop, Jarmusch enlivens GIMME DANGER (lyrics from the 1973 album, Raw Power) with collages and witty animations (by James Kerr) depicting vignettes from the band’s history and these are restlessly interwoven into the narrative that zips along with photos and archive footage of Iggy and the band that go to make up this entertaining and meaty biopic, dedicated to band members who are no longer alive. Born in Muskegon, Michigan 1947, James Newell Osterberg Jr was an indulged child allowed to play his drum kit in the main room of the trailer where he grew up and eventually took over the main bedroom in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Jarmusch focuses his film on the rise and early demise of the band from the late 1960s until the mid 1970s and the Bowie association (under British manager Tony DeFries) and then follows through with the Stooges’ ‘reunification’ in 2003 until their recognition in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010.

His own musical influences number R&B blues singer Bo Diddley and he irreverently disses the 1960s flower power era as being a corporate set-up. Talking heads joining the commentary are his original guitarist James Williamson who returned to the band after a 30-year career in Silicon Valley and whose intricate playing style Pop describes as “like somebody’s just let a police drug dog into your house – he goes everywhere”. There is also Stooges’ manager Danny Fields who signed the band to Elektra Records; Ron and Scott Asheton, Mike Watt and Steve Mackay.

Drugs were an inevitable part of the band’s decline but this is acknowledged in a cursory fashion and Pop is clearly much more interested in talking about musical styles and jazz and blues influences that informed his creativity. His shirtlessness is down to Yul Brynner in The Ten Commandments and there is a hilarious and well-chosen clip showing the actor flirting with Anne Baxter from 1956.

Live performances are evidence of Pop’s sheer joie de vivre that often leaves his band members playing alone as he throws himself at the mercy of the crowd during hits “I Wanna Be Your Dog”, I Got a Right and “T.V. Eye” and there are also moments with the Sex Pistols, The Ramones and the Buzzcocks who were influenced by the wildfire force of nature that is Iggy Pop. MT

OUT ON DVD \ BLURAY FROM 16 JANUARY 2017 | COURTESY OF DOGWOOF | AMAZON.CO.UK

https://youtu.be/6fgiW_S2Hgk

Jinnah (1998) | Dual format bluray release | Eureka

Dir.: Jamil Dehlavi | Cast: Christopher Lee, James Fox, Richard Lintern, Shireen Shah, Shashi Kapoor, Sam Dastor, Robert Ashby, Indira Varma, Maria Aitken | Pakistan/UK | 110 min

Director/co-writer Jamil Dehlavi (Seven lucky Gods) has created a lively bio-pic of Mohammed Ali Jinnah (1876-1948), the founder of modern Pakistan. Aesthetically close to David Lean, and with a towering Christopher Lee in the title role, JINNAH serves the audience well for information and entertainment.

Jinnah (Lee) is dying of tuberculosis in an ambulance in 1948, being looked after by his sister Fatima (Shah). After his death he wakes up in an office where a clerk (Kapoor) is supposed to judge his life – alas, the files have been transferred to a computer, which is not working. The guide, very much in the manner of his equivalent in Lubitsch’ Heaven Can Wait, now accompanies Jinnah through his life, with the older man watching his younger self (Lintern) marry the beautiful teenager Ruttie (Varma) during his fight in the early struggle for independence from the British Empire. But Ruttie dies young of cancer after giving birth to their daughter Dina, and Jinnah falls under the spell of his sister Fatima for the rest of his life. Jinnah has neglected his wife, fighting early battles with Ghandi (Dastor) and Nehru (Ashby) – the latter having an affair with Lady Edwina Mountbatten (Aiken) the wife of the – rather vain – Viceroy (Fox). There are many violent clashes between the independence fighters and the British army, but also bloodshed between the two rival factions. Ghandi is, for once, not shown as a martyr but foremost as a clever politician who uses his wile to out-manoeuvre Jinnah, by offering him the premiership of an independent India in the full knowledge that Jinnah would be at the mercy of the Hindi majority in the country. But Jinnah fights successful for the partition of the country into India and Pakistan, dying a year after independence.

DoP Nicholas Knowland uses lush colours and wide panoramic shots, very much like Freddie Francis for Lean, creating a melancholic atmosphere, where Jinnah’s successful political struggle is overshadowed by his personal loneliness; escalating into a fight with his daughter Dina who wants to marry a Hindu – just like her father – who denies her the same right. The Edwina/Nehru side-story is the only weak aspect of the narrative, coming over like a parody, rather than a plausible element. There are many speeches but they are (for once) necessary, explaining the background for the final partition. Lee’s Jinnah comes over a mature statesman, scolding his compatriots for intolerance towards other religions and women. Overall, the strong cast supports Lee in making JINNAH into an emotional and intellectually convincing epic about love, politics and war. AS

NOW AVAILABLE COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA ON AMAZON

Le Fils de Joseph (2016) | The Son of Joseph

Director: Eugene Green

Cast: Mathieu Amalric, Fabrizio Rongione, Victor Ezenfils

Eugene Green, the American born director continues to explore themes of creativity, family connection and the nature of fatherhood in his latest drama, his most delightful and effective since the Portuguese Nun.

Vincent (newcomer Victor Ezenfils) lives with his loving mother Marie (Natcha Regnier) in Paris, but still feels troubled and let down. Determined to find his father, he sets in a voyage of discovery that the director tackles through a series of five parables relating to the Holy Family entitled: The Sacrifice of Abraham; The Golden Calf; The Sacrifice of Isaac; The Carpenter and The Flight into Egypt.

Made on a low budget, yet none the worse for it, this satirical drama follows Green’s usual mannered style: the characters talk in perfect diction directly to the camera as if reciting their lines from a book, often moving slowly away from the camera. Cinematographer Raphael O’Byrne’s uses a static arthouse two-shot technique but also captures the beauty of the Parisian skylines and the lush landscapes of the Normandy countryside.

Vincent finally manages to track down his father through a change meeting at a party. Oscar Pormenor (a snarling Mathieu Amalric) is a successful publisher with a wife, three kids and a mistress who also runs his affairs in a small hotel in Paris. Oscar is odious and arrogant; entirely uninterested in his family who he regards with disdain. Copying the front door key to his father’s office, Vincent manages to eavesdrop on Oscar and decides very quickly that this is a man he has no wish to be his father, or any other relation. While hiding under his couch, while Oscar is in flagrante with his secretary, Vincent also discovers that he has an uncle Joseph, and contrives a meeting with him in a nearby bar, where they chat and get on admirably.

Vincent’s hatred of his father grows so vehement that one day he decides to attack him in his office and handcuff him to his chair in exactly the same position as that of his print of Caravaggio’s painting ‘The Sacrifice of Isaac’, which hangs in his bedroom in the flat. Running away, before revealing his identity to Oscar.

Vincent and Joseph (La Sapienza star Fabrizio Rongione), become close as they visit museums and parks in the vicinity. In the Louvre, Vincent admires Philippe de Champaigne’s The Dead Christ and Joseph the Carpenter by Georges de la Tour, and the title of the film becomes clear when Vincent happens to mention that Joseph was not Jesus’ real father but became his father by looking after him.

When Vincent asks Joseph for dinner, the biblical link falls into place in a light-hearted way, without becoming too serious or religious. The humour lies in this constant juxtaposition of the religious and secular elements, always feeling fresh and light-hearted and thoroughly amusing.

The final act takes the trio to Normandy where they visit Joseph’s family home where Oscar is unexpectedly hosting a reception and calls the police when he suspects gatecrashers upstairs in the property. Religious associations aside, the ensuing beach caper involves the police and a donkey and will go down well with arthouse and mainstream audiences alike with its infectious feelgood appeal. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 16 DECEMBER 2016 at PICTUREHOUSES AND CINE LUMIERE

Jet Trash (2016)

Director: Charles Henri Belleville

Cast: Sofia Boutella, Joelle Koissi, Robert Sheehan

Drama (2016) 80mins UK/India

JET TRASH isn’t exactly trash: the title refers to the aimless young drifters who arrive in India to ‘find themselves’, often finding themselves in more dubious circumstances, as they do here in Scottish filmmaker Charles Henri Belleville’s second roadie title – his debut one was The Inheritance. Gorgeously lurid and party-loving is how the billing describes this stylishly psychaedelic back-packer thriller that’s schematically plotted but well performed by a promising cast of British actors, amongst them the mesmerising Robert Sheehan. The takeaway is Belleville’s stunning ability to re-package quite ordinary material into something glamorously hedonistic and fun, albeit rather glib.

Aimed at the ‘millennial’ crowd and based on his book ‘Go’, Simon Lewis co-scripts with Dan M Brown to evoke the contempo zeitgeist where brash and privileged Brits ease themselves into adulthood not by hard work and entrepreneurial endeavour but by an infinitely more unimaginative and streetwise mix of drug-dealing and marrying for money (of the passport variety). The result is an under-scripted affair that leads its impressive cast on a predictable dance rather than an exciting journey.

Waking up on Christmas Day on a palm-fringed caster sugar beach was always going to be preferable to a wet one-bedder in Harlesden or some inner city tower block. And this is where our unappetising lead duo find themselves, after a dip and ‘one off the wrist’ in the crystal waters of Goa. Lee (Sheehan) and Sol (Osy Ikhile) have fetched up here courtesy of Sol trousering £17,000 in a dodgy marriage deal – to one Adeze (Adedayo), all pimped by the venal villain Marlowe (Craig Parkinson) who has knocked up his girlfriend Vix (Sofia Boutella) to keep her under control. Sadly, a sacred cow gets involved and, being India, the fallout is pivotal to the storyline of a sassy thriller that never takes itself too seriously and is all style over substance, but strangely none the worse for it.

By all accounts the cast and crew had a lovely time filming JET TRASH and it looks stunning too thanks to Maja Zamojda’s sumptuous cinematography and Laura Ellis Cricks’ vibrant set design. JET TRASH is just that: See it as a bit of a knees up and you won’t come away disappointed. MT

JET TRASH PREMIERED AT EDINBURGH FILM FESTIVAL 2016 AND IS NOW ON RELEASE AT VUE CINEMAS

Donnie Darko (2001) | re-release

Richard Kelly’s debut DONNIE DARKO is a strange and wonderful beast. The story opens in the wealthy family county of Middlesex, New Jersey where Jake Gyllenhaal’s rebellious teenager Donnie lives with his parents and younger siblings in a plush and leafy part of town. This is no straightforward fantasy but a dark and tonally complex curio seeped in unsettling anxiety that scratches at the edges of horror, and seems even more relevant today in our unpredictable social climate, than it did back in 1988.

Assigned to a kindly behavioural therapist (a middled-aged Elaine Robinson/aka Katherine Ross), Donnie seems to suffer from mild paranoid schizophrenia manifesting in daytime visions of a fierce grey bunny rabbit, who exhorts him to commit crimes and misdemeanours in the upmarket residential backwater where Donnie’s pleasantly straight-laced parents only want the best for him and his sisters Elizabeth (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a Harvard hopeful, and Samantha, who is part of a slightly inappropriate dance troupe.

Donnie is a gifted and smart adolescent whose sleepwalking habit actually saves his life when he narrowly avoids death on the night when a 747 engine lands on the family house. This is weird for two reasons: the rabbit told him to make himself scarce before the event, and, there is no trace of the engine’s plane. And when Donnie’s doc discovers he has stopped taking his meds, she recommends hypnotherapy, which ends embarrassingly – on the verge of Donnie playing with himself.

Gyllenhaal is perfectly cast in the lead: far from geeky, his face has a compelling quality that is both wholesome and otherworldly depending on Steven Poster’s clever lighting techniques. He also conveys a dreamy sexuality that feels entirely natural as he falls for Jena Malone’s troubled teenage crush, Gretchen Ross, who father is a criminal.

But the underlying theme of the narrative is teenage anxiety in all its forms. And Patrick Swayze’s inspirational school mentor Jim Cunningham aims to counsel the kids on how to realise their true potential, adding a very prescient and modern day touch to the proceedings.

Where Donnie Darko slightly goes off the rails is in scenes featuring the ‘wormholes’ as described during the physics lessons. These are shown in bubbles that extend from each character’s torso, yet move the film from its disturbing psychological agenda to an unfeasible fantasy territory that feels unconvincing and lacks the charm of, say, Michel Gondry’s magic realist moments in Mood Indigo.

But Gyllenhaal’s mesmerising and mystical performance carries the film through these flaws, making Donnie’s sinister world of worry a compelling and

twisted portrait of teenage anguish and a convincing parallel universe to his upbringing in conventional suburban America of the 1980s. MT

DONNIE DARKO is on Arrow Films and Mubi.

The Black Hen (2015) | Kalo Pothi

Dir.: Min Bahadur Bham | Cast: Sukra Ray Rokoya, Khadk Raj Nepali, Benisha Hamal/Nepal/France/Switzerland/Germany | Drama | 90 min.

First time director Min Bahadur Bham explores an intense story of friendship in the midst of a civil war: The Black Hen is set in 2001, during the Maoist insurgency in Nepal from 1996-2006. The conflict cost over 13 000 lives – over twelve per cent were children who had to join the Maoist forces, often against their will.

Prakash (Nepali) and Kiran (Rokoya) are school friends at their primary school, divided by classes: Prakash’s father is a poor peasant, whilst Kiran’s belongs to the wealthy ruling class. The boys are nevertheless the best of friends. One day, Prakash’s sister Bejuli (Hamal) gives her little brother a white hen as a present. Soon afterwards she will be married, but runs off fighting with the Maoist soldiers. Prakkash’s father sells the hen – called Karishima, after a Nepalese film star – to Tenziny, whose daughter is pregnant and needs nourishment from the bird’s eggs. But Prakash and Kiran don’t give up easily: they steal the hen, and colour it black. Prakash pretends he has bought it for a good price with the money his sister left him, and his father lets him keep it. But soon the hen disappears, and the two boys stumble into a deadly battle between forces of the Nepalese Army and the Maoists, supported by China. They nearly fall out with each other, having to play dead to save their lives – but back at home, a surprise awaits them.

THE BLACK HEN is told without sentimentality, this story of friendship conquering class divides and a brutal war, is moving and full of deeply felt humanism. Prakesh and Kiran are anything but goody-two-shoes boys – they are truants who steal money for cinema tickets, and are not above picking a fight with anyone. But the hen is the symbol of their friendship, they fight for it with idealism, untainted by adult opportunism. DoP Aziz Zhambakiev excels particularly in the dream sequences, when Prakash imagines the big city, where Nepalese monks and Maoists fight their battle on the streets. Whilst the colours here are dreamy and soft, his images of the hilly countryside seem bleached out of all light, the action occurring at always dusk or dawn. Amidst the harsh reality of war, THE BLACK HEN is imbued with a childlike magic, deservedly winning the Critic’s Week Prize at Venice Film Festival 2015.AS

ON RELEASE FROM 9 DECEMBER 2016 | CURZON CINEMAS

Fanny & Alexander (1982)

FANNY AND ALEXANDER (FANNY OCH ALEXANDER)

Dir.: Ingmar Bergman; Cast: Betil Guve, Pernilla Allwin, Ewa Frölling, Jan Malmsjö, Allan Edwall); Sweden/France/West Germany 1982, 168 min (film version) 312 min (TV Series)

Fanny and Alexander was supposed to be the swansong of Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007), but he went on to direct many more TV films, like Saraband (2003), often with his favourite screen actors Liv Ulmann and Erland Josephson. FANNY AND ALEXANDER was one of his most optimistic features, even though the dark epilogue takes some of the positivism away.

Set between 1907 and 1910 in Uppsala, a Swedish city famous for its university, it tells the story of two siblings Fanny (Allwin) and Alexander (Guve), whose father Oscar (Edwall) dies suddenly of a stroke. Their mother Emilie (Frölling), soon remarries the bishop of the city, Edward Vegerus (Malsmsjö), who turns out be an autocratic, joyless tyrant. The children and their mother were used to a carefree, artistic lifestyle, and do not want to adjust to the cold hearted stepfather, who in particular punishes Alexander, for his ability to see “invisible friends”. When Emilie decides to leave with her children, Edward threatens that she will loose them, since he will not agree to a divorce. But a friend of her former mother-in-law, smuggles the children out of Vegerus’ house, while he is sedated with a bromide drink. She tells Edward, that she intends to leave him, but he makes it known that he will go on ruining their lives. Vegerus’ dying aunt, who lives in his house, sets her hair and bedclothes on fire with a gas lamp, and runs to Edward’s bedroom, setting him on fire. In spite of his sedation, he manages to save his aunt, but dies soon afterwards. In an epilogue, the family is again living their former, sunny and lighthearted way, when Alexander sees Vegerus in his dream, And is told “you will never be free of me”.

Whilst the sprawling saga is one of Bergman’s more traditional outings, DoP Sven Nykvist conjures up a romantic atmosphere of a bygone era, which overwhelms the audience with its sumptuous visual aesthetic. The contrast between the dark, mausoleum-like atmosphere in Vegerus’ house, is set against the playful, lightly and softly lit scenes bookending the dreadful insulation where the three have suffer. The cast, particularly the children, are brilliant and Bergman directs with his usual thoughtful sensitivity. AS

SHOWING AT CURZON SOHO | 11 DECEMBER 2016

Mother (2016) | Nordic Baltic Film Festival 2016

Writer|Dir: Kadri Kousaar, Tiina Malberg, Andres Tabun, Andres Noormets, Siim Maaten, Jaak Prints, Katrin Kalma, Getter Meresmaa | Drama | Estonia | 89min

Estonia’s official Oscar foreign language hopeful is a sardonic suspense drama that explores themes of responsibility, personal freedom and community in a small town near Talinn.

Described by its prize-winning director Kadri Kousaar as Baltic Noir, it has the dark humour of Aki Kaurismaki and its heroine – a put-upon middle-aged mother (Elsa) forced to care for her comatose adult son – is Estonia’s answer to Kati Outinnen with her own brand of miserable charm. MOTHER also has Kousaar’s regular Finnish cinematographer Jean-Noel Mustonen whose visual style here has a striking resemblance to that of the Swedish breakout hit A Pigeon Sat on a Branch (2014) but the remainder of the crew is female (and blond).

Only a woman can understand Elsa’s life of quiet desperation trapped in a loveless marriage with her avoidant husband Arvo (Andres Tabun) and financially wrung out by her son Lauri (Siim Maaten) who was born when she was only 17, chaining her to domestic drudgery and destroying her dreams of studying in Moscow. Elsa channels her frustrations into obsessive cleaning routines in their cramped cottage, using gardening as a displacement activity for addressing her marital woes with Arvo. To make matters worse, Lauri is now bedridden after a mysterious shooting incident and Elsa is forced to care for his every need. The only glimmer of hope is her secret lover Aarne (Andres Noormets) – Lauri’s geeky colleague from school – who visits at inopportune moments bearing bunches of flowers and sexual favours which Elsa snatches hungrily rather than amorously while fending off a stream of unwelcome visits from Lauri;’s friends, confessors and hangers-on.

All this is treated with a tongue in cheek, toy-town briskness. The crime element of MOTHER is of secondary interest to its fascinating study of small-town social politics: Kousaar uses Lauri’s deaf mute status as a backcloth to expose the possible motives of his would be assassin: with each visit an intriguing story unspools encouraging the viewer to become amateur sleuth in a guessing game: was it his girlfriend, his childhood friend, his mate, or his doting pupil, and why?. It then emerges that Lauri took out a large sum of money shortly before the shooting, so clearly a financial incentive was the motivating factor in the crime. And it appears that several of Lauri’s guests are aware of the money stashed somewhere in the house and furtively look for it while Elsa’s back is turned.

Kousaar certainly takes on some heavyweight issues: her Cannes selected debut Magnus (2007) dealt with suicide: The Arbiter was concerned with abortion and genetics and now MOTHER sees dark comedy in tragedy and female desperation. Performances are strong with Malberg superb is her first lead role and Noormets and Tabun providing suitably insipid male support. But in the end, Kousaar makes fun of her tragic heroine after exposing her bitter hopelessness, and even her pathetic paramour ends up betraying her. Elsa is a sad character but her flaws are understandable and her motives justifiable in the circumstances. Arvo is a cypher whose only regret is that he never got to know his son, not to mention his wife. MOTHER is based on a play by Irish writer Kevin McCann and although Kousaar’s film is an inoffensive domestic drama is offers a rich underbelly of food for thought. MT

SCREENING DURING THE BALTIC NORDIC FILM FESTIVAL | DECEMBER 2016

Me, Myself and Her (2016) | Io e Lei | DVD | VOD

Me Myself and Her is an upbeat and sophisticated romantic comedy that provides a thoughtful addition to the growing mainstream collection of lesbian-themed dramas, although the ending is sadly rather predictable. With shades of Portrait of a Serial Monogamist (2015) and La Belle Saison (2016) it is award-winning Roman director Maria Sole Tognazzi’s second collaboration with Margherita Buy who is just the right person to play the rather sensitive Federica, a woman in her fifties who finds herself living with her friend, who is also a lover Marina (Sabrina Ferilli) after a long marriage to a man. The idea is based on a book by Ivan Cotroneo who also wrote the script for I Am Love (2009) and Loose Cannons (2010).

Early on in the film Federica states: “I am not a lesbian” and this pivotal statement leads to the crucial premise of the film – that sexual orientation can be a moveable feast, not a cast iron condition. At different times of our lives, the sexuality we originally identify with may be called into question as attraction and compatibility often surprisingly become more a feasible state of affairs, whatever the sex of the person we’re attracted to. Margherita Buy and Sabrina Ferilli (The Great Beauty) are believable as a couple of straight-acting and accomplished women who feel comfortable living together, and loving together also works for them in their middle age.

While Federica’s sexuality is morphing into a different sphere, Marina is on also entering a different phase of her life on a career level: a well-known actress, she is now running a restaurant that gives all its daily uneaten food to charity. The difference between them however is where the problems arise. Marina is the more assertive one of the couple and is happily open about their arrangement, even to the Press, and that’s something that makes Federica uneasy as she doesn’t really identify as a ‘lesbian’. And meeting up with an old boyfriend Marco (Fausto Maria Sciarappa), Federica finds herself in bed with him and starts to reappraise her physical feelings for a man. But the affair moves too quickly, as she finds herself trapped between two dominant characters – Marina on one side, and Marco on the other. And both want to take over her life. And Federica is not sure whether she loves Marina or prefers Marco, although these two sexual perspectives are not really examined in depth in Tognazzi’s rather freewheeling, carefree narrative. Marina is also grappling with a personal dilemma of her own: should she take a part she’s been offered in a film that may take her away from Rome, or continue with her successful eaterie.

Despite the rather unoriginal ending, this is a drama that feels really convincing from a relationship point of view. Tognazzi’s two characters are not driven together by toxic dysfunctionality, but by their comfortable attraction and compatibility with one another, which at the end makes for a more satisfactory midlife union that sexual fireworks and slanging matches. MT

MY, MYSELF AND HER IS AVAILABLE ON DVD | VOD FROM WOLF VIDEO FROM 6 DECEMBER 2016 |

The Ardennes (2016)

Robin Pront proves that blood is thicker than water, but that love doesn’t conquer all in his feature debut, a hard-edged ‘Flemish noir’ that explores the rift that develops between two petty criminal brothers whose relationship is put under strain after a burglary goes wrong.

The verdant rolling hills of the title give way to the rainy urban setting of Antwerp where their family echoes that of Bullhead – close-knit and protective of their own but always open to internecine resentment and small-mindedness. In fact the films share the same producer Burt Van Langendonck. But the only pâté made here is a by-product of violent head-butting and brutal violence between the males.

After an intriguing opening scene where a man struggles out of a domestic swimming pool, fully clothed and gasping for air through his stockinged hood, it turns out this is Dave (Jeroen Perceval/Bullhead), escaping from the scene of the crime but his accomplice brother Kenny (Kevin Janssens) ends up in the clink serving seven years for burglary. Once in prison, Kenny’s resistance to grass on his brother ends in a poke in the eye when Dave promptly runs off with his trailer trash ex-druggie girlfriend Sylvie (Veerle Baetens), who has aided and abetted the pair’s criminal career.

Kenny is less than pleased, on parole four years later, to discover that Sylvie is pregnant and shacked up with Dave, and it later transpires his former gang have gone straight and teetotal, and his only future lies in manual work. Clearly, these men are meatheads, and even their mother looks like she has had her fair share of punch-ups. THE ARDENNES spends a great deal of time painting a portrait we can already well imagine: grimy sink estates, violent outbursts of machismo, Sylvie vomiting and smoking riffs, and general cries of ‘Gott Verdomt’ but this sordid and repetitive detail adds nothing to a the tension of a narrative whose central thrust is: when is Dave going to spill the beans to Kenny about Sylvie.

The climax eventually comes when Kenny loses his cool and kills the owner of their local, giving Dave the leverage he needs – assisting with the disposal of the evidence. And this all takes place in the isolated trailer home of Kenny’s old prison roomie Stef (a slimy Jan Bijvoet), deep in the Ardennes countryside where Stef’s transvestite boyfriend cooks up a mean fry- up while Pront gets rounds to delivering the denouement we’ve all been waiting for. This is a decent thriller that could have been a bit tighter in the first two acts but all’s well that ends well, or doesn’t, in this arthouse tragedy that will make you re-think that walking trip to the gentle pleasures of Belgium’s Ardennes. MT

OUT ON RELEASE FROM 9 DECEMBER 2016 courtesy of STUDIOCANAL at CINE LUMIERE AND THE ICA AND CHAPTER CARDIFF FROM 16 DECEMBER 2016

Life, Animated (2016)

Dir.: Roger Ross Williams | Documentary with Owen Suskind | USA 2016 | 89 min.

Director/co-writer Roger Ross Williams (God loves Uganda) offers up a humane and hopeful portrait of Autism Spectrum disorder (ASD) through sufferer Owen Suskind and based on “Life, Animated: A story of Sidekicks, Heroes and Autism” by Owen’s father, the Pulitzer winning journalist Ron Suskind, who is also the executive producer of this documentary.

When Owen Suskind was three years old, the communicative and lively boy withdrew into himself cognitively and emotionally. For over four years, his only stimulation where Disney films, which he watched over and over. When his father Ron and mother Cornelia were told that their youngest son was suffering from ASD, their dream of a perfect family life was shattered. But with the help of therapists they have enabled their son, who is now 25, to lead an assisted but nevertheless rewarding life with his own home and romantic attachment. Owen gave a speech to a conference of specialists in autism in France, and hosts a radio-show. His message to all his audiences is clear: autistic people do not want to be alone.

LIFE, ANIMATED does offer insights into ASD: one of the signs is Echolalia, a sort of parrot speech, which peaks with normal children at around 30 months, but ASD sufferers, who have great anxiety problems because their brains are differently wired, do not unlearn this early communication model. Their prediction and anticipation timing is much slower than the norm. Furthermore, as Owen’s history proves, they often suffer from weak co-ordination and motor planning inflicted by a low muscle tone which leads to walking impairment, amongst other inflictions. Because those afflicted by ASD have great difficulty identifying the meaning of words, due to a lack a rhythmical understanding of the words, their speech is often slow and sometimes difficult to understand and this is made worse because they cannot grasp the body language of the person they communicate with. Owen proves over and over again that this is not because of a mental disorder, his drawings and acute analysis of concepts like heroism, in his beloved Disney world, show a vivid imagination and acute knowledge of interactions. But this is limited to the black-and-white world of Disney cartoons. In the real world, Owen struggles, because the signals he gets from his environment are not clear and understandable for him. If we consider that we all suffer from double-bind signals given to us, we can imagine how hard it is for someone like Owen to cope with contradictive signals given by the adult world he lives in.

His first relationship with Emily, who also suffers from ASD, comes to an end, because she does want the closeness Owen needs. Owen is stunned, because Disney movies, with their regular happy-endings, have not prepared him for this outcome. As his older brother Walter – who is prepared to look after him, when their parents are gone – muses, Disney has not prepared Owen for a normal sex life, since there is no “Disney Porn”. It is a sign of normality – rightly or wrong – that children who want to be Superheroes, are seen as normative, whilst Owen, who identifies with all the sidekicks in the films, is really much more realistic than his so called normal brethren.

LIFE, ANIMATED is greatly helped by the original animation of Mac Guff, who draws the world in which Owen lives. DoP Tom Bergmann’s close-ups of Owen are highlighting the world he lives in – trying to understand a universe that does not always complies with the norms of his Disney world. A deeply humanistic and emotionally satisfying documentary showing that the other side of ‘normal’ is often more innovative than the bland world the rest of us live in. AS

SCREENING AT BERTHA DOCHOUSE FROM 9 DECEMBER 2016

Holy Cow (2015)

Director: Imam Hazanov

With the villagers of Luhic, Azerbaijan

77min | Documentary | Azerbaijan | Romania | Germany

Writer and filmmaker Iman Hazanov’s debut feature uncovers a picturesque corner of rural Azerbaijan where the only immigrants are of the bovine variety. Magnificently captured on the widescreen and in intimate close-up, this cinema vérité piece takes us through a year in the life of an impoverished villager who is determined to give his family a better life without leaving his homeland.

A decent family man, Tapdig figures that prosperity is cow-shaped. On the telly he’s seen that European cows are bigger and more healthy than Azerbaijani ones. They also produce more milk. Unfortunately the local village elders don’t agree: “Bring a woman, yes, but not a cow”. Although the subject matter is light-hearted there are important messages in the idle chat of these village elders who, despite their old-fashioned thought patterns, consider themselves fully part of the European Union, but are at pains to point out “Prosperity must come from the top”. These Azerbaijani villagers claim to be contented feel looked after by their Government. Traditional they may be, but they also have minds of their own in this close community, and are not afraid to express them. But Tapdig believes prosperity is a ‘bottom-up’ affair and is determined to prove it, despite the negative opinion of his elders.

Sarvar Javadov’s camera-work is Turkish in style with its wide-screen panoramic views capturing the great sense of space in the surrounding countryside and the moody skyscapes of the Eastern Caucasus, and this is borne out in the views of the villagers: “there’s plenty of room here for everyone”. The dialogue scenes are shot in long slow takes, often with subjects wandering out of the frame while still talking, which adds a freshness and spontaneity, and occasionally a comic element, as when one of the old men nearly slips on the ice and the path of the cameraman.

Ready to risk it all, Tapdig eventually buys his cow, names her Madona, and brings her home to his family where she flourishes in a seemingly idyllic setting, providing milk, and even a calf: Alyona, although there is no mention of the breeding process, and no evidence of any other cattle in the village, apart from geese. The community here is clearly of the Muslim faith with their mosque the biggest building in the village. Azerbaijan, like Turkey, remains a secular country but a traditional one, where women are clearly submissive to their husbands but well cared for and loved, almost on a par with their animals, or so it seems. We see this in Tapdig’s single-mindedness and the fact that he discusses business matters with his son, even though the boy is yet hardly a teenager. His wife Vafa is reluctant to take care of Madona but eventually the cow becomes part of the large community with a promise of better things to come with Tapdig managing to finish building his house thanks to the proceeds from Madona’s milk.

Imam Hazanov took part in the Berlinale Talents scheme in 2014 and his touching human interest documentary very much connects to a global narrative of survival of small communities all over the World, and even provides an interesting counterpoint to the timely economic migration story, as revealed in its final third act. Hazanov’s story-telling shows a rich vein of situational humour that recalls that of Pawel Pawlikowksi’s early documentaries Tripping with Zhirinovsky (1995) and Serbian Epics (1992), obviously these are grander in scale but it will be interesting to see what Imam Hazonov makes of weightier matters himself. Clearly a talent in the making. MT

SCREENING AT BERTHA DOCHOUSE FROM 9 DECEMBER | REVIEWED AT INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL | AMSTERDAM | 2015

Roxanne (1987) | Bluray review

Dir: Fred Schepisi | Cast: Steve Martin, Daryl Hannah, Shelley Duvall, Chris Rossovich | 107min | Romcom | US

Steve Martin brings his legendary comedy talents to the role of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, transforming the pinocchio-nosed Cavalier into a soft-hearted Fire Brigade Chief in smalltown America, where he falls for the charms of Daryl Hannah’s blonde bombshell stargazer, in this lyrical and lovely cult classic from Fred Schepisi. Unselfishly, Bale (Martin) hides behind his dorkish junior (Chris Rossovich), to vicariously court the leggy astromer with billets doux and dulcet tones over the airways. The timeless classic from Fred Schepisi and Edmond Rostand has never felt so prescient in its timeless message that we should never judge a book by its cover, despite how unappealing its cover may be. MT

OUT ON 21 NOVEMBER 2016 COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA Amazon http://amzn.to/2cYp9Gi

Actress (2014) | DVD release

Director: Robert Greene
86min | Doc | US

Robert Greene first ‘nonfiction/melodrama’ about actors playing themselves, explores the creative energy behind the craft in a cinema vérité style profile of the actress Brandy Burre as she tries to kickstart her career after the birth of two children.

Brandy Burre is best known for her long-standing part in the American TV series The Wire but here she plays herself as a young mother who is facing the breakdown of her relationship with her children’s father. It is a moving piece of filmmaking that reveals Burre at her most raw and vulnerable. Being a mother, like acting, is an all-consuming emotional occupation and Burre successfully tries to convince herself (and us) that she is ready to go back to giving her best to her career, at 40, now that the kids are less dependent on her, in order to set herself on the road to financial freedom. Clearly, it’s been a difficult transition but she is fronting up well. Or so it seems.

Burre’s assertiveness is laced with wry humour. Reading through a script, glass of wine at hand, she admits that the stipulation for “partial nudity” is “right up my ally”, clearly indicating that the pressures entailed in the profession are often a bridge too far, but one that must be crossed in order to get work. She also admits to missing the intimacy of a sexual relationship – Tim and her are clearly no longer sleeping together.

Although Greene attempts to instil some more imaginative and stylistic elements in his documentary with the use of inventive devices including slow motion, the films works best when it is probing Burre’s innermost thoughts as her kids play quietly in the background, often making impromptu appearances in this an engaging and thoughtful film. MT

ACTRESS is Available on DVD 14 November to buy as an extra with the release of KATE PLAYS CHRISTINE, as well as incredible extras including: alternative opening, nine deleted scenes and the theatrical trailer. Presented as a double DVD set, Kate Plays Christine is a must have for any fans of genre-bending and experimental film.

Stigmata (1999) | Eureka Bluray DVD release

Dir: Rupert Wainwright | Cast: Patricia Arquette, Gabriel Byrne, Jonathan Pryce | US | Horror | 203min

Rupert Wainwrights bring his skills as an MTV promo director to this Gothic tale of possession that melds the past and the present in exploring how an ordinary hairdresser from Pittsburgh is taken over by dark forces and finds herself afflicted with stigmata wounds, similar to those that Christ suffered when nailed to the Cross. The Vatican’s Father Kiernan is initially sceptical of the story but when her condition worsens he arrives to investigate the case, and the two develop a powerful sexual chemistry.

Patricia Arquette brings an eerie otherworldiness to her performance morphing between a vituperative virago spouting ancient Aramaic and a down to earth blond from the ‘hood, Frankie Paige. Gabriel Byrne brings his potent sensuality to the part of Father Kiernan: a man of the cloth whose black robes could easily be hiding something more sinister. The scenes he shares with a malign Jonathan Pryce (as the Vatican Head) are the most convincing and enjoyable in this stylish and well-paced cult thriller that nonetheless feels quite dated when Arquette does her supernatural stuff to strobe lighting and a score from The Smashing Pumpkins. Blood spurts and the fires of Hell blaze forth and we ponder whether Arquette and Byrne are going to make it through the night as lovers or simply as the Priest and the Possessed. Stigmata certainly still packs and punch but it’s more entertaining that terrifying. MT

NOW OUT ON DUAL FORMAT COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA.

Havarie (2016) | Promised Land Symposium

DIR: Philip Scheffner | Merle Kroger | Doc | 93min | Germany

A tribute to those who constantly risk their lives in hope of a better future, HAVARIE is the documentary curio of Philip Scheffner who gave us Revision and The Haffmoon Files . This is a slow-burning affair that focuses on the grainy footage of a group of men who are adrift in a in a small dinghy in the narrow stretch of water between Southern Spain and North Africa. Scheffner has chosen to extend the original three-minute clip by slowing it down to a running time of 93 minutes – a feature that will no doubt bemuse audiences who come expecting action.

HAVARIE is informed by a series of voiceovers and radio communications that take place between the local Spanish coast guards and the cruise ship that spotted the men on their precarious mission to reach mainland Europe but whether this is really their mission remains unclear. Any why they are not picked up by the captain of the ship is never explained or explored.

In an attempt to add context, we hear from putative family members who have made it to Europe but are clearly finding the going uncertain and not have yet discovered the crock of gold they were possibly hoping for. Scheffner alludes to an undercurrent of terror and abuse in their countries of origin but this is merely conjecture as the provenance of the stranded men is never clarified.

HAVARIE doesn’t have the same resonance as Sergei Loznitsa’s Austerilitz but some viewers may find it moving and it certainly offers food for thought on the continuing narrative of migration and displacement. MT

SCREENING AS PART OF THE PROMISED LAND SYMPOSIUM AT CENTRAL SAINT MARTINS IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE GOETHE INSTITUTE IN LONDON.

The Squid and the Whale (2006) | Criterion UK bluray release

Writer|Dir: Noah Baumbach | Cast: Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Jesse Eisenberg, Owen Kline

Baumbach offers a wincingly painful black comedy that will resonate with us for its poignance and human truth. Based on his own experiences of his parents’ divorce, this subtle character-led drama bears all the thorns of traumatic breakdown where each party is left emotionally scarred for the rest of their lives, and particularly those who are innocent and free from negative baggage are now laden down with it.

Set in brownstone Brooklyn, New York City, during the 1980s there are echoes of Woody Allen films of the era, and Simon and Garfunkle tunes. This is a place of traditional values and literary underpinnings. May be it still is like this.

Jeff Daniels plays arrogant intellectual Bernard Berkman: a man who looks older than his years but whose books are no longer paying the family bills. His bluestocking hippyish wife Joan (Laura Linney) has been biding her time in waiting to leave him for years but, emboldened by her recent literary success, has found this the time to spread her wings – unfortunately in the direction of her youngest son Frank’s tennis coach Ivan (a smug Alec Baldwin).

The couple’s elder son is Walt is played by a febrile and outwardly cocky Jesse Eisenberg who has attempted to master his father’s intellectual confidence (erroneously referring to Kafka’s own works as Kafkaesque) but is still just an awkward and vulnerable 16-year-old virgin. Walt is close to his father whereas Frank (Owen Kline) sides with his mother, and is even more wet behind the ears, although spiky and truculent as he struggles with puberty.

After a vicious confrontation over writing issues, Joan and Bernard decide to part and organise joint custody of the kids in an unfeasible ‘every other night’ arrangement. Into the equation comes Bernard’s student Lili (Anna Paguin) who he unwisely invites to share his new home ‘across the park’ with Walt becoming a more regular over-night visitor than Frank. This pits man against boy on the flirting stakes and Bernard naturally pulls rank.

Daniels and Linney are both superb at evoking creative insecurity and how it impacts on the boys’ need for security and moral grounding at their delicate stage development. Clinging to both parents and then erupting violently and distancing themselves, the two manage to convey the hurt and bristling anger of incertitude and impending separation.

On the tennis court Bernard tramples on his younger son’s pride in his game, mercilessly thrashing him and admitting to ‘allowing him to win’ when he is himself defeated. The injured party in the marriage breakdown, Bernard also leaks inexcusable intimacies about his and Joan’s love life – seeking to get the boys on his side, with disastrous consequences for all concerned. Bernard is a wincing study of diminished masculinity, due to romantic and financial failure, and this brings out the worst in him as he is well aware of the shamefulness of his behaviour. The scene where he actually accepts Walt’s girlfriend’s contribution at the end of their joint restaurant meal nails humiliation to perfection.

THE SQUID AND THE WHALE is a joy to watch as we wallow deliciously in its unalloyed misery with each scene revealing more exquisite emotional torture. Totally devoid of American cheesiness, this is about the pare-down simplicity of the bare-boned truth. As bracingly refreshing a slap on the face with a frozen cod. MT

OUT ON BLURAY COURTESY OF CRITERION UK from 5 DECEMBER 2016

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) | Criterion UK bluray Release

Writer|Dir: Wes Anderson Cast: Gene Hackman, Angelica Huston, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Owen Wilson, Luke Wilson, Billy Murray, Danny Glover, Alec Baldwin | 110 Comedy | US

Wes Anderson offers us another delightfully eccentric comedy this time about a wealthy family of Jewish geniuses who single-mindedly peddle their own canoes while hanging together in a sprawling and dysfunctional dystopia. They hating each other but at the same time are viscerally connected. Snappily narrated by Alex Baldwin to a score that opens with the Beatles and includes snatches from Simon & Garfunkel, the film enjoys a solid gold cast playing uniquely unappealing characters headed by pater-familias Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman), a disbarred lawyer who spends an unfeasible time away while still asserts his authority. This florid and stylised affair takes places loosely in ‘chapters’.

One day Royal returns home, unable to pay his bills in the hotel suite that has been his temporary hiding place, with the story that he is terminally ill and wants his family under one roof again for the first time in 17 years: “I’ve always been an asshole, that’s just my style”. His wife Etheline (Angelica Huston) tells him to “stop following her” then breaks down in tears. The three children: Gwyneth Paltrow is Margot, a playwriting prodigy who was adopted; Luke Wilson plays Richie, a failing tennis pro who is in love with Margot; and Ben Stiller as Chas, a recently widowed financially savvy property developer who has previously sued his father twice and holds him in contempt, despite his tragic news. They are joined by Chas’ two kids (in tracksuits looking like something out of Cronenberg’s The Brood) and close family friend and best-selling novelist Eli (played by co-scripter Owen Wilson). But Royal is adamant in wanting a rapprochement and soon finds himself in Richie’s mice-ridden bedroom complete with drips and hospital medication.

What then ensues is a hypochondriac chambre piece (that actually takes place partly on the roof) where squabbling and sniping are the order of the day whereby a genial Royal attempts to ingratiate himself back into the bitching bosom of his family. But it soon transpires that his illness is faked and he leaves in a humiliating climbdown, one snowy New York day, spending the rest of the film as a bell boy.

Bill Murray appears in a comedy cameo as a psychologist and there is a deliciously dark and deadpan humour in all the characters’ often inappropriate exchanges. Naturally Gene Hackman is the standout with all the best lines: When Royal is told of Etheline’s close relationship with her financial advisor (Danny Glover), he responds “she may have had her share of infidelities but she’s still my wife, and no two bit chartered accountant is gonna change that”. He later puts him down scathingly with the greeting “Hey Pops, what’s cooking?” Eventually when the two get married he introduces himself to the Vicar as being “Half-Hebrew, and the children are a quarter Catholic”. Highly entertaining. MT

AVAILABLE ON CRITERION UK BLURAY FROM 5 DECEMBER 2016

Heritage of Love (2016) Geroy | Russian Film Week 2016)

Dir.: Yuriy Vasilev | Cast: Dima Bilan, Swetlana Ivanova, Jurgita Jurkuta, Alexandr Baluev | Russia | 96 min.

Some films are difficult to take seriously – and Yuriy Vasilev’s Heritage of Love, starring the Eurovision Song Contest winner Dima Bilan, falls into this category. A hotchpotch of advertising show reels make up the narrative – by Natalya Doroshjevic and Olga Pogodina-Kuzmina – so phony, that even Leni Riefenstahl would have asked for a re-write, probably resulting in a turgid melodrama.

Set a hundred years apart, this ‘eternal’ love story plays out between Andrey (Bilan) and Vera (Ivanova) in 20th century and the present day. We first meet the doomed couple near St. Petersburg in 1914, when princess Vera hangs out in a tree near the royal palace, chided first by her sister – for jumping out of the tree; then later by her mother, who wipes a speck of grass from her face, calling her “dirty as a street urchin”. The little tear-away is very much Daddy’s darling, and her father has just bought a new car, a Russo-Bolt, which will feature again in the film’s contemporary setting of Paris. After some officers re-enact the William-Tell scene with a hapless private on the estate of the Royals, captain Kulikov arrives just in time to admire Vera dancing happily in the water fountains and hear about the outbreak of the First World War.

Later, when the war seems to be lost, and the October Revolution is around the corner, the perfidious Tershenko (Baluev), a suspicious merchant, upsets the aristocrats (Vera is working as a nurse in a very clean field hospital), with talks of their deserved doom. He is in love with Vera’s sister Irina (Jurkute), but she looks down on the “shopkeeper”, who confesses ”you are the meaning of my life”. This meets with derision with Irina’s response “I hate you” – leaving him rather on the spot.

Meanwhile, Andrey has joined the White Army fighting the Reds, were he succumbs to a bullet, sacrificing himself for a superior. Those still interested (and able to tolerate the creaky performances) should know that the evil Tershenko-look-a-like bribes Andrey, and sends the him to contemporary Paris in order to swindle a Russian duchess (sic) out of a Russo-Bolt, which is priceless. Andrey meets Vera, when the she causes a flowerpot to drop from her balcony onto his head….

Heritage of Love was shown at the Marche du Film at Cannes this year. We learn from press releases that “industry professionals warmly received the film; some wept whilst watching”. We are also informed, that Dima Bilan “arrived in Cannes for the theme party on board a yacht”. He cheerfully greeted those attending the ‘premiere’ aboard the yacht, which was designed in the style of the movie: characters’ costumes (incl. blue Bilan’s uniform, memorable from the movie) and seamen’s caps sporting the words “The Heritage Of Love” (this is the international name of the picture), as songs of Dima Bilan ringing out through the festivities, accompanied by French wines – the reception was a success!” Shame about the film. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 2 DECEMBER 2016 | RUSSIAN FILM WEEK UNTIL 4 DECEMBER 2016

https://vimeo.com/182021665

The Unknown Girl (2016) | La Fille Inconnue | Cannes Film Festival | In competition 2016

Directors: The Dardennes Brothers

Cast: Adèle Hanael | Jeremie Renier | Olivier Gourmet | Fabrizio Rongione |

117min | Belgium | Drama

One wonders if the Dardennes brothers are still living in the real world with this low-key Belgian crime drama which feels stuck in the 1970s. It follows the daily life of a young GP who makes round the clock personal visits to her patients and harshly admonishes her practice intern for his lack of emotional detachment before reacting with guilt and tearful outbursts when a total stranger calls at the surgery after hours, and subsequently winds up dead.

The Dardennes’ 10th feature is a slow-burning procedural drama set in modern Liège where a solid cast perform a dreary tale of social realism amid unremitting gloom. This is not the Belgian city of frothy chocolate drinks and buttery waffles, but one of drugs and the dejected.

Hanael plays the bossy and humourless Jenny who takes great care of her patients but comes up against her intern Julien who decides to leave the medical world for good after a mild contretemps with Adèle Hanael’s good doctor. Matters take a turn for the worst when the police arrive to investigate the death of a young black girl who attempted to gain access to the surgery, just as it is closing (we feel her pain). Jenny is fraught with guilt at the incident and turns passive aggressive on several of her patients as she begins a freelance investigation into the possible murder.

For the first part of the two hour running time the film unspools in intimate close-up shots in the confines of the surgery and various domestic locations – as Jenny attempts to juggle her worthy medical activities (examining her patients’ seeping wounds, foot ulcers, stools and vomiting)- but eventually the ‘murder investigation’ takes complete hold of her and widens out into the environs of a wintery Liège where she is unable to let go of the stranger’s destiny for a predictable conclusion in the Dardennes’ trademark elliptical style.

The Dardennes Brothers have a legendary history of social realist filmmaking with successes at Cannes Film Festival winning the Palme D’Or for The Child and Rosetta and gongs for The Kid with a Bike, The Silence of Lorna amongst others. This is their least enjoyable film to date, but will no doubt appeal to ardent fans of their particular pared-down brand of realism. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 11-22 MAY 2016 | IN COMPETITION

http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/web-tv/trailer/la-fille-inconnue#vid=1112

Magnus (2016) |Home Ent release

Dir.: Benjamin Ree; Documentary with Magnus Carlsen; Norway 2016, 78 min.

First time documentary feature filmmaker/writer Benjamin Ree offers up a rather subdued and colourless portrait of reigning Chess World Champion, the Norwegian “Wunderkind” Magnus Carlsen, who won his first title when he was only twenty-two, and retained it for over a decade.

Ree’s uses of videos, showing a rather withdrawn character, is the strongest part of this biopic. Magnus’ father Henrik was concerned that Magnus was not developing like other children. But it soon emerged that for Magnus all numbers formed pattern, even pictures; and soon Magnus would beat his father and older children at chess, becoming the youngest Grandmaster at the age of thirteen, Magnus had the world at his feet. His father was told that the only way of further success for Marcus would require a disciplined and rigidly structured learning process. Henrik and the rest of the family did not take this advice on board, and allowed him to be playful, relaying on his intuition.

When Magnus faced the five times World Champion Viswananathan Anand in the latter’s hometown of Chennai in November 2013, the contrast between the two players could have not been greater: not only was the Indian 21 years older than Carlsen, but he relied on his brilliant memory when playing: not only had he memorised all the games Carlsen had played during his career, but nearly all important games in history. The results are interesting, but will mean much more to aficicionadoes of the game.

Ree uses a linear structure which has the effect of robbing his documentary of surprise elements and tension and Magnus himself is rather a bland character, making this rather tedious for those who are not fans of the game. Ree never really enquires about the obviously stunted emotional development of the “Mozart of Chess”, but seems content to stay in a hagiographic mode, which results in a certain stylistic blandness. Those keen on chess or fans of Magnus will no doubt lap this up, despite it’s failings, as Carlsen faces his next challenge : he will face another fresh-faced Russian challenger Sergey Karjakin in New York in November 2016. AS

MAGNUS will be available on digital, VoD, Blu-ray & DVD from 12th December

Chi-Raq (2016)

Dir.: Spike Lee | Cast: Teyonah Parris, Nick Cannon, Wesley Snipes, Angela Basset, John Cusack, Samuel L. Jackson | USA | 127 min.

Director/co-writer Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing) seems to be getting more and more angry as he gets older. Whilst the reasons are obvious, and we did not need a triumphant Trump for proof, Lee’s method of translating his rage in Chi-Raq (as in may of his other films) is hardly helping a reasonable discussion about the social woes of the United States. Chi-Raq (the first major production of Amazon Studios) is an overblown numbers revue, a re-setting of Aristophanes Lysistrata in Chicago’s notorious Southside and a sort of hip-hop musical.

Lysistrata (Parris) is living with her lover Demetrius Dupree alias Chi-Raq (an amalgamation of Chicago and Iraq), the gang leader of the purple clad Spartans, in Chicago’s Englewood district. Their sworn enemies are the Trojans, led by Wesley Snipes (with an eye patch) as Cyclos. As in reality, the gang warfare has claimed more victims in Chicago than the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts combined. After the death of a baby-girl called Patti in a shoot-out between the gangs (most perpetrators and victims are black), Lysistrata, with the help of her wise neighbour Miss Helen (Basset) and her many sexy girl friends, organises a sex boycott: the men of both gangs have to give up their weapons, to gain access to their bedrooms again. With the help of preacher Mike Corridan (Cusack), Lygistrata organises the withdrawal action (No peace, no pussy), supported by a big chorus and Dolmedes (Jackson), who comments the action like a ringmaster.

Chi-Raq immediately sets the tone with its opening number “Pray 4 My City”, a raucous chorus. From then on, Lee hammers home his message, borrowing shamelessly from West Side Story, Patton and Dr. Strangelove, among others. Yes, this is supposed to be satire, but the numbers are so overblown, that they are more caricature than critique. Particularly the contrived ending underlines that form has overtaken content to a degree that the aesthetics have swamped the critical aspect of the film. Furthermore, Lee, like many others, does not seem to recognise the obvious: that the free availability of weapons and the billion Dollar profits of the industry are the true reasons for the killings. With its running time of more than two hours and its uneven narrative, Chi-Raq loses the audience at the end, when one gag after another tries to outdo its predecessor. DoP Matthew Libatique images dominate the proceedings, his choreography is truly marvellous – but help to suffocate the message. The cast, obviously having fun, is brilliant, particularly Teyonah Parris, who dominates the proceedings. What a shame that script and structure let everyone down. AS

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM

https://vimeo.com/144523728

The Light Between Oceans {2016) | Venice Film Festival 2016

DIR: Derek Cianfrance

Cast: Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbinder, Rachel Weisz

Based on the 2012 novel by M.L. Stedman, director/writer Derek Cianfrance picks up where he had left off with Blue Valentine: a relationship spoilt by circumstances, fate and human fragility. The epic format, rare today, suits the subject well: spanning decades, the emotions are played out in full, leaving the audience exhausted by the end of the sweepingly romantic tragedy.

Tom Sherbourne (Fassbinder), a British soldier in WWI, seeks refuge as a light keeper on an isolated rock called Janus, off the coast in Western Australia. Emotionally and physically spent, he just seeks solitude; the bloodbath in France has opened his eyes to the endless possibilities of human cruelty. Just before he leaves for his post, he falls in love on the mainland with the young and headstrong Isabel Graysmark (Vikander), who later agrees to marry him. The two live – for a time – happily in the wilderness, before two miscarriages drive Isabel into a manifest depression. When Tom rescues a rowing boat, the couple find a dead man, and a baby girl very much alive. Isabel talks the very reluctant Tom into keeping the baby, pretending it was their own and setting in motion untold drama of colossal proportions.

The Light between Oceans is somehow a meeting between Henry James/Thomas Hardy and David Lean. The emotional hurt inflicted on their protagonists by the two authors, match well with Lean’s strong sense for the epic battle in hostile surroundings. The wild, beautiful landscape is the perfect background for this drama of guilt, savage suffering and motherly yearning seen through this visceral human need to procreate. DoP Adam Arkapaw’s magnificent visuals match both the human obsessions in the intense close-ups, and the dramatic remoteness of the environment in panoramic shots. Vikander and Fassbinder, a couple in real life, play their hearts out; Vikander’s strong but elegant poise (she is a trained ballet dancer), is well opposed to Fassbinder’s tortured movement and demeanor. Weisz’ Hannah, in spite of her turmoil, being the detached chess player, setting a trap for Isabel. This might be traditional cinema, but it is emotional and aesthetically powerful, well crafted on all levels, and truly moving thanks to Alexandre Desplat’s operatic score. AS

ON RELEASE AT SELECTED CINEMAS VUE, ODEON, CURZON FROM 2 DECEMBER 2016 | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2016 REVIEW

The Curious World of Hieronymous Bosch (2016)

Dir: David Bickerstaff | Prod: Phil Grabsky | Documentary | 86min |

The dynamic duo of Grabsky and Bickerstaff are at large again this time in Holland where the latest addition of their Exhibition of Screen series offers insight into one of the most intriguing painters of the medieval times through the Hieronymus Bosch Exhibition that took place at the Noordbrabants Museum in the small Dutch city early this year. Not only does this allow us unprecedented access to the extensive paintings and their curators, it also enables us to get a clear and often microscopic look at Bosch’s highly detailed 16th century world in his intricate artworks.

And commentary is provided by the experts; this time chief curator, Jos Koldeweij, Rachel Campbell Johnson, Art Critic of The Times and British filmmaker Peter Greenaway. And there’s so much to see and learn about here in The Garden of Earthly Delights where animals are often bigger than people, as they cavort on unicorns while birds swims and fish fly. Or The Last Judgement where grotesque events take over in a manic mayhem. The small town has able to gather all his most important works into this one place by offering deep insight into his work by an impressive collection of scholars. Campbell Johnson explains how Bosch interpreted his medieval vision and translated into our modern world, as if we were meeting the man himself, face to face. But what does it all mean?

In a tiny corner of Saint John of Patmos, we see a self-portrait of Bosch who was, contrary to popular belief, an ordinary and quite serious man who married well and became a leading member of the city’s religious fraternity ‘Brotherhood of our Lady’, living in one of the most illustrious townhouses in the main square. But behind this bourgeois facade, lay a highly inventive mind. Many of his triptych’s portray Heaven and Hell, a sort of pictorial version of Dante’s Inferno, where figures were roasted on poles or cast out in the wilderness, reflecting the doctrines of his era and gave rise to his vivid imagination and often tortured soul. Twenty of his drawings survive and 19 are offered in the exhibition and they depict an existential angst of nightmarish scenes where terrible eyes peer out from the ground and ears from the branches of trees. And then there is the legend of the woman who was martyred on the cross for growing a beard. As the camera zooms in to the delicately rendered portrait, it’s clear to see the bum fluff sprouting on her pale chin.

The Curious World of Hieronymus Bosch certainly lays to rest some myths and provides a fascinating insight into the artist himself, giving us a chance to get to grips with Bosch’s work in the context of this most intriguing time in art history. MT

SHOWING NOW | TICKETS AND INFORMATION HERE

The Dreamed Ones (2016) | DIE GETRÄUMTEN

Director: Ruth Beckermann

Cast: Anja Plaschg, Laurence Rupp; Austria 2016, 89 min.

Vienna born director Ruth Beckermann (East of War), explores the relationship between the Romanian born Jewish poet and author Paul Celan and the Austrian poet and writer Ingeborg Bachmann and the unsurmountable emotional conflicts brought about by different parental influences. Celan was a Jew whose parents were murdered in the Holocaust and Bachmann was the child of a committed Nazi.

Beckermann has chosen an interesting structure: two actors read the letters between the couple, dating from 1948 to 1967; including the ones from Bachmann which she never posted. Between the readings, the actors Anja Plaschg (Bachmann) and Laurence Rupp (Celan) talk and smoke and wander around in Vienna’s “Funkhaus” (Broadcasting House) listening to concert rehearsals and dining in the cafeteria. Their discussions are earnest and give the impression of genuine conflict resolution.

Celan and Bachmann only spent a few months living together in the late 1940s, but they were obsessed with each other. Bachmann had great difficulty committing to any long-term relationships, and Celan’s hesitant nature was no help. But the main stumbling block was their rivalry as poets and writers. Both were writing in German, and as members of the literature circle “Gruppe 47” they were fierce competitors. Celan had written the Holocaust poem ‘Death Fuge’ (Todesfuge) in 1945, which was published in 1948. In 1953 Bachmann won the “Gruppe 47” award for ‘Die gestundete Zeit” (The extended hours), while just a handful voted for Celan’s ‘Death Fuge’. As Celan put it: just six people remembered my name. To make matters worse, Böckler, a critic of the West Berlin paper “The Tagesspiegel”, criticized Celan’s “dead language” and insinuated the poet “ gets away with it, because of his race”. This sort of reaction was not uncommon in West Germany after the war where the majority of Germans, including intellectuals, felt sorry for themselves, and transferred their repressed guilt for the Holocaust into attacks on Jews.

Both Bachmann and Celan had two major relationships during their involvement and avid exchange of letters: Celan was married to the French aristocrat Gisèle de Lestrange, with whom he had a child. Bachmann lived with the Swiss writer Max Frisch in Zurich and Italy. Dominated by hatred and self-hatred, their obsession with each other was to end in tragedy: Celan committed suicide in 1970 drowning in the Seine. Bachmann, addicted to Barbiturates, literally set herself alight with a cigarette in bed, and died three weeks later in Rome.

Their mainly unfulfilled love was typically for the decades after the end of WWII, when the emotional chasm between the victims (or their children) of the Holocaust and the Nazis (and their children) was simply too much of a hurdle to overcome, however strong their feelings for each other. Celan and Bachmann simply stood no chance: history overcoming their love .

DOP Johannes Hammel creates loving close-ups of the ‘couple’, and his matter-of-fact shots of the “Funkhaus”, where broadcasting history has been made for the last 90 years or so, is a reminder that these ordinary-looking places have witnessed a violent and changing history. THE DREAMED ONES is a chronicle of despondency and unfulfilled desires in a time over-shadowed with a past which not only lead to the death of millions, but also poisoned the lives of innocent survivors like Celan and Bachmann. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS COURTESY OF CONTEMPORARY FILMS | 2 DECEMBER 2017

Blue Velvet (1986)

Dir|Writer: David Lynch | Cast: Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Dean Stockwell, Hope Lange, Priscilla Pointer | US | Fantasy thriller | 120min

In the recent eponymous documentary The Artlife, David Lynch talks about unsettling events that took place during his childhood in a small-town American setting, similar to Lumberton where BLUE VELVET takes place (although this feels like a larger city given its river and industrial wasteland). One of these incidents involved a naked woman outside his neighbour Dickie’s house. Sitting on a curb, she was crying and bleeding from the mouth – is this Dorothy? Those pivotal moments seem to have sparked a dark introspective quality in Lynch that he can’t talk about, but that later found its way into his films: Eraserhead, BLUE VELVET and Mulholland Drive.

BLUE VELVET is a noirish fantasy thriller flecked with irony, and a convincing rites of passage love story. Lynch could easily be Jeffrey Beaumont, the pleasant college boy who returns to the fictitious town of Lumberton to run the family hardware shop, while his father recovers in hospital from an incident involving the garden hose. The discovery of a severed human ear then takes Jeffrey to the local police chief, Detective John Williams, whose daughter Sandy will become Jeffrey’s accomplice in an adventure that leads to sexual awakening – although not with Sandy, at least not in the beginning.

Clearly, both Lynch and Jeffrey Beaumont come from similar loving families, but they also strive for adventure and, particularly, the darker side of life. Not content with running the local hardware store, student Jeffrey turns detective, hatching a plan that dices with danger, based on Sandy’s inside information on the police inquiry. And this involves gaining access to the home of nigh-club singer Dorothy Vallens (Rossellini) who is linked to the case and lives nearby. What Jeffrey discovers next involves a sordid criminal underworld that excites and appals him. Gradually he is drawn into a nefarious web of sexual deviancy, deceit and murder that runs contrary to his simple life in the lumber town where the most dangerous threat is being hit by a falling tree. A place where “a woodchuck actually knows how much wood he can chop” according to the local radio station.

BLUE VELVET is full of contrasts: red roses and white picket fences jossle with a severed human ear and a kidnapped child. Tonally, Lynch lurches successfully from sinister noir to light romance, and dissonant irony, and the dissonance is what makes it all so compelling. Jeffrey and Sandy are squeaky clean (how does the raunchy red décapotable fit in?) – sanitised even, in contrast to Dennis Hopper’s snarlingly vicious sadist and Isabella Rossellini’s battered bunny boiler. The motley crew that hang around in Rossellini’s private life – when she is not crooning on the dance floor of The Slow Club – are truly are a weird mix of depraved old biddies and over the hill hill billies, one of whom is also a convincing crooner in the style of Elvis (Dean Stockwell) . These are surely snatches from a Lynchian teenage dream, and over the years he has successfully channelled this dream life into the world of film.

Back in the day BLUE VELVET was quite shocking – the scissor scene is seared to the memory; 30 years later the bizarre and ironic elements come to fore – the opening scene with the garden spray and dog and the final one with the model bird – and it feels almost quaint and Eighties. The score is magnetic and memorable but without the florid colour BLUE VELVET could actually be a Forties film Noir, complete with its functioning factories, Deco diners and even a smaltzy night club. The power of great cinema is its ability to re-invent itself across the generations. MT

CELEBRATING ITS 30 ANNIVERSARY BLUE VELVET is RE-RELEASED COURTESY OF PARK CIRCUS on 2 DECEMBER, OPENING AT BFI SOUTHBANK AND SELECTED VENUES NATIONWIDE

Austerlitz (2016) | Tallinn Black Nights 2016

Dir: Sergei Losnitza | Doc | Ukraine | 94min

In a former Nazi concentration camp where tee-shirted tourists snigger, snack and shuffle with selfie-sticks, Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Losnitza (Maidan) brings rhythm and rigour with his sober yet richly textured black and white portrait that a sense of sad irony at the banal contrast between the tortured past and the insouciant contemporary.

On the outskirts of Berlin, Sachsenhausen is now a memorial to the many thousands who met their death there. Set up as an interrogation centre during the Second World War; the Gestapo questioned prisoners of war in spartan conditions of near starvation and physical privation. The captives were then gassed alive in the showers and were later imcinerated in the vast ovens by a series of Sondercommandos (themselves prisoners) who were also regularly exterminated, although the final Sondercommando 14 unit left the site to tell their tale.

Using the burbling background of human chatter and the ambient sounds of nature as his soundtrack, Losnitza’s static camera records a typical summer’s day here in a series of long takes. The first sobering one lasts nearly fifteen minutes. Eventually a narrative emerges as we learn about the history of the camp from the (here) Spanish and American tourist guides whose desultory diatribes recount the events that took place during the Holocaust. Tourists look on, some in voyeuristic amazement. But for many the site seems just another picnic site in their daily agenda.

Contemplative and unsettling, Loznitsa’s film illustrates the spectacular banality and insuperable void between past and present. Although we look and learn can we ever really engage and comprehend the events that took place when many are faced with so many momentous tragedies of our own in the 21st century. Losnitza opens up the debate with his remarkable documentary.

Austerlitz takes its title from the final work by the German novelist W.G. Sebald. The film is a sober yet strangely satisfying piece: at the end we do feel as we have not only learnt facts but experienced the gravity of the momentous tragedy that went on here. While the film’s structure initially seems simple, each successive composition moves nearer to its subject allowing our thoughts to wander and engage with the horror of what went on during the world’s last war. MT

TALLINN BLACK NIGHTS UNTIL 27 NOVEMBER 2016

A United Kingdom (2016)

Dir.: Amma Asante; Cast: Rosamund Pike, David Oyelowo, Laura Carmichael, Tom Felton, Jessica Oyelowo, Jack Davenport, Terry Pheto, Vusi Kunene; UK/US/Czech Republic 2016, 105 min.

Director Amma Asante’s moving portrait of the love story between English secretary Ruth Williams and Seretse Khama, Prince of Bechuanaland, offers political clichés instead of analysis but stays just the right side of a good melodrama held up by its convincing lead performances. With her scripter Guy Hibbert, Asante dusts down with a certain aplomb this fascinating episode from England’s post war history and Pike and Oyelowo share a natural onscreen chemistry that feels both genuine and appealing.

Clearly, it was love at first sight when Ruth Williams (Rosamund Pike) met Prince Seretse Khama (D. Oyelowo) at a London dance in 1947 organised by the Missionary Society – of which her sister Muriel (Carmichael) was an avid member. Prince Seretse had come here to study Law and one year after their ‘coup de foudre’ the couple married at Kensington Registry Office, since the Bishop of London, William Wand, would only allow a church wedding if the government gave its consent. Needless to say, this did not happen and the couple are treated rather shabbily by the powers that be. And also by their own families: Ruth’s father George disowns her and things don’t get better for the couple in Bechuanaland (Botsawana) – at the time a British Protectorate: Seretse’s uncle Tshekedi (Kunene), who wants his nephew to succeed him as a ruler, but only on condition of Seretse marrying a black woman. The Prince’s sister Naledi (Pheto) offers the couple her reluctant support.

Back in London, Prime Minister Attlee is in league with the South African government, who has just introduced Apartheid. Since South Africa cannot stomach a multi-racial couple governing in a neighbouring country, Attlee agrees that the prince should be exiled from his own country for five years. After Ruth gives birth to their first child, she and her husband put all hope in Winston Churchill, who had promised Khama’s return to his homeland. But once in power, Churchill just expands the exile for the whole lifespan of Khama (“being in opposition is one thing, the reality of governing is another one”}. Meanwhile, in the future state of Botswana, Alistair Canning (a sneering Davenport), and his wife (Jessica Oyelowo), try their best to persuade Ruth to give up her marriage, and Alistair even puts on the garish uniform of a Viceroy, to impress the locals. But with the help of Tony Benn (the grateful couple would name one of their sons after him) and petitions by the population of his native country, Ruth and Seretse are allowed back to Bechuanaland in 1956, after living five years in Croydon. Seretse Khama would later modernise the country as the first President of an independent Botswana.

The scenes in London are realistic but the Bechuanalanders are shown as being rather naive and very romanticised, the newly independent Botswana was, at the time, the third-poorest country in the world, despite fantastic mineral reserves. Pike and David Oyelowo really hold it all together and one can really believe their boundless love, which started with their common passion for Jazz. The political machinations are the weakest part of A UNITED KINGDOM: the characters involved in these scenes are not only shown as manipulative, but also downright unappealing: merely satirical cardboard cuttings. DoP Sam McCurdy succeeds in great panoramic images in Africa, and a foggy, subdued post-war London, still staggering on its knees from the war. Whilst this is certainly a story which needs to be told, Asante and writer Guy Hibbert, often simplify the political aspects, using the protagonists as ‘talking heads’. When all said and done, A UNITED KINGDOM has great universal appeal as being a real and enduring romance between Ruth Williams and Seretse Khama, lasting until his death in 1980. AS

SCREENING from 25 NOVEMBER AT THE TRICYCLE CINEMA, ODEON, PICTUREHOUSES AND VUE

Diving into the Unknown (2016) | Nordic Baltic Film Festival 2016

Dir: Juan Reina | Doc | Finland | 90min

A documentary that will appeal to those who get their kicks from extreme sports or the great outdoors DIVING INTO THE UNKNOWN follows four Finnish cave divers trying to recover the bodies of their colleagues (who died in 2014), in a feat that pushes out the boundaries of this dangerous sport.

Many may question the thrill of plumetting into perilous potholes: Cave diving carries the added bonus of the freezing cold water and ice. In Norway, documentarian Juan Reina follows the group to Mo i Rana, northern Norway, as they defy the authorities – who have failed to bring up the bodies – in a life-challenging mission of covert recovery, 100 metres below the surface, and in strictest secrecy. Visually striking snowbound landscapes and computer graphics help us to appreciate just what is at stake during this dangerous opertion. Clearly careful planning and working in unison are the main considerations, and Reina spends time interviewing the party as they organise the life-threatening trip before heading into the hostile terrain in this isolated part of the pennisula. Chainsaws are needed to cut through the ice before they can descend into the freezing subterranean depths of the Plura river, taking with them breathing equipment and heavy hearts. Failure is clearly not an option this time, and the men emotional and nervous, not least because they are technically unauthorised to proceed. But their fear is made more tangible by the very nature of cave-diving, that requires mental strength and self-belief as well as peak physical fitness. And are no longer as young as they were. The emotional unpredictability of the encounter is what seems to fascinate Reina most. And he homes in on the psychological aspects of the dive, as well as the technical difficulties. Crucially the filming relies on cameras strapped to the men, so luckily the director is not forced into the feat of following the divers down himself. What happens next is intriguing in this impressive documentary thriller. MT

THE NORDIC BALTIC FILM FESTIVAL | 1-11 DECEMBER 2016

The Wailing (Goksung) 2016

Dir.: Na Hong-jin; Cast: Kwak Do-won, Hwang Jung-min, Jun Kunimura,
Chun Woo-hee, Kim Hwan-hee, Moo Myeong); South Korea 2016, 150 min.

Director/writer Na Hong-jin (The Yellow Sea) imagines a monstrous journey into the occult – gigantic not only in length, but also in narrative and aesthetic over-kill. What makes THE WAILING bearable in spite all of the hocus-pocus, is the performance of lead actor Kwak, whose police officer Jong-Goo is more of a loafer than an enforcer, bringing some comic relief to the often gruesome proceedings.

Set in the same rural environment as many of the famous South Korean detective mysteries like Memories of Murder, Jong is introduced at the breakfast table with his wife and daughter, eating leisurely before setting out to investigate a multiple murder – as if this would be a routine case in his tranquil village. As it turns out, Jong doesn’t need to worry, because the culprit, the father of the slain family has been already caught. Soon more gruesome killings occur, and Jong sets out into the woods, to look for the chief suspect, a Japanese stranger (Kunimura), who has been spotted eating animals. But in spite of employing a shaman (Il Gwang), Jong does not get any nearer to the solution of this mysterious murder spree, which starts to dominate his dreams, But worse is to come when his daughter (Hyo-jin Kim), is affected by the illness. Then a strange woman (Moo) starts throwing stones at the detective, before warning him that the Japanese is not the culprit. In the end, THE WAILING ends as it began: as a riddle about religious obsession: which is really the devil behind the mass slaughter – and poor Jong has to come up with the right guess, to save his daughter.

THE WAILING is not a traditional horror movie, it does not rely on jump-scares (only once) or use sound as a harbinger of approaching evil – it more or less sucks the audience in, just like the virus spreading in the village. This is a story about desperation, the helpless Jong (and the audience) trying to find a rational solution for the crimes. There is contamination, affected victims vomit constantly: bodily and psychologically possession is the name of the game. But in the end, this endless cycle of new victims and new suspects is tiring: the self-indulgence of the director takes it toll – not only in running time, but in the narrative structure of film. DoP Kyung-pye is able to create to create two separate worlds: the mundane village life, to which Jong clings too long for his own good, and the jungle of the woods, from where evil spreads. It is ironic, that after such an exhaustive tour-de-force the main emotional impact should be deflation. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 25 NOVEMBER 2016

The Incident (2016) | Underwire Festival 1-6 December 2016

A rather unsatisfying and typically British class drama whose message is enigmatically couched in a series of polite middle class characters who exchange doleful glances but fail to make THE INCIDENT resonant or rewarding as a piece of filmmaking.

In an impressive central performance Ruta Gedmintas does her best as Annabel to stretch the wafer thin narrative into something meaningful. Various incidents do occur but we are never sure which one Linfoot is referring to in her enigmatic title. Is it the initial one where Annabel’s unsatisfied architect husband Joe (Tom Hughes) has it off with troubled teenager Lily (Tasha Connor) in the confines of his car? Cracks were already visible in the facade of their marriage and they irritate each other in every scene.

Or is Linfoot alluding to the second interminably long but undeniably frightening incident where Lily turns up at the couple’s home, blind drunk and rocking a jaunty balaclava, when Annabel is alone, startling her before then disappearing without further ado?.

After a while the film gradually loses its momentum as it wanders into a didactic exercise in the British class system where the teenager is villified while the married couple discretely cough and distance themselves from the rather unfortunate scenario, deciding to ‘keep calm and carry on’ in an increasingly alienating denouement.

For the most part, THE INCIDENT fails to get under the skin of its characters, but perhaps this is what Linfoot intended in portraying typical English reserve. Hats off to Ruta Gedmintas for making it strangely compelling and watchable for her performance alone. Cinematography is also to be applauded, reflecting the mournful mood and sober aesthetic of muted shades with intimate close shots and subtle lighting techniques. Linfoot could have dug deeper into the rich morass of moral issues behind her storyline but decides not to and this is why THE INCIDENT ultimately feels as hollow as Gedmintas’ beautifully sculpted cheekbones. MT

THE INCIDENT IS PLAYING AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS DURING UNDERWIRE FESTIVAL 2016

In the Blood (2016) | I Blodet | 5th Nordic Baltic Film Festival

Writer/Director: Rasmus Heisterberg | 104min | Denmark | Drama

Award-winning of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and A Royal Affair Rasmas Heisterberg gets behind the camera for his directorial debut IN THE BLOOD with some success, although his scathing critique of Copenhagen’s student medical elite fails to reach a satisfying conclusion, feeling more like a freewheeling mood piece capturing the zeitgeist of Summer in Nørrebro, in an alcoholic haze.

His film follows medic in the making Simon (Kristoffer Bech), a brilliant but compulsive student who breezes through exams and spends the evenings partying before heading to the Amazon for a study year with his best friend Knud (Elliott Crosset Hove), an introspective softie whose longtime girlfriend, Mia (Lea Gregersen) leaves him in the opening scenes.

Heisterberg captures the dreamy days of summer and really gets inside the characters concerned. Intimate and even claustrophobic, in a good way – it’s a superb portrait of young middle class privilege where self-centredness and blasé ennui takes centre stage. Knud is the most likeable character and Heisterberg conveys his emotional vulnerability in a role earnestly captured by Elliott Crosset Hove. Simon is less appealing: When caught stealing medical equipment he thinks only of his trip rather than showing any remorse, then becomes obsessed with bar worker Emilie but rather messes her around. This is a soulful and resonating drama that explores its characters effectively without becoming melodramatic or intense. MT

THE NORDIC BALTIC FILM FESTIVAL 1-11 DECEMBER 2016

https://youtu.be/VrAbIMhsEPU

In the Heat of the Night (1967) Sidney Poitier tribute

Dir: Norman Jewison | Cast: Sidney Poitier, Rod Steiger, Warren Oates | US | Crime Drama | 109min

Directed by Norman Jewison (Rollerball), and scripted by Stirling Silliphant from the novel by John Ball – In the Heat of the Night was shot during the height of the Civil Rights movement and the Anti-Vietnam war protests, in the openly racist Southern state of Mississippi. It was the year before Bobby Kennedy’s murder and Richard Nixon’s victory in the Presidential elections: this was not only a topical, but also a brave undertaking, considering the violent climate in politics which spilled over into the streets.

In the little town of Sparta, Philadelphia homicide detective Virgil Tibbs (Poitier) waits at the railway station for the next train, taking him on to Memphis. Tibbs is arrested, without reason by the sheriff’s deputy, Sam Wood (Oates) – just because he is black. For Wood and his boss, sheriff Gillespie (Steiger), Tibbs is a godsend: he is the fall guy for the murder of industrialist Colbert who has been killed on the streets of the sleepy town the night before. After Tibbs shows Gillespie his police shield, the sheriff checks his identity with his home precinct, then asks Tibbs to help him clear up the murder, since he has already imprisoned the second wrongly accused man. Against his better judgement, Tibbs takes on the task: his main suspect is the cotton farmer Endicott (Grates), who had a motive to kill Colbert. Endicott slaps Tibbs, who retaliates, making the stunned Endicott cry out “my grandfather would have shot you for this”. In spite of being chased by a deadly quartet of racist killers, Tibbs solves the case, winning finally Gillespie’s respect.

This is not really a whodunit but a portrait of Southern society still living in the days of the Confederation whose flag can not only be found on cars and buildings in this film, but still proudly raised above the Governmental Mansions (and many ordinary houses) in some southern States today. Tibbs is permanently taunted being called “boy”. Meanwhile other black people in Sparta can’t get their minds round how a fellow black man could be a police officer.

Institutional racism is the order of the day and even the local café waiter ignores him. Verbal and physical threats poison the atmosphere – Tibbs is made to feel like a second-class citizen. The Voting Act of the 60s helped to restore some lawful semblance of order – at least at the polls, but the Supreme Court abolished it before this year’s election – making voter suppression in the South of the USA rife again.

The cast is stunning, but DoP Haskell Wexler is the real star (One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Mulholland Falls) is the real star: his images reflect the simmering heat and violence, the evil lurking in the shadows and in broad daylight. His confrontational close-ups of Tibbs and Gillespie show restrained anger confronting bullying prejudice. The seediness of the little town where Wood lurks voyeuristically, looking at naked white women, is symptomatic of the era’s repressed sexuality. Edited by director-to-be Hal Ashby, Jewison has created not only an aesthetically supreme film, but a political document, that is still resonant today, nearly 50 years later. AS

NOW On MGM with Prime Video Channels

Dreams | (1990) | Criterion UK Bluray release

Dir: Akira Kurosawa | Cast: Martin Scorsese, Akira Terao, Mitsuko Baisho, Mitsunori Isaki, Toshie Negishi, Mieko Harada | Japan | Fantasy Drama | 119min

Akira Kurasawa trained as a artist, in common with David Lynch and Abbas Kiarostami, and this is a filmed realisation of eight of the director’s recurring dreams, presented as a series of interconnecting shorts incandescently rendered in a magic realist style presented by Kurosawa for the first time as sole writer.

The vignettes explore with sumptuous imagery his nightime imagination that is often linked to episodes of Japanese folklore featuring tragic events and fairytales: a young boy wandering through woods discovers a fox wedding; a soldier confronts the macabre spectre of the war dead who were once his companions; a radioactive leak from a power plants spills over to contaminate the local countryside; and Martin Scorsese appears as Vincent van Gogh in a glowing tribute to the artist. DREAMS is a deeply personal and ravishing jewel box of tantalising tricks showcasing Kurosawa’s talents to edify, entertain and mesmerise his audience. MT

AVAILABLE FROM CRITERION UK FROM 21 NOVEMBER 2016

Punch-Drunk Love (2002) | Criterion UK release

Writer|Dir: Paul Thomas Anderson

Cast: Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Don McManus, Luis Guzman

95min | Comedy Drama | UK

Adam Sandler is the star in Paul Thomas Anderson’s febrile and jittery black comedy romance in which he plays Barry, an emotionally buttoned-up novelty supplier in thrall to an after hours telephone chat line, suddenly emboldened and redeemed when he falls in love.

After the confident dramas Boogie Nights and Magnolia, PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE feels like a cinematic volt face for Anderson, almost as if he has wandered into the realms of Northern European arthouse cinema of the 90s and decided to change his style, specially when the love interest here is Emily Watson (Breaking the Waves).

Drenched in its cold detached aesthetic, the film drifts into some unsettling themes and feels strangely prescient of a future where chatlines provide a subliminal twilight zone where men can get their rocks off while outwardly seeming as macho and in control and they ever were, in between random psychotic outbursts, which Sandler conveys in a deft performance of comic complexity.

Here in a cavernous warehouse somewhere in California, Barry is overworked and underpaid but has discovered a scam where he can earn a fabulous amount of air miles simply by purchasing a type of canned pudding in the local supermarket. And his family offers no sanctuary. Teased by his overbearing sisters, who taunt him with a story of how he once broke a window pane with a hammer, he confesses to his brother in law that his life is in emotional turmoil and he suffers from anger issues (preparing him for his role in Peter Segal’s comedy Anger Management).

On a date with Emily Watson’s empathetic but slightly predatory Lena Leonard (a friend of his sister), he gets so hot under the collar that he escapes to let off steam by trashing the restaurant lavatories, returning calmly to face the restaurant manager. This pent up and tortured scene finally ends with him surrendering and kissing Lena. But in a weird subplot, he is then bundled into a truck and attacked by extortion thugs, controlled by Philip Seymour’s bullishly livid businessman,

Emily Watson is well cast here as she comes across as slightly unhinged but also placid and conciliatory as Lena. After the kissing scene, Barry desperately calls directory inquiries for her number (cue psychotic outburst) before loudly interrogating her (“do you have a boyfriend, well when did you last have a boyfriend?”) from a telephone box on a noisy street full of passers-by.

Turns out she already fancied him from a family photo. So when he follows her on business to Hawaii everything goes swimmingly until they end up in bed, when calmly confesses to “wanting to smash her face up with a sledgehammer” as they quietly make love. But there are more sinister events that slowly unfold in this sinuously disturbing and bracingly refreshing comic film about latent male aggression and dysfunctional romance, brilliantly set to Jon Brion’s flighty and discordance score. MT

AVAILABLE ON BLURAY COURTESY OF CRITERION UK FROM 21 NOVEMBER 2016.

Girls Lost | Pojkarna (2015) | DVD release

Dir.: Alexandra-Therese Keining | Cast: Tuva Jagell, Louise Nyvall, Wilma Holmen, Mandus Berg | Sweden | 106 min.

Adapted from Jessica Schliefauer’s prize-winning novel, Alexandra-Therese Keining (Kiss Me) retro drama harks back to the 80s where three teenage girls find away to escape bullying thanks to a magic drink. What starts as a body-transfer fantasy soon explores weightier themes about the true nature of sexual orientation and teenage angst in a macho school environment.

The three girls are 14 year old students Kim (Jagell), Momo (Nyvall) and Bella (Holmen) who are close allies in their campaign against sexual bullying by the boys, and a total lack of protection from the indifferent teachers. One evening, Bella finds a mysterious seed, that produces a an exotic flower in just one night. After a fancy dress party (with masks straight out of Eyes Wide Shut), the trio samples the flower’s sap, and during a cut in a trance-like sequence, suddenly are transformed into their male equivalents (played by male actors):

Whilst Bella and Momo revel in this confidence-boosting return to girlhood during the daytime, Kim is much more happy to be a boy. On the following night, the (male) trio is invited to a football game and a party, where Kim meets Tony (Berg), a toughie from a nearby the estate. The two go on a burglary spree, and Kim somehow falls for Tony, whose harsh exterior hides a uncertainty about his sexual orientation. During the day time, the girls, now better equipped to fight off the aggressive boys at school, discuss their future: Kim alone dreads the day the sap will dry up. To make matters even more complicated, Momo discovers her feelings for the male Kim. After the greenhouse with the sap burns down, the female Kim, her male Ego rejected by Tony (“you are a faggot”), steals his car and gun and drives off into the night.

It is clear, that Kim is much more at home in a male body than a female one. At the same time, he is drawn to boys, and rejects the female Momo, who has fallen in love with his male identity. What looked like at first as semi-lesbian trio, turns out into something completely different: The female Momo is clearly attracted to boys (but not the one of the macho-variety she encounters at school), Bella is extremely shy and reticent, and has yet to discover her sexual identity, whilst the male Kim is prone to male violence, his female Alter-Ego hated so much. For the female Kim, there hangs indeed a big question mark about her future.

DOP Ragna Jorming’s images are rich and evocative, often cutting off into science footage, with multiplying cells. The slow-motion underwater images are a rather overdome, but overall the visual impact is stunning. Whilst Keining’s direction is faultless, her script, particularly the dialogues, is often trite and over-didactic; some things are better left the the imagination in a subtle subtext. But overall, Girls Lost is a daring and original achievement. AS

GIRLS LOST will be released in the U.S. and Canada via Wolfe Video on December 13: on DVD & VOD and across all digital platforms including iTunes, Vimeo On Demand, and WolfeOnDemand.com and many major retailers.

Celine – Louis Ferdinand-Celine (2016) | UK Jewish Film Festival 2016

CÉLINE (LOUIS-FERDINAND CELINE)

Dir.: Emmanuel Bourdieu | Cast: Denis Lavant, Geraldine Pailhas, Philip Desmeules | France | 97 min.

Director/writer Emmanuel Bourdieu (Intrusions) is best known outside France for his work as scriptwriter for Arnaud Desplechin (Esther Kahn, My Sex Life, or how I got into an Argument). With Céline, he steps out of the shadow of his famous compatriot, painting an honest portrait of the giant of French literature – who was so viciously anti-Semitic that the Germans avoided publishing most of his violent rants, during the occupation in Vichy France, because they deemed the extremism as counter-productive.

The title promises a bio-pic, but Bourdieu tackles just a few months in the life of the disgraced writer and physician: during his exile in the Danish town of Korsor in 1948, Céline is visited by the American scholar Milton Hindus (1916-1988), who happened to be Jewish, but was so star struck by Céline’s pre-war writings (Journey to the End of the Night and Death on Credit) that he is entrusted with the author’s world-wide rehabilitation, to allow him a return to France. Céline (Lavant) and his wife Lucette (Pailhas), living in a small cottage in the woods, eagerly await Hindus’ (Desmeules) arrival – whilst both are very much aware of Celine Anti-Semitism, they both hope he might be their ticket back to France – because he is Jewish. At first, Hindus walks voluntarily into the trap set for him by the devious couple: Lucette fawns over him, whilst the author supresses his contempt for Hindus, whom he just sees as a useful dilettante. Hindus has just come to talk literature, but Céline is only interested in discussing how Hindus can help him to persuade the French Government to allow the collaborator’s return. Slowly it dawns on Hindus that he is merely a pawn, and when he learns that a Danish doctor did not find the steel-plate in Céine’s skull, which the author claimed was a result of a wound from WWI, he withdraws slowly. During a drunken night spent by the trio outdoors, Céline and his wife lose their self-control under the influence of alcohol.

Bourdieu shows Céline not as a mad genius, but a rather small-minded little man who has to be right at all costs, offending others at will, unable to take any criticism himself. He is a wild little bourgeois, who happened to have talent as a writer. Céline is scheming, but when his patience snaps, he is only too proud to admit to his fascist beliefs: “Aryan culture came to an end at the battle of Stalingrad”. At the same time, Céline and other ‘intellectuals’ in Europe were not taken in by Hitler; whom they despised but used the power the Nazis gave them to persecute Jews. As for Hindus, on whose book The Crippled Giant, the film is based, his rude awakening helped him to value his Jewish identity for the first time in his life. Céline and his wife, alas, returned to France in 1951 after being pardoned, where the auhor went on writing and espousing his unrelenting racism.

DoP Marie Spencer skillfully conveys this prison-like atmosphere of Céline’s Danish exile: at night the musty brown Autumnal shadows see him again and again grabbing a pitch fork to defend himself against imagined intruders. Suicidal, Lucette is forced to take his revolver away as the two engage in a morbid web of deceit from which Hindus has to de-entangle himself. The only real light occurs at the end of the film, when Hindus is sitting in a bus to Copenhagen, fleeing the malign influence of his manipulators. Lavant and Pailhas are brilliant, but Desmeules is not given much identity, his Hindus seems too reserved to be a match for Céline. Far from being a story from yesterday, Céline asks the audience to re-examine questions about art and politics, and the role of the author in society as a whole. AS

SCREENING DURING THE UK JEWISH FESTIVAL NATIONWIDE UNTIL

Starless Dreams (2016)

Dir: Mehrdad Oskouei | Doc | Iran | 76min

Award-winning documentarian Mehrdad Oskouei (The Other Side of Burqa) gives us a predictably stark snapshot of life in an juvenile correctional facility for teenage girls, on the outskirts of Tehran.

Infact, the word correctional seems to be rather a misnomer as none of these young women appears to receive any behavioural therapy during their stay in the spartan dormitory where they only have each other for comfort, and a few cuddly toys. STARLESS DREAMS (Royahaye Dame Sobh) is a sensitive and compassionate study that never attempts to offer judgement. The girls discuss their harrowing experiences to camera, often breaking down in tears or even smiles of embarrassment in revealing sexual abuse (euphemistically termed ‘bother’) from their crackhead fathers and uncles and verbal and physical abuse from their mothers (often by ‘burning’). What emerges is a generalised picture of familial discord and dysfunction where the parents favour their sons and mistreat their daughters in a cycle of anger, drug use and petty criminality that percolates through to the girls, who are often forced into dealing and drug addition themselves.

Often outwardly flippant, the girls face up well to camera but behind the scenes they are depressed and often hysterical: “Once I was young and in love but unfair times have made me feel old”. The tone is claustrophobic and unremittingly grim as some talk of “chains and beating” back home, others of going back to the streets. STARLESS DREAMS could have benefited from the occasional cutaway to some hard facts or more ample backstories to give context to the girls’ misery. When their families arrive, tears, smiles and hugs give a different impression from the girls’ negative feedback offered ‘in private’, leading us to believe there is possibly more going on here than meets the eye. But it is clear that these girls are unhappy, unfulfilled and mistreated by their families and are never going to be given equal treatment in their male-dominated society. The ‘therapy’ offered inside the remand home consists of washing babies, hairdressing and making glove puppets, yet when the Imam arrives for prayer and discussion, the girls are ready for some feisty debate and probing questioning. Of course, all their intelligent ideas meet a dusty and non-committal response answer from the Imam. MT

NOW SHOWING AT BERTHA DOCHOUSE LONDON W1

Underwire Festival | London 2016

UNDERWIRE FILM FESTIVAL exclusively celebrates female filmmaking talent across the crafts from Directing, Producing, Screenwriting, Editing, Cinematography, Sound Design, and Composing. Founded in 2010 by Gabriella Apicella and Gemma Mitchell the festival has awarded training and mentoring opportunities to over 40 filmmakers, and has screened over 300 films.

In a time of where the UK has a female Prime Minister, women still over make up only 21.8%* of a typical feature film crew. And the more opportunities available to start honing their craft, the better it will be for women in filmmaking careers and so that female stories get to be heard and to be enjoyed all over the World.

Now in its seventh year, UNDERWIRE has become a BAFTA recognised festival and is working with some of the best independent cinemas in London, including Genesis Cinema, BFI Southbank, ArtHouse Crouch End and Barbican.

UNDERWIRE FESTIVAL 2016 | ARTHOUSE VENUES ALL OVER LONDON | 30 November -5 DECEMBER

I, Olga HEPNAROVÁ (2016)

Writer/Dir: Petr Kazda, Tomas Weinreb | Cast: Michalina Olszanska, Martin Pechlat, Klara Meliskova, Marika Soposka, Juraj Nvota

Glowing in Adam Sikora’s luminous black and white photography, I, OLGA HEPNAROVÁ is a stylised debut drama telling the true story of a mentally unstable teenager who became a cold-blooded killer in 1970s Czechoslovakia.

Olga Hepnarová was born in Prague in the early 1950s. An unhappy and alienated childhood made her reject her family and after an attempted suicide lead to a spell in a psychiatric institution, her career as a manual worked was brought to an abrupt end when she drove an HGV into a crowd of people at a tram stop in the city centre.

The subject matter is grim enough, but Tomas Weinreb’s spartan linear narrative gives this moody and at times explicitly sexual gay-themed character piece a detached and clinical feel so that it almost feels like a caricature of Eastern Bloc stricture. This acetic treatment feels too emotionally chilly and insubstantial to spark any mainstream interest outside the LGBT or arthouse crown who will be intrigued by Michalina Olszanska who plays the perverse and glowering chain-smoker with poise and an almost wilful insouciance.

The life of a mass murderer is surely rich in dramatic potential yet I, OLGA HEPNAROVA is completely devoid of drama. It initially feels as if Weinreb has failed to get under the skin of his anti-heroine, who remains a cypher throughout, not really appearing to care about being bullied at school, or ostracised in the mental home. The only time she shows emotion is during sex. And yet, in some ways, this is the perfect portrayal of a psychopath, who feels absolutely nothing for others, yet demonstrates a well concealed but seething narcissistic rage when ignored or thwarted, which is exactly how Olszanska plays Olga. It certainly explains Hepnarova’s anger which later erupts as revenge on the society that has failed to recognise her worth and potential. The final bathetic denouement has absolutely no impact in dramatic terms, coming without any warning or build up and almost seeming like an irrelevance until the police arrive, when we realise what exactly has happened – blink and you almost miss it.

Klara Meliskova is subtle and quietly affecting as Olga’s disappointed yet restrained mother but this is Olszanska’s film and she dominates it with a powerful sense of entitlement and denial. The final scene is a masterpiece in stiff upper lippery. MT

OUT at SELECTED VENUES ON 18 NOVEMBER 2016 BEFORE THE FILM LAUNCHES ON MUBI LATER IN THE MONTH.

Low and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (2016)

Dir.: Werner Herzog | Documentary | USA | 98 min.

For someone who has battled with alligators in the Amazon and avoided being killed by Klaus Kinski, the internet doesn’t seem too much to tackle: Werner Herzog stands manfully up to the experts he interviews in his Teutonic tones, always having the last word, even when it comes to delicate questions like “can robots fall in love”.

The first of the ten-chapter exercise starts in the room where it all begun: on 29.10.1969, at UCLA, the first internet-message was sent out to Stanford University, some hundred miles away. It should have read “log in”, but the system crashed after just two letters – ‘lo’ becoming part of the title for this documentary. Herzog’s turns the inquiry often from its scientific base to practical all too human consequences. He is not awed by the scientists (or hackers for that matter), always arguing his point, often supported by Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”. And there are some nasty examples he has uncovered: we see the family of Niki Catsouras, who had committed suicide in her father’s car, with the gruesome images plastered all over the net. Or the sanctuary for victims of internet games in Green Bank, West Virginia, where an enormous telescope, run and erected by Robert C. Byrd, blocks any connection. One of the ex-gamers is even afraid to discuss games in detail “in case it brings up my cravings”. We also learn that South Korea seems to be particularly afflicted by the plague of game addiction, some cases even being fatal. And worse is to come: physicist Lucianne Walkowicz talks about the danger of sun flares, which could bring down the whole network – endangering all aspects of our lives, including food and water supply. Hacker personality Kevin Mitnick, at a congress in Las Vegas, tells the story of his life and how he spent years in federal prisons.

Nowadays, hackers are more likely to be employed by federal governments – the case of Russian hackers trying to influence the USA presidential election a very much on-going case. There are less serious questions asked: who will be legally responsible for car accidents when artificial intelligence is driving our cars. Whilst trying to explain the function of the net, Ted Nelson uses the metaphor of flowing water as a metaphor for the interconnectivity. Another worthwhile thought is the lack of any mention of the internet in SF literature – we read all about flying cars, but nobody mentioned anything about the net. And finally the question of love among the robots: how would you react if your washing machine told you that it could not do the laundry, because it was in love with the dishwasher?

Herzog’s most important interception is to agree with the thesis “that computers are the worst enemy of deep, critical thinking.” I would even go a step further: they are the enemies of any form of emotional contact between humans. In a world still dominated by men often resembling patients suffering from semi-autistism, computers will eventually obliterate the difference between humans and robots. Then, robots won’t be the only ones that can’t dream. A sober and extremely unsettling documentary. AS

OUT ON DVD WITH ADDITIONAL EXTRAS FROM 5 DECEMBER 2016 COURTESY OF DOGWOOF

Special features include:
BFI London Film Festival Q&A with Werner Herzog and Richard Ayoade
Interview with Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog Screen Talk
Theatrical Trailer

https://youtu.be/f8QWGl8F7Wo

Indignation (2016)

Script|Director: James Schamus Writers: Philip Roth

Cast: Sarah Gadon, Logan Lerman, Linda Emond, Ben Rosenfield, Tracy Letts, Margo Kazaryan

110min | Drama | US

Best known for his successful writing collaborations with Ang Lee, James Schamus adapts a Philip Roth novel for his directorial debut INDIGNATION.

Themes of love and religious commitment play out in this impressively mounted and gently affecting drama with dynamite performances from Logan Lerman, Tracy Letts and Sarah Gadon. Lerman plays Marcus Messner, an aspirational A student from a strict Jewish background who dreams of becoming a lawyer in the Supreme Court and avoids conscription to the Korean war by winning a scholarship to Winesburg College Ohio during the close-minded society of 1950s America.

Despite identifying as an atheist, Messner finds himself sharing a room with several disruptive Jewish boys (Philip Ettinger and Ben Rosenfield) who are desperate to involve him in their Fraternity. Against his better judegement, he then falls for the charms of fellow student Olivia Hutton (Sarah Gadon) who is sexually experienced and emotionally unstable despite her respectable background.

Consumed by passion and finding it difficult to fit in, Marcus is transferred to a single room but not without the intervention of his college rector, Dean Caudwell, who debates the pivotal issue with him at length in a coruscating battle of wills and one of the best scenes of this intelligent drama. Schamus focuses on the intellectual and cultural aspects of the narrative rather than delving deeply into its romantic ideals: the love affair is there to serve the story rather than the other way round, and what transpires in the aftermath involves a deal with his mother (a superb Linda Edmond) who reads the riot act as only Jewish mothers can.

INDIGNATION is an absorbing and accomplished literary adaptation for James Schamus and a storming start to his filmmaking career. MT

IN SELECTED ARTHOUSE VENUES FROM 18 NOVEMBER 2016

The Wings of the Dove (1997) | Bluray release

Dir: Iain Softley | Writer: Hossein Amini

Cast: Helena Bonham Carter, Linus Roche, Alex Jennings, Charlotte Rampling, Ben Miles, Michael Gambon

102min | UK | Drama

In 1910 London, Kate Croy (Helena Bonham Carter) is being controlled by her aunt Maude (Charlotte Rampling) over the choice of a husband – he must be very rich. Kate is seeing a poor journalist Merton Densher (Linus Roache). Realising that she’ll be disinherited, Kate temporarily suspends the relationship when she meets her aunt’s choice, Lord Mark (Alex Jennings) and also a wealthy American heiress Milly. Theale (Alison Elliot). Milly is terminally ill. Kate persuades Merton to woo Milly so that her money will be left him in her will.

The job of adapting Henry James is fraught with problems. James (like Proust) is essentially un-filmable. James’s memorable characters are impeccably rounded in their psychology. Their thoughts take central stage over their actions. James’s dense prose style, with its great interiority, defeats a scriptwriter. Things have to be simplified. Scriptwriter Hossein Amini’s solution for The Wings of the Dove is to concentrate on sub-plots and audaciously invent scenes. In interviews he has said, “I couldn’t help but see it in terms of a film-noir, a story of triangles, conspiracies and deceptions.”

There are many memorable scenes in this remarkable film. But to carefully delineate them would be to rob you of their acute emotional surprise. Instead here are two quotes. “We shall never be as we are.” And simply “I love you…Both of you” Such lines could reek of romantic cliché. But the first is sadly spoken in a bedroom sex scene where Kate and Merton sense their guilt over scheming to get Milly’s fortune. The second line has a heartbreaking intensity in the scene where the dying Milly questions Merton, after she has learnt from Lord Mark the nature of their plan.

The Wings of the Dove has minimal dialogue, pauses, silences, body language and intensity of looks – searching eyes and faces suggesting febrile thoughts. The acting of its three leads is of the highest order. Helena Bonham Carter is superb as the minx-like Kate. She’s on record as having said that this strong woman role was for her the Bette Davis part. A more appropriate actress to cite would be Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. Alison Elliot does the impossible and creates a genuinely good person. She’s never a naïve American woman but a warm and vibrant character. It’s such a brilliant and wonderfully affecting performance. Linus Roach’s acting is maybe a notch down from the women, but he is still very convincing as the serious minded journalist.

There are only two self–conscious flaws in this almost great drama. The first is where you think the proper ending of the film should have been. I won’t say but leave you too decide. And secondly the film has too much music which drenches its first act.

Otherwise The Wings of the Dove has gorgeous sets, costumes and photography. The moneyed societies of both London and Venice positively glow with self-assurance. Aside from Ian Softley’s sensitive direction, the true joy of The Wings of the Dove is the brilliant screenplay and the subtlety of its acting. I wonder what Henry James, the continually failed playwright of staged versions of his own novels, would have said about filming his interiors? Alan Price

THE WINGS OF A DOVE IS NOW AVAILABLE ON BLURAY COURTESY OF STUDIO CANAL

The Music of Strangers (2015)

Director: Morgan Neville | 99min | Documentary | US

A motley crew teams with Yo-Yo Ma in a bid to foster cross-cultural connectivity in another highly enjoyable documentary from Best of Enemies director Morgan Neville. For those new to Yo-Yo Ma, he is a proponent of Western classical music but here takes time out with the Silk Road Ensemble, a group of storytelling troubadours who co-create art, performance and ideas.

But first Neville sketches out a brief introduction to Ma, a Chinese American who was born in Paris in the ’50s and accidentally discovered his musical talent for cello during his childhood when he met the conductor Leonard Bernstein. The cello prodigy then developed his musical style collaborating with such luminaries as John Williams, Stephane Grappelli and Bobby McFerrin. Inventiveness is clearly the challenge for Ma who wanted to be more than ‘just’ a cellist and when he got together with the Silk Road Project, his creative juices continued to flow and percolate through their rich river of musical styles and influences from Italy to the Middle East culminating in their first experimental concert at Tanglewood in 2000.

Concentrating on the more eclectic members of the group and their newsworthy backgrounds of political upheaval and migration, Neville never really explores their musical genesis. Wu Man who plays the Chinese pipa; Iranian Kayhan Kalhor; the kamancheh – a stringed instrument – and Syrian clarinetist Kinan Azmeh are amongst the collaborators whose stories are explored in greater depth but the nature and origin of their instruments is a subject for a more thorough musical doc.

The most moving story is that of Kalhor’s who was forced to flee Iran nearly a decade ago despite his desire to remain in his homeland. Live music also features in Neville’s film and we are entertained by a variety of upbeat songs and more poignant fare. Clearly this is a heartwarming collaboration that will go from strength to strength, forging new links that transcend those of race or nationality. MT

SCREENING AT CURZONCINEMAS.COM FROM 18 NOVEMBER | REVIEWED AT BERLINALE 2016

We are Never Alone (2016) | Made in Prague Festival 2016

NIKDY NEJSME SAMI | Director: Petr Vaclav | Cast: Karel Roden, Lenka Vlasakova, Miroslav Hanus, Zdenek Godla, Klaudia Dudova | Czech Republic/France 116min

Director Petr Vaclav’s latest film is a provincial drama full of passion, violence and mental health issues. The characters could be straight out of a Sartre play and Vaclav certainly asks many existential questions.

Zena (Vlasakova) runs a grocery shop in a small town where he lazy hypochondriac husband is her husband (Roden) is out of work and makes life for Zena and his two sons a living nightmare. He befriends his prison guard neighbour, Zivatem, who is a racist neo-fascist. Driven out of her mind by her husband, Zena falls in love with the local brothel owner (Godla), who himself is obsessed by one of his girls, the pouting Sylva (Dudova) – who in turn is still in love with her husband (and father of her daughter), who is in prison.

To make matters even worse, Zena, after a one-off romp with the brothel owner, decides to become a prostitute herself. The adult characters here are totally out of control and this disturbance filters through to their children: Zena’s oldest son, and Zivatem’s boy (who feeds his father’s paranoia with putting dead animals outside their house). They take great pride in wanting nothing to kill their fathers and discuss this loudly during hikes in the countryside. And when the tension becomes unbearable, violence is the only way out: Zena’s oldest shoots his grandfather, a stingy emotional cripple, and then her husband and his friend Zivatem shoots the brothel owner for having led Zena astray. As a final twist, Zena’s youngest pockets the money from the body of the man his father helped to kill – and sets off on a journey as a blind passenger on a HGV.

We are never Alone is certainly wild and passionate, but the characters are entirely believable: stuck in the middle of nowhere with no love life to speak of, the adults opt for violence, physical and psychologically. And their mostly neglected children follow their ‘role models’. The characters here are always on the move creating a frenetic energy. But they invariably return – even the middle-aged Zena on her Vespa. Whilst Zivatem looks back fondly to communism – he preferred the authoritarian regime to democracy – the other characters – apart from Zena – are totally without any values – apart from wanting to get rich quick. They are soulless materialists, desperate to exploit each other.

DoP Stepan Kucra creates an eerie atmosphere, his images changing regularly from black-and-white to colour and back providing ghoulish world in which the buildings are as decayed as these human souls: the environment mirroring the moribund population, washed-out, bled dry of any colour. The assembled cast is impressive, with Vlasakova’s Zena a towering performance. A brilliant ride on the wild side from the Czech Republic.

UK PREMIER AT THE BARBICAN | 30 NOVEMBER 2016 | Berlinale Review

The High Frontier (2016) | Fantastic Fest | Austin, Texas

Writer|Dir: Wojciech Kasperski Cast: Andrzej Chyra, Marcin Dorocinski | Thriller | Poland | 98min

Andrzej Chyra (In the Name 0f) and Marcin Dorocinski (Anthropoid) are the stars of this stylish survival thriller that makes great use of stunning snowbound locations and an atmospheric soundtrack in a trekking holiday that turns into a sinister endurance test for a family of three.

Chyra is Mateusz a former frontier official who is keen to toughen up his teenage boys and teach them the meaning of machismo through heavy drinking bouts and stiff walks through the remote snowscapes and hostile terrain of Poland’s border with Ukraine.

The trip gets off to an inauspicious start when their truck hits a deer on the way to the wood cabin that is to be their remote retreat and the claustrophobic setting for this unsettling nail-biter. Shortly after they arrive the mood turns tense when Janek (Bartosz Bielenia) and Tomek (Kuba Henriksen) open the door to a bloodied and bruised man called Konrad (Marcin Dorociński), who promptly collapses at their feet. Mateusz ventures into the permafrost to look for Konrad’s vehicle and discovers more injured survivors of a serious crash, But while he is gone, the teenagers find themselves having to deal with Konrad who turns out to be a vicious psychopath, despite his life-threatening injuries, and by the end it’s clear that someone is going to die.

Debut director Wojciech Kasperski certainly knows how to generate an unsettling ambience with a sinister soundtrack and DoP Lukasz Zal (IDA) supports the story with his impressive camerawork complimenting the remote locations and edgy standoff between Konrad and the boys. But his script sadly lets him down and leaves the boys robbed of any personality – let alone masculinity – until the final scenes. And with Andrzej Chyra gone for most the running time, the emphasis is on Dorocinski to carry the action forward almost singlehandedly – apart from a scene featuring Andrzej Grabowski (Lechu) – with Bielenia and Henriksen paling into insignificance as sappy teenagers in rather underwritten roles. It is never made clear why Konrad is free to be travelling with the truck that overturned or why Lechu suddenly turns up at the cabin in its isolated location. The film picks up in the final act where a corruscating finale is the payoff for those who stay the course of this relentlessly gruelling story. MT

THE HIGH FRONTIER WON BEST SOUND AT THE POLISH FILM FESTIVAL 2016

El Rey Del Once | The Tenth Man | UK Jewish Film Festival

Director: Daniel Burman | Cast: Alan Sabbah, Julieta

70min | Drama | Argentina

In Daniel Burman’s upbeat rites of passage drama EL REY DEL ONCE, Alan Sabbagh plays a typical put-upon Jewish softie returning home to Buenos Aires in the hope of reconnecting with his ageing father. Ariel emigrated to New York and in the intervening years his father Usher has founded a charity foundation in Once, the city’s Jewish district where Ariel spent his youth. But Ariel’s dreams of a father son reunion are drowned in the cacophony of demanding duties that Usher ropes him into while keeping a distinctly low profile himself.

Burman’s film brilliantly conjurs up the close and often stifling nature of the orthodox Jewish community and Once looks very much like old districts of Tel Aviv. The friendly openness of the people and their paranoia and hypochondria seeps through the narrative but also their endless support of one another. In Buenos Aires, everyone is talking and no one’s listening and Ariel feels desperate for a real connection. He’s drawn to Eva, a charity volunteer who also feels cut off from her family. Eva’s strength lies in her silent radiance. An orthodox girl, she nurtures Ariel with home cooking and the precious gift of listening while he reflects on his troubled soul and slowly, unwittingly, he falls in love.

With endless phonecalls from his girlfriend back home creating an oppressive claustrophobia, Ariel re-examines his life. Eva becomes jealous and after submerging herself in the mikveh, (a purifying bath often taken after a period) the two end up in bed and conversation flows for the first time. EL REY DEL ONCE is told as a straightforward narrative; the final act brings a happy ending but not a surprising one as Ariel volunteers to sit shivah as the tenth, vital man at a local funeral.

This is Daniel Burman’s third film at Berlinale where he once more explores the father son dynamic with a lightness of touch that is occasionally moving. As Ariel moves from darkness to light towards his inner strength, he finds himself at the centre of a community where he rightly belongs. Burman’s previous films at Berlin were El abrazo Partido (in Competition in 2004) and Derecho de familia (in Panorama in 2006). MT

SCREENING DURING THE UKJFF AT ODEON SWISS COTTAGE 17 NOVEMBER 2016 | BERLINALE 2016

Dong-ju : The Portrait of a Poet (2015) | London Korean Film Festival 2016

Much of Korea’s historical cinema harks back to the Colonial era as blockbuster director Lee Joon-ik teams up here with arthouse auteur Shin Yeon-sik (The Russian Novel) for a stylish black and white indie biopic of Yun Dong-ju, an early 20th century poet (sensitively played by Kang Ha-neuf) whose voice conveyed the sentiment of an entire generation in Korea when the country was under Japanese rule.

Lee’s delicately romantic and often humorous treatment is underpinned by Shin’s potent script that successfully evokes the artistic subject matter, exploring Yun’s lyrical poems that led to his imprisonment by the Japanese authorities who tortured and emotionally abused him, along with his friend and resistance activist Mong-kyu, during the Second World War.

The tone is light but serious in a narrative that explores the young mens’ burgeoning creative talents and the difficult relationship with their traditional parents – who try to force them into more solid professional careers – as they hone their craft in preparation for university. Deeply affected by Japanese Imperialism, the education system comes under pressure as Japan’s try to submerge Korean heritage and force its own culture on the country through the educational establishments.

Young ‘matinee idol’ stars Kang Ha-neul and Park Jung-min are well cast and supported by more established performers. This is a film that will possibly have more appeal to young audiences than the more diehard arthouse connoisseurs but offers thoughtful insight into an interlude of Korea’s creative past. MT

THE LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL CONTINUES UNTIL 27 NOVEMBER 2016

United States of Love | Zjednoczone Stany Miłosci| Silver Bear | Best Script | Berlinale 2016

Director: Tomasz Wasilewski (Floating Skyscrapers)

Cast: Julia Kijowska, Magdalena Cielecka, Dorota Kolak, Marta Nieradkiewicz, Łukasz Simlat, Andrzej Chyra, Tomek Tyndyk

Drama | Poland / Sweden

After the festival success of 2013s Floating Skyscrapers, Tomasz Wasilewski returns with UNITED STATES OF LOVE; which had its world premiere at the 66th Berlinalé. Mining similar themes that include a pessimistic representation of emotional entrapment and the effects of such situations.

The film opens in Poland, 1990. The huge changes are brewing and percolating. The first euphoric year of freedom, but hovering is the idea of the unknown. An attempt to create a state of the nation micro epic, Wasilewski focuses on four women of different ages who ponder the central premise of existential action to please themselves. Agata is a young mother, trapped in an unhappy marriage, who seeks refuge in another, impossible relationship with a young priest. Renata is an older teacher fascinated with her neighbor Marzena – a lonely former local beauty queen, whose husband works in Germany. Marzena’s sister Iza is a headmistress in love with the father of one of her students.

The four stories overlap and intersect at various points but none strikes an emotionally fulfilling enterprise. The film seems a collection of much mocked eastern European art house tropes which we have seen before and been better handled by superior filmmakers. Expertly shot (by ace Romanian DoP Oleg Mutu) and with very strong performances by the four central actresses, you are very much left with the idea that the film is not the sum of its parts.

It is obvious that Wasilewski is attempting to move the big table of Polish art house greats but one comes away thinking that all he has been successful in is strip mining visual iconography and thematic questions and answers of a specific time and place. In all the qualities the film presents the female perspective is the most startling and welcome but again one feels that these female characters are laid naked (both metaphorically and literally) but ultimately for cynical and self-serving reasons.

In the role of Renata (expertly played by Dorota Kolak) we are faced with the one time in the film that Wasilewski gets to a point that passes his rigid distancing devices but typically he manages to drop the ball with an act of doubling that he probably thinks is a coup de cinema but only comes across as yet another international art trope that he hasn’t deserved to present.

UNITED STATES OF LOVE is not a lost cause and for that matter neither is the director. There is plenty here to interest; whether that be an all-encompassing melancholia or the stellar female performances. In retrospect he needs to lose the affluence of influence and head for pastures new that will enhance his obvious talents. D M Mault.

ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE VENUES | 18 November 2016

https://youtu.be/4LAQgzlb6YQ

Keep Quiet (2016) | UK Jewish Film Festival 2016

Dir.: Joseph Martin, Sam Blair | Documentary with Csanad Szegedi | UK/Hungary | 91 min.

Directors Joseph Martin and Sam Blair have created an impressive portrait of Hungarian fascist turned orthodox Jew Csanad Szegedi, whose conversion seems too good to be true for many. But much more important than the Szegedi story itself, this documentary shows again that many survivors of the Shoah have “kept quiet” not only about their suffering in the camps, but about their Jewish identity as a whole.

When Csanad Szegedi became vice-president of the far-right Hungarian Jobbik Party in 2008, he was only 26 years old. His party would gain 14% of the national vote, and Szegedi was elected as an MEP in 2009. He was also the co-founder of the “Hungarian Guard” in 2007, the paramilitary wing of Jobbik, which modelled itself on the “Iron Guard”, the Hungarian fascist organisation which supported the Horthy Regime from 1920 onwards. This was so radical in its Anti-Semitism that Eichmann said at his trial in Jerusalem: “we had it so easy in Hungary, because the locals were so helpful”. Subsequent letters from the SS to Himmler revealed the Germans complained about the “unnecessary brutality towards the Jews” of their Hungarian allies.

Szegedi was a violent Anti-Semite, proud of his country’s dealings with the Jews until 1945. But in 2012, a political ally and former skinhead, Zoltan Ambrus, discovered that Szegedi was actually Jewish: his grandmother Katalyn Molnar (née Meisels) was actually deported to Auschwitz; she survived, but hid her tattooed camp number on her wrist, from the family.

Szegedi left Jobbik, and with the help of Rabbi Boruch Oberlander, converted to Judaism: he was circumcised in 2013. His conversion was not always greeted with approval in the Jewish Community: at the Jewish Youth Congress in Berlin, a Hungarian woman, who had to flee Hungary because of the violent Anti-Semitism, accused Szegedi of “faking it”. Others came to the same conclusion: since the media-savvy Szegedi could not be the “King” of Anti-Semitism, he tried to be the King of Judaism. When the newly converted Jew flew to Montreal, to speak at a Jewish Congress, he was not allowed into the country. Rabbi Oberlander had to defend Szegedi to the Jewish community, many of them were angry about the Rabbi’s support for the Hungarian.

The most moving and important sections of the documentary are Csanad’s conversations with his grandmother, and his visit to Auschwitz with the Holocaust survivor Eva ‘Bobby’ Neumann. Katalyn Molnar tells her grandson that she kept quiet about her ordeal, “because “we had been so good at playing out the illusion [to be Christians] and I was ashamed of my tattoo, so I covered it up”. Even after Szegedi talked to his grandmother on her deathbed, he was still n denial about the Holocaust. That would change, when he visited Auschwitz with Neumann, who again talked about trying to hide her experiences:” I never allow myself to show my true feelings”. Confronted with reality of the death-camp, Szegedi caves in “It was really like in Schindler’s List”. The last word should go to Neumann, who lost all her family on the selection ramp in Auschwitz: “Our souls froze”.

The lesson of KEEP QUIET is that Csanad Szegedi’s fake identity is actually irrelevant. In the event, he has subsequently emigrated to Israel. But the long-term effects of concealing their identity for survivors of the Shoah, are much more corrosive and important issues: at a time when Holocaust deniers and the never-ending chorus of “let’s draw a line, it was over seventy years ago” gather in strength and find youthful supporters like Szegedi in Hungary, they all should all be reminded that some victims are still alive, and still paying for the crimes of the European Nazis. Hungary is not alone in its official rejection of the truth about the Holocaust. AS

THE UK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL CONTINUES UNTIL 20 NOVEMBER NATIONWIDE

Two Women (2016) | Russian Film Week 30 Nov – 4 Dec 2016

Dir: Vera Glagoleva | Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Anna Astrakhantseva, Nikita Volkov, Anna Levanova, Sylvie Testud | 100min | Drama | Russia

This lush-looking love story turns out to be a sterile and stuffy affair despite Ralph Fiennes’ ambitious attempt to learn Russian for his portrayal of a spurned suitor in Vera Glagoleva’s screen adaptation of Turgenev’s stage play A Month in The Country.

Turgenev, a close friend of Henry James, wrote the play during the final years of Tsarist Russia, when it was still considered risqué for its saucy subject matter rather than its politics. It didn’t reach the stage until 1872 due to the censors, but Glagoleva’s film version, shot in 2014, has failed to get off the ground for reasons that will gradually become apparent.

The role of Mikhail Rakitin also feels like a throwback to the 199os for Fiennes who has since evolved into a fascinating and versatile actor in A Bigger Splash, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Hail Caesar and In Bruges, but here the emotionally buttoned-down and rather winsome part has firmly clips his wings, and feels artificial.

Actress-turned-filmmaker Vera Glagoleva and her scripters Svetlana Grudovich and Olga Pogodina-Kuzima suggest we ‘imagine ourselves in the film’s characters, despite the 19th century setting’, but instead we feel alienated from them in this detached and often clichéd period drama which is a million miles away from Stephane Brizé’s highly successful recent attempt to pull this off in his recent screen adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s Une Vie – A Woman’s Life .

Glagoleva casts Russian actors who are largely unknown on the international circuit so there is nothing familiar to engage us with the material – even Sergey Banevich’s original score feels flat and un-engaging. Fiennes’s role is also a minor one in a story majoring in women at different stages of their lives, who are feeling insecure for various reasons connected to their femininity, as this is all their have to identify them. There is Natalya (Anna Astrakhantseva) who is afraid of losing her looks despite her solid marriage to a rich landowner Arkady (Aleksandr Baluev). Flirting with family friend Fiennes, she secretly lusts after her son’s tutor, the much younger Alexei (a sultry Nikita Volkov). Her adopted daughter Vera (Anna Levanova), meanwhile also has her eye on Alexei. The weather cleverly charts their emotional ups and downs, although the play’s original humour is sadly lacking replaced by a rather foreboding tone that constantly threatens to bring bad news in this colourless and melodramatic treatment. MT

RUSSIAN FILM WEEK | REGENT STREET CINEMA | 30 NOV – 4 DEC 2016

The Last Princess | London Korean Film Festival 2016

Dir: Hur Jin-ho | Biopic Drama | 127min | South Korea

Hur Jin-ho gives full rein to romantic melodrama in his sumptuous retelling of the unhappy life in exile of Princess Yi Deok-hye, who was the last member of Korea’s Joseon Royal Dynasty. Based on Kwon Bi-young’s novel of the same title, it chronicles her life from a tiny child in the Changdeok palace in Seoul, until her capture by the Japanese authorities who transported her to Japan where she lived a cloistered existence until the last years of her life in her beloved country. Interwoven into the period narrative is a strand that takes place in 1960s Seoul that offers romantic and historical resonance to the central story that deals with the princess’s tragic life.

Son Ye-jin is leads with a performance of regal dignity tinged with discrete emotional interludes in this illuminating study that exposes not only the cruelty of the Japanese but also the treachery of the Koreans who betrayed their own people by kowtowing to Japanese imperialism, many ending up in positions of power after the Japanese annexation ended in 1945.

This is a more sombre offering than Park Chan-wook’s recent drama The Handmaiden although it deals with another historical interlude in the history of the Korean occupation. Hur, Lee Han-eol, and Seo Yoo-min begin their narrative a decade into Japanese occupation with King Gojong (Baek Yun-sik) still acting as the leader of his country and doting on his youngest child Deok-hye. Her confidence in her father’s love instills an unshakeable self-belief in the little princess who is seen in floods of tears in a touching scene where he father is dies after drinking a poisoned persimmon cocktail. Later she defies the Japanese authorities by refusing to wear a kimono and asserting her authority with graceful detachment as an inspiration leader for her people, although in private she is miserable and desperate to return home. In Toyko she is reunited with Kim Jang-han (Park Hae-il), to whom she was betrothed in childhood, and who is now high up in the Imperial Japanese Army and working alongside Deok-hye’s nephew Prince Yi Woo (Go Soo) for the underground resistance movement. He hatches several plans to get her and her brother Crown Prince Yi Eun (Park Soo-young), to safety in Shanghai but the wicked Japanese Chief of Staff always manages to rumble them. This no-win stalemate for Deok-hye climaxes in a torrid night in a hut with Jang-han followed by a momentous meltdown on a white sandy beach where, once again, an escape plot is foiled by the arch-villian, arriving on the boat she thought would take her to freedom. Although the THE LAST PRINCESS is a well-crafted historical drama that feels like a Hollywood epic with its rousing orchestral score and grippingly eventful storyline. MT

THE LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL UNTIL 27 NOVEMBER 2016 NATIONWIDE

https://youtu.be/f1eBsKNRGo4

Germans & Jews | UK Jewish Film Festival 2016

Director: Janina Quint; Documentary; USA 2016, 76 min.

Janina Quint’s directorial debut is an illuminating portrait of contemporary Jews and Germans living together in a precocious co-existence, that uncovers more questions than answers.

Quint structures her documentary around interviews famous people – like the popular German singer Herbert Grönemeyer – and a room full of ordinary citizens, where equal numbers of Germans and Jews discuss their experience of living together. There are about 200 000 Jews living in Germany today, that is exactly 0,2 % of the whole population. It is therefore very likely that many Germans outside the big cities – particularly Berlin, where the overwhelming majority of Jews live – never come in contact with a Jewish person. It is hardly a surprise that most of this documentary is shot in the reunified capital, where many Jews from the old USSR- and some Israeli emigrants – have re-settled.

Before we listen to contemporary problems of coexisting, we hear from the older generations of re-migrants – such as the publisher Rafael Seligmann, who was born in 1947 in Tel Aviv – talking about how life has changed for Jews living in post-war Germany. After Goebbels declared Germany “Judenfrei” (free of Jews) in 1943, meaning that 523 000 German Jews had ‘disappeared’, the majority murdered in Concentration Camps; about 27 000 Jews lived in West Germany at the beginning of the 50s. The overwhelming emotion of Germans in those days was enormous self-pity, they would not stop about talking about how victimised they were. The Nazi past, particularly the Holocaust, was a taboo in post-war West German society; whilst the population in the GDR, celebrated victory over he Nazis, thanks to their Soviet liberators, but was wary of the Jewish survivors, in the majority communists, whose religious freedom was curtailed. The Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, followed by the Auschwitz trials in West Germany, at the beginning of the Sixties, changed attitudes in the Federal Republic. The student uprising in 1968 brought a confrontation between Nazi parents and their children, and the USA TV series ‘Holocaust’ in 1979 was watched by over ten million in West Germany, children asking their parents “if this really had happened”.

Today many Germans of the younger generation don’t want to be lectured about the Holocaust anymore; recent polls show that about 27% of reunited Germans are Anti-Semitic, the most mentioned complain is “that Jews have too much influence”. One of the reasons for this is the fact, that about 20% of the German population has a migrant background, often coming from Muslim countries, where Anti-Semitism is rife. Anti-Semitism in Germany today centres around the human rights record of the state of Israel in the occupied territories – which is hardly worse than that of many other countries in the region, and around the world. The most ironic interviews are with emigrants from Israel, who prefer a life in Germany to their homeland, “because it is safer to live in Germany than in Israel”. Because the Germany of today is part of a democratic Europe, third generations Jews and Germans may be able live together (even though an emotional chasm still exists), but for any older Jews there is still the post-war consensus of living out of suitcases, promising to “be next year in Jerusalem”.

GERMANS & JEWS tries to spin the theory of change, which makes co-existence between Germans and Jews possible. But by mentioning these statistics, it somehow contradicts itself. By leaving out the growing danger of European fascism, which manifests itself in Germany with recent elections successes of the German ADF party, an extreme right-wing organisation, Quint paints a rather hopeful and optimistic picture. But she still tackles a necessary conundrum: how far can the past between Germans and Jews be ignored, before it becomes a denial?. AS

THE UK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL | UNTIL 27 NOVEMBER 2016 | NATIONWIDE

The Innocents | Agnus Dei (2016) | LFF 2016

Dir.: Anne Fontaine; Cast: Lou de Laage, Agata Kulesza, Agata Buzek, Vincent Macaigne; France/Poland 2016, 115 min.

Director and co-writer Anne Fontaine (Emma Bovary) creates an emotionally intense, aesthetically outstanding and politically brave film. Set in rural Poland in December 1945, THE INNOCENTS draws on material by the French doctor and resistance fighter Madeleine Pauliac (1912-1946) who was a Medical Lieutenant in the French Army and a member of the ‘Blue Squadron’, an all female unit involved in repatriating displaced citizens after the WWII.

Mathilde Beaulieu (de Laage) works in a field hospital in the Polish countryside. The war wounded are still dying, but the psychological impact on the even more serious, as Mathilde will soon find out when she meets Maria (Agata Buzek) a nun from the nearby cloister, who approaches her in a desperate state of mind, asking for help. Smuggled into the cloister by Maria, Mathilda finds out that more than a dozen of the nuns are pregnant, having been raped by Russian soldiers. Mother Superior (Kulesza) is against any outside help, she wants to sweep everything under the carpet: the esteem of the cloisters in the eyes of the outside world is more important to her than the physical and mental wellbeing of her nuns. With the help of her lover, the Jewish doctor Samuel (Macaigne), Mathilde intervenes to help the women but the Mother Superior remains deeply troubled and devises a scheme of her own.

Agata Kulesza – brilliant here as the Mother Superior – was cast as the die-hard Stalinist in Pawlikowski’s Ida. Both Catholicism (together with some other religions) and Stalinism (in common with other authoritarian ideologies) represent a deeply inhuman ideology (camouflaged by a canon of salvation for the worthy), with often deeply misogynist tendencies. The Mother Superior is hell bent on being the executor of a dogma, punishing “her” women again, after their traumatic experience with the Russian soldiers. And, like the Stalinist gospel, it is all about blind, intransigent submission: “We cannot doubt her, we can only obey her” says Maria to Mathilde at first – but her later defiance will save lives. Samuel, whose parents were murdered in Bergen-Belsen, and Mathilde, from a working-class background, are the sceptics: they have seen enough horrors not to rely on any religious or political faith to cloud their judgement. Focusing on their humanitarian convictions, they don’t select victims, but help them all. Needless to say, both of them are ‘suspects from the sinful world’ for the Mother superior. Their own low-key romance helps to leaven the austerity of the Convent theme, with Macaigne injecting some caustic moments of humour to an otherwise severe scenario.

DoP Caroline Champetier again works wonders with natural light. She frames landscapes, cloisters and the hospital with a limpid and painterly lens that seems illuminated by candllelight to show the darkness of the era. The delicately rendered interior scenes glow with a gentle purity and those in the snow evoke a white shroud placed over all the mass-graves of those that have fallen. THE INNOCENTS is never melodramatic with Fontaine keeping a detached eye in spite of the emotional turmoil, but this makes for an even even more harrowing drama. Whilst getting the balance between form and context right, the real success Is her ability is to create an overwhelming emotional impact, which remains for a long time.

ON GENERAL RELEASE AT PICTUREHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 11 NOVEMBER 2016|

Francofonia (2015)

Writer | Director Alexandr Sokurov

Cast: Louis-Do de Lencquessaing, Vincent Nemeth, Benjamin Utzerath, Johanna Krthals Altes

Sukurov once again reminds us what cinema could be: an intellectual tour-de-force of documentary, essay and feature: as such, FRANCOFONIA is entertaining and absorbing fare.

FRANCOFONIA is foremost a film about German-French relationships on a mostly cultural level; the director calling the link between the two nations “sisterly” which is an unusual word to use considering the many wars they fought with each other – unless he is hinting at sibling rivalry here. The star is certainly The Louvre where the two protagonists: the French director of the museum, Jacques Jaujard (Lencquesaing), and the German officer, Count Franziskus Wolff Metternich (Utzerath), in charge of cultural affairs for the German occupiers, fought in a low-key manner between 1940 and 1942. Metternich was then recalled to Germany not having given in to the Nazi leadership whose main aim was to steal the art treasures – a task they managed successfully later. Jaujard, who worked for the French Resistance, could rely on Metternich for help, a favour which was returned after the end of WWII, when Metternich needed help for the de-Nazification trial. But in the two years, Metternich, a Nazi Party Member since 1933 was civil while trying to delay the art robbery of his superiors, like a good Nazi.

In the summer of 1940 it was clear to the M Jaujard that his Museum was in danger, haunted by the spectre of Germany as the French government surrenders and the German army arrives in force. Archive footage of the era shows Hitler casting his beady eye over the Eiffel Tower and the Champs Elysees, desperately looking for the Louvre and its treasures.Fortuitously the perspicacious M Jaujard, the museum director, has taken precautionary measures and does not flee his museum when Count Wolff-Metternich, the officer commanded by Hitler to supervise France’s art collection for the Nazis, arrives at the Louvre to find its most important works have vanished. Jaujard has had them moved to Chateaux hundreds of miles away in preparation for the German bombings – and Metternich – who made the same wise moves in Germany – thus protects the French patrimony from the thieving hands of Hitler, Goering and Goebbels. In this ‘sisterly’ way Jaujard (a suave Louis Do de Lencquesaing) and Metternich (a suitably aristocratic-looking Benjamin Utzerath) are bought together with their love and appreciation of Art.

Marianne, the typical French heroine who chants “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” and self-obsessed Napoleon – who points to himself in paintings around the walls – are the ghosts who haunt the Louvre in their traditional costumes. Napoleon claims that his sole purpose of waging war was to raid countries for their art treasures. And Sokurov takes us on a guided tour of these treasures, marking out the particular European propensity for portrait painting, enabling us to identify ourselves hundreds of years ago. Something that, he points out, the Muslims did not do. The Mona Lisa is given the most attention, with her enigmatic smile.

Often the director is seen sitting in his office, talking to a sea Captain on a ‘ship to shore’ computer link. The ship is bearing artworks and clearly many thousands have been lost at the bottom of the sea during their transportation around the globe, by trophy-taking warlords.

FRANCOFONIA is the first Sukurov film which shines a positive light on the Soviet Union. Bruno Delbonnel’s breathtaking cinematography successfully recreates the wartime effort in Paris, and the extensive archive material gives so much information and philosophcal debate that one viewing cannot do justice to this masterpiece. This is a film to savour.

ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 11 NOVEMBER 2016

Arrival (2016)

Dir: Denis Villeneuve | Cast: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forrest Whittaker | US Canada | Sci-Fi | 120min

We can always expect something fresh and exciting from Canadian filmmakers and Denis Villeneuve delivers just that with this Venice Competition entry: a Sci-fi thriller based on a positive premise: that non-verbal communication has the power to save the world.

Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner star as academics hired by the US military to attempt a parly with the aliens that arrive in a mysterious pod-shaped spacecraft that lands in the Montana farmland. This is a crisp and pristinely packaged piece of kit that brings no blood-letting or gruesome images in its wake. Instead it feels like a dreamily intelligent vision giving an uplifting image of an imagined future where our scientists and, particularly, our linguistic specialists can use their brainpower and training to bring about good and heal our troubled, wartorn planet.

And it is a woman who naturally will bring this into being. As a professor of linguistics, Amy Adams gives a deeply sensuous and emotionally intelligent performance in this adult drama whose tension and palpable terror rises out of the cherished hope that human communication could be the answer rather than malign or nefarious forces. Suffering from an intangible loss or beareavement she harnesses her innermost intuition and professional training in an attempt to reach out amicably and sensitively to the seven legged shapeshifters or heptopods that emerge from the summit of the pod. Scripted by Eric Heisserer, ARRIVAL is based on Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, and feels very much like Close Encounters in its subtle approach to the interplanetary arrivals unspooling as a peaceful and intelligently nuanced arthouse outing. Ambitious in scope and exquisitely mounted, there are minor flaws and ambiguities in the plotting that occasionally arise out of the parallel narrative of present and future. That said, the spirit of adventure and compromise is laudable in this decidedly upliting and inventive film that will make you leave you with a smile, if not the odd tear. MT

NOW ON RELEASE FROM 11 NOVEMBER 2016 | REVIEWED AT VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2016

Erotikon (1929) | Made in Prague Season

Writer-Director: Gustav Machatý

Cast: Ita Rina, Olaf Fjord, Luigi Serventi,Charlotte Susa,Theodor Pištěk, Karel Schleichert.

Czech / Erotic drama / 108min

Gustav Machatý (1901-1963) continues to be remembered today primarily for launching the international career of Hedy Lamarr by exposing her naked charms in Extase (1933). But his earlier EROTIKON is easily the more accomplished film, as was confirmed by its recent screening at the Barbican as part of the Czech Centre’s 20th Made in Prague Festival. EROTIKON was Machatý’s third feature and his last silent, and like Extase earned international notoriety for its nude scene. Stills from this scene identified as Ita Rina have often appeared in books; but it turned out not to be in the print shown at the Barbican. What we are left with is heady enough, however, with director Machatý and his cameraman Václav Vích’s restless camera juggling a rousing brew of lust-crazed close-ups, arty superimpositions and intoxicating Freudian scenes of railway engines in full steam.

Two films were made during the twenties with the title EROTIKON, the first being Mauritz Stiller’s saucy comedy of 1920. Machatý’s film at first resembles Griffith’s Way Down East, with Andrea, the sweet young daughter of a railway gatekeeper ravished by a city slicker named Georg Sydney – who wears more even makeup that she does (especially around the eyes) – and woos her with sophisticated metropolitan blandishments such as an enormous bottle of perfume marked EROTIKON. Having got Andrea pregnant, he returns to his glossy married mistress Gilda back in the big city. As happens in so many movies the baby is conveniently stillborn and when Andrea’s path again crosses that of Georg she has a wealthy new husband on her arm and a sumptuous new wardrobe on her back. Here Griffith-style rural pathos abruptly gives way to Noel Coward-like urban sophistication. The five main players now comprise the original lover, two married women and two husbands, and the fun can really start; including a suggestive chess match between romantic rivals worthy of The Thomas Crown Affair (and which also anticipates Zvonimir Berković’s Rondo [1966]).

Andrea is played by Ita Rina, formerly Miss Slovenia of 1926, the bridge of whose nose appears to join her face somewhere in the middle of her forehead, giving her a profile more dramatic than even those of Myrna Loy or Norma Shearer. (In 1931 she converted from Catholicism to Serbian Orthodoxy in order to marry, and her name became Tamara Đorđević. The same year she received an offer from Hollywood which her new husband vetoed; although she continued to act in Czech films). In Machatý’s hands she does a superlative job of maturing from innocent young waif to worldly, fur-coated society wife. The scene of her arching her back in ecstasy in a quite unprecedented screen depiction of sexual consummation (later echoed in the scene in which she gives birth) is far more energetic than the equivalent sequence in the much better-known Extase. As Andrea’s new husband Jean, Luigi Serventi is plainly a far worthier catch than the unctuous Georg Sydney, played by Olaf Fjord; and Charlotte Susa is a blast as the mistress who doesn’t take her relegation lying down (it’s also probably her – rather than Ita Rina as is always claimed – who did the nude shot). RICHARD CHATTEN

MADE IN PRAGUE SEASON CONTINUES AT THE ICA

Sembene! (2016) | Rebel with a Camera Season

Dir: Samba Gadjigo | Doc | 89min | Senegal

Samba Gadjigo captures the life of Sénégal director, writer and freedom fighter Ousmane Sembène (1923-2007) in this engagingly hagiographic documentary that offers up fascinating archive footage, photos and interviews to paint his story with heartfelt vigour, without examining a ruthless ego necessary for political success.

Sembène’s modest start in life took him as a teenager to portside Dakar where he worked as a docker and – because Black Africans were banned from filmmaking in the French colonies – eventually made his journey to France and to international recognition as a film director with his 1966 feature Black Girl, a cinema vérité portrait of a Senegalese maid working for a wealthy family in France. But most importantly Sembène was to raise the profile of the terrible process of FGM with his colourful drama Moolaadé in 2004 that was to be the glittering jewel in the crown of his 40-year career. MT

SCREENING AS PART OF THE REBEL WITH A CAMERA SEASON NATIONWIDE

EVOLUTION Mallorca International Film Festival 2016 | 3 -12 November 2016

EL DESTIERRO | THE EXILE ( 2015) Dir.: Arturo Ruiz Serrano; Cast: Joan Carlos Suau, Monika Kowalska, Eric Frances | Drama | Spain | 88 min.

Arturo Ruiz Serrano’s directorial debit is an uneasy and sometimes unsettling film set during the Spanish Civil War. It features – literally – a ménage-à-trois between two Fascist soldiers and a young Polish woman fighting for the International Brigades.

Theo (Suau) and Silverio (Frances) have the arduous and gruelling job of guarding an isolated mountain outpost in a remote, primitive stone hut. One day, Silverio, a burly macho, finds Zoska an injured Polish woman in the mountains and brings her back into the hut where it emerges that she is fighting for the Republicans. After saving her life by stopping her bleeding to death from a gunshot wound, Silverio then tries to rape her – but is prevented when Theo’s intervenes. But Zoska eventually sleeps with Silverio, but somehow falls in love with Theo, whose virginity appeals to her desire to be sexually in control. After Zoska succeeds in seducing the earnest young man (while Severio is asleep), the trio settles down to a peaceful co-existence. This tranquil state of affairs is interrupted when one of the soldiers, delivering food parcels, spots Theo and Zoska half-naked. Jealous, he verbally abuses her whereupon Theo intervenes. Silverio more or less stands by, his macho image brought into question: he would have allowed her rape but he somehow finds this violent confrontation unacceptable.

Serrano’s study of soldiers away from the battlefield provides an inventive moral counterpoint to the usual subject of wartime. Watchable enough, it is hard to find EL DESTIERRO credible: there are too many over-simplifications that stem from the male characters: Theo and Silverio clearly represent polar opposites on the moral compass, but they feel like caricatures. And Zoska’s only function is to be with the men and do the washing, in a poorly underwritten female characterisation. One suspects that Serrano wanted to show that loves conquers all, even in the time of war, but he has failed miserably: his debut is implausible, and sometimes downright sordid. DoP Nicolas Pinzon creates an evocative romantic mountain idyll, but the narrative lets him down.

EL DESTIERRO | OPENING NIGHT GALA | THE 5TH MALLORCA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | 3 – 12 NOVEMBER 2016

Rachid Djaidani’s buddy road movie feels like an attempt to wave an Olive Branch in a France very much divided by recent terrorist unrest. And Gerard Depardieu has gamely volunteered to give the project credibility as the central character Serge, a raddled and mildly cantankerous widower who honours his dead wife with a painting trip round the Gallic coast, tracing the steps of her favourite artist, the maritime painter Joseph Vernet. His voluble chauffeur on this freewheeling creative odyssey is French-born Arab musician Far’hook (Sadek), and a cheesy but nourishing friendship blossoms between the pair that ultimately has Serge rooting for the rapper in the final redemptive scene that takes place at Far’hook’s hip hip event in Marseilles.

Once on the road, Far’hook is far from the angry hoodlum he would us believe in his punchy hip-hop lyrics. More of a puppy dog than a rottweiler, he emerges a metaphor for the marginalised youth of France, documenting the seaside séjour on his mobile and striking up a flirty friendship with a girl they meet along the way (Louise Grinberg). Meanwhile, painting serves as both a tribute to his wife and therapy for the ‘loss’ of his own son ‘Bilal’ (Nicolas Marétheu) who left home to become a Muslim and found his way into music.

TOUR DE FRANCE however corny, is a cheerful tale of racial diversity. Very much about the healing and unifying power of music, it serves as a well-intentioned balm to pour over his country’s troubled times.

TOUR DE FRANCE | CLOSING NIGH GALA | THE 5TH MALLORCA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | NOVEMBER 3-12 2016

NARRATIVE FEATURE COMPETITION
Luca Tanzt Leise, Director: Philipp Eichholtz (Germany)
After years of depression Luca reinvents herself with the help of new friends.

Nirgendwo, Director: Matthias Starte (Germany)
A stranger in his own life, Danny reluctantly returns to his childhood home after his father’s sudden passing. He rediscovers his hometown as a summery paradise.

Anna’s Life, Director: Nino Basilia (Georgia)
Anna a single mom is forced to take four jobs to support herself and her autistic son, she decides to leave Georgia but it’s easier said than done. Director will be in attendance.

A Heavy Heart, Director: Thomas Stuber (Germany)
A former East German boxing champion working as a bouncer and debt collector reflects on life when he is diagnosed with ALS.

Pura Vida (After Words), Director: Juan Feldman (US)
A librarian facing a mid-life crisis travels to Costa Rica in search of enjoying life to the fullest.

Kiss Me Kill Me, Director: Casper Andreas (US)
While confronting his unfaithful boyfriend, Dusty blacks-out. When he comes to, his boyfriend has been murdered and he’s the prime suspect. Director will be in attendance.

Parasol, Director: Valéry Rosier (Belgium)
Holiday time, a Mediterranean island. The determination, no matter the cost, to make things change. Nostalgia for a past that never existed.

Bittersweet Days, Director: Marga Melià (Spain)
Julia rents a room to Luuk. Their cohabitation will make them rethink their lives: are they living the way they really want to? Director will be in attendance.

Where to Miss?, Director: Manuela Bastian (Germany)
We follow Devki’s story, as it tell us why Indian women find it difficult to free themselves from their traditional roles.

Dusky Paradise, Director: Gregory Kirchhoff, (Germany – Made in Baleares)
After the death of his parents a young man travels to Mallorca to live in their house and look after their turtle.
Director in attendance.

Autumn Fall, Director: Jan Vardøen (Norway)
Ingvld entangles herself with two men, it is a very dangerous journey.

Buddymoon, Director: Alex Simmons (US)
Jilted groom David is convinced by his best man Flula to continue with his planned honeymoon. Lead actress Lilith Stangenberg in attendance.

Hotel Problemski, Director: Manu Riche (Belgium)
For the refugees of the multinational residential centre somewhere in Europe, this black comedy reveals their daily stuggles and laughs.

DOCUMENTARY FEATURE COMPETITION

Oasis: Supersonic, Director: Mat Whitecross (UK)
An in-depth look at the life and music of Manchester-based rock band, Oasis <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?

The Karamazoffs (A walk on the SoHo years), Director: Juan Gamero (Spain)
In the 1960s, New York’s SoHo was occupied by artists from around the world, The Karamazoffs, a group of Barcelona artists relive their experience during those wild years in SoHo.

In Europe’s shadow, Director: Florian Schnell (Germany)
Human rights activist Elias Bierdel commentates throughout the film and meets refugees from different countries and activists.

De Lola à Laila, Director: Milena Bochet (Spain)
From mother to daughter the film shifts to a reflection about female emancipation, fight, movement and cinema.

The Key to Dalí, Director: David Fernández (Spain)
Tomeu L’Amo, a Majorcan scientist and artist bought an unknown painting in an antique shop 25 years later, he tries everything to get it certified as a real Dalí. Cast&Crew will be in attendance.

THE MALLORCA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 3-12 NOVEMBER 2016

Tour de France (2016) | Mallorca International Film Festival 2016

Letter Never Sent (1959) | Neotpravlennoe pismo | Bluray

A plot summary of Letter Never Sent appears simplistic. Four geologists are sent by the government into the forests of central Siberia to look for diamonds.Initially they find little evidence, express philosophical doubts and yet strive for the best. A diamond seam is discovered. On returning with the good news they are blocked by a forest fire, lose radio contact and most of their supplies. There then follows a struggle to survive in a forbidding landscape. We share the hopes and fears of a very human and idealistic group. Sabinine
(Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy) is writing a letter home to Vera (Galina Kozhakina) that turns into a diary that is never sent. Sergei (Yevgeni Urbansky) is sexually attracted to Tanya (Tatyana Samoylova) already the girlfriend of Andrei (Vasili Livanov). She discovers a note from Sergei expressing his passionate feelings for her.

There is a remarkable sequence where Tanya and Sergei are working in a trench. Tanya is examining the earth for diamonds and Sergei is digging with pick-axe. He stops and attempts to seduce Tanya. She recoils and Sergei departs. Tanya is shaken. Yet she gradually becomes overjoyed in realising that she has discovered the diamonds.

In a rare moment for Soviet ‘50s cinema things turn intensely sensual. Andrei appears and as they both run ecstatically through the woods there is a lyrical scene that is remarkable for its pantheism. However this proves only a momentary reprieve in Letter Never Sent. Soon the geologists will confront the intense hostility of Nature. Visually the film has a poetry that few wilderness adventures can match. The black and white photography is miraculous. Superimpositions, dissolves, tracking shots and natural lighting are used to masterly effect. People are pitted against the elements of earth, fire, air and water to create a cinematic osmosis. Fire and water are filmed in a way that makes these forces appear to be real constituents of the actor’s bodies.

Where words often fail to describe these images, music succeeds in the visceral nature of Sibelius’ Finnish tone poems (especially Tapiola and Oceanides). One criticism levelled at the film is that its characters are underwritten and that Sergey Urusevsky’s brilliant photography is a triumph of form over content. I disagree. Firstly the characters are convincing and rounded enough for their conflict and primal relation with the film’s principal character – its natural environment.

Mikhail Kalatozov’s direction is powerfully understated. He gets subtle performances from his actors and, aided by Uresevsky, produces unforgettable imagery and compositions that hark back to Pudovkin (Arsenal) and also forward to Tarkovsky (especially Ivan’s Childhood released in 1962). Kalatozov also creates a subdued homage to the endeavours of the Soviet state (See Sabinine’s hallucinations of the shipyards) accompanied by a subtle critique of power (the declamatory hollowness of the authoritarian radio voice they lose contact with).

Cinema has given us many adventure stories and Kalatozov’s film has echoes of Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala (1975) and documentaries such as Robert Flaherty’s Man of Arran. But there is nothing really like Letter Never Sent. A genuinely immersive experience of nature and a treasure of Russian cinema. @ALAN PRICE

LETTER NEVER SENT IS AVAILABLE COURTESY OF CRITERION US | DVD| BLURAY

The Darkest Universe (2016)

Dir.: Tom Kingsley, Will Sharp; Cast: Will Sharp, Tiani Ghosh, Joe Thomas, Sophie Di Martino, Chris Langham | Comedy Drama | UK 2016, 86 min.

In a bid to be original Tom Kingsley and Will Sharp (Black Pond) deliver a hotchptoch of clichés in an indie drama which is inaccessible and sometimes hilarious – for all the wrong reasons.

Financial trader Zac (Sharp) is looking for his sister Alice (also co-writer) who has disappeared on a boat moored at Camden Lock, along with her boyfriend Toby (Thomas). Random flashbacks tell the story of the missing couple, who have both been unable to communicate properly with friends and family. But soon Zac’s story of “finding himself” takes over: Rejected by his girl friend Eva (De Martino), he cuts off his hair, produces maddening videos, which hardly help to find the missing couple, and visits Toby’s father Alan (Langham), in a country house where Toby grew up. There Zac discovers Toby’s cartoon story by entitled ‘The darkest Universe’, written for his sick mother, when he was little. Zac sinks deeper and deeper into a depression, blaming himself for Alice’ disappearance, having promised their dead mother, that he would look after Alice. The solution to their disappearance is about as nonsensical as the film itself.

DoP Will Hanke’s dreamy images of floating clouds are wasted on this amateurish production, which pretends to be enigmatic, and the actors try in vain not to sink to the level of script and direction – for which they are, at least partly, responsible. AS

ON RELEASE AT ARTHOUSE VENUES FROM 4 NOVEMBER 2016

My Feral Heart | EAST END Film Fest 2016

MY FERAL HEART

Dir.: Jane Gull; Cast: Steven Brandon, Eileen Pollock, Sarah Swash, Will Rastall, Pixie Le Knot | UK 2016 | 83 min.

Steven Brandon makes an impressive screen debut in Jane Gull’s heartfelt care home drama MY FERAL HEART. He plays Luke, an empathetic young man with mild Down’s Syndrome who, despite his own heath concerns, becomes a positive asset to the inmates of Blossom House care home where he is transferred after the death his bedridden mother (Pollock), whom he cared for with great tenderness. Struggling to come to terms with his new environment, Luke befriends teenager Pete (Rastall), a gardener with a troubled past and a feral girl (Le Knot), who has been caught in an animal trap, nursing her back to health. Brandon carries the film with his understated performance, best shown in his scenes with Peter, which are a tribute to those suffering from borderline mental and physical impairment. Although Gull’s care home appears to be idyllic, she directs Duncan Paveling’s script with sensitivity and maximum emotional impact, Gull avoiding all sentimentality. DoP Susanne Salavati, also shooting her first feature, flips seamlessly between realism in the care home and the natural beauty of the surround countryside making MY FERAL HEART humanistic and engaging in its consideration for vulnerabilities on many different levels. AS/MT

SCREENING DURING THE EAST END FILM FESTIVAL ON 28 JUNE 2016

The Small World of Sammy Lee (1963) Prime Video

Ken Hughes was an award-winning writer and director who made his name in the 1950s and 60s after winning an amateur filmmaking competition in the late 1930s at the age of 14.

This stylish comedy caper captures the zeitgeist of early Sixties Soho seen through the eyes of Anthony Newley’s snazzy strip club compere, Sammy Lee, who ducks and dives his way through the bookies’ clutches constantly on his tail for mounting gambling debts. Behind the cheeky vibe of the club, violence lurks on every corner: punch-ups, bloody noses, and slashed faces bear witness to the shadowy underworld of The Krays. Punctuated by jazzy vignettes from dancing girls singing the likes of “Unforgettable”, Kenny Graham’s trumpet score enriches an evocative portrait of one of the 20th century’s most iconic decades.

Ken Hughes directs with panache and the legendary Viennese cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky (Get Carter) showcases London’s Soho in luscious black and white. Sammy’s perky love interest is played by a dizzy blonde in the shape of Julia Foster. Warren Mitchell is almost unrecognisable as his brother and occasional bankroller Lee Leeman and Miriam Karlin (A Clockwork Orange) plays Lee’s glamorous but vituperative Jewish wife ((“you’ve never known a woman with more shoes”).

Slick and watchable, this snappily scripted mercurial film has plenty of dark moments and thrills up its sleeve. Newley acts his socks off, fast-talking, gestures flying rather like a diminutive Leonard Rossiter, as he goes around raising cash from his close Jewish friends and trousering it feverishly as he races against the clock to meet the bookies’ demands. Dennis Nimmo gets one of the funniest lines as the poshly-spoken gay Rembrandt, momentarily breaking the tension. And then comes a most fabulous scene as a Black duo (bass and piano) play velvety Jazz. Wilfrid Brambell, Roy Kinnear and Robert Stevens also star in this simply wonderful and unmissable gem of English filmmaking. MT

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

London Korean Film Festival 2016 | 3-27 November 2016

The LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL (LKFF) celebrates its 11th year running with an extended run from 3 – 27 November at accessible state of the art venues around London.

Opening with the UK Premiere of female director Lee Kyoung-mi’s The Truth Beneath at Picturehouse Central, in keeping with this year’s edition which has a ‘Special Focus on Women’. Hong Sang-soo’s San Sebastian Best Director winner Yourself and Yours, (left) is one of the titles worth seeing. So often called the “Woody Allen of Korean cinema”, his films are full of dry wit and probing characterisations. His 18th feature is the closing gala at Regent Street Cinema on 27 November.

The Focus on Women strand will screen 11 key works. Worth looking out for will be a rare screening of Nam-ok Park’s 1955 drama The Widow (Mimangin), (image below) the first film to be directed by a Korean woman. The festival also explores Korea’s New Wave before presenting UK premieres of the latest Korean outings: Jin-ho Hur’s The Last Princess (2016) a biographical drama set during the Korean struggle for Independence under Japanese rule. Two documentary features join the programme in the shape of Wind on the Moon, a charming documentary that explores the life of a mother and her deaf mute child and Keeping the Vision Alive (2001), Yim Soon-rye’s study that explores the journey of Korea’s women filmmakers.

Young-joo Byun’s tense mystery thriller Helpless (Hoa-cha) (2012) and for those that like their cinema dark and vengeful there is Woo Min-hun’s Inside Men (2016) featuring Korean star turn Lee Byung-hun as a wronged political henchman; the European premiere of Asura: City of Madness, Kim Sung-soo’s impressively over-the-top and violent gangster thriller, where a shady gets caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. And flying the flag for the country’s animated talent is Seoul Station (2016) a prequel to the breakout zombie hit of the summer Train to Busan. MT

LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL 3-27 NOVEMBER 2016

Richard Linklater: Dream is Destiny (2016)

Directors: Louis Black, Karen Bernstein | US | Doc | 86min

Richard Linklater joins the sparkling array of Texan talent along with Patricia Highsmith, Wes Anderson, Ethan Hawk, Tobe Hooper, Howard Hughes, Forest Whitaker, Rip Torn and Joshua Oppenheimer, to name but a few.

And in a this enjoyable documentary, Louis Black and Karen Bernstein uncover the life story of the modest and appealing Houston born director, described by his father as “a self-starter who was always going to make a go of anything he did” and who went on to be among the first and most successful talents to emerge during the American independent film renaissance of the 1990s.

Linklater comes across as gentle but also driven by a laudable and impulsive desire to learn and improve his craft with every film he makes. Surviving outside the movie industry of Hollywood and New York allows him to hold on to his creative vision rather than focus on the money-making side of things and this is best evidenced in his audacious project Boyhood (2014) which is perhaps his best known film since the non-narrative comedy drama Slacker which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival 25 years ago.

Moving to the comparative backwater of Austin when his parents divorced was auspicious for Linklater as the city provided an open-minded and unrestrictive backdrop for experimenting (“it’s a long time before your technical skills catch up with your ideas”) and he set up the Austin Film Society with the aim of screening arthouse films. This led to the making of Slacker and providing local creatives for the project.

The documentary‘s talking heads are particularly insightful and, avoiding hagiography, are drawn equally from talent (Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke), industry and press (Justin Chang/Variety). New York-born Black serves as both director and interviewer. The founder of SXSW Film Festival has known Linklater since the beginning and has access to early footage of the him and they chat about his first hand written scripts in the writing sanctuary of Linklater’s eco ranch in Bastrop, where is preparing for Everybody Wants Some.

DREAM IS DESTINY is keen to stress Linklater’s collaborative approach to his filmmaking and Jack Black talks about Linklater’s earnest desire to know what his actors are experiencing and what they can bring to their roles, even though in the end the film is always the director’s. Here Linklater is at pains to point out that he would never want to lose artistic control of his work, whatever the financial situation, as in the case of Dazed and Confused where Universal wanted to take his film in another direction from that intended. The only criticism of the doc is in not really covering his lesser known films as the focus is primarily on Boyhood and the Midnight series, but given a trim running time of 86 minutes this provides scope for a more ample study of this personable and talented man in the future. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 31 OCTOBER 2016

Ethel & Ernest (2016)

Dir: Roger Marwood | Voices by Jim Broadbent | Brenda Blethyn | Animation | UK

Jim Broadbent and Brenda Blethyn are the voices behind Roger Marwood’s ETHEL & ERNEST, an animated portrait of marital togetherness in suburban England. Based on Raymond Briggs’ biographical tribute to his own parents, this is an emotionally resonant drama that glows in its water-coloured tenderness echoing the likes of John Betjeman and Alan Bennett in capturing the quintessential middle class tolerance and quiet humour of the era.

Against the dramatic background of the 20th century, Ethel and Ernest’s modest story unfolds as a delicate domestic tapestry. They first meet in 1928 and go to enjoy 40 years of marriage that sees them through the privations of the Second World War, the start of the Welfare State and other national events, and the birth of their son who went on the create the evocative children’s animation Snowman.

For the most part enjoyable, some of the dialogue verges on twee in phrases such as “Mr Hitler”, and “this nice Mr Atlee” which feel like an attempt to trivialise Ethel – as if women were so ignorant back then. While some of the scenes begin to feel rather predictable, this is a touching arthouse treasure that will appeal to patriotic mainstream audiences and cineastes alike. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 28 OCTOBER 2016

Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977) | Bluray release

Dir.: Robert Aldrich; Cast: Burt Lancaster, Charles Durning, Melvyn Douglas, Joseph Cotton, Richard Widmark; USA/West Germany 1977, 146 min.

TWILIGHT’S LAST GLEAMING sees director Robert Aldrich (Kiss me Deadly, The Dirty Dozen) at his most uncompromising: this post Vietnam epic, based on “Viper 3” by Walter Wager, treats a government cover-up with utter cynicism, leaving nothing to the imagination. Considering all the recent revelations – not only about the US government – this is a very contemporary topic.

General Lawrence Dell (Lancaster) has escaped with three other convicts from an US military prison, and has gained control of a missile base in Montana, where he now commands nine nuclear warheads, targeting the USSR. He wants ten million USD from the government and safe conduct to a country of his choice. But most of all he requires a TV disclosure by President Stevens (Durning), reading out a secret protocol by the last administration, which admits to the Vietnam War being just a PR stunt, to show the Russians that the USA would go to war – even though the Vietnam War, costing the lives of a million Vietnamese and 50 000 US soldiers – was unwinnable from the beginning.

Secretary of State Renfrew (Cotton) and Defence Secretary Zachariah Guthrie (Douglas) as well as the rest of the cabinet, do not want the secret text to be made public – they would rather sacrifice Stevens, who allows himself to be held hostage by Dell; with the latter’s arch-enemy, General MacKenzie (Widmark) in charge of the sharp shooters, covering Dell, Stevens and one of the surviving escapees on their way out of the silo to Air Force One, where the cabinet is waiting.

Using split screens to enhance the action, Aldrich achieves a thrilling finale, in which the protagonists are clearly divided: Dell and Stevens the innocent idealist, the cabinet standing by, hiding their betrayal behind unmoving masks. Particularly Douglas’ pipe smoking Defence Secretary is very menacing; Douglas being a dead ringer for former CIA boss Allen Dulles, who is rumoured to have played a very active part in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Aldrich achieves a good balance between action and cabinet discussions, even though the epic length is somewhat mystifying. Performance-wise, Douglas and Lancaster are outstanding, only topped by the brilliant paranoid General played by Widmark. DoP Robert Hauser (Panic in Echo Park) convinces equally with his images of the confined White House scenes and the daring plots and counter plots around the missile silo. Aldrich leaves no doubt about any ones intentions, Twilight’s Last Gleaming (quoting a line from the National Anthem of the USA) is a brilliant suspense thriller about the amorality of power. AS

Eureka’s Masters of Cinema Dual Format release of TWILIGHT’S LAST GLEAMING to be released on 31 October 2016.

After Love | l’Economie du Couple (2016)

Dir: Joachim Lafosse

Cast: Berenice Bejo, Cedric Kahn, Marthe Keller, Jade Soentjens, Margaux Soentjens

100min | Belgium | Drama

Berenice Bejo stars in another tale of marital discord this time partnering with Cedric Kahn in Joachim Lafosse’s slick but uneven exploration of emotional unravelling.

In The Past (2014), she played the sequestered wife of an Iranian business man, while Childhood of a Leader (2016) saw her trapped in the home of Liam Cunningham’s fascist politician. Belgian auteur Lafosse is himself no stranger to the theme of claustrophobia which engulfs the characters in Private Property (2006), Private Lessons (2008) and Our Children (2012).

As the camera follows the couple through their elegant one floor living quarters AFTER LOVE touches on a few raw nerves but mostly highlights the sheer desperation of wanting to move on from a situation that has run its term. Only the very wealthy can just ‘up sticks and run’, and Lafosse and his co-writers home in on this stifling aftermath when the ties that bind uncomfortably start to strangle the past and, crucially, suffocate the future, as one party refuses to let go.

The set-up is all too familiar: Marie (Bejo) is happily living in the flat with her twin girls (Jade and Margaux Soentjens), but wants rid of their father, Boris (Kahn), who is firmly staying put until he gets his share of the equity for a sale that simply isn’t happening. An architect and designer, he’s added value to the place. And now he is unemployed. Frustration, humiliation and barely concealing anger follows in spades as he becomes the elephant in the room in several scenes, particularly during a dinner party.

The relationship breakdown has also broken Marie and Boris, whose characters are slowly imploding with the sheer stress of it all. And this is not helped by Marie’s mother (Martha Keller) who contributes to her psychological pain, that tracks back to the past in uncomfortable ways. Most effective in its early scenes, AFTER LOVE shows how the flat becomes a toxic prison in a storyline riddled with slow-burning tension, that gradually dissipates in the final scenes that resorts to legalese. A must see if you’ve experienced marital breakdown. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM FRIDAY 28 OCTOBER 2016 | CANNES REVIEW

Una Giornata Particolare (1977) | A Special Day

Dir.: Ettore Scola; Cast: Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni, John Vernon; Italy/France 1977, 110 min.

Ettore Scola (1931-2016) usually showed the tragic side of life in Italy in a rather romanticised way, in common with his close friend Federico Fellini. A Special Day is one of his most realist films and, for once, he does not soften his tone.

A SPECIAL DAY is set in Rome 1938 where Italy had joined the Second World War as an ally of Germany and the people are preparing to watch Hitler meeting Mussolini. Antonietta (Loren) stays at home because she is not a friend of the Duce, unlike her husband (Vernon) and the rest of her family, who are out to celebrate the great day. Antonietta’s neighbour Gabriele (Mastroianni), a homosexual, is an opponent of the fascist regime, and about to be shipped off to Sardinia. The two get to talk to each other, and Antonietta, unaware of Gabriel’s sexual orientation, starts flirting with him. Even though they are both feeling rather low and depressed, they end up in bed.

In the background we hear Hitler’s address to the crowd (which actually is his Nuremberg speech of 1934). And there can be no happy end: in the evening, Gabriele is deported, and Antonietta’s husband returns, with the intention of making good his promise to the Duce, to produce children for the country now under Fascism.

A Special Day is a low-key affair, and the maudlin atmosphere is caught by the bleached out images of legendary cinematographer Pasqualini de Santis (Death in Venice, L’Argent). Scola directs with great sensitivity: A Special Day is not so much political cinema, but a parable of the coming together of two outsiders, who meet just for a few moments of happiness, before both will embark on a bleak future. A chamber piece full of heart-breaking detail, in its approach strangely close to Käutner’s Romanze in Moll, which was ironically produced in Nazi Germany shortly before the end of the war, and was furiously attacked by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. AS

ON BLURAY COURTESY CULT FILMS | 31 OCTOBER 2016

Take Me Home (2016) | Tribute to Abbas Kiarostami

Director, Scriptwriter, Photographer: Abbas Kiarostami | Editor: Adel Yaraghi | Visual Effects Supervisor: Ali Kamali
Music: Peter Soleimanipour

16min | Iran | Black & White

Abbas Kiarostami was born in Tehran to a professional artist father who influenced his decision to study design. After winning a painting competition, he went to study graphic design, working as a commercial artist, graphic designer, illustrator and eventually shooting adverts the 1960s.

This artistic training informs his filmmaking and is noticeable here in a 16 minute short entitled TAKE ME HOME. The film is really all about symmetry and gracefully illustrates Kiarostami’s natural ability and visual flair in understanding shape, form and architectural perspective.

TAKE ME HOME is engaging as a film and satisfying as a multimedia piece of art. In Southern Italy, a little boy drops his football at the top of a narrow stone stairway outside his home, As the ball bounces downwards, our eyes are drawn along with it, in an endless rhythm from side to side, as it travels to the bottom. Each perfectly framed tableau could stand as an individual piece of artwork. Put simply, the film shows the balance of lines and perspective, the chiaroscuro shadows that move and constantly change from dark to light in the black and white minimalism of shades of graphite grey and chalky white as the football cascades inexorably connecting each frame to the next in a mesmerising sprial study that draws us in, until a little boy retrieves it and goes back home. Adel Yaraghi’s perfect editing and Peter Soleimanipour’s upbeat original score give this a hopeful and positive feel. From a more complex perspective TAKE ME HOME is a metaphor for life’s diurnal rhythms soothing us reassuringly in the knowledge that whatever happens, and despite the endless chaos of the day, all will be well in the end. MT

SCREENED AT VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2016 | TAKE ME HOME IS ON A FESTIVAL WORLD TOUR AS A TRIBUTE TO ABBAS KIAROSTAMI (1940 – 2016)

Pool of London (1951) | BLACK STAR SEASON | BFI

Dir: Basil Dearden | Writers: Jack Whittingham, John Eldridge

Cast: Bonar Colleano, Susan Shaw, Renee Asherson, Earl Cameron, Moira Lister, James Robertson Justice, Leslie Philips

82min | UK | Crime Thriller

Showcasing London’s docklands in the 1950s, Basil Dearden’s gritty film noir was one of Ealing’s darker titles intrepidly dipping its toe into the avangarde theme of interracial romance in a diamond smuggling story performed by a sterling British cast.

On a sunny Friday afternoon, merchant Navy sailors Dan MacDonald (Bonar Colleano/Dance Hall) and Johnny Lambert (Earl Cameron) arrive on board the freighter Dunbar which docks near Tower Bridge on the Thames. As Customs board the ship, the sailors eagerly squirrel away nylons for their girls, and bottles of whisky, amongst other more valuable goods. MacDonald is a glib chain-smoking American. Lambert hails from Jamaica on his last tour of duty. The polite and open-faced Jamaican has no idea why he is met with contempt by an usher at the theatre were he ends up after meeting Pat (a luminous Susan Shaw who also starred in the Ealing production It Always Rains on Sunday). But this is just the first of many things that will go wrong when he is drawn in a heist with MacDonald.

Pool of London features sparkling black and white footage of the working docks, up and running again after the end of the Second World War and with St Pauls and the City in the distance; a milkman delivering milk in a barrow (a bottle of which becomes the Maguffin in the heist), and the jazz dancing clubs that became a popular way for men coming out of the forces to meet young women. Jamaican immigrants had started to arrive in the capital with the promise of a new life.

Whittingham and Eldridge’s tight scripting is underpinned by amusing turns from Robertson Justice and Philips. New Yorker Colleano adds a briskness to the English cast (he was killed a car accident a few years later, but not before marrying Shaw, who never got over his death, dying prematurely of liver failure in 1978). But the tone changes from cheerful optimism to dark and seedy despair as the narrative sails on.

Filmed in 35mm, Gordon Dines’ brilliant camerawork captures the familiar with a sinister noirish feel; here is an amazing stunt where Max Adrian’s crim Charlie Vernon jumps from one building to the next. In fact, Pool of London‘s tense storyline is nearly eclipsed by the stunning backdrop of these 1950s images, with London’s iconic landscapes and buildings adding texture and verve. MT

OUT ON 24 OCTOBER IN A 2K BLURAY RESOTRATION COURTESY OF STUDIOCANAL AND ALSO IN CELEBRATION OF THE BFI’S BLACK STAR SEASON | Q&A WITH EARL CAMERON CBE ON 23 OCTOBER 2016

https://youtu.be/Gewc3Maw0Z0

Aloys (2016) | Bluray release

Writer|Director: Tobias Nölle

Cast: Georg Friedrich, Tilde von Overbeck, Kamil Krejci, Yufei Li

91min | Drama | Switzerland

Tobias Nölle’s second feature is a coldly rendered exploration of loneliness and isolation made all the more so by its impressive visual style.

ALOYS follows the unusual day to day activities of the eponymous central character, a soi-disant private investigator in an unnamed Swiss town. As the film opens, this hard-edged loner is mourning the death of his father, indicated by graphic images of his coffin and wake. Clearly distraught, Aloys has no interest in sharing his grief, preferring to retreat to his spartanly decorated flat to reflect and seemingly gloat on the footage recorded on his video cameo during the day’s investigations. This suggests he may even be a voyeur, such is his hostility towards the outside world and his clandestine satisfaction derived from these private scenes behind closed doors. Perusing footage of his father fills Aloys with genuine nostalgia suggestive of a close relationship based on filial adoration and respect. Noelle eschews dialogue for the most part, telling his tale visually, building a portrait of a deeply disturbed individual painfully aloof to the world; locked in the past; defensive and controlling of the present; fearful of the future; cloyingly locked in an oppressively dank rural location, oppressed by a ’70s-style palette of insipid aqua and beige.

Clicking backwards and forwards like his dated camcorder, things become increasingly dreamlike and fetishist as yellow tights are added to the motifs of dampness, condensation and foggy morning mists, almost as if Aloys is under the spell of a sickening succubus, he falls mysteriously asleep in a single decker bus where his camera equipment is stolen, including his footage. Phone calls from an anonymous female confound and anger him. He informs ‘the authorities’. They have to deal with it. Whether the thief responsible is the woman he filmed through a keyhole – or a fantasy figure – is unclear. Engulfed by fear and irritation, he retreats again. The stranger on the end of the line then introduces Aloys to the ‘telephone walk’, a method used by analysts in the therapy of reclusive types, whereby they are counselled by telephone in a less visually confrontational exercise in rehabilitation. This episode marks a shift in the tonal vibe from melancholy drama to upbeat fantasy, exploring the human need to reach out and connect intimately with like-minded souls. Sometimes difficult to engage with, ALOYS is a challenging film but visually very rewarding in its inventiveness and certainly one to watch out for in the upcoming season of arthouse releases. MT

REVIEWED AT BERLINALE 11-21 FEBRUARY 2016 | NOW ON BLURAY COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA

La Ciociara (1960) | Two Women | Bluray release

Dir.: Vittorio de Sica

Cast: Sophia Loren, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Eleonora Brown

Italy/France 1960, 100 min.

After the box-office failure of Umberto D. – perhaps his greatest achievement – Vittorio De Sica turned for the rest of his career to more light hearted fare, but LA CIOCIARA, based on the 1957 novel of the same title by Albert Morovia, was one of the exceptions: it was surprisingly bleak and utterly violent.

Set during the last months of WWII in Italy, Cesira (Loren) runs a little grocery shop in Rome, With the Allies approaching, she decides to take her teenage daughter Rosetta (Brown) to her hometown of Ciociara, to the south of Rome. There they meet Michele de Libero, a communist sympathiser, who seems to be flirting with both women, but making a greater impression on the young Rosetta. After the Allied troops liberate the region, Cesira decides to return home with her daughter, following the victorious troops. But they are both gang raped in a disused church by Marroccan soldiers, fighting for France. Back in Rome, Rosetta is still in a catatonic state, only the news of Michele’s death sets her – partly – free: behind her uncontrollable tears, we see the young Rosetta re-appearing. (De Sica, who was co-writer of the adaption, chose a rather hopeful ending, in the novel Rosetta embarks on a life as prostitute).

Winning Best Actress at Cannes, Sophia Loren is brilliant as the woman losing her faith in humanity: she starts off as pragmatic, always in control, but the evil she finds there, robs her of any hope. The black-and-white images of Hungarian born Gabor Pogany (Antonio Gramsci: The Days of Prison) are particularly sensitive, relaying the terror of the women without using graphic violence, but concentrating on the aftermath. De Sica directs without succumbing to melodrama, returning to the pure neo-realism of his first films. AS

NOW OUT ON BLURAY ON 24 OCTOBER 2016| IN BOTH THE ITALIAN VERSION WITH IMPROVED (SWITCHABLE) ENGLISH SUBTITLES AND ENGLISH SPOKEN AUDIO TRACK | NO OTHER WORLDWIDE RELEASE HAS THESE TWO OPTIONS |

Picasso | On film and Canvas

In life and in death Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881-1973) was an iconic figure who continues to influence and mesmerise with his potent magnetism, prodigious talent and stylistic versatility as an artist, sculptor, stage designer and playwright. Born in Malaga, Picasso spent most of his adult life in France where he co-founded the innovative Cubist movement at the opening of the 20th century. Surrealism came in the 1920s, and he portrayed the atrocities of the Spanish Civil war in his painting Guernica (1937). And as he changed his style, each phase of his creative output was partnered by a new romantic relationship.

Picasso has also captured the imagination of filmmakers in both drama and documentary features, and his close friendship with Jean Cocteau led to the pair collaborating on a one-set ballet ‘Parade’ for the Ballets Russes, for which he designed the sets and costumes.

In 1956 Henri-Georges Clousot documented Picasso’s creative process at work in the dialogue-free Le Mystère Picasso. Claude Renoir position the camera behind the canvas so that the artist is simply seen painting and drawing for 75 minutes, without his hands and arms blocking the view (right).

SURVIVING PICASSO, from left: Natascha McElhone, Anthony Hopkins as Pablo Picasso, 1996, © Warner Brothers

Picasso gets the James Ivory treatment in the romantic biopic Surviving Picasso (1996) where Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s engaging narrative framework explores his often ferocious cruelty during his two passionate marriages and love affairs with Olga Kokhlowa (Jane Lapotaire), Françoise Gilot (Natascha McElhone); Dora Maar (Julianne Moore) and Marie Therese (Susannah Harker).

Now Malaga born Antonio Banderas is set to play the artist in 33 DIAS which explores Picasso’s emotional turmoil as he worked on the Guernica mural during his relationship with Dora Maar (Gwyneth Paltrow. BAFTA awarded Carlos Saura (Cria Cuervos) will write and direct the drama which should be out later in 2017.

Meanwhile a new exhibition of Picasso’s portraits is currently showing at the National Portrait Gallery until January 2017.

PICASSO PORTRAITS

I, Daniel Blake (2016) | Cannes Film Festival | Palme d’Or Winner | 2016

Director: Ken Loach. Writer: Brian Laverty DoP: Robbie Ryan

Cast: Dave Johns, Hayley Squires, Briana Shann, Dylan Philip Mckiernan

100mins | Drama | UK

It seems appropriate that a British auteur with his own particular brand of social realism should still return at 80, to a Film Festival that, at 69, still prides itself with being about the art of film rather than just the money. THE CANNES COMPETITION line-up is still gloriously auteur-driven; but you may never get to see these arthouse films at your local cinema- apart from the Palme d’Or winner, naturellement. That’s why Woody Allen, a treasured regular at Cannes still brings Red Carpet glitz and the big crowds. His festival opener Cafe Society (out of Competition) is a romantic comedy and social satire of America in the 1930s, will definitely be coming to a cinema near you.

But back to Ken Loach and this latest film that arrives a decade after he won the Palme d’Or for The Wind That Shakes the Barley and two years after he brought Jimmy’s Hall to Cannes. This is a story about an decent man, another auteur, but this time one who crafts wood, and suddenly finds himself in his fifties having to fall back on the Welfare State due to a heart attack, after years of self-employment as a joiner. His life of using his hands comes to an abrupt halt – “I can build you a house, but I can’t use a computer” – and he feels demoralised and smoulders with quiet desperation at having to deal with the social services and a grim breed of people called ‘medical professionals’ and’ decision-makers’ instead of his regular normal customers in his Newcastle home.

Loach works with his regular co-writer Paul Laverty in this bleak but trenchant indictment of the British Welfare System where Daniel Blake, a Geordie, is played by stand-up comedian Dave Johns. The only score is that stalwart of ‘on-hold phone lines – The Four Seasons – but the dialogue is humorous and fraught with Geordie expressions.

Blake is a self-reliant bloke but soon he is smouldering with resentment at the humiliating situation of having to sign on for benefits having been warned by his doctor about retuning to work. Loach often offers a didactic approach which is occasionally moving and sparked with fierce humour, although the support characters often feel typecast into the nasty government types versus the compassionate underdogs. When Daniel sees a young mother (Hayley Squires) of two being denied basic support for missing her appointment slot, an unlikely friendship develops and he offers to help with the kids and odds jobs around her council flat. Although the mother’s story occasionally veers into the realms of mawkish melodrama, Daniel emerges as the hero, a truly likeable bloke mourning the death of his wife as he deals with the Kafkaesque absurdity of form-filling red tape that most of us will thoroughly identify with. Although the finale feels rather uncharacteristic in the light of Daniel’s previous sensible attitude it will certainly appeal to those who have reached the end of their tether with bureaucracy or share Loach’s signature political affiliations. It will no doubt be Jeremy Corbyn’s film of the year.

So six months down the line, after a revisit, I’m still with Robbie Collin on his Daily Telegraph review: “the award (Palme d’Or) sat awkwardly with a few critics, including myself, who felt the film’s determination to more or less frogmarch its audience around to its way of thinking felt less like the stuff of great cinema than the party political broadcast – although doubtlessly Loach and his long-time collaborator, the screenwriter Paul Laverty, would respond that right now, explicitly partisan left-wing politics is exactly what cinema needs.” MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 11-22 MAY 2016 | Winner Palme d’Or

In celebration of Ken Loach’s 80th Birthday in June 2016, Dogwoof and the BFI support a film by British documentarian Louise Osmund: VERSUS: The Life and Films of Ken Loach |

The Widow (1955) | Mimangin | London Korean Film Festival 2016

Dir: Nam-ok Park | Writer: Bo-ra Lee |Cast: Min-ja Lee, Seong-ju Lee, Tak-kyun Lee, Ai-shim Na, Dong-hu Shin, Yeong-suk Park

90min | Drama | Korea

Nam-ok Park was a Korean athlete who turned her talents to film journalism and eventually to filmmaking. Her feature debut and only film is a tenderly told domestic drama that doesn’t idolise maternal love in its exploration of the realities of postwar life from a female perspective in 1950s Korea. Unfortunately, the final scenes of the film have been lost and so actual outcome remains an eternal enigma.

Young war widow and refugee Shin (Lee Min-ja) has been left to fend for herself and her young daughter Ju (Lee Seong-ju). The financial help she gets from a dutiful married friend of her husband, Lee Seong-jin (Shin Dong-hun), is misinterpreted by his jealous and controlling wife (Park Yeong-suk), who suspects the two of having an affair, intuitively sensing his strong feelings for Shin.

Sensitively-crafted and photographed in the leafy suburbs of Seoul, the film provides insight into the social politics of the day, showing how women were forced to rely on manipulative behaviour due to their lowly status in comparison to men. Rich women, such a Mrs Lee, were able to take lovers to entertain them while their husbands were busily running empires., and Mrs Lee pays a young man called Taek (Lee Taek-kyun), to take her out and about and one day while the two are frolicking on the beach, Taek saves little Ju from drowning in the sea.

Shin meanwhile, is more impressed by Taek’s masculinity than Mr Lee’s romantic gestures and cleverly uses his money to set a business, tempting Taek to move with her and be a business partner, while paying a neighbour to looks after Ju. But the plan falls through when Taek’s former girlfriend suddenly turns up, not having died in the war after all, and Taek is also forced to make a choice between his past love and his future prosperity. There’s nothing new about the message here: that honest women and men will always follow their heart, while weaker souls have to resort to scheming and subterfuge. MT

THE LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL CONTINUES NATIONWIDE UNTIL 27 NOVEMBER 2016

Day for Night (1972-3) | La Nuit Americaine

Dir.: Francois Truffaut; Cast: Jacqueline Bisset, Valentina Cortese, Jean-Pierre Aumont) Alexandra Stewart, Jean-Pierre Laud, Francois Truffaut, Natalie Baye; France 1972/3, 116 min.

With DAY FOR NIGHT, his fourteenth feature film, Truffaut wanted to make a break from his earlier work: “I am a French filmmaker, and I have to make another thirty films”. Unfortunately, he would only direct another eight, due to his untimely death at the age of fifty-two in 1984.

DAY FOR NIGHT refers to a technical term in film making, where night scenes are shot at daytime, with dark lenses creating the illusion of darkness. The director Ferrand (played by Truffaut), shoots the film within a film in Nice. There (fictional) shoot proves to be problematic: the director clashes with the producer, the star Alphonse (Léaud) falls in love with the fragile leading lady Julie Baker (Bisset), who calls her husband/analyst to sort things out. Another leading man called Alexandre, (Aumont) dies. Fiction and reality continuously overlap: Harassed by Alphonse, Julie exclaims: “I want to live alone”, only to find the same sentence written by the director in her script for next day’s shooting. Wearing a hearing aid in reference to Luis Buñuel, Ferrand/Truffaut shows himself above crew and cast: he tries to be disinterested, being only in love with cinema itself, and wanting to be loved back by the audience as the only reward. DAY FOR NIGHT is a love letter to filmmaking, traditional and uncontroversial.

The film was used by Jean-Luc Godard and Truffaut to bring their personal relationship to a bitter end: Truffaut even calling his ex-collaborator a “shit”. After all, they had directed Une Histoire D’Eau (1958) together, and Truffaut gave Godard the script to direct “A Bout de Souffle”. Godard started the argument, calling Truffaut a liar, since Ferrand/Truffaut in DAY FOR NIGHT rises above all emotional complications. The real Truffaut liked to sleep with his leading ladies – in common with Godard. As usual, financing was an issue: but this was more about where the two directors were standing in filmmaking terms: Truffaut was going backwards, making exactly the same movies “of qualities and psychology” which he had panned as a film critic; whilst Godard was well on his way to ‘re-inventing’ cinema. When Ferrand/Truffaut comments after the death of Alexandre in DAY FOR NIGHT: “With him we lose a whole epoch of filmmaking. From now on, the studios will be dying, films will only be shot on the streets, without proper scripts”, he echoes Melville’s critic of Godard, whom he once defended against the older filmmaker. In an interview with Suzanne Schiffman, Truffaut’s collaborator for decades, she told me, that “if Truffaut would have lived, he would have only shot in studios, the only place he felt secure”. Interviewed by the German Film journalist Michel Ladiges in February 1974, Ladiges asks Truffaut about his relationship with Truffaut. There seem to be not so much hard feeling, just puzzlement: “I don’t know [about the directions taken by the directors of the Nouvelle Vague], but with Godard, you have to be very careful. He has finished a certain period in his work. Today, he is very much in favour of video, because he believes, this is the future of filmmaking. But he can change his opinion any time, and will return to filmmaking. One can be never sure with him”.

Which proved to be true: Godard would return to directing films in 1975 with Numéro Deux – but comparing this radical portrait of a family with Truffaut’s L’Histoire d’Adèle H., shot in the same year, one has the answer for the spat: it was not so much about jealousy and money, but a parting of the ways: Godard created his own universe, whilst Truffaut, a true romantic at heart, went on trying to please a mass audience. AS

OUT ON BLURAY COURTESY OF CRITERION UK COLLECTION ON 24 OCTOBER 2016

The Woman Who Left (2016) | Golden Lion Winner | Venice 2016

THE WOMAN WHO LEFT (ANG BABAENG HUMAYO)

Dir.: Lav Diaz; Cast: Charo Santos-Concio, John Lloyd Cruz, Micheal de Mesa, Sharmaine Buencamino, Nonnie Buencamino, Marjorie Lorico, Jean Judith Javier; Philippines 2016, 226 min.

After winning the Berlinale Silver Bear in February for his eight hour epic A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery, Philippine maximalist Lav Diaz – as usual – directed, photographed, wrote and edited The Woman who Left, a revenge drama (running a mere 226 minutes), for which he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival this September. Venice was where he rose to international fame, winning in the Horizon section for his seven and half hour long Melancholia (2008), a psychological drama about Philippine resistance fighters coming to terms with their defeat. The past and present of this war torn and utterly poor country, being the subject of nearly all Diaz’ films.

Horacia (Santos-Concio), a teacher, has been in prison for a murder she did not commit. We meet her first in jail, working the fields, and afterwards teaching some of her inmates reading and writing. After thirty years, she has given up any hope of a release, but out of the blue, her best friend Petra (S. Buencamino) confesses she was the culprit, having been paid by Rodrigo Trinidad (de Mesa) to frame Horacia. It seems Rodrigo wanted to punish his former lover for marrying another man. On the same day Horacia leaves prison, Petra commits suicide. After meeting her daughter Minerva, now thirty-seven, Horacia learns, that her husband has died and her son is missing. She starts leading a double life: during the day she organises the poor neighbourhood, setting up a restaurant, and teaching the children and young adults. At night, she turns into an angel of revenge, plotting to kill Rodrigo, a gangster who is living in a heavily guarded community. In the dark streets she meets the snack vendor Magbabalot (N. Buencamino) and another homeless man, Mameng (Jean Judith Javier), and finds out that Rodrigo goes every morning at five to the cathedral to pray. We watch Rodrigo, trying to confess to the priest, but he is just too proud and wicked to really repent. Horacia also takes care of the transvestite Hollandia (John Lloyd Cuz), a prostitute, who is beaten up. For the first time, Horacia opens up, telling Hollandia she was on the way to kill Rodrigo, when she found him injured in the gutter. She is unaware of the consequences this confession has, and we see her last in the fog and mist of Manila, distributing leaflets, looking for her son.

The Woman Who Left is shot in the typical Diaz way: low key black and white, with high contrast lighting. It often feels like one is watching a silent film such as Metropolis, early Eisenstein works or the first part of Mark Donskoy’s Gorky trilogy My Childhood. When Horacia walks the nightly streets, she reminds us of Murnau’s phantom. The glacial pacing contributes to a nightmarish atmosphere, the blackest of noir. Horacia uses different names for herself, indicating that her personality is splitting. We see the shadow world she moves in, out of her POV: the focus is blurring, particularly at a scene at the beach, when handheld camera images get more and more out of focus. In common with many Diaz films, the past takes over the present, destroying the main protagonist’s identity.

Making her first screen appearance for over eight years after resigning as CEO of ABS-CBS Broadcasting Corporation, Charo Santos-Concio is brilliant in the title role. Dignified, but increasingly losing her faculties, she sings to herself more and more, and joins Hollandia for a chorus of “Somewhere” from Westside Story, one of the most touching scenes of this epic journey into darkness.

Whilst the editor in Diaz is still not disciplined enough to cut the favourite images of the DoP Diaz, The Woman who Left is still very restrained, compared for example with A Lullaby. For anyone who has never seen a Diaz film, it is difficult to explain the magnetism his work has: one is literally drawn into his world, lives through the film, the absurd length strangely helping this process of going into a parallel universe. He creates another world, and after leaving the cinema, anything seems simply second best. Diaz’ magic cannot be expressed with words, but when you watch The Woman who Left, you will understand. AS

THE WOMAN WHO LEFT | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2016 | WINNER OF THE GOLDEN LION FOR BEST FILM

Au nom de ma fille (2016)

Vincent Garenq’s suberb French legal procedural drama follows a father’s lengthy fight for justice grappling with international border complexities and the breakdown of his marriage.

Ably scripted by Julien Repeneau, it stars a dynamite Daniel Auteuil as a loving family man and tender husband whose wife falls for the doctor in charge of their recuperation from a road accident while they are living in Morocco. Relocating the family swiftly back to France, he tries to save his marriage but clearly his wife is smitten by Sebastian Koch’s suave German doctor Dieter Krombach, and she leaves to live in Germany, where Kalinka’s suspicious death occurs 8 years later during a holiday there.

Based on the true Kalinka Bamberski case, Au nom de ma fille spans Andre Bamberksi’s 30-year court battle to convict Dr Krombach of her murder and provides us with a stunning array of European of locations from seaside Archachon in South West France to Munich in Bavaria. Vincent Garenq masterfully manages the various timeframes in an intelligent narrative that takes into consideration the audience’s interest in knowing when and where the crucial events occur, as a peripatetic story unfolds from 1974 until 2011. The hard-hitting film takes on noirish proportions as it seamlessly transits from family drama to legal procedural and through to a sinister crime thriller, Garenq’ straddling tonal changes with the dexterity of a high-wire trapeze artist. Meanwhile Auteil is absolutely first class as Bamberski, nipping at Krombach’s tail with the perseverance and doggedness of a terrier, never giving in ’til his bitter struggle is through.The story alone makes for a gripping thriller and thanks to tight scripting the hatred between Andre and Krombach feels hard-edged and plausible. Naturally Auteuil has to age considerably but this all looks totally natural and even the cars are authentic, the Peugeots here are the very same models I travelled through France in during the 70s.

Auteuil and Koch bring a touch of sophisticated allure to the proceedings and this is carried through in soigné interiors and Nicolas Errèra’s sexy score. Auteuil’s sensitivity captures moments of tearful emotion and boiling anger and we feel his pain and desperation in the pivotal plotlines of a fast-paced narrative that weighs heavily on his fight for justice. Koch is also impressive as a man whose subtle charisma slowly turns malign. Solid entertainment. MT

NOW OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE AT THE CINE LUMIERE

The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976) | Bluray release

Dir.: Nicholas Roeg; Cast: David Bowie, Candy Clark, Rip Torn, Buck Henry

UK 1976, 139 min.

Director Nicholas Roeg (Don’t Look Now) films Paul Meyersberg’s script of Walter Tevis’ novel of the same name in eleven weeks in the summer of 1975, shooting in the desert of New Mexico, mainly around Fenton Lake.

Claiming that he never read the script, David Bowie makes his screen debut as an inter-galactic visitor in this cult classic: a heady mixture of avant-garde/ SF/drama/metaphysical satire and social critique. The enigmatic, heavily fragmented narrative, with its genre hopping and strategic cross-cutting is secondary: The Man Who Fell to Earth is a bedazzling trip into a dissociative world. The film manages to carry a slim story and no plot. Yet it manages to be consistently interesting and entertaining throughout, rather like something from David Lynch. Above all, it’s stunningly photographed. The ubiquitous sex scenes are so stylistic they manage to avoid being pornographic, although the film was considered too outré at the time of its release.

Bowie plays an alien calling himself Thomas Jerome Newton who lands on Earth carrying a British passport and nine lucrative electronic patents (one of them a precursor of digital photography). He has come to try and transport water to his dried up planet and teams up with the cynical chemistry professor Dr. Bryce (Torn) and the patent lawyer Farnsworth (Henry), to run a global enterprise, World Enterprises.

But he soon falls for Mary Lou (Clark) in a hotel in the New Mexico desert where she works as a receptionist. The two become a couple in a relationship mainly founded on sex as images of the his extraterrestrial family on slowly die of thirst. Newton then builds a spacecraft to return home, but the government takes over his company, killing Farnsworth in the process. But the emotionally aloof Newton is held prisoner in a hotel where his power dissipates, drugged on cocaine and alcohol and forced to reveal his real – sexless – body to a shocked Mary The doctors in charge make it impossible for him to return to his planet by gluing his ‘earthly’ eyes to his original ones, as he ends his life an alcoholic wreck.

Roeg’s film remains evergreen with its contempo themes of corporate greed, media intrusion and immigrant invasion and the images echo these ideas in a stream of consciousness pattern: Newton is Alice, living in a mean, inhospitable country, where alcohol and TV are used to subdue the population. He is very defenceless (as a man and an alien), a characteristic of many Roeg heroes/heroines in Walkabout, Performance, Don’t Look Now and Bad Timing. The more human becomes Newton becomes, the more he falls for human weaknesses: alcohol and emotional strife with Mary Lou. Newton is also an angel (in the messenger sense), albeit a fallen one. His reports from his home planet are clear: the same fate will befall our earth. Roeg blends a sequence with a Brueghel painting and a mournful poem by W.H. Auden, relating to it: Newton could be Icarus, haven fallen from the sky. A man of the past (singing in church with Mary-Lou Blake’s/Parry’s ‘Jerusalem’) and one of the future: in a planet full of deserts, if climate change does go unchecked.

Bowie is the ethereal outsider (he could be the twin of Tilda Swinton), he is not safe in either of his personas. Newton often has to rest, his journey is slow, he seems too fragile to survive. Clark is full of life at the beginning, but she too becomes a victim: loving Newton too much, preferring him to the money she is offered in exchange to leave him. Bryce is cynical, but very much aware of it. DoP Anthony Richmond set pieces could be from a Hockney universe. Roeg directs with a minimum of interference: when Mary-Lou talks about trains – how slow they are – she muses about the central message: our slow decay, caught by Roeg as a journey to nowhere. AS

AVAILABLE TO OWN ON BLURAY FROM 24 OCTOBER 2016

In Pursuit of Silence (2016)

Director: Patrick Shen | US | Doc | 81min

Patrick Shen is an American award-winning filmmaker best known for his feature debut Flight From Death. Here he turns his camera to silence, an increasingly sought after commodity in our busy world. IN PURSUIT OF SILENCE is a well-intentioned but rather condescending documentary presenting the corrosive effects of noise and as this were some new revelation. But does he bring anything new to the debate with his premise that seems more affirming than revealing.

We know that modern life is a cacophonous existence. Twenty four hours a day we are continually bombarded by obtrusive sounds, whether we are aware of it or not: other peoples’ conversations on the tube; builders’ drills and sirens; musak in cafes and babies crying: wherever we go it is almost impossible to escape the intrusion of noise. Try to find noise-blocking headphones and you will be offered those that only function with personal media devices – more sound and sensory stimulation. Silence (or the sound of the natural ambient world) is becoming not only golden but also vital to our survival as human beings, but many (particularly the young) are aware of this: so it is vital that we tune into its healing power. As animals we need to retreat and connect with our natural environment. The more we resort to the technological world for satisfaction, the less we feel validated, and the more we have to clamour to be heard and valued.

Shen opens his investigation on the role of noise pollution with John Cage’s silent composition 4’33. We discover that silence was the main thrust of his work, and this piece consists of four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence (or, rather, of whatever ambient sound exist where this work is being performed). More common knowledge comes next. Unwanted sound can have a detrimental effect on both our physical and mental health. It leads to increased heart beat and cortisol release – causing stress, sleep deprivation, hypertension and even cardiac arrest.

We meet Greg Hindy who in 2014 walked from New Hampshire to Los Angeles under a self-imposed vow of silence, his innermost thoughts written on a notebook and held up to the camera – crystallise our feelings: “The sources of noise that I am trying to get away from are so embedded in electronics and entertainment that I really could not allow any such distractions. Time away has given me perspective on what I should allow back into my life, and to what extent. Sometimes to really see things the way that they truly are, you have to take a step back, and then another step, and then a few more”. Well put Greg. But is this new?.

Structurally, the film feels overly episodic with two many commentators making it feel fragmented rather than discursive, and where is the ground-breaking revelation in the third act?. As is often the case in documentaries: a point is made and then rammed home over and over again without leaving the audience to reach their own conclusions. We hear from Dr. Helen Lees (author of Silence in Schools), Pico Iyer (The Art of Stillness), Susan Cain (Quiet), Maggie Ross (Silence: A User’s Guide), and Brooklyn-based author George Prochnik whose book In Pursuit of Silence was largely an inspiration for Shen’s film and his definition of silence is simply “the interruption of the imposition of our own egos upon the world.”

There are glorious interludes in remote landscapes such as the Denali National Park in Alaska, where a geeky park “soundscape technician” instructs us on the balance between silence, listening, and space. Even here overhead planes can still be seen and heard. In Japan, a researcher explores the benefits of natural ambient sound revealing the calming effects that this has on improving the body’s overall capacity to heal itself. Particularly, the rhythmic sound of waves on a beach has the power to regulate human functions and heartbeat. Trappist monks spend a great deal of their time in meditation in Iowa and a Zen temple in Japan leading to some footage of a Japanese tea ceremony; silence offers us a way to return and to reconnect with ourselves and is the most reaffirming thing we can do, rather than to reach out to technology or even people. But this is all ‘white noise’ that qualifies what we already know.

And In Pursuit of Silence isn’t always the balm you may be hoping for when you see its title. To illustrate his points Shen frequently blasts us with loud noises, some of which are quite unbearable. We know what that feels like and don’t need to hear it – specially from TV news or talk shows. During a political TV debate we witness an hilarious scene of three people talking at once, none of them listening, leading to Lees observation: “If nobody’s talking, nobody’s dominating,” And this seems to be the only salient takeaway worth ruminating over. We live in an increasingly vocal world, where everyone is trying to impose their own will and their own opinions on the rest of us, even when they have no informed opinion on which to place their rhetoric. We have lost the power to remain silent. And sometimes silence is the most powerful statement of all. MT

NOW OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE.

You are My Sunday | Tu Hai Mera Sunday (2016) | LFF 2016

Advertising exec turned filmmaker Milind Dhaimade offers up a feelgood snapshot of modern Mumbai in this lively and watchable comedy drama that interlaces the lives of five ordinary young men who just want to be happy and play football at the weekends on Juhu Beach. At least, that’s the plan.

According to Dhaimade, not all modern Indians are striving, high-powered yuppies, and YOU ARE MY SUNDAY certainly proves his point. The humour here ranges from witty to hilariously dark and even raucous as Dhaimade hopes to show a new world of Indian independent cinema, with a charm and honesty that is truly representative of the urban youth – Speaking in a mixture of English and Hindu – they all still live with their families, apart from one who lives with some rats.

The story kicks off during one Sunday. The group are playing a freewheeling game of footie, when a senile old man called (Appa) joins in and accidentally kicks the ball into a nearby political rally. As a penalty, the five friends are banned from their Sunday routine game and their growing frustration gradually seeps into their private lives, even seriously disrupting their close friendship. All this all unravels in a light-hearted way thanks to some dry situational humour that confirms Dhaimade has his finger firmly on the international pulse.

Taking pity on Appa, one of the guys takes the old man home where he meets his forthright daughter (Shashana Goswami) and the attraction is instant. Being shy of her sparky intelligence, he then back-peddles until a tentative romance is kindled on a glorious beach where the mood turns dreamy and introspective, as he soulfully admits:”the problem with city life is there’s no place to enjoy the little things”. But suddenly having cold feet, he deep-sixes their dalliance and the action moves on, much to her disappointment. Meanwhile, another guy is having problems with his mother who keeps harping on about his single status – nothing new there – but he urges her to “relax”. YOU ARE MY SUNDAY works best in the scenes were Dhaimade’s wicked sense of humour runs free. One involves a ridiculous incident underlining misogyny in the workplace where one of the guys is forced to defend his co-worker when she is given the sack, her boss trying to blame her for his own internet porn habit.

Well-performed and intelligently scripted, TU HAI MERA SUNDAY could benefit from tightening its slightly saggy middle section. That said, film’s optimism and sheer joie-de-vivre, helped along by some really catchy musical choices, makes this a thoroughly enjoyable ride through the domestic life of contemporary Mumbai. MT

SCREENING DURING THE BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL UNTIL 16 OCTOBER 2016 |

https://youtu.be/uePEHK7EOpQ

Kate plays Christine (2016) | DVD release with Actress

Dir.: Robert Greene; Cast: Kate Lyn Sheil; USA 2016, 112 min.

Director/writer/editor Robert Greene (Actress) tries to answer more than one question with his documentary style psycho thriller KATE PLAYS CHRISTINE: he uses the 1974 on-air suicide of US TV newscaster Christine Chubbuck not as an isolated tragedy, but to highlight and explore questions of gender, gun control, news media and the reality of acting.

The documentary part of KATE consists of Sheil trying to retrace the steps of Chubbuck, whilst the re-enacted scenes are purposefully tacky and unsettling, stylistically close to the 70s aesthetics. Central to the film is lead actress Kate Lyn Sheil (You’re Next) who becomes obsessed with the life and death of the tragic newscaster, who seems to have faded from the public memory, dying just short of her 30th birthday. Reading up on the sparse literature which exists on Chubbuck, Kate travels to Florida where Chubbuck lived and worked. Sheil buys a spooky brunette wig, brown contact lenses and uses spray tan to get into character. In Sarasota, always a town of transients and tourists, hardly anyone remembers the dead woman. In an interesting contrast, we see Sheil buying a gun from the same dealer as Chubbuck in the re-enactment. The shop owner admits freely to Kate that everyone answering a few simple questions can acquire a gun “even if he is mad – after all, I am no psychologist”. Sheil also buys fluffy animals, it emerges that Chubbuck’s bedroom resembled more that of a nine year-old girl than a woman of 29.

Greene wants to avoid explaining Chubbuck’s suicide, depression is far too complex an illness to be explained in two hours. Instead he concentrates “on showing the gap between the ‘real’ self and the ‘staged’ one”, a gap, which Chubbuck savagely obliterated. The irony is that her on-screen suicide was a protest against the sensational packaging of news, which is run by men, and Chubbuck’s depression and loneliness was used as an excuse for her objective criticism of the male dominated TV news. The recent events at Fox TV, where millions of dollars were paid to female newscasters for sexual harassment by their male bosses, are proof that the tradition has survived. Chubbuck put all of her energies into her work and to be passed over for promotion by a boss who favoured her male colleague, who then landed the prize job taking with him her best friend at work, was just the last straw.

As for Kate Lyn Sheil, who is as much a collaborator as an actor, the experience of playing Christine Chubbuck has left her convinced that acting is much more than re-creating a person: “What I care about most is trying to give a voice to the lonely and unusual. Empathy is what matters to me. I hope that people watching the movie will feel as bewildered, infuriated and ultimately heartbroken as I did”.

When approaching the re-staging of the suicide, both director and actor came to a solution which does justice to Chubbuck. DoP Sean Price Williams excels with his colour schemes: the cool, cold Sarasota of today is shot in arctic blue, the TV studio is a mass of colours, fighting which each other, the close-ups reveal masks, not real people.
Greene struggles sometimes to keep a unity of the different styles, but Sheil always keeps everything together: unlike Network or the most recent Christine, Kate plays Christine asks question, and lets the audience answer them. An unique undertaking, worth watching as an example for its critical approach of the medium it represents. AS

KATE PLAYS CHRISTINE comes to DVD 14 November to buy. The DVD release will feature a bonus DVD of Greene’s 2014 cult film ACTRESS as well as incredible extras including: alternative opening, nine deleted scenes and the theatrical trailer.

The Emigrants | The New Land (1971-1972) | Bluray release | Criterion UK

THE EMIGRANTS (UTVANDRARNA)/THE NEW LAND (NYBYGGRNA)

Dir. Jan Troell; Cast: Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Eddie Axberg, Allan Edwall, Monica Zetterlund, Eva-Lena Zetterlund, Pierre Lindstedt; Sweden 1971/72, 151 min. (The Emigrants), 102 min. (The New Land)

To direct an epic of such ambition totalling 253 minutes is an achievement in itself, but Jan Troell (*1931) was also his own DoP, co-writer and editor in this saga based on two novels by Vilhelm Moberg. Troell tells his story with great care, the characters are are given plenty of backstory, and their suffering is told with great empathy. The drama is full of stunningly photographed images – particularly impressive are the contrasting landscapes in Sweden and the USA.

Spanning nearly half a century from its beginning in 1844, The Emigrants/The New Land tells the story of a Swedish family who emigrated to the United States after much hardship in their homeland.
Karl Oscar (von Sydow), a hard working farmer in the Swedish province of Smaland, is married to Kristina (Ullmann); the couple have a constantly growing number of children which they can hardly feed, since the land is barren and the weather extremely inclement. Karl Oscar’s much younger brother Robert (Axberg) is working for a rich farmer who treats him like a slave, beating him up sadistically. Kristina’s uncle Danjel (Edwall) is a lay preacher who rebels against the teaching of the state church which favours the wealthy. Danjel lives with Ulrika (M. Zetterlund), who once was sold to a brothel, and her daughter Elin (E.L. Zetterlund). After Karl-Oscar’s barn burns down during a thunderstorm, the families decide to emigrate to the USA. The crossing on a ship is dangerous, and many of the passengers die.

The second part, The New Land starts where part one ended, when Karl Oscar settles with his family (and the still growing number of children) near Minnesota. Robert decides to leave his family, who has built a new house and is having a better living standard than in Sweden: together with Arvid (Lindstedt) he wants try his luck as a gold digger in California. Arvid dies from a fever, Robert makes a fortune and is swindled out of it, before returning to his family, where he dies of a virus infection caught during his travels. Later Sioux Indians attack the white settlers, killing Danjel and his three children. Kristina, who always was homesick for Sweden, dies in 1862, having given birth to seven children and suffering many miscarriages. Finally, after given the farm to his children, we learn about Karl-Oscar’s death in 1890.

The ocean crossing journey is one of the highpoints: the elements that have challenged the emigrants in Sweden, seem to conspire against them with force once they set sail. Von Sydow is majestic in his willingness to find a new home for his family, Ullmann’s Kristina is a honest portrait of a woman’s life in the 19th century. Edwall’s Danjel is well cast as a would-be Jesus opposite Monica Zetterlund’s Maria-Magdalene. In spite of its length, this epic never lets audience out its grip, it is pure cinema, a story of defiance told with humanistic warmth. AS

NOW AVAILABLE COURTESY OF CRITERION UK COLLECTION FORM 10 OCTOBER 2016

The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years (2016)

Dir: Ron Howard | 137min | Doc | The Beatles

“The Beatles became the emperors and prisoners of their fame” declares music journalist Jon Savage in Ron Howard’s documentary on the touring years (1962-1966) of the Beatles. He’s one of several interviewed talking heads who emphasise that the Beatles were as much a cultural force for social change as well as a musical phenomenon. Another is Whoppie Goldberg who as a teenager at a Beatle concert was given “Their (Beatles) idea that everybody was welcome.” Whilst screenwriter Richard Curtis informs us that “The Beatles were the dream of how you got through life.”

Eight Days a Week skilfully consolidates edited live concert footage to give what is probably the definitive account of the highs and lows of their touring experiences. There is much to enjoy. The spontaneity and warm irreverence of the Beatles is captured. “Four things that looked alike” (Paul McCartney) who actually spoke as non- manufactured individuals. Led by John Lennon their responses to journalists are joyful examples of the sublime art of being cheeky. Eight Days a Week also reveals the darker side of Beatlemania with its angry US response to Lennon’s remarks on the popularity of the Beatles compared to Jesus Christ. We are shown a burning at night of Beatles vinyl and memorabilia. Before this orchestrated ‘rejection’ we have references to the assassinations of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, race riots and the war in Vietnam. Ron Howard’s documentary is very much about the Beatles’ external musical journey and the progress of their genuinely spontaneous personalities. By 1966 the Liverpudlians with “those fabulous hair-dos” were weary of being interviewed and sick of touring. After Candlestick Park in San Francisco they felt they were “becoming a freak show”. Music gigs were abandoned for the recording studio in order to undergo an internal journey of musical experimentation and to simply remain sane.

Yet Ron Howard’s film has some serious omissions. We have the Beatles accepting their MBEs but nothing about Lennon’s later rejection. And a TV recording of their Royal Variety performance at the London Palladium, where the Beatles asked the British royalty and the rich to clap hands and shake their jewels, ought to have been included.

The ‘colourisation’ of some of the monochrome footage feels redundant. All nicely digitised and good looking but…? And could there have been a least one Beatle song performed in its entirety? (On average they are only three minutes long). Pacy, economically edited, intelligently compiled and – as a social document really fascinating – although the inclusion of a cultural critic being interviewed about the reasons for Beatlemania would be appreciate here. Eight Days proves to be a very entertaining 138 minutes. Beatles aficionados will love it. Others will certainly feel admiration. See it on a fabulous big screen first where it will resound more powerfully than on your blu-ray player. And a small footnote; watch out for Signoury Weaver as a teenager, caught by the camera revelling in the music! Alan Price.

NOW OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE At the EVERYMAN, CURZON, ICA AND RITZY BRIXTON

Quit Staring at my Plate (2016) | NE GLEDAJ MI U PIJAT |Warsaw Film festival 2016

Dir.: Hana Jusic, Cast: Mia Petricevic, Croatia 2016, 105 min.

Marijana (Petricevic) has the misfortune to be a member of the most dysfunctional family in a small Croatian town. At 24, she works as a midwife assistant in the local hospital where the staff are all fearful of keeping their jobs. But life at home is even worse: her father is a tyrant, beating her with a towel when she gets on his frayed nerves. Her brother is an overweight layabout who has never worked a day in his life, but is protected by their mother, who, like her son, is only interested in stuffing her face with food. Marijana meanwhile is fit and slim, always trying to make the best of herself. Things go from bad to worse after the father suffers a stroke and she is forced to care for him whilst sharing a bed with her mother, who has fled the marital bedroom.

Without a boyfriend, Marijana takes up casual sex, but it fails to satisfy her emotional longings. Sliding more and more into a masochistic way of life. Marijana is finally ‘saved’ by her mother in an unexpected release. Although freedom now beckons, the young woman is not quiet sure yet what do with it .

Jusic crafts a fine portrait of a person who is driven to despair by her repressive family, and retreats into herself. Without a concrete identity – apart from feeding her family – she succumbs to her grim existence as a cleaner. Petricevic is brilliant, and Jusic observes her with distance and slight humour. Cinematography is also impressive, with particularly good use made of camera angles that swoop down on Marijana in her hopeless existence. Yet despite of its grim subject matter, Quit Staring is energetic and innovative drama. A little gem. AS

IN COMPETITION AT WARSAW INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL UNTIL 16 OCTOBER 2016

Capote (2005) | bluray release

Dir: Bennet Miller | Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Chris Cooper,

Before watching Capote, in the cinema, in 2005, I hadn’t read In Cold Blood. Afterwards I bought a copy and devoured it. The book stunned me as much as Bennet Miller’s stunning film. CAPOTE isn’t an adaptation of In Cold Blood (for that go to Richard Brooks 1967 film) but the story of how Truman Capote wrote his documentary fiction. Last night, viewing CAPOTE again, in a fine blu-ray transfer, I was still moved by its emotional power, sombre atmosphere and high intelligence.

In 1959 four members of the Cutter family were murdered on their Kansas farm. Truman Capote was gripped by the newspaper account and impelled to document the tragedy. Accompanying him was the writer Harper Lee (Catherine Keener) who acted as a facilitator between Capote and the detective on the case Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper). Capote was gradually taken into the confidence of Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jnr), one of the two killers.

Capote is a dark film about a writer’s motivations. It exposes Truman Capote’s contradictory pull to create a work of fiction that will inform, instruct, entertain and
gratify his egoistic and narcissistic impulses for notoriety and fame; whilst he ruthlessly manipulates the accused to achieve his deadline and finish the book. Capote, the man, fascinated (possibly with erotic undertones) by Perry Smith, also finds an empathy with his sad background. “When I think how good it (In Cold Blood) can be I can hardly breathe.” declares Truman Capote, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. He gives a masterly performance, full of nuanced pain and joy that cunningly captures the mentality of a brilliantly gifted writer. Yet if there’s a sole flaw in Capote it’s a technical issue. Hoffman says his lines in a quiet, whispering, whiny manner. This is authentically Truman Capote but sometimes difficult to hear in the film’s sound mixing.

Capote has unforgettable moments. Especially the scene where an impatient Truman wants Perry to tell him what really happened during the killings. Both actors modulate their acting – one listens and the other talks. Perry conveys a chilling detachment. And Truman, both excited and repelled, becomes a witness to a heart of darkness. The tone of this remarkable sequence, with its brooding low key lighting and judicious cutting back to the crime, has a severity that evokes the style of Robert Bresson. In substance, the film hints at the kind of malevolence you’ll find in Laughton’s Night of the Hunter or Thompson’s Cape Fear.

Capote probes and disturbs with equal measure. Not just because of its superb performances, but the restrained direction of Bennet Miller, a brilliant screenplay by Dan Futterman and the beautiful, often pastoral, photography of Adam Kimmel.
The film Infamous was released in 2006 and dealt with the same story. Although Infamous was more dramatically balanced between the two killers, it took fictional liberties with the story that were unconvincing. CAPOTE is for me the superior portrait of this fascinating writer and is already high up on my list as one of the great American films of the early 2000’s. ALAN PRICE

NOW OUT ON BLURAY

Porto (2016) | LFF 2016

Dir.: Gabe Klinger; Cast: Anton Yelchin, Lucie Lucas, Francoise Lebrun, Paulo Calatre; Portugal/France/USA 2016, 75 min.

In his feature debut, director/co-writer Brazilian filmmaker Gabe Klinger relies almost totally on atmosphere and some beautiful, dreamy images – but leaves his two main characters largely underwritten so the audience is left guessing.

American traveller Jake (Yelchin, in his final role) meets French archaeologist Mati (Lucas) in Porto, where the two have a passionate one-night stand. Jake wants a relationship, but Mati returns next day to her professor and lover Monteiro Oliveira – in spite of her misgivings about the relationship. In the end we see her regreting her decision to her mother (Leburn) in Paris.

The narrative is split in three sections: Part I, “Jake” tells the story of how the two lovers met at a restaurant. Part II, “Mati” features the archaeologist being disappointed by her marriage, which leads to a split which seriosuly affects her daughter, before setting out to Paris to meet her mother. Part III “Mati and Jake” is a very detailed observation of their sexual relationship.

Trying hard to emulate the Nouvelle Vague, Klinger relays on the wonderful camerawork of DoP Wyatt Garfield (Mediterranea), whose Porto is a city of wonders. So are the interior shots, creating magic out of the simplest rooms; whilst the images in the restaurant, where the couple meets, are full of enigmatic longing. This makes for an enjoyable watch. Unfortunately, we learn next to nothing about the protagonists who are purely intuitive, acting on impulse. PORTO is at its best in the scene where Mati returns with Oliveira to her flat, only to find Jake still in bed. The much older professor is very restrained, making small talk, as if nothing has happened. But Klinger never explains any motivations, the trio remains a total mystery, making it impossible for anyone to care for any of them. What remains are images, unsettling in their mysterious otherworldliness. An enigmatic tribute to Anton Yelchin. AS

SCREENING DURING BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL UNTIL 16 OCTOBER 2016

Driving with Selvi (2015)

Dir.: Elisa Paloschi; Documentary; Canada 2015, 74 min.

Elisa Paloschi’s uplifting documentary looks at the life of Selvi, the first female taxi driver in South India, chronicling her way from abused child bride to independence – and a licence to drive buses and HGVs. The film also offers a glimpse of rural life in India, far away from the modern images projected by the state agencies.

A month after having her first period, and in her last year at school, Selvi was forced by her parents to marry an unknown man. But Selvi’s family were poor, and in the absence of a dowry, the man pimped his wife out, to make the money he thought he deserved. Depressed, Selvi decided to throw herself under a bus, but at the last minute finds her fighting spirit. And does so with help of the Odanadi Organisation, which helps child brides and other repressed women to enable themselves to earn a decent living. Selvi learns to drive (the director’s vehicle ends up in a ditch during the learning process), and becomes the first female taxi driver in the city of Karnatuka. Selvi then goes on to find happiness with her second husband, Viji (who is also a professional driver), and makes a success of her life in more ways than one.

Apart from making the film, Elisa Paloschi is very much Selvi’s enabler and mentor who charts the young woman’s progress in some heart-breaking scenes that clearly show how female subjugation begins in the family unit and goes on into the workplace: when Selvi meets her aunt, the only relative who cared for her, it emerges that her mother did not even bother to feed her, giving all her love to her brother – who, having married her off, called her a whore. But Selvi’s story is full of hope as she is positive and very adamant about the future for her daughter “she will be my legacy, she will get everything I didn’t. One day, I might tell her my story”.

A simple but life-affirming documentary which tells the story of an exceptional woman, one of 700 million child brides, of which 250 million are under the age of fifteen – a third are living in India alone. AS

SCREENING AT BERTHA DOCHOUSE from 7 OCTOBER 2016

The film was described by the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) as “… a tragic and poignant yet also energetic and inspirational portrait of an extremely tough Indian woman.”

The Bait (Tope) | LFF 2016

Dir: Buddhadeb Dasgupta

Cast: Sudipto Chatterjee, Kajal Kumari, Ananya Chatterjee, Chandan Roy Sanyal, Paoli Dam

88min | Fantasy Drama | India | Bengal

Putting the art into arthouse, Bengali director Buddhadeb Dasgupta takes Bandyopadhyay’s short story and creates a gorgeously vivid and surreal melodrama shot through with touches of magic realism and whimsy and set in the lush and languid landscapes of rural Bengal. This often poetic literary adaptation is evocatively steeped in sensuous imagery and cultural references, conjuring up its ancient folklore with dreamlike sultriness and gentle comedy.

Lost in the past, Sudipto Chaterjee plays a fierce and arrogant Raja living in faded splendour in a palace deep in the jungle, whilst his plumb lover Rekha (Ananya Chatterjee) feasts on bananas and dreams of escaping; clearly a dissillusioned romantic. Meanwhile the Raja has pretensions to greatness and spends his days dancing fiestily around the exotic palace and its extensive grounds, chanting and generally trying to impress anyone with his wild ambition to kill the local tiger. His nose is rather put out of joint when a Kolkata film crew arrives to make a documentary about the tiger. This seems to upset his feudal sensibilities and he reacts with pompous hostility to the well-intentioned filmmakers. Meanwhile there are two other strands to the storyline: a colourfully clad low caste girl dances on a tightrope through the fish-filled river beds, and a mad former postman Goja (Chandan Roy Sanyal) chants jibberish from the branches of a tree, strewn with his postbags full of mail.

The denouement is sudden, startling, and open to interpretation as the narrative plotlines come elegantly together. THE BAIT is a beguiling and bewitching film full of rich colours, seductive warmth and exotic mysticism. MT

SCREENING DURING BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 5-16 OCTOBER 2016

Planetarium (2016) | LFF 2016

Rebecca Zlotowski follows her nuclear-power-based love story Grand Central with a drama that is more about psychics than physics. PLANETARIUM is of the ether and floats sumptuously and delicately through a pre-war story of supernatural powers possessed by two gorgeous sisters who arrive in Paris from New York to perform seances, connecting the living with the dead. Zlotowski has written the script herself in an meandering and impressionist style-narrative that gracefully conjures up the febrile state of Europe in the late 1930s, capturing a magical moment in time that is both starstruck and doomed. The girls’ whimsical story is firmly anchored by a powerful racist subplot involving its lead male character André Korben, a wealthy Polish Jew.

Natalie Portman is the brightest star of PLANETARIUM as Laura Barlow, but she is surrounded by a galaxy of sparkling performances from Lily Rose Depp, who comes into her own as the younger and more ethereal sister Kate; Emmanuel Salinger as Korben, a film producer who part-finances and accommodates the girls in his elegant Art Deco home; and Alexandre Zloto who plays a silver-tongued René-Lucien Chomette (aka René Clair best known for his work with silent film in the 1930s and titles such as A Nous la Liberté and Le Million). Seeing that times are hard seance-wise in the run up to the war, Korben seizes on the potential of a supernatural-themed film harnessing the skills of The Barlow Sisters, as a potential career in acting beckons for Laura. Sadly despite a fascinating detour into cinematic methods of the era, this film within a film burns a financial hole into Korben’s production company and the story ends as a tragedy after his Jewish roots are exposed and he is sent ‘East’ (to the gas chambers). But not before the champagne flows and a seriously soigné time is had by all. So even if Zlotowski’s storyline often blinds you with its science and the odd plothole, it does so in such a fabulously enjoyable and inventive way with stunning costumes, glamorous locations and starry encounters, by the end it’s all been a blast. MT

SCREENING DURING BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL UNTIL 16 OCTOBER 2016 | VENICE REVIEW

American Honey (2016) | Cannes Film Festival | Jury Prize 2016

Director: Andrea Arnold

Cast: Sasha Lane, Shia LaBoeuf, Arielle Holmes, Corey McCaul Lombardi

142mins | drama | US

Andrea Arnold’s US debut is a runaway road movie that follows fiesty newcomer Sasha Lane across America’s Midwest with a crowd of defiant drifters trying to sell something that nobody really wants on a journey that never comes to much but rambles enjoyably on its way. Drawing parallels with Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park there are also echoes here of Larry Clark’s loose brand of sexuality in the partying and free-wheeling fun that goes on as the band bond with Shia LaBeouf adding his own brand of charisma. Although there are some magical moments with Jake (Shia LaBeouf), adding his own brand of charisma to the road show as head of sales in a drama that drifts along dreamily often in a drunken haze.

This is fun for the first hour but only two other characters stand out: surfer dude Corey (McCaul Lombardi), and ditzy Pagan (Arielle Holmes in a similar role to her character in Heaven Knows What). The tone is upbeat and rebellious in this melange of meandering and amorphously linked encounters, but for its scant three hour running time it lacks dramatic torque for the most part working best as a euphoric mood piece where the romance between Star and LeBoeuf is the slow peddling driving force.

The visuals are vibrant and sensual whether on the widescreen or in the more intimate spaces of the van and motel rooms and Arnold never judges her characters letting them glide on in the glory and occasionally more soberly in this (for them) memorable story with its eclectic musical moments from Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Dream Baby Dream’, and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s “Careless Love,”. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 11-22 MAY 2016

The Noon Witch (2016) Polednice | LFF 2016

later inspired an 1896 symphonic poem by Antonin Dvorak.

DIR: Jiri Sadek | 90min | Horror | Psychodrama | Czech Republic.

Sun-baked cornfields make for an unusual setting in Czech director Jiri Sadek debut feature which takes inspiration from a folkloric poem by Karel Jaromír Erben. With echoes of Philip Ridley’s twisted tale The Reflecting Skin this slim but imaginatively-crafted psychodrama is permeated by a sinister tone of baleful remorse.

A grieving woman Eliska (Anna Geislerova) and her young daughter Anetka (Karolina Lipowska) move back to her husband’s birthplace in a remote country village where they hope to start a new life in a dilapidated cottage. Eliska has not yet told Anetka that her father will not in fact be joining them – or that he is dead. And this monumental lie is pivotal to the toxic dynamic that slowly develops between the pair, fuelled by the daughter’s festering resentment and her mother’s growing guilt.

Plagued by sweltering heat and unwelcome support from the invasive locals, the two get off to a difficult start. Their neighbours consist of a sexually predatory (and married) odd job man and the Mayor’s mentally unstable wife (Daniela Kolarova) who killed her only son, and warns of ‘The curse of the Noonday Witch’, which is about to strike again.

Sadek echews the usual blood and gore settling for jump cuts and macabre visions of a goulish black-hooded figure, and it’s clear from the start that Eliska’s and her daughter’s psychological state are to blame for these negative vibes and despite convincing performances the dialogue is often trite and mostly redundant. Where the film triumphs is in Alexander Surkala’s florid 35mm cinematography that glows resplendently particularly during the impressive solar eclipse scene. MT

SCREENING DURING BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL UNTIL 16 OCTOBER 2016

Mirzya (2016) | LFF 2016

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Dir: Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra | Cast: Harshvardhan Kapoor, Siyami Kher, Om Puri, Art Malik, K K Raina, Anjali Patil | 130min | India

Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s latest Hindi drama is an ambitiously mounted and dazzling lyrical epic that interweaves the legendary Punjabi love story between Mirzya and Sahiban “If you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt – only love”. The traditional version opens in the magnificent desert fortresses of Rajasthan and tantalizingly precedes each episode of the reimagining of a modern day Romeo and Juliet, where school friends Monish and Suchitra found first love in modern Delhi as children and then unite as adults in the 21st century. However, Monish (Harshvardhan Kapoor) now works for a prince, to whom Suchitra (Saiyemi Kher) is engaged to be married.

What makes MIRZYA so appealing to watch is the dynamic performances of newcomers Harshvardhan Kapoor and Saiyami Kher who are glamorously gorgeous both as a modern couple and as their mythical counterparts. A tunefully rhythmic soundtrack by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy sets the extravaganza off on its way, and minimal CGI effects depict an exotic bird involved in the narrative, zooming exuberantly into the sky in a metaphor for the feelings of the lovebirds themselves.

MIRZYA has brave intentions and plenty of chutzpah, but much of the story gets confused as it flips backwards and forwards and the result is an over melodramatic affair that often feels implausible and over-excited in the contemporary context, despite the convincing onscreen chemistry of the leads. MIRZYA is certainly spectacular to look at and entertaining to watch, but the narrative fails to be convincing despite the director’s best intentions. MT

SCREENING DURING BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL UNTIL 16 OCTOBER 2016

Blue Velvet Revisited (2016) | LFF 2016 | World Premiere

Dir: Peter Braatz | With David Lynch, Isabella Rossellini, Kyle MacLachlan, Dennis Hopper | Doc | 86min

Aficionados of the iconic thriller made in 1985 by David Lynch will be entranced by Peter Braatz’s documentary BLUE VELVET REVISITED which world premieres here in London on 7 October 2016. The director served as an editor on the original film made in Wilmington, North Carolina and this ‘meditation on a movie’ offers a collection of his personal musings – a daily chronicle – of the making of the original that has achieved cult status in the intervening years.

In a grainy indie style Braatz pieces together his footage to form a collage of the shoot with cast members chatting and hanging around on set: Isabella Rossellini, Laura Dern, Dennis Hopper and Kyle MacLachlan, all recorded on his Super 8 camera. There are some insightful interviews with Lynch himself, who comes across as confident and articulate, and talks of mastering new technology so that he can “think” his films onto the screen without the endless preparation entailed in each frame and scene. Isabella Rossellini and DoP Frederick Elmes offer their feelings about the film and the personalities involved. These are spliced with evocative inter-titles picking out buzz words and phrses so familiar in the film “a candy-coloured clown” (originally from Roy Orbison’s song) and “tiddlywinks” are a few. The film speaks for itself and has a pleasurable rhythm of its own although there is no clear narrative, as such. Braatz cleverly evokes the detached, unsettling terror and dreaminess of the original and has obtained Lynch’s exclusive permission to document his drama with this material that has never previously been seen by the public. BLUE VELVET REVISITED feels as much a reverie of filmmaking in the eighties as a trippy voyeuristic voyage back in time. MT

SCREENING DURING LONDON FILM FESTIVAL UNTIL 16 OCTOBER 2016

Voir du Pays (Stopover) | LFF 2016

Dir.: Delphine Coulin, Muriel Coulin: Cast: Ariane Labed, Soko, Ginger Romain; France/Greece 2016, 102 min.

Sisters Delpine and Muriel Coulin (17 Girls) surprise us with a tense yet reflective portrait of French women, fighting in the army alongside men. As one would expect, misogyny, in all forms, from verbal to violent, is at the centre of this captivating film that stars Ariane Labed and Soko.

Set on the island of Cyprus in the autumn of 2012, just before newly elected President Hollande would withdraw French troops from the Afghan war, STOPOVER follows a battalion of French soldiers returning from a tour of Afghanistan. Before they go back to their families, the army has set up a demob camp in a luxury hotel as an antidote to PTSD.

For two close friends, Aurore (Labed) and Marine (Soko), who grew up together in Lorient, and joined the army together these three days will decide their future (“Lorient is an army town, what else was there to do?”). Together their debate the aftermath of conflict: “What the hell was I doing in Afghanistan” – but they will both reach differing conclusions by the end. After their arrival in the hotel, they are annoyed to have to share their room with a third person Fanny (Romain), but soon the daily remedial sessions – with help of virtual reality simulations – take over. All the soldiers have reacted differently to the hostilities, most of them are traumatised by the loss of their friends. It is that the three days merely scratch at the surface, the whole exercise is just a placebo. The men are sexually frustrated, at first voicing their repressed anger at the women soldiers, then, after the trio drives off with some local men, the violence explodes. Two of the women get off with Cypriots, and after the French soldiers follow them to a local restaurant, there is talk about “taking our women and our wine”. Knives are drawn, before the French soldiers drive off. On the way to the hotel, they kill a goat and one of the soldiers tries to rape Aurore “I show you that I have balls, but you don’t”. Marine just comes in time to save her friend. On the flight to France, Aurore asks Marine why she is fighting – Marine’s answer “defending France, Europe”, which is not enough for Aurore any more.

The French title Voir du Pays means “see the world”, a slogan the Army uses to seduce recruits to join. Aurore and Marine have seen little outside Lorient before they embarked on their army careers. But the directors make it clear that women experience fighting on a different level: Marine can’t get the image of her dead compatriot out of her head. “It goes round like a loop”, she tells Aurore. On the other hand, some of the male soldiers are thirsty for more battle. Aurore’s statement regarding her male fellow soldiers: “They need an enemy”.

DoP Jean Louis Vialard creates a fake world in the hotel in stark contrast to what have happened in Afghanistan. Once again leads Ariane Labed and Soko are impressively convincing in this watchable and resonant war drama which won Best Script in the Un Certain Regard sidebar at Cannes 2016. AS

SCREENING DURING BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 5-16 OCTOBER 2016

War on Everyone (2016)| Berlinale 2016

Director: John Michael McDonagh

Cast: Michael Peña, Alexander Skarsgård, Theo James, Tessa Thompson, Caleb Landry Jones

98min | action drama | UK

John Michael McDonagh’s rip-roaringly irreverent cop buddy movie is largely a vehicle for the combined talents of Alexander Skarsgaard and Michael Pena who play the glib twosome and Glen Campbell who provides the musical hits. Short on laughs but long on cinematic scenery, WAR ON EVERYONE is very much a curate’s egg. Crashing cars and waging war on international crims the duo manage to upset everyone, as the title would suggest, but their bad boy blunders all boil down to boredom in a patchy comedy that exposes the police force as a bunch of warm-hearted racist thugs. But there’s nothing new there. WAR ON EVERYONE works best in its filmic scenes where Glenn Campbell’s iconic hits provide golden moments for the starry Skarsgaard (the camera loves him) and his bouncy love interest who have great fun between the sheets and up against walls. Spectacular widescreen visuals of the desert and snowy Iceland provide the background to the duo’s pursuit of a criminal gang of vicious paedophiles. McDonagh’s loose ‘cops and robbers’ narrative stitches it all together with a script that is gloriously politically incorrect; kicking over the usual hackneyed racial slurs in a formulaic plotline. But hey; there’s plenty to enjoy im this blistering britflick if you just switch your mind to autopilot and enjoy the ride. MT

NOW ON RELEASE AT SELECTED CINEMAS | REVIEWED DURING BERLINALE 11-21 FEBRUARY 2016 | FOLLOW OUR COVERAGE BERLINALE 2016

The Greasy Strangler (2016)

Director: Jim Hosking Writer: Toby Harvard

Cast: Michael St Michaels, Sky Elobar, Elizabeth De Razzo, Gil Gex

93min | Drama Comedy | US

Jim Hosking’s debut feature can best be described as repulsive; at worst – a simply awful con intended to perplex and intrigue audiences with its ambiguous title, the fantasy is none other than a repetitive series of vile visuals exploring the relationship between a dysfunctional father and co-dependent son who inhabit the seedy backwaters of Los Angeles. These grotesquely sordid scenes exist merely to flesh out a vapid narrative that serves no other purpose other than providing a salacious talking point between critic and cineaste, some of whom postulate that the feature may appeal to kids – which is frankly insulting, as most kids have a modicum of taste and know when they are being taken for a ride.

The plot is simply thus: Big Ronnie (St Michaels) and his son Big Brayden (Elobar) are forced into romantic competition over Janet (De Razzo) a pleasant participant in one of their bizarre walking tours while the murderous activities of the soi-disant serial killer the Greasy Strangler, play out in the hinterland.

Visually and technically The Greasy Strangler is well-crafted with Marten Tedin’s camerawork capturing the low-life lassitude of nighttime Los Angeles. Performances are lacklustre in an outing that transcends even the cult status of being camp or kitsch. Endless stomach-lurching bodily functions are frequently thrust into our gaze – if The Greasy Strangler were an exhibit it would smell like a fetid cesspit in downtown Dakar – that said – if you get your kicks from fetid cesspits in Dakar – this is your flick – and no offence to Dakar which has a delightfully dry year-round climate and some wonderful street markets. Catch the boat to the nearby island paradise of Gorée for its fascinating history and idyllic beaches!. MT

NOW ON RELEASE AT SELECTED CINEMAS | SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL LONDON | 2-5 June 2016

Dearest Sister (2016) | LFF 2016

Dir.: Mattie Do; Cast: Amphaiphun Phommapunya, Vilouna Phermany, Tambet Tusk, Manivanh Boulom; Laos/France/Estonia 2016, 100 min.

Laotian director Mattie Do’s claim to fame is that she has directed two of the thirteen films produced in her country. Genre-wise, DEAREST SISTER could be called a horror film, but it is much more: a ghostly treatise on family relations, class and colonialism.

Nok (Phommaphuna), a village girl, is called to the capital Vientiane to look after Ana (Permany), a distant relative, who lives with her Estonian husband Jacob (Tusk) in a splendid villa. Nok is supposed to help Ana, who is slowly going blind, but she uses her employer’s disability to her own advantage. The maid (Boulom) and her husband, the gardener, both despise Nok, who has a room in the house, whilst they have to sleep outside in a covered shelter. Soon we realise that Ana’s illness is not only physical: she can communicate with the dead but is often not able to differentiate between the ‘ghosts’, and real people. She also obtains numbers from the dead, which she relates to the materialistic Nok, who uses them successfully to play the lottery. Nok turns out to be a nasty piece of work, using her wages for clothes and glitzy objects instead sending the money – as promised – home to her poor family in the village. After Ana’s sight is saved by an operation, Nok fears that she will become redundant, and at the same time, the servants take their fate in their own hands: the long repressed conflicts of interest explode, setting up a violent denouement for all concerned.

Without resorting to a gore fest of slashing, jump-cuts or over-sensational horror elements, Do and her cinematographer Mart Ratassepp’s evoke a netherworld of menace where the horror is subdued but deadly– even the ghosts appear to be human as Ana’s state of mind enables her to slip between both worlds in a visually captivating tale of sexual politics. AS

SCREENING DURING BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 5-16 OCTOBER 2016

CallBack (2016) | LFF 2016

Dir: Carles Torras | Cast: Martin Bacigalupo, Lilli Stein, Larry Fessenden, Timothy Gibbs | Thriller | Spain | 80min

Catalan director Carles Torras makes his English language debut a watchable and darkly drole character study of a small time New York actor who gradually reveals his psychopathic nature in this lean and stylish thriller.

Slick and slightly sepia-tinted, CALLBACK stealthily follows Larry de Cecco (a sardonic Martin Bacigalupo) as he goes about his business playing bit roles for adverts that deal with the ennui of city life and keeping up with the American Dream (‘Drink megaboost, and you’ll be fine). At first Larry seems to rub along with this rather humdrum existence, at least that how it all appears. He clearly doesn’t have the chops to grab the headlines performance-wise, so he works in removals as a sideline, and often helps himself to things belonging to the people he moves, to the irritation of his weary boss (Larry Fessenden). By night, Larry is a peeping Tom to his latest tenant Alexandra (Lilli Stein) who also has aspirations to act, and amongst his other behavioural issues, he has a tendency for temper tantrums for which he attends the sessions of of a local religious pastor, purporting to be a ‘born again’ Christian..

But there’s something unpleasantly creepy about Larry who would certainly freak you out if you spent time with him at home. And flatmate Alexandra (Lilli Stein) is clearly either naive or far too polite to make anything of the way Larry talks in American clichés: ‘here’s some fresh towels’; ‘I’m a very driven person” and ‘thank you for sharing this with me’ or the way he plays Tchaikovsky classics at full volumn his car (is there a US equivalent to classic fm?). Musical choices add bathos to this delicious drama with Jimmy Fontana’s sixties love song “Il Mondo,” suggesting that Larry’s schizoid personality is fully conversant with a romantic life that he is unable to fulfil.

And soon enough Alexandra gains confidence in the de Cecco household, eventually falling foul of Larry’s romantic sensibilities over dinner one night. The result is shockingly grim. But Bacigalupo is simply dynamite in his creation of Larry (his voice even sounds like Vincent Price at one point) which dovetails with Lilli Stein’s foxy turn as Alexandra, making this compact and understated psycho thriller eventually worth its weight in gold. MT

SCREENING DURING BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 5-16 OCTOBER 2016

Under the Shadow (2016)

Writer|Dir.: Babak Anvari

Cast: Narges Rashid, Bubby Naderi, Avin Manshadi

84min | Iran/Jordan/Qatar/UK.

Writer filmmaker Babak Anvari grew up in Tehran in the 1980s, before moving to the UK. His debut is this harrowing portrait of family life during the last phase of the Iraq/Iran war in 1988 using elements of the horror genre to show the effects of war and the Islamic Revolution on the mind of an emancipated mother during the bombing raids in Tehran.

We first meet university administrator Shideh (Rashid) after she has been expelled from the medical faculty for her left-wing activities after the Islamic takeover of 1979. She had hoped to be re-instated, but the stern bureaucrat rejects her application, asking her to look for another goal in life. Her doctor husband Iraj (Naderi), who has stayed out of politics tells her “it may be all for the best”. He later further undermines her skills as a mother to daughter Dorsa (Manshadi) and claims that she only wants to be a doctor because it was her late mother’s dream – to which Shideh caustically replies “the dead don’t dream”. Stuck at home all day, she spends her time dancing to a Jane Fonda video and listening to the BBC.

As the bombardment of Tehran intensifies, the family are forced into the cellar of the apartment block with their neighbours. Iraj is called up to do his annual medical service; this time in a district near the front of the fighting and advises Shideh to leave the city and live with his parents in the countryside, but she refuses. When a (dud) bomb hits the apartment above Shideh’s flat, cracks appear in the ceiling, and Dorsa puts it down to evil spirits of ‘djinn’. Shideh laughs this off at first but soon jump scares, violent sound effects and moving objects frighten her out of the house. In wild panic, she is caught on the street by police who arrest her for not wearing a hijab: “A woman should fear nothing as much as being exposed” she is told, and gets lucky, with only one night in jail. But when Dorsa’s favourite doll disappears, the tone darkens further. With all the neighbours having moved out, Shideh must make a decision.

Under the Shadow is an inversion of A Girl walks home alone at Night: this time the female main protagonist is not in charge, but is invaded by external manifestations provoked by emotional turmoil. Shideh is isolated and abandoned by her husband, in more than one way, and has no friends to turn to. Whilst the djinn – medieval spirits – do not exist, Shideh and her daughter need an explanation for their plight, and the terror of the bombings drives her into a fantasy world of terror. Under the Shadow uses symbols and metaphors to create a specific feminist horror scenario. DoP Kit Fraser turns living rooms, hallways and staircases into nightmare alleys, the lighting is expressionist and evocative. Narges Rashid is brilliant in this tour-de-force of emotions, and her interactions with Manshadi’s Dorsa are near telepathic. Babak Anvari has created something of a contradiction: a meaningful horror film. AS

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE from 30 SEPTEMBER 2016

King Cobra (2016) | LFF 2016

Dir: Justin Kelly | Cast| James Franco, Christian Slater, Garrett Clayton | 87min | Drama

The ubiquitous James Franco was once a name to be conjured with: Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, 127 Hours and even Pineapple Express showed initial promise for his sterling efforts and energetic talents as an actor, director and writer. But Interior Leather Bar set him off down another track and Every Thing Will Be Fine followed. In KING COBRA he is back on form, once here again teaming up with Justin Kelly (I Am Michael) and lending a certain charisma to his supporting role in this rather seedy gay porn outing, based on the true story of the early career of the soi-disant ‘Brent Corrigan’ (aka Sean Paul Lockhart) played by Garrett Clayton, who we first meet, aged 17, auditioning for Cobra Video, an amateur gay porn company set up by King Cobra himself, Stephen (Christian Slater).

From the get go, audiences will smell a rat when they see Stephen salivating at the discovery of his nascent porn starlet while still purporting to be straight: when his sister offers to set him up on a blind date, he protests: “I can manage my own love life”. You bet he can, and it all originates from the privacy of his own home.

At first Stephen appears to be a relatively low key nonce. He is sadly aware that his ageing looks are a hindrance in bedding desirable under-age men. Although Sean claims to be 18. But delusion is his only bedfellow, and while he kids himself that Lockhart and he are lovers, the blond boy-star has other plans. Far too cute to fall in with Stephen, he swiftly leverages his burgeoning potential by demanding more money from the slippery entrepreneur. And soon enough, perky porn producer Joe (Franco) comes sniffing along and smartly involves Lockhart his boss a ‘ménage à quatre’ with his easygoing partner Harlow ( Keegan Allen) and thus the ‘Viper Boys’ are born, servicing their physical and financial lives. But Joe is clearly also a profligate narcissist with a penchant for fiery temper tantrums when he is thwarted.

KING COBRA’s narrative plays out as a fascinating character study between the four men and their sexual interplay with some decent performances in scenes of an often graphic nature that will go down well if gay sex or gay porn is your schtick. MT

SCREENING DURING THE BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 5 -16 OCTOBER 2016

Rara (2016) | LFF 2016

Dir.: Pepa San Martin; Cast: Julia Lübbert, Emilia Ossandon, Mariana Loyola, Augustina Munoz, Daniel Munoz, Micela Christi; Chile/Argentina 2016, 92 min.

Filmmaker Pepa San Martin delivers a stingingly truthful portrait of family disintegration in her promising debut RARA, where a father uses the sexual orientation of his ex- wife to gain custody of their two daughters. Based on a true case in Chile, RARA is a sad account of judicial prejudice, told often in an ironic tone when describing situations bordering on the absurd.

In the Argentine city of Mar de Plata, Paula (Loyola) has left her husband Victor (D. Munoz) and taken their kids Sara (Lübbert) a maudlin teenager, and her much younger sister Catalina (Ossandon) to form a new family with. Lia (A Munoz). Things come unstuck when Sara tells her father about harassment at school because she lives with “two Mommies”, and Victor, a one time supporter of Pinochet in Chile, starts a court case to get custody of his two daughters, ably supported by a “tame” psychologist and his influential mother.

The catalyst of the narrative is Sara, whose teenage angst is driving her into the arms of her father, sometimes against her own will. Homelife for Paula and Lia is often problematic with the two arguing and causing friction between Catalina and her sister. At school, Sara’s best friend, Pancha (Christi), is everything Sara wants to be: slim, articulate, and indulged by her rich parents. Victor, manipulative by nature, uses Sara’s birthday party to alienate her from his ex-wife – after all, his house is much bigger than Paula’s. When Sara stays out late – just another attempt to copy Pancha – the situation boils over.

RARA, means strange in Spanish, and is certainly the situation finds herself in caused by adults who say something, but mean exactly the opposite. Sara flirts with co-student Julian, her sister is obsessed by a little kitten – their worlds do not meet. On top of it, Victor is a true macho man: when his new partner Nicole tells him to wash his hands before lunch, he immediately hits back, shouting at Sara to take her feet off the sofa.

RARA’s strongest moments are these small observations. The true victim is Sara, who is not only used by her biological parents as a pawn, but also is left to mother Catalina, since her father is hopeless at communicating with his girls and Paula is too engaged in her emotional struggle with Lia to notice, let alone care. Carried by Lübbert and Ossandon, RARE is always lively and tenderly humane as evoked in DoP Enrique Stindt visuals that contrast the two very different family homes, but also create lyrical scenes of the city, where Sara will find her freedom away from the interfering and selfish adults. AS

SCREENING DURING BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 5-16 OCTOBER 2016 | BERLINALE 2016 REVIEW

Moonlight (2016)|LFF 2016

Dir.: Barry Jenkins; Cast: Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, Andre Holland, Mahershala Ali, Naomie Harris, Janelle Monae, Jharrel Jerome; USA 2016, 110 min.

Barry Jenkins’ second feature MOONLIGHT is a mixed bag after the much-praised Medicine for Melancholy. High on atmosphere, but relying too much on atmosphere and restricted by a very episodic narrative, this gay interest drama is carried most of the time by great acting.

We first meet the main character, Chiron, in Miami, first as a small boy in Chapter One “Little”: Chiron (Hibbert) is running away from bullying kids, but his mother Paula (Harris) is not much help, since she is a good customer of the rather sensitive drug dealer Juan (Ali), who takes Chiron under his wing, helped by his partner Teresa (Monae). The dichotomy is that Juan is ruining Chiron’s home life, whilst fathering him at the same time. Chapter Two, “Chiron” sees the teenage boy, played by Ashton Sanders, questioning his sexuality, after an encounter with Kevin (Jerome). Torn between violence and passion, Chiron again ends up as victim. Chapter Three “Black” features the adult Chiron (Rhodes), who is a successful drug dealer, having pumped up his body meticulously in the gym. He meets a man from his past, and again, the quest for his own sexuality is the central answer to this episode.

Adapted from a play by Tarell McCraney by the director, MOONLIGHT leaves very much unsaid – behind the clichés – we suspect, there is a different Chiron hiding. The two main women in the film, his mother and Theresa, are not drawn out enough as real personalities and are mere cyphers, unlike Juan, who makes the most impressive impact on Chiron’s life. DoP James Laxton creates a wonderful mix between social and poetic realism. MOONLIGHT could have easily been set in South America; the glimmering light on the beach being central to the story. But some moments of magic do not compensate for the missing dramatic arc and dialogue which is often trite.

Certainly not a failure, MOONLIGHT nevertheless represents no progress for Jenkins; underlining the truism that any director’s second film is often the most difficult. AS

SCREENING DURING LONDON FILM FESTIVAL FROM 5-16 OCTOBER 2016

12th London Spanish Film Festival | 22-29 September 2016

The London Spanish Film Festival is back this Autumn for its 12th edition and a unique opportunity to watch some UK premieres at Ciné Lumière and the Regent Street Cinema. The season opens with La Novia, Paula Ortiz’s second film, based in Federico García Lorca’s classic Bodas de sangre and closes with, Endless Night (main picture) Isabel Coixet’s Berlinale 2015 title, which stars Juliette Binoche and Rinko Kikuchi, an intimate but rather portrayal of the relationship between two women from two opposite worlds.

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This year’s festival includes a Catalan Window with the fresh but solid debut, Les amigues de l’Àgata, and a drama about the battle of the Spanish Civil War, Ebre, which will be presented by the historian and Hispanist Paul Preston. Possibly the standout film is Victor Erice’s El Sur, a masterpiece about loss and memory, which also forms part of the BFI’s Pedro Almodóvar’s retrospective. Films in competition are marked with a **.

LA NOVIA**

Based on Federico García Lorca’s play Blood Wedding, which is considered one of his best works, La novia tells us the story of a tragic love triangle set in the deep South of Spain. Ortiz’s treatment of Lorca’s play is respectful and very close to the original poetic dialogue, while the photography of Miguel Amoedo enhances a fable-like atmosphere with nuances of a catastrophe. All performances are powerful but special mention deserves that of Luisa Gavasa, worth of a Greek tragedy, in the role of the cold-hearted widow, mother of the groom.

The film will be followed by a Q&A (tbc) with Prof. Maria Delgado (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama)

Thu 22 Sep | 8.40pm | £12, conc. £10 | Ciné Lumière

MARÍA CONVERSA

Dir. Lydia Zimmermann, with Blanca Portillo, Agustí Villaronga, Colm Tóibín | Spain | 2016 | 59 min. | col | doc | cert. PG | In Spanish with English subtitles | UK premiere

Blanca Portillo has one of Spain’s richest, unstoppable acting careers in film, TV and theatre. She won the Cannes Film Festival’s Palm Award for her work in Pedro Almodóvar’s film Volver and her work has been awarded several times.Zimmermann’s documentary follows the actress’s creative process as she prepares to incarnate María of Nazareth in Colm Tóibín’s play Mary’s Testament under the direction of Agustí Villaronga. A privileged and enriching insight into the work of one of the most interesting Spanish actresses of all times.

The film will be followed by an on-stage conversation between Blanca Portillo and Prof. Maria Delgado (The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama).

Fri 23 Sep | 6.30pm | £12, conc. £10 | Ciné Lumière

FALLING**

Alma and Aslan, now separated, meet in the place where they spent their best years married. While they remember their shared dreams and try to figure out what went wrong, Aslan tries to change Alma’s memories and make sense of them for a new life. Shot with a very small crew in the dream setting of the Dominican Republic, Falling is a very intimate film where the enormous talent of the actors thrives under the perceptive and sensitive direction of Rodríguez Rosell, who visited us with her debut film, Buscando a Eimish, also featuring Suárez and Ünel, a few years ago.

Followed by a Q&A with Ana Rodríguez Rosell, Emma Suárez and Birol Ünel

Sat 24 Sep | 6.30pm | £12, conc. £11, University of Westminster students £8 | Regent Street Cinema

LA PUERTA ABIERTA**

Through the years, we have programmed Marina Seresesky’s shorts (La boda and El cortejo) and are delighted now to show her first feature film, the moving, at times even poetic, story of Rosa, an embittered middle-aged prostitute living with her mother – who was a prostitute as well. When Rosa accepts to take Lyuba, an orphan little Russian girl, it seems that redemption might still be possible. Machi’s is a poignant, memorable performance. The humour is brought by a superb Etxeandia in the role of a foul-mouthed transvestite.

Followed by a Q&A with the director

Sat 24 Sep | 8.40pm | £12, conc. £10 | Ciné Lumière

A PERFECT DAY

Dir. Fernando León de Aranoa, with Benicio del Toro, Tim Robbins, Mélanie Thierry, Olga Kurylenko | Spain | 2015 | 106 min. | col | cert. 16 | In English, French, Serbian and Spanish with English subtitles

Fernando León de Aranoa’s film revolves around the efforts of a group of aid workers to remove a corpse from a well in an armed conflict zone in the Balkans. What initially seemed like a relatively simple task turns out to be a nearly impossible mission complicated by bureaucracy and the stubbornness of the population in conflict. The director achieves with remarkable skill, consistency between the different yearnings of the international, polyglot array of characters in a frustratingly complicated context. Like a Russian doll, the film is a drama inside a comedy, inside a road movie, inside a war movie…

Followed by a Q&A (tbc)

Sun 25 Sep | 6.30pm | £12, conc. £11, University of Westminster students £8 | Regent Street Cinema

BERSERKER**

Dir. Pablo Hernando, with Julián Génisson, Ingrid García Jonsson, Vicenc Miralles | Spain | 2015 | 100 min. | col | In Spanish with English subtitles | UK premiere

When Hugo Vartán, a struggling writer, finds out that someone he vaguely knows was connected to a murder, the next thing he does is to set out to investigate the facts and use the story to write his next book – which needs to be delivered in a few weeks. As his investigation progresses, Hugo finds himself entering an enigmatic, dangerous world that doesn’t belong to him. Will he go ahead with the investigation for his new book or will he stay away beware of any consequences it may have in this life? Hernando’s second feature film is an accomplished and compelling thriller balanced with graceful suspense.

Preceded by the short EL CORREDOR | The Runner

Dir. José Luis Montesinos, with Miguel Ángel Jenner, Lluís Altés | Spain | 2014 | 12 min. | col | In Spanish with English subtitles | UK premiere

Five years ago the boss closed the company and fired 300 workers. The first day that he goes out to run he meets one of them.

Followed by a Q&A with Pablo Hernando

Sun 25 Sep | 8.40pm | £12, conc. £11, University of Westminster students £8 | Regent Street Cinema

LOBOS SUCIOS**

Dir. Simón Casal, with Marian Álvarez, Ricardo de Barreiro, Manuela Vellés | Spain | 2015 | 105 min. | col | In Spanish and German with English subtitles | UK premiere

Manuela and the poor population of her small village in Galicia work in the mines retrieving and processing wolfram for the Nazis, who need this rare metal for the Third Reich’s war machine. When some of the miners plan a revolt against Franco’s military men and the Nazis, while her sister is helping Jews cross the border into Portugal, she must decide if she can remain neutral in a time of war. Inspired by real events in the early 1940s, Casal manages nonetheless to infuse the Galician mountains, forests and wolves with a mysticism and magic very much in line with the mythology of that part of Spain. Marian Álvarez, as usual, delivers here a powerful and nuanced performance.

Preceded by the short ECO | Echo

Dir. Xacio Baño, with Xosé Barato, Rocío González | Spain | 2015 | 20 min. | col | In Spanish and Galician with English subtitles | UK premiere

Echo’s voice was stolen and she was sentenced to repeat what everyone else said. Trapped, she decides to take shelter in a cave and to distance herself from human touch.

Followed by a Q&A with Lobos sucios’s Executive Producer and Scriptwriter Paula Cons and Nir Cohen, Film Programmer at UK Jewish Film

Tue 27 Sep | 8.40pm | £12, conc. £11, University of Westminster students £8 | Regent Street Cinema

NACIDA PARA GANAR** | Not What It Looks Like

Encarna, a thirty something girl from Móstoles (Madrid) traumatised from childhood by a joke made by the most successful comedy duo in Spain in the national TV, is trapped in a monotonous life between her selling mattresses and her hiding from her mother that her life-long lover is her old Geography teacher. For Encarna it seems impossible to change anything in her life… until she meets an old school friend whose life seems to be one success after another. Ironic, and cruel at times, Villanueva’s is a comedy with tinges of surrealism and esperpento in its most realistic way, which includes Victoria Abril playing a fictitious Victoria Abril.

Preceded by the short DETOUR

The adventures of a Spanish nymphomaniac smuggling drugs in Australia.

Followed by a Q&A with Eulàlia Ramón

Wed 28 Sep | 8.40pm | £12, conc. £10 | Ciné Lumière

ENDLESS NIGHT |Nadie quiere la noche

Josephine Peary is trying to reach her husband, who is in a geographic quest to the North Pole. Upon the impending arrival of the Arctic winter, she finds herself stuck with an Inuit woman and trying to survive the impossible conditions of the harsh climate and the scarcity of food. Inspired by real events, the intimacy of the two women is superbly shown by the Catalan filmmaker and the two actresses are at their very best. The costumes by Clara Bilbao together with Jean-Claude Larrieu’s cinematography make for some really stunning images.

Followed by a Q&A (tbc)

Thu 29 Sep | 6.30pm | £12, conc. £10 | Ciné Lumière

B A S Q U E W I N D O W

ACANTILADO** | The Cliff

Gabriel has to put his promising political career on hold when a mass suicide of members of a sect takes place and his little sister, Cordelia, whom he hasn’t seen for years, seems to be involved. With the help of his sister’s former lover, Helena, and the police inspector, Santana, he’ll try to find Cordelia and the sect’s leader. The beautiful cinematography of Javier Agirre captures the extraordinary landscape of the Canary Islands, helping evidence the emotional state of the characters. The thriller is based on Lucía Etxebarría’s book El contenido del silencio.

Against the stunning backdrop of Lanzarote, a poetic reflexion on life and unexpected encounters.

Followed by a Q&A with Jon Kortajarena

Fri 23 Sep | 8.45pm | £12, conc. £11, University of Westminster students £8 | Regent Street Cinema

AMAMA** | Grandma | Abuela

Amaia grew up in a farm with her parents, brother and grandmother. A video-artist, she finds inspiration in the context in which she grew up and, particularly, in her amama (grandmother) and in the conflicting relationship with her father, who remains firm in his traditional farmer beliefs. A poetic homage to the Basque rural world and matriarchy, a world that is disappearing, Altuna’s Amama is a film with several layers, which, in the end, aims for reconciliation between tradition and modernity.

A middle-aged man and a woman are the only people living in an abandoned village when lights start appearing in some of the empty houses. Their lives will never be the same again.

Followed by a Q&A with Asier Altuna

Mon 26 Sep | 6.30pm | £12, conc. £11, University of Westminster students £8 | Regent Street Cinema

PIKADERO**

The eyes of the Welsh filmmaker based in the Basque Country, Ben Sharrock, perfectly capture the mood among Basque youths caused by the economic crisis gripping Spain and making them unable to fly the parent’s nest. Penniless Gorka starts an unlikely relationship with Ane. Both broke, they try to consummate their relationship somewhere, in the car of Gorka’s friend Iñaki. The frustration in front of a hopeless future economic independence gets hold of Gorka, while Ane dreams of leaving for another country.

Followed a Q&A with actress Bárbara Goenaga

Mon 26 Sep | 8.40pm | £12, conc. £10 | Ciné Lumière

LEJOS DEL MAR** | Far From the Sea

Dir. Imanol Uribe, with Elena Anaya, Eduard Fernández | Spain | 2015 | 105 min. | col | In Spanish with English subtitles

When Marina, a doctor living in Almería, leaves her work place one day, the last thing she expects is to see Santi, with whom she had a terrible encounter when she was a child. Recently released, Santi, who has been in prison since then, has come to visit an old cell mate, who is terminally ill and whom Marina is taking care of. One of the most established filmmakers in Spain, with unforgettable films like La muerte de Mikel (1983), Días contados (1994) or El viaje de Carol (2002), Uribe offers us here a wonderful meditation on love, loss and absence with the support of the superb performances of two of Spain’s best actors, Fernández and Anaya.

Followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker

Tue 27 Sep | 6.30pm | £12, conc. £11, University of Westminster students £8 | Regent Street Cinema

UN OTOÑO SIN BERLÍN** | An Autumn Without Berlin

June comes back to her hometown after some time spent abroad, but her family and her first love are not the same. Like the southern autumn wind, June is going to change everything, getting back her place in the family and the dream shared with Diego of going together to Berlin. Izaguirre’s first feature film is, in a fresh and elegant way, a story about love and personal growth. Irene Escolar, sixth generation of one of the most established actors sagas in Spain, the Gutiérrez Caba, received a special mention for her work at San Sebastian Film Festival last year as well as the Best New Actress Goya Award. Tamar Novas, best known to British audiences for his work in The Sea Inside or Broken Embraces, delivers as well a strong and nuanced performance.

The film will be followed by a Q&A with the director

Wed 28 Sep | 6.30pm | £12, conc. £10 | Ciné Lumière

C A T A L A N W I N D O W

EBRE DEL BRESSOL A LA BATALLA** | Ebre. From the Cradle to the Battle | Ebro. De la cuna a la batalla

The Spanish Civil War as a war of attrition. In 1938 the War had already worn out both armies and the spirits of the whole population. The National army however had the support provided by Hitler and Mussolini whereas the Republican army was ignored by the rest of Europe as these countries were more worried about a possible world war. It is in these conditions that, in an effort to stop the National army from crossing the river Ebre, the Republic calls to arms thousands of youths aged 17 and 18. The story of some of these youngsters is narrated by Parrado with fresh enthusiasm and passion, all the while staying true to the facts.

Preceded by an introduction by Hispanist Prof. Paul Preston (London School of Economics)

Sat 24 Sep | 4.30pm | £12, conc. £11, University of Westminster students £8 | Regent Street Cinema

LES AMIGUES DE L’ÀGATA** | Àgata’s Friends | Las amigas de Àgata

Les amigues de l’Àgata is a thoughtful and delicate portrait of four young friends through the eyes of Àgata, now in her first university year, who sees how the relationship with her school friends is transformed in their lives in Barcelona as well as during a trip to the Costa Brava. An exceptional final thesis in which all four directors have shared all tasks, the film establishes itself as their opera prima, with the assistance and tutorials of, among others, Isaki Lacuesta and Elías León Siminiani.

The film will be followed by a Q&A with one of the directors

Sun 25 Sep | 4.15pm | £12, conc. £10 | Ciné Lumière)

SPECIAL SCREENING

EL SUR | The South

Dir. Víctor Erice, with Omero Antonutti, Sonsoles Aranguren, Icíar Bollaín | Spain/France | 1983 | 95 min. | col | cert. PG | In Spanish with English subtitles

In collaboration with the BFI, as it is part of Pedro Almodovar’s carte blanche for their full retrospective about him and upon their re-release of this timeless masterpiece, we are proud to programme Victor Erice’s melancholic reflexion on the passing of time and loss. He does so through the eyes of Estrella, a little girl who grows up in a town in the North of Spain, fascinated by the secrets and the past of her beloved father, who was raised in the South.

The film will be introduced by Geoff Andrew, film critic and programmer

Thu 22 Sep | 6.30pm | £12, conc. £10 | Ciné Lumière

THE 12 LONDON SPANISH FILM FESTIVAL 22 -29 SEPTEMBER 2016

Counting (2015)

Director: Jem Cohen

111mins Documentary US

‘Sleeping dogs; Waking cats; Straws that break the camel’s back

The subtle urban portraiture of Jem Cohen’s work could be described as tragi comedy in motion. His recent drama MUSEUM HOURS was a hit amongst the arthouse crowd but COUNTING is a straightforward documentary that explores the peripatetic fillmaker’s wanderings through New York, Moscow, St Petersburg, Istanbul and an unknown city in the Middle East (Islamabad?).

Taking the form of 15 different but interconnected fragments, a lose narrative gradually emerges that points to a World where everyone is in contact but no one is actually engaging; people are talking but no one is listening. So COUNTING feels like an intensely personal take-down of our contemporary cities where animals and people are increasingly bewildered and alienated from their urban surroundings.

Continually leavening his film with ironic commentary that juxtaposes images of alienated people, cats or dogs photographed against the urban landscape often with poignantly amusing signs, his acute observations reflect the state of play in contemporary society. Whether faintly amusing or poignantly sad, they put Terrence Malick’s saccharine Hallmark greetingcard platitudes to shame, making Jem Cohen a unique and inventive director who deserves more acclaim. A treasure not to be missed, but not his best outing. MT

ON RELEASE 20/9/2016 FOR BARBICAN ARCHITECTURE ON FILM SERIES | BERLINALE 2015 review

Rapture (1965) | Bluray release

One of the major rediscoveries on Blu-Ray/DVD has been John Guillermin’s 1965 film RAPTURE. This remarkable work had almost vanished from film history. On its initial release American critics were kinder than the British press but the film was largely ignored and under-promoted, failing badly at the box office. It was a classic case of general failure to appreciate cinematic tone and ambition.

RAPTURE effortlessly conflates the genres of gothic romance; fairy tale; psychological drama and even the brief early sixties fascination with films about mentally disturbed women. Lilith (1964), David & Lisa (1962), Repulsion (1965) come to mind here, and perhaps, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). Maybe RAPTURE’s purpose is to depict a tender coming of age story of a teenager ‘afflicted’ with mental heath issues.

Agnes (Patricia Gozzi) lives in a farmhouse in Brittany with her father Frederick (Melvyn Douglas) and their housekeeper Karen (Gunnel Lindblom). When they meet Joseph (Dean Stockwell), a convict who has escaped from a prison van, he and Agnes become sexually infatuated, their relationship threatening the overbearing hold that Frederick, now a retired judge, has over his daughter.

RAPTURE could easily have been a melodramatic mess. But with John Guillerman’s sensitive and understated direction the film’s all round superlative acting; Marcel Grignon’s beautiful photography – especially of seascapes and farm interiors; the lyrical music score (vintage Georges Delerue) and intelligent scripting (Stanley Mann) something very special develops. If there is one creative element that is crucial to the success of this marvellous film, it is the unforgettable performance of Patricia Gozzi in a difficult role that manages to avoid histrionics or sentimentality.

Her characterisation of Agnes is totally convincing in evoking fragile innocence, and ambition to unearth the deeper truths of her sexual awakening. She is forced to reconcile her own private world with the real world. Patricia Gozzi magnificently modulates a struggle between solipsism and a need for both intimacy and empathy with other people. Gozzi brings to her part such heartbreaking emotional power that makes it possibly one of the greatest female performances ever realised on film.

The scene where Agnes makes a scarecrow using her father’s old wedding suit,
takes the obsession to a whole new level – it’s the latent desire for an asexual object to be transformed into a real man. On a stormy night, Agnes’ wish appears to come true when the convict, dressed in scarecrow’s clothes, approaches her. Here Gozzi’s acting and Gullierman’s direction are powerfully integrated.

Patricia Gozzi was as remarkable in her earlier film Sundays with Cybele (1962). An interview with Gozzi, now in her mid sixties, appears as a DVD extra here. Sadly, there is no such interview on the RAPTURE disc. In tribute to Gozzi, the BFI should interview her onstage accompanied by a handful of films she made. If that never happens, then please go out and buy RAPTURE and celebrate Gozzi and everybody involved in its production. Alan Price

NOW ON DUAL FORMAT BLURAY DVD COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA

The First Monday in May (2016)

Director: Andrew Rossi | With Anna Wintour, Andrew Bolton, Wong Ka Wai | 90min | US | Doc

The first Monday of every May is a red letter day for the fashion industry worldwide. From New York, Andrew Rossi’s documentary explores the collaboration between the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute and its annual fundraising event, the Met Gala. He reveals the preparations leading to the evening when the world’s most recognisable figures in fashion, business and entertainment will unite to honour the spectacular 2015 exhibition China: Through the Looking Glass, curated by the Institute’s Andrew Bolton who attempts to unite contemporary and historical fashion with fine art, world history and film. The Met evening has burgeoned into one of the premier events of the New York social calendar since Anna Wintour took over the fundraising as co-chair, raising over USD 12 million for the Institute from this glittering soirée.

Where once only architecture, painting and sculpture were considered ‘art’ by the Met. Nowadays, thanks to Andrew Bolton, whose Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty exhibition was a breakout success and the eighth most popular show in the Met’s history, fashion has joined the critical list. Laden with concepts and intricate techniques, fashion, and in particular ‘haute couture’, transforms clothing into veritable works of art. This has changed the way art critics view fashion, according to Bolton, who plods around sockless in black lace-up brogues, half-mast trousers and a un-ironed shirt. Clearly the stress is taking its toll on the highly organised, and biddable Lancashire-born art supremo. His intelligent raciness adds a touch of class to the proceedings.

Alongside Bolton, Vogue editor-in-chief and eminence grise, Anna Wintour (Starbucks venti coffee permanently at hand) finesses the guest list, hoping to ‘lose’ a few B list guests, while sternly overseeing the general style of the evening in collaboration with filmmakers Wong Ka Wai and Baz Luhrmann who warn against tainting Chinese heritage with inappropriate influences. John Galliano, Jean-Paul Gaultier and Karl Lagerfeld also offer their opinions and insight into the world of haute couture.

Rossi certainly showcases the event and the exhibition to perfection in his comprehensive documentary that offers compelling viewing for those interested in the world of celebrity and fashion. America’s answer to Baz Bamigboye does some witty compering on the red carpet, buttering up a fur-strewn Rihanna before she unleashes her tribal-style opening song that has the ensemble guest list bopping and writhing to her command: George and Amal Clooney, Kate Hudson, Justin Bieber and Alicia Keys are all their acting their part in this opulent costume drama that feels rather grotesque. MT

NOW ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS

L’Hermine (2015) | Courted

Director: Christian Vincent

Cast: Sidse Babett Knudsen, Fabrice Luchini, Marie Riviere, Miss Ming

98 min | Drama | France

United with Fabrice Luchini, the star of his 1990 film La Discrète, director Christian Vincent’s drama COURTED observes the goings on in a courthouse in Saint-Omer, north-west France, where the trial of a presumed child murderer is taking place.

Judge Racine (Luchini) is presiding over the trial, he is not very much liked, his frigid manner and punitive nature earned him the nickname “Double-Figures” because of his severe sentences. The defendant, a young man is not very helpful, he simply repeats that he did not kick the four-year-old Mélanie to death. Racine, who is in the process of divorcing and lives in a hotel, comes down with a heavy flu at the beginning of the trial, which does not improve his mood. But soon enough, Racine mellows, when he finds out that one of the jurors, Ditte Lorensen-Coteret (Knudsen), is the anaesthetist he fell in love with in the hospital where she treated him after an accident. Suddenly, Racine becomes human and allows the defendant to go free, since it is clear, that he covered up for his girl friend, who was expecting another child at the time of the crime.

The meetings in a restaurant with Ditte show another side of Racine: he is a lonely man, only too willing to impress Ditte, even trying not to show his annoyance at her internet-obsessed daughter, who hijacks the rendeszvous of her mother. The visuals cleverly convey the two levels of this film: medium and wide shots dominate the court scenes, close-ups the restaurant scenes. Vibrant colours suffuse the romantic meetings, whilst in the court the light is harsh with all protagonists being more or less colourless ciphers. Vincent does not try to tell a story: L’Hermine is episodical and fragmented, only held together by Luchini’s personality, and it carries it well and very competently. There is a masterful dramatic tension here that leaves the audience always wanting to know more. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 30 SEPTEMBER | VENICE 2015 FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW | WINNER BEST SCRIPT AND BEST ACTOR

The Fencer (2016)

Cast: Mart Avandi, Liisa Koppel, Joonas Koff, Ursula Ratasepp, Hendrik Toompere

Director: Klaus Haro Writer: Anna Heinamaa

Cinematographer: Tuomo Hutri

Klaus Haro’s drama THE FENCER is a smalltown old-fashioned drama with universal appeal making it ideal as the country’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Oscar. Set in Estonia during the Soviet regime, it lacks the dramatic heft or character development for really engrossing viewing, veering towards clunkiness in its overly didactic approach. A rather stolid and pedestrian experience then, despite being impeccably filmed and impressively mounted.

It follows the story of Endel Nelis (Mart Avandi) who we first meet in 1952 when he arrives in the small town of Haapsalu in Estonia, which was under the Stalinist rule. Athletic and entrepreneurial, he starts up a fencing club which is soon the talk of the town where he meets young Marta (Liisa Koppel) and Jaan (Joonas Koff) and soon falls for Kadri (Ursula Ratasepp). But the fly in the ointment is the stern head master (Hendrik Toompere), who takes a dim view of his sporting activities simply because swords are involved. Coming up against the locals, the frustrated head master decides to undermine Niels’ popularity and begins digging for dirt on his rival, aided and abetted by a hostile political climate that is open to any kind of controversy and always ,ready to pursue negative claims against individuals.

And it does appear that Niels has something to hide in Estoni, but he is drawn between sporting heroism for the nation in an upcoming fencing tournament, and risking his own life by playing into Moscow’s hands. Kadri supports him with romantic gusto as the two lead their fellow Estonians into battle against the superior Russian team, a metaphor for Communism in its purest form. This is a rousing if rather reductive drama based on imagined events; a codicil confirms that the real Niels lived through the reign of terror finally dying in the 1930s but is still remembered for his fencing club. MT

Baden Baden (2016)

Dir: Rachel Lang | Cast: Salome Richard, Claude Gensac, Oliver Chantreau | France Belgium | 90min

French director Rachel Lang won a Silver Leopard at Locarno for a short film in 2010. Her rather slim feature debut follows the vacuous life of its young Strasbourgeouise heroine who dreams of greater things and richer emotional pastures after going back home to reconnect with past loves and install a shower in her grandmother’s bathroom.

Guaranteed to leave some viewers mildly irritated with its aimless plotline and rather pretentious characters whose ditzy exploits may intrigue others,. there are some laughs to be had in this realist drama with its brief moments of surrealism and sardonic humour.

Ana (Richard) is a film chauffeur who spends the opening scene driving round in circles to deliver the lead actress (Kate Moran) to the set on time and failing miserably. Excused by a sympathetic boss, she then takes the courtesy vehicle, a Porsche Panamera, for an extended spin all the way home where her likeable grandma, Odette (Claude Gensac, On My Way) promptly has a fall, literally bringing BADEN BADEN down to earth with a thud. The freewheeling nature of this arthouse drama gives the impression that Lang is making things up as she goes along or she may just be trying to convey the hit and miss attitude of her central character.

For want of anyone better, Ana gets back with her ex Boris (Olivier Chantreau), who shoots videos, and then is attracted by hunky Gregoire (Lazare Gousseau) who offers his plumbing services for the bathroom project, although it soon emerges that DIY is clearly not his schtick. Later Ana dreams of following Boris through some magical woods – clearly wishing him to be something he is not. BADEN BADEN could be seen as a metaphor for modern life trapped in a grim and directionless urban existence, conjured up by Strasbourg’s stark and featureless architecture, whilst longing for the romantic release and promise inspired by Le Corbusier’s stunning Notre Dame de Haut chapel seen through Fiona Braillon’s impressive camerawork. MT

ON RELEASE VIA MUBI FROM SEPTEMBER 2016 | BERLINALE 2016 review
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Norfolk (2015)

Dir.: Martin Radich

Cast: Denis Menochet, Bary Keoghan, Goada Letkauskaite, Eileen Davis, Sean Buckley

UK 2015, 83 min. Thriller

In the bucolic stillness of the Norfolk countryside, director Martin Radich (Crack Willow) shows a post-apocalyptic set up, were rival military gangs fight for survival.

NORFOLK explores the ever popular father/son relationship, which is, like the whole film, very opaque, not to say enigmatic; the characters don’t even have names. The father (Denis Menochet) is menacing and most of the time armed, like all the warriors in their various camps. His son (Keoghan) is a dreamer who looks in bewilderment at the world. Father and son have an array of old TVs in their decrepit house, where different programmes from the time “before” are playing. But when the father gets a call from his leader: his task is to take out a rival group of ageing mercenaries without showing any mercy. This extermination project disrupts the father and son dynamic and when a random girl (Letkauskaite) enters the plot, the boy falls in love with her. The girl is subjected to violence by the soldiers and runs away. Somehow the trio comes together again, father and son shooting at the old TVs, which they have lined up in the garden.

The lack of narrative makes it often difficult to understand what is going on here, one has to literally fight for any information. Nevertheless, the haunting atmosphere is just enough to hold our interest and the impressive actors, who seemed to be in the dark, as much as we are, glide by, like ships in the night. DOP Tim Sidell’s images carry the film embuing it with a nightmarish, glowering Norfolk. Nature is not pleasant here, but threatening just like the humans, who stalk each other. Overall, a strong paranoia perverts all interaction, and death seems like a welcome solution for most concerned. Norfolk is not for everyone, but it has a gloomy attraction. AS

NOW ON RELEASE AT SELECTED CINEMAS | REVIEWED AT EAST END FILM FEST 2015

Dare to be Wild (2015)

Director.: Vivienne De Courcy

Cast: Greenwell, Tom Hughes, Christine Marzano, Brendan Somers

100 min | Drama | ROI

First time writer/director Vivienne De Courcy makes an ambitious attempt to connect the highly organised Chelsea Flower Show with the adjective “wild” – personified in this case by the real life Irish garden designer Mary Reynolds, who won a Gold Medal there in 2002. Somehow, the filmmaker brings these contradictions together, even though the strain sometimes shows.

Mary Reynolds (Greenwell) grows up in the Irish countryside as a wild child, falling in love with nature. A headstrong young woman, she then moves to Dublin to try her luck as a landscape designer. But her first employer, Charlotte “Shah” (Marzano) steals her design book, and sells the designs as her own – before firing Mary, after marrying a rich Englishman. Luckily for Mary, she also falls in love – with Christy Collard – the leader of a band called The Green Angels, who lives in Cork and has a highly competitive relationship with his father Mike (Somers) who has a New Age group. Mary needs the help of these men for her project at the Chelsea Flower show, where she wants to re-create a nature garden – not forgetting the £250 000, which are needed to enter the competition. But Christy, although very much in love with Mary, goes back to Ethiopia, where he leads a campaign for re-forestation, telling Mary that this project is much worthier than her Chelsea project and putting their love on the back burner.

De Courcy does her best to create a very lively drama, with Mary travelling the world, but never losing sight of her target: winning at Chelsea. Greenwell is vey apt at portraying the young woman as a mixture of stubborn, adventurous and naïve. She carries the film singlehandedly, and lets the audience forget the many contradictions and implausibilities of the storyline. Gorgeous to look at, Cathal Watters sumptuous visuals paint a glorious background, and particularly the African environment is shown impressively. The Chelsea settings are a also brilliantly re-constructed, complete with an actor impersonating Prince Charles having a word with Mary. In reality, he helped her create her own garden project at Kew Gardens, the first designer for 250 years to be honoured this way.

Somehow DARE TO BE WILD is true to Reynolds’ spirit of preservation and protection, the desire to return to our naturalistic gardens and to the simple beauty of the environment, rather than the manicured phoniness of many of the showcased contemporary gardens where props have taken over from reality. AS

THE CHELSEA FLOWER SHOW 25 – 29 MAY 2016 | DARE TO BE WILD IS ON RELEASE FROM 23 SEPTEMBER 2016

Trezoros (Treasures) The Lost Jews of Kastoria (2016)

TREZOROSDir.: Lawrence Russo, Larry Confino; Documentary; USA 2016, 93 min.

For many centuries Jews and their Greek Orthodox neighbours have co-existed peacefully in the picturesque Greek town of Kastoria, on a peninsula near the Albanian border. The two communities celebrated their Holy Days together, Christians visited the Jews for Passover, Jewish citizens celebrated Christmas with their friends. On Good Friday the Jews lit the fire for their friends, every Sabbath Christians returned the favour.

The multi-cultural idyll would come to a traumatic end in March 1944, when German troops deported nearly one thousand Kastorian Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Just thirty-five survived, some of them tell their stories to filmmakers Lawrence Russo and Larry Confino (Racing Romans) from Kastoria, Thessaloniki, Athens, Tzur Moshe, Tel Aviv, Miami, Los Angeles and New York.

In October 1940 Italy invaded Greece from Albania, which they had occupied. But the Greeks fought back and soon half of Albania was in their hands. In April 1941 the Germans came to the aid of their Italian Allies, occupying Greece. But German troops soon left Kastoria, which was occupied by Italians who did not share the Germany’s racist racist stance. But eventually Italy capitulated in June 1943 and the Germans entered Kastoria on the night of March 23rd, and whilst black snow was falling from the ashes of Vesuvius, they captured all the Jewish pupils in the local Girl’s School and deported them two days later to a camp in Armintio, from where they were transported to Auschwitz. Only Maurice Rosso escaped but warned his Christian friends, not to help them: “Don’t hide us, they will kill you too”. Lena Elias Russo and her brother Beni Elias tell their stories in this observational yet poignant portrait of survival.

Never cloying or sentimental, Treasures is a melancholic good-bye to an era of Greek multiculturalism, destroyed by the Nazi machine. The individual stories about the camps are heart-breaking, and beyond our comprehension. TREASURES pictures a microcosm of the greatest mass-murder in human history; the few survivors of this Greek tragedy scattered all over the world, having to re-built their lives, never being able to forget their families who perished, or the life they once had shared with them. AS

SCREENING DURING THE RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL London | 27th 5.45pm in VUE Piccadilly then October 14th in New York Village Theater cinema | November 2 in Melbourne | from 26th November in Los Angeles Music Hall cinema

Shadow World (2016)

Dir: Johan Grimonprez | Doc | 94min | Belgium

In his well-crafted documentary based on Andrew Feinstein’s book. Johan Grimonprez tries to flesh out and shed further light on the well-known but nonetheless inflammatory subject of arms trading and, crucially, the finance governments receive from the racket. Whilst our leaders try to distance themselves from it, they condone the damage it causes by perpetually greasing the wheels of the gravy train that rolls on from one to the next, like a lucrative hot potato.

The evidence is all there and is masterfully curated by Grimonprez and corroborated by talking heads and witnesses who profess incredulity. The whole process started back in the 80s during Ronald Regan’s time in office when the term ‘special relationship’ with the UK’s Margaret Thatcher was first coined (and later passed to Blair, Bush and Obama) and led to and facilitated a profitable trade with Saudi Arabia that escalated into an ubiquitous state of perpetual international conflict – still happening today – and ‘affectionately’ termed (and I use that term ironically) the ‘War on Terror’.

According to the alledged findings of Shadow World, which seem entirely plausible – this is a conflict that shows no signs of abating, and why should it when one considers the positive contribution that it has made to those concerned. Not a documentary that will make you leave the cinema laughing. MT

NOW OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE from 17 SEPTEMBER 2016 | Bertha Dochouse W1

SHADOW WORLD

Early Murnau 1921-1925 | Bluray release

DIE FINANZEN DES GROSSHERZOGS (THE FINANCES OF THE GRAND DUKE)

Dir.: F.W. Murnau; Cast: Mady Christians, Harry Liedtke, Robert Scholz, Alfred Abel; Germany 1924, 80 min.

This attempt at a satirical comedy is one of Murnau’s minor films. Scripted by Thea von Harbour from a novel by Frank Heller, the action is rather complex, and the audience is left often wondering how to connect the many strains of the narrative.
Grossherzog Don Ramon XXII of Abacco (Liedtke) is in dire financial trouble. He is an early version of a playboy, and his creditors want to take his whole island away from him as the sulphur deposits promise enormous profits. Trying to stir up trouble, by paying some ‘revolutionaries’ to stir up trouble, the creditors make his life difficult and Don Ramon’s only hope is a marriage to Grossfürstin Olga of Russia (Christians), but she is also in trouble, having to run away from home, chased by her enemies. Don Ramon and his brother (Scholz) try to get in contact with the dubious adventurer Philipp Collins (Abel), who seems to be in contact with Olga.
In spite of the convoluted narrative, Die Finanzen is enjoyable, mainly due to producer Erich Pommer and the DoPs Karl Freund (Metropolis) and Franz Planer (Die drei von der Tankstelle).

SCHLOSS VOGELÖD (THE HAUNTED CASTLE)

Dir.: F.W.Murnau; Cast: Olga Tschechowa, Paul Bildt, Paul Hartmann, Lothar Mehnert; Germany 1921, 75 min.

Even though The Haunted Castle is mere colportage, the atmospheric tension is astonishing. Again produced by Pommer, Murnau excels in creating a haunting atmosphere with a minimalistic narrative.
At castle Vogelöd, a hunting party has gathered – but the harmony of the meeting is disturbed when Count Johann Oetsch (Mehnert) arrives unsolicited. He is suspected to have killed his brother – although the presence of the widow (Tschechowa) and her second husband, Baron Safferstadt (Bildt), makes it impossible for him to stay. But Oetsch has played his cards shrewdly: he has impersonated a priest, to whom the Countess has confessed that Baron Safferstadt is the murderer of her first husband. Safferstadt commits suicide.
The eerie atmosphere is all down to DoPs Laszlo Schaffer (Berlin, Sinfonie einer Grosstadt) and Fritz Arno Wagner (M), the script an early work of the great Carl Mayer, who later emigrated and died, aged only 49, in London.

PHANTOM

Dir.: F.W. Murnau; Cast: Alfred Abel, Lya de Putti, Aud Egede Nissen, Lil Dagover, Frida Richard; Germany 1922, 125 min.

Again scripted by Thea von Harbour, based on a novel by the great German playwright Gerhart Hauptmann, Phantom is classical “Street” film, as categorised by Kracauer. Here, the middle-class hero is driven by his love for a “Flittchen” to a life of crime, but is redeemed by his incarceration.
Lorenz Lubota (Abel) is injured by a collision with a carriage. He is a poor clerk, and fancies himself as a poet. The collision changes his character, he falls in love with the upper-class young woman (De Putti), who was a passenger in the carriage. But her wealthy father is against the relationship, and Lorenz turns to a pleasure-loving girl (De Putti, again), who spends his money. She involves Lorenz into a robbery of his aunt, who is killed by a accomplice. After his rehabilitation Lorenz returns to his long suffering wife.
The original version had many allusions to Abel’s mental illness but the surrealistic images were edited out by the production company who feared that the length of the film might put the audience off. Still Axel Graatkkaer (Erdgeist) and Theophan Ouchakoff visual mastery is very impressive. Phantom’s narrative is very much in line with “bookend” structure, so popular in the silent film era.

DER LETZTE MANN (THE LAST MAN)

Dir.: F.W. Murnau; Cast: Emil Jannings, Maly Delschaft, Hans Unterkircher; Germany 1924, 90 min.

Seen as the pinnacle of German silent films, The Last Man is best remembered for the Emil Jannings’ portrait of the hotel porter and Karl Freund’s camera, which showed the narrative out of the subjective viewpoint of the main protagonist.
The porter (Jannings) of the posh Westend Hotel Atlantic, who lives in one of the backyards of the slum-like estates in the backstreets of Berlin, has been proud of his spectacular uniform all of his life: his job is compensation for the poverty he lives in after returning to his flat. But one day, the manager (Unterkircher) of the hotel decides that the porter is too old for his position, and relegates him to bathroom attendant. The porter is distraught, but tries to keep this demotion a secret from his family. At the marriage party for his daughter (Delschaft), he attends in his old uniform, which has been stolen. But soon his scam is detected, and feels even more dejected. He seems to be a beaten man until a rich hotel guest dies in his arms, leaving him his fortune. The porter now becomes a guest in the Atlantic, where everybody grovels to him.
The happy-end was enforced on Murnau and his writer Carl Mayer by UFA producer Erich Pommer. But Murnau shot the last sequences in a very distant way, making sure that the audience understood the artificiality of the ending. The Last Man is not social realism, but a psychological drama. The film is shot from the POV of the porter, and DoP Karl Freund used something resembling a camera crane – sometimes he ties the camera round his chest. In the opening shot, the camera travels in the lift, and is afterwards fixed to a bicycle, which crosses the huge foyer.

TARTÜFF

Dir.: F.W. Murnau; Cast: Werner Krauss, Lil Dagover, Emil Jannings; Germany 1925, 70 min.

Carl Mayer’s script of Moliere’s comedy pars down the play to more or less the leading trio of Tartüffe, Orgon and his wife Elmire. Further more, he used the popular “Bookend” construction for a contemporary angel, when a young actor warns his uncle of the machinations of his housekeeper.
Emil Jannings plays the title character, a religious hypocrite who lusts after Elmire (Dagover) who is the daughter of the gullible millionaire Orgon (Krauss), who all but convinces Orgon to hand over his daughter and all his wealth in exchange for Divine absolution. But at the last moment, an emissary of the King arrives, and arrests him. Again, like in The last Man, the happy-end in Tartüffe, was forced: dictated to Moliere by the French censors – in the original version he gets away with his scheme.
Again Carl Freund’s camera is the real star of the film, which is full of innovative camera angles and spidery shadows, that crawl over the actors and sets, which seem out of proportion. Overall, Murnau’s Tartüffe looks very much like Caligari – which is no surprise, since PD Walter Röhrig worked on both films. AS

AVAILABLE FROM 26 SEPTEMBER 2016 COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA

Cecilia (2016)

DIR.: PANKAJ JOHAR | Documentary | India/Norway | 83 min.

Director/producer/DoP Pankaj Johar (Still Standing) has invested a great deal of emotional energy in his documentary CECILIA: becoming a participant rather than a detached observer in this tragic film about child-trafficking.

Cecilia Hasda was 54 when she arrived in Delhi from her village in Bengal (1500 km away) to housekeep for Pankaj Johar and his lawyer wife, Sunaina, in the first year of their marriage. Almost immediately Cecilia finds out that her daughter Mati, 14, has been found dead in Dehli, having hanged herself. Cecilia is naturally distraught, and Pankaj and Sunaina try to help her investigate the circumstances of Mati’s death. The couple shamefully admit that they have employed children as young as twelve to work for them when they finally discover a child-trafficking ring, led by a certain Rafiq, who ‘bought’ Mati in her home village, obviously with the consent of her father – and, as it turns out, the consent of the whole village. In turns out that all the villagers are in league with Rafiq and his men, paying them to procure household staff.

Researching the widespread issue of child-trafficking, Johar and his wife meet the campaigner Kailash Satyarthi, who has fought against the practice for twenty years, just before being awarded the Nobel Peace Price. Mati’s employers approach Cecilia offering her compensation for her loss, on the proviso that she agrees to swear to an affidavit that they treated Mati well. But soon it becomes clear that Cecilia’s husband is attempting to have Rafiq freed from jail. Cecilia learns that he has agreed to the affidavit on the basis that he was divorced from her at the time when Mati started work in Dehli, so making it impossible for Cecilia to pursue the case further.

Pankaj and Sunaina travel with Cecilia twice to her home village, but are frightened away by the villagers, who blame Cecilia for setting the police on them. At one point Sunaina is so upset she admits: “I don’t trust anybody in this country”. And it turns out that she is right: the villagers and her husband put Cecilia under pressure to take back the accusations against Rafiq. Returning to her home village for good she steadily becomes an alcoholic.

Working on three levels, CECILIA is a testament to the evils of child trafficking; an exposé of the financial benefits of the racket to the police and legal authorities (who are well compensated); and a portrait of a middle class Indian couple who finally wake up to the stark reality of their domestic lives. At least Pankaj Johar accepts his co-responsibility for the injustice he exposes in this brutally frank documentary. AS

SCREENING AT BERTHA DOCHOUSE | www.dochouse.org for tickets

Neglected British film directors | Seth Holt

Our series on British filmmakers who deserve another look, Alan Price explores the work of SETH HOLT (1923 -1971)

The DVD release of Seth Holt’s Nowhere to Go (1958) is a timely reminder of one of England’s most intelligent and original directors. Holt’s first feature has a European noirish energy that’s prescient of ideas to be later fully realised over the Channel. Critics citing the initial feature of the French New wave choose Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge (1958). In December of that same year, Nowhere to Go was released – the last film produced by Ealing Studios and the most un-Ealing of films.

Nowhere to Go has the texture and atmosphere of a Jean Pierre Melville crime movie, displays a smoother sense of narrative expediency (or qausi-jump cuts) just before Godard’s Breathless (1960) and carefully creates a gritty, though stylised, realism comparable to Joseph Losey’s early British productions. It also contains the screen debut of Maggie Smith; revealing that amongst Holt’s many talents was his sensitive direction of women. Susan Strasberg, Carroll Baker and Bette Davis star in later Seth Holt films. Those performances can rank with their very best work.

What most distinguishes Nowhere to Go is the remarkable editing. Holt’s apprenticeship was as an editor on such distinguished films as Mandy, The Lavender Hill Mob and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. You have only to watch Arthur Seaton (Albert Finney) going through his tedious routine, on the factory lathe, in the opening of Reitz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, to experience cutting of an admirable precision. Finney’s great line, “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” is memorably overlaid on the soundtrack as he grinds out a never ending line of machine parts.

Holt’s editing of his own films was approached rather differently. Back in 1982 the magazine Film Dope published an interview Holt had given in 1963, but which had not previously seen the light of day. Here Holt mentioned the word syncopated in relation to editing. “It isn’t quite the same as simply overlaying. You cut away just off where you feel the emphasis should be, and it gives quite an exciting rhythmic texture.”

In Nowhere to Go we see the beginning of Holt’s concern with rhythm. Essentially the film is a man hunt drama with Paul Gregory (George Nader), an escaped criminal, trying to collect money from the sale of stolen valuable coins kept in a safe deposit box. The fragmentary way Holt employs Dizzy Reece’s excellent jazz score, each time he is thwarted in his efforts to get the money, is suspenseful and slightly out of kilter. The effect of this collision of sound and image reveals Gregory’s isolation and frustration. Holt (pictured above) presents us with scene after scene where all of Gregory’s scheming and effort leads to a desperate nothing. Back to the Film Dope interview. Holt regards Gregory as a central character “who doesn’t seem to feel very sorry for himself.” Kenneth Tynan wrote the script together with Holt and together they tried to break away from the stereotyped image of the British screen criminal. In Nowhere to Go Holt introduces the idea of betrayal and the complexities of deception – a theme of all his subsequent films.

Critics have been rather facile in taking the title Nowhere to Go to describe Holt’s ‘unfulfilled’ career in British cinema. Too often they’ve spoken of the director’s ambition unrealised and/or compromised. David Thompson wrote that Seth Holt produced “six features of unrelenting promise” To which I would add that they are also six features with much that’s unrelentingly successful. Holt’s cinematic rewards greatly compensate for any flaws. And Seth Holt definitely had somewhere to go with his next three films: Taste of Fear, Station Six Sahara and The Nanny.

In Taste of Fear Holt pulled off a very atmospheric Hammer film. Its wheel-chaired heroine, Penny (Susan Strasberg) is certainly devoid of any obvious self-pity. The film’s plot is an old and creaky one about the efforts of a stepmother Jayne (Anne Todd) and her chauffeur lover, Bob (Ronald Lewis) to murder daughter Penny and claim a large inheritance. Screenwriter Jimmy Sangster was no Kenneth Tynan. His plot contrivances can appear, after the credits role up, to have seriously undermined things. Yet you are gripped by Holt’s immersive and canny direction, with its subtle framing of scenes (such as wheel- chaired Penny edging towards a swimming pool at night). Of course it’s a Hammer project. But Seth Holt is no Hammer House style director. With its Psycho influenced shock moments, Taste of Fear pushes out into a subtle exploration of character. Unfortunately, Holt’s visual skill at suspense is at variance with Sangster’s obvious solutions. This very good horror film doesn’t quite come off because the characters are just a little too stock to fully come alive. All the film’s excellent acting finally fails to overcome the machinations of the plot.

The case made for Seth Holt’s failure to make his career blossom has been put down to alcoholism, rubbing film industry executives up the wrong way and being landed with projects unworthy of his talents. You can make a case for Holt’s drinking and difficult temperament (even Bette Davis found him a ‘ruthless’ director). However he could work wonders with well worn themes and genre clichés. In The Nanny, Bette Davis delivers, post-Baby Jane, a really chilling performance. Her passive/aggressive response to children and stealthy control of parents is not due solely to her enormous talent but Holt’s skill in getting his great star not to over-act. You only have to compare Davis’s over the top and rather unpleasant performance in The Anniversary, to see that Holt could make his screen women a driving force through powerful understatement. Again it is a Jimmy Sangster script and there are problems. But this is certainly not the “spirited pot-boiler” dubbed by Time Out. For Holt creates a sharp cat and mouse game of rivalry and deceit between Nanny and her ten year old boy (William Dix) just released from a psychiatric hospital.

The Nanny (1965) is a good film, but coming straight after the remarkable Station Six Sahara (1962) an anti-climax. For of all his films, and the reason why Seth Holt should be better known today, Station Six Sahara crackles with great originality and confidence. Perhaps it’s because the film is an English/German co-production, made in the desert and he had more freedom on the shoot. Like Joseph Losey, Holt had an acute sense of hypocrisy, sexual repression and class tensions. Yet he didn’t necessarily need the social setting of England in order to play out such conflicts.

Station Six Sahara is enacted in an oil pumping station in the Sahara desert. The boss is Kramer (Peter van Eyck) a German, ex-military man. Second in command is Macey (Denholm Elliot) another army officer and ex pat. Fletcher (Ian Bannen) a working class Scot, Martin (Hansjorg Felmy) a younger Southern German and Santos (Mario Adorf) make up the rest of the crew. A tense game ensues between the snobbish Macey and the vulgar Fletcher. Macey receives more letters than anyone else. Fletcher buys one letter from Macey with his month’s salary. The undisclosed letter is tauntingly employed as a possible love letter against the arrogant Macey. Though only an important secondary story of Station Six Sahara, it makes for some wonderfully funny scenes of class anger. Denholm Elliot and Ian Bannen give terrific performances and obviously relished Brian Clemens’ and Bryan Forbes’ script.

This sold letter plotline, the clash between the two efficient Germans, and an excitingly directed poker game scene, replete with the hot and sweaty atmosphere of the desert, make up the first third of Station Six Sahara. When Catherine (Carroll Baker) and her ex-husband Jimmy (Biff McGuire) crash their car into the station we are into more interesting sensual and sexual developments. Catherine is no longer in love with Jimmy. She is a free, and importantly for a 1962 movie, a liberated woman. Catherine chooses her men for sex. Kramer cannot control her, neither can any of the other men. She cannot be dominated.

You might feel that at this point Station Six Sahara would fall into some cheesy and steamy melodrama. Yet Holt, and the film’s writing, sends it into other directions.

Carroll Baker’s sexy character manages to be blousy, sultry, calculating and ultimately sad. Holt’s direction sides with Catherine, then criticises her but allows a sympathetic and strong personality to emerge. In no way, does Holt voyeuristically play up the box office appeal of Carroll Baker. The scene where she’s sitting outdoors dressed in a bikini and shorts was obviously meant as a selling point for the film. Catherine is well aware of being sexually provocative, yet she’s even more determined to just sit around in the sun and damm any man who approaches her (Carroll Baker pitches her fine performance with a knowing ambivalence). Kramer rushes over to complain and ‘cover her up’. Catherine makes us positively share her anger at his intervention.

Holt’s interviewer in Film Dope, says of Station Six. “Would you be offended if the film were called pornographic?” To which Holt replies, “I prefer the term erotic.” Indeed it’s the erotic tension of the film that makes for its unpredictability. Though the eroticism is concentrated on Baker, it is also subtly diffused amongst the male relationships. Their macho behaviour has limits. Any instant sexual gratification proves sweet, short and is frustratingly terminated. Without being gay or homoerotic there’s a strong sense of frustrated love for each other arising out of the boredom and routine of an isolated work place. Vulnerability and loneliness is written into their roles. They’re failures and misfits, leftovers from the nationalism and imperialism of WW2 now stuck in the desert. Station Six Sahara creates its own world of intense moods and atmosphere. It feels like the work of an accomplished auteur. And behind his authorship Holt’s ‘syncopated’ editing is strikingly original and intelligent. Holt says he subscribed to Eisenstein and Pudovkin theories, but he never bludgeons us with a Russian dialectical montage. Whenever he employs Ron Grainger’s score and much uncredited African music it is done with aim to unsettle the audience emotionally. These disruptions or ‘omissions’ in the story contain visuals that are personally tuned to each actor. Holt always knows where to place his camera and challenge the viewer. And with Station Six’s desert location and sets, Holt and photographer Gerald Gibbs conjure up a weary, bleached look that beautifully complements the story.

After this near-masterpiece, Holt’s final three films The Nanny, Danger Route, Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb can appear artistically subdued. Yet they have their moments, insights and excitement. Apart from Bette Davis’s presence, The Nanny contains some fine visual framing of her vindictive behaviour. Danger Route (a sub-Bond like thriller) picks up twenty minutes into the film when Holt is obviously enjoying directing Diana Dors. And it picks up even more at the end when Carole Lynley is imaginatively observed and killed by her lover and rival spy played by Richard Johnson.

Sadly Holt died, aged only forty eight, on the set of Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb. This Hammer production was hurriedly finished by Michael Carreras – and it shows despite Holt’s own material achieving an ancient Egyptian strangeness that equals the best films of the Mummy genre, and (like Danger Route) echoing his themes of treacherous behaviour.

Before his death Holt was originally up for producing If… But that was handed over to Michael Medwin and Lindsay Anderson. The rest is sweet film history. Though if Holt had had a go at the public school system I doubt that his and Anderson’s ego would have got on well together.

We are left with so few films. Along with Holt’s four excitingly directed episodes of the TV series Danger Man, and apart from Station Six Sahara, they are easily available on commercial DVD’s (though Danger Route is a bootleg issue). But the absence of an official DVD release of Station Six Sahara is the biggest injustice of all for Seth Holt. You can only buy a DVD bootleg version online. Or watch all of the film on the Vimeo website plus view extracts on YouTube.

Holt has a small and faithful cult following. And Martin Scorsese is reported to be a great admirer of Station Six Sahara. Can you intervene, Martin? Help to have it re-mastered onto BLU-RAY and organise an outing on the big screen of this criminally neglected film, please! Alan Price

The 9th Life of Louis Drax (2016)

Dir: Alexandre Aja | Cast: Sarah Gadon, Aaron Paul, Aiden Longworth, Oliver Platt, Jamie Dornan | US Drama | 90min

Filmmaker Alexandre Aja bases the premise of this tonally up the spout but enjoyable supernatural thriller on the belief that any human life, no matter how damaged, can be valuable and build connections. Adapted for the screen from Liz Jensen’s 2004 novel, this is watchable and rather wacky largely due to Max Minghella’s engaging script and a wonderful central performance from Aiden Longworth as the little boy who dies after falling into freezing water and is brought back to life becoming quirky and amusing in his therapy sessions. “When I grow up, I’d like to sit in a chair and say ‘how does that feel,’ for a living”. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE

El Sur (1983) BFI Southbank

Dir: Victor Erice, DoP: José Luis Alcaine | Cast: Iciar Bollain, Sonsoles Aranguren, Omero Antonutti, Aurore Clement, Lola Cordona, Rafaela Aparicio, Francisco Merino, and Maria Caro | 97min | Drama | Spain

Enigmatic and soulful, El Sur reveals its slow-burning narrative as tentatively as sunrise on a winter’s day. In the opening scenes, a young girl gradually awakens in the penumbral darkness of her room to realise that her life has changed forever, as the film unspools, the memories of her childhood play out and gently crystallise into this moment of wistful sadness when all that has gone before suddenly become clear in the exquisite metaphoric dawn. This is a rare and subtly nuanced study of a father daughter relationship.

Victor Erice’s painterly depiction of Spain in the 1950s expresses the conflict of Civil War through a domestic tragedy that takes place in the family’s ‘chalet’ in the Logrono countryside near Madrid. The South and Seville is imagined as a sultry El Dorado of movie stars and exotica. It is also the birthplace of young Estrella’s father (Omero Antonutti) who in turn dreams of a glamorous starlet Irene Rios (Aurore Clement) whose name Estrella finds scribbled in his bookcase in the sequestered antic of their home.

Estrella, played as a child by Sonsoles Aranguren and a teenager ny Icíar Bollaín, tries to understand the adult world around her which is fiercely traditional one held under the of General Franco’s rule, where women stay timidly in denial at home and men got on with being men. “I grew up more or less like everyone else, getting used to being alone and not thinking too much about happiness.” But Estrella forms a charismatic bond with her father, feeling more compatible with him than her straight-laced mother, and the two share a rich interior life of reverie against the backcloth of their dank and dismal provincial life.

Victor Erice’s EL Sur is an elegantly understated drama about childhood that actually benefits from its modest running time of 97 minutes although the director had hoped to create a lengthier film envisioned a lengthier venture and got the Stroheim treatment, the half that remains is nevertheless exquisitely lucid and tender about childhood’s shifting emotional spaces. The drama is soberly shot in burnt ocres and muddy browns synonymous with Franco’s grim regime and the starkness of Northern Spanish winters Erice but spices up this cold terrain with sensuous moments: cognac and cigars in the Gran Hotel, a pasa doble plays at a wedding; and Film Noir posters in the local cinema that capture the imagination and beckon Estrella to a life beyond her lonely childhood. MT

VICTOR ERICE AT THE BFI SOUTHBANK | JULY 2023

The Brother (2016)

Director|Writer: Ryan Bonder

Cast: Anthony Head, Jed Rees, Belinda Stewart Wilson, Tygh Runyan

86min | Crime thriller | UK Canada

This slick and rather enigmatic crime thriller is made on British soil with Canadian money and a transatlantic feel that gives it the edge over most contemporqry Britlicks of the genre. It also has a well-chosen Canadian\British cast which gives a shot of international glamour to a story that could have been rather more pedestrian in British hands. Ryan Bonder was born in Canada but latterly came to London where he honed his craft shooting commercials in preparation for his second feature THE BROTHER which he describes as ‘thematically resonant with the rest of my work – about Memory, Identity and Loss’.

The story is straightforward and unfolds in linear structure: Adam Diamond escaped the family business of international arms dealing to set up a new carefree existence. His past crashes in around him upon the arrival of his brother, who brings news that his father’s (Anthony Head) health is failing, leaving him to pick up the pieces of a deal about to sour.

Of course, English actor Anthony Head’s gritty performance as the spaced out pater familias scratching on the foothills of Alzheimers keeps it firmly tethered to its London territory along with Brian Johnson’s impressively shot cityscapes, but this is no sweary, overtalky caper. Quite the reverse, it feels spare and rather refined at times and despite some brutal bouts of violence, such as Head’s hand being staplegunned to the floor (obviously Bonder had the Kray Brothers in mind), his two sons are Canadian actors who adds a twist of suaveness to the proceedings, along with Bjorknas’ ominously stylish score that ramps up to the feeling of underlying tension, making THE BROTHER a compulsively watchable but ultimately rather unsatisfying experience. MT

NOW OUT ON RELEASE FROM 16 SEPTEMBER 2016

Clair Obscur | Tereddut (2016)

Dir.: Yesim Ustaglu; Cast: Funda Eryigit, Ecem Uzum, Mehmet Kurtulus, Okan Yalabik, Serkan Kesucin, Sema Poyraz

100min | Turkey/Poland/France 2016 | Drama

Writer/director Ysim Ustaglu is known for her soulful portraits of characters in challenging circumstances in Turkey. Her latest Clair Obscur is about two women who, at first sight, seem to have very little in common. But as the harrowing narrative unfolds we learn a lot about the fate of many women in Muslim society – regardless of their social status.

Shenaz (Eryigit) works as a psychiatrist in a hospital in small seaside town. One of her patients, a teenager called Elmas (Uzun), has been found one morning on the balcony of the flat she shared with her husband, Koca (Kesucin) and her mother-in-law Kaynana (Poyraz). The older woman, a diabetic, is found dead in her bed, while Koca died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Elmas seems to have no memory of the night in question, but Shenaz works patiently with her to unblock her memory.

It soon emerges that Elmas had to marry her husband, who was in his forties, when she was only thirteen. Her father had her passport changed, and she was literally carted off straight from school. From the first days of their marriage, Koca literally rapes Elmas every night, causing her physical and emotional distress. Shenaz doesn’t fare much better, despite her more privileged background. Her jealous boyfriend is a great cook but a lousy lover who tries to control her. But when Shenaz finally finds someone else, her boyfriend threatens to kill Shenaz and himself.

Clair Obscur is a sensitively told drama but some may find it too opaque and ambiguous; the relationship between Shenaz and the two men in her life only becomes clear at the very end. And her therapy sessions with Elmas show positive results in days – this would take months or even years in a real setting. Still, Eryigit and Uzun are convincing as the two distraught women, and DoP Michael Hammon makes the claustrophobia of their marginalised lives seem real despite its modern day setting, using muted colours in the maritime locations. Clair Oscur is similar in tone to the work of Ustaglu’s fellow countryman Nuri Bilge Ceylan, presenting a unique female voice from Turkey. AS

CLAIR OSCUR won the Golden Tulip Award | Best Feature | Antalya Film Festival 2016

The Fixer | Fixeur (2016) | TIFF 2016

Director: Adrian Sitaru Writers: Adrian Silsteanu, Claudia Silisteanu

Cast: Sorin Cocis, Tudor Istodor, Mehdi Nebbou, Diana Spatarescu, Adrian Titeni

110min | Drama | Romania

Romanian New Wave drama The Fixer asks a simple question: how far are we prepared to go to get ahead in our increasingly competitive world? A young Romanian father and hungry trainee journalist at a French network uses a topical sex scandal as an opportunity to make his mark in Adrian Sitaru’s sombre and intense fifth feature, whose non-judgemental stance leaves us to find our own way in the moral maze.

The translator and general ‘fixer’ Radu Patru (Tudor Istodor) pricks up his ears when a breaking news story involving two underage Romanian prostitutes creates an international scandal. Doing his best to get an interview with the girl involved, without compromising his own moral scruples, Radu soon realises that there is a thin line between professional journalism and dishing the dirt.

Themes of fatherhood, misogyny, and the class divisions of contemporary Europe percolate through Claudia Silisteanu’s clever script but sadly none of the performances really stand out, making it difficult to engage or empathise with any of the characters, although Tudor Istodor is probably gives the most appealing turn. Shooting in Bucharest and Transylvania, co-writer Adrian Silisteanu dark and desaturated hand-held photographs do their best to capture the dark days of Communism linking the contemporary world with the past in an intriguing but sometimes intractable piece of filmmaking that requires intense concentration to follow the storyline. MT

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL UNTIL 18 SEPTEMBER 2016

Questi Giorni (2016) | These Days | Venice 2016 | In Competition

Dir: Giuseppe Piccioni | Drama | Italy | 119min

Festival head Alberto Barbera openly lamented the lack of strong Italian titles at this year’s Venice festival and this piece of contemporary social realism certainly confirms his views. An everyday story of cardboard characters it has the luminous presence of Margherita Buy but not even she can save it from the banality of a plot and script that is vapid in the extreme.

Four young women decide to go to Belgrade: you could pick the characters off the shelf: one has cancer; another is a lesbian, the third is pregnant and the fourth has a bad boyfriend. Nothing stands out in their colourless performances and they all appear interchangeable in their personalities. Then there is Professor Mariani (a greying middle-aged man) who tries to be funny in a vain attempt to get off with one of them who must be half his age, and his pupil into the bargain. Meanwhile Margherita Buy’s character, a single mother, flits around desperately trying to gain acceptance by the younger girls, one if whom is her daughter who treats her with utter contempt.

THESE DAYS is reductive, poorly thought out and derisory to women in general and is hopefully not coming to a cinema near you. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL UNTIL 10 SEPTEMBER 2016

Paradise | Rai (2016) | Best Director | Venice 2016

Fir: Andrei Konchalovsky | 130min | Drama | Russia, Germany

Russian veteran Andrei Konchalovsky has been making films for fifty years and bringing them to Venice where he first won the Volpi Cup in 1966 with his debut Pervvy Uchitel. His élatest Golden Lion hopeful PARADISE interweaves three tragic lives during the Second World War – Olga, a Russian countess and member of the French Resistance; Jules, a French collaborator; and Helmut, an aristocratic German SS officer.

PARADISE is a dense and romantically complex piece that provides an intense experience for those who have the stamina for its complicated episodic structure, despite superb performances and outstanding cinematography from Russian DoP and regular collaborator Alexander Simonov (Postman’s White Nights) who also worked with the sadly missed Alexei Balabanov (Brat, Cargo 200). The velvety black and white visuals and combination of 35mm and 16mm perfectly conjure up the war years from 1942-44 and there is sumptuous and intimate attention to detail and lighting throughout the film’s graceful interiors and more grisly scenes in claustrophobic concentration camps evoke a keen sense of confinement. The only scene where freedom is felt is in flashback to the pre-war years where Olga and Helmut frolic on a rooftop (main picture).

Olga is played by the sinuously elegant Russian actress Julia Vysotskay who we first meet after her imprisonment for having taken two Jewish children under her wing in occupied Paris. In the offices of genial police interrogator Jules (Christian Duquesne) she is écross-examined and deftly turns the table on him by seductively opening her legs. In exchange for a Grand Cru classé (1919) she agrees to meet him the following day. But the rendezvous is never to be as Jules is later assassinated while in the woods with his son Emile.

Olga is then sent to a concentration camp but again siezes her chance for freedom when the camp’s rambunctious chargé d’affaires is caught for cooking the books, by Olga’s willowly ex-lover Helmut (Christian Clauss) who hires her as his very personal maid, and as the Nazi’s luck runs out the pair plot their escape via Switzerland until tragedy intervenes.

Scripted by Konchalovsky and Elena Kiseleva, the story unspools via sketchy face-on interviews with Jules, Olga and Helmut dressed in prison garb. These are interlaced with the action scenes and where the film requires intense concentration, making it difficult to engage with the characters and their story. Viktor Sukhorukov’s cameo as Heinrich Himmler is a fascinating interlude but is voiced by another actor in Russian and German, with some technical glitches.

And so PARADISE – an attempt by the Nazis to create a perfect Aerian world – becomes Paradise Lost. Despite the rather complicated mise-en-scene this is nevertheless an achingly beautiful and resonating picture of wartime from one of Russia’s most outstanding filmmakers. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL UNTIL 10 SEPTEMBER 2016

White Sun (2016) | Venice 2016

Dir: Deepak Rauniyar | Drama | Nepal | 94min

Deepak Rauniyar brings the only Nepalese film to Venice 2016. A delicately drawn and poignant paean to peace after a decade of civil war between Maoists and royalists (1996-2006), it takes place in the foothills of the Himalayas where nearly all the adult males have been wiped out leaving the only the weakened elders.

This is not a political film but a subtle and often intimate intergenerational cinéma vérité style parable where politics often rears its ugly head disrupting the characters’ relationships. Co-written by Rauniyar and David Barker, it takes place in the village of Nepaltra where the sudden death of the former mayor Chitra (Prakash Ghimire), poses a tricky problem: how to remove his body from the house to start the tortuous process towards the riverside where it is to be cremated according to strict traditions governing who can come into contact with the cadaver. There are no strong men to help.

Luckily, Durga (Asha Magrati) is a clever and strong-minded villager who appeals to ex-husband Chandra to make the journey from Katmandu to give his assistance, along with his brother. The long-standing rivalry between Chandra (Dayahang Rai – a famous star in his native Nepal) and his brother Suraj (Rabindra Singh Baniva) adds grist to the dramatic mill along with the fact that Durga’s young daughter Pooja (Sumi Malla) is neither his biological daughter, not that of his sibling. The subsequent journey downhill gives rise to some magnificent local views, all shot on the widescreen, as we get know the colourful local characters amongst whom is 10-year-old porter Badri (Amrit Pariyar), who has known nothing but war, and Deepak Chhetri’s priest who is the feisty star of the film, determined at any price to to resist change, in this thoughtful and deeply resonant arthouse drama. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL UNTIL 10 SEPTEMBER 2016

The Bad Batch (2016) | Venice 2016

Director: Lily Amirpour

Cast: Suki Waterhouse, Jason Momoa, Giovanni Ribisi, Yolonda Ross, Jayda Fink, Cory Roberts, Louie Lopez, Keanu Reeves, Jim Carrey, Diego Luna

115min | Fantasy Drama | US | Iran

A girl walks out alone into a psychedelic desert of cannibals and crazed criminals in Lily Amirpour’s startling but generic follow up to her standout vampire drama A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night making this a visually exciting but narratively torpid experience despite its Mad Max pretensions. The Bad Batch is a brutal and bewildering blowout of surreal and dreamlike sequences that plays with some exciting toys but they all belong to other filmmakers such as Alejandro Jodorowsky, Robert Rodriguez and even Arturo Ripstein.

Outstaying its welcome at nearly two hours, the slim narrative wreaks of genetic or ethnic cleansing and suffers from longueurs, but the buzzy and inventive visuals make it almost worth the ride. Performances are adequate from the ensemble cast; the standout being Keanu Reaves who plays an almost sympathetic cult leader called The Dream. Ex-model Suki Waterhouse looks the part and is adequate as Arlen, the heroine loses an arm and a leg at the start of her journey into a dystopian, incandescent hell of lurid lights, surreal encounters accompanied by a sparky selection of eclectic tunes including All That She Wants, tracks from Chilean artists Darkside, South African hip-hop band Die Antwoord, and indie ambient musician Francis Harris..

After escaping from a penitentiary’s ‘bad-batch’ (delinquents) into the Texan desert, she is abducted by cannibals and maimed for their tea. Being a spunky girl with taut abs, attitude and ‘fear’ tattooed on her fingers, she escapes on a skateboard and is picked up by Jim Carey’s mute wayfarer who takes her in his shopping trolley to the Comfort community who dwell in a walled city where she is equipped with a prosthetic leg and so on. Her search for a suitable soul mate (no kidding) makes her yearn for love and a stocky Mexican called Miami Man could be the answer, but remember – this is dystopia.

The Bad Batch looks sensational and offers light-hearted fun while it lasts but its emptiness leaves you unsatisfied when the titles roll. MT

Venice Film Festival until 10 September | SPECIAL JURY PRIZE WINNER 2016

Rocco (2016) | Venice Film Festival 2016

Dirs: Alban Teurlai, Thierry Demairziere | 112min | doc | Italy, France

The “Italian stallion” Rocco Siffredi always prayed he would be famous. Growing up in the Adriatic town of Ortona fame eventually came thanks to “the devil between my legs” fuelled by a massive sex drive that started at an early age. Worshipping his mother Rocco is also a perfect example of the ‘madonna whore complex’ and has a fascinating ability to probe the women he meets both physically and emotionally despite his ordinary looks.

ROCCO is quite simply the self-indulgent story of his journey from council house to penthouse that starts here in the film studio where he is grooming his prospective – mostly East European – ‘porn starlets’ as he talks about his life, his mother and wife Rosa – whom he met on the set of Tarzan X, Shame of Jane . They now have several children. Siffredi has starred in more than 1,500 films over his 30-year career and also had a brief foray into French indie cinema, appearing in Catherine Breillat’s Romance and Anatomy Of Hell. Now in his early fifties, Siffredi has also decided to bow out due to disenchantment with the industry that has financed his entire life.

ROCCO is a well made: a glossy, big screen personalised version of what you might expect to see in online porn sites and, with a threadbare narrative, certainly overstays its running time of nearly two hours. But then porn sells. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL UNTIL 10 SEPTEMBER 2016

One More Time With Feeling (2016) | Venice 2016

Dir-: Andrew Dominik | with Nick Cave | Biopic | UK | 112min

Embracing the overwhelming grief Nick Cave is feeling due to the death of his son, New Zealand filmmaker Andrew Dominik has chosen to film his biopic in black and white, and with “ridiculous handheld 3D camera” – his words precisely but with the help of Benoit Debie and Alwin Kuchker things finally get on track. Leaving the 3D glasses off detracts nothing from the well-observed but overlong picture of the musician’s experience since the death of his son. Cave brings his own witty stream of consciousness to the party, as we watch the film taking shape in the studio during a pre-recording session.

With his seemingly idyllic life: a wife and soulmate, and twin sons – actor, writer and musician Nick Cave confessed to having it all in Iain Forysth’s (far superior) 20,0000 On Earth. Here he pours his grief on losing a child into a string of striking lyrics (“your legs are so long they should come with their own elevator”). He now confesses to occasionally feeling “an object of pity”, a fact that does not fit well with his own self image, but his natural self-deprecation prevents this from sounding narcissistic. Cave also admits that songs can foretell certain events, as dreams can be visionary, and this is something he shares with his wife whom he describes as multi-facetted. Clearly death and bereavement has brought them even closer together. But as he gets older he feels that “the struggle to do what I do requires more effort”.

The test of a successful biopic must surely be that it offers entertainment not only to fans but appeal to wider audiences. And here Dominik largely fails as the format and filming detracts from the subject matter. Despite these obvious flaws ONE MORE TIME WITH FEELING adds a certain something to the Nick Cave experience that will appeal to his many fans and resonate with the bereaved arthouse audiences. Let’s hope there’s more great stuff to come from this engaging musician and lyricist. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL UNTIL 10 SEPTEMBER 2016

Tabl (2016) | Drum | Venice Settimana della Critica 2016

Dir.: Keywan Karimi, Cast: Amirezza Naderi, Sara Gholizade; France/Iran 2016, 95 min.

First time feature film scriptwriter/director Keywan Karimi crafts a disturbingly bleak and noirish picture of life in contemporary Tehran – the city’s name being the only concrete reference to its reality. The narrative is opaque, but everyone can decypher the code used. In October 2015 Karimi was sentenced to one year in prison and 223 lashes for defying the laws of Iran. He is still in a state of limbo, waiting to start his imprisonment.

The film opens as a lawyer (Naderi) is visited by a limping man who dumps a parcel on his desk and disappears. Soon afterwards, the lawyer’s flat is searched, and gets a visit from a man threatening with grave consequences if he does not give up the parcel. The harassment continues, and the lawyer is forced to oeave his flat, sleeping rough or taking a room in a hotel where he meets his girlfriend (Gholizade). The only other person he trusts is his best friend, who happens to be a drug addict. Tragedy eventually forces the lawyer starts to wreak revenge.

DRUM is a Kafkaesque nightmare with images worthy of any Bela Tarr film. Whilst the audience is made well aware of the enemy, the main protagonist is stubborn enough not give in to “them”. Tehran is very much a character here, portrayed as a nightmarish vision of never-ending staircases and vertiginous apartment blocks spelling danger, even in the modern hotel where the lawyer meets his girlfriend. Nothing is safe: the bleakness of the day is just a shade lighter than the nighttime, where most of the action is set. DoP Amin Jaferi evokes a world of shadows and doom where interiors are sparsely lit prison cells. Words do not help: they are either threats or enigma, the Farsi language has lost much of its meaning. Without naming the authorities in Iran, Karimi holds up a mirror to them: they have created a world of fear and hopelessness. What remains is individual resistance, the only way to bring light into the madness created by religious fanatics.

This is not the first time that a filmmaker has been threatened by authorities at home, whilst his film is being shown at a film festival abroad. DRUM is a promising debut. Let’s hope Keywan Karimi’s reprieve follows as soon as possible. AS

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL UNTIL 10 SEPTEMBER 2016

Paths of Glory (1958)

Dir: Stanley Kubrick | Cast: Kirk Douglas, Adolphe Menjou, Ralph Meeker, George Macready | USA 1958, 87 min.

Paths of Glory was Kubrick’s first foray into the battlefield, based on the true story of French soldiers refusing to obey orders. Anti-war films often fall into the trap of somehow glorying the war action and showing the heroism of the soldiers. But there is nothing heroic about Kubrick’s men in the trenches: in all their human frailty, they are afraid of pain rather than death. The film opens in half darkness and eerie silence, a mixture of fog and smoke, the black and white images forging together in chiaroscuro perfection, each frame painstakingly composed. A long and haunting tracking shot meanders through a trench in the run-up to battle, witnessing the terror etched on soldiers’ faces as they prepare for the onslaught. In contrast, the generals meet in elegant drawing rooms, full of antique furniture and the opulent ballroom scenes anticipating the ones in Visconti’s Il Gattopardo.

Kubrick’s narrative is set during the third year of WWI. The French General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) hints to his subordinate, General Mireau (George Macready), that he might become a three-star general if he leads a successful attempt to capture a heavily armed German position, called “The Anthill”. Mireau knows that this is a near impossible task, risking the lives of the 8000 men under his command. But he soon convinces himself: “But, by god, we might just do it!” Colonel Dax (Douglas), having protested against the attack, is leading the action on the battlefield, which turns out to be the disaster he was afraid of. In the end Mireau even orders his own artillery to shoot on his own men, but his orders are refused. To save his promotion, Mireau finally orders three ordinary soldiers (drawn by lots) to be shot for cowardice, since his plan of attack was “perfect”. Dax defends the three in a military tribunal, but even though more evidence of incompetence of the planning comes to light during the trial, the men are condemned and executed.

The class structure of society still exists in times of war and is demonstrated by the scene of the three condemned men in the cell awaiting their execution: one complains that the cockroaches will probably survive him and continue to enjoy family life. His comrade in arms squashes the cockroach with the words: “Now you have the edge on him”.

The camera captures the ”upstairs-downstairs” scenario perfectly: the hectic action scenes, and the dolly-shots of the ball scenes, only one example of the variety. Douglas is the standout, a repressed soldier who will prove his worth when confronted by his murderous superiors. The final scene of Paths of Glory is as unexpected as brilliant: in a pub, a group of French soldiers are celebrating when a German girl, a prisoner, is forced onto a make-shift stage to sing “Ein treuer Husar”: the soldiers hum the familiar melody, not knowing the German text.

A startling ending to an impressive production which the French authorities were obliged to ban until 1975. It was also banned during Franco’s Spanish dictatorship, it was an embargo that would last until 1986, ten years after his death. Once again Kubrick’s work was to send resonating ripples through the Western World: a fitting tribute to the Great War that changed the World forever. AS

COMING TO BLURAY ULTRA HD IN FEBRUARY 2024

American Anarchist (2016) Venice Film Festival 2016

Dir.: Charlie Siskel. Documentary; USA 2016, 80 min.

Providing compelling viewing filmmaker Charlie Siskel (Finding Vivian Mayer) interviews William Powell, the author of the infamous ‘The Anarchist’s Cookbook’ (still available on Amazon) in his home in Massat (France) shortly before his death in July 2016. Siskel relentless probing style and cross examination often has the effect of makimg the audence sympathise with Powell who gradually emerges as a man who has suffered emotionally during his peripatetic childhood – he was only 19 years old in 1970, when he wrote the provocative manual that lists amateur bomb-making methods during a time where the US was experiencing a period of cultural and societal shifting, similar to that seen in France with the student riots.

Powell was the eldest son of the spokesman for the UN General Secretary, and he went to be schooled privately in a UK boarding school were he felt as alienated for his ‘English upperclass accent’ as he did later on his return to New York State where was expelled from ‘a school for delinquent children of the rich’. He confesses to feel most at home in countries where he is an outsider, explaining his reason for settling in a remote part of rural France.

The near civil war atmosphere in the USA druing the Vietnam War at the end of the 1960s, made many outsiders like Powell feel that the time for revolution had come. After all, Lincoln himself had written about the right of the population to raise up against the government. The Anarchist’s Cookbook sold about 2 million copies – not bad for a book mainly copied from US Army handbooks, and found in public libraries. Powell himself sold the rights to his publisher Lyle Stuart for 10000$, and got royalties of around 5000$. Unfortunately for the Powell, 65 at the time of the film, when ‘interrogated’ by Siskel it also emerges that his book was found in the possession of the perpetrators of the Columbine School shooting, and the Oklahoma City tragedy amongst many others. “Would you villify the makers of guns?” points out Powell, who maintains his innocence although confesses to feeling a certain amount of regret, if not remorse.

Nevertheless, Powell comes over as haunted man: his whole career in schooling pupils with special needs in Asia and Africa, was blighted by the “Cookbook”: he lost countless positions and always lived in fear that his youthful tract would catch up with him. What is surprising, is the fact, that neither Powell nor SIskel discuss the role of the USA gun lobby and State Weapon laws in the terror acts of the past. After all, the Columbine killers bought their weapons on the net! Who needs “The Cookbook” when they can buy weapons like sweets.

It is the US-gun culture, who is far more responsible for the violence in the streets than any books – and it is defended by politicians of both major parties. As long as no changes in the law are enforced, the status quo is an invitation to run amok – never mind the political/religious affiliation of the disturbed psychopath.

William Powell died suddenly this summer after one year into shooting of the documentary. He atoned all his life for his youthful provocation, helping young students to channel their alienation and aggression into something constructive. As for Siskel: we should thank him for his efforts as a filmmaker, which are invaluable. But one would except a little bit more humility from a man who was involved in controversy himself as a filmmaker of Finding Vivian Mayer and co-producer of Michal Moore’s Bowling for Columbine. Nobody should throw stones – never mind the glass house. AS

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2016 | UNTIL 10 SEPTEMBER 2016

Theo and Hugo (2016)

Directors: Olivier Ducastel, Jacques Martineu

Cast: Geoffrey Couet, Frqncois Nambot

97min | drama | France

This ‘boy meets boy’ drama deftly handles tonal shifts ranging from euphoria to anxiety to offer a slightly flawed but engaging experience of gay coupledom. What starts out as an 18 minute unbridled orgy in a Parisian sex dive (severely testing viewers’ attention spans), leads to a breezily romantic nighttime bike ride for Theo and Hugo (newcomers Couet and Nambot) who then make the angst ridden discovery that they have had unprotected sex and this leads to a blow by blow procedural of their medical treatment.

Capturing the freshness realisation of new love this drama will be a winner with the LGBT crowd or those drawn to bold filmmaking. MT

OIT ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 9 SEPTEMBER 2016 | BERLINALE REVIEW

Hell or High Water (2016)

Dir: David Mackenzie. Writer: Taylor Sheridan | Cast: Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine | 102min | UK/US | Crime Drama

HELL OR HIGH WATER is a rangy arthouse western with a witty political undercurrent courtesy of actor turned writer Taylor Sheridan who wrote Sicario. British director David Mackenzie (Starred Up) continues to impress with a Texas-set heist led by a laconic Jeff Bridges (with an undecipherable Texan drawl) And Texas is looking a bit tired round the edges as brothers Toby and Tanner (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) embark on the dodgy business of robbing banks. The humour sparks from their cynical repartee as they go through the motions of petty crime for paltry financial gain.

Toby and Tanner get down to business early in the morning so as to steal a march on the banking staff before they are really geared up for the day. This is a high-risk business, and they only take small amounts of untraceable bills so it’s not worth the bank’s while pursuing charges. Toby, a divorcé, was very much the apple of his mother’s eye and the sole beneficiary of her will, leaving him in control of a family property on oil land which he has signed over to his kids in trust. The bank heists have become a way of life rather than a desperate need, but he still goes through the motions to support his brother Tanner, a career criminal who got nothing in the Will, so there is a kind of irony in the plotline that spikes the dark humour.

Meanwhile, the Texas Ranger Marcus (Bridges) has his eye firmly fixed on their trail through his Wayfarer sunglasses. His partner Alberto (Gil Birmingham) is a Native American and they share an affectionate relationship – this is the kind of film that doesn’t pull its punches – with some politically incorrect racial jibing – in the best possible taste. Marcus is on the verge of retiring but reticent to throw in the towel knowing that not much else awaits him but the inevitable, and the two of them mooch around town checking in at the same old diner where the feisty old local waitress would certainly give them the cold shoulder if they went too far off the main menu selection by ordering the trout like some out-of-towner did back in 1987.

Nominated for a fistful of Oscars this is an upbeat crime thriller with some vicious dust-ups and convincing action scenes between Marcus, Toby and Tanner that feel at home in the sun-baked landscape of New Mexico and Arizona. MT

ON NETFLIX

The Blue Room (2014) | La Chambre Bleue

Director: Mathieu Amalric | Crime Romance | France | 76min

Mathieu Amalric bases his directorial debut, in which he also stars, on a 1964 crime thriller from Belgian detective Simenon. Lushly erotic, highly stylised and superbly shot on the Academy format by the capable Christophe Beaucarne, it will please the art house circuit with its skilful performances and clever fractured narrative. After making love to his mistress Esther (a sinuous Stephanie Cléau) in the eponymous blue room, tractor magnate Julien (Amalric) goes home to his lovely wife (Léa Drucker) and daughter. The story jumps forward to show him being cross-examined by a local magistrate (a masterful Laurent Poitrenaux) as it transpires that his affair with Esther is not as simple and compartmentalised as has hoped for. As the story flips backwards and forward further clues gradually emerge, fleshing out the storyline but at leaving the details as shady as Esther’s background. The Blue Room is a workable and sophisticated piece of cinema that offers good entertainment, but many critics questioned why it premiered in the Un Certain Regard sidebar at Cannes on its release. Those in the know will realise it was due to Amalric’s close relationship with the festival. Bijoux, smart and entertaining – it’s certainly a film to be proud of. MT

OUT ON MUBI FROM 26 AUGUST 2016

Sámi Blod | Sami Blood (2016| Venice Film Festival

Writer| Dir. Amanda Kernell

Cast: Lene Cecilia Sparrok, Mia Erika Sparrok, Maj Doris Rimpi, Julius Fleischandrl, Olle Sarri, Hanna Alström, Malin Crépin, Andreas Kundler, Ylva Gustafsson

110min | Sweden/Denmark/Norway.

Amanda Kernell brings her Sámi heritage to this impressive feature debut, a fresh and painterly portrait of Sweden’s little known history of racism and colonial domination, set during the 1930s and seen through the eyes of a fiercely precocious teenager who is determined to make a future for herself away from the Lapp reindeer-herding community of her childhood.

Kernell’s masterly command of framing, cinematography, script and tone is laudable and her ability to evoke powerful emotions through her central characters sets her out as a real talent in the making. SAME BLOOD also raises the profile of the Sami community and their fight for a future which very much connects to a global narrative of survival for small communities all over the world.

The girl in question, Ella Marja is played by newcomer Lene Cecilia Sparrok as a young teen, and Maj Doris Rimpi as an elderly woman (based on the director’s own grandmother) who we first meet in the opening scenes where she has renounced her rheindeer hearding community, an event which sparks off her memories of the past which unspool gradually forming the central narrative. From the beginning Ella Marja is different from her school friends who are all happy to wear the Sami national dress in their local school.

After humiliation during a visit from Swedish scientists when she is forced to strip naked for the collection of genetic data she runs home and is set upon by a group of local Lapp louts. Deciding to call herself Christina, she then runs away to Uppsala where she reconnects with a wealthy Swedish boy she danced with at a party. The two develop a chemistry of sorts and she later turns up at his home in the mistaken belief that Swedish hospitality is as welcoming as that of her native culture. But his parents are clearly suspicious of his intentions and urge him to get rid of her, fearing she may get pregnant or become dependent on him. After attempting to join an expensive local boarding school, she finds her way back to his birthday party one night, and is cajoled into singing a traditional Sami yodelling song, as they look on condescendingly as if she if some circus clown.

Kernell makes great use of the magnificent skyscapes of Lapland and the elegance of Uppsala’s buildings and ‘beautiful people’ with impeccable attention to period detail, sumptuous fashions and glorious Scandinavian interiors . SAME BLOOD is one of the gems of the festival so far. MT

GIORNATI DEGLI AUTORI | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL UNTIL 10 SEPTEMBER 2016

Anthropoid (2016)

Writer\Director.: Sean Ellis

Cast: Jamie Dornan, Cillian Murphy, Charlotte Le Bon, Anna Geislerova, Toby Jones, Jiri Semek

120min | Czech Republic/France/UK, 120 min.

Three years after success with his multi-award winning thriller Metro Manila. Sean Ellis turns his focus back on Europe with an ambitious WWII thriller ANTHROPOID, based on the assassination of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, acting Reichs Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. His death has been planned by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, and was carried out by two Czechoslovakian soldiers, trained by British SOE Forces in London, on May 27th 1942 in Prague and was a turning point in WWII. The event has been the subject of several feature films, notably the Czech production of The Assassination, and Operation Daybreak. HHhH (Himmler’s Brain is called Heydrich), based on the novel by Laurent Binet, directed by Cedric Jiminez to be released later this year.

Heydrich, chief organiser of the Final solution at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin in January 1942, was soon to be ordered back to Berlin by Hitler, to be promoted to run all occupied countries, setting him up as The Führer’s heir. Heydrich was by far the most intellectually competent member of the Nazi leadership, which he proved in his position in Prague, carrying out his reign with stick (nearly completely liquidating the Czech resistance movement), and carrot, paying the Czechoslovakian workforce decent wages to raise their productivity in the factories – unlike his compatriots, who literally starved to death the foreign workers in the countries under their control.

Sean Ellis acts as his own DoP, as well as writing, directing and producing and has chosen the name of the operation, Anthropoid, for his version of the campaign. A hand-held camera retains a gritty, indie feel to the piece which is shot in intimate close-ups and on the widescreen, offering magnificent vistas of Prague. The assassination endeavour was riddled by bad planning, hampering the progress at nearly every stage. When Jan Kubis (Dornan), Josef Gubcik (Murphy) and Karel Kurda (Semek) parachute into the Czech countryside, Jan and Josef are separated from Karel. The two are injured and have lost their equipment but soon have to deal with two traitors, before they even set out for Prague. There the underground agents, led by Jan Zelanka-Hajsky (Jones), are aghast at the proposal to kill Heydrich. They are aware that a successful attempt would bring revenge from the Germans – as it happened, over five thousand Czechoslovakian citizens lost their lives in the Germans reprisals, among the nearly the whole village of Lidice. But Kubis and Gubcik are adamant, and finally Zelanka gives in and supports the trio, Kurda having joined them after a visit to his family. Jan falls in love with Maria, Josef with Lenka (Geislerova). The women are very different: Maria emotional and full of histrionic outburst, trying to deny the danger they are in; Lenka, the daughter of an officer, has no illusions about the outcome as is calm and controlled.

The scenes in the countryside are feels like a noir-western: darkness prevails, the environment is as hostile as the human opponents. Prague is magnificent, full of twilight and foggy mystery; human relationships are fragile, but again, it never really gets light, shadows linger everywhere. The grandiose finale in the church is again a return to the western motive: the Alamo, were the brave outlast the enemy, superior only in numbers, for an eternity, before darkness falls. Performance-wise Cillian Murphy as Josef is the standout: strong and full of integrity while retaining his vulnerability in the scenes with Lenka. Toby Jones makes a believable and utterly sober, always reinventing himself as her with a fine portrait of Uncle Hajsky, and Hana Frejkova makes an appealing Mrs Lukesova, who shelters the pair while they plan their mission. Ellis crafts his central characters carefully and appealingly in the early domestic-based scenes and we invest in them enough to care what happens at the denouement. ANTHROPOID is an exercise in resistance: the human spirit triumphs over all obstacles, as in Lang’s Hangmen also Die, the tyrant is caught by fate as much as human struggle. AS/MT

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 7 SEPTEMBER 2016

The Net | Geumul (2016) | Venice 2016

Dir: Kim Ki-Duk | Cast:

Cast: Ryoo Seung-bum, Lee Won-gun, Kim Young-min, Choi Guy-hwa

112min | Korea | Thriller

Nobody wins in Korean maverick Kim Ki-duk’s latest film – a brutal North|South ‘defection’ tragedy that opened the new Cinema del Giardino at Venice Film Festival 2016.

With moments of dark and lacerating humour and a really grim scene where a potential North Korean spy gurgles to his death by swallowing his own tongue, this is a social and political story that condemns both the Communist regime in the North and the South’s rampant Capitalism showing that, at the end of the day, both are morally and politically corrupt and unsatisfactory for completely different reasons – although the North Korean hero, an honest fisherman who thinks the grass is still greener in his homeland until the mournfully tragic denouement.

When his fishing boat breaks down in a slim stretch of water between North and South, sending it into the ‘no go’ zone, he is captured by the South Korean security forces and remanded for questioning. Although he answers openly and frankly, his assigned investigator is an embittered sadist who is desperate to convict him for spying against the South and subjects him to a series of harsh cross examinations reducing his morale to rock bottom despite his fierce attempts at self preservation claiming his toughness and physical strength is earned him the name ‘Iron Fist’ – during his National Service days. A sympathetic guard (who secretly fancies him) desperately tries to protect him in the face of the ambivalent Head of Security but things go from bad to worse when he finally tries to make it on his own when his guard loses him while taking him on a reccy in downtown Seoul – engineered to see if he really has nefarious intentions. ‘Iron Fist’ shows himself to be a good guy by first refusing to open his eyes to avoid the corrupting forces of the surrounding commercial district, and then beating off some venal pimps who are chasing a prostitute clad only in her baby dolls. This lands him back in custody where he is practically forced to defect to the South, on ‘humanitarian’ grounds after insisting on returning home. But his problems are far from over when he is eventually released back to join his wife and daughter in the North.

Kim Ki-duk tells his political satire in a straightforward linear style taking a disenchanted look at each regime, not really coming down on either side but but exposing the gross inhumanity and injustice of both parties. At the end it is the common man who suffer; the ordinary self-employed worker. Sound familiar? MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL CONTINUES UNTIL 10 SEPTEMBER 2016

Tutti a Casa (1960) | Venice Classics 2016

Dir.: Luigi Comencini; Cast: Alberto Sordi, Serge Reggiani, Martin Balsam; Italy 1960, 115 min.

Luigi Comencini (1916-2007) was an Italian director mainly known for his successful comedies like Till Marriage Do Us Part (1975). And Tutti a Casa, restored for the centenary of his birth seems to start off in a lighthearted manner. But soon, the narrative takes a very serious turn, when Lieutenant Innoncenzi (Sordi) and his men try to return home, instead of joning the German soldiers on 8th of September 1943, Armistice Day as Italy surrenders to the Allies Forces, but is thwarted by German troops, who kept on fighting,

The Germans start killing their former allies, if they do not fight on with them, and bring the war to the civilian population, who they suspect to hide partisans. One by one, Innocenzi’s man are slaughtered by the Germans: helping a Jewish girl to escape; hiding an American soldier and being shot in crossfire; doing slave labour for the Germans. Finally, Innocenzi is left alone, and is ready to fight with the partisans, firing the first shots in anger of the film.

Comencini here addresses certain taboos in Italy, where post-war history saw the country only as victims of the Nazis, never as their collaborators. But Tutti a Casa is anything but a war film, it is a humane portrait of pacifists who do not want fight on either side, but just want to return to their families. Italians were unable to see the moral dilemma of Italy becoming the accomplices of Nazi ideology after four years of war,- even if it was just by silent consent. Tutti a Casa is a humanist masterpiece, directed by a master craftsman. AS

VENICE CLASSICS | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL UNTIL 10 SEPTEMBER 2016

You Never Had It – An Evening with Bukowski (2016) | Venice 2016

Director: Matteo Borgardt

With Charles Bukowski

51min | US | Doc

Not really much to be learnt from Silvia Bizio’s seventies interview with the legendary American writer who appears here in LA surrounded by a psycophantic wntourage of his young chain smoking wife Linda Lee and a photographer. Interspersed with Bokowski’s maxims and truisms to a collage of grim photos of down and outs in LA – Jem Cohen style without the irony – Bizio attempts to ask leading questions as they all get drunk together, but is met with a stream of largely uninformative answers laced with plenty of references to the sex that Bukowski is clearly not getting, or managing: pithy it is not. One of two revelations emerge: He puts his candour and insight down to prolonged beatings by his father and dislikes talking to other writers describing it as “like sitting in a bath drinking water”. Bizio was right, her tapes are in poor condition and the sound in Sala Perla was screachingly loud. Stick to his books is the advice here.

SCREENING DURING VENICE FILM FESTIVAL until 10 SEPTEMBER 2016

Chick Lit (2016)

Dir: Tony Britten | Cast: John Hurt, Niamk Cusack, James Wilby, Dame Eileen Atkins | Comedy | 90min | UK

Writer/director Tony Britten’s (In Love with Alma Cogan, Benjamin Britten: Peace and Conflict) latest feature provides some welcome humour this summer with its stellar British cast of John Hurt; Niamh Cusack, Caroline Katz, Cathy Tyson, James Wilby and Dame Eileen Atkins to name but an impressive few.

Set in a north Norfolk village where an upmarket mixture of Brexiteers and eclectic London ‘ex-pats’ have found a quieter existence, the story follows their collective bright idea of using an erotic (aka ‘mummy porn’) novel in the style of “50 Shades of Grey” as a vehicle to raise funds to prevent their local pub from closing its doors on this recherché community.

The ensuing caper is amusingly scripted by Oliver Britten lampooning a series of caricatures (the sexy barrister; the sardonic literary agent; the gay booksellers, the aspiring novelist and the TV exec) all played wittily by a fabulous cast, who gently send each other up. The slightly bumbling chaps get together in the pub one night and agree to each pen several pages of purple prose together to form the book which is then delivered to said literary agent (Eileen Atkins in classic form) where it is snapped up. However, there is a catch, the interested publisher (John Hurt) stipulates a female author – and not four middle class blokes – to spearhead the book’s publicity campaign. Keeping their involvement a secret, they engage an out of work actress to ‘role play’ the part of the author but the tables are turned on the guys when she takes control.

Combining TV and film talent CHICK LIT is an enjoyable comedy drama of the kind you might enjoy on BBC1: it’s amusingly written, attractively filmed and impeccably performed by the best of British acting talent, and best of of all – it doesn’t take itself seriously. MT

In UK cinemas from September 2nd courtesy of Capriol Films and VOD Trinity | VoD from September 12th with a US release planned for Autumn 2016

Jim: The James Foley Story (2016)

Dir.: Brian Oakes | Documentary | USA 2016 | 120 min.

First time feature documentary director/co-writer Brian Oakes’ portrait of conflict journalist James Foley, whose execution by ISIS in northern Syria on August 19th 2014 was videoed by the terrorists and went viral, is a passionate portrait of a man who tried to give voice to the many who have none. Oakes, like co-writer Heather McDonald, is a childhood friend of ‘Jim’ Foley, and has wisely not included the sensationalist clip in his documentary, stating that he “never watched it and probably never will”.

James Foley was born in 1973, the oldest of five children who grew up in quaint, middleclass surroundings in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. After his studies at Marquette University in Wisconsin, he worked for four years with ‘Teach for America’ in inner-city schools in Phoenix/Arizona. Whilst doing his MA in writing at the university of Massachusetts, he taught English to inmates of Cook County Jail. Becoming a conflict journalist in Afghanistan, Libya (where he was hold hostage for 44 days by Gadaffi’s forces) and finally Syria, he found yet another way to help those worse off than himself, in this case Syrians, who were at the mercy of Bashar-al-Assad’s regime and the growing terror of ISIS. He lived with Syrian citizens, gained their confidence and reported home. He was abducted in November 2012 in Syria, and held hostage with other conflict journalists (many of them were released) for nineteen months.

Oakes interviews colleagues of Foley and their stories are anything but heroic. Many full time journalists and photographers had been made redundant by their media outlets in the US, and the freelancers had to fight to make a living – whilst also being in a war zone; often mistrusted and constantly under threat by the forces whose war crimes they were reporting. Foley’s own videos are very much proof of this. Nicole Tung, who often worked with Jim, states that “conflict journalists are the intimate chroniclers of conflict.” She talks about their day-to-day life, playing with Syrian children, capturing the life of the communities, as they were destroyed by outside forces.

Oakes has recreated some scenes from captivity, with some of Foley’s co-prisoners giving harrowing testaments of their physical and psychological torture. But they also tell about their small victories: like inventing a simple board game, and playing it with such passion that they totally forgot where they were. These black-and-white images shot in shadows, support the emotional content of the narrative.

Interviews with family members (and videos about the siblings growing up together) show Jim as very much at odds with his socially adjusted family. There is still so much regret that they did not know him better. Jim was foremost a moralist, somebody who never owned a property, particularly valued material possessions. He was a nomad who identified himself with the victims of society, wherever he went.

The James Foley Story is a testament to a man who had not only the physical, but also the moral courage to live in war zones. It is only fitting that the James W. Foley Foundation is a living legacy of this brave humanitarian. AS

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 2 SEPTEMBER 2016

Venice International Film Festival | Competition titles | 31 August – 10 September 2016

The 73rd edition of Venice International Film Festival runs this year from 31 August until 10 September stealing a march on Toronto with a sparkling array of some of the most innovative arthouse world premieres of the year together more mainstream fare competing for the coveted GOLDEN LION.

Under the auspices of Jury President Sam Mendes, Venezia 73 presents the following films in Competition»

ANA LILY AMIRPOUR – THE BAD BATCH
USA, 115’

Amirpour’s follow-up to A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, this dystopian love story is set in Texas amongst a community of cannibals and features locals alongside stars Suki Waterhouse, Jason Momoa, Keanu Reeves, Jim Carrey and Giovanni Ribisi. Amirpour’s regular award-winning DoP Lyle Vincent and musical collaborator Andrea von Foerster should make this another entertaining watch.

STÉPHANE BRIZÉ – UNE VIE

Brize’s screen adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s first novel is a pessimistic study of love and loss seen through the eyes of a Normandy woman in the late 1888s. Starring Judith Chemla, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Swann Arlaud, Yolande Moreau it is a French Belgian co-pro.

DAMIEN CHAZELLE – LA LA LAND (cover picture) USA, 127’

Chazelle’s follow-up to the ubiquitously popular Whiplash is an LA-set love story again music is the theme – this time full on Jazz. Stars Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, John Legend, J.K. Simmons, Finn Wittrock

DEREK CIANFRANCE – THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS
Usa, Australia, New Zealand, 133’

Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Rachel Weisz are the troubled trio in this lighthouse-set story about an Australian couple who adopt a baby discovered in a lifeboat. With Alexandre Desplat doing the score this promises to be a sweepingly romantic love on the rocks affair with some inventive visuals from Macbeth (2015) DoP Adam Arkapaw.

MARIANO COHN, GASTÓN DUPRAT – EL CIUDADANO ILUSTRE
Argentina, Spain, 118’

Award-winning Argentinian directors Mariano Cohn and Gaston Duprat are best known in their native country particularly for their dark comedy thriller The Man Next Door. Oscar Martínez, Dady Brieva, Andrea Frigerio, Nora Navas, Gustavo Garzón star in this Golden Lion hopeful about a Novel prize winner who visits the town and meets the real people who have been the inspiration for his novels, with some spectacular revelations.

MASSIMO D’ANOLFI, MARTINA PARENTI – SPIRA MIRABILIS
Italy, Switzerland, 121’

Anyone who saw the documentary ‘Never Ending Factory of the Duomo’ at Locarno last year will be looking forward to this latest documentary offering from the prize-winning Italian director.

LAV DIAZ – ANG BABAENG HUMAYO (THE WOMAN WHO LEFT)
Philippines, 226’

Another slow and thorough drama from Diaz this time offering a leading role for veteran Philippina actress Charo Santos-Concio. John Lloyd Cruz also stars.

AMAT ESCALANTE – LA REGIÓN SALVAJE
Mexico, 100’

Fans of the Mexican director will be thrilled to see that he is back in the competition line-up with another gritty drama from the wilds of his often violent homeland starring Ruth Ramos, Simone Bucio, Jesús Meza, Edén Villavicencio.

TOM FORD – NOCTURNAL ANIMALS
USA, 115’

A Single Man director and former Gucci impresario Tom Ford’s latest drama is set in California with a starry cast of Jake Gyllenhaal, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Isla Fisher and Laura Linney. It centres on an art gallery owner who is haunted by the violent subtext of a thriller written by her ex-husband. With Oscar-nominated DoP Seamus McGarvey behind the camera and Ford helming, this should be a good-looking and glamorous affair.

ROAN JOHNSON – PIUMA
Italy, 98’

British filmmaker, writer and actor Roan Johnson directs an Italian cast in this drama starring Luigi Fedele, Blu Yoshimi Di Martino, Sergio Pierattini, Michela Cescon, Francesco Colella.

ANDREI KONCHALOVSKY – RAI (PARADISE) 130′

The Russian auteur was last in Venice in 2014 with his Green Drop award-winning drama Postman’s White Nights which is still waiting for a UK release. This Russia Germany co-pro follows three people whose paths cross during wartime: Olga, a Russian aristocratic member of the French Resistance, Jules, a French collaborator and Helmut a senior SS Officer. It stars Julia Vysotskaya, Christian Clauss, Philippe Duquesne, Victor Sukhorukov, Peter Kurt and is shot by ace DoP Aleksandr Simonov (Cargo 200, The Stoker, Heaven on Earth).

MARTIN KOOLHOVEN – BRIMSTONE
Holland, Germany, Belgium France, GB, Sweden, 148’
Dakota Fanning, Guy Pearce, Emilia Jones, Kit Harington, Carice Van Houten

Winter in Wartime was Koolhoven’s beautifully crafted and touching wartime drama that never got a UK release but is available for less than a £1 on amazon. This promises to be an epic Western drama that boasts Spain, Hungary, Germany and Austria amongst its settings for a tale of religious vehemence, as the title would suggest.

EMIR KUSTURICA – NA MLIJECNOM PUTU (ON THE MILKY ROAD)
Serbia, GB, Usa, 125’

This film has be mired in controversy for several years, so if nothing else, it will be interesting to see it finally on the big screen. Monica Bellucci was last in Venice in 2014 for Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders and is always worth watching. Emir Kusturica, Sloboda Micalovic, Predrag Manojlovic also star in a drama that is billed as “3 periods in the life of a lucky milkman who ends up as a monk” . Go figure.

PABLO LARRAÍN – JACKIE
Usa, Cile, 95’
Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Greta Gerwig, John Hurt

Eclectic casting here will certainly make Larrain’s drama an intriguing watch if nothing else. But with his latest films Neruda and The Club still resonating amongst critics and audiences, it’s a tribute to the young Chilean director that he has finally made it to the Venice competition line-up with a biopic drama that explores the First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy’s days in the immediate aftermath to JFK assassination. Surely it will be better than the last film that tackled this subject at Venice, Peter Landesman’s Parkland.

TERRENCE MALICK – VOYAGE OF TIME
Usa, Germay 90’

Malick is back with a docudrama that may not prove to be as divisive as his recent efforts To The Wonder and Knight of Cups. This sets out to be an examination of the birth and death of the Universe with narration by Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. Photographed by The Revenant‘s DoP Paul Atkins it should at least offer an eyeful so watch this space. Hopefully no more swirling through sunlit beaches by scantily clad nymphs…but you never know.

CHRISTOPHER MURRAY – EL CRISTO CIEGO
Chile, France, 85’

A drama set in a remote backwater of the Chilean desert is Christopher Murray’s third feature – the leading actor is Michael Silva who made his big screen debut in Neruda and here he plays Rafael aka Christ. He is also ‘blind’ Bastian Inostroza, Ana Maria Henriquez, Mauricio Pinto also star.

FRANÇOIS OZON – FRANTZ
France, Germany, 113’

After his gender-bending comedy drama The New Girlfriend, French maverick François Ozon will be in Venice to present a black and white WWII romantic drama starring Pierre Niney (Yves Saint Laurent) and Paula Beer as a couple who meet at the grave of her fiance. Marie Gruber, Ernst Stötzner, Cyrielle Claire provide support.

GIUSEPPE PICCIONI – QUESTI GIORNI
Italy 120’

Margherita Buy is Italy’s answer to Isabelle Huppert although she tends to take on softer more tentative characters as here where she plays Adria in Giuseppe Piccioni’s literary adaptation of Marta Bertini’s novel about four provincial university friends and their trip to Belgrade, where one of them has a mysterious friend and an possible job opportunity.

DENIS VILLENEUVE – ARRIVAL
Usa, 116’

Set to be the action film of the late summer, premiering at Venice before opening Toronto. Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker lead a starry cast in this Sci-Fi adventure that takes place after alien crafts land across the globe inciting the military to bring in an expert linguist to discover whether they are goodies or baddies.

WIM WENDERS – LES BEAUX JOURS D’ARANJUEZ (3D)
France, Germany, 97’

Wim Wenders certainly enjoys filming in 3D, this being his second foray – his first Everything Will Be Fine – was met with mixed reviews as to why he’d used the medium for a standard drama that explored the aftermath of a domestic tragedy. Experimental to the last, this stars Reda Kateb, Sophie Semin, Jens Harzer and Nick Cave who find themselves in the contempo Spanish city of Aranjuez dealing with a complex set of moral and sexual dilemmas. Judging from his previous 3D affair this should be torrid and colourful. MT

WATCH THIS SPACE FOR FURTHER ADDITIONS TO THE COMPETITION LINE-UP | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 31 AUGUST – 10 SEPTEMBER 2016

That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)

Dir: Luis Buñuel | Cast: Carole Bouquet, Angela Molina, Fernando Rey | Comedy Drama | France | 102min

Luis Buñuel’s career began with Un Chien Andalou with its now iconic image of a razor slicing through a woman’s eye. In his last film That Obscure Object of Desire, the visceral attack and its damage are repaired. A rip in some bloodstained lingerie is calmly sewn up near the end of the film, and the story also begins with on a bloody note. Amongst a woman’s clothes, thrown out by a manservant, is a bloodstained cushion. The woman, who may have stained the cushion, is finally accepted back by her frustrated lover who cannot live without her.

Mathieu (Fernando Rey) a wealthy, middle aged Frenchman tries to sexually consummate his relationship with Conchita, a beautiful dancer /chambermaid played by Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina. She claims to be virgin and demands that Mathieu prove his love to her in a different way before succumbing to his desire. These delaying tactics prove only to be a tease: what she really want from Mathieu is money, and he gets frustrated by her manipulative behaviour. On a train journey from Seville to Paris Mathieu regales his fellow passengers with the story – if his efforts result in a runaround of unrequited desire, then Buñuel’s linear train narrative ‘helps’ to calm and ground Mathieu after his hapless relationship.

That Obscure Object of Desire was adapted from the 1898 novel La Femme et la Pantin by Pierre Louys. In the book the hero claims not to be attracted to blondes as he saw them as “those pale objects of desire” By changing one word Buñuel turns a blonde into a powerful obsession. Buñuel was certainly indebted to Freud. Yet his ever playful relationship between surface attraction and unconscious drive has too much dry wit to ever be mere textbook explanation.

The details of everyday life, attempting to interrupt Mathieu’s blind obsession with Conchita, prove to be both funny and disturbing. A sub-plot is terrorism. Attacks by the R.A.I.J (The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus) occur but never distract Mathieu. His manservant, complaining about vermin, interrupts a conversation between him and Conchita’s mother to show him a mouse in a trap. A waiter notices a fly in Mathieu’s drink and Mathieu is shown carrying round a mysterious sack. Buckets of water are thrown over Conchita and Mathieu. With these surreal interruptions come the repetitions of everyday life. Doors opened, keys turned in locks and Mathieu’s hand always going into his jacket to produce an endless supply of banknotes. Buñuel and and Jean Claude-Carrière’s level of invention is a constant delight. Their plotting and signage is beautifully subtle and assured; shaking us out of complacency, turning habit into a mysterious dream state.

Both Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina are splendidly capricious. Whilst Fernando Rey (often regarded as Buñuel’s alter ego) gives a brilliant performance as a man whose bourgeois authority is sorely tested by Eros. That Obscure Object of Desire is a highly entertaining film showcasing the great Spanish master’s sly and subversive powers. Alan Price

NOW OUT ON MUBI and on BLURAY COURTESY OF STUDIOCANAL

War Dogs (2016)

Dir.: Todd Philips

Cast: Miles Teller, Jonah Hill, Ana de Ama; Bradley Cooper

USA 2016, 114 min.

Hollywood is full of directors who have never really grown up. Todd Philips, with his Hangover trilogy, definitely qualifies as a leading contender in this category – but with WAR DOGS he has his coming-out as an adult. And, even more surprisingly: his latest feature (co-written by him based on an article in Rolling Stone) is truly funny.

We meet David Parkouz (Teller), a college drop-out, selling quality bed-linen to nursing homes, whilst also working as a massage therapist in Miami Beach. This is not exactly the career he dreamed of and when he meets long lost school friend Efraim Diveroli (Hill), who runs a one-man conglomerate called AEY (which stands for nothing), trying to get into the arms business, David is only too keen to join.

We are in the middle of the Iraq war and the Pentagon, having given giant companies like Halliburton and Lockheed Martin countless no-bid mega defence contracts, wants to level the playing field somehow, and invites everyone to bid for the small fry contracts. Whilst Efraim obviously adores violence, his office wall features a big poster with Al Pacino in Scarface, shooting wildly. David, on the other hand, is a pacifist and he and his – soon to be pregnant – girlfriend Iz (de Ama), have been on many anti-war marches. After spending hours on the net, the duo finally lands their first contract: they have to smuggle Berretta guns from Jordan to an US unit Bagdad. The two have to cross the “Triangle of Death” – without being aware of it – but their 17000 $ reward makes it all worth it. At least for Efriam, because Iz finds out about David’s activities and leaves him with their daughter Ella. When David meets a shady arms-dealer (Cooper) in Las Vegas, AEY hits the big time: $ 300M worth of AK-47 munitions is rotting in an Albanian warehouse. The only hitch: it was manufactured in China, which means it is on an embargo list, and can’t be used by the US military. But David and Efraim have another brilliant idea: they re-package the munitions, making them products of a neutral country. The whole exercise takes months, after which, Efraim, always with an eye for extra-profit, “forgets” to pay the Albanian helpers, which will have consequences.

One could call WAR DOGS a comedy of terror. Instead of a buddy movie we get the opposite: Efraim, always trying to be everything to everyone, has cheated his way through life by mirroring people’s needs. He uses them constantly, pretending to be something he is not. David is naive, and obviously in need of a friend, so that he glorifies their High School past. Whilst Efraim is aware of the danger all the time, always pretending that everything is will be alright, David only wakes up to the many threats of their ”business” in stages. In short: David has something to lose (his family), while Efriam, the chameleon, has no close ties with anybody – apart from himself. Male friendship has never been caricatured so efficiently.

DoP Lawrence Sher (Garden State) has found a colour palette for every stage of this adventure: David and Iz’ old home has warm brown colours, their new home at the beach front is cold, arctic blue – symbolising the soullessness. The Bagdad scenes are shot in primary colours, the reality of war never far away. Albania is a dark, unforgiving environment, a true set for a horror movie. Teller and Hill feed of each other well, the only drawback being that Iz’s role is not fleshed out enough. We can only hope that Philips stays with his newfound maturity, because he owes it to his talents as a filmmaker. AS

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 27 August 2016

The Closer We Get (2015) | DVD | VOD release

Writer|Director: Karen Guthrie

With Karen Guthrie, Ian Guthrie, Ann Guthrie, Nina Pope

87min Doc UK

Karen Guthrie and her mother Ann had decided to make a film together, but Ann’s near fatal stroke brings her daughter back to Scotland in this moving tale of female resilience and male self-centredness, told from Karen’s uncomplaining, non-judgemental viewpoint. From the opening scene of Karen driving back through the night THE CLOSER WE GET has a compelling quality and a gentle lyrical feel to it. Narrated in her soft Scottish burr with a soft guitar score in the background, it is lushly shot by regular collaborator Nina Pope in warm summery tones, her Glasgow family home making an appealingly pleasant domestic setting for a bittersweet saga.

Riffling through the family snaps – both black and white – Karen brings us up to speed on her childhood – her parents, Ian and Ann had met in the early sixties – a sweet and sociable story of Glasgow family life in; aspirational and happy or so it seemed at the time. It emerges that both daughter and father nurtured an adventurous steak that led them to dream of better things and a more adventurous existence. But tight-lipped father Ian takes this a stage further when he suddenly ups and goes to Ethiopia to following his ‘passion for cycling’. On a mountain, there is a single shot of Ian, the only one during his ten years away in Africa. Her parents continue to meet for an exotic holiday once a year – until Ian moves back in again, ten years later and without comment to continue with his former life. But his behaviour has had a seismic yet unspoken affect on family dynamics. And Ann senses that all is not well, although she keeps this to herself until after Karen’s graduation. The repercussions of Ian’s behaviour are far-reaching over the following years, and when Ann suffers a stroke, Karen becomes a long-term carer for her delightfully endearing mum. Surprise and heartache awaits them both again, around the corner, but for now they’re all back together as a family – this time Karen is the mother and while Dad is expressing his dissatisfaction for his childrens’ under-achievements, as she patiently administers his glaucoma eye-drops.

With its shifts in tone and cinematography reflecting the dark more disturbing episodes, THE CLOSER WE GET is an honest, amusing and heartfelt testament to unexpressed feelings and resentments that brew under the surface of family dysfunction when a man’s infidelity results in fractured hopes and dreams for everyone else. Karen sensitively evokes these myriad emotions, as a family wound that gradually heals on the surface but continues to feel raw and sensitive beneath. And as she cares for her parents she gradually gets to know them as real people. “The closer we get, the less we can hide from each other”. MT

CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED DOCUMENTARY ‘THE CLOSER WE GET’ COMING TO VOD 31st AUGUST & DVD 5th SEPTEMBER 2016

The Royal Road (2015) | DVD release

Director: Jenni Olson | Doc | US |

Acclaimed LGBT filmmaker Jenni Olsen’s candid and deeply personal cinematic essay takes the form of a stream of consciousness monologue set against a contemplative backdrop of urban 16mm California landscapes with long static takes of buildings along the road in question. The Royal Road serves as an intimate musing on nostalgia, and the pursuit of unavailable women (she is identifies as a Lesbian), it also features a voiceover cameo by Tony Kushner.

Clearly, Olsen has researched her material thoroughly to present this engaging and often fascinating historical and exquisitely poetic reflection that explores the conquest and colonisation of Mexico and the American Southwest and the faded glory of urban old California from El Camino Real (stretching from San Diego to Sonoma) and the Boulevard of Broken Dreams and Sunset Boulevard.

Olsen reflects on the value of collective remembering and the attraction of unrequited love in this beautifully drawn trip down memory lane which sometimes moves a little too slowly and leisurely for those that may not connect so readily with her train of thought or be in the mood for such a sultry affair. For those who enjoy travel and architecture, The Royal Road is intelligent, engaging and laudable in its soul-bearing. MT

ON DVD VOD FROM 6 SEPTEMBER 2016 VIA WOLFE VIDEO

Ambulance (2016)

Dir | Mohamed Jabaly; Documentary | Norway/Palestine 2016, 109 min.

In the summer of 2014, Israeli forces bombarded Gaza for 51 days, after Hamas attacked Israeli Special Forces. 18,000 houses were destroyed, half a million people had to leave their homes. After his neighbour’s house was destroyed on the first day of the war, 23 year-old Mohamed Jabaly took his camera and filmed an ambulance crew for the most of the war; his main reason was “to escape his own fear, clinging to the camera make me feel safe”. The result is an honest reportage, where we always hear Jabaly’s comments, without ever seeing him.

Surprisingly, there is a nearly total absence of politics – neither the director, nor the citizens of Gaza even mention Israel. Most comments of the victims praise their resilience, for which they thank God. And they need it – the camera showing the chaos of the fleeing masses. Strangely, the Israelis often give warning of around a minute, which block of flats they are going to attack. Sometimes the information is true, helping the targeted populace to flee in time – some times the phone calls are pure hoax. There are very strange moments, like the male nurse in the hospital proudly wearing proudly a Frank Lampard Chelsea shirt, and a man complaining to Jabaly, “the bomb destroyed my washing machine, which I did not even pay for.”

Finally, the director gets caught an apartment block, where he has followed the ambulance crew, and the rubble comes down on him. “I only wanted to run, for my life”. There are hardly any gory scenes, Jabaly does not hover over the casualties; a bone fragment on ground makes an impact, but at the same time, Ambulance shows the doctors in the hospital, trying to get the crowds away from the hospital entrance because they are blocking the way of the ambulance. Jabaly’s comments are confirming his approach to show as much as possible: but his fear grows, and he has to take a break form shooting; his family more or less locking him in. But five days later, he is back with the ambulance crew: the driver Abu Zouq, a calm and competent leader of his men. Jabaly shows the rubble, through which the people are fleeing back into their bombed houses, just to fetch a mattress so as not to have to sleep on the bare ground. Suddenly, the ambulance becomes a taxi service when the crew drives women and children from an area under bombardment to a safer zone in the city. After an excursion to a boarder crossing with Egypt, where families are separated because they do not share the same nationality, Ambulance ends on a hopeful note: children playing at Eid, just before a ceasefire ends this war – one of many since 1947 when the British government partitioned their Protectorate Palestine. Ambulance is passionate: it not only shows the suffering, but also the happiness of the survivors at being alive. Jabaly’s portrait of Gaza echoes Humphrey Jennings documentaries about London during the Blitz – a well deserved compliment indeed. AS

AT BERTHA DOCHOUSE | CURZON BLOOMSBURY from 26 AUGUST 2016

L’Avenir (2016) | Things to Come

Director: Mia Hansen-Løve Cast: Isabelle Huppert, André Marcon, Roman Kolinka, Edith Scob,Sarah Le Picard

100min | Drama | France Italy

Nathalie is a philosophy teacher in Paris. Happily married to another intellectual, she has a full life with two kids and a possessive mother to take care of. But gradually, in her sixties, her life starts to unravel.

French auteur Mia Hansen-Love’s fifth feature could almost be mistaken for a film by Eric Rohmer with its themes of philosophy, ménage à trois and the infinite cycle of love and life. Appropriately she casts Isabelle Huppert in the leading role which she plays with her usual elegance and panache. Taking life in her stride she encourages her pupils in provocative thought, whisks up a delicious family lunch and rushes to her petulant mother’s bedside to dole out tisanes and sympathy at 5 in the morning.

In all this she suddenly finds herself alone when her husband Heinz (Andre Marcon) announces his departure to leave their airy Parisian apartment to live with a younger woman. Crucially she keeps on going nonchalently; a towering figure of strength and compassion in a world where she is needed but not always valued. Insightfully, Hansen-Love spots she important things she will miss: her husband’s family seaside home where she loves to swim and relax, surrounded by books and beautiful sunsets, but she is still grounded in her Paris home; a salient fact that Hansen Love flags up – a woman’s home is more important to her than an outworn relationship. Nathalie’s ageing mother, Yvette (the immensely attractive, Edith Scob) finally agrees to move to an expensive nursing home and Heinz is seen walking in town with his girlfriend. The tone is upbeat and matter of fact: Hansen-Love and Huppert treat this all with a light-hearted derision.

Sex and romance take a back seat in L’AVENIR and this is the only criticism of the film: to assume that a woman in her early sixties is content to be absorbed into her children and grandchildren at such a young age, is simplistic and questionable but this dimension is glossed over here. Although Nathalie recoils from an approach from a young would-be suitor in the cinema one night; further exploration of her emotional (and sexual) needs, beyond the intellectual ones, could have added further texture to bring this drama into the 21st century. Cleverly Huppert identifies herself as an empowered woman, open to choices, allowing herself moments of grief and laughter at the absurdity of it all. Vulnerability is not dealt with here, although it may be locked away somewhere in her character’s psyche.

If Nathalie’s does have some emotional life it’s will with a good-looking and younger pupil, Fabien (Roman Kolinka), who offers to look after Yvette’s cat whom she visits in the a communal mountainside chalet in the Grenoble countryside. This episode is a clever vehicle for examining alternative ways of surviving financially for those whose passion is to be creative. But those hoping for a sex-fuelled spring /winter romance will be disappointed, and rightly so, this realist and well-crafted vision if about a woman taking control; empowered by force of circumstance, to re-invent herself once her biological imperative ceases to count. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 2 SEPTEMBER 2016 | BERLINALE 11-21 FEBRUARY 2016 | IN COMPETITION

The Samurai Trilogy | Criterion Collection UK

Dir: Hiroshi Inagaki | Starring: Toshiro Mifune | Drama | Japan | Part I, II, III

Romance and fierce battle coalesce in Hiroshi Inagaki’s Musashi Miyamoto, often known as Japan’s answer to Gone with the Wind together with its two sequels, it won the 1954 Oscar for Best Foreign Film. A rousing, emotionally gripping tale of combat and self-discovery, it portrays the life of a 17th century warrior, swordsman and artist, played by the legendary Toshiro Mifune (who also lived his life like a traditional Samurai pursuing spiritual interests and the traditional arts). Following his exploits from unruly youth to enlightened and disciplined warrior this is an ambitious and epic that was restored to its full glory on bluray in 2012, and now forms part of the latest Criterion UK releases. MT

OUT ON 5 SEPTEMBER 2016

Behemoth (2015)

Where once verdant grasslands carpeted Inner Mongolia in a lush natural landscape of green, dehumanisaing machines now occupy the home of herdsman and their families alienating them from their former life with a cacophony of drills and ash mountains in the place of pastureland.

Zhao Liang’s documentary serves as an ode to the past and a meditation on an uncertain future as industry destoys a way of life that was for centuries both spiritually nourishing and profitable for the locals. Behemoth is a visually evocative piece that recounts a descent into hell brought about by the surge in mining activities, offering gruelling employment to both Chinese and migrant workers as is it wounds the scenery in search of coal. The grimly drawn images offer a plaintive paean to the past that is mesmerising, rhythmic – monotonous even. Life before was tough, but this new order sucks the souls from the workers and infects their lungs. Once proudly in control of their destiny now they are cogs in a mindless, meaningless inferno.

Zhao and his French co-writer (and producer) Sylvie Blum liken the process to Dante’s Inferno where gradually the circles of Hell get hotter and darker commensurate with the sins of the souls forced to endure their torment; but these people have commited no sin.

After a day’s work we see them retreat to their shanty homes as grey slags heaps dominate the distance. Caked in soot they scratch around for supper after wiping themselves in grey cloths, having lined the silken pockets of their new masters, the mining companies. One evocative scene shows a naked man curled up in a green field with a slag heap sharply jutting up in the background. And this is a clever motif that runs through the film.

Zhao’s most striking footage turns the screen red with the incandescent fires of the furnaces. This is contrasted with a simple image of a horseback shepherd returning a lost lamb to the fold. Now these people are the lost and forsaken. A haunting and sinister soundtrack accompanies the frightening images; word seem redundant.

Not that there is anything to be gained by this flagrant industrialisation. As we experienced in Stray Dogs (2013) and Black Cole, Thin Ice (2014), the rapid and ill-conceived urbanisation of China and its neighbours is a tragedy that is made more relevant when we witness the dispossession and destruction it has created in its wake. And the final act of Zhao’s important documentary builds to a startling finale. You won’t know whether to laugh or cry. MT

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM FRIDAY 19 AUGUST 2016

Godless | Bezbog (2016) | Golden Leopard Winner | Locarno 2016

Dir: Ralitza Petrova | Cast: Irena Ivanova, Alexander Triffinov, Ivan Nalbantov, Ventzislav Konstantinov, Dimitri Petkov; Bulgaria/France/Den | drama | 100 min.

The first feature film by Bulgarian director/writer Ralitza Petrova, who studied at the NFTS, won the Golden Leopard at last year’s Locarno Film Festival, and its main protagonist Irena Ivanova, was awarded the prize for Best Actress. Reminiscent of Jim Thompson, this minimalist, small town noir is a stunning debut from an uncompromising talent.

Gana (Ivanova) is a geriatric and dementia nurse in the small Bulgarian mountain town of Vratsa. The young woman seems caring at first, but it soon emerges that she is stealing her patients’ ID-cards. She, and her partner Aleko (Konstantinoiv), a car mechanic, sell the ID-cards to the local police officer Pavel (Triffinov), who runs a money laundering racket. Pavel is also in league with the local judge (Petkov), who makes sure that any complaints are rebuffed by the court.

However, despite all this criminal activity Dana lives a modest existence with her mother in a run-down apartment block, where gun fire is a nightly occurence. Her sexless relationship with Aleko gets by on a morphine addiction, which Gana steals together with other prescription drugs. Her relationship with her mother is equally emotionless, summed up by Gana herself in the words: “I want to love, but can’t. Neither can you. Do you have any pills for it?”.

Unflitchingly grim, this is a drama that delves into the sad deparavity of modern life in this formally Stalinist state where corruption and larceny seems endemic and continues to thrive despite apparent economic improvememts. But there is a chink of light in the darkness that sees Gana redeeming herself in the final act.

GODLESS takes its – ironic – title from a mountain near Vratsa, were a local priest in the middle ages took his flock and was duly massacred by invaders. The cryptic coda of the film might refer to this. Sparse and unforgiving, Godless is a claustrophobic masterpiece. Rooms are narrow and unlit, grimy snow covers a bleak landscape. Even a brothel scene, where the judge and Pavel copulate, is passionless. In her apartment block, Gana finds a young boy alone in the staircase. He later wanders off and watches a couple having sex, having left the door to their flat open. Desolate and abandoned, people in post-communist Bulgaria seem to have given up on themselves. DoPs Krum Rodriquez and Chayse Irvin evoke this grim rigour on 35 mm film, transferred to digital. With its opaque conclusion, Petrova avoids any judgemental comment. GODLESS is a cheerless experience – but it is a gem despite its restricted budget. MT

GODLESS HAS BEEN AWARDED THE GOLDEN LEOPARD AT LOCARNO 2016 AND TOP PRIZE AT THE SOFIA AWARDS 2017

Cosmos (2015) | Best Director Locarno 2015| Kinoteka 2016

Director: Andrzej Zulawski

France/Portugal Comedy 100mins

Andrzej Zulawski gets in and amongst it with COSMOS, his first feature in 15 years. This French-language adaptation of Witold Gombrowicz’s 1965 novel is a top-to-bottom fever dream, extending the Polish filmmaker’s penchant for mania with an exceptionally reference-heavy tale of wham-bam obsession. Seconds in and we have a melodramatic score, jolting jump-cuts, opaque voiceover, plush pans and a narrative that proceeds onward like a furious sprint through a theatrical downpour. What’s not to love?

Plenty. With viscous plot and rake-thin premise (make what you will of that narrative contradiction), many a good film has been made. But it’s nigh-on impossible for any of the myriad ideas put forth here to take hold with any lasting thematic coherence. With a slickly-rendered attention-deficit (the real glue that holds his surgical focus together), Zulawski promotes his rococo vision by piling meta-echoes upon meta-echoes with such off-puttingly ugly verbosity that the engineered madness, a kind of ad hoc lo-budget ornamentalism with the hyper-jittery frame-rate of a TV movie, becomes the entire raison d’etre. It forewarns the impatient: fall for the first minute and the next 101 are a treat.

Otherwise, pith off: “You are just a face, a mask. Behind it, there is nothing.” But what a mask! Memorably gaunt-cheeked, sunken-eyed, Jonathan Genet plays Witold, a law school dropout who arrives with his pal Fuchs (Johan Libéreau) at a family-run bed-and-breakfast (with breakfast-in-bed) in Portugal with dreams of writing his first novel—and finds no shortage of inspiration there. Rocked by inexplicable spasms that run through his face like an electrical current, Witold falls for the whole affair: the gobbledygook-gabbling patriarch Leon Wojtys (Jean-François Balmer), his long-suffering wife (Sabine Azema), their daughter Lena (Victoria Guerra) and even the deformed lip of family maid Catherette (Clementine Pons). A murder mystery runs beneath all of the feigned and strained emotionalism: a sparrow, a cat and pieces of wood are all found hanged on the guesthouse’s premises.

Words, words, words. Tongue twists abound in this hotchpotch of “chasms, patterns, strata, rhythms, wounds, spasms,” and the crazed maximalism and heightened delirium make this a dramatic exercise rather than a drama per se: when one character breaks down into tears, it’s impossible to engage with the material due to the heightened delirium—and just when a scene threatens to convince us into something resembling a consistent mood, Zulawski hangs the string score in mid-air: just when we thought we were in, he wrenches us back out. As Witold himself remarks, “She is impenetrable, elusive and vast like the ceiling.” There are enough highbrow references and self-deprecating winks, meanwhile, to keep a certain crowd chuckling away to publicise their own understanding of this essentially self-serving work.

There’s an unconsummated eroticism at play here. All of the film’s secret, underlying energies are contained in Guerra, whose Lena is subtly flirtatious with and increasingly exasperating to Witold. Guerra’s beauty is her ordinary (and unexceptionally photographed) face, which explodes in later scenes into outrageously striking frivolity, tongue out between perfect teeth and eyes to be read as one wishes. In truth, it’s a test of one’s patience whenever she’s not onscreen—and the film carries all of its weight when she is. MICHAEL PATTISON

ON RELEASE FROM 19 AUGUST 2016 | LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTlVAL | BEST DIRECTOR 2015 WINNER |

All About Almodóvar | Mubi

A retrospective on MUBI looks back at the work and influences of Pedro Almodóvar and forward to his most recent work.

Visionary filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s – now in his seventies – is showing no signs of slowing down. Pain and Glory his latest – an intensely personal film – took Best Actor at Cannes 2019 for its star Antonio Banderas, but the Oscar-winning auteur has never yet won the Palme d’Or, ironic considering most of the films are European arthouse in nature, including his Hitchcockian 2016 outing Julieta.

Last Summer’s Venice festival premiered his impressive short film The Human Voice that starred Tilda Swinton in Jean Cocteau’s one-act, one-hander, 2021 will see the release of a full length drama Madres Paralelas a that follows two mothers who give birth on the same day. And Almodovar is already working on the next one based on a novel by Spanish co-writer Lucia Berlin (A Manual for Cleaning Ladies) that will hopefully screen next year.

Inventive and always surprising his work melds comedy with the intensely personal and the mood is generally upbeat. One of his most outrageous films to date I’m So Excited was a random comedy but one that was well received by his Spanish audiences and proved that even his more forgettable films have wacky and watchable appeal.

Although, in common with Aki Kaurismäki, Almodóvar is one of the few auteurs never to have won the coveted Cannes main trophy, he is considered amongst many cinephiles as the most accomplished and triumphant Spanish filmmaker of all time. However this illustrious director is still to make an English language film or be tempted by the allure of Hollywood – and yet his work continues to be admired and adored across the globe. So what is it about this remarkable artist that has such worldwide appeal?

Although producing an eclectic range of films, there is something instantly recognisable about Almodóvar’s work, with his unique blend of comedy and melodrama. A consistent, and certainly universal, theme within his pictures is that of sex, as he explores every taboo related to the subject, with sexual identity a consistent issue within his films, expressed provocatively in the likes of All About My Mother, Bad Education and The Skin I Live In. However where Almodóvar stands out, is within his ability to tackle these sensitive subjects in such a surrealistic way, introducing humour into the most complex situations, and vibrantly portraying humanity with all its foibles.

Much of the reason why Almodóvar’s work is so well-received worldwide, is due to his unashamed appreciation of Hollywood, with a brazen-faced admiration of classic cinema, conspicuously referencing films such as All About Eve, A Streetcar Named Desire and Frankenstein. Almodóvar is a storyteller first and foremost, who thrives on the tense nuances inspired by one of his heroes, Alfred Hitchcock, as well as the intertwining romantic narratives and eccentric plot-points, which are certainly a nod in the direction of Woody Allen.

That said, the one divine guidance upon his work is a home-grown talent, as he is evidently influenced by Luis Buñel. He unapologetically references the father of cinematic surrealism in his movies, remaining faithful to his Spanish roots and heritage. In his more recent films Almodóvar has also taken to referencing his own work– with a parody of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown performed in Broken Embraces.

Almodóvar always manages to bring popular Spanish culture into his productions – even within his latest feature he touches upon the current economic crisis. He isn’t afraid to explore the political implications of the authoritarian dictatorship of Franco either, nor Catholic religious schooling in Bad Education, whilst bullfighting is explored in great depth in both Matador and Talk to Her, being both beatified and vilified in equal measure. As such, Almodóvar has changed our very own perceptions of Spain as a nation; his features are unreservedly intertwined with his homeland, making it impossible to detach ourselves from his unique representation of the country.

Another factor in Almodóvar’s appeal is his incomparable portrayal of women, as they are always shown to be the more powerful of the sexes. The female characters are not only strong-willed, but fervently idolised by their male counterparts, to a quite disturbing extent in films such as Talk to Her or Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! Though his lead roles tend to be disturbed and dark, he somehow manages to humanise them, allowing the audience to empathise with our protagonists, despite them frequently being sexual deviants, rapists and kidnappers. Here is an example of a filmmaker who is approaching cinema as an art first, and an industry second.

There is just something about Pedro Almodóvar. His original, innovative approach to film-making remains unsurpassed, and his immense ability in finding solace and humour within the darker sides of the human brain is miraculous. He will forever continue to apply his twisted, whimsical style to these universal themes, maintaining this definable, idiosyncratic approach which has lasted from the very start of his career until the present day.

Whether he makes the move to Hollywood one day is ultimately a futile question, as regardless of where this director plies his trade, his films will continue to involve and inspire audiences, as a good story is a good story in any language, and here is a director who is majestic at telling them, finding a common ground in the most unlikely of places.

MATADOR ***

Pedro Almodóvar had once admitted that he considers Matador to be one of his weaker films, and regrettably this surreal allegory of sex and death makes such a statement somewhat easy to agree with.

We delve into the lives of a trio of damaged individuals, where a thin line exists between murder and sexual desire, as a provocative black comedy that explores the darker side of the human mind, with a young Antonio Banderas standing out.

Matador is full of the symbolism and idiosyncrasies that define Almodóvar’s work. Ultimately quite fatuous, this struggles in its tedious story and lack of depth to characters. An early Almodóvar production that ensures it’s only uphill from here on.

WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN ****

The film that made Almodóvar, and you can see why. An ingenious and fanciful farce that signals the filmmakers move towards the whimsical melodrama of which he has since become renowned.

When Pepa (Carmen Maura) is left by her lover, she confronts his son and partner seeking answers, a matter made complicated with the arrival of her fugitive companion, all taking place in her apartment across one fateful day.

Hitchcockian in parts, Woody Allen in others, this flamboyant and elaborate comedy is surrealistic, detracting from the severity of the distress felt by our protagonists, as a film that cements Almodóvar’s status as one of the most important and promising filmmakers in world cinema – a promise very much fulfilled.

TIE ME UP TIE ME DOWN! ***

With pointers from Martin Scorsese, influenced by the likes of The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver, this dark and disturbing thriller manages to retain a sweet and somewhat touching sentiment, taking characters you shouldn’t approve of and endears you to them. This is Almodóvar doing rom-com. Sort of.

Ricky (Antonio Banderas), is a deranged opportunist who kidnaps a porn-star and ties her up, not allowing her freedom until she agrees to marry him. Banderas is outstanding, in a tense and beguiling feature that keeps you captivated throughout.

You could be offended by this offering given the questionable sexual politics in one of Almodóvar’s most divisive works – but it all depends on how earnestly you view it.

LIVE FLESH ***

Almodóvar has received eight nominations for Best Film not in the English Language at the BAFTAs, and Live Flesh – a less celebrated title by the notorious filmmaker, is one of them – exploring the intertwining relationships between five ardent, passionate and proud lovers.

We follow an ex-convict who is determined to make amends with a former fling and prove himself as the world’s greatest love maker, with a supporting Javier Bardem stealing the show.

Conflicting with the tragic themes comes an optimistic political undercurrent, playing against the rejuvenation of Spain following the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Live Flesh is also witty, allowing for any grave situation to be viewed upon as chic and frivolous, deserving of its BAFTA recognition.

ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER ****

Almodóvar’s most iconic piece of work, unapologetically influenced by classic Hollywood productions such as All About Eve and A Streetcar Named Desire, while always feeling innovative, with that Almodóvar spirit stamped all over it.

When a distressed mother (Cecilia Roth) loses her son in a car accident, she attempts to track down his father, who has since changed his identity to that of a woman. Combining comedy and tragedy expertly, All About My Mother is intimately moving, despite the exuberant, melodramatic setting.

Every lead is a strong female character – so dominant that even the male protagonists are transvestites. Sexual identity is an important factor in this, dealing with severe themes such existentialism and homosexuality in true Almodóvar fashion.

TALK TO HER *****

Talk to Her is Almodóvar’s one true masterpiece, as an outstanding drama that is beautifully touching, blended majestically with a dark, harrowing edge.

Epitomised in lead character Marco (Darío Grandinetti), in touch with his emotions and cries consistently – he falls for a bullfighter who is admitted into a coma, where they meet nurse Benigno (Javier Cámara), who has an unhealthy adoration for a patient.

Spanish culture is magnified, beautified and scrutinised in one film – intriguingly witnessed through the eyes of an Argentine, in what is a delicately crafted, unassuming slice of cinema. This is Almodóvar’s most accomplished piece, following a narrative that doesn’t deviate too far from realism, unlike what we have grown accustomed to with his work.

BAD EDUCATION ****

A fascinating look into how our past can affect our future – particularly in the wake of the Franco era, and the implications his reign has had on Spain and those who have lived through it.

Gael García Bernal plays a man (and woman) who returns to a childhood sweetheart turned filmmaker, to present a screenplay he has written about the sexual abuse they suffered at the hands of priests at their all boys school.

A lurid melodrama combined masterfully with a murder thriller narrative running through the heart of it, Almodóvar leads you down one path before heading down another. The intense themes are contained within a grandiose setup that allows us to explore such issues while avoiding morbidity.

VOLVER ****

After Bad Education and Talk to Her, Almodóvar returns to a female orientated cast, with Penélope Cruz turning in a career defining performance that earned her a much deserved Oscar nomination.

She plays Raimunda, a single mother who returns back home to visit her mother’s grave, only to be told by her auntie that the deceased woman is still alive. Volver is an archetypal crime thriller, well, by Almodóvar’s standards.

The filmmaker comes into his element, with a riveting story that is full of the nuances of the thriller genre, yet combined with his typically theatrical and darkly comic edge. Also working as a hypothetical fantasy, anyone who has ever lost someone can find solace in this absorbing production.

BROKEN EMBRACES ***

You’d be forgiven for admitting to this one passing you by, as although earning a BAFTA nomination, Broken Embraces has been overlooked somewhat. A surprise given this tells a gripping story, with an engrossing lead performance from Lluís Homar.

He plays Harry Caine, a blind writer who is reluctantly transported back to his past with the arrival of an aspiring filmmaker, coming to him with the idea for a screenplay, yet one that stirs up old memories – recalling the twisted love triangle surrounding the beautiful actress Lena (Penélope Cruz).

Without a palpable wit, Broken Embraces is a more conventional, narrative driven piece, blending together a series of interlinking characters and erotic tales, through a vibrant and glorious aesthetic.

THE SKIN I LIVE IN ****

Following on from two somewhat conventional thrillers in Volver and Broken Embraces, anyone anticipating a shift in style from Almodóvar – with Hollywood lingering at the back of the mind – were soon put right, as he returns to his dark and disturbing ways with his most deranged picture since Matador.

A self-described horror story, we delve into the twisted world of a plastic surgeon (Antonio Banderas), who creates a synthetic skin that can withstand any burns, using the imprisoned Vera (Elena Anaya) as his guinea pig.

Helped along by a haunting Hitchcockian score, The Skin I Live In is one of Almodóvar’s most erotically intense works, as a psychosexual thriller that sees Banderas put in his finest career performance. SP

PEDRO ALMODOVAR RETROSPECTIVE series now on MUBI

Almost Holy (2015)

Dir.: Steve Hoover; Documentary; USA 2015, 100 min.

Blood Brother director Steve Hoover creates another tour-de-force aesthetically as well as contents wise with this portrait of the “vigilante priest” Gennadiy Mokhnenko, who singlehanded created a refuge centre for abused children in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, liberating the victims by force from abusive parents and exploiting drug dealers,

Gennadiy Mokhnenko likes to be seen as the hard-but-fair, rather naïve do-gooder, who is both priest and strongman: saving the young victims in the Ukranian city of Mariupol and enforcing the law, police and civil authorities seemingly do not want to uphold. This requires certainly an uncompromising attitude in a society, where lawlessness seems not the exception: it is fair to say, that order has broken down in Mariupol. At the beginning, we see Mokhenko cultivating this image in front of a TV, where “Crocodile Gennadiy” a Russian cartoon character from the Soviet era, saves children. Then we are introduced to Mokhnenko’s own Republic “Pilgrim”, an orphanage for the forcefully liberated children: sex-slaves, drug addicts and victims of horrific parental abuse and neglect.

But Mokhnenko’s biography is anything but simple: In 1991 he attended a bible course in Latvia, a year later he founded his own church in Mariupol, and became its pastor. In 1994 he started to study at the Donetsk Institute of Social Education in the Department of History and Religion, graduating in 1999. He followed it with an MA in Theology at Kiev branch of the Westminster Theological Seminar. And when he reads through his Wikipedia page under the heading ‘Criticism’, he smiles warily: one of the few moments when the mask of guilelessness slips. Next we see him munching hotdog, drinking a coffee from plastic cup, declaring “that he likes everything Western”.

But there is an organised purpose behind the façade, his missionary streak is very cultivated, but he reaches out to many: his speech at a women’s prison is a great example of motivational vigour: he coaxes and threatens at the same time, a born orator. It is fair to say, that the long and unhappy relationship between the Ukraine and USSR/Russia, culminating in the war, and the annexation of the Crimea by Putin’s forces, plays a big role in this conflict ridden region: Donetsk, the capital, is occupied by pro-Russian forces of the “Donetsk People’s Republic”, and Mariupol is now the provisional centre of the Donetsk Oblast. In June 2014 the Ukrainian army recaptures Mariupol from the Russian forces after a short invasion, but Russian rocket attacks continued into 2015. For once, Gennadiy, saying goodbye in the last take like a stranded walrus on the beach, is speechless and rather morbid.

Seguing back and forth between archive footage from 2000 to 2008 and the more recent past, Hoover does not spare us horrific images, like the deaf girl, who had been raped for many years, whose baby has been taken away by the authorities, and who lives now, after her liberation by Mokhnenko, in a psychiatric ward, asking to be re-united with her baby. DOP John Pope’s changing widescreen images include pure horror elements, cinema verity realism and dystopian S-F elements. Almost Holy is radical in its approach and innovative in its execution – but it is as bleak as a Hieronymus Bosch painting. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 19 AUGUST 2016

El Clan (2015) | Best Director| Argentinian Film Festival

Director: Pablo Trapero

Cast: Antonia Bengoechea, Gaston Cocchiarale, Guillermo Francella, Stefania Koessl

110min Crime Drama | Argentina

Pablo Trapero’s heightened melodrama chronicling the true story of the Puccio Clan, a family who kidnapped and killed people in 80s Buenos Aires, will have little interest for those outside Argentina. Though as a study of family psychopathy, it zips along in undeniably gripping although at times uneven style.

It emerges that the Puccio family were hardly on the breadline. The scion, Arquimedes Puccio, is father to five kids who live in reasonable comfort together with wife Epifania (Lili Popovich), a teacher; while making a living kidnapping those who clearly had a few bob more than themselves. Guillermo Francella (The Secrets of Their Eyes) plays the hard-eyed cool operator with a smug obsequious conceit that is both irritating and deeply unsettling; his fiery rugger bugger son, Alex (Peter Lanzini), is a more appealing character and the two vy with each other throughout making this an absorbing father|son portrait as much as it is a noirish seventies-set crime thriller.

EL CLAN opens with a brief political sketch of the Argentinian scene in the early eighties when the country was attempting to return to democracy after years of dictatorship. As in most Latin countries, well-heeled Arquimedes is closely connected to the right people in business and government. He also expects to rule his family with a rod of iron, maintaining a close grip on family affairs and engaging the children as accomplices in his skulduggery – whether they like it or not. Alex resents his father using him to facilitate the kidnap of a rugby club contact – even though he gets to set up a diving shop with a cut of the dosh – but is horrified when the victim is kept chained to a radiator in one of their bedrooms. Kidnappings pile up often ending in the victims being killed after the ransom is collected.

There’s nothing particularly stylish or inventive about the brass-tinted aesthetic of Sebastian Orgambide’s production design or Julian Apeztquia’s camerawork: this is a bog standard genre thriller that slips down nicely as a straightforward narrative – if you happen to drop off for twenty minutes – you can rejoin the action without really missing a trick, although you’ll be hard-pressed to get much rest with Sebastian Escofet’s pounding soundtrack. Particularly macho and misogynist is the scene where Alex’s girlfriend’s cries of ecstasy are matched with those of a distressed kidnap victim.

All and all, this is stolid, run-of-the mill stuff. Decently scripted by Trapero and his sidekicks Esteban Student and Julian Loyola this will appeal to men who like a good kidnapping story or Trapero’s style. Quite why it won Best Director at Venice Film Festival remains as much of a mystery as the activities of the strangely banal yet clearly lethally dysfunctional Puccio family. MT

ARGENTINIAN FILM FESTIVAL | CURZON LONDON on 18 August 2016 | REVIEWED AT VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2 -12 SEPTEMBER 2015

Locarno Film Festival 2016 | 3 – 13 August 2016 | WINNERS

Known for its edgy and eclectic selection of international titles, the Locarno International film festival takes place each year in the town’s Piazza Grande in temperatures that often sizzle in the late 30s promising a scorching experience and adding a surreal touch to Carlo Chatrain’s ambitious programming.

This year’s festival runs from 3-13 August opens with US title THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS and closing on a Hindu note with Ashutosh Gowaricker’s MOHENIJO DAHO in a programme that includes 17 world premieres and the latest from Alejandro Jodorowsky – who this year receives a Pardo d’Onore – Arturo Ripstein (International Jury President) Rafi Pitts, Edgar Reitz, Bill Pullman and Radu Jude.

The festival offers a chance to see the latest films from Cannes in the presence of European stars such as Dario Argento – who presides over the Concorso del Presente jury – Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Ken Loach. And where would be without the doyenne of the European circuit Isabelle Huppert?

This year’s festival celebrates the work of US film director Roger Corman and there will be a retrospective dedicated to ‘Cinema in the young Federal Republic of Germany from 1949 to 1963’ while the Open Doors focus showcases eight countries in South Asia: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

GODLESS by Ralitza Petrova GOLDEN LEOPARD WINNER

BEST ACTRESS: IRENA IVANOVA

Bulgaria/Denmark/France – 2016 – 99’
with Irena Ivanova, Ivan Nalbantov, Ventzislav Konstantinov, Alexandr Triffonov
World Premiere, First feature

O ORNITÓLOGO by João Pedro Rodrigues | BEST DIRECTOR

Portugal/France/Brazil – 2016 – 118’
with Paul Hamy, Xelo Cagiao, Wen Han, Chan Sua Lin
World Premiere

INIMI CICATRIZATE (Scarred Hearts) by Radu Jude | SPECIAL JURY PRIZE

Romania/Germany – 2016 – 141’
with Lucian Teodor Rus, Ivana Mladenovic, Ilinca Harnut, Serban Pavlu, Marian Olteanu, Alexandru Dabija, Dana Voicu
World Premiere

OSTATNIA RODZINA (The Last Family) by Jan Matuszynski

BEST ACTOR | ANDRZEJ SEWERYN

Poland – 2016 – 122’
with Andrzej Seweryn, Dawid Ogrodnik, Aleksandra Konieczna, Andrzej Chyra
World Premiere

Special tributes will focus on the late filmmakers Abbas Kiarostami and Michael Cimino.

THE FULL LINE-UP

Piazza Grande

AM TAG, ALS DER REGEN KAM by Gerd Oswald

Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) – 1959 – 85’
with Mario Adorf, Christian Wolff, Gert Fröbe, Corny Collins

CESSEZ-LE-FEU by Emmanuel Courcol

France – 2016 – 103’
with Romain Duris, Grégory Gadebois

COMBOIO DE SAL E AÇUCAR by Licinio Azevedo

Portugal/Mozambique/France/South Africa/Brazil – 2016 – 93’
with Matamba Joaquim, Melanie Rafael, Tiago Justino, António Nipita, Sabina Fonseca World Premiere

DANS LA FORÊT by Gilles Marchand

France/Sweden – 2016 – 103’
with Jérémie Elkaïm, Timothé Vom Dorp, Théo Van de Voorde, Sophie Quinton
World Premiere

INTERCHANGE by Dain Iskandar Said

Malaysia/Indonesia – 2016 – 102’
with Shaheizy Sam, Nicholas Saputra, Prisia Nasution

JASON BOURNE by Paul Greengrass

USA – 2016 – 123’
with Matt Damon, Alicia Vikander, Julia Stiles, Tommy Lee Jones, Riz Ahmed, Vincent Cassel

LE CIEL ATTENDRA by Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar

France – 2016 – 105’
with Clotilde Courau, Sandrine Bonnaire, Noémie Merlant, Naomi Amarger
World Premiere

MOHENJO DARO by Ashutosh Gowariker

India – 2016 – 153’
with Hrithik Roshan, Pooja Hegde

MOKA by Frédéric Mermoud

France/Switzerland – 2016 – 89’
with Emmanuelle Devos, Nathalie Baye, Diane Rouxel, Samuel Labarthe, David Clavel
World Premiere

PAULA by Christian Schwochow

Germany/France – 2016 – 123’
with Carla Juri, Albrecht Abraham Schuch, Roxane Duran, Joel Basman, Stanley Weber
World Premiere

POESÍA SIN FIN by Alejandro Jodorowsky

France/Chile – 2016 – 128’
with Adan Jodorowsky, Pamela Flores, Brontis Jodorowsky, Leandro Taub

TEO-NEOL (The Tunnel) by Kim Seong-hun

South Corea – 2016 – 132’
with Ha Jung-woo, Oh Dal-su, Bae Doona
International Premiere

THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS by Colm McCarthy

United Kingdom/USA – 2016 – 110’
with Gemma Arterton, Paddy Considine, Glenn Close, Sennia Nanua, Anamaria Marinca, Fisayo Akinade, Anthony Welsh, Dominique Tipper
World Premiere

VINCENT by Christophe Van Rompaey

France/Belgium – 2016 – 118
with Alexandra Lamy, Spencer Bogaert, Barbara Sarafian, Geert Van Rampelberg, Fred Epaud
World Premiere

VOR DER MORGENRÖTE – STEFAN ZWEIG IN AMERIKA by Maria Schrader

Germany/France/Austria – 2016 – 106’
with Josef Hader, Barbara Sukowa, Aenne Schwarz, Matthias Brandt, Charly Hübner
International Premiere

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION

AL MA’ WAL KHODRA WAL WAJH EL HASSAN (Brooks, Meadows and Lovely Faces) by Yousry Nasrallah

Egypt – 2016 – 115’
with Laila Eloui, Mena Shalaby, Bassem Samra, Ahmed Daoud, Sabrine, Alaa Zenhom, Mohamed Sharnouby, Lama Kotkot, Enaam Saloussa, Mohamed Farag, Zeina Mansour
World Premiere

BANGKOK NITES by Katsuya Tomita

Japan/France/Thailand/Laos – 2016 – 183’
with Subenja Pongkorn, Sunun Phuwiset, Chutlpha Promplang, Tanyarat Kongphu, Sarinya Yongsawat, Hitoshi Ito, Yohta Kawase
World Premiere

CORRESPONDÊNCIAS by Rita Azevedo Gomes

Portugal – 2016 – 145’
with Eva Truffaut, Pierre Léon, Rita Durão, Anna Leppänen, Luís Miguel Cintra
World Premiere

DAO KHANONG (By the Time It Gets Dark) by Anocha Suwichakornpong

Thailand/Netherlands/France/Qatar – 2016 – 105’
with Arak Amornsupasiri, Atchara Suwan, Visra Vichit-Vadakan, Inthira Charoenpura, Rassami Paoluengtong, Penpak Sirikul, Apinya Sakuljaroensuk, Waywiree Ittianunkul
World Premiere

DER TRAUMHAFTE WEG by Angela Schanelec

Germany – 2016 – 86’
with Miriam Jakob, Thorbjörn Björnsson, Maren Eggert, Philip Hayes, Anaïa Zapp
World Premiere

HERMIA & HELENA by Matías Piñeiro

USA/Argentina – 2016 – 87’
with Agustina Muñoz, María Villar, Mati Diop, Julian Larquier, Keith Poulson, Dan Sallitt, Laura Paredes, Dustin Defa, Gabi Saidón, Romina Paula
World Premiere

JEUNESSE by Julien Samani

France/Portugal – 2016 – 83’
with Kevin Azaïs, Samir Guesmi, Jean-François Stévenin
World Premiere, First feature

KAZE NI NURETA ONNA (Wet Woman in the Wind) by Akihiko Shiota

Japan – 2016 – 77’
with Yuki Mamiya, Tasuku Nagaoka, Ryushin Tei, Takahiro Kato, Michiko Suzuki
World Premiere

LA IDEA DE UN LAGO by Milagros Mumenthaler

Switzerland/Argentina/Qatar – 2016 – 82’
with Carla Crespo, Rosario Bléfari, Malena Moiron Production: Alina film, Ruda Cine
World Premiere

LA PRUNELLE DE MES YEUX by Axelle Ropert

France – 2016 – 90’
with Mélanie Bernier, Bastien Bouillon, Antonin Fresson, Chloé Astor, Swann Arlaud
World Premiere

MARIJA by Michael Koch

Germany/Switzerland – 2016 – 100’
with Margarita Breitkreiz, Georg Friedrich, Olga Dinnikova, Sahin Eryilmaz
World Premiere, First feature

MISTER UNIVERSO by Tizza Covi, Rainer Frimmel

Austria/Italy – 2016 – 90’
with Tairo Caroli, Wendy Weber, Arthur Robin, Lilly Robin
World Premiere

SLAVA (Glory) by Kristina Grozeva, Petar Valchanov

Bulgaria/Greece – 2016 – 101’
with Stefan Denolyubov, Margita Gosheva
World Premiere

FILMMAKERS OF THE PRESENT

AFTERLOV by Stergios Paschos

Greece – 2016 – 94’
with Haris Fragoulis, Iro Bezou
World Premiere, First feature

AKHDAR YABES (Withered Green) by Mohammed Hammad

Egypt – 2016 – 72’
with Hiba Ali, Asmaa Fawzy, Jhone Ikram Hanna, Ahmed Hammad, Samia Hammad, Tamer Abdul Hamid, Ikram Hanna, Nabil Samy, Saad Amer, Basant Khalifa
World Premiere, First feature

DESTRUCTION BABIES by Tetsuya Mariko

Japan – 2016 – 108’
with Yuya Yagira, Masaki Suda, Nana Komatsu, Nijiro Murakami
International Premiere

DONALD CRIED by Kris Avedisian

USA–2016–85’
with Kris Avedisian, Jesse Wakeman, Kyle Espeleta, Louisa Krause
International Premiere, First feature

EL AUGE DEL HUMANO by Eduardo Williams

Argentina/Brazil/Portugal – 2016 – 95’
with Sergio Morosini, Shine Marx, Domingos Marengula, Chai Fonacier, Irene Doliente Paña, Manuel Asucan, Rixel Manimtim
World Premiere, First feature

EL FUTURO PERFECTO by Nele Wohlatz

Argentina – 2016 – 65’
with Xiaobin Zhang | World Premiere, First feature

GORGE CŒUR VENTRE by Maud Alpi

France – 2016 – 82’
with Virgile Hanrot, Dimitri Buchenet
World Premiere, First feature

I HAD NOWHERE TO GO by Douglas Gordon

Germany – 2016 – 100’
with Jonas Mekas
World Premiere

IL NIDO by Klaudia Reynicke

Switzerland/Italy – 2016 – 80’
with Ondina Quadri, Fabrizio Rongione, Diego Ribon, Sonia Gessner
World Premiere

ISTIRAHATLAH KATA-KATA (Solo, Solitude) by Yosep Anggi Noen

Indonesia – 2016 – 97’
with Gunawan Maryanto, Marissa Anita, Eduward Manalu, Melanie Subono

World Premiere

L’INDOMPTÉE by Caroline Deruas

France – 2016 – 98’
with Clotilde Hesme, Jenna Thiam, Tchéky Karyo, Bernard Verley, Pascal Rénéric, Marilyne Canto, Lolita Chammah, Tanya Lopert, Filippo Timi, Renato Carpentieri
World Premiere, First feature

MAÑANA A ESTA HORA by Lina Rodríguez

Colombia/Canada – 2016 – 85’
with Laura Osma, Maruia Shelton, Francisco Zaldua, Clara Monroy, Catalina Cabra, Francisco Restrepo, Juan Miguel Santana, Juan Pablo Cruz, Valentina Gómez
World Premiere

PESCATORI DI CORPI by Michele Pennetta

Switzerland – 2016 – 64′

World Premiere, First feature

THE CHALLENGE by Yuri Ancarani

Italy/France/Switzerland – 2016 – 65’

World Premiere, First feature

VIEJO CALAVERA by Kiro Russo

Bolivia/Qatar – 2016 – 80’
with Julio Cesar Ticona “Tortus”, Narciso Choquecallata, Anastasia Daza López, Rolando Patzi, Israel Hurtado, Elisabeth Ramírez Galván
World Premiere, First feature

SIGNS OF LIFE

300 MILES by Orwa Al Mokdad

Syria/Lebanon – 2016 – 95’

World Premiere, First feature

ANASHIM SHEHEM LO ANI (People That Are Not Me) by Hadas Ben Aroya

Israel – 2016 – 77’
with Hadas Ben Aroya, Yonatan Bar-Or, Meir Toledano, Netzer Charitt, Hagar Enosh World Premiere, First feature

ASCENT by Fiona Tan

Netherlands/Japan – 2016 – 80’ with Hiroki Hasegawa, Fiona Tan

World Premiere

BEDUINO by Júlio Bressane

Brazil – 2016 – 75’
with Alessandra Negrini
World Premiere

POW WOW by Robinson Devor

USA–2016–75′

SVI SEVERNI GRADOVI (All the Cities of the North) by Dane Komljen

Serbia/Bosnia-Herzegovina/Montenegro – 2016 – 100’ with Boban Kaludjer, Boris Isakovic, Dane Komljen

World Premiere, First feature

RAT FILM by Theo Anthony

USA–2016–82’
World Premiere, First feature

THE SUN, THE SUN BLINDED ME by Anka Sasnal, Wilhelm Sasnal

Poland/Switzerland – 2016 – 74’ with Rafał Maćkowiak Wilhelm Sasnal World Premiere

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 3-13 AUGUST 2016

Journey of Hope (1990) | Locarno International Film Festival 2016 | Classics

Director: Xavier Koller

Cast: Necmettin Cobanoglu, Nur Surer, Emin Sivas, Erdinc Akbas

110min | drama | Turkish

Swiss director Xavier Koller’s road movie was the first in the crop of immigration stories that now feels rather dated but still relevant with its poignant humanist appeal and Elemer Ragali’s imaginative cinematography capturing the magnificent scenery of Northern Turkey and Switzerland. In 1991 Journey of Hope won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film firmly nudging Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s Best Costume Winner Cyrano de Bergerac out of the way. Its simple but cumulatively gripping linear narrative follows a Kurdish family who naively imagine a better life in Switzerland.

For Haydar, his wife and young family life is tough but reasonably happy in their modest smallholding in Southeast Turkey. But their journey of hope soon becomes one of despair when they sell all their possessions to fund the passage to paradise, as portrayed by images of cuckoo clocks and Swiss chocolate that Haydar buys in his local village grocery store.

Unscrupulous traffickers have now become daily headline news, but 25 years ago they were still the relatively unknown root of transmigration, taking ready cash in return for a perilous and often unsuccessful voyage to Europe. And we soon discover that the family’s sea passage as stowaways and onwards across the snowbound Swiss Alps is a dangerous and misguided one that provides a hefty dose of drama as the entourage stumble across treacherous terrain weighed down by their prized possessions. Predictably fatalistic, Journey of Hope is nonetheless as harrowing and resonant today as it was several decades ago but its characters’ touching humanity and genuine honesty is what really makes it appealing as a story and the performances by the ensemble cast are genuinely moving. Naive they may have been, but there is something laudable about their desire to seek a better life tempted by a picture postcard portraying perfection in the Swiss Alps, and based on the enduring and misguided belief that the grass is always greener on the other side. MT

SCREENING at LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 3-13 AUGUST 2016

Where is Rocky II (2016) | Locarno International Film Festival 2016

Director: Pierre Bismuth

With: Ed Rushca, Michael Scott, DV DeVincentis, Anthony Peckham, Mike White

97min | Doc | US

Well known artist Ed Ruscha made an unusual piece of art in 1979 that is surrounded in enigma. He called it Rocky II for several reasons: firstly after the famous film by Sylvester Stallone, and secondly because his first attempt was a miserable failure – it got eaten by animals. The point here is how a seemingly ordinary or even mildly bizarre state of events can be easily and simply transformed into an amusing suspense thriller when it comes to Hollywood, given the right treatment.

But back to the mystery artwork; Fashioned out of wire covered by a fibreglass resin, it emerges in filmed footage that the successful boulder-like sculpture was hidden somewhere in the Mojave desert by the media-shy Rushca, who cannot remember where possibly due to being high at the time. Meanwhile his friend, the screenwriter and documentarian Pierre Bismuth (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) is made aware of the existence of the piece and hires a former detective, Michael Scott (who becomes more and more irritated as he’s thwarted) to investigate the missing sculpture by following clues and contacting former colleagues of the artist, leading to this fascinating film which unfolds as Where is Rocky II. The unexpected humour largely springs from Bismuth’s fellow collaborators on the project, the screenwriters DV DeVincentis (Grosse Point Blank, currently working on The Bengali Detective) and Anthony Peckham (Invictus) who create a fiction in parallel narrative to the doc, cleverly editing it and setting it to a classicly ominous and suspenseful score, with hilarious input from Mike White (Nacho Libre).

As we are constantly reminded, truth is stranger than fiction, and the real account of events is far more engaging than the fictional one. Thus Where is Rocky II works simultaneously as a satisfying detective-style documentary; a magnificently shot chase movie and a fascinating lesson in how to make a thriller. Brilliant. MT

The film was presented in Locarno by Art Basel | LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 3-13 AUGUST 2016

The Wave (2015)

Director: Roar Uthaug

Cast: Kristoffer Joner, Thomas Bo Larsen, Ane Dahl Torp

104min | Norway | Drama

Norway’s mountains and fjords provide a magnificent setting for the country’s first natural disaster film and the Norwegian Academy Awards 2016 Foreign Language hopeful.

Starring Kristoffer Joner and Ane Dahl Torp, THE WAVE is based on the probability of a massive rockslide and resulting tsunami destroying the fjord’s shoreline community. There are echoes here of The Poseidon Adventure and The Impossible as director Roar Uthaug takes a visual cue from the ice-bound landscapes of his homeland for a well made but rather stolid affair whose tonal watchwords are restrained panic rather than the unbridled hysteria or even heightened melodrama which characterised its Hollywood predecessors.

With a modest €6 million budget (part-financed by Danish funds) THE WAVE still manages to be a thrilling rollercoaster employing every cliché in the book with a large chunk of ‘Jarlsberg’ chessiness to deliver a tale that takes place in the small community of Geiranger. Geologist Kristian (Kristoffer Joner) is responsible for reporting rockslide changes with his prefessional crew. The previous slide happened in 1905, but disaster is always imminent in this perilous but impressive location; the sound of klaxons giving the community ten minutes to flee to higher ground.

Kristian and his highly capable wife Idun (Ane Dahl Torp) are on verge of moving to Oslo for an oil company – Statoil?. The kids are not altogether pleased with the change as teenage son Sondre (Jonas Oftebro) – unusually for a boy his age – likes the peace and safety of the location: little does he know how exciting his life is about to become.

The screenplay adopts the classic three-act form: Uthaug takes time to familiarise audiences with the set-up in this traditional provincial town where the family are wrapping things up for the move ‘to pastures new’. Kristian senses that all is not well, however, and a last visit to the early warning centre has him fearing the worst. His warnings to ex-colleagues that evacuation may be prudent all fall on deaf ears as the season will shortly be in full swing. Meanwhile, Idun goes on duty in the chintzy local tourist hotel, while Kristian takes Julie for a last night at their old home as disaster lies only hours away. Dozing over a late nightcap of whisky on the rocks, as heavier rocks head towards him, and these are not going to just chill his drink. D.P. John Cristian Rosenlund’s superb widescreen visuals bare witness to the village’s rude awakening and his hand-held camera judders through the fleeing footfall as a thundering avalanche of boulders cascade into the fjord throwing up a tsunami of ash-filled breakers as the sky turns obsidian black.

Joner and Dahl Torp gives performances of surprising strength and complexity for a film of this genre. Dahl Torp comes out on top, very much the Nordic heroine of the piece, leading the men with icy determination and laudable calm, given the circumstances. For a hotel receptionist, she appears to have a thorough grounding in physics, casualty-level resuscitation techniques, not to mention the lungs of a whale.

Despite its clichés and practical implausibilities, there’s a great deal to enjoy here although it’s somehow doubtful that Norway will be coming home with the Oscar. Let’s just hope that if disaster does strike, a woman like Idun will be around to save the day. MT

SCREENING DURING THE LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 7 -18 OCTOBER 2015

Valley of Love (2016) |

Dir.: Guillaume Nicloux

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Gerard Depardieu

France/Belgium 2015, 91 min.

Several decades after after appearing together in Maurice Pialat’s Loulou, Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu are reunited in Guilluame Nicloux’s VALLEY OF LOVE, where they play a long divorced middle-aged couple, trying to come to terms with the death of their adult son Michael, who committed suicide.

Whilst Huppert and Depardieu have gone from strength to strength in their careers, not only in France, the director has struggled since his debut with Les Enfants Volant in 1991. Guillaume Nicloux’s twelve feature films – among them a remake of Rivette’s La Religieuse, also starring Isabelle Huppert – vary in style and content, but always seem to fall short; never fulfilling the director’s great potential. With VALLEY OF LOVE Nicloux has finally realised his ambitions as scriptwriter and director: a contemporary parable of spirituality, very much in the way of Robert Bresson.

A long tracking shot of Isabelle (Huppert) opens the films, the camera follows her patiently through a resort in the Eastern Californian desert. Later she meets Gerard (Depardieu), who turns out to be her long divorced ex-husband. Both are uneasy, after all, they have come here for a ‘meeting’ with their son Michael, who committed suicide a few months previously, but who has written letters to both his parents agreeing to meet them – albeit briefly – in one of seven spots in Death Valley, as described in the letters. The two have not been very attentive parents: sending him to boarding school at a very young age, and after his 18th birthday have lost contact more or less altogether – Isabelle even missing his funeral. Michael was gay, and his mother is more concerned whether he had Aids, than the reason for his suicide.

Wiry, passive-aggressive Isabelle is seemingly the total opposite of her saggy-bodied ex-spouse, who is fond of banal small-talk and avoidance. But somehow, they not only end up in bed together, but find a common language, their old emotional bonds surfacing – even though they have nothing in common anymore. But they visit the Death Valley rendezvous, as instructed, Gerard suffering particularly in the overbearing heat. They mourn their own lives more than the loss of their son: new partners and children have obviously not satisfied them any more than their own relationship: Isabelle is separating from her husband, and Gerard is distraught about his fragmented life, having been diagnosed with cancer of the bladder. He wants to see a consultant for a second opinion, leaving a day earlier than asked for by Michael – something Isabelle fights vigorously. There is a spooky nighttime scene on the tennis court, when Gerard is visited by a ghost – David Lynch would have been proud of it. But the way Nicloux introduces some spiritual healing for this dreadfully ordinary and self-obsessed couple, is truly amazing.

DoP Christophe Offenstein creates serene widescreen images, dwarfing the main protagonists in the desert and towering mountains. Charles Ives’ mournful, a-tonal music underlining the couple’s struggle to come to terms with their own lives as well as the loss of their son. Huppert and Depardieu are always caustic to the point: she answers his statement “I got fat” with a dismissive “Whatever makes you happy”. The ethereal paradise they can’t grasp at first, finally allows them a view beyond the boxed-in existence they call reality and Nicloux ends with a glimmer of hope – like with Bresson, you don’t have to be exceptional to be chosen. AS.

The Shallows (2016) | Infierno Azul

Director: Jaume Collet-Serra

Cast: Blake Lively, Oscar Jaenada, Angelo Josue, Lozano Corzo, Jose Manuel, Brett Cullen

87min | Action Thriller

Billed as the most terrifying shark thriller since Jaws, THE SHALLOWS doesn’t quite push the boat out in the same way as Steven Spielburg’s seminal seventies shocker, but for a slick 87 minutes it serves up a shot of adrenaline that will see you through the summer’s torpid cinema selection. Certainly filmic and well-constructed with some taut and tricky action scenes THE SHALLOWS makes great use of its tropical Australian seascapes and Blake Lively’s considerable charms as a stunning actor and capable action woman.

Catalan director Jaume Collet-Serra is known for a string of decent but untroubling thrillers, amongst them Unknown and Orphan, and this glossy bikini-buster is a welcome addition to his workmanlike repertoire, it slips down easily offering light entertainment unlikely to take the enjoyment out of your relaxing holiday swim in the sea; whether it be in the Med or a more exotic location.

Essentially a one-hander THE SHALLOWS is carried through on Lively’s perfectly formed shoulders as Nancy. a Mermaid-defyingly devastating surfing heroine who exudes a sensual, sweet-smiling vulnerability as a dropout medical student who is taking time out to kick back after a tough year. A backstory as tight as her buttocks contextualises her life: Mum also loved the beach but has recently died and she is close to her sister and father back home on the ranch in Galveston Texas. She arrives on a remote palm-fringed beach courtesy of her hungover companion Carlos and flirts with a bevvy of surfing buddies on her way to ‘blue hell’ (the film’s Spanish title is Infierno Azul) after tripping through the shallows in her neoprene wetsuit and gold jewellery (which later comes in handy when surturing her thigh). The rest is pretty much formulaic but tenderly told: nasty shark threatens, mermaid is injured but avails herself of her medical training to add spice to this compulsive survival against the odds narrative that incorporates a Friends of the Earth subtext. Ultimately THE SHALLOWS is less of a shark shocker and more a guide to surviving against the odds by using our instincts in harnessing nature’s protective forces. Amid a flurry of wetsuits, blonde tousled locks, twisted limbs, sharks teeth and gulls wings, Anthony Jaswinski somehow crafts a convincing storyline to keep us amused for the duration and although the finale comes as no surprise it’s somehow enjoyable getting there. MT

THE SHALLOWS IS ON GENEAL RELEASE IN AUGUST 2016

Wiener Dog (2016)

Director: Todd Solondz

Cast: Greta Gerwig, Julie Delpy, Charlie Tahan, Ellen Burstyn, Danny DeVito, Zosia Mamet

90min | Comedy | US

Todd Solondz is often seen as a divisive figure in the world of filmmaking where his dark comedies are often uncomfortable to watch despite their mordant humour and edgy subjects. His eighth feature, the intriguingly titled Wiener-Dog is no exception. For those of us who may wonder at this canine breed, it is a dachshund or more commonly known as the sausage dog. And this one is billed as no ordinary pet who ‘changes or inspires’ the lives of its various owners, who will possibly enrage you but certainly leave you dreadfully sad.

WIENER-DOG takes the form of a series of four vignettes featuring the dog in question whose peripatetic life leads him to a selection of owners – and not all appear to be animal lovers. We first meet the female dachshund languishing in a cage in a dog’s home, where her little paws are trying to find a comfortable spot to settle down. Bought by the father of a boy to help him on remission from cancer (Keaton Nigel Cooke), his mother Dina (Julie Delpy) takes an instant dislike to the pooch, emerging from her own childhood pet who was ‘raped’ by a dog called Mohammed, and has him speedily put down.

But Greta Gerwig’s veterinary nurse Dawn Wiener (the grown-up version of the shy girl in Welcome to the Dollhouse) takes pity on Wiener-Dog and nurses her back to life before embarking on a weird weekend with an ex-classmate she meets while shopping. Leaving the pup with her friend’s Down Syndrome brother and his wife, Wiener-Dog ends up with Danny DeVito’s professor of film studies who is despairing of his lacklustre students. Clearly Solondz brings his personal feelings into this caustic satire: he dislikes dogs, and doesn’t think much of modern day Hollywood or even men called Mohammed…go figure.

But the closing chapter really takes the dog biscuit when it comes to cruelty, in an hilarious segment involving a bitter old woman (a superb Ellen Burstyn) who re-names the dog ‘Cancer’ and reminisces over her mispent youth. Beautifully filmed by award-winning DoP Ed Lachman (Carol) WIENER-DOG is an acquired taste – enjoyable enough but with an ending that is the worst nightmare for any self-respecting dog lover. You have been warned. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE | REVIEWED AT SUNDANCE LONDON | PROGRAMME

Bleak Street (2015) | Calle de la Amarga

Director.: Arturo Ripstein; Cast: Nora Velazquez, Patricia Reyes Spindola, Guillermo Lopez, Juan Francisco Longoria; | 99min | Mexico | Crime Drama

Mexican veteran director Arturo Ripstein (El Carneval de Sodoma) once again films a script by his partner Paz Alicia Garciadiego, telling the story of a double murder in the seedy atmosphere of downtown Mexico City.

As in most Ripstein films, destiny plays a major role in BLEAK STREET, a sordid area that certainly lives up to its name. The main reason for watching Bleak Street is the crisp black & white cinematography of DOP Alejandro Cantu, who shows the gloomy side streets and alleys of Mexico City with an intensity that echoes G W Pabst’s silent German classic Die Freudlose Gasse (1925)

Dora (Velazquez) and Adela (Spindola) are middle-aged sex workers down on their luck and lamenting the lack of work due to competition from younger talent in a profession where experience seems to count for nothing. Their male dependants La Akita (Lopez) and Muerte Chiquita (Longoria), are twin midget brothers who who work in the wrestling ring where they support the normal sized fighters AK-47 and La Muerte. The brothers are so proud of their occupation they even wear their masks at home. Celebrating a big prize win in the ring they organise a special treat for their female companions which ends in tragedy all round.

This is not Ripstein at his best: the main failing with being the two-dimensional characters who are not fully sketched out as real people; but simply there to carry out the film’s message – poverty ruins your life. But the gracefully choreographed shots of the grim backwaters make up for the lack of connection feels towards the protagonists.

In the aftermath it becomes clear that the four were supposed to meet on a collision course and that the women’s guilt is secondary to the situation they find themselves in. But how can we relate to these men or understand their motives unless they take off their masks? There are other elements here of the silent films of that era: the detective solving the murder being seen not so much as a man of the law, but a rather sinister figure in the same vein as the detectives in Fritz Lang’s films of the same period. AS

NOW ON MUBI | ARTURO RIPSTEIN RETRO

Touched with Fire (2016)

Writer|Director: Paul Dalio Cast: Katie Holmes, Luke Kirby | Drama | US |

Paul Dalio’s exploration of a semi-autobiographical love story between two bipolar poets, whose toxic relationship ignites and stokes up their manic tendencies when they meet as patients in a mental home, is certainly touched with melodrama and histrionics. In Touched with Fire, inspired by a book by psychologist author, Kay Jamison, who also appears as herself to endorse its contents, Carla (Katie Holmes) and Marco (Luke Kirby) fail to engage our sympathies or capture our imagination as lovers who continue their relationship in the outside world, under the watchful eyes of their respective parents. Having exposed their worthwhile story Dalio’s greatest flaw is in failing to probe deeper into this challenging theme or contextualise his narrative for wider audiences than those affected by its subject matter. Given its limitations, Touched with Fire is a reasonable human drama but don’t expect much from Holmes and Kirby. In more experienced hands this could make a fascinating feature. MT

OUT ON DVD

Symptoms (1974) | BFI Flip Side | Bluray and DVD

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Director: Jose Ramon Laraz

Cast: Angela Pleasance, Lorna Heilbron, Peter Vaughan, Paule Mailleux

UK | Horror Drama

Symptoms is a British horror film directed by Jose Ramon Laraz normally known as a director of exploitation movies with arresting titles such as The Violation of the Bitch, Whirlpool and Deviation. However the effective Symptoms is a much more subtle and nuanced production for Laraz.

Helen (Angela Pleasance) invites her girlfriend Anne (Lorna Heilbron) to an English country mansion house for a holiday. Some time back a young woman Cora (Marie –Paule Mailleux) was murdered and dumped in a lake in the woods. Brady (Peter Vaughan) is an odd job man who lives and works locally. He begins to intimidate the two women. And from the attic come noises at night.

The pleasure of Symptoms is that it’s a character study where no back history is provided. In Hitchcock’s Psycho, a glib analytic explanation of Norman Bates’s behaviour is given, only to then be shattered by Norman’s final motherly grimace. Symptoms deliberate omission of reasons for mad behaviour allows the film to journey inwards in a pure and non-didactic manner. Symptoms is slow, measured and appropriately shocking when the story demands. Laraz is no Hitchcock but he displays considerable skill in creating atmosphere whilst carefully restraining his direction.

Laraz had an early background education in art history, which probably accounts for the convincing set design. The house has a gothic appearance without being over-cluttered by disturbing artefacts. Great care is taken with the lighting and Laraz allows his camera to often pause on the disturbed Helen to produce eerie compositions (One such reminded me of the painter Fuseli). The film is beautifully photographed by Trevor Wrenn. With its muted colours, Symptoms could be described as a pastoral take on Polanski’s Repulsion. I suspect Laraz was also aware of the work of Ingmar Bergman, Kummel’s 1971 vampire film Daughters of Darkness and Clayton’s great ghost story film, The Innocents.

The women’s repressed lesbianism is pleasingly understated. One Kiss. One touch. One brief hallucination. All remind you of moments of desire in Bergman’s Persona. And though Symptoms is a psychological horror film it does have its ghostly frissons – the startling appearance of Brady at a window. Yet influences aside, Symptoms never feels derivative, but manages sensitively to adapt tropes and themes to powerful effect. Even when the film occasionally ventures into scenes of normal village life it avoids being clunky.

John Scott provides some very effective music – employing flute, harp and minimal piano that enhance the story. However such character driven horror movies stand or fall by the quality of their performances. Symptoms has exemplary casting. Angela Pleasance (possessing eyes as haunted as her father, the actor Donald), Lorna Heilbron (with dykish short hair) and Peter Vaughan (such malevolent body presence) are all excellent.

Symptoms was once on the BFI’s list of most desired, but now lost, British films. Thanks to a Belgian archive we again have a print. Symptoms is a fine horror movie for those who don’t normally like horror. For those of us who do it should be warmly applauded as an honourable contribution to the genre. Alan Price.

NOW AVAILABLE AT A BFI FLIP SIDE RELEASE | DVD AND BLURAY

Up for Love | Un Homme a la Hauteur (2016)

Dir.: Laurence Tirard

Cast: Jean Dujradin, Virginie Efira, Cedric Kahn, Stephanie Papanian, Cesar Dombuy;

France 2016, 95 min | Romantic drama

French director’s Laurence Tirard’s straight remake of the Argentinian film Corazon de Leon by writer/director’s Marcos Carnevale (2013), seems to have gained little from its change of location to the Cote d’Azur. The frothy love story between tiny Diane and architect Alexandre, who finds her mobile, is simply too glossy to have an real emotional impact.

Diane (Efira) leaves her ‘phone in a restaurant, after yet another row with her ex-husband Bruno (Kahn) largely sparked by their shared legal practice. Later, a charming voice belonging to Alexandre (Dujardin) invites her to dinner to hand over the phone. Diane is taken back when she sees Alexandre in the flesh and soon forgets her reservations when he invites her to parachute – certainly a novelty for a first date. Meanwhile, at the office, Bruno stills makes life difficult for his ex-wife, sleeping with judges and clients, to help his course. The office secretary Colarie (Papinian) is a sort of referee for the fighting lawyers, changing her support frequently. Alexandre, whose grown-up son Benji (Domboy) lives with him, has a running battle with the indolent femme-de-menage, and a St. Bernard’s dog, who loves nothing more than flattening his beloved master. When Diane introduces her parents to Alexandre, the first cracks appear, and Bruno’s jealousy is not very helpful either. Whilst Alexandre is aiming for full cohabitation, Diane is getting cold feet.

It would have helped had Tirard (Moliere) chosen less opulent settings: the sun always shines, illuminating the couples’ wealthy dwellings – particularly Alexandre’s, who is a star architect, and always hops over to Liege, where his designs for the rebuilding of the opera house are realised. Apart from the parachuting, he always finds new, exotic pleasures to impress Diane with, whilst showing his more insecure side to his son.

Then there are the speeches, Colarie, in particular, is always ready to launch into one; at one point accusing Diane of being an emotional fascist because she cannot get over the fact that her friends, family and the public will always baulk at the height difference btween the two of them. Needless to say, the resolution is as much over-the-top as the build up. DOP’s Jerome Almeras’ images would be better suited to glossy commercials: the lighting is always perfect, showing off a luxurious environment, where opulence dominates, stifling the protagonists: UP FOR LOVE feels like a competition where Alexandre tries to woe Diane with more and more extravagant surprises, to make up for his missing inches. When Diane tells him he is so special, we cannot recall a single emotional quality: he is just a stage manager, coming up with new sets to impress Diane. As frothy as candyfloss and as sweetly insubstantial.

ON RELEASE FROM 5 AUGUST 2016

Presenting Princess Shaw (2015)

Writer|Director: Ido Haar

With: Ophir Kutiel, Samantha Montgomery, Liran Atzmor

Care-home nurse Samantha Montgomery was always an active presence on YouTube where she energetically performed her own material under the name of Princess Shaw. Then a meeting with an Israeli mash-up artist finally brought the New Orleans woman into the limelight forming the subject of this entertaining documentary that brings her story to life, showing that artistic collaboration is often the only way forward.

At first, Montgomery was unaware her YouTube material was being used or that the ‘composer’ in question, Kutiman, had released a song called ‘Give It Up’ which, amongst others, featured one of her own pieces. Director Haar and Kutiman clearly recognised Princess Shaw’s natural talents as a singer songwriter. With a difficult childhood (physical and sexual abuse) and a gruelling existence, Montgomery puts her best foot forward and seems to have a winning personality. After performing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ to her charges she then goes home to find her car trashed and is barely making ends meets in her nursing job, let alone finding time to record a demo-tape or finance to get an agent to back her musical talent. Thanks to the latest technology she is able to get her strong voice and material out there and Kutiman clearly knew a good thing when he found her on the internet. Remixing and adding a full band to flesh out her basic tunes, Kutiman, a well-known and respected artist in his Israeli homeland, adds his own wacky blend of marijuana-laced musical magic to her fiesty upbeat vibe on life and the end result is amazing.

Ido Haar keeps his cards close to his chest throughout the film – which some may find frustrating – and certain salient questions remain unanswered: Did Princess profit from the collaboration? Isn’t Haar, or Kutiman, for that matter, just using her? Although Princess Shaw gets recognition aplenty, does she make any money of this venture? Well the answer seem to be a glaring ‘no’ and Haar fails to spill the beans; but where would he be without Princess?.

That said, Haar has certainly made an inspirational documentary about the modern music industry and about a remarkable woman who never gives up on her dream – and who has now found emotional fulfilment and a recognition of sorts but may be not a crock of gold – let’s hope she makes enough to pay her bills. MT

NOW SHOWING AT BERTHA DOCHOUSE | LONDON W1

An | Sweet Bean (2015)

Director: Naomi Kawase | Cast: Kirin Kiki, Masatoshi Nagase | Japan | Drama | 113min

Naomi Kawase’s light domestic fare was served up at Cannes Un Certain Regard sidebar in 2015. Adapted from Durian Sukegawa’s novel, AN is a freewheeling ode to the elderly that is tasteful and modest in its ambitions and intimate in its scale. It focuses on an old lady in her late seventies who is a dab hand at cooking, and particularly at making a sweet red bean paste that sandwiches together the pancakes that are called dorayaki in her native Japan. AN won’t frighten the horses and is the sort of film you might enjoy on a Sunday afternoon with your great aunt or grandmother, or a small child. The message here seems to be that life is not only enjoyable in the slow lane, but there is much to be gained by looking and listening and savouring that often gets left out, to our detriment, in the busy modern world.

Tokue, played by veteran actress Kirin Kiki (also seen in Still the Water) applies for a job in the local dorayaki shop run by soulful manager Sentaro, played calmly by Masatoshi Nagase (Mystery Train) Despite a rejection on the grounds of her age, Sentaro then hires Tokue on the strength of her cooking skills and lives to sees his business really take off with her help and support. The dramatic punch comes when it emerges that Tokue has suffered a form of Hansen’s disease (leprosy) and this sets the cat amongst the pigeons in the close-knit community. Kawase’s subtle narrative points at a life of harmony; mindfulness is very much the way to go. Delicate visuals of blossoming cherry trees link this idea to the healing power of nature but sometimes AN verges on the twee, outstaying its polite welcome with a discrete yawn, even for old ladies and tiny kids. Others might find it a charming way to relax and learn to make these delicate pancakes. MT

AVAILABLE ON VOD 5 AUGUST 2016 AND THEREAFTER ON DUAL FORMAT BLURAY COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF FILM

Born to be Blue (2015)

Wirter|Director: Robert Budreau

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Carmen Ejogo, Callum Rennie, Tony Nappo, Stephen McHattie

97min | Biopic | US

Ethan Hawke’s career took off when he received critical prise for Reality Bites which lead to his role in the Before trilogy in a career that has steadily grown as a screenwriter, novelist director and actor in mainstream titles and independent arthouse fare such as BORN TO BE BLUE where he plays the role of Chet Baker in a re-imagining of a period in the celebrated jazz musician’s life that blends reality with ‘semi-fictiona’l elements as a film within a film.

Opening with Baker playing himself in a biopic, we see him falling for his on-screen love interest (Carmen Ejogo) as he battles with heroin addiction.

With its relaxed jazzy score, BORN TO BE BLUE plays out in a freewheeling way as it dabbles at the edges of truth which gives it an innovative but also questionable slant, neatly side-stepping cliche. Like many artists, Baker did struggle with drugs, and interestingly, he found it difficult to break into the world of jazz as a white man – but this is by no means a pitiful portrait or one that see Baker cry into his cups but it is certainly a worthwhile take on the music industry of the era.

Hawke is convincing as the tortured musician (did he have trumpet lessons – possibly) and appealing in the role to which he brings a certain intensity without going overboard. Born to be Blue is an enjoyable film rather than a great one. But worth watching nevertheless. MT

NOW OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE

Barry Lyndon (1975)

Director: Stanley Kubrick Screenplay: Kubrick Novel: The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq.

Cast: Ryan O’Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Leonard Rossiter, Gay Hamilton, Marie Keen, Hardy Kruger, Philip Stone, Murray Melvin, Leon Vitali, Andre Morell

183min | Drama History Adventure | UK US

BARRY LYNDON is certainly Stanley Kubrick’s most underrated film. A UK and US production, it was shot in 1975 after a trio of international sensations: Dr Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971) it received indifferent reviews on its release (possibly due to Irish sympathies, Kubrick received death threats from the IRA) but has since grown to become one of the most lauded historical dramas.

Based on William Makepeace Thakeray’s 1844 rags to riches story about a feckless Irish adventurer (Redmond Barry) who lacks integrity or judgement who nevertheless enjoys an illustrious and eventful career before ending life with nothing to show for himself but tragedy. Barry Lyndon’s emotional lassitude is possibly key to his popularity as an appealing antihero who we initially admire but eventually grow to dislike, and provides Kubrick with the requisite unhappy ending for his ambivalent but colourful character. And although he remains detached and emotionally distant from his protagonist, the film exudes a sweeping romanticism that makes it all the more effective as a tragedy. Kubrick’s trademark attention to detail, exquisite framing, narrative rigour, musical choices and peerless performances, elicited from an eclectic international cast, all go to make this film an enduring masterpiece that can be revisited and savoured time and time again.

After losing his childhood sweetheart to a wealthy English soldier (Leonard Rossiter in one of his most idiosyncratic turns), Barry leaves home and becomes a British deserter in the Seven Years’ War, soon switching sides to become a Prussian conscript, and then an itinerant gambler thanks to his suave Irish mentor, the dapper Chevalier du Balibari (a resonant Patrick Magee). The mood turns more sombre in the second half of the film that explores Barry’s attempts unsuccessfully to become an aristocrat, via the vicarious ambitions of his mother (a wonderfully crafty Marie Keen) through his marriage to the elegant Lady Honoria Lyndon (Marisa Berenson in a performance of discrete charm) but his insensitivity and lack of judgement eventually make his wife and stepson despise him and he is disdained by their friends and courtiers before he ends his days in a comparative squalor.

Made all the more enjoyable by Michael Hordern’s sonorious but mellow narration, the tone is sober throughout the 183 minutes and Ryan O’Neal brings a brooding often mournful intensity to his role as a self-seeking empty vessel who acts but never feels: his only love is for his young son Brian, but even as a parent he is morally loose and indisciplined. Marisa Berenson triumphs in a portrait of poignant and elegant disappointment as she goes from a respectable but sexless marriage à la mode (to Frank Middlemass’ crusty but amiably appealing Lord Lyndon) to one where she is completely demeaned after her brief love affair with Barry.

Murray Melvin and Philip Stone (the only actor to appear in all of Kubrick’s films) are memorable as the Lyndons’ advisors and Leon Vitali manages to play the part of a pasty-faced but well-intentioned Lord Bullingdon without losing credibility. The film won four Oscars, most notably for John Alcott who used the well-known NASA lens (f/0.7) to convey the glowing candlelit scenes and those that ethereally capture the lushly rolling England landscapes with a soft incandescence. BARRY LYNDON can be a simple story or a highly complex study of psychopathy and social history: whichever you desire. Relax and be enveloped by 19th century life, as the slow movement of Franz Schubert’s Piano Trio in E-flat major and Handel’s sinister Sarabande in D Minor gently sears itself into your memory for the rest of time. MT

OUT ON RELEASE FROM 29 JULY 2016

The Commune (2016) | Berlinale 2016 | Silver Bear Award

Director: Thomas Vinterberg Writers: Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm

Cast: Trine Dyrholm, Ulrich Thomsen, Helene Reingaard Neumann, Martha Sofie Wallstrom Hansen, Julie Agnete Vang, Fares Fares

114min Drama Denmark

Growing up in a commune in Denmark, Thomas Vinterberg brings his experience to bear on this long-awaited but rather disappointing and occasionally vapid drama set in Seventies Copenhagen. Inspired by Vinterberg’s own childhood spent in a similar set up, he roundly dismisses the idea that commune living is the be all and end all but not in a way that’s altogether convincing, despite this collaboration with well-known and reliable scripter Tobias Lindholm. Refreshingly, he pitches his story from a middle-aged angle with the premise that commune living might be the answer to jaded marriages rather than offering unbridled sex for the twenty something brigade. But what emerges is quite surprising and often emotionally cruel: that said, it is a more cheerfully playful film than its more interesting bedfellows Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm and Lucas Moodysson’s Together.

Talk of communes immediately conjurs up the subject of drug-fuelled evenings by the camp fire but there are more provocative issues stoking the flames in this ’70s household that was once the exclusive family home of its altruistic owners, Ulrich Thomsen’s well-off middle-aged architect Erik and Trine Dyrholm’s newscaster Anna, whose marriage is ticking along nicely but needs some tuning up as it approaches the final hurdle. And as women often are, Anna is the one to suggest that commune living might be the answer to spicing things up in the bedroom and elsewhere.

The idea here is that Erik and Anna will open their spacious home in an upmarket suburb of Copenhagen to friends and acquaintances with the hope of creating an interesting new dynamic in their domestic arrangements. Clearly extroverts – the pair of them – but even then, this facile idea predictably falls flat when, surprise surprise, blond bombshell Emma comes along in the shape of Helene Reingaard Neumann. To be fair, she emerges via Erik’s office as a young architect keen to cosy up to his superior design skills and a bit of extracurricular activity. Emma makes all the running initially but Erik is soon smitten and the two begin a torrid affair. Initially gobsmacked, Anna takes it all in the spirit of openmindedness but pretty soon cracks begins to appear in the facade of false bonhomie. The saying “Out of sight, out of mind” couldn’t be more apt here as things take a turn for the worst. Had Anna had a chance to tackle Erik from a position of strength and silence, all might have turned out reasonably; the affair burning itself out naturally due to living arrangements not being up to standard (he is an architect, remember). But having the affair played out in front of her in the confines of her family home – with Erik enjoying the marital bedroom and still having access to her whenever he needs, the dynamic takes a toxic turn for the worst.

The Commune is a watchable drama – even if, by the end, you’re watching it while grimacing or slowly dying inside. But there’s a trite glibness to the story that feels overly misogynist and mean. Characterisations are superficial and flimsy, with every part underwritten except for Anna’s. And here Dyrholm gives a moving and intensely knowing performance for which she won a Silver Bear. The Commune has the quality of a soap opera rather than a serious drama and there is nothing to tether it to the ’70s setting apart from its fashions and hairdos and the odd reference to Vietnam, making it feel insubstantial, immature and tonally bland in the competition line-up. One feels sorry for Anna, but Vinterberg keeps on turning the knife, almost as if he had a personal axe to grind with the cruelty unremitting until the bitter end – in a similar vein to his previous Berlinale 2012 outing The Hunt.

Vinterberg and cinematographer Jesper Toffner go back to Dogme days with their dizzying handheld cameras and the colour palette of pastels adds to the feeling of glibness: duck-egg blues and caramel creams. It’s all a bit beige and unchallenging but the undertone is rapier sharp and raw.MT

BERLINALE 11-22 FEBRUARY 2016 | IN COMPETITION | ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 29 July 2016

Author: The J T Leroy Story (2016)

Writer|Director: Jeff Feuerzeig | With Laura Albert, Bruce Benderson, Dennis Cooper, Winona Ryder

110min | Documentary | US

Jeff Feuerzeig’s laboured and tedious documentary endlessly explores the story of a damaged woman writer who posed as a man and a transsexual and tricked stars and ordinary people for nearly six years in America.

Claiming sexual abuse from her mother’s boyfriend, Laura Albert aka J T Leroy first came to fame in the late 1990s with a slew of tales that purported to represent the voice and zeitgeist of a section of the community, gaining overnight notoriety. Celebrities such as Winona Ryder and Courtney Love claimed to be on close terms with the amorphously sexual literary talent whose second novel once premiered at the Un Certain Regard sidebar in Cannes.

But the hype ended in 2005 when Laura Albert was revealed as a buxom Brooklyn mother who adopted an English accent purporting to be LeRoy’s manager when actually it was all a con. Albert comes across as a narcissitic bore and during her flowery attempts to redeem herself – decked out as a siren – our interest continues to flag.

Feuerzeig interweaves his expose with multiple flashbacks, news footage and technical flourishes – images of literary works appear to fly out of Albert’s black-gloves hands and onto the screen intercut with interminable shots of an old-fashioned recording tape, but the tale she tells fails to fascinate after the first half hour when it becomes mired in endless detail as revelation jossles revelation.

If you are interested in the American fame dream or cult of celebrity this may well appeal but otherwise leave well alone. MT

SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL LONDON | FULL PROGRAMME

The Killing$ of Tony Blair (2016)

Dir.: Sanne Van Der Bergh, Daniel Turi, Greg Ward

Documentary, UK 2016, 92 min.

This is the closest a documentary has come to pure agit-prop in recent years: whilst directed by first timers Sanne Van Der Berg, Greg Ward and Daniel Turi (head of research), The Killing$ of Tony Blair is a film by George Galloway, as stated in the production notes.

Blair and Galloway have been intimate enemies for the whole millennium, since Galloway was expelled from the Labour Party in 2003, over his opposition against of the Iraq war. Both men’s reputation has suffered mightily in the last years, and although Galloway is certainly not in the league of the ex-PM, this documentary is very much a case of projection.

Still, as we learned from the Chilcot Report, Blair dragging this country into the war was at least negligent – some might call it criminal. George Galloway to his credit opposed the regime of Saddam Hussein, when Western powers armed the dictator in the hope he would defeat Iran in the war of neighbours. Galloway, then a Labour MP in Glasgow, later switched sides when the US-led embargo on medicines Iraq was subjected to, led to the death of over 100 000 of children in the country.

Galloway, who always pops up to have the last word here, has assembled an impressive array of witnesses for his case against the war, among them the ex-shadow secretary David Davis MP (Con); Naom Chomsky (MIT); the former UN Assistant Secretary General Denis Halliday; the former British ambassador to Iran and Libya, Sir Richard Dalton and former British intelligence Officer Annie Machon – none of them have anything in common with the former Respect MP George Galloway. Davis in particular is very adamant about the fact that he felt that Blair misled parliament. Stephen Fry and Lauren Booth, Tony Blair’s sister-in-law, talk about the charm of the Ex-PM, which is proven in news-clips: Blair striding in war zones, smiling like a saviour, every inch the messianic figure he wanted to be.

The second half of The Killing$ is a little bit of a murky affair, but mainly due to the fact that Blair, using a loophole in the law, is not required to make his tax returns public. This leads to wild speculations about his real wealth, anything between fifty and a hundred M£. The only fact for certain, is that his property portfolio alone is worth 25m£. But the exact figure of Blair’s wealth is irrelevant: the fact that he brokered deals, earning millions for a few phone calls for the likes of Muammar Gaddafi and the Sultan of Kuwait (to name but a few), very well known for their violation of human rights among other crimes, is sufficient. A final mention should go to Blair’s relationship with Rupert Murdoch, whose British papers supported him during his time in office: in 2013 Murdoch filed for divorce from his third wife, Wendy Deng, rumours indicating an affair with between Deng and Blair. Blair’s negative treatment in the Murdoch press since are indications that these rumours might be true.

George Galloway has done a fine job with The Killing$. Apart from his own vanity making him literally centre stage, there are are too many Talking Heads, and the structure is sometimes undermined by the over-emotional approach, but The Killing$ is still informative and, yes, amusing. But, we have not forgotten the George Galloway of the 2005 General election in Bethnal Green and Bow, where he defeated the black, Jewish Labour MP Oana King by some 800 votes, after using the Islamic Forum of Europe – who supports the Sharia Laws – extensively in his vile and vicious campaign.
A little projection can go a long way…AS

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE

The Reflecting Skin (1990) | Blu-ray release

Writer|Director: Philip Ridley

Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Lindsay Duncan, Jeremy Cooper, Sheila Moore, Duncan Fraser

96min | Fantasy Drama | UK

The Reflecting Skin is seasoned theatre director and novelist Philip Ridley’s feature debut. Unfolding with a blinding clarity of an advert for Kellogg’s Cornflakes. The hyper realist brashness of its copper-coloured cornfields and royal blue skies provide an unlikely backdrop to what is essentially a child’s nightmare rite of passage in fifties rural Idaho. The child is Seth and he’s barely nine years old.

This is American Gothic at its most doom-laden and bible-bashing. A burnished baptism of fire both for its protagonist and its viewers. By cherry-picking from the likes of David Lynch and Terrence Malick, and casting some worthwhile actors (a young Mortensen and Duncan) Ridley hopes to cobble together a decent film. But he forgets about the script and characterisation and lacks the directorial experience. Stringing together a range of poorly thought melodramatic cyphers: a depressed father (Duncan Fraser) who self-immolates, an abusive unloving mother (Ruth Dove), an aimless widow (Lindsay Duncan) and a sheriff (Robert Koons looking as if he’s lost his way back to the set of a Tarantino movie) and, to cap it all, a carload of text book amateur paedophiles suddenly their hands to adult murder in the closing moments. he delivers an quasi operative experience that is both bafflingly inept and unsatisfyingly unengaging. With The Reflecting Skin he evokes a meaningless world that uncovers nothing and fails to move or entertain us in the process.

The banality of evil is David Lynch’s stock in trade but he also knows how to direct a film and create a false sense of reality where things are rarely what they appear to be. His masterful direction and sense of timing and aesthetics are flawless in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. In The Reflecting Skin everything is out in the open: no mystery or magic, no sense of dramatic tension. It is a drama without drama, a horror outing without terror, a ‘fantasy’ that possesses nothing dreamlike for the subconscious.

As Seth Jeremy Cooper is a one dimensional character whose only emotion spills out in the final scene; probably with relief that it’s all finally over. Seth witnesses events that are horrible and bizarre not only from a child’s point of view but also to most adults. Lindsay Duncan is hopelessly miscast as the widow, although she does her best with an underwritten character who lives in a Barrett’s show home on the prairie. An embarrassingly awful love scene with Viggo Mortensen’s young soldier (Seth’s older brother) is singularly un-sensual and meaningless as the pair have no chemistry or romantic arc. Animal cruel aside: The exploding frog scene is sad rather than horrific and the female twins who drift by occasionally with a wounded bird feel out of place and non-sensical but are the film’s only horrific experience. A drop in the ocean of this weirdly irritating fantasy horror that thankfully has a brief running time of 96 minutes. Still that’s 96 minutes you could have been watching something worthwhile.THE REFLECTING SKIN is the perfect film to illustrate just how difficult it is to make a good film. MT

OUT ON BLU-RAY FROM 30 NOVEMBER 2015

Chevalier (2015) | Best Film Award | London Film Festival 2015

Director: Athina Rachel Tsangari

99min | Comedy Drama | Greek with subtitles

If you didn’t get the humour in Athina Rachel Tsangari’s first Weird Wave outing Attenberg, you’re unlikely to appreciate the subtlety of her indie follow-up, CHEVALIER, voted Best Film at the London Film Festival this year, by a jury whose president, Pawel Pawlikowski, took the trophy last year for IDA, and won the foreign language Oscar.

A tribute to male competitiveness, CHEVALIER is a sparky and sophisticated affair that takes place on a wintry out-of-season yacht trip where six well-off men attempt to get ‘one up’ on each other over a pivotal few days on the Aegean. The one-upmanship revolves around a game. And the game is called ‘Chevalier’, named after the signet ring worn by French noblemen. By the end of the voyage, the winner of the game will get to wear the so-called Chevalier ring on his little finger, although the narrative gradually sails into more eclectic waters.

Tsangari’s usual collaborator Yorgos Lanthimos was away making The Lobster, but she works again with their co-writer Efthimis Filippou in a narrative that concentrates on male dominance rather than female submission, as was the case in Attenberg. The men on board all vary in age, attractiveness and kudos. ‘The Doctor” (Yorgos Kentros) is clearly the most distinguished and urbane of the motley crew, he is also the owner of the critical ring. The youngest and least bankable is the pudgy Dimitris (Makis Papdimitriou) who has been brought along by his older brother, Yannis (Yorgos Pirpassopoulos) who threatens to reveal his fear of sleeping alone if he misbehaves. Yannis also happens to be the Doctor’s son-in-law, so is on his best behaviour; the suave Christos (Sakis Rouvas) is the best looking. Josef Nikolaou (Vangelis Mourikis) and Yorgos (Panos Koronis, from Before Midnight) are long-term colleagues.

Once holed-up ‘at leisure’ in the yacht with diving trips and boozy lunches to enjoy, certain patterns of behaviour start to emerge in the name of the game. The men spar and vy for superiority indulging in playful and, at times, more more ribald banter that occasionally verges on the hilarious, particularly when Dimitris does an on-deck rendition of Minnie Ripperton’s “Lovin You`’ complete with girlie high-pitched voice. The ultimate aim here is to establish who is the best at everything rather than in one thing in particular – ‘primus inter pares’ style. Challenges also include who is the ‘most loved’ on the home front – requiring the men to engage in hands-free phone calls in front of the others. There is even an ‘erection contest’ in this male-bonding (aka competitiveness) routine. The winner is thankfully never revealed.

For a film that takes place by the sea, the colour palette is refreshingly devoid of azure blues and dazzling turquoise: instead Tsangari has chosen a chic taupe, teal and gunmetal aesthetic which compliments this recherché masculine set-to. D.oP Thimios Bakatatakis does his best to frame and photograph within the claustrophobic confines of tight spaces to great effect, given the equally tight budget. And in the end, the individual tasks are not taken that seriously; they are simply representative of the male ego and what it is prepared to undergo and tolerate within the parameters of the game, however outlandish or absurd. At times, there are echoes here of Eddie Waring’s “It’s a Knockout”. Spot Greece’s answer to Keith Chegwin and you’ll enter the spirit of this clever satire. MT

CHEVALIER WON A SPECIAL MENTION BY THE JURY AT SARAJEVO FILM FESTIVAL 2015

Papusza (2013) | DVD release Kinoteka 2014

Director/Writers: Joanna Kos, Krzysztof Krauze

Main Actors: Jowita Miondlikowska, Joanna Niemirska, Antoni Pawlicki

131 minutes Polish and Romany Origin: Poland Documentary

Picture: Black and White

Though ostensibly a biopic of the Polish-Romani poet and singer Bronisława Wajs (aka the eponymous Papusza), Joanna Kos and Krzysztof Krauze’s Papusza seems to concern itself just as much with the life and history of the Romani people in 20th Century Poland as it does with Papusza herself. In telling Papusza’s story, the film jumps back and forth over a sprawling timeline, encompassing both World Wars and, perhaps equally significantly for the Romani community, a government decree aiming to end their nomadic roaming. This, then, is as much a story about the effect of external politics upon a community as it is a story about one woman’s struggle with the ideological confines of that same community.

In a sense, though, it’s also external politics that exacerbate Papusza’s situation. On the run and in hiding in the post-war years, poet and ex-resistance fighter Jerzy Ficowski takes refuge with the Romani, entering a world where people believe in spells and justify stealing animals by claiming that they are God given and owned by all. Here, he meets Papusza who, unusually for a Romani, has learnt to read – much to the disgust of her fellow travellers. At one point, when Papusza is still just a girl, the Romani camp is attacked and burnt. Papusza believes the attack to be her fault, simply because she has learnt to read. It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that Papusza is hesitant about her literary gifts – gifts noticed and encouraged by Ficowski, who will later translate and publish Papusza’s poems in Polish newspapers, bringing Papusza both wider fame and banishment from the Romani world. She is accused of betraying their honour and their secrets, and therefore of breaking the rules of their insular community.

When Papusza states that she would have been happy if she hadn’t learn to read, it’s hard not to read in wider issues of social and sexual politics, both within and beyond the Romani community – and yet, the continual focus on the community at large prevents Papusza from becoming a ‘woman’s film’, or from ever giving us a central protagonist with which to truly identify. As a whole, the film may be very well made and strikingly shot, but it’s also long and a little too leisurely, given the lack of tight engagement. Still, as a detailed portrait of an outsider community, the film leaves a textured imprint which won’t be soon forgotten. Alex Barrett

PAPUSZA IS ON GENERAL RELEASE AT SELECTED VENUES

Ace of Hearts (1921) | DVD

Dir: Wallace Worsley | Lon Chaney, Leatrice Joy | Horror Drama | US | 75min

At noon on 16 September 1920 the United States suffered the most destructive act of terrorism yet committed on American soil when a bomb believed to have been planted by Italian anarchists exploded on Wall Street, killing 30 people outright and injuring hundreds of others. Already in cinemas, Wallace Worsley’s ‘The Penalty’ (1920), had recently starred Lon Chaney as the head of a gang of anarchists plotting a spectacular robbery; and a year later the director and star released a similarly themed follow-up based upon another novel by Gouverneur Morris.

Obviously a pot-boiler compared to ‘The Penalty’ (but like its predecessor handsomely shot by Donovan Short), Chaney has top billing but a very secondary role as a member of a secret society who resemble the anarchists in Conrad’s ‘The Secret Agent’ (1907), the conspirators in Thorold Dickinson’s ‘Secret People’ (1952) and the vigilante judges in Peter Hyams’ ‘The Star Chamber’ (1983). They decide to rid society of a vile plutocrat (Raymond Hatton, called “The Menace” in the cast list but referred to throughout the film as “The Man Who Has Lived Too Long”) by cutting cards to choose the assassin. This scheme is complicated by an extremely uninteresting love triangle comprising Farallone (Chaney), Forrest (John Bowers) and the intriguingly named Lilith (Leatrice Joy); the last being the brotherhood’s only sister, a prig whose infatuation with “the Cause” means she has zero interest in romantic matters.

Although selected on the basis of cutting cards (an obvious nod to Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Suicide Club’), Forrest should have been the obvious candidate to carry out the assassination in the first place; since for the past three months he’s been working as a waiter in the restaurant where The Menace has breakfast every morning at 9.00, and thus perfectly placed to shoot him in the head at point blank range. Instead their chosen method of execution takes the form of an entirely indiscriminate act of terror employing a bomb capable of destroying an entire building; which it should already have been obvious to Forrest and his associates would mean that The Menace would not be the only casualty (like the little Kenyan girl in ‘Eye in the Sky’). Sure enough, when it finally dawns upon Forrest that there will be collateral damage the entire operation is compromised.

The bomb itself looks like a cigarette case and neatly fits into a jacket pocket: yet another example of movie technology far in advance of anything available in real life. The Wall Street bomb itself had had to be brought to the site where it exploded on a horse-drawn wagon. Richard Chatten

NOW AVAILABLE ON DVD

Men & Chicken (2015)

Writer| Director: Anders Thomas Jensen

Cast: David Dencik, Mads Mikkelsen, Nikolaj Lie Kass, Søren Malling, Nicolas Bro,

Fantasy | Comedy | Horror

Anders Thomas Jensen is best known for strong storytelling and screenwriting both in his native Denmark (Brothers | In a Better World) and the UK (The Duchess | Love is All You Need). His latest film is almost impossible to define: a lyrical blend of tragicomedy, fantasy and horror with dynamic performances from the best of Denmark’s acting talent all go to make this film an unforgettable experience in tonal weirdness. CHICKEN & MEN is best described as a grotesque Danish version of the BBC’s League of Gentlemen with undertones of Cold Comfort Farm.

Family dysfunction is at the core of a story set in the glorious island seascapes of Ork (the Danish isle of Fyn) where three retarded and cleft-paletted half-brothers (Franz (Soren Malling), Gregor (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) and Josef (Nicolas Bro) occupy the rambling stately ruins of a manor house (Beelitz, Brandenburg Germany) overrun with a range of hybrid farm animals (some alive, some preserved in formaldehyde) adding a twist of quirkiness to its Gothic splendour. The film opens as two other ‘brothers’ Elias and Gabriel (Mikkelsen and Dencik) arrive on the estate having found out from their dying adoptive father, that their birth father, an eccentric scientist, is still living in the stately pile.

From this bizarre narrative, a strangely philosophical parable emerges which is by turns hilarious, macabre, romantic and even tender in its fairytale pretensions. Mads Mikkelsen swaps his signature sexual allure for one of sad sexual disfunction in a role that is gruesome and at times even demeaning: rocking brassy curls and a lopsided grin, his strange affliction forces him to wank involuntarily every time he comes into contact with a woman. The ‘maguffin’ here is a well-used role of loo paper. Each character gives a nunaced interpretation of madness and physical deformity that keeps us entertained and intrigued in disbelief and horror. At the end Gabriel is the brain behind the brothers delivering the philosophical thread that weaves the story together giving it a meaningful integrity. Bak and Kaas’ sweepingly romantic score elevates the film in a poetic way and combined with Sebastian Blenkov’s wildly bucolic cinematography MEN & CHICKEN is both entertaining and memorable whether you buy into its grotesque humour or not.MT

SCREENING DURING THE LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 7 – 18 OCTOBER 2015

Burroughs: The Movie | Criterion Collection UK

Dir.: Howard Brookner | Documentary with William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg; 90min | USA

What started as an expanded version of Howard Brookner’s MA thesis in 1978, became the portrait of beatnik author William S. Burroughs (1914-1997).

The film premiered at the New York Film Festival and was based on the first time writer/director’s extensive footage that featured over a hundred hours of his subject shot between 1978 and 1983. Soon afterwards the documentary ‘got lost’, but Brookner’s nephew Aaron rediscovered it a few years ago in Burroughs’s flat in 222 Bowery in New York, ‘guarded’ by the poet John Giorno. Aaron not only helped with the restoration of the film material, but set Howard Brookner a moving tribute with his own documentary Uncle Howard, his subject having died aged thirty four in 1984 of complications from AIDS, a few days before his first feature film, Bloodhounds of Broadway, starring Madonna, was released.

It tells how William S. Burroughs was born into a wealthy family in St. Louis in 1914, and lived on for 83 years, despite “having ingested enough heroin to kill several entire rock bands”. He walks through the film like his own ghost, dressed immaculately in expensive suits, looking very much like a banker. When he turned up to give his readings in the off-beat New York venues, security staff at the door often refused to admit him, fearing he was a undercover agent. Burroughs shares much of his outward demeanour with another native of St. Louis, the poet T.S. Elliot (1888-1965), who actually worked as a banker, and cultivated the look of an aristocratic British gentleman covering up the turmoil of emotional contradictions.

Burroughs comes over as robotic, not only in his readings, but also when he talks about his past and his monotonous delivery often makes this a tough watch despite its fascinating content. When recounting the accidental death of his wife Joan Vollmer in Mexico in 1951, he seems to be talking like bystander – not a man who shot his wife, restaging the William Tell incident – a glass replacing the apple. His relationship with his son from this marriage, William S. Burroughs jr., was fraught, the young man died during the shooting of the film of liver cirrhosis in his mid thirties. Instead, Burroughs invested all his emotions in James Grauerholz (*1953), who was introduced by Allen Ginsberg into the circle. Grauenholz became Burroughs’ private secretary and ‘protector’ for the rest of his life, and his literal executor after his death. When William Burroughs muses over old family photos with his brother Mortimer in St. Louis, there is no hint of how different the brothers were, apart from one remark by Mortimer criticising his brother for the language used in Naked Lunch. Furthermore, when talking to the family gardener about his dead son, Burroughs very much comes across as the understanding patriarch of a feudal family. The true Burroughs emerges much more when talking about Wilhelm Reich’s ‘Orgone Box’ (which was supposed to give physical health through orgasms), to which Bill credits his longevity. The same Reich – a former student of Freud – who, incarcerated in an American prison, blamed Stalin for his imprisonment. And Burroughs really cuts loose when re-enacting a scene from his Naked Lunch, clad in a bloodied surgeon dress, performing a messy operation.

DoP Tom De Cillo conjures up a morose landscape, the overriding feeling is sadness as Burroughs traipses catatonically through the film like a, bereft of any compassion or empathy. He is a great raconteur but there are no smiles, let alone laughter – never anything but William S. Burroughs. The director’s puppy-love for his subject cannot hide a man caught in himself, lonely and terminally depressed, whatever the circumstances. Burroughs the author seems to have scarified everything about himself for his art – alone for decades in his symbolically soundproofed and windowless flat in New York’s Bowery. AS

RELEASED AS PART OF THE CRITERION UK SELECTION on 11 JULY 2016

Hide and Seek (2014)

Director: Joanna Coates

Cast: Hannah Arterton, Joe Banks, Daniel Metz, Rea Mole, Josh O’Connor

82min Drama US/UK

In the depths of an English summer, four loosely connected friends from London move into a remote country cottage with the aims of creating an environment free from social conventions including those of sexuality. Living in this intimate setting they hope to drift into a state of harmony where there are no boundaries and they will discover the missing element in their lives.

Joanna Coates first feature is an elegant and visually inventive art house affair. Evoking a suspenseful sense of intrigue from the opening, with an eclectic choice of music and her clever casting: a slightly neurotic Leah (Rea Mole), a relaxed and playful Charlotte (Hannah Arterton), ) an assured and assertive Max, (Josh O’Connor) and a placid American (Jack), Daniel Metz). This radical approach works well at the start especially as the foursome seem mutually attracted to one another. But it also feels slightly hopeful on the sexual front. That they are all going to casually sleep together on an ongoing basis seems naive and presumptuous. However, Joanna Coates’ well-paced drama makes this an enjoyable voyage of discovery, leaving us to guess how things will eventually work out with some spirit of faith. The characters are enigmatic yet plausible even though the physical side of their relationships gets considerably more exposure than the emotional and intellectual one. Although it often feels as if events and scenarios are being forced unnaturally by some outside party, somehow this works. The arrival of another male friend (Simon, Joe Banks) changes the dynamics abruptly. His inquisitive line of questioning and perceptive comments seems quite natural, in the scheme of things, and yet seem intrusive to the quiet cohesion of the existing group, which has reached a state of suspended nirvana.

But the psychological parlour games start to destabilise his equilibrium and when one of the girls attempts to force a fantasy scenario on him he makes a desperate attempt to inject a spirit of reality into the proceedings. Afterwards, it’s clear that the utopia has been challenged but also that an unwanted element of their former lives has been purged. A thought-provoking and engaging debut that explores the state of modern society, xenophobia, nuclear relationships the fear of loneliness. MT

Winner of the Michael Powell Award for Best British Film at the Edinburgh Film festival 2014, HIDE AND SEEK, opens in selected cinemas across the country on Friday July

Waves | Fale (2016) | Karlovy Vary Film Festival 1 – 9 July 2016

Dir: Grzegorz Zariczny;

Cast: Anna Kesek, Katazyna Kopec, Tomasz Schimscheiner, Jolanta Olzewska, Edyta Torhan

Drama | Poland 2016 | 71 min

Grzegorz Zariczny revives contemporary Polish cinema with this feature debut WAVES which draws on his experience as a documentarian and is based on the experiences of one of the lead actors. In its brevity and non-polemic style, WAVES has something in common with the early work of Krzysztof Kieslowski who also started his career in documentaries, producing through the Munk Studio, as Zariczny has done.

Teenagers Ania (Kesek) and Kasia (Kopec) dream of being successful hairdressers and are apprenticed in a salon run by the bitter, disillusioned Mrs Szefowa (Torhan), who is also an unpleasant boss. To be fair, Ania has no natural talent, and despite her friend Kasia’s encouragement, she tries to blame her distant mother and alcoholic father (Schimscheiner) for her ineptitude in her chosen career. Kasia’s parents are loving in comparison and she is close to her mother. Ania hopes for the best when her mother announces a reunion, getting the family together for a dinner.

There are some strong performances here but this resonant slice of social realism is really brought to life by DoP Weronica Bilska whose evocative camerawork brilliantly evokes the grim post-industrial cityscape of Krakow’s Nova Huta district; the former industrial hub of this great Southern city now lies empty and neglected, the streets lined with shabby housing and high rise blocks. But strangely enough Ania’s father, a painter and decorator, has managed to cobble together a decent modern flat with furniture that Ania despises: “it’s too new and too clean” she tells Kasia, who, in turn, starts sleeping over more and more often, preferring it to the run-down hovel she lives in with her parents.

Zariczny pictures this corner of modern Poland almost on its knees; the old are nostalgic for the Stalinist past (which was no better than the present) and frozen in a static grip of negativity, whilst the young are disenchanted. What emerges is a country that has failed to reinvigorate its previously thriving industry, with the talented and ambitious seeking their fortunes abroad or in the large cities. AS

WAVES has its WORLD PREMIERE at KARLOVY VARY FILM FESTIVAL 1-9 JULY 2016

Jules et Jim (1962)

Dir: Francois Truffaut | Cast: Oskar Werner, Jeanne Moreau, Henri Serre | France

Of all the French Nouvelle Vague films JULES ET JIM has for me proved problematical.
I keep changing my mind on whether it fully works or not. I must have seen it three
or four times now. First time round I was completely captivated, being young and receptive to its youthful high spirits (especially in the film’s first half). It had a joy and spontaneity that accorded so well with the promise of the liberating politics happening round me (circa 1968, six years on from JULES ET JIM. Then I couldn’t recall an earlier British or American film that spoke of such personal freedom. And of course it very soon had a big influence on Arthur Penn’s 1967 Bonny and Clyde (that Truffaut himself was once considered for directing).

But on subsequent viewings, doubts about the merits of JULES ET JIM have crept in. Is it not all surface charm? A Gallic case of style over substance? The film is gorgeously photographed by Raoul Coutard. It’s a wide screen charmer filmed in glistening black and white; Coutards’s lyrical texture of light and shade proved so powerful that he convinced me – alongside the mid-summer photography of early Ingmar Begman films – that the best really hot summers were only attainable in monochrome. Link that up with a great joyful film score by Georges Delerue and cineastes are well on the way to being won over. But as for Truffaut’s direction, the scripting and the performances?

It’s Paris 1912. Jules (Oskar Werner) a German writer strikes up a friendship with a French writer named Jim (Henri Serre). They enjoy a semi-bohemian existence; exploring the cultural life of the city and the pursuit of women. When they both meet Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) an intense love triangle ensues. Both are sexually attracted to her, yet it’s the more introvert Jules that Catherine decides to marry. She’s both strong and liberated, with a restless and capricious nature. An uncontrollable force, she oscillates her affection between the two men. After the rupture of the First World War they all appear to settle down together domestically, but cannot create a workable level of friendship/relationship. Such testing of the limits of freedom has dark and tragic consequences.

Occasionally Jules manages to engage my sympathy and interest. Jim hardly ever does. And Catherine intermittently succeeds. For me Truffaut keeps too great a distance from his characters. Many admirers of this film say that an emotional detachment was necessary so as to make them also work as archetypes. Fine,but I now find it hard to warm to this perplexed and rather narcissistic trio. Only Jeanne Moreau has her moments when she reveals a troubled vulnerability behind great strengths. Too often you feel that Truffaut is content to make everyone beautiful in beautifully self-conscious shots, or exuberant and melancholic in over-striking compositions. Such an excess of surface beauty in Jules et Jim makes it appear more like a pretty commercial for the New Wave, not the crest of the wave itself. Alan Price

NOW OUT ON BLURAY COURTESY OF ARTIFICIAL EYE

The Wait (2015) | L’Attesa

Director: Piero Messina

Cast: Juliette Binoche, Razor Rizzotti, Lou de Laâge, Domenico Diele

100min Drama France | Italy

In an villa in Sicily a woman is waiting in the dark. Something terrible has happened and this mystery feels as ancient and as dark at the one between mothers and their sons. THE WAIT is Piero Messina’s directorial debut and it feels a very Italian film with is echoes of Christ’s death underpinning the narrative and linking it to the deep sense of loss and pain that one mother feels in the aftermath to a tragedy that unravels during Eastertide in her family home.

Clearly taking cues from his mentor Paolo Sorrentino, Messina has made a highly stylised and haunting drama with another tour de force performance from Juliette Binoche in the role of Anna. A French woman who married a Sicilian several decades previously, she is now divorced but still lives in the age-old villa at the foothills of Mount Etna.

This is a slow-burning drama that has divided audiences here at Venice Film Festival, where it has its premiere. Lou de Laâe plays a madonna-like young woman who has been invited to the villa to share the Easter holidays with her boyfriend Giuseppe, Anna’s son. But Anna, devastated by the death of her brother, is caught of guard by this arrival and simply cannot communicate, what appears to be another absence, that of her son Giuseppe.

This very simple storyline allows Messina to craft a seductively atmospheric two-hander in which two woman dance a tentative tango while each attempts to scope out the other. As Anna, Binoche is captivating. While being drawn to Jeanne – who is also French and a welcome guest from the ‘outside’ world – she craves her company but also keeps her at arms’ length from the awful circumstances of her sudden loss. This is a clever ploy but also a deeply selfish act, for which she is chided by the old retainer, Pietro (Giorgio Colangeli). Claiming she is waiting for the ‘right time’ to tell Jeanne, she continues to luxuriate in the girl’s bewilderment and she quizzes her on the relationship with her son; playing a power- game while she teases out information from the younger woman.

Clearly, something is not right. Jeanne has not heard from Giuseppe for several days and cannot raise him on his mobile phone. Deeply in love with him, she waits patiently while politely playing houseguest to Anna. At the same time, Giuseppe’s whereabouts remain a mystery: is he injured, dead or simply gone away without letting anyone know? Messina builds up such a magical ambiance, luxuriating in the glorious heat of this Sicilian springtime, that somehow we are content to let the enigma play out, clutching at straws and letting our own imaginations wander as we wonder where he is.

Deeply ambiguous, yet imbued with ancient symbolism, the film ends without even revealing the truth behind this everlasting mystery: that of the relationship between a mother and her precious son. For Catholics, this is especially resonant: the Virgin woman conceiving and giving birth to a boy single-handedly, she continues through life to exert a special and enigmatic control over him until the end. And to re-enforce the sacred mystery: we never meet Giuseppe in THE WAIT. And for many mothers, this is the only power they have over their sons when the boys grow into men. Jealously guarded them and keeping other women away for as long as they possibly can. When their sons do fall in love, the women will always regarded with suspicion and occasionally atavistic hatred and mistrust, by their mothers.

Essentially a two-hander, inspired by the Pirandello’s play: “The Life I Gave You” from Luigi Pirandello’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author”), THE WAIT may be prove too long a wait for many. But savour its atmosphere while you can. Messina is a new voice and a stylish one. And Italian cinema is desperately in need of one. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE

REVIEWED AT VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 12 SEPTEMBER 2015

A Poem is a Naked Person (1974)

Director.: Les Blank | Documentary with Leon Russell | USA 1974 | 90min

Shot between by Les Blank between 1972 and 1974 at the compound of singer/songwriter Leon Russell in Tulsa, Oklahoma, A POEM IS A NAKED PERSON could not be shown until 2015 because of rights issues involving the star singer and the director. Blank’s son Harrod finally got in contact with Russell to resolve these.

Les Blank (1935-2013) was a veteran filmmaker and as eccentric as his many documentaries featuring among others, director Werner Herzog in Werner Herzog Eats his Shoe. One reason for Russell’s long resistance to having the film shown was that he did not always appears centre, quite literally. Blank focused on the lively artist community in Tulsa where painter Jim Franklin painted a mural resembling nightmares from Hieronymus Bosch – while also sweeping out an empty swimming pool and removing baby scorpions. Other offbeat attractions are a glass-eating parachutist and a demolition job of a large building.

Singer/Songwriter Leon Russell had performed with Bob Dylan, George Harrison and Joe Cocker. He had been a member of the Wrecking Crew since his early teens and recorded with The Byrds, Frank Sinatra and Herb Alpert. But Blank was also interested distilling the environment: the old-fashioned storefronts of Tulsa; the floating motels; the beautiful women, ordinary folks and Tractor Pull competitions.

Les Blank being, as usual, his own DoP, relied mostly on sound technician and editor Maureen Gosling, who collaborated with Blank over twenty years on films such as Burden of Dreams (1982) and In Heaven, There is No Beer (1984). For A Poem is a Naked Person, “we had about fifty to sixty hours footage”. Blank’s concert shots of Russell are a sweaty affair and the studio sequences are intimate. Harrod, who was nine years old when shooting started, was often present and remarked that his “father’s penetrating camera work was a result of luck and patience. He would be filming with one eyes and looking out with the other ahead of the shoot, He would anticipate when to move the camera.” Still, he missed one particular shot – when Russell and Bob Dylan tried to get away in a canoe to seek out some privacy.

Blank cut about twelve minutes of the original, mostly slow scenes, having no patience with long shots; he wanted authenticity, as seen during a concert performance when the camera is on Russell’s shoulder during the honky-tonk melody of ‘Tight Rope’, and the next moment we see a member of the crowd literally in ecstasy. Overall, A Poem is a Naked Person is much more like a music documentary, it is a time capsule from a bygone era where everything was meant to be an excuse for a great party, and music and all other art forms were a way of life. AS

OUT ON RELEASE AS SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 8 JULY 201

The Neon Demon (2016) prime

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn | Cast: Elle Fanning, Keanu Reeves, Alessandro Nivola, Christina Hendriks, Jena Malone, Karl Glusman | 110min | Thriller | US

Nicolas Winding Refn’s coruscating takedown of the LA fashion industry epitomises the competitive resentment women feel for one another in this cat eat cat world.

Its subject matter clearly indicates that this is not a thriller about wallflowers or the faint-hearted. A phenomenal central performance from Elle Fanning leads a cast of international acting talent categorised by punchy female characters with two standout male roles for Alessandro Nivola and Keanu Reeves. Scripted by Winding Refn and co-writers Mary Laws and Polly Stenham, this mannered often bitchy exposé is driven forward by its blindingly magnetic visual style and a pounding electronic soundtrack from Cliff Martinez (Drive).

When 16 year old Jessie (Elle Fanning) arrives in LA from her native Georgia she cuts a seemingly demure and homespun figure amid the blare and bright lights of LA’s modelling fraternity. Jessie is no strinking violet, but up against the hard-bitten competition she has a ‘deer in the headlights’ quality which is much sought-after by the agency heads and photographers and soon catches the eye of Alessandro Nivola’s cliquey fashion designer wannabe actor. Beauty isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. You’ve got something that other women would kill for – natural beauty”. His words will eventually bear poisonous fruit although Refn fails to delivery a satisfyingly convincing outcome for his underwritten heroine.

There are scenes in this shocking often erotic thriller that audiences will find objectionable. Elle Fanning carries through her character’s naive personality with a subtlety that connects us to the hard-edged world where most sink in the mire. The themes of vampirism and cannibalism at times feel far-fetched and outlandish but make this fantasy somehow plausible in this fake community where evil lurks in every character, a manifestation of fear of failing and losing face – quite literally.

Refn’s visionary visual style that aligns him with Jonathan Glazer in Under the Skin where unspoken scenes project us into the realms of mystery and even terror and once again, he is driven by the power of electronic sound which tinkles and throbs by turns. This is an LA inhabited by real and metaphorical vampires who ‘feed off’ their victims with a creepy and hateful fascination showcased by Klaus Kinski in Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) and Gary Oldman’s Dracula in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992).

There are some impressive performances from Christina Hendricks’ model booker and , Jena Malone’s lesbian make-up artist Ruby. Jesse’s rivals Sarah (Abbey Lee) and Gigi (Bella Heathcote) seethe with poorly disguised malice in some of the most viturperative lines their vacuous characters have ever uttered, spitting venom on Jesse’s meteoric rise to acceptance amongst the male designers and photographers. Alessandro Nivola is stunningly persuasive as a cruelly narcissistic fashion designer who has models parade in front of him in their underwear before callously dismissing them. The only character who plays it straight is Jesse’s decent boyfriend (Karl Glusman) who is cast aside when he cramps her style. As despite her lack of redemption, Fanning is nonetheless our conduit into this sunny world of lost souls floundering on the dark side that Refn conjures up with conviction and aplomb leaving us without a Hollywood happy ending in the true style of Polanski. MT

| NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Shoot the Pianist (1960) | Tirez sur le Pianiste | Bluray release

Writer|Director: François Truffaut | Story: David Goodis “Down There”

Cast: Charles Aznavour, Marie Dubois, Nicole Berger, Michèle Mercier

92min | Drama | France

For many admirers of the French New Wave, Tirez Sur le Pianiste is a key film. Perhaps even more than Godard’s A Bout de Souffle it wilfully and playfully broke the textbook rules on filmmaking that were perceived to have become so rigid in the 1950s. Truffaut described it as an “explosion of a genre”. From a pastiche film-noir base (chiefly modelled on Fuller, Lang and Ray) Truffaut gleefully shook up and conflated the gangster film, romance, melodrama, comedy and musical into an existential mindset of delightful lightness and disconcerting darkness.

Edward Saroyan (a marvellous self-effacing performance by Charles Aznavour) is a famous classical pianist who abandons his career after his wife’s suicide. Going under the name of Charlie Kohler he’s employed playing upbeat jazz piano with a group in a dive of a bar. Charlie’s two brothers get involved with gangsters and he’s dragged into the affair. A waitress Lena (Marie Dubois) falls in love with Charlie. She does her best to help Charlie after he ‘accidentally’ kills the landlord, Plyne (Serge Davri).

Tirez sur le Pianiste is reflectively anti all the genres it parades and explodes, so as to fashion them into something less genre burdened, more anxious to be genre free. All the cinematic cards are thrown up into the air and we experience how they come down. When they hit the floor, there’s no mess but many playful indicators of a fresh order of filmmaking. Tirez sur le Pianiste remains constantly modern and exciting; continually shifting its evasive form and content. An extended flashback describes the background to Charlie’s career. Inside this part digression a sequence of shots succinctly conveys his ambivalence. Charlie arrives for an important audition with a music agent. Cut to a huge close-up of his finger about to ring the bell of his door. Cut to a woman who has just been auditioned, and looks like she’s been rejected. Charlie watches her leave. Truffaut returns to the woman (looking hurt) walking down a corridor. On the soundtrack we hear (but never see) Charlie’s piano audition. Success, failure, sexual attraction, uncertainty, diffidence, freedom of action and choices, both artistic and sexual, are suggested on and off screen. Multiple possibilities for the film’s journey are presented to the viewer, director and Charlie our conflicted and melancholic hero. Truffaut brilliantly portrays dramatic indecision whilst paradoxically opening up his free-flowing story for even further development.

Tirez sur le Pianiste never leads to a proper resolution but still makes for a deeply satisfying film. For Truffaut’s framing of shots, assisted by Raoul Coutard’s expressive monochrome photography, mean that Charlie’s loose aims and real needs are precisely handled. With the accompaniment of George Delerue’s lovely music, the vivid spontaneity of the whole cast and an exhilarating use of city and country locations, it all makes up for Truffaut re-writing our experience of cinema narratives. Still wonderfully watchable: this very personal and very alive landmark film. Alan Price

NOW OUT ON BLURAY

St Peters and the Papal Basilicas of Rome (2016)

Dir.: Luca Viotto | Documentary with Antonio Paolucci, Paolo Portoghesi, Claudio Strinati | Italy 2016 | 100 min.

Director Luca Viotto (Florence and the Uffizi Gallery) is back with another cultural travelogue; this time he turns his camera on the four main basilicas in Rome to offer an architectural exploration with commentaries by leading museum directors, an architect and an art historian, and readings from Stendhal’s diaries between 1814 and 1821 (when he was expelled as a spy). For lovers of art history and architecure this is an informative and aesthetically overwhelming portrait not only of the basilicas, but their central function in Rome.

Antonio Paolucci, the Vatican’s Museum director, comments on the building of St. Peter’s, which took nearly 100 years to complete in 1626. Its main architect, Michelangelo, did not see the finished building, the world’s largest church which also has the world’s tallest dome Housing Michelangelo’s Pieta and Bernini’s baldacchino. The latter also designed the Piazza San Pietro in front of the basilica.

The Papal Archbasilica of St. John’s in the Lateran is the “Mater et caput” of all the churches in the world, not only Rome’s. It was founded in the forth century by Constantine the Great, and is dedicated to John the Baptist and John the Evangelist. The architect Paolo Portoghesi describes all the phases of the re-construction well into the 18th century, when the great façade, a two-storied portico supported by giant columns and crowned by 15 meter high statutes and white marble steps, cased in wood, which, so the Catholic teaching, were used by Jesus on his way up to Pilatus “Praetorium” before his trial.

The basilica of St. Mary Major, the largest church in Rome, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, is located on Piazza Equilino, not far from the Termini train station. It is the only basilica of the four, which has kept the paleo-christian structure of the 5th century, even though, as art historian Claudio Strinati explains, it underwent countless makeovers and additions. One of them is a campanile (bell tower) added in the 14 century, the highest in Rome at 75 meters. The 16th century coffered ceiling, designed by Guiliano da Sangello, is said to be gilded with gold from the Americas, presented to Pope Alexander VI by the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella.

The Papal Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls is the second largest basilica of the four. It was founded by Emperor Constantine I, and covers the burial place of St. Paul, who was supposed to be beheaded on this site. Whilst the basilica has maintained most its original structures, it was nearly completely destroyed by fire in 1823. Pope Pius VII, who was dying, was not told of the destruction. His successor Leo XII, ordered a total reconstruction, a work, which lasted until 1930. As Micol Forti, the director of the Vatican’s Museum collections (by far the liveliest commentator) explains, the nave’s interior walls are decorated with scenes from St. Paul’s life. South of the transcept is the cloister, one of the most beautiful of the Middle Ages, designed by Vassaletto who also designed the magnificent Easter candle stick.

Massimilano Gatti sumptuous camerawork glides impressively over the city into the basilicas, treating the churches and piazzas like giant film sets, which provided the backcloth to the city’s fascinating political and ecclesiastical history. The endless data is rather dry and overwhelming, but for devotees of this is provides comprehensive and compelling viewing. AS

A ONE OFF SCREENING AROUND THE UK ON 4th July 2016 at DISCOVERARTS.CO.UK

Native (2015) | East End Film Festival 2016

Director.: Daniel Fitzsimmons

Cast: Rupert Graves, Ellen Kendrick, Leanne Best

85min | Sci-Fi | UK

First time director and co-writer Daniel Fitzsimmons’ debut is a low budget Sci-fi his hand where two Aliens arrive to conquer Earth. But somehow neither the design nor the cliché-ridden script is very convincing.

Cane (Graves) and Eva (Kendrick) hurtle towards our planet in a spaceship packed with deadly viruses intended to kill off mankind. But the lovesick Cane is over-emotional and pining for the loss of his partner Awan (Best) on their mother planet whence a Big Brother like metallic Voice issues order to the co-pilots while Cane tunes into Beethoven’s Fifth, driven to despair and a suicide attempt, hanging himself from a noose and rescued by Eva and the last moment. If this all sounds rather unimaginative – it is. The main problem with NATIVE is the dialogue – for no apparent reason, it’s in Italian – it also seems clumsy and in short hand: When the two are eating food from a plastic tube, in a brief break from arguing, Cane asks Eva “Do you like the food?, she answers brusquely “Whether I like it or not – this question is irrelevant”. The metallic Voice is equally to the point, advising Eva to “sedate and restrain.” Cane. Later, Eva screams at Cane “Do not touch me!”, whilst he answers “I want to feel somebody”. When Cane hangs himself, he is still under the influence of Big Brother’s Voice “This is the rational solution” he tells himself. But the Voice can be soothing too, telling Eva “I will be with you, when you need me”. Eva is remorseless about Awan too: “She is dead, disposed off, we should not speak about the dead”. When Cane is “turning emotional”, Eva puts him in a contraption rasembling an electric chair. Which brings us to the production design that utterly fails to recreate an environment worthy of a species so superior. The set-up is not much more than an arcade playground, where coloured lights are in playful interaction.

Nick Gillespie and Billy J. Jackson try their best to inject appropriate atmosphere with their cinematographer, but only manage to create second-hand images – which – like the narrative, are a regurgitation of everything that has gone before in this underrated genre: Fitzsimmons is not so much a victim of his mini-budget, but also his lack of creative imagination. AS

THE EAST END FILM FESTIVAL 23 JUNE – 3 JULY 2016

The Mafia only Kills in Summer (2013)

Director: Pierfrancesco Diliberto “Pif”

Writer: Michele Astori

Cast: Cristiana Capotondi, Alex Bisconti, Ginevra Antona, Pif, Barbara Tabita

90min Italian Comedy

An appealing rom-com that races irreverently and at breakneck speed through the director’s imagined family story, growing up in a sixties Palermo as Arturo. But beneath its sunny exterior lies a dark indictment of Mafia violence throughout Sicily. THE MAFIA KILLS ONLY IN SUMMER is the big screen debut of popular Italian household name, Pierfrancesco Diliberto or “Pif” as he’s best known to his fans. He also wrote and produced the title which won the audience award at Turin Film Festival in 2014.

According to the story, told mostly in flashback, Diliberto’s birth coincides with the election of a famous anti-Mafia mayor, Vito Ciancimino and a mass execution by the legendary clan. Played cheekily as a young boy by Alex Bisconti, and later by the director himself, Arturo develops a keen interest in Mafia-linked PM Giulio Andreotti, obsessing over his biopic (Il DIVO by Paolo Sorrentino) and even going as the PM to a kid’s fancy dress party. During this time, he also develops a shine for his a little girl called Flora (Ginevra Antona).

His childhood it full of chance meetings with anti-Mafia heroes in Italian society who all end up victims of the deadly organisation – magistrates Giovanni Falcome and Paolo Borsellino and General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa. Eventually in his twenties, Arturo wises up to the corrupt criminal underbelly in his hometown of Palermo and his drama ends on a triumphant note in tribute to all those who have lost their lives as innocent victims of the Mafia’s treachery. Deftly intertwining fact and fiction by a skilful blending of archive footage and actual staging: the upshot is an entertaining if slightly slapstick story with the same cheerful charisma as Roberto Benigni’s LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL.

Significantly Diliberto has declined to pay protection taxes to the Mafia, in line with the Addiopizzo policy adopted by a group of Italian businesses. Let’s hope he’s stays around to bring more of this kind of cinema to arthouse audiences.

OUT ON RELEASE IN LIMITED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 1 JULY 2016

Queen of Earth (2015) Mubi Retro

Director/Writer: Alex Ross Perry | Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Patrick Fugit, Katherine Waterson, Kate Lyn Shiel | 90mins Drama Thriller US

One of America’s best loved indie directors takes a dramatic left turn with this entrancing thriller. He broke onto the scene with his low budget road trip comedy The Colour Wheel in 2011 and won over audiences with the wonderfully narcissistic Listen Up Philip, but Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of the Earth is a different fish entirely. Boasting yet another scenery-devouring central performance from Elisabeth Moss, QUEEN OF THE EARTH is a film of passive aggression, crumbling friendships and psychological trauma in an idyllic wooden cabin in the outskirts of New York.

We’re introduced to Catherine (Elisabeth Moss) in unforgiving close-up. Her boyfriend is breaking up with her. She’s in a bit of a mess. She wants to get away from it all, so decides to take a trip to her friend Jinny’s family cabin. We learn that the women have been friends for years but flashbacks to previous summers suggest it’s a relationship in free-fall decline.

It becomes apparent that neither Catherine nor Jinny have had such a difficult ride and, as blows are exchanged about their respective upbringings, a rotting passive aggressive atmosphere grows. When a local guy called Rich (Almost Famous’ Patrick Fugit, all grown up) is thrown into the mix things reach critical levels of toxicity. Nerves are shot; eggshells get trampled; Catherine soon loses her marbles.

The female ‘force-of-nature’ angle that Perry’s title suggests is never quite fully realized, but Moss has plenty of fun with it anyway. The Mad Men star gives a terrific central performance, stretching and contorting Catherine’s psyche into various degrees of mental disrepair. Katherine Waterston, hot on the heels of her Inherent Vice breakthrough, offers a fitting foil in the supporting role.

Fans of Listen Up Philip will be pleased to see Sean Price Williams back behind the camera and his lightweight grainy handheld photography is just as beautiful here, fitting surprisingly well into the psychological horror mold. The change of pace from Perry’s earlier outings might seem alarming and yet, with Mumblecore/gore head honcho Joe Swanberg among the producers; perhaps it shouldn’t come as such a surprise. Indeed, Queen of the Earth might seem a long way away from Jason Schwartzman’s troubled author and yet it does sort of fit in with the director’s fascination with narcissism in extremis. Whatever the case, it’s terrifically uncomfortable stuff and, for Perry’s catalogue, a finely navigated diversion. Rory O’Connor

ALEX ROSS PERRY SEASON | NOW AT MUBI | BERLINALE REVIEW 2015

A Bigger Splash (2015) | DVD release

Director: Luca Guadagnino

Cast: Tilda Swinton, Dakota Johnson, Matthias Schoenaerts, Ralph Fiennes, Aurore Clément

Paolo Sorrentino, Piero Messina and Luca Guadagnino: the Southerners seem to be making the most interesting Italian films at the moment and using their native towns and villages as the cinematic backdrop to their narratives. A BIGGER SPLASH is set in the volcanic island of Pantelleria – nearer to Tunisia than to Sicily, it is a wild and savage place popular for its hots springs and therapeutic mud – an suitable place for a re-make of Jacques Deray’s sixties psychodrama. Guadagnino’s regular collaborator Tilda Swinton is an inspired choice as Marianne, a jaded rock star and a cross between Eve, her Only Lovers Left Alive character and David Bowie. Wise and witty, she is a statuesque and sexy heroine with an aristocratic swagger and sensitive hunky Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts) who keeps her satisfied in their deserted villa, where she has come to rest her voice, after surgery.

But peace is shattered by the unexpected arrival of Ralph Fiennes, who plays Harry, an all-singing, all-dancing producer whose glib one-upmanship makes you exhausted just to look at him. Harry is Tilda’s ex and clearly still carries a candle for her and to up his ante he arrives with a trailer-trash sexbomb Penelope, who is apparently his daughter. And so begins a game of cat and mouse amongst the geezers and the rock pools, cleverly acted by Fiennes and Swinton and scripted by American writer David Kajganich (True Story).

Harry is desperate to be alone with Marianne and leave their younger counterparts to amuse themselves. So after pleasuring Marianne with some impromptu oral sex, Paul wanders off with Penelope: it transpires that there is no chemistry in the pairing and so they drift silently into the hinterland while we are entertained royally by the more captivating couple – Marianne and Harry. Marianne’s voiceless whisper throws the emphasis on her physical allure and poise and she is bedecked with some stylishly provocative outfits and eye-make-up that is a legend in its lunchtime – rivalling that of Liz Taylor in Cleopatra.

Tilda Swinton is clearly the uber-frau of the drama. Not only does her chemistry boil over with Schoenaerts: she also shares a simmering sexiness with Fiennes kicking Dakota Johnson firmly into touch. There is much pleasure in seeing a mature woman knock the younger one into a cocked hat, especially when the older one is Tilda Swinton, whose beauty and style is still unparalleled in her mid-fiftes. Fiennes gives another extraordinarily entertaining comic performance to that in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Suave and sardonic by turns, he too sports a torso taut and tanned by the Italian sun. Although there is a vague immigration theme bubbling in the background to give it gravity, Guadagnino treats this with such levity that it is almost blown away by the more-scene grabbing central thrust.

A BIGGER SPLASH is seductive witty and wonderful to watch. Although initially it appears facile, it is one of those films that grows on you in retrospect and one, quite frankly, you’ll definitely want to see again. Oscars for Tilda and Ralph. MT

REVIEWED AT THE VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2 -12 SEPTEMBER 2015 | Now available to buy on DVD and Blu-ray from 27th June | http://tinyurl.com/hk29gx3

From Afar (2015) | Desde Alla | Golden Lion Winner | Venice Film Festival 2016

Director: Lorenzo Vigas

Cast: Alfredo Castro, Luis Silva, Jerico Montilla, Catherina Cardozo

93min Drama Venezuela | Mexico | Spanish with subtitles

The feature film debut of director Lorenzo Vigas, who has created a body of documentaries, is a small but well- observed drama set in the violent environment of Caracas and is based on a story by Guillermo Arriaga.

Armando (Castro) is a well-to-do but lonely man in his fifties resigned to his lucrative work a dental laboratory. At an encounter with his middle-aged sister, who is planning to adopt a child with her husband, we meet Armando for the first time agitated at his father’s return from abroad; his sister attempting to keep the peace. It never emerges what Armando’s issue is with his father (who we see a few times in the distance), but these negative feelings seep into his life. Sometimes he pays for a young male prostitute, but the sexual experience is more voyeuristic than anything else – until he meets the young Elder (Silva), who beats him up. Strangely, Armando seems to return for more punishment, until we begin to understand that the older man is trying to use Elder to revenge his father. Eventually passionate sex occurs but Armando warns Elder “not to get too close”, a warning Elder, who is looking for a father figure, after his mother had rejected him as a ‘faggot’, does not take seriously. The clever twist in the tale lies in the ambiguity between the two men: what appears as a tale of sexual awakening turns out to be something quite different and intriguing.

Castro is well cast as the loner who is single-mindedly focused on his own revenge: his Armando is a distracted avoidant, wrapped in his own world, alone at work and in his flat, a subdued retreat full of books and records. Elder, on the other hand, is full of contradictions: his violence is a defensive mechanism, ashamed of his tender feelings for Armando, he compensates with a macho role when he is with his friends. Vigas evokes a threatening sense of place in the Venezuelan capital where violence and alienation of the young and poor, dominate. Somehow, Armando’s psychopathic tendencies gradually emerge and it is clear that his relationships have all being tainted by his hatred for his father but his reaction to Elder comes as a complete surprise. Cinematographer Sergio Armstrong (NO) creates a sense of alienation and detachment with his washed out and torpid palette of sombre olive green and teal. A subtle and expertly-performed character study from veteran Alfredo Castro (The Club, Tony Manero) and newcomer Luis Silva. AS

REVIEWED AT VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2 -12 SEPTEMBER 2015 | NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 1 JULY 2016

Abluka | Frenzy (2015) |

Writer|Director: Emin Alper

Cast: Mehmet Ozgur, Berkay Ates, Tülin Özen, Ozan Akbaba

Drama Turkish with subtitles

Mehmet Ozgur played the central role in writer|director Emin Alper’s stunning debut Beyond the Hill. Here he is again as the eldest brother in a family struggling to survive political violence in a dystopian Istanbul. Menacing by the same brooding tone of his first feature, FRENZY (Abluka) is a study in paranoia that transport the threat experienced in the mountains of Beyond the Hill‘s Karaman, to an urban setting in the capital. Here the authorities here are losing control, and to achieve a semblance of order, Kadir and his brother Ahmet (Berkey Ates) are working to establish a reasonable living environment by clearing away undesirable elements: stray dogs are mercilessly shot and rubbish is collected and disposed of on a daily basis. But despite these methods of civil control, disorder rears its ugly head.

As in all Turkish films, the family is crucial to the storyline: and the family is usually divisive in some way. Here, the violent city environment – nightly bomb blasts from ‘terrorism’ and an aggressive police presence, are having a de-stabilising effect on Kadir’s relationship with Ahmet. Ahmet’s wife has left with their children. The middle brother Ali has disappeared. Kadir has served time in prison and is now working out his parol in a community-based rubbish clearance project which includes ‘bomb’ disposal. The stray dogs appear as a metaphor for the universal theme immigration. As a clever corollary to this, when Ahmet discovers an injured dog in his street, he takes him in but treats him badly.

Ahmet is clearly at odds with Kadir and resents his constant visits which turn into menacing intrusions with Kadir practically banging down the door and ringing his ‘phone incessantly. Ahmet retreats into himself as an act of defiance and fear. The two are clearly not communicating: another modern predicament that is skillfully woven in the storyline. Kadir’s boss (Mufit Mayacan) starts to question his overly diligent report-writing (Mufit Kayacan). The projection here is evident. But in the absence of any real threats or tangible facts in this febrile and suspicious environment, one starts to tire of the enigmatic thriller and its suberb but deafening electronic score (Cevdet Erek also scored SIVAS). That said, this is a well-crafted affair set both on the widescreen and in intimate domestic scenes that successful evokes how daily paranoia can seep into the fabric of our everyday lives threaten our ability to communicate successfully and healthily. Alper has built a menacing thriller that conveys this paranoia with dramatic affect. While it has it downsides, he is a director worth following. MT

JURY PRIZE WINNER | VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2015

God’s Acre (2015) | East End Film Fest 23 June – 3 July 2016

Writer|Director: J.P. Davidson.

Cast: Matthew Jure, Isgerour Elfa Gunnarsdottir, Debra Baker

80min | Psycho Drama | UK

In J P Davidson’s cinematic low budget mood piece, an amateur property developer Malcolm (Matthew Jure) owes his childhood friend Sonny (Richard Pepple) a chunk of money – £6000 to be precise. So all he needs to do is renovate his dilapidated London flat and release some capital on the resulting sale. Simple really. But his life has spiralled out of control and debt and alcoholism have overtaken his mind and started to play tricks on him, particularly when he starts to imagine a secret wall in his property.

In a triumph of style of substance, GOD’s ACRE is shot in shades of grungy gunmetal with a stealthy soundtrack from debut composer Christopher Campbell. Davidson’s film looks superb and feels unsettling at it explores the nooks and crannies of a man’s home and then the inner sanctum of his claustrophobic mind as he glides aimlessly through a former existence that no longer works in the scheme of things. Enter the nurse, his noctural neighbour whose down to earthiness is the polar opposite of Malcolm’s instability and this could be the start of something interesting. GOD’s ACRE feels like an extended short: long on atmosphere but short of a really gripping narrative. Not only is Malcolm vapid as a central character, but he is also unappealing. In short, he is a cypher who drinks a great deal, rants and wanders around in this plotless and rather pointless psychological drama. MT

EAST END FILM FESTIVAL | 23 June – 3 July 2016

That Cold Day in the Park (1969) Mubi | Blu-ray

Dir: Robert Altman Wri: Gillian Freeman from the novel by Peter Miles | Cast: Sandy Dennis, Michael Burns, Susanne Benton, David Garfield, Luana Anders

113min | Drama | US | Canada

When she offers a random stranger sanctuary from the rain, a rich but lonely woman has only one thing on her mind in Robert Altman’s vapid psychological thriller.

The novel clearly captured Altman’s imagination but the film he made is a rather muted affair rendered even less affective by Laszlo Kovacs’ insipid visuals of sober domestic interiors in and around Vancouver. Back in the late 1960s the film created some buzz in the otherwise placid Pacific coastal town where cinema was hardly setting the night on fire.

Sandy Dennis gives an almost desperate performance as Frances, a woman whose ceaseless inane chatter makes absolutely no impression other than gawping disdain on the face of Michael Burns’ monosyllabic nineteen year old boy.

Clearly, lonely rich women with no work or interests to fire them up go for the lowest common denominator where men are concerned. Frances Austen spends most of her days having a bath or an ‘extra hour in bed’ followed by a spot of light shopping before donning a dowdy housecoat to ply her aimless male house visiter with homemade titbits. An afternoon nap is then followed by introspective navel gazing as she picks her feet to Johnny Mandel’s tinkly score. But after this plausible beginning the narrative descends into torpor as the two play-act and pose. At one point Frances goes out bowling but her mischievous, naked houseguest hardly utters a word.

It comes as no surprise that this vacuous young man is up to no good and, after a brief visit to the family planning clinic where the now slightly neurotic Miss Austen is told: “some men are bigger than others”, she returns home to find The Boy helping himself to a drink and a cigar. Meanwhile unbeknown to Frances, he has been entertaining his sister (Suzanne Benton) and offering her a bath and a massage in the main bedroom while the two then traipse around naked abusing Frances’ hospitality. But things turn weird when the the now psychotic Miss Austen sexes up this rather dreary scenario by procuring the services of a prostitute from a downtown dive, and he gamely joins this flaccid house party.

Robert Altman directs his second big screen feature with competence but Gillian Freeman’s script fails to instil any real personality in the main characters who are completely unappealing and devoid of depth. The denouement to this doomed drama surprisingly involves a great deal of desultory posturing between the sexually aggressive prostitute, The Boy, a knife and lashings of blood. MT

ON MUBI | BLURAY COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA

Il Solengo (2015) | Open City Doc Fest 2016

Directors: Alessio Rigo de Righi, Matteo Zoppis

With: Ercole Colnago, Bruno di Giovanni, Ugo Farnetti, Giovanni Morichelli, Orso Petrini

70min | Documentary | Italy Argentino

Drawing comparisons with Michelangelo Frammartino’s story of reclusiveness, Le Quattro Volte, IL SOLENGO approaches its subject from the other extreme in exploring community values from the perspective of a group of old men, (in local dialect a ‘solengo’ is a boar chased from its herd) who ruminate over the local hermit Mario de Marcello who grew up with them in nearby Pratolongo, on the banks of the river Mignone, Italy.

Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis’s exquisitely framed paean to rural life and slow cooking follows these local men, all in their late eighties, enjoying a peaceful existence together drinking in a hunting lodge where we first meet them waxing lyrical in increasingly florid recollections of Mario’s secretive past and blighted childhood which began in prison where his mother gave birth to him after killing his father with a hoe (“his mother gave the evil eye, she was a witch”). Commenting on loner Mario’s standoffish attitude, they then reveal their own xenophobia by vehemently forbidding outsiders from joining their local hunt for wild boar. This is a quietly pleasing and darkly amusing film that very much connects to a global narrative of survival for small communities all over the world.

Spending their days making cheese and slow-cooked stews, these men unite in reminiscing over their joint past where 1929 and the early 1930s looms large in their collective memory as a difficult time in Italy: “if you didn’t grow beans, you didn’t eat”, and clearly this attachment to the land has shaped their community where ‘tit for tat’ self-regulation has always obviated the need for police intervention. Mario grew up a loner ostracized from the local men, he went on to experience another quiet tragedy which is revealed in the surprisingly ghostly disembodied third act of this impressive documentary that makes great use of the densely scrubby surrounding countryside in the foothills of the Alps.

Occasionally the camera catches sight of a bearded Mario wearing a red baseball cap, slowly moving through the undergrowth to Vittorio Giampietro’s sinister oboe score. At one point a snake slithers out of a crack in the caves where Mario purportedly lives underlining the dangers of the enigmatically hostile woodland undergrowth. Myths and legends seem to flourish in this remote Italian corner, passed down by old to young and where women are frequently alluded to but mysteriously absent. One old man says: “I like my freedom – home is where I sleep, but it’s full of problems”. MT

The Violators (2015)

Director: Helen Walsh

Cast: Lauren McQueen, Brogan Ellis, Stephen Lord, Liam Aisnworth, Derek Barr, Challum King Chadwick

97min | drama | UK .

Helen Walsh is a novelist turned filmmaker Helen Walsh whose debut feature takes place in the grim post-industrial landscape of Birkenhead’s council estates in Cheshire. Ultrarealistic in tone and supremely acted by the two female teenagers, Walsh’ script plays with underlying sexual motives, before a dramatic final rush destroys much of the intricacies that preceed.

In their rundown council flat, sixteen year-old Lauren (McQueen) has to look after her two brothers: the adult, near catatonic Andy (Barr) and the schoolboy Jerome (Chadwick). Lauren befriends Rachel (Ellis), who lives in a posh gated complex. It is unclear why Rachel showers Lauren with gifts as their relationship seems impenetrable and enigmatic. When Lauren learns that their violent father will soon be released from prison, she panics and has asks middle-aged pawnbroker/debt collector Mikey (Lord) for help. The would-be sugar-daddy exploits her sexually, but when Laura discovers that their father is to remain incarcerated, she turns to the her neighbour, the friendly army cadet Kieran (Ainsworth). With the audience still wondering about the Lauren/Rachel relationship, Walsh decides to deny all the malevolence, which has festered throughout the film, opting for a sudden and dramatic finale.

Despite this botched ending, THE VIOLATORS suffers from its ambiguous storyline where too many questions remain unanswered. Eerie images by first time DoP Tobin Jones always promise much more than the narrative delivers. A shroud of tension hovers over the proceedings, but the atmosphere of decay and alienation is by far the strongest part of this promising first feature – apart from the teenage leads, who are impressive in acting out the subtle nuances of their individual emotional issues. Perversely, the novelist in Walsh actually lets down the filmmaker with her script, creating dark, forlorn images which fail to be matched by convincing dramatic arc. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 17 JUNE 2016

The Great Wall (2015) | Open City Doc Fest 2016

Director: Tadhg O’Sullivan | Documentary | ROI 2015 | 74 min.

Very much an essay film, THE GREAT WALL is the second feature documentary of Tadhg O’Sullivan (Yximalloo), is a lament on boarders and divisions featuring a (part) reading of Franz Kafka’s short story ‘The Great Wall of China” in its original German, the latter underscoring the conceptual character of the work.

The Great Wall is also a baffling experience, in a positive way, it feels a little like the first Chris Marker films: somehow the different levels seem to not compliment each other totally, but encourage the audience to de-code them. It is perhaps helpful to quote O’Sullivan himself who explains his intentions and his conceptual approach which did not start with the short story, “architecture can be a tool for articulating power. I used Kafka as a prism, as a lens, to look at the subject.” The result is sometimes comes over as a film shot by Aliens on a visit to this planet, who trying to figure out what is going on. The enigmatic nature of The Great Wall is its main strength, like a good poem, it would gain from a second revisit.

Starting with a Kafka quote: “A Cage went in search of a Bird”, the Czech’s writer’s story about the rather unorganised building of the Great Wall, and its reflections on power structures, features overpowering images of borders starting with the only land boarder between Africa and Europe, the old Spanish enclave of Melilla where a three meter high wall with barbed fence is supposed to keep Africans out; even though we see so-called fence jumpers trying to gain illegal access to the continent. During the narration a score of Electronic music often drowns out our thoughts subliminally reminding us of the purpose of the Chinese Wall: to keep the Southern ‘savages’ out, whose frightening images are shown to children, when they misbehave.

Then the film translocates to Athens where police and demonstrators clash violently, before huge office blocks in the cities of London and Brussels dwarf all humans, reducing them to swarming ants. Bach lightens the tone, but soon we are back with the Electronic onslaught and images of boarder installations, frightening and at the same time alien. Kafka’s short story tells us not to question the authorities; their imperfect wall is a reflection on themselves.AS

SCREENING DURING OPEN CITY DOC FESTIVAL UNTIL 26 JUNE 2016

Crazy About Tiffany’s (2016)

Director: Matthew Miele | Documentary | 87min | US

Matthew Miele’s ‘fully authorized’ documentary on Tiffany & Co plays out like a glossy (what else) commercial for the jewellery brand founded in 1837 that now aligns itself with a celebrity following of media mavens, New York socialites and ladies who lunch, along with more illustrious clientele such as JFK and the Roosevelts. Those seeking to learn more about Louis Comfort Tiffany’s glass and ceramic designs will be disappointed as this very much concentrates on the modern and contemporary cultural impact of the fine jewellery creations, and also its film associations.

CRAZY ABOUT TIFFANY’S relies heavily for its commentary on an endless stream of talking, coiffed and botoxed heads – amongst whom are Razzie award-winner Jessica Biel, Jennifer Tilly (Bride of Chucky) and filmmaker Sam Taylor Wood (50 Shades of Grey) – who extol the spinoff effects of the jeweller’s highly fashionable diamond-encrusted credentials for a vacuous 86-minutes commercial. All this is interwoven into a cursory, often animated, history of the iconic emporium which was founded in 1837 by Charles Lewis Tiffany and John B Young originally as a stationery company that soon grew into a classy mail-order store and originator of the famous “Blue Book” and eventually the most desired address to buy your girlfriend (and nowadays your boyfriend) an engagement ring, even for those who “self-purchase” (ie: buy their own).

“I’m really a fan of big, big pieces,” gushes Jennifer Tilly, shaking a multi-coloured hair-do onto her low-cut décolleté. Others leer through porcelain-capped teeth (probably more expensive than the jewels they “self purchase”) to rave about the beauty and rarity of the ‘pieces’ (and we’re not talking about guns here) and their incredible craftsmanship and legacy interpreted by British design director and Audrey Hepburn lookalike – Francesca Amfitheatrof.

All of this majors on clips from the ’60s classic Breakfast At Tiffany’s. We hear from Andy Tennant who directed Sweet Home Alabama and see footage from the 2002 romcom and excerpts from The Great Gatsby further tenuously endorsing the luxury product and providing retail porn for those who get their rocks off on rocks. CRAZY ABOUT TIFFANY’S is ultimately a vehicle that will appeal to acquisitive fashionistas and the likes of news anchor Katy Curic, who claims that her 50th birthday was ‘the most fun event ever’ simply because it was held at the flagship store in New York City’s Madison Avenue. MT

OUT ON RELEASE FROM 24 JUNE 2016

Mallory (2015) | Open City Doc Festival 2016

Director: Writer-Director: Helena Trestikova

97min | Documentary | Czech Republic

Veteran Czech documentarian Helena Trestikova (Katka) delivers up a grim but often poignant slice of observational social realism that follows the life of a drug addict who valiantly tries to turn her life around after becoming a single mum.

Over the course of this gruelling story, with its scant chinks of positivity in an otherwise bleak Prague, Mallory – the heroin heroine – reveals in the opening scene, grittily set from a high-rise block, that she only wants: “to feel like a woman” and share her life with a man. And therein lies her main problem. Whenever Mallory has a boyfriend she appears strong, positive and in control, but afterwards things fall apart. These men are initially hailed as saviours – and she has three relationships during filming – which start well but seem to unravel to expose serious character flaws for all concerned. It seems that poor Mallory is a ‘bad picker’ but we never get to the bottom of why, and no background is ever given of her father’s influence on her life, although her mother appears a shadowy but delightfully warm figure, in a brief early scene. And tellingly Mallory claims to have fallen into drug abuse as “a form of protest to my parents”. A pivotal meeting on the Charles Bridge with Czech actor Jiri Bartoska who is also president of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival (in which this won the top documentary award) purportedly gave Mallory a financial handout which helped her turn things around. Trestikova adopts an non-judgemental approach to cleverly tease out Mallory’s personality, her pain and suffering as she attempts to make a better life for herself and her son, who really seems to be the making of her.

Mallory is seen living in a car with her then boyfriend, and has placed her loving little son in an institution. It later emerges he would rather “punch the teacher, than listen” exposes more latent flaws. Again and again, Mallory remains bloodied but unbowed, not always likeable but certainly ready to show her vulnerability with mordant dark humour as she struggles to find work and housing in a system mired down with red tape. The affectionate boyfriend never leaves her side but appears to have a serious drinking problem, as does her son’s father Ballin, who later meets a sticky end.

This is an impressively crafted and edited piece of filmmaking that serves as much as a character study as a glimpse of Czech lowlife, taut with unexpectedly tense moments that often hint at a tragic denouement. MT

OPEN CITY DOC FESTIVAL | 21 – 26 JUNE 2016

Depth Two (2016) | Dubina dva

Director: Ognjen Glanovic | Documentary | Serbia/France, 2016, 80 minutes

The serene waters of the River Danube pictured in Serbian filmmaker Ognjen Glanovic’s unremitingly grim DEPTH TWO hide a terrible secret: they have swallowed up the lives of 53 refugees fleeing across the Romanian border. But these are no ordinary refugees; they are victims of ethnic cleansing from the Kosovan town of Suva Reka who met their deaths in a pizzeria in 1999 at the hands of Serbian soldiers. And they were transported some distance from the Serbian capital Belgrade on the orders of Serbian authorities with the utmost secrecy being taken to ensure all evidence was hidden.

Made on a shoestring budget, and none the worse for it, Glanovic’s camera surveys this vast and desolate landscape to convey a faceless, bloodless, and ominous image of devastation while a monotone often droning narration bears witness to the killings that the Serbian government tried to conceal. Grimly poetic images of endless ghostly plastic bags trapped in tree branches are juxtaposed with a ghoulish stream of bullet-strewn clothing and personal effects that are the only surviving remnants of the dead apart from some improvised burial grounds. No faces just facts: a stark reminder of a tragic and brutal past.

After premiering his documentary at Berlinale Forum in 2016, Glanovic intends to film a dramatic reconstruction of the events, once the finance is in place. But somehow this faceless tribute feels all the more potent and effective forcing the viewer to imagine the horror. MT

BERLIN REVIEW | NOW SCREENING AT OPEN CITY DOC FEST \ 21 -26 JUNE 2016

Pinocchio (1940) | Bluray release 2016

Director: Norman Ferguson Story: Carlo Collodi

Voices: Dickie Jones, Christian Rub, Mel Blanc

88min | Animation | US

Carlo Collodi’s Adventures of Pinocchio is now considered a classic of children’s literature. Yet perhaps fewer people have read an unexpurgated edition of the book than watched Disney’s 1940 film version on the big screen. In print Pinocchio is a bad lot: obnoxious, rude, unruly and only learning to conform to society after being tortured.

With Norman Ferguson’s collaboratively directed animation we have a Disneyfication of the wooden puppet/boy. Pinocchio’s naughtiness is more redeemable due to his charm and naivety. So Walt Disney may have opted for a softer version of Pinocchio, but his film is not without its darkness.

The certification on the new blu-ray edition of Pinocchio is U and “contains no material likely to offend or harm.” True for today’s kids. Yet if you are an adult of an older generation who first saw Pinocchio between the ages of 8-10 then you might have been freaked-out by its “Pleasureland.” Here little boys are turned into donkeys and shipped across the sea to China. This was such a scary idea that you probably checked your head and bottom hoping that a pair of floppy ears and a tail hadn’t suddenly sprouted. Last night I still felt a twinge of infant fear whilst watching Pinocchio on my crystal clear blu-ray edition.

Disney and his writers shrewdly selected enough of Collodi’s negativity to make this moral tale work. Particularly in Pinocchio’s scenes with boy criminal Lampwick who introduces him to drinking, smoking and gambling. Disney’s moral is that children must learn the benefits of hard work; fear the working classes; always consider others and join the middle class to get on in life. You can accept or reject that message. However, that Pinocchio is a work of art is simply unequivocal – such is the dazzling brilliance of its animation and the camera dexterity, colour, line and shadow – making it a landmark.

Pinocchio’s realism is best illustrated by the underwater episode: Geppetto, the puppet maker, his cat and goldfish, have gone of in search of Pinocchio and their boat has been swallowed by a whale. Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket then journey down to them. For the rescue from the whale (Monstro) we are presented with artwork of a terrifically high order. Disney’s animators have a feeling for the sea with its spray, crashing waves and turbulence that is so sensual, it actually makes me feel as if I’ve been swallowed then thoroughly drenched as the whale sneezes everyone out of its body. Monstro is comparable to the whale of Huston’s Moby Dick or Spielberg’s Jaws. Only A Perfect Storm soaks me more.

Apparently, Disney is set to do a live action re-make of Pinocchio. Paul Thomas Anderson did some writing for it and was then dropped as a possible director. Now Ron Howard is attached to the project. Even if it manages to conjure up Collodi’s cruelty, I will still love their earlier effort which was the masterpiece of Disney’s animation studio. Besides, any attempt at a more faithful adaptation would involve Pinocchio killing Jiminy Cricket by stamping him underfoot. No, Walt or Ron. Not that! Alan Price.

PINOCCHIO IS NOW AVAILABLE ON BLURAY

Ma ma (2015)

Director: Julio Medem

Cast: Penelope Cruz, Asier Etxeandia, Teo Planell, Luis Tosar, Alex Brendemuhl;

111min | Drama | Spain/France.

Best known for his drama Lovers of the Arctic Circle, Spanish director Julio Medem has always built his films around great love and equally overwhelming loss. In Ma ma he manages to go over the top, even by his own hyper excessive standards.

Ma Ma is produced and driven forward by a passionate performance from Penelope Cruz who plays Magda, a teacher who loses her job in Madrid and her husband Raul (Brundemuhl). After being diagnosed with breast cancer by Julián (Etxeandia), her gynaecologist, she meets Arturo a Real Madrid scout, while watching her son Dani (Planell) play football. His daughter is killed in a car accident, and his wife is in a coma, shortly to die. Magda and Arturo are thrown together in the turmoil only for Magda’s cancer to resurface.

This is Cruz’s film and she carries Ma ma– just – by the force of her personality and acting skills but the outlandish narrative stretches the imagination often to breaking point, relieved only by occasional poetic interludes, which make up for the absurd plotlines. Julián has all the time in the world for Magda largely due to his own unhappy relationship which comes under pressure when he and his wife want to adopt Natasha, a little girl from Siberia. Magda’s life revolves around the image of a frail little girl in the arctic cold, calling her Natasha. And this girl accompanies Magda as a side reality during her last months; and she christens her unborn daughter Natasha.

Surprisingly, Magda seems to have no women friends (apart from a friendly nurse at the hospital), and is surrounded by three adoring men, including Raúl, who begs – in one of many cringe-worthy scenes – for her forgiveness. Cruz’s Magda sails through everything with great spirit, never losing her optimism. One has to admire her, but in spite of DoP’s Kiko de la Rica’s poetic images of Natasha, and his pristine close-ups of Cruz, Medem’s script often tends towards kitsch. The subject matter really deserved a more realistic, less grandiloquent approach. AS

OUT ON RELEASE FROM 24 JUNE 2016

No Home Movie (2015)

Director: Chantal Akerman; Belgium/France 2015, 113 min.

The last film of avant-garde director Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) is a still life of her mother Natalie, survivor of Auschwitz, who occupied her flat in Brussels. It is the final filmic account of Natalie Akerman, by a daughter whose life (and work) she completely dominated, unintentionally yet inevitably, until her death in 2014. Chantal Akerman committed suicide the following year.

Chantal Akerman’s obsession with her mother is the topic of News from Home (1977), a work show entitled My Family and other dark Materials, and Letters Home (1986), about the visceral link between the poet Sylvia Plath and her mother Aurelia; who described Sylvia’s struggle with her Jewish identity before her own suicide in 1963. And, as Akerman once said in an interview, “my mother is Jeanne Dielman”, the heroine of the director’s most famous work of the same title: “My mother making her home into a jail”. In common with all children of Holocaust survivors, Chantal Akerman’s life was formed by the Shoah. Her mother Natalie had fled Poland in 1938 to Belgium, but was deported by the Germans in 1943 to Auschwitz, not 30 miles away from the place she grew up near Kracow. Returning to her husband in Brussels, the rest of her family having been murdered, Natalie gave birth to two daughters, Chantal and Sylviane, who also features in NO HOME MOVIE. Without a formal education, Natalie became a prisoner in her own flat, while Chantal lived a peripatetic existence, filmmaking and making her home everywhere, yet nowhere.

After watching a screening of one of her daughter’s films, Natalie commented: “You have all this, I only have Auschwitz”. There is no way a child can have a remotely satisfying relationship with a mother like this. Akerman opined to her fellow Belgian filmmaker Marianne Lambert “I don’t belong anywhere, yet my mother is the centre of my oeuvre”. And yet her Jewish roots would always catch up with her wherever she travelled, rather like the Jewish joke about the man called Katzmann (Catman) from Paris, who wanted a less Jewish name – his friend translated Cat into ‘Chat’, man into ‘l’homme’, finally calling him Shalom.

NO HOME MOVIE, a medium between essay and documentary, is a final attempt by Akerman to come to terms with her mother’s history, and to make peace with a woman whose total apathy in terms of feminist emancipation must have made her feel desperate at times, even though she inspired, or better, counter-inspired, her to make all these films. Using consumer grade digital camera (and Skype), NO HOME MOVIE is very different from many of Chantal Akerman’s ‘formal’ films, being her own DOP underlines the concept: but she has chosen this personal medium to show a relentless private world. And the private world and the director’s world come full circle, when her mother goes into an endless monologue about how to cook potatoes, evoking the potato peeling ritual of Jeanne Dielman. But other topics are also sensitive: the war, anti-Semitism and the double bind her parents put her into as a young girl: Her father wanted her to be slim so she would find a husband; her mother fed her constantly, to make up for her own near-starvation. To watch NO HOME MOVIE requires patient tolerance; it only leaves the confines of the flat/jail for two long shots of desert grass in Israel – apart from this, it is a ‘Trauerarbeit’ about a mother and two daughters. Cut from over twenty hours of original footage (“if I had tried to make a film about my mother, I might not have dared”), NO HOME MOVIE is a still life, where events unfold out-of-frame: when we leave her mother’s graveside, what happened the following year seems somehow a logical conclusion. AS

NO HOME MOVIE IS ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS

Remainder (2015)

Director.: Omer Fast | Cast: Tom Sturridge, Cush Jumbo, Asher Ali | UK/Germany 2015, 103 min.

Well known for his video installations, REMAINDER is Israel-born filmmaker Omer Fast’s first full-length feature after his debut with the medium length hybrid documentary/fiction Everything that Rise must Converge. Based on the novel by Tom McCarthy, the obtuse drama deals with the function of human memory, and is difficult to classify.

Tom (Sturridge), loses his memory after being hit by a big black box falling from a highrise office block in central London. He spends the rest of this film trying to reconstruct his life before the accident. After receiving an £8 million settlement, he buys an old-fashioned mansion block, where he believed he had lived before. He then employs all the tenants to act out his memories. Two men, supposedly agents from the Security Services, kill a man with whom Tom was in contact, near a phone box out side his flat. The mysterious Catherine (Jumbo) visits him and he has her repeat some dialogue from their past. With the help of the equally enigmatic Naz (Ali), who is supposed to be an architect, Tom assembles a crew in order to restage a bank robbery in a private City bank, where Catherine works. When the restaging turns real, Tom feels as if he is caught in an endless time loop.

REMAINDER is well crafted on all levels, but lacks any emotional interest for the audience. We are tossed a few red herrings about Tom’s past but he remains a cypher along with the other protagonists in this guessing game exercise: Fast plays with the audience, but he does not engage for a moment. DoP Lukas Strebel’s images are fittingly cold and ascetic creating an atmosphere of enigma, where the protagonists float rhythmically in this soulless operation that fails to connect on any level. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 24 JUNE 2016

24 Weeks (2016) | Berlinale Competition 2016 | Edinburgh Film Festival

Cast: Julia Jentsch, Bjarne Maedel, Johanna Gastdorf, Emilia Pieske Director: Anne Zohra Berrached
Screenwriter: Anne Zohra Berrached, Carl Gerbe

Down’s Syndrome is a heart-breaking condition for any parent. But 24 WEEKS brings nothing new in a stultifying storyline which explores the aftermath when a German couple discover their unborn child has even more serious complications than this. Anne Zohra Berrached’s script plods through the tragedy in the most direct way possible despite a strong and committed performance from Julia Jentsch, who plays the stand-up comic in domestic drama that won her a Silver Bear at Berlinale 2016.

Already the parents of a young daughter (Emilia Pieske), Astrid and partner and manager Markus (Bjarne Maedel) until live in an attractive house near Leipzig and have ample support from Astrid’s chain-smoking mother (Johanna Gastdorf). But things become more serious when it emerges their baby also has a heart condition that indicate a possible need to terminate the pregnancy. Mustering all her professional skills to see the humour here is some feat for Astrid and this is made more difficult by Berrached’s seemingly perfect characterisation of the couple up to their tragic discovery leading to mind-numbingly boring scenarios in the strip lit clinic that often make it feel like a docudrama.

Jentsch’s acting skills are stretched to the limit in part that offers little intensity but a great deal of close-up camerawork requiring her to look distraught and strung out for most of the running time. Maedel does not have an easy time either as an insipid and rather hapless sidekick of a partner. Attempts to conjure up poetic elements with Astrid floating in a dreamlike state underwater with her baby in utero feel forced and unconvincing here in what could have been an opportunity to offer something meaningful. MT

EDINBURGH FILM FESTIVAL | 15 -26 JUNE 2016

BERLINALE REVIEW

Raman Raghav 2.0 (2016) |Cannes Film Festival Directors’ Fortnight 2016

Director: Anurag Kashyap Writers: Anurag Kashyap, Vasan Bala

Cast: Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Vicky Kaushal, Sobhita Dhulipala

Writer-director Anurag Kashyap is best known outside India for his dazzling gangster saga Gangs of Wasseypur that took the LFF by storm in 2012. His latest crossover outing is an arthouse thriller with a Bollywood signature premiering at Cannes Film Festival’s auteur side-bar Directors’ Fortnight.

RAMAN RAGHAV spins the common perception that criminals and cops have sociopathic tendancies in common. Stained by a violent misogynist streak, this is a nevertheless a strangely captivating story not least for its sizzling snapshot of modern Mumbai – a city that seethes with a sleepless outdoor population making it an ideal setting for a crime thriller. Taking its name from an infamous ’60s serial killer Raman Raghav, who killed 41 people on the streets Mumbai, this violent and rambunctiously rowdy film is fuelled by a pulsating energy and punctuated by Ram Sampath’s electronic score. With violence aplenty but hardly any gore, the director inculcates an atmosphere of palpable fear from the opening scene where we first set eyes on our narcissistic abusive anti-hero Raman (Nawazuddin Siddiqui in ferocious form). But he is not the only character wielding a weapon – a bloodied car-jack that he drags along behind him noisily – Detective Raghav, investigating the crimes, has a licence to kill that is equally illicit.

Nawazuddin Siddiqui carries the film with glaring eyes and a gleeful disassociation from the terror wreaked in his brutal killing spree: murdering just for the pleasure of it, indiscriminately and abundantly as a reflex action. Siddiqui’s greedy smile and peacock preening make him a hateful criminal as Raman in total contrast to his portrayal of a lowly office clerk in The Lunchbox, this is more in the style of Sonu Duggal in Miss Lovely.

Vicky Kaushal, who played the romantic teenager in last year’s Un Certain Regard entry Masaan, is also a nasty piece of work here as the gorgeously handsome Raghav Singh Ubbi, a coke-snorting detective who terrorises his girlfriend Simmy (Sobhita Dhuliwala in a poorly underwritten role) and arrives on the crime scene before heading off for another fix. Discovering that his pusher has been murdered, his reflex action is to take out an intruder and snaffle a package of drugs, firmly establishing him as another villian rather than the hero of the piece in the audiences’ eyes. Although he rises to the occasion, Kaushal doesn’t quite muster the requisite charisma or grist for the part.

The killing rampage goes on bruised by vibrant bursts of Bollywood-style electronic vibes as the terrible two slither in and out of each other’s clutches. Both men are killers in a crime wave that showcases the inner workings of the city with an authenticity that seems grittier and more visceral than the Mumbai of Slumdog Millionaire yet with a striking psychedelic aesthetic that makes it wicked to watch, the only thing lacking here is some strong female guts. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 11-22 MAY 2016 | UN CERTAIN REGARD

Open City Doc Fest (2016) |London | 21 – 25 June

Open City Documentary Festival is back in London from 21 – 26 June 2016 bringing 26 UK premieres to Picturehouse Central, Hackney Picturehouse, Crouch End Picturehouse, Regent Street Cinema, ICA, Bertha Dochouse and JW3. During six days the festival will screen over 60 films plus programmes of short films, special events, a programme of industry masterclasses, talks, networking drinks and parties.

https://vimeo.com/166371241

The 6 day festival opens with THE GREAT WALL – Tadgh O’Sullivan’s exploration of how we keep the hordes of would be migrants and refugees from ‘swamping’ our wealthy and secure societies? We don’t like to think about the answer: we build walls. Alongside O’Sullivan’s troubled images we hear Kafka’s short story, The Great Wall of China – an inspired juxtaposition.

This year’s Closing Night Film is DEPTH 2 Ongjen Glavonic’s salient reminder of Milošević’s regime in what had been Yugoslavia. Glavonić uses voiceover victim testimony from the ICTY trials over a series of tableaux of the Serbian countryside. The effect of this audio is incredibly powerful – as the documentary thriller unveils its terrible tale.

A pioneer of the line drawn between documentary, anthropology ethnomusicology and visual/arts performance, Vincent Moon is a singular figure in the European cultural landscape. He will be premiering a live audio-visual performance which explores the art of ritual and a tenth year anniversary of his pioneering web series ‘The Take Away Shows’.

The Ross Brothers are the festival’s other special guests: American brothers Bill and Turner Ross’s work is some of the most exciting work to emerge from America and yet has had very little attention in the UK. OCDF will be showing their American Trilogy and the brothers will be giving a masterclass.

GRAND JURY AWARD

For the film that exemplifies an author in control of their subject matter, craft and story. Matching matching content and form in a powerful and persuasive fashion:

Another Year: Shengzhe Zhu / 2016 / China / 181′

Depth Two: Ognjen Glavonić / 2016 / Serbia/France / 80′

Mallory: Helena Třeštíková / 2015 / Czech Republic / 97′

EMERGING INTERNATIONAL FILMMAKER AWARD

Il Solengo: Alessio Rigo de Righi & Matteo Zoppis / 2015 / Argentina/Italy / 70′ (left)
In Limbo: Antoine Viviani / 2015 / France / 84′
The Prison in 12 Landscapes: Brett Story / 2015 / Canada/UK / 84′
Roundabout in My Head: Hassan Ferhani / 2015 / Algeria / 100′

OPEN CITY DOC FEST 21-26 JUNE 2016 | TICKETS HERE

The Childhood of a Leader (2015)

Dir.: Brady Corbet; Cast: Tom Sweet, Berenice Bejo, Liam Cunningham, Stacy Martin, Yolande Moreau, Robert Pattinson;

UK/Hungary 2015, 113 min.

First time director Brady Corbet tries to engage with Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’enfance d’ un Chef (1938), crucially leaving out one of the main themes of the book – anti-Semitism – to end up with a caricature; in the process transforming the future petit-bourgeois ‘leader’ of Sartre’s work into a laughable, monstrous dictator by the ending.

Set in a French village after the end of WWI, little Prescot (Sweet) the son of an American diplomat (Cunningham) helping President Wilson with the Peace treaty and a German born, religiously devout Catholic(Bejo), is prone to histrionics and dark tantrums. Since both his parents are control freaks who take an emotionally distant interest in the boy (quite normal for the era) this is not particularly surprising. After his mother dismisses Mona (Moreau) the only person of any warmth in Prescot’s life, on the grounds of her disobeying orders, the wilful boy decides to stay in his room, rejecting figures of authority. The mother also sacks Ada (Martin), the boy’s French teacher. Finally, the father chases beat him brutally when he refuses him entry to his boudoir – where he literally is, as the word suggests, sulking. Childhood of a Leader ends as a farce, with the grown-up Prescot morphing into a ludicrously overbearing ruler.

Corbet’s debut is a muddled affair that attempts to keep us in the dark throughout: the tone is sinister and often terrifying, heightened by a ominous and melodramatic orchestral score. Does Presot’s father have an affair with Ada? Has the mother (an effectively coquettishly petulant Bejo) has the mother slept with family friend (Pattinson) mother f who comes for sporadic visits? Prescot seems to look more like him than his putative father. It’s uncertain. And finally, what is the reason for the mother getting rid of everyone who comes into daily contact with her son without replacing them?. The acting – apart from young Tom Sweet – is contrived and rather wooden, DoP’s Lou Crawley’s images are muddy and pseudo-naturalistic – pseudo being the operative word which characterises the whole production: bereft of any insight into psychological or political structures, this is a superficial travesty of Sartre’s novella. Quite why it was awarded the LEONE D’ORO for Best Debut is also unclear. Corbet has a future, let’s hope it’s a more promising one than that of his protagonist little Prescot. AS

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE | REVIEWED AT VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2015

Suture (1993) | Dual Format Blu| DVD release

Writer| Director: Scott McGehee

Cast: Dennis Haysbert, Mel Harris, Sab Shimono, Dina Merrill, Michael Harris, David Graf

99min | Thriller | US

SUTURE starts out like a Helmut Lang fashion shoot that morphs into an early ’90s episode of CSI meets Emergency Ward Ten, if ever there was one. Stylish and slick in its chairoscuro monchrome credentials yet rather stagey in its execution and hollow in its characterisation. It is certainly ominous in tone, intimate in its close-ups and visually intriguing while leaving you hollow and empty like an evening with the ‘in crowd’.

We are in Phoenix Arizona where two unlikely brothers meet up for the first time in years: a black one named Clay (Dennis Haysbert) and his half-brother called Vincent (Michael Harris) who is white. All the other characters in this cult classic curio are of the persuasiom that the two look alike and this is vital to the plot. Not that there is much of a plot – this is more a stylised concept than a real story as it never really develops beyond the initial idea which is the brainchild of one Scott McGehee whose flimsy narrative serves merely as an vehicle for him to try out a series of interesting visual techniques and glossy mise-en-scenes.

Borrowing from Hitchcock and Bunuel, SUTURE loosely explores the premise that Vincent is the only person aware of the existence of his ‘identical’ half brother. So if he murders Clay, the body will be identitfed as Vincent’s; enabling Vincent to do away with their father, claim a vast inheritance and then disappear while everyone thinks he is dead. All this works quite ingeniously but the film is so theatrical and self-conscious it fails to be convincing as it plays out like a series of commercials for linen suits, cars, shower equipement or even art deco light fittings; more aware of how it is looking than how it is engaging the viewer as a piece of engaging cinema. Scott McGhee and his co-director David Siegel lack the directorial experience to make the arrestingly visual glide over something more meaningful and immersive. They have achieved the former but not the latter in this promising visual experiment. MT

ON DUEL FORMAT BLU\DVD COURTESY OF ARROW FILMS AND VIDEO | 4 JULY 2016

https://vimeo.com/55288801

Edinburgh Film Festival 2016 | What’s On?

Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF), takes place between the 15th and 26th of June. Celebrating a landmark 70th edition, the Festival this year showcases a total of 22 World premiers from around the World.

BEST OF BRITISH

This year’s strand includes David Blair’s romantic drama AWAY, starring Timothy Spall and Juno Temple as two lost souls seeking solace under the lights of Blackpool while Rita Osei’s debut BLISS!, follows a teenage girl on a rite of passage journey of discovery across Scandinavia and Mercedes Grower’s offbeat debut BRAKES led by Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding. In the theme old age comes János Edelényi’s hilariously poignant THE CARER starring Brian Cox, who will be in attendance at this year’s Festival.

Will Poulter and Cara Delevingne lead a fantastic British ensemble cast in the sumptuous coming-of-age drama KIDS IN LOVE from Chris Foggin and, in a similar vein, Philip John takes us on an anarchic road-trip in MOON DOGS. More death scenes from Wales as twin librarians plan revenge in the quiet section in Euros Lyn’s Welsh-language THE LIBRARY (Y Llyfrgell) and brooding Scottish Icelandic Noirs PALE STAR and A REYKJAVIK PORNO are the latest outings from Scot Graeme Maley

Acclaimed artist Henry Coombes’ SEAT IN SHADOW is a witty and perspective study into the symbiotic relationship between an eccentric, part-time Jung-obsessed psychotherapist and his patient/muse.
Joanne Froggatt plays a woman attempting to keep her family together as her husband endures unimaginable pain in Bill Clark’s STARFISH. Ibiza-set crime thriller WHITE ISLAND from Benjamin Turner. Also in thriller territory, Agyness Deyn stars in dystopian THE WHITE KING from Alex Helfrecht and Jörg Tittel.

IN PERSON

A Celebration of the Films of Cinéma du Look retrospective will welcome legendary filmmaker Nagisa Oshima, the prolific producer of over fifty films, including 1983’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence.

AMERICAN DREAMS

Welcomes the very best in new American independent cinema (left) including Rebecca Miller’s MAGGIE’S PLAN, with Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke and Julianne Moore each delivering pitch-perfect performances.
Meg Ryan’s directorial debut ITHACA, an elegant and moving story of a teenager delivering telegrams in World War II. The European Premiere of Rob Burnett’s THE FUNDAMENTALS OF CARING, a charming comedy-drama that pairs Paul Rudd and rising British star Craig Roberts as caregiver and dependent. Paco Cabezas’ MR RIGHT starring Anna Kendrick and Sam Rockwell as an oddball assassin. There will be a chance to see the International Premiere of fan fiction marvel SLASH and Steven Lewis Simpson’s road trip through Lakota country NEITHER WOLF NOR DOG.

THE DIRECTORS’ SHOWCASE

Shines a light on the latest work from some of the world’s most highly-respected auteurs, each film offering an insight into perspectives and stories from across the globe. Screening over the course of the Festival are:

Bleak Street, Arturo Ripstein’s black and white tale of a pair of murderous Mexican lucha wrestlers
Dark Danish comedy The Commune (RIGHT) from Thomas Vinterberg
Hans Petter Moland’s gripping police thriller A Conspiracy of Faith
Giuseppe Tornatore’s The Correspondence, starring Jeremy Irons and Olga Kurylenko
Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s elegant Families
Kurdish docu-drama A Flag Without A Country from Bahman Ghobadi
Taika Waititi’s hilarious Hunt for the Wilderpeople, following Sam Neill and newcomer Julian Dennison into the New Zealand bush
Yeon Sang-ho’s vision of zombie apocalypse Seoul Station
Paddy Breathnach’s Viva, set amongst the colourful world of Havana’s drag clubs
Yoga Hosers, the latest madcap adventure from Kevin Smith

EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVES

This year’s strand features a number of much anticipated films making their UK debuts:
Bilall Fallah and Adil El Arbi’s emotive Black, a story of forbidden love set on the streets of Brussels driven by a mesmerizing performance from newcomer Martha Canga Antonio. Florian Gallenberger’s ‘70s- set melodrama The Colony with Emma Watson and Daniel Brühl.
Gérard Depardieu stars in The End from Guillaume Nicloux and Saint Amour (ABOVE) by Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kerven; Jihane Chouaib’s sterling Go Home; Riotous Icelandic incest comedy The Homecoming by Björn Hlynur Haraldsson; Gripping legal drama Kalinka by Vincent Garenq; Kadri Köusaar’s pitch-black Estonian comic gem Mother; San Sabastian winner, a soulful coming-of-age drama Sparrows by Rúnar Rúnarsson. The strand also boasts a World Premiere of Balazs Juszt’s supernatural thriller The Man Who Was Thursday

WORLD PERSPECTIVES

The strand delivers a global array of works from emerging and established filmmaking talents which include
India’s leading indie director Q’s coming-of-age comedy (RIGHT) Brahman Naman; Jon Cassar’s stoic western Forsaken, starring father and son Donald and Kiefer Sutherland; Assad Fouladkar’s study of romance in a sharia setting Halal Love (And Sex); Kim Sang-chan’s darkly eccentric Karaoke Crazies

DOCUMENTARIES

EIFF offers highlights in a genre that rightly continues to go from strength to strength. Titles include:
Andreas Johnsen’s challenging and thought-provoking documentary for foodies and environmentalists alike Bugs; Alexandru Belc’s love letter to the big screen Cinema, Mon Amour; Portrait of electro-music star Gary Numan: Android In La La Land by Steve Read and Rob Alexander; Mike Day’s ode to the Faroe Islands The Islands and the Whales; Niam Itani’s timely reflection on the place of refugees in the modern world Twice Upon A Time.

EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | 15-26 JUNE 2016

Ivan’s Childhood (1962) | Ivanovo detstvo | Bluray release

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky Writer: Vladimir Bogomolov (novel ‘Ivan’)

Cast: Nikolay Burlyaev, Valentin Zubkov, Evgeniu Zharikov, Stepan Krylov

Tarkovsky’s first feature IVAN’S CHILDHOOD (1962), tells the story of 12-year-old Ivan who, orphaned by Hitler’s invading troops, becomes a scout for the Soviet army, risking his life and slipping between the marshy front lines. Ivan’s Childhood won Tarkovsky international acclaim and recognition in the West by being awarded the Golden Lion at Venice on the year of its release.

Before the war Tarkovsky’s elegantly rendered dream sequences and flashbacks recall Ivan’s happy childhood before his tender years are subject to the horrors of war where he is is guided by two officers, Kholin (Valentin Zubkov) and Galtsev (Evgeny Zharikov) who spar over their lust for a beautiful nurse, Masha (Valentina Malyavina). But in darker scenes, lit only by flares in some of most powerfully haunting scenes ever committed to film, the three companions are seen creeping through a bleak battlescape during the grim task of collecting the bodies of their compatriot scouts who have been hanged by the Nazis. In a skilfully edited switch the film comes to a closes reflecting on a devastated Berlin in 1945. MT

NOW OUT ON BLURAY from 27 June 2016 COURTESY OF ARTIFICIAL EYE

https://youtu.be/aNnVDHZAMe8

Tale of Tales (2015)

Director: Matteo Garrone

Cast: Vincent Cassel, Salma Hayek, Toby Jones, John C Reilly, Shirley Henderson

125min Fantasy Drama Italy

Matteo Garrone’s TALE OF TALES is an orgiastic fairytale romp in sumptuous costumes far away from the real world. Based on the fables of the 16th-century Neapolitan poet and scholar Giambattista Basile, this splendid offering is an imaginative blend that echoes Beauty and the Beast, The Singing Ringing Tree, Immoral Tales, Dante’s Divine Comedia and every other trip to fantasy that literature has offered since the beginning of time. To watch it is to surrender to a mythical realm of the senses steeped in madness, magnificence and medieval bodily fluids – a dark and sinuously sensual world of pain and wicked pleasure.

Three fables intertwine from neighbouring imagined kingdoms drawn from the Pentamerone, a 17th-century book of Neapolitan folk stories compiled by the Italian poet Giambattista Basile: In Selvascura (Dark Wood) Selma Hayek and John C Reilly play a troubled King and Queen desperate for royal offspring. Their efforts to procreate lead them to a soothsayer who offers a remedy that results in ghastly albino twins.

Meanwhile, in Roccaforte (Strong Wood), a aptly-cast Vincent Cassel plays a corrupt and sex-obsessed King who has slept with all the available maidens in his pleasure-filled kingdom. When he becomes bewitched by the singing of a old woman, who he imagines to be a sexy nubile girl, he goes in hot pursuit of his prey. When she finally agrees to entertain him during the hours of darkness, Dora (played successively by Hayley Carmichael and Stacy Martin) emerges in her full glory, to his utter horror.

In the third Kingdom, Altomonte (Top of the Mountain) a tearful and cheerful Toby Jones plays a deranged King who decides to challenge his daughter Viola’s suitors with a bizarre test involving a giant flea the size of a cinquecento, reared tenderly in his palace. You can’t imagine the horrific outcome here.

Despite this extraordinary spectacle of grotesque black comedy – some of which is quite outlandish – the tone of TALE OF TALES is completely serious and dead pan and there are clearly stark moral lessons to be learnt from the wise Basile’s writings: Selma Hayek has the ridiculous task of devouring a giant bleeding heart, with utter dedication rather than horror. And Toby Jones is simply wonderful as the detached and mournful King, offering his daughter in marriage to the man who guesses the identity of a bizarre animal hide. Peter Suschitzky’s inventive cinematography sets this fantasy world on fire and Dimitri Capuani’s set design conjures up jewel-like contrasts from glowing candlelit interiors to sun-filled set pieces where Massimo Cantini Parrini’s gorgeous cossies glow vibrantly in gem-like crimson and indigo against pristine white and woodland green. A sumptuous treat. MT

NOW OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE \ CANNES REVIEW 2015

A Serious Game (2016) Netflix

Director: Pernilla August

114min Drama Sweden

Pernilla August fails to convey the passion of her unrequited lovers in this Swedish answer to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

Adapted by Lone Scherfig from the 1912 novel by Hjalmar Soderberg, A SERIOUS GAME is another costume melodrama exploring the potent chemistry of sexual desire and longing in a story of sexual obsession. The couple in question, Arvid Stjarnblom (Sverrir Gudnason) and Lydia Stille (Karin Franz Korlof), never quite captivate our attention throughout this initially steamy bodice-ripper but August’s efforts are to laudable in her second feature.

Arvid is a young writer and proofreader for Stockholm’s main newspaper when he meets the daughter of one of Sweden’s most noted landscape painters, Anders Stille (Goran Ragnerstam): “I painted a completely blue canvas once, it’s in the National Gallery”.

This is the third screen adaptation of the story that follows the amorous exploits of starstruck lovers whose enduring ardour for each other is fated never to end in marriage, de-stabilising and upsetting everyone in their wake. Initially engaging, it eventually becomes tedious (along with its monotonous score) but offers a fascinating snapshot of early 20th century life in Swedish publishing and literary circles.

The couple first set eyes on each other at Lydia’s father’s summer cabin on an island near Stockholm. Lydia offering her beau one of her father’s paintings inscribed with the words: “Away. I long to get away.” Sadly Papa is to die leaving her without an inheritance and, without any means of supporting herself Lydia is forced to marry the wealthy, older Roslin (Sven Nordin). The lovers meet again years later when they are both married parents: Arvid has settled for an attractive and wealthy blond (gracefully played by Liv Moines).

This rather drably photographed romantic drama then goes backward and forward as the two make each other, and everyone else, unhappy with their illicit affair; hot-headed Lydia doesn’t quite think things through, deciding to leave her husband to return to the cabin and a rather passive Arvid, who shilly shallys all the way home. With neither character convincing beyond their vapid victim status, the narrative slowly unravels to a disappointing conclusion.

The more interesting characters here are seriously underwritten: Michael Nyqvist, as the charismatic newspaper publisher and Mikkel Boe Folsgaard (A Royal Affair) as the much maligned Lidner, the paper’s froeign correspondent, who Lydia truculently casts aside.

A SERIOUS GAME is indeed serious and rather depressing, the only fire coming from a initial spark of sexual ardour rapidly extinguished by a narrative whose central characters fails to exude any appeal for the audience. They can be forgiven, in part, for being young and aimless, but youth alone does not make for exciting viewing. MT

NETFLIX | REVIEWED AT BERLINALE FEBRUARY 2016

The Violators (2015)

Director.: Helen Walsh

Cast: Lauren McQueen, Brogan Ellis, Stephen Lord, Liam Aisnworth, Derek Barr, Challum King Chadwick

97min | Drama | UK 2015

Novelist turned filmmaker Helen Walsh sets her debut feature The Violators in and around the sink estates of Birkenhead (Cheshire), a grim post-industrial heartland. Ultra-realistic in tone and supremely acted by the two female teenagers, Walsh’ script plays with the underlying sexual motives of female solidarity before a dramatic final rush destroys the intricacies that take place beforehand.

Sixteen year-old Lauren (Mc Queen) has to look after her two brothers – the adult, near catatonic Andy (Barr) and the schoolboy Jerome (Chadwick) – in their rundown council flat. Lauren strikes up an unlikely friendship with Rachel (Ellis), who lives in a posh house in a gated complex. Lauren showers Rachel with gifts a in a relationship that seems impenetrable and enigmatic. But Lauren panics and turns to middle-aged pawnbroker Mikey (Lord) when she hears that their violent father is to be released from prison. The would-be sugar-daddy exploits her sexually and when she discovers that their father is not coming home she then turns to her neighbour, a friendly army cadet Kieran (Ainsworth). With the audience still wondering about the implications of the Lauren/Rachel relationship, Walsh decides to deny all the previous festering malevolence, opting for a dramatic finale. But the botched ending is not the only problems with The Violators. Walsh’s underwhelming script leaves too many unanswered questions to satisfy the shroud of seething tension created by first time cinematographer Tobin Jones’ dark and eerie images, which are the most potent element of this edgy drama; with the teenage leads impressively acting out the individual nuances of their quiet emotional despair. AS

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM FRIDAY 17 JUNE 2016

Long Way North (2016) Tout Au Haut du Monde

Director: Remi Chaye; Animation; France/Denmark 2015, 81 min.

In this animated big screen debut Remi Chaye incorporates elements of Mulan in a 19th century snowbound adventure that follows teenage Russian aristrocrat Sasha to the North Pole in a bid to reclaim the family honour and find the ship of her grandfather Oloukine, an intrepid explorer.

This delicatately rendered 2D animation opens in St. Petersburg where Sasha is mourning the loss of her grandfather Oloukine who was lost after setting out with his ship Daiva to find a passage to the North Pole. Her father, Count Chernetsov, is only interested in his diplomatic career, hoping to become the Russian ambassador in Rome. But the new scientific adviser to the Tsar, Prince Vladimir Tomsky, the nephew of the Imperial ruler, tries to discredit Oloukine and his mission. At a ball, Sasha challenges the Prince, who calls her grandfather a megalomaniac. Tomsky is only too happy to be insulted, and leaves in a huff: Chetnetsov can say goodbye to his post in Rome.

Sasha flees her home and sets out to find the Daiva, a supposedly unsinkable vessel that cost the State a fortune. She has to work for months in restaurant near the Arctic circle before she finds a ship which takes her near the Pole, where the frozen corpse of Oloukine is discovered. After a gruelling mission in the icy wasteland hampered by a fierce bear, the exhausted crew finally track down the Daiva and sail back to St. Petersburg, where Sasha’s parents, all forgiving, await her.

LONG WAY NORTH seems to be two films rolled into one. The action only gets going halfway through, when Sasha climbs on board to start her journey to the Pole after a lengthy and didactic preamble explores the changes Sasha goes through in her quest to raise money to finance her trip. The hand-coloured images are highly original using a bleached out pastel palette. Young audiences might have difficulty sitting through the adult-orientated narrative of the first half in St. Petersburg. Still, when Sasha finally makes it to the world of mountainous icebergs and growling polar bears, their attention will be rewarded. AS

OUT ON 17 JUNE 2017

The Ones Below (2015) | Bluray release

Writer|Director: David Farr

Cast: Clémance Poésy, David Morrissey, Stephen Campbell Moore, Laura Birn

97min Thriller UK

“Do you ever really know your neighbours” asks David Farr in his directorial debut, a weird London-set psycho thriller that fails to convince despite a decent budget and the BBC’s support in the venture.

We’re in media-flat-land – West Kensington or Maida Vale – judging from the pre-prandial banter: “We’re out of saffron” of our loved-up young marrieds Justin (Stephen Campbell Moore) and Kate (Clémence Poésy), who have just had their first scan and are settling down to babydom in a soigné ground floor apartment.

Anyone who draws comparisons with Roman Polanski’s The Tenant or Rosemary’s Baby here should have their head examined, but there is an edgy surreality to this pastel arthouse piece that would go down well on BBC3 (or ITV) on a Tuesday night. Farr’s storyline is likely to ramp up maternal and paternal anxiety levels so this is probably one to avoid if you’re shortly expecting to hear the patter of tiny feet of the human variety.

As it turns out, the couple’s downstairs neighbours are also in the family way. Buttoned-up middle-aged banker Jon (a superbly supercilious David Morrissey) and latterday Hitchcockian ice maiden Theresa (Laura Birn), who has been selected ‘off the peg’ by Jon for her youth and child-bearing potential, are unlikely bedfellows. Over a tense impromptu dinner chez Kate and ‘Just’ it emerges that the couple have been trying to conceive for seven years and according to Theresa: “Jon’s last wife couldn’t have kids, so it was no good”: clearly there are also potential issues for Jon on the siring front.

The girls hit it off initially although Kate is the more laid back and Theresa, labouring under some kind of mental strain, drinks heavily all through the dinner. The evening takes an unfortunate turn for the worst whereupon Theresa and Jon both bridle viciously and retreat into a hostile stand-off in their basement. Thoughts of a possible legal battle run through our minds at this stage, but the status quo soon returns to normal – these are educated and well-bred people, after all – until strange goings-on indicate that possibly the tables are turning against Kate and Just. And this is where Farr’s script plays up the isolation and neurosis that child-rearing can entail. Kate is left alone while Just works long hours on web design.

Meanwhile, the more affluent couple are out lunching together trying to work out what they have in common. At least Theresa enjoying the benefits of a financially secure and work-free existence although her character utterly fails to convince. THE ONES BELOW has an genuinely eerie feel to it while neatly sidestepping the usual horror tropes such creaking floors or a sinister score. Ed Rutherfood’s visuals offer a shady look behind the doors of the seemingly ‘shiny’ couple who clearly live their lives on the outside. The house is bright and clean with decent furniture and a positively pristine ‘curb appeal’. But while his narrative aims to be enigmatic, it ends up being unsatisfactory with meaningless flashbacks and an ill-thoughtout and nonsensical third-act that morphs into heightened melodrama where everyone suddenly behaves completely out of character in performances that are as creaky as floorboards. Of the four, Morrissey probably gives the most polished turn as the brittle, snide businessman. Campbell Moore isn’t given a great deal to work with and Clémence Poésy does her best as the most likeable and down to earth of the foursome. David Farr is clearly a filmmaker with talent and although THE ONES BELOW has its faults, its certainly worth watching. MT

THE ONES BELOW | Available to buy on blu-ray from 4th July

The Girl King (2015)

Director: Mike Kaurismaki, Writer: Michel Marc Bouchard

Cast: Malin Buska, Sarah Gadon, Michael Nyqvist, Laura Birn, Hippolyte Girardot, Lucas Bryant

106min | Drama | Finland Sweden

Finnish director Mika Kaurismaki (Road North) and writer Michel Marc Bouchard (Tom at the Farm) join forces for this impressively-mounted historical biopic that focuses on an interesting era in Swedish history. Queen Kristina, who ruled Sweden in the middle of the 17th century, was an enterprising feminist in many ways similar to our own Queen Elizabeth I, Previously played most notably by the legendary Greta Garbo in Rouben Mamoulian’s 1933 classic Queen Christina; what makes this version special is Kaurismaki’s full throttle slant on Kristina’s lesbian tendencies, where previous adaptations have just pussy footed round the subject.

That Kristina was a fully-fledged lesbian is a bold premise but sadly the film fails to live up to this intended ideal and ends up being just another period drama, albeit a watchable and beautifully-crafted one. This English language production has newcomer Malin Buska as Kristina, and Martina Gedeck as the mother of the only surviving legitimate child of King Gustav II Adolf (Samuli Edelmann). Tomboyish Kristina becomes Queen as a tiny girl and starts to reign when she is just 18. In masterful form, Michael Nyqvist plays her chief political consultant, Chancellor Axel Von Oxenstierna, advising her on the peace talks during Europe’s religious Thirty Years’ War. We discover how Kristina was an ardent and respected patron of the arts and engaged with Europe’s finest artists and philosophers of the era, such as Rene Descartes (Patrick Bauchau) who is invited to stay at the Royal Palace. But her lesbian love affair with a beautiful young countess Ebba Sparre (Sarah Gadon) and her Catholic leanings (in Protestant Sweden) were the factors that made her unpopular when the going got tough.

Queen Kristina’s is a riveting story of bodice-ripping raunchiness and rich historical intrigue yet Kaurismaki and Bouchard’s offering is tepid in comparison with the real life deal; it is a drama that lacks dramatic heft and we care little for the protagonists or their tragic plights. Much of the problem lies with Bouchard’s script which was clunkily translated into English from its French original and then given to a cast of non-native speakers who do their best despite some real corkers on the dialogue front. Some of the performances are uneven and leave a great deal to be desired including the seduction scene between Kristina and Ebba.

That said THE GIRL KING is a sumptuously crafted historical romp set in some gloriously evocative snowy landscapes, featuring amongst others Turku Castle in Finland and Eschenlohe in Bavaria, but the tone too often veers towards the melodramatic rather than the politically and emotionally resonant. MT

SCREENING IN ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 17 JUNE 2016

Gang Bang (A Modern Love Story) 2016

Director: Eva Husson

Cast: Finnegan Oldfield, Marylin Lima, Daisy Broom, Fred Houtier, Lorenzo Lefebvre;

France 2015, 98 min.

When Larry Clark exploded onto the film scene in 1995 with Kids, the schlock-value barometer seemed to go into the stratosphere. Further outings allowed Clark to gain cult-status – but first time writer-director Eva Husson’s equally provocative Bang Gang is just pure soft porn, lacking any narrative and providing a bland amateur version of Clark’s film, which was after all an exercise in socio-political reflections.

Set in trendy Biarritz, George (Lima) is the blond bombshell of her class while her best friend Laetitia (Broom) is rather shy. When George conquers Alex (Oldfield), who lives alone in a big house, his mother being in Morocco, all seems to go to plan. But Laetitia, for once, gains the upper hand leaving George fuming. Alex’s creepy friend Nikita (Hotier), helps to come up with the not very original idea of group sex and George has ample time to sleep with every adoring male. But she still has time to fall in love with Gabriel (Lefebvre), a composer of some sort. Soon the party dwellers are infected with syphilis, parental control takes over, Alex goes to live with his mother, but George and Gabriel elope to Paris, where we can see them frolic naked in the kitchen.

This is a pure excuse for a film. It is not so much the voyeuristic nudity which makes Bang Gang so unbearable, but the absence of any narrative or plot. Shot like a commercial by DoP Matthias Troelstrup, the images overwhelmingly depict (half) naked teenagers snorting, smoking and copulating. Even the good old-fashioned slow motion is back with the protagonists roller skating or driving their Vespas through the gorgeous landscape – only to be disturbed by an annoying voiceover, explaining the obvious. Bang Gang is a wasteful exercise in banal superficiality. AS

OUT ON 17 JUNE 2016

Overlord (1975) | Criterion Collection UK Bluray release

Director|Writer: Stuart Cooper

Cast: Brian Stirner, Davyd Harries, Nicholas Ball, Julie Neesam, Sam Sewell, John Franklyn-Robbins

83min | War Drama | UK

Stuart Cooper directed this impressionistic Second World War drama that follows a young British soldier from his home town to the D-Day beaches of Normandy. The soldier is Tom Beddows, a polite young man who could have inspired a poem by Wilfred Owen in the Great War. Played here by Brian Stirner (A Kind of Hush), Beddows naively takes a copy of Great Expectations with him to read in his spare time, conjuring up the general impression that the war would be some kind of a temporary blip in everyday life – little did they know.

This is a searingly poignant portrait of an ordinary soldier behind the guns and bluster of the war machine where anonymous death features daily in terrifying scenes and in silent moments where a Spitfire floats over the distant sea below before unleashing a tirade of torpedoes, and savage fires devastate towns and buildings. Stanley Kubrick’s regular DoP John Alcott’s shocking images of soldiers trying to clamber onto the rocky shoreline will remain burnt into the memory and are deftly interwoven with archival footage of giant metal Catherine Wheels rolling along the beaches to explode landmines and cut through barbed wire. Stuart Cooper spent several years compiling the archival and filmed footage in collaboration with the Imperial War Museum. A score of classics such ‘The Lambeth Walk’ lend a nostalgic and sometimes comforting atmosphere to the otherwise pitiful tragedy that unfolds.

Private Beddows meets a girl (Julie Neesam) at a dance. They chat and start to fall in love in a touching way, glad to share human tenderness in the midst of violence. At night, we see the young soldiers talk and smoke in bed as their potential fate gradually dawns on them: “Cannon Fodder – that’s what we are”. But there are lighter moments too as Beddows receives a birthday fountain pen from his parents and writes back to tell them about a trip to the cinema to see Celia Johnson in This Happy Breed. All this is intercut with horrifying footage of war plane flying treacherously overhead the countryside below. One hellish sortie sees an aircraft mercilessly shooting on a train as it puffs its way along a summer cornfield. Tom says goodbye to his parents telling them of his fear but acceptance of death and at never coming home again. He will miss his dog Tina. The final scene takes the form of a dreamlike sequence as Tom runs along the French beaches, imagining the girl embracing and undressing before him as her shadowy figure is reflected in his eyes. But it is not to be. MT

OVERLORD takes it title comes from an operation code word for an invasion sortie during wartime. Restored in a new 35mm print, OVERLORD is a different kind of war film; touching the psyche with a heart-rending sadness and melancholy evoked by Wilfred Owen: “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity”. MT

OVERLORD won the Silver Bear at Berlin | AVAILABLE FROM 6TH JUNE 2016 | CRITERION UK —

Phaedra(s) | The Barbican

Director: Krzysztof Warlikowski | Dramaturgy Piotr Gruszczynski

Performed by: Isabelle Huppert, Agata Buzek, Andrzej Chyra, Alex Descas, Gael Kamilindi, Norah Krief, Rosalba Torres Guerrero, Gregoire Leaute

220min | Drama | Poland | France

It seems fitting that one of Greek tragedy’s most controversial figures should be played by one of film and stage’s most enigmatic French actors, Isabelle Huppert, who makes a rare London appearance to play three roles (Aphrodite, Phaedra and Elizabeth Costello) in Krzysztof Warlikowski’s radical and visionary French Polish production which bewilders and bewitches despite occasional longueurs.

His PHAEDRA(S) takes the form of three versions of the Greek myth, blending fresh material from Lebanese-Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad with the provocative text of Sarah Kane’s brutal ‘Phaedra’s Love’ and extracts from J M Coetzee’s novel ‘Elizabeth Costello’.

In 2010, Warlikowski cast Huppert in his version of A Streetcar Named Desire and this captured his imagination to create her three incarnations here as she morphs seamlessly from the sexually manipulative Aphrodite taking revenge on Hippolytus, then switching to Phaedra and finally to the perverse Elizabeth Costello.

Hot on the heels of her intoxicating performance in Paul Verhoeven’s outré ‘rape comedy’ ELLE, that premiered at Cannes in May, Huppert struts provocatively around the stage in a range of raunchy rigouts from Dior, Hedi Slimane for Saint Laurent and Givenchy during an evening that perpetually teeters on the brink of elegant outrage. During the opening scenes she strips down to her blood-stained undies before girating in angst-ridden love-sickness on a bed, throwing up into a sink and fatally climaxing in the arms of her step-son Hyppolyte 1, a coltishly exotic Gaël Kamilindi who slinks in as a black dog.

In the second and most protracted segment, Andrzej Chyra (In the Name Of) plays Hippolyte as a bored and bloated playboy sulking in a sliding glass enclosure (representing his regal quarters) where he is entertained by the intoxicatingly rhythmic dance routines of Rosalba Torres Guerrero while Hitchcock’s Psycho plays in the background, in the first of the production’s three references to the film world. Jessica Lange’s lobotomy scene in Clifford’s Frances (1982) plays during the final Coetzee segment along with Pasolini’s ’60s allegory Teorema, which cleverly draws a parallel with Silvana Mangano’s chic but sexually frustrated Milanese mother. In final strand Huppert plays conference speaker Elizabeth Costello who disdains Chyra’s intellectually arrogant interviewer during a conference debate that uses Frances, German Romantic poet Höderlin who incorporated Greek tragedy into his 19th century works, and Racine’s 17th century version of Phèdre as its pivotal conversation points. Of the three parts, this is possibly the most amusing but also the most challenging.

In sharp contrast to the starkly elegant stage sets (marbled walls, chrome shower heads and contemporary low level Italian furniture) and haute couture, the cast bravely submits to the full complement of human physical and emotional degradations: crying, pleading, throwing up, bleeding and crawling on all fours with open legs.

Isabelle Huppert’s coruscating emotional intensity ranges from the sarcastically perverse Costello to the proud posturing of Aphrodite and the clipped sardonic diction and soulful sobbing of Phaedra, making us scorn and then pity her characters within minutes. Amusement jostles shock and contempt. Agata Buzet (11 Minutes) is potently feline and as Phaedra’s real daughter Strophe. And there is a dizzying dance from Guerrero. Complimented by Pawel Mykietyn’s arresting atmospheric score this is an often bewildering but ultimately rewarding production. MT

PHAEDRA(S) | BARBICAN THEATRE EC2 | TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE

Where You’re Meant to Be (2016) | Sheffield Doc Fest 2016

Dir.: Paul Fegan: Documentary with Aidan Moffat & Sheila Stewart; UK 2015, 75 min.

First time director Paul Fegan’s documentary chronicles the short encounter of two Scottish independent musicians: Aidan Moffat, frontman of Arab Strap and Sheila Stewart (1937-2014), Scotland’s most popular folk ballad singer who was born in the horse barn of a Traveller’s family and went on to performed for the Pope and US President Gerald Ford.

Moffat narrates the film and is clearly very taken with Stewart, and perhaps even overawed. But when they travel together through the hilly Scottish countryside, Stewart driving, an earnest dispute ensues: while Stewart insists in leaving the traditional ballads intact, Moffat wants to re-interpret the songs to reflect more modern times. As it turns out, Moffat has misinterpreted a line in the song ‘Where you’re meant to be’, not realising that the phrase “my ship’s in the harbour”, actually means that the person quoted is ready to die.

Although Stewart was selected by her uncle to learn all the Traveller ballads by heart, at the time she remembers regretting not being able to play outside with her friends. And at her last public performance, singing the song who gave the film its title in Glasgow’s ‘Barrowland’, Moffat has the grace to admit his lack of knowledge to the assembled crowd, even though he insists on rewriting many Stewart songs, which are in the public domain, transplanting them into a more comfortable urban environment.

Although Fegan makes a good job of portraying the rather prickly relationship between Moffat and Stewart, the documentary suffers from too much additional padding: the Loch Ness monster is called upon to vote “Yes” the Scottish referendum, and a gang of ancient Scottish knights fight the English in mock battles. Somehow the eccentric Scottish travelogue deflects from the central musical element here.

Sheila Stewart MBE is the last in a long line of ‘troubadours’ who kept alive the memories of their rootless, often persecuted people, and somehow she deserves a better farewell than this rowdy concoction. The raunchy punchlines and Moffat’s near pathological urge to see something comical in any given situation often side-tracks the seriousness of Stewart’s material, and the suffering of her people. DoP Julian Schwartz visuals are impressive in showing the husky darkness of the Scottish nights that make a atmospheric background to the music. AS

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 17 JUNE 2016 | Also screening at SHEFFIELD DOC FEST ON 12 JUNE

Mile End (2015) | East End Film Festival 23 June – 3 July 2016

Director: Gahame Higgins

Alex Humes, Mark Arnold, Heidi Agerhom Baile

110mi | Thriller | UK

MILE END is another British film that loves to hates the Bankers (who offer them funding them through the EIS scheme); with a selection of nauseously unattractive characters who appear aimless and forlorn in their lives, bickering and purporting to help each other amid the twinking skyscrapers of gloomy old Docklands – yet slowly through all this dispondency a tense thriller starts to make its way to the surface in Grahame Higgins’ fourth feature that won him an award in the New York Independent film festival this year.

When Paul (Alex Humes) is made redundant at his publishing job, he believes running may be the answer to help him mull through his life and find a way forward with his girlfriend Kate (Heidi Agerholm Balle). He comes across American John (Mark Arnold) out jogging one day, the slightly older grey fox is suave and assured and comes across as a mentor. As they slowly get to know one another, John appears resentful of the other City types they pass on their daily jog through the wharves and waterways, and while John offers advice and business ideas, his comments on Paul’s personal relationships feel ominously judgemental and distinctly anti-capitalist for a soi-disant City guru. Then Paul’s friend (Valmike Rampersad) mysteriously gets killed while out jogging and Paul begins to question John’s ulterior motives.

Creaky performances (particularly from an irritatingly insipid Alex Humes) and some ropey dialogue don’t do Higgins’ drama any favours, but Anna Valdez-Hank’s pristine camerawork, Ed Scolding’s subtle atmospheric score and the enigmatic character called John (well-played by Mark Arnold) keep things ticking over tensely during the film’s 101 minute running time. MILE END is a thought-provoking thriller whose style and atmosphere overcome form and substance in s fragmentary narrative leading to an open-ended conclusion. Many may find MILE END unsatisfying, but if running is your thing, this is worth a watch. MT

MILE END IS SCREENING DURING THE EAST END FILM FESTIVAL | 23 JUNE – 3 JULY 2016

Cemetery of Splendour (2015)

Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Cast: Banlop Lomnoi, Jenjira Pongpas, Jarinpattra Rueangram

102min Drama Thailand

Apichatpong Weerasethakul won the Palme d’Or in 2010 with his strangely-titled piece of poetic reverie Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Cemetery of Splendour premiered at Un Certain Regard in 2015. Taking up the fashionable theme of psychogeography, it is a blissful and serenely spiritual study of a group of soldiers who have fallen ill with sleeping sickness while working on a government building project. Their convalescence is overseen in the tropical surroundings of a “laying in” hospital by the calming presence of elderly volunteer, Jenjira, and a local medium, Keng, who is uses her spiritual powers to heal the soldiers. The women are also visited by the spirits of two Laotian princesses who appear naturally and calmly: dressed as mortal women.

Cemetery works as a clever allegory of the suffering of the Thai people. The twist is that this ground was once the site of an ancient Royal Palace. The spirits of past royals (who also represent the unquiet ghosts of the corrupt Thai nation) are drawing on the energy of the soldiers and using it to fight their own continued battles, causing a generalised sleeping sickness amongst the veterans.

Weerasethakul’s film is beautifully-framed in a series of long and medium shots. On a spiritual level, it serves as a meditation that contemplates the value of harsh western medicine in contrast to the curative powers of touch and silence that assist healing. An atmospheric soundtrack of ambient insect sounds and cicadas lull us into a deep sense of calm, making this an affecting and deeply restorative experience. MT

THE TATE MODERN is currently running a film installation entitled PRIMITIVE 2009

CEMETERY OF SPLENDOUR is on general release from 17 JUNE 2016

Dead Slow Ahead (2015) | East End Film Festival 23 June – 3 July 2016

Writer|Director: Mauro Herce Writer Manuel Munoz Rivas

74min | Docudrama | Spain | France

Dead Slow Ahead joins a growing subgenre of marine docudramas along with Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s Leviathan, Axel Koenzen’s sinister Deadweight and Félix Dufour-Laperrière’s Transatlantique that all take place on on commercial shipping vessels – in this case, the ‘Fair Lady,”. The fascination of these films is how the quotidian takes on a surreal and otherworldly aspect, thousands of miles from home. The diurnal drudgery of months adrift in a lonely seascape is transformed into a realm of alien eeriness when captured by Mauro Herce’s roving camera. Jose Manuel Berenguer’s sound crew creates a spacey soundscape aboard the ‘Fair Lady’.

Where Lucien Castaing Taylor’s Leviathan felt like a horror film for fish, Herce’s horror is a human experience, homing in on unsettling skies and sinister ambient sounds of computer navigation conjuring up a menacing loneliness onboard the gigantic container ship that dwarfs its human crew on a journey into the unknown seas. Gone are lively ‘ahoys’ and spirited sailors songs of yesterday: today’s modern vessels echo, bleep and drone with the dissociative sounds of 21st century science.

As distant refineries illuminate the skylines with the toxic twinkle of their chemical haze, the vast decks of the vessel glimmer and glow under translucent skies. Below deck, the vacant corridors clank and jolt and the billowing bowels of the container compartments appear like chasms in a mammoth sea monster, swallowing up the inanimate human crew like ineffectual ants, their only humanity telegraphed by disembodied voices in a seaborne planet heading into the unknown. MT

Mauro Herce won the Special Jury Prize at Locarno Film Festival 2015

SCREENING DURING EAST END FILM FESTIVAL 23 JUNE – 3 JULY 2016

Ace In The Hole (1951) | Bluray release

Director: Billy Wilder

Cast: Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling, Robert Arthur, Frank Cady, Porter Hall, Ray Teal, Richard Benedict

11min | Film Noir | US

Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole is one of his greatest achievements but also his biggest commercial failure. In Cameron Crowe’s book “Conversations with Wilder,” Wilder states that his films probably contain more irony than cynicism, and then he makes an exception, “Maybe Ace in the Hole. That was the one. It was the way I thought the picture should go.”

Unfortunately public and critics didn’t go along with such a corrosive depiction of media manipulation and its shoving of the public’s face in the dirt. The film was released in 1951. The Korean War was at its peak and many Americans found it disturbingly anti-American, and a few thought it Communist inspired. Paramount’s change of title to The Big Carnival didn’t help its box office performance.

Ace in the Hole tells the story of Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas, at his very best) trying to make his way back up the career ladder as a newspaper reporter. Stuck on an insignificant provincial paper, he yearns for excitement. This comes in the form of Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) who gets trapped in a cave looking for Indian artefacts. Tatum sets up a rescue effort in order to prolong the story for maximum exposure. He ruthlessly employs the victim’s wife Lorraine (Jan Sterling), the Sheriff Kretzer (Ray Teal) and engineer Sam Smollet (Frank Jaquet) to this end. The public flock to witness what becomes an entertainment with a country fair and instant ballad making. Tatum contacts an editor in New York to get the biggest scoop possible. But his vitriolic and scheming plans come horribly undone.

For Ace in the Hole the writing trio of Wilder, Walter Newman and Lesser Samuels provided a scorching script. I could easily spend the rest of this review giving you examples of its acrid and cynical tone. But that would spoil your full enjoyment of the film. A script this good and sharp functions as cinematically as the most dynamic film editing; sweeping you along with a precision that exposes all the characters strengths and weaknesses (mostly weaknesses!).

Billy Wilder has his detractors who claim his words are often made subordinate to his images. Not so. They enhance. And Wilder was never a showy director. Yet when he wants an image to have maximum impact, he delivers. No more so than in the powerful final shots of Chuck Tatum. Yet like the dialogue treats, I wont divulge such a satisfying comeuppance.

Suffice to say if you admire Von Stroheim’s Greed, Scorsese’s King of Comedy
and Nathanial West’s novella The Day of the Locust, then Ace in the Hole joins that
select company as a bitter destruction job on The American Dream. Frighteningly acute in its take-down of the media, public collusion, personal ambition and greed, it is one of the great films of the fifties. Substitute Ace in the Hole’s radio cars and candy floss for an international TV crew; hand out smart phones with cameras, Twitter and facebook and the show still goes on. Alan Price

NOW AVAILABLE ON BLURAY

Love & Friendship (2016)

Writer|Director: Whit Stillman Novella: Jane Austen

Cast: Kate Beckinsale, Chloe Sevigny, Xavier Samuel, Emma Greenwell, Justin Edwards, Tom Bennett, Morfydd Clark, Jemma Redgrave, James Fleet, Stephen Fry, Conor Lambert, Jenn Murray

92min | Drama | US

Kate Beckinsale plays the quintessential English coquette in Whit Stillman’s witty screen adaptation of Jane Austen’s Lady Susan. Tripping lightly and astringently through this little-known and long-unpublished epistolary novella, Beckinsale is joined by a caustic cast of sterling British acting talent in the shape of Stephen Fry, Jemma Redgrave and Tom Bennett with transatlantic twists from Chloë Sevigny and Emma Greenwell.

And this is no staid period drama but a spritely, often hilarious, comedy of manners that follows the newly widowed machiavellian adventurist, Lady Susan Vernon, through a risqué game of shrewd social ritual to redemption in the arms of a malleable replacement suitor. With his well-known comedies Last Days of Disco and Metropolitan, Stillman has proved to be a dab hand at distilling delicious drama from urbane society. And Kate Beckinsale is at her best yet, back in a literary role that she handles with delicious aplomb (occasionally echoing the TV mannerisms of Nigella Lawson) and hopefully ushering in a return to a genre she does best.

The story opens with Lady Susan on the verge of leaving the household of “a divinely attractive” but irritatingly married Lord Manwaring, introduced by caption but ever to remain silent on screen, glowering with lustful intent in a walk-on part. In order to clear the path for her indiscretions in the homes of suitable friends and connections, Susan has despatched her daughter Frederica (Morfydd Clark) to finishing school in London, while she plots her next incursion into her late husband’s family, alighting on the coltish charms of a young in-law, Reginald DeCourcy (Xavier Samuel).

Her partner in crime in these adventures is one Alicia Johnson (a discreet Chloe Sevigny, her sidekick from Last Days) who is married to Stephen Fry’s staid statesman who is, inconveniently, also the guardian of Lord Manwaring’s wittering wife Lady Lucy (Jenn Murray).

The enjoyable thing about LOVE & FRIENDSHIP is that it leaves you wanting more of its delightful wit and charm. From the main performances to the small cameos – particularly that of Tom Bennett as the hilarious Sir James Martin, in the jaunty style of a dumbed-down Robert Peston. Lady Susan is the ultimate ‘mistress of the put-down’ who cunningly moves between Xavier Samuel’s tousled toyboy DeCourcy and the subtle stability of Sir James with the consummate skill of Molière’s Célimène or Choderlos de Laclos’ Marquise de Merteuil – with lines like “Facts are horrid things” showing that she is woman who won’t ever countenance defeat in this tightly-plotted marvel and wittiest drama of the year – so far. MT

OUT ON FRIDAY 27 MAY 2016

Versus: The Life and Films of Ken Loach (2016)

Director: Louise Osmond | Documentary | UK | 93min

With a string of award-winning documentaries under her belt Louise Ormond is fast becoming one of Britain’s foremost female filmmakers. Here she makes swift work of uncovering her subject – the social realist superman Ken Loach whose charming and gentle persona belies a steely and terrier-like resolve. Cutting to the chase, the doc opens with Loach branding David and Samantha Cameron ‘bastards’, he is later seen tearfully reflecting over the endless pain of losing his own son at nearly the same age – in a car accident. Raised in an aspirational Tory household in Nuneaton we discover that Loach did well at the local selective Grammar school and read Law at Oxford where he was ‘radicalised’ before failing to make it as an actor, joining the BBC at a time when it was casting around for new blood. Here he joined committed left-winger Jim Allen in making a series of films that went beyond the remit of the channel’s regular ‘posh filmed drama’ by presenting life as it really was: aka social realism.

Osmond neatly avoids a hagiographic approach using a tight selection of informative talking heads and although Loach appears charmingly self-effacing on screen and adept at giving his actors the security needed show their vulnerability, as in the case of Carol White in Cathy Come Home, Osmond is quick to point out that he can also demonstrate a rapier-like intransigence when on the attack evidence in his doomed directorship of the 1987 stage play ‘Perdition’ which was pulled from London’s Royal Court Theatre in a controversy that curtailed his filmmaking activity until the mid 1990s – due to lack of funding – forcing him into the commercials domain to keep his family in their large North London home.

At 80, Loach still sticks to a politically incisive style whose social relevance was most poignant in ’60s dramas Kes (1969), Poor Cow (1967) and Cathy Come Home (1966) but whose velvet sledgehammer approach now only appeals to a European arthouse crowd who feted his latest flawed agitprop I, Daniel Blake at Cannes this year. Cleverly, Louise Osmond points this out in her subtle and watchable biopic. MT

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE 3 JUNE | A ‘PAY AS YOU CAN’ DAY WILL OPERATE ON THE 6 JUNE AT THE FOLLOWING CINEMAS.

Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015) | bluray release

Writer/Director: Peter Greenaway

Cast: Elmer Bäck, Luis Alberti, Maya Zapata, Lisa Owen, Stelio Savante,

105min Comedy Drama

Peter Greenaway proudly presents this fast-talking, flashy and visually overloaded outing that aims to shed a light on Sergei Eisenstein’s transformative trip to Mexico in the early 1930s.

Having achieved success with STRIKE, BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN and OCTOBER (TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD) by his late twenties, Eisenstein arrived in Hollywood 1930 on the invitation of Paramount Pictures. But movie plans fall through and he travels down to Mexico to meet the writer Upton Sinclair and make a film with him and his wife Mary Craig Kimbrough, Que Viva Mexico. It was never made.

The tone is unapologetically provocative with beefy Finnish-born actor Elmer Bäck playing Eisenstein as a bumptiously theatrical, overgrown baby with flyaway hair and a propensity to walking around his hotel room in the nude talking to his penis to the overbearing tones of Dance of the Knights from Prokoviev’s Romeo and Juliet. This is possibly due to the sweltering heat and culture shock brought on by discovering this new and uninhibited exotic playground: there’s even running water in the bathroom. Away from the strictures of Stalinism, Sex (Eros) and Death (Thanatos) take over his thoughts and coalesce with the steamy temperatures to have a transformative effect on Eisenstein’s libido of that of his local guide a well-endowed and sultry, Palomino Cañedo (Luis Alberti), who indulge in ultra-marital anal sex during their afternoon Siesta giving the Russian director two new experiences to take home. This affair was to have a dramatic effect on his creativity when he returned to Russia, and Greenaway cleverly evokes this transformation of his style from one of conceptual filmmaking to a fascination with more human concerns. His visit coincides with Mexico’s Day of the Dead (images of the Museum of the Dead here are accompanied to a playful Mexican score in contrast to those of Herzog’s sinister opening sequences of NOSFERATU.

The film is beautifully-crafted as one would expect with visuals morphing from the vibrant colours of the Mexico to the stylish bedroom interiors and black and white, Greenaway’s trademark montages are evident as are triptych split screens showing different timings of events and imaginative set-designs by Hector Iruegas (Post Tenebras Lux). There are exquisitely-tailored costumes for the men and soigné attire for the women courtesy of Brenda Gomez. Those expecting to learn anything about Eisenstein or indeed the films themselves or even Mr and Mrs Sinclair will be disappointed as this is largely a vanity piece for Greenaway to showcase his considerable filmmaking talents (and possibly even align them to those of Eisenstein); Elmer Leupen’s impressive editing skills and Reinier van Brummelen expertise with his lenses. Despite all this cleverness – THE DRAUGHTSMAN’S CONTRACT still remains his best film MT.

REVIEWED AT BERLINALE 2015 IN THE COMPETITION LINE-UP | NOW ON BLURAY

The Intervention (2016)

Director | Writer: Clea DuVall

Cast: Clea DuVall, Melanie Lynskey, Natasha Lyonne, Vincent Piazza, Jason Ritter, Ben Schwartz, Alia Shawkat, Cobie Smulders

90min | Comedy | UK

Actress turned filmmaker Clea DuVall’s debut, a gender-bending reunion comedy, is well-acted and watchable enough despite its trite take on relationships of the sexual kind. It follows a weekend get-together for a group of old timers who meet up in a glorious colonial country house where they end up judging each other with drastic consequences. THE INTERVENTION never really leaves the drawing board, despite some moments of insight: navel-gazing, self-analysis – call it what you will – it’s always a mistake to look at relationships from the outside in – as this group of unappealing characters soon find out but not always to their detriment. Does DuVall really think she’s being edgy or clever with her sexual shenanigans in the 21st century? Judging by THE INTERVENTION the answer is would appear to be ‘yes’.

The group of late thirty somethings is lead by DuVall herself who invites everyone to her Ralph Lauren-style Savannah estate where her unsmiling sister Ruby (Cobie Smulders) and bed-dodger husband Peter (Vincent Piazza) are encouraged – in a bizarre showdown – to seek a divorce. The passive aggressive initiator of this ‘group’ decision is Annie (Melanie Lynskey) who is having problems with her putative marriage to non-person Matt (Jason Ritter). Widower Jack (Ben Schwartz) who is dating 22 year-old Lola (Alia Shawkat), are also the target of much bitchiness but Lola turns out to be the saving grace.

From the get-go this premise is a non-starter but easy enough on the eye – the interiors and countryside providing most of the interest – along with mouthwatering food-porn scenes and lashings of ice cold liquor. Drunken accusations fly amid bouts of charades whereafter the couples retire for scenes of a sexual nature (why oh why do filmmakers dwell on endless boring sex scenes in a comedy?).

The upshot here is a mundane and moderately amusing drama where unattractive characters reveal nothing of consequence. MT

SUNDANCE LONDON | FULL PROGRAMME HERE

Other People (2016)

Writer/Director: Chris Kelly

Cast: Molly Shannon, Jesse Plemons, Bradley Whitford, June Squibb, Paul Dooley

90min | Comedy Drama | US

Molly Shannon and Jesse Plemons are the standouts in this comic but often uneven portrait of a family united by terminal illness. Chris Kelly’s directorial debut lays its cards on the table early on as Plemons’ gay writer David returns from New York to be with his mother in her final months in Sacramento, California. Undergoing chemo naturally brings out the worst physically and mentally for Joanne who is happily married to Norman (Bradley Whitford) a father who perversely refuses to accept his son’s sexuality. Sometimes the nature of Shannon’s suffering verges on embarrassing moments that fail to be funny and would be better off left in the dark. But Plemons and Shannon hold the comedy together as do her often hilarious parents played by June Squibb and Paul Dooley. The other characters are merely window-dressing in this often overfamiliar treatment of terminal illness, that follows in the footsteps of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl in an approach that often lacks dignity.

The opening scene is vaguely comic in describing other peoples’ crass and often inappropriate handling of death and dread disease but whether this is a subject for comic treatment is debatable. From that momen the film flashes back to the previous year marking the bittersweet homecoming of 29 year old David who is suffering a break-up and a rejection in his writing career. Joanne decides to give up chemo after some fairly explicit scenes of trauma and the two become closer in their shared tragedy. At one point there is a crude dance scene from a gay kid (J J Totah from Glee) who is totally at home with his sexuality as compared to David who is painfully shy and withdrawn about his.

Kelly’s well-crafted debut is based on his own experiences and manages some moments of authernticity and poignance amid the horror of bodily meltdown that will resonate with anyone who has experienced a life-changing condition. MT

SUNDANCE LONDON | PROGRAMME HERE

Goat (2016)

Director: Andrew Neel Writers: David Gordon Green et al

Cast: Virginia Gardner, Nick Jonas, Ben Schnetzer, Danny Flaherty, Jake Pickering, Austin Lyon

96min | US | DRAMA

US director Andrew Neel’s men only testosterone-fuelled fraternity tale is, as you’d expect, long on bolshy male-bonding and short on characterisation. Rather more in the mould of The Riot Club than 22 Jump Street, it follows teenager Brad (Ben Schetzer) on the first year at Cincinnati’s Brookman College after a vicious mugging has left him under par and psychologically scarred during the summer vacation. Although his elder brother Brett (Nick Jonas) is there to watch over him this proves to be offer consolation once he arrives in the macho environment where he undergoes a violent initiation routine of hazing.

This film offers a trenchant and unflinching look at all-male environments where uncotrolled aggression and bullying go unchecked while posing as brotherhood and eventually reach outlandish proportions and tragic consequences. Although Neel makes us feel the blunt force of this relentless brutality he gives us little in the way of backstory or textural context to make us care about any of the individuals cooped up in a macho web of tribal warfare, based on Brad Land’s 2004 memoirs and scripted by David Gordon Green.

Ben Schnetzer gives a resonating performance as the young man determined not to let his masculinity crumble in the force of circumstances; his whole college persona and social life and seems to hang on a successful outcome in the initiation war. For many GOAT may prove almost unwatchable at times but Neel keeps the tension taut and the undertone lyrical with a few Latin phrases and occasional moments of introspection amid the stark realism and Ethan Palmer’s handheld camerawork in an around the Ohio countryside. Arjan Miranda’s atmospheric score punctuates the action in an arresting indie drama. MT

SUNDANCE LONDON | FULL PROGRAMME

Rams | Hrutar | Home Ent release

Writer\Director: Grímur Hákonarson

Cast: Sigurour Sigurjonsson, Theodor Juliusson, Charlotte Boving,

90min Iceland Docu-Drama

The startling minimalist splendour of Iceland is the setting for this dour but touching tale exploring how blood is thicker than water in a remote farming community where the largely male inhabitants strive for self-sufficiency. Summerland director Grimur Hakonarson’s RAMS has echoes of the recent Of Horses And Men and Village at the End of the World. Two estranged but neighbouring brothers, Gummi and Kiddi, each own a flock of sheep but have not spoken for nearly forty years. Gummi is a reserved but decent man who prides himself in his animal husbandry and expert care of his flock on the snowy foothills of central Iceland. Occasionally, his brother takes a drunken pot shot at his farmhouse, particularly during the annual competition where their prize rams compete for a trophy.

Hakonarson brings his extensive documentary experience to this windswept story that pictures these bearded and weatherbeaten old men toughing in out in the hostile terrain and their hand-knitted, fairisle jumpers. Clinging to past traditions with his beloved family of sheep and faithful shepherd dog, Somi (Panda); Gummi proudly eats his Christmas dinner alone in candlelight with Christian hymns playing softly in the background. But his brother becomes a liability when his winning ram is found to be suffering from ‘Scrapie’, a dread disease that spreads like the plague and requires the slaughtering all the local flocks. Whilst compensation is due from the authorities, this is the last straw from many of the islanders, so Gummi decides to take matters into his own hands to secure his livelihood.

Despite its sombre tone and windswept landscapes, RAMS is full of wry humour especially in the scene where Gummi scoops Kiddi’s drunken body out of the snow and drops him from a fork lift truck outside Casualty at the local hospital. Sigurjonsson gives a heartfelt performance as Gummi, and Atli Orvarsson’s muted accordion score adds a touch of local charm to this melancholy but heart-warming story of brotherly conflict in a community struggling for survival. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 13 -24 May 2015 | UN CERTAIN REGARD | GOLDEN TOWER WINNER AT PALIC FESTIVAL | GOLDEN EYE WINNER AT ZURICH

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Holding the Man (2015)

Director: Neil Armfield Script: Tommy Murphy Autobiography: Timothy Conigrave

Cast: Geoffrey Rush, Ryan Corr, Craig Scott, Anthony LaPaglia, Guy Pearce, Kerry Fox, Camilla Ah Kin

127min | Drama | Australia 2015,

Neil Armfield (Candy) screen adaptation of Tommy Murphy’s script, based on a true story of forbidden gay love in the ’70s and ’80s Australia plays out like a heightened melodrama in tonal oddity HOLDING THE MAN.

In Melbourne 1976, at the prestigious Xavier Catholic College, Tim Conigrave (Corr) falls for his classmate, the Australian Football player John Caleo (Scott). The sixteen year-old boys try to hide their mutual passion, but a love letter mistakenly falls into the hands of the teachers exposing their strictly illicit liaison in a society whose penchant was for tradition and masculinity. Where Tim’s parents Mary (Fox) and Dick (Pearce) simply try to deny their son’s wrongdoing; John’s father Bob (LaPaglia) hits the roof, refusing to let the relationship develop. Tim is meanwhile keen to develop his acting skills and is having difficulty expressing the sadness required for his part as Romeo. His drama teacher gives him a hard time over this: “You lost your fiancée, not your bus pass”. Tim later moves to Sydney to attend Drama School, where his teacher (a masterful Geoffrey Rush) again criticizes his performance, this time in his performance as a monkey: “There is not much work for effeminate monkeys”. John meanwhile is training to become a chiropractor but gradually the relationship breaks down – Tim enjoying the gay life of the capital. A reconciliation leads to tragic news for both men as the drama morphs into ultra realism, before a rather poetic ending on the Italian island of Lipari.

The main drawback of Holding the Man (a term from Australian Rules Football) is the poorly-drawn characterisation of this rather vacuous pair of men: they seem to lack any kind of moral fibre lack, particularly John, who is portrayed as a fluffy, simpering pushover, just waiting for Tim to tell him what to do – and without him, he seems to have no life on his own. John at least has a selfish streak, but not much more. This is billed as being a great, passionate love story, but the characters are so devoid of any real traits, that their homosexuality seems to be their only exceptional quality – hardly the impact Conigrave would have wished for when penning his memoir. The rather the top ‘ 70s aesthetics and cliché ridden images of DoP Germain McMicking give the film a strange retro feel, without adding anything substantial. And while the leads Corr and Scott are mostly convincing despite their poor material, their portrayal of 16 year old boys suffers from a rather too obvious age gap. Overall, HOLDING THE MAN is a missed opportunity to give voice to what clearly may have been a meaningful experience in challenging times, making it difficult for the audience to invest emotionally or feel sympathy for their struggle. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE AT ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 3 JUNE 2016

Gilda (1946) | Criterion Collection UK

Dir.: Charles Vidor | Cast: Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, George Macready |USA 1946 | 109 min.

Two of Hollywood’s most iconic films, both directed by Hungarians, share a rather haphazard way of shooting: Michael Curtiz’ scriptwriters for Casablanca, Philip and Julius Epstein and Howard Koch, waited every day for a new development during WWII, trying to get the newest changes on the front into their script; while producer/ scriptwriter Virginia von Upp delivered the script for Vidor’s GILDA (based on a short story by E.A. Ellington) at the rate of one or two pages at a time – usually on the day of shooting.

Gambler Johnny Farrell (Ford) is saved by casino owner Ballin Mundson (Macready) after the losers in his last card game try to rob him of his winnings. Mundson employs Farrell as his assistant while he is away working as frontman for a Nazi organisation in South America. Mundson, a misogynist like Farrell himself, returns with a bride in the shape of Gilda (Hayworth). Farrell seems to be employed to look after Gilda, making sure his boss’s prize possession doesn’t meet other men – while falling for her himself. After Mundson fakes his own death, Farrell and Gilda marry but he wants his new wife, to remain faithful to her first husband. When Mundson, very much alive, learns about the marriage, he wants revenge – but a lavatory attendant kills him with his own stiletto.

Before shooting started on September 7th 1945, the marriage of Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles was very much on the rocks, and an announcement was made that the couple was divorcing – even though there was a late reconciliation (for the time being). Columbia boss Harry Cohen was very keen in following the Hayes Codes to the point that the film did not make any sense (Gilda turned out to be a lady and not the tramp). He fostered a romance between Hayworth and Glenn Ford for the newspapers. Ford and Hayworth led him a merry dance, staying on the studio long after shooting: the money conscious Cohen asked them to leave: “I can’t keep the studio open all night. It costs money. Now, get the hell out of here and don’t forget to shut off the lights when you leave.” The pair had another drink on Harry.

GILDA is full of sexual innuendos: when Gilda and Johnny are dancing she says: “I have to keep dancing, Johnny, as long as I have my arms about you, or else I might forget to dance. Push my hat back, Johnny’”. The people in the Hayes Censorship office had obviously never heard that the star’s hair is used as a sexual metaphor. Neither did they object to Hayworth (or better Anita Ellis) singing “Puut the blame on Mame”, stripping off her long gloves, and asking the audience to help her with her striptease: “I’m not so good with zippers”. GILDA changed Hayworth’s image for good: she was no longer the good girl from the musicals but one of the new breed, the deadly femme fatale of the film noir, in the footsteps of Mary Astor (The Maltese Falcon), Clare Trevor (Farewell my Lovely), Barbara Stanwyck (Double Indemnity) and Lana Turner (The Postman Always Rings Twice).

Glenn Ford was not very fond of the director: “Mr. Vidor was a very strict, demanding director who had a streak of sadistic, Hungarian love-hate understanding, and he sort of nurtured that aspect. His instructions, before we did a scene or were thinking of doing it, were pretty incredible – even in today’s market. I can’t repeat the things he used to tell us to think about. They are marvellous images to hold.”

Apart from Hayworth, Polish born DoP Rudolph Mate (To Be or Not to Be), was the other stars of Gilda. The black and white images literally glitter when the camera trails on Hayworth: the light plays with her, treating her like a dark, dangerous creature illuminated by star light. Her floating presence alone is the total subversion of the Hayes Code. AS

OUT ON 30TH JUNE 2016 COURTESY OF THE CRITERION COLLECTION UK

Gray Matters (2014)

Dir.: Marco Orsini; Documentary; Ireland/Monaco/USA/France/Germany/UK, 76 min.

Director/Co-writer Marco Orsini (The Reluctant Traveler) portrays the life of the iconic Irish designer and architect Eileen Gray (1878-1976) in this compact, non-frills documentary which would have pleased the artist who was well known for her down-to-earth approach, but always ahead of her times – and often her male competitors.

Born in the Irish town of Enniscortly, the youngest of five siblings of a wealthy and aristocratic family, Eileen went to the Slade School of Fine Arts in 1898, a very brave step, particularly for a woman of her background. But her social class did not affect how she developed into a radical and passionate bi-sexual lover.

Orsini sketches out how in 1900 Gray emigrated to Paris, where she stayed for the rest of her life, returning during the first World War and s short break to look after her mother. After studying at the Academie Julian, and the more formal Academie Colarossi, Gray met the Japanese lacquer artist Seizo Sugawara and became engaged in this art form. Her first exhibition in Paris in 1913 was a great success. After work on the now famous Bibendium chair (1917-21) Eileen had a long affair with the singer Marie-Louise Damia amongst other female artists, but she fell in love with the Rumanian architect Jean Badovici, a friend of Le Corbusier.

In 1924 the couple started work on Eileen’s first architectural project, the Villa E 1027 in Cap-Martin, near Monaco. The villa and the furniture were later (one of many) reasons for the couple to split up, when in 1938 Badovici, in whose name the villa was registered, allowed his friend Le Corbusier to paint the walls with some occasionally explicit, murals. This way, E 1027 became wrongly associated with Le Corbusier, who somehow must have felt jealous of Eileen’s achievement. He later bought a property next door, and, in an act of poetic justice, finally drowned in August 1965 swimming in front of the house he desired so much. But the irony goes further, Le Corbusier saved the villa’s furniture, and because, it was – wrongly – assumed, to be his building, the State looked after it. It should be said that Gray and Le Corbusier corresponded well into the late 50s and in 1970, Gray opined how, “he never got enough praise for his work.” In the late 1930s Eileen Gray started work on her second home, Tempe à Pailla, in Menton. She supervised the buildings work and was very innovative with the furniture: it was foldable to save space. At the age 78 she led the construction of her summerhouse near Saint Tropez. Eileen Gray worked until her death in her apartment in the Rue Bonaparte in Paris.

Today, her classic furniture designs are mass produced and originals, like the Dragon Chair (1917-19), auctioned off for 19m £. Luckily she lived long enough to be recognised as one of the greatest avant-garde artists of her time, after being written out art history for over twenty years. Orsini employs the talking heads of the art world paying tribute to Gray, but centres his documentary on her houses in the South of France. This way he stays true to the artist: her work was not so much art, but creating ‘designs for living’ from any given material. She would have liked Orsini’s workmanlike approach, not a hagiography, but the portrait of the artist at work. As a minimalist, she never cared for dogmas or categories, but she was a modernist in her personal and artist life. Gray Matters, in its erudite understatement, does her fully justice. AS

IN SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 27 MAY 2016

Sundance London 2016

In June this year Robert Redford brings a selection of American independent narrative and documentary films that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah in January this year. Although the winners have been picked up for distribution and will appear in the coming year, this should be a worthwhile film festival – best of all – it comes right to your doorstep in Central London.

THE JT LEROY STORY (Director / screenwriter: Jeff Feuerzeig) –The definitive look inside the mysterious case of 16-year-old literary sensation JT LeRoy – a creature so perfect for his time that if he didn’t exist, someone would have had to invent him. Perhaps someone did? The strangest story about story ever told. (Documentary)

THE GREASY STRANGLER | International premiere

The Greasy Strangler (Director: Jim Hosking) – When Big Ronnie and his son Brayden meet lone female tourist Janet on Big Ronnie’s Disco Walking Tour—the best and only disco walking tour in the city—a fight for Janet’s heart erupts between father and son, and the infamous Greasy Strangler is unleashed.
Principal Cast: Michael St. Michaels, Sky Elobar, Elizabeth De Razzo, Gil Gex, Jesse Keen, Joe David Walters

GOAT – International premiere
Goat (Director: Andrew Neel) – Reeling from a terrifying assault, a 19-yearold boy pledges his brother’s fraternity in an attempt to prove his manhood. What happens there, in the name of “brotherhood,” tests both the boys and their relationship in brutal ways.
Principal Cast: Nick Jonas, Ben Schnetzer, Virginia Gardner, Danny Flaherty, Austin Lyon

INDIGNATION – UK premiere
Indignation (Director / screenwriter: James Schamus) – It’s 1951, and among the new arrivals at Winesburg College in Ohio are the son of a kosher butcher from New Jersey and the beautiful, brilliant daughter of a prominent alum. For a brief moment, their lives converge in this emotionally soaring film based on the novel by Philip Roth.
Principal Cast: Logan Lerman, Sarah Gadon, Tracy Letts, Linda Emond, Danny Burstein, Ben Rosenfield

INTERVENTION | UK premiere

The Intervention (Director / screenwriter: Clea DuVall) – A weekend getaway for four couples takes a sharp turn when one of the couples discovers the entire trip was orchestrated to host an intervention on their marriage.
Principal Cast: Melanie Lynskey, Cobie Smulders, Alia Shawkat, Clea DuVall, Natasha Lyonne, Ben Schwartz

Winner of the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Individual Performance (Melanie Lynskey)

LIFE ANIMATED \ International premiere

Life, Animated (Director / screenwriter: Roger Ross Williams) – Owen Suskind, an autistic boy who could not speak for years, slowly emerged from his isolation by immersing himself in Disney animated movies. Using these films as a roadmap, he reconnects with his loving family and the wider world in this emotional coming-of-age story. (Documentary)

Winner of the Directing Award: U.S. Documentary

MORRIS FROM AMERICA | UK premiere

Morris from America (Director / screenwriter: Chad Hartigan) – Thirteen-year-old Morris, a hip-hop loving American, moves to Heidelberg, Germany, with his father. In this completely foreign land, he falls in love with a local girl, befriends his German tutor-turned- confidant, and attempts to navigate the unique trials and tribulations of adolescence.
Principal Cast: Markees Christmas, Craig Robinson, Carla Juri, Lina Keller, Jakub Gierszał, Levin Henning

Won: Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award: U.S. Dramatic; U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Individual Performance (Craig Robinson)

OTHER PEOPLE | UK premiere

Other People (Director / screenwriter: Chris Kelly) – A struggling comedy writer, fresh from breaking up with his boyfriend, moves to Sacramento to help his sick mother. Living with his conservative father and younger sisters, David feels like a stranger in his childhood home. As his mother worsens, he tries to convince everyone (including himself) he’s “doing okay.”
Principal Cast: Jesse Plemons, Molly Shannon, Bradley Whitford, Maude Apatow, Zach Woods, June Squibb

TALLULAH | International premiere

Tallulah (Director / screenwriter: Sian Heder) – A rootless young woman takes a toddler from a wealthy, negligent mother and passes the baby off as her own in an effort to protect her. This decision connects and transforms the lives of three very different women.
Principal Cast: Ellen Page, Allison Janney, Tammy Blanchard, Evan Jonigkeit, Uzo Aduba

WEINER | International premiere TBC

Weiner (Directors / screenwriters: Josh Kriegman, Elyse Steinberg) – With unrestricted access to Anthony Weiner’s New York City mayoral campaign, this film reveals the human story behind the scenes of a high-profile political scandal as it unfolds, and it offers an unfiltered look at how much today’s politics are driven by an appetite for spectacle. (Documentary)

Winner of the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary

WEINER-DOG | European premiere

Wiener-Dog (Director / screenwriter: Todd Solondz) – This film tells several stories featuring people who find their life inspired or changed by one particular dachshund, who seems to be spreading comfort and joy.
Principal Cast: Greta Gerwig, Kieran Culkin, Danny DeVito, Ellen Burstyn, Julie Delpy, Zosia Mamet

SUNDANCE LONDON 2 – 5 JUNE AT PICTUREHOUSE CENTRAL

The Price of Desire (2015)

Director: Mary McGuckian

Cast: Orla Brady, Francesco Scianna, Vincent Perez, Alanis Morisette, Adrianna Randall

Drama | France | 104 min.

Writer/director Mary McGuckian (Best) has done the avant-gardist designer and architect Eileen Gray (1878-1976), no favours as the main focus of her feature bio-pic The Price of Desire: a turgidly slow and Kitsch affair, it also manages to be a pretentious melodrama of the worst kind, colliding frontally with Gray’s cool artistic output and her self determined personal life.

Born into an aristocratic family in Enniscortly, Ireland, Eileen Gray attended the Slade School of Fine Arts, before moving to Paris and the South of France, where she spent the last 70 years of her life. Famous for her work with lacquer, which was used in Chinese and Japanese art, she also designed the Bibendum chair between 1917 and 1921.

McGuckian seems not to care much for Gray’s artistic output, but quickly dives into her relationship with the singer Marie-Louise Damia (Morisette); sex in slow motion is all we see of the couple. After meeting the Rumanian architect Jean Badovici (Scianna), Gray then begins a torrid relationship with the womaniser – again, his sexual escapades with Charlotte Perriand (Randall) are documented in great detail. Gray’s clashes with Le Corbursier (Perez) a friend of Badovici, who “defiles” Gray’s architectural masterpiece the Villa E 1027 in Cap-Martin near Monaco with his nudist murals, takes up the latter part of The Price of Desire, Perez’ Le Corbusier emerging the pantomime villain. Instead of attacking the architect for his ties with the Fascists during the German occupation, or his support for eugenics, the filmmaker again personalizes the professional conflict between Gray and Le Corbusier. A dreadful deathbed scene with Badovici could not have been worse.

The scenes shot by DoP Stefan von Bjorn in the renovated Villa E 1o27 are the highlight – at least we see, in detail, Gray’s – then revolutionary – approach, to make the border between furniture and architecture indistinct. The rest are of the images are on a par with the narrative: grandstanding, pompous and utterly unimaginative. Just the opposite of what Eileen Gray stood for. AS

ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 27 MAY 2016

Bo66y (2016)

Marking the 50th anniversary of England’s victory in the World Cup, this energetic tribute to East End footballer Bobby Moore (1941-1993) explores with appealing fervour the life of a young man from Barking who joined West Ham United in 1956 going on to become one of the greatest defenders of all time and a national icon after leading England to success in the 1966 international tournament, when Pele left the field. The film is co-produced by West Ham fan and family friend Matt Lorenzo and directed with great passion and verve by Ron Scalpello

Scalpello adopts a talking heads approach as fellow players recall their fond memories of Moore’s integrity as a leader and skill as a player. Known as “a Prince” among men, Robert Frederick Chelsea Moore commanded respect through his calm presence in a team of strong players who were a “tough bunch of boys”. His first wife reminisces about their first date – when she asked the ‘rather square’ young man round for tea with her mother – and the subsequent courtship which lead to marriage after a year. Far from being a macho man, she describes the sporting hero as romantic and vulnerable, but he was also practical: “when I had blond hair he used to do my roots – he was like a mate”.

His diagnosis of testicular cancer in 1964 (described as a groin injury in the press) left him humiliated and deflated. But despite training harder than anybody on the squad, Moore also wanted to have a life outside football. Rebecca Moore Hobbis describes her special bond with her father – due to his insomnia – he looked after her during the small hours in the first months after her birth and the two became close.

Old fellow footballers such as Sir Geoff Hurst, Harry Redknapp, George Cohen, Norman Hunter and Martin Peters speak with pride and fondness about their old pal and captain and touch upon how football became a popular career for them and the opiate of the masses due to the release it offered during the war and post war autherity. A dazzling array of archive material brings this colourful documentary to life and a rousing score from Benjamin Wallfisch (12 Years a Slave) reflects the highs and the lows of his career and personal life MT

BO66Y – the story of football legend Bobby Moore – is coming to UK cinemas on 27 May 2016 and will be soon available on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital Download

The Daughter | (2015)

Dir.: Simon Stone; Cast: Geoffrey Rush, Ewen Leslie, Miranda Otto, Odessa Young, Sam Neill, Anna Torv, Paul Schneider; Australia 2015, 96 min.

Established Australian actor and theatre director Simon Stone has assembled a talented cast for his directorial debut based on Ibsen’s play The Wild Duck but his cliche-ridden script derails this predicable family drama.

In a small logging town in Australia, the feudal reign of Henry Neilson (Rush) is drawing to an end with the sale of his timber company, the mainstay of the community for many years. Apart from offering employment, Neilson s to have cut a swathe through the womenfolk of the small town and has even traded up his wife for a younger ‘model’ in Anna (Torv). Their upcoming nuptials coincide with mass redundancies hitting the local work force and their families. Neilson’s son Christian (Schneider), is also a nasty piece of work who returns reluctantly from the USA to join the celebrations but can’t forgive his father for his mother’s suicide. Blue colour worker Oliver Finch is disgruntled by rumours that Neilson also bedded his wife Charlotte, another long term employee, and possibly even sired their daughter Hedvig, a rumour shamelessly spread by the spiteful Christian.

Geoffrey Rush and Sam Neil carry the film with with their usual sterling efforts but the problem here is a lack of inventiveness and style in a narrative that leaves nothing to the imagination: all is revealed by wise old Grandfather Walter. DOP Andrew Commis’ images are bland, one-to-one naturalism underlining the anaemic impact of the film. And Mark Bradshaw’s score fails to lift this mundane drama out of the outback. AS

REVIEWED AT VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | now ON GENERAL RELEASE

Streetdance Family (2016)

Director: Debbie Shuter, Adam Tysoe

87min | Documentary | Germany/Italy.

When fourteen year old Ethan, the son of filmmakers Debbie Shuter and Adam Tysoe, joined the ‘Entity Allstars’, an Under-16 Street Dance crew of twenty Hip-Hop dancers in Barking, his parents decided to film the journey without realising that it would take them from their home in Barking via Luton and Rimini (Italy) to Bochum (Germany). Here in September 2014 they were the first British team to take on the World Champions of the IDO (International Dance Organisation) in the Junior Streetdance category.

The directors called this a “passion project” – and quite rightly so. The young dancers, their parents, the choreographer, the juries and even the IDO president of the British section all infuse Streetdance Family with a spirited emotional impact on a level with the competition itself. To start with, Tashan Muir, a big burly man and the crew’s dance coach, saw himself “like a re-incarnation of Noah”. Helped on by Pater Adjaye, the religious undercurrent was very clear, and Muir certainly had all the qualities of a religious leader. Unfortunately, some of the dancers’ parents could not always keep their emotions under control, and made life for their children difficult. Petty quarrels erupted, some parents being not very good role models when it came to conflict resolution. It led to one of the main dancers missing the Bochum finals. To make matters more difficult Derek Povey, the President of the British Section of IDO, walked around the competition places, seemingly unhelpful to the course of Entity. Still, Muir held the group together and when they reached the final of the competition, he instilled an “us-against-the-world” underdog feeling in his troupe.

Being his own cinematographer helped Tysoe to capture the spontaneity and often also the chaos of the events. The rollercoaster ride is pure cinema-verite, recalling Jean Rouch documentaries about tribal rituals: with Entity coach Muir acting as the chieftain, putting his dancers into a trance-like attitude where they believed they could overcome all obstacles. The filmmakers tried not to be judgemental when it came to parental misbehaviour – resulting in early cuts when tempers flew. Overall, Streetdance Family retains a gritty indie feel, either by accident or design, and in the process achieves a hyper-realistic intensity, and an affectionate tenderness for the young dancers. AS

OUT NATIONWIDE FROM FRIDAY 27 May 2016

The Danish Girl (2015) | Home ent release

Director: Tom Hooper

Cast: Eddie Redmayne, Alicia Vikander, Amber Heard, Matthias Schoenaerts, Sebastian Koch

120min Drama Biopic

Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech) has filmed David Ebershoff’s novel of the same name about the life of the transgender pioneer and Danish landscape painter Lilli Elbe (aka Einar Wegener) with his usual over-emotive approach, which suits this ménage-à-trois of two highly-strung people much more than his portrait of King George V.

Gerda (Vikander) and Einar Wegener (Redmayne) are two painters enjoying their unconventional bohemian lifestyle in early 1920s Copenhagen. Einar seems to be more successful than his wife; his impressionist landscapes are in demand unlike Gerda’s portraits, and the pair are desperate to start a family. This, and much else, will change when Gerda starts painting her husband in stockings, firstly as a willing model so she can finish a portrait and then, when he is turned on by wearing female clothing after attending a party. Whilst Gerda gains reputation, Einar sheds his identity only too willingly. He obviously has repressed his wish of becoming a woman, but now insists on being called Lilli by his wife, who although sexually happy to dominate, is nevertheless unhappy about losing her male husband. Visits to the medical profession end in disaster and finally, the couple settle in Paris, where Hans (Schoenaerts), a friend from Lilli’s schooldays in the provincial Vejle, is working as an art dealer. Hans, who had kissed Einar innocently as a boy (only to be chased away by the enraged father), is unable to help Lilli but falls in love with Gerda, who has to terms with her husband’s cross-dressing and is determined to help Lilli realise his dreams, such is her unconditional love for him. After meeting Dr. Warnekros (Koch), a doctor from Dresden, Lilli has an operation to remover her male genitals. After returning to Copenhagen with Gerda, she feels happy and relieved at finding becoming herself but this is not the end of the story.

Lilli Elbe’s diary formed the backbone of Eberhoff’s novel. Hooper and his scriptwriter Lucinda Coxon have focused very much on the strong emotional bond between Gerda and Lilli, which survived their conventional marriage. The rollercoaster, which their life had become after Lilli’s ‘rebirth’, would have unsettled any partner, let alone a woman, who had lost her spouse to another gender identity, and also the opportunity of becoming a mother. But Gerda shows her caring instincts when handling Lilli in her ‘perpetual crisis’. She might have become irate at times, but Lilli,’s happiness was always paramount for Gerda, and appreciated by Lilli. In a way, Gerda was the midwife, who delivered Lilli.

Redmayne gives another Oscar-worthy performance as Einar|Lillii transforming from a man to a woman in seemless and convincing style and Vikander is also to be praised for her strikingly feminine yet powerful turn as Gerda. Schoenaerts takes on another tricky role as a masculine man who is unable to really exert any influence over Gerda or Einar|Lilli, such is the strength of their completeness as a couple. Sadly he has very little scope in this secondary role.

Lilli was very much the pioneer who is surprised to find herself in the wrong body; after all, knowledge about transgender theories were not even found in psychoanalytical circles of the time. Lilli was always fighting for the next step, against an environment, which was not ready for any of this. Working as a shop assistant in Copenhagen, enjoying the company of her same-gendered colleges, was perhaps the highlight of her female life. The images of DOP Danny Cohen do the life story of two painters admirable justice with ravishingly painterly sets and glorious landscapes. Costume design is impeccable as is the Art Nouveau set design from Eve Stewart. Alexandre Desplat’s evocative score compliments this gorgeous period piece that explores the heartbreaking emotional adventure of a couple who overcame all biological borders, proving that sexuality can easily be a moveable feast, when mutual attraction and real love is present. AS

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE | REVIEWED AT THE VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2015

Silent Storm (2014) |

Director/Writer: Corinna McFarlane

Cast: Andrea Riseborough, Damian Lewis, Ross Anderson

98min UK Drama

Damian Lewis is the driving force in Corinna McFarlane’s debut drama exquisitely set on a picturesque Scottish island during the 1930s. With a second world war looming, the local community is leaving the island to move to the mainland and the delights of Glasgow’s Willow tearooms amongst others. Hardly surprising, also, when their much revered pastor is a raving lunatic with unscrupulous Victorian morals and a mercurial temper to boot. Preaching in the local ‘kirk’ with his jet black robes and flaring eyes, Lewis evokes a devilish Dracula figure with the best Scottish accent since Dr Snoddy hit the airwaves in Dr Finlay’s casebook. Clearly, he is a force to be reckoned with and another example of religious fervour masking more deep-seated mental issues. The film opens with his wife, Aislin (Andrea Riseborough) writhing in childbirth: the consequent death of this child, his first born, further erodes his ability to engage with parishioners in a sympathetic and supportive way: his confessional style is one of ‘fire and brimstone’ rather than ‘care in the community’. As a husband, Balor is harsh, truculent and unloving.

In contrast Riseborough’s Aislin is gentleness personified, but with no child or work to keep her occupied she feels rather underwritten as the Vicar’s wife. Until, that is, the arrival of a young delinquent (Ross Anderson) who is delivered to their care and guidance from a local remand home. From the moment he sets foot in the remote Vicarage on the edge of the cliffs, Aislin has one thing on her mind. Andrea Risborough brings a delicate subtlety to her performance and, although she sounds more French than Scottish in some of the scenes, her soft submissiveness is tempered with a new hope radiating and a luminous serenity that transform her completely. Sadly, Ross Anderson makes for neither a believable rogue nor a simmering love interest as the bad boy looking for redemption. Clearly a deep and thoughtful thinker who has suffered a misguided past and enjoys literature; with his tousled curls and soft features, he is more cherubic that Byronic. For this love triangle to really succeed dramatically, the part clearly needed a brooding Colin Farrell type who could add ballast to Damian Lewis’ pugnacious fury as Balor, but the budget had been spent on the others. When Balor leaves for the mainland with a mission to transfer the kirch, the young pair grow closer, as Aislin feels his supportive presence. They are pictured frolicking in the local woods in an ill-advised vignette that is neither convincing nor well-staged with garishly bright lensing making the forest glow a sickly incandescent green. However, Aislin and the lad are clearly enjoying themselves and there is hell to pay in a predictable denouement when Balor finally hits the croft on his return.

Silent Storm is a visually ravishing affair that makes wonderful use of its lush island setting with Ed Rutherford’s superb camerawork. It works best dramatically in the scenes where Damian Lewis’s Balor injects his ebullient, masculine presence: strutting around the island as the bitter and frustrated priest, he is vehemence personified and makes this otherwise tepid story worthy of a watch. MT

SILENT STORM HAS ITS WORLD PREMIER SCREENING DURING THE LONDON FILM FESTIVAL | NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE

Ma’ Rosa (2016) | Cannes Film Festival 2016 | In Competition

Director/Writer: Brillante Mendoza

Cast: Jaclyn Jones, Julio Diaz | 110min | Drama | Philippines

The Filipino director Brillante Mendoza returns to the social unease of midtown Manila that was so flagrantly protrayed in his 2009 drama Kinatay as a world of police corruption, dissociative violence and hopelessness where ordinary people labour under the authority of the powers that be. Ma’Rosa (Jaclyn Jones) is a shopkeeper and mother of four with her husband Nestor (Julio Diaz) who also runs a sideline in drugs to make ends meet – although they hardly ever do – in this stark slice of social realism told in the style of a docu-drama.

Eventually the police arrive and arrest the couple demanding to know their substance supplier and to pay a heavy fine or go to prison as drug traffickers. Ma’Rosa is forced to go back to the drawing board and her kids out on the street to beg, steal or borrow the money to keep the voracious cops at bay. This is a desperate drama that plays out as a gritty study of resourcefulness and instinct for survival in the crowded streets of the capital as the kids come up with demoralising ways to save their parents with the knowledge that their only future is just more of the same.

Ma’Rosa is a lucid and well-crafted piece of cinema that nevertheless fails to engage with the hearts and minds of its characters, keeping us alienated but in no doubt as to their plight at the end of the day. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 11-22 MAY 2016 | IN COMPETITION

Julieta (2016)

Writer| Director: Pedro Almodovar Stories: Alice Munro

Cast: Emma Suarez, Adrian Ugarte, Dario Grandinetti, Rossy de Palma

110min | Drama | Spain

JULIETA, which screens at the 69th Cannes Film Festival, is Almodovar’s fifth Palme D’Or hopeful since he started wooing the coveted trophy back in 1999 with All about My Mother; winning Best Director. Volver (2006) went on to garner Best Script and Best Actress; in 2009 Broken Embraces came away empty-handed from the competition;, in 2011 The Skin I Live In bagged him the Youth Award and his festival opener in 2004 was Bad Education.

His latest, and certainly his most ambitious film to date, is a peripatetic melodrama loosely based on three tales by Canadian Nobel prize winner Alice Munro about motherhood and loss suffered by its central character Julieta played by Adriana Ugarte and Emma Suarez – in youth and in middle age respectively. Men are merely sidekicks in this sorrowlful saga that pulls out all the stops in its Palme D’Or quest: referencing Almodovar’s highbrow cultural credentials : a sweeping orchestral score from Alberto Iglesias that vigorously drives the narrative forward, capable performances from an all-Spanish cast embracing stars and newcomers; atmospheric and unusual Spanish locations, tributes to Hitchcock and Patricia Highsmith and even classic works of art from the Prado, amongst other flourishes. But the watchword here is melodrama: after the frivolity of I’m So Excited, JULIETA plays out like a Greek tragedy: its tortured heroine teaches Greek language and culture, falls spectacularly in love, gives birth to a cherished daughter and goes on to suffer tragic loss. But the often ambiguous narrative stumbles over plotholes and implausibilities, making so many demands on its audience that by the end one feels exhausted, overwhelmed and even perplexed. With the best of intentions, Almodovar has thrown all his tricks into the mix and come up with a meaty but passionless potboiler. That’s not to say JULIETA is a flop, but it feels rushed and urgent – despite its generous running time – rather than well-paced and satisfying. And Julieta is the only fleshed out character in a cast that is, for the most part, underwritten and one-dimensional, merely existing to serve its heroine.

The film takes the form of a story within a story that opens in contempo Madrid. Julieta is in her fifties and planning a move to Portugal with her partner Lorenzo, when a chance encounter with an old friend brings her surprise news of a recent meeting with her daughter Antia and her three children, whom she bumped into during the holidays. Only afterwards does it emerge that her only Antia, her only daughter, is no longer a part of Julieta’s life, having disappeared in her late teens. But once she discovers that Antia is still alive and aware that she herself lives in Madrid, Julieta is devastated. Canclling her plans to move to Portugal with Lorenzo (Dario Grandinetti from Talk to Her), she moves back into the old flat where she raised Antia, in Madrid’s Barrio Gotico.

Closeted in Antia’s childhood home, she spills out her emotions in a desperate letter to her daughter, as the film’s narrative gradually fragments into flashbacks informing us of the past; the ’80s see a young Julieta with punkish hair and wacky earrings taking a romantic train journey that ends in torrid sex with a tousled-haired married fisherman called Xoan (Daniel Grau). As they make love a wild buck symbolically canters past their carriage in the swirling snow.

Some time later, in another of the film’s extraordinary coincidences, Julieta chances upon Xoan’s Belle Epoch seaside villa in Galicia when he just happens to be at his wife’s funeral. His hostile housekeeper (Rossy de Palma rocking a grey Afro wig) petulantly serves coffee but Xoan’s is overjoyed to welcome Julieta their daughter – cue more torrid sex. Ava (Inma Cuesta), another ex-lover who channels her unrequited love for Xoan into weird neolithic priapic figurines, becomes Antia’s confidante, while the contented couple raise their daughter by the stormy sea in scenes reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Marnie superbly captured in DoP Jean-Claude Larrieu’s luminous visuals.

A sejourn with Julieta’s parents in their country farm provides further family background but only to sadly inform us that her garden gnome-like father (Joaquin Notario) has taken up with a Moroccan peasant girl, while her mother shrivels away in a locked bedroom. Returning to the seaside, more tragedy awaits Julieta amidst heavy weather, echoing one of the film’s various leitmotifs.

Antia’s growing years are variously played by Ariadna Matin, Priscilla Delgado and Blanca Pares, but she never really gains depth as the character who, we are led to believe, has such a momumental impact on her emotionally broken mother. And In the final dénouement, Julieta appears shocked as a reaction to her own shattered ego and narcissistic expectations, rather than as a result of a passionate and intense love for her only daughter. This leaves us feeling underwhelmed and rather irritated with her as on once again, the doting Lorenzo is wheeled into place with a tray of tea and sympathy for the self-pitying Julieta, who clutches on to him for self-serving supoort rather than in a re-awakening of love and passion. Ultimately JULIETA is a film that has been so indulged with cult references, stylistic embellishments and tributes that it often feels unwieldy and hollow overstaying its welcome despite a reasonable running time. That said, its certainly worth a watch for its Hitchcockian overtones. MT

Paterson (2016) |

Writer/Director: Jim Jarmusch

Cast: Adam Driver, Golshifteh Farahani | Drama | US | 118min

Jim Jarmusch’s Palme d’Or Cannes competition entry could be described as ‘cuddly and serene’. PATERSON has Adam Driver as the eponymous New Jersey bus conductor who cherishes pretensions as a poet. The tone is upbeat, the pacing languid in a film that plays out as a meditation on untapped creative potential.

Unremarkably, Paterson lives an ordinary and cosseted existence in a town called Paterson with his pleasant Iranian-American wife, Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), and his daily duties involve walking his English bulldog, Marvin, and taking a leisurely beer at a bar while he shoots the breeze with the locals. Does he write those musings for the London Underground, one may ask? Potentially he might, for he treasures his notebook where he scribbles down lines of poignant poetry (they are, in fact, the work of the 73-year-old Oklahoma-born poet Ron Padgett.) but he quails away from publishing them as, for Paterson, these words are a private diary. Many secret writers often blog away on the internet all day with no conscious realisation that their words could potentially go viral, read by millions, but imagine they are tucking thoughts away in the ‘soi-disant’ anonymity of the web. In some ways Jarmusch has found another way of linking his narrative to contempo audiences through through this cosy tale that is influenced by 1950s pre-counterculture.

Jarmusch pictures Paterson and Laura’s life as idyllic and stress-free. Laura is a homemaker with artistic qualities that involve plastering the interior of their place in geometric patterns.The story follows the course of one week where events are slowly repeated in a pleasant clockwork routine in this simple linear narrative that mimics a well-scanned piece of poetry. A paean to a peaceful existence, this is a film that dwells in the ordinary and in the agreeable symmetry of a life well-lived but one that never pushes the boundaries. And in our rushed and aspirational society there is a great deal to be said for both. MT

PATERSON NOW ON RELEASE AT THE GATE CINEMA AND PICTUREHOUSES

REVIEWED AT CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 11-22 May 2016

Loving (2016) | Cannes Film Festival | Competition 2016

Writer/Director: Jeff Nichols

Cast: Joel Edgerton, Ruth Negga

121min | biopic drama | US

Hot on the heels of his mystery drama Midnight Special Jeff Nichols was back at Cannes Film Festival this year with a superbly crafted biopic of the interacial couple who rocked the headlines in 1950s Virginia for marrying against state laws.

Richard Perry Loving is played by a very white Joel Edgerton (his hair dyed blond) and Mildred Perry by the Irish Ethiopian actress Ruth Negga (Iona) in a classicly told linear narrative where Nichols rapidly skteches out the genesis of their early courtship, Mildred’s pregnancy and their subsequent nuptuals. This is all, of course, against highly illegal and after spending a night in prison Mildred is bailed out by her father.

Nichols adopts a candid sombre approach to his re-telling as the couple are advised by their lawyer to leave the state for 25 years or risk further imprisonment. Images of close family and security are the keynotes in this painterly picture which makes atmospheric use of the lush surrounding scenery that glows with fifties wholesomeness and a regularly occuring leitmotif of a wheelbarrow full of cement leaves us replete with the cheesy earthyness of their worthy plight. Many may muse over the perceived awfulness of having to move with your loved up spouse and growing pregnancy to a reasonable flat in DC. But the fact remains that they are fighting a cause that feels unjust and inhuman.

Set against the backdrop of the American Civil Rights movement, the couple’s love story plays out as a convincing one – Edgerton plays Perry as mildly pugnacious and insular, Mildred the more visonary of the two, is a subtle turn for Negga which she plays with sunny dignity. A couple of clever young Jewish lawyers work hard for them ‘pro bono’ taking the case to the supreme court through thick and thin. Although the stakes are high, Nichols never gives an impression that they are villified or pressurised in any way as they move to a picturesque wooden house in the middle of wheat fields with their three growing children and Mildred plays the (outwardly) contented housewife. A little more strife and an undercurrent of pain and desperation would have served the story better as the course of justice is portrayed as pretty much of a breeze from start to finish -which clearly it was not – leaving little tension or moving moments in a drama totally devoid of any drama. A worthy and important biopic that fails to make us feel the couple’s undeniable pain. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 11-22 MAY 2016

Journey to the Shore (2015) | Dual format release

Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Cast: Eri Fukatsu, Tadanobu Asano, Masao Komatsu, Yu Aoi, Akira Emoto, Nozomi Muraoka, Tetsuya Chiba, Kaoru Okunuki, Masaaki Akahori, Daiki Fujino, Kana Matsumoto

128min | Fantasy drama | Japan

Best known for his horror outings, Japanese auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s JOURNEY TO THE SHORE is slow cinema par excellence. This meandering romantic fantasy sees a young widow reunited with her husband’s ghost three years after his death, echoing the 1990 cult outing Ghost.

This type of ghost is well known classic in Japan and has long-existed in Japanese kwaidan (horror) films but also in Shakespeare. In JOURNEY TO THE SHORE a completely new form of death appears. The figure here is different from the usual ghosts. Carried away by a temporary death (or physical death), Yosuke will remain in the world for three more years allowing him to prepare for his spiritual death. A certain Karma comes back into these meetings between as the couple as they delicately explore the unfinished business of their married life in a spiritual limbo that shifts backwards and forwards between the living world and the afterlife. And although this premise appears captivating at first and sets off with the best of intentions, JOURNEY TO THE SHORE is gradually becalmed by its rather dull pacing as sentimental tedium engulfs the shady interiors where the supernatural story mostly unfolds.

Loosely based on a novel by Kazumi Yumoto, the films opens with a scene that is re-worked quite movingly later in the story, and showing Mizuki teaching piano to one her pupils, a young girl whose mother blames Mizuki’s lack of enthusiasm for her daughter’s musicial ineptitude. Mizuki is clearly depressed and shortly after this episode, her dead husband Yusuke (Tadanobu Asano) makes the first of his haunting visits, three years after his death. The first time he appears, she listens quietly, hardly perturbed by his homecoming (and looking so well into the bargain), he describes his death by drowning. The following morning, she wakes up and discovers her husband is still there. Promising to show her “beautiful places,”, the two then embark on a journey to meet the circle of people who have become part of his afterlife in the intervening years.

There is the newspaper seller (Masao Komatsu); the owners of a dumpling restaurant (Nozomi Muraoka, Tetsuya Chiba), whose daughter died some years earlier; and a nice old man (Akira Emoto) whose daughter-in-law (Kaoru Okunuki) has fallen on hard times, losing both her husband and her mind. It emerges that Mizuki’s husband has become a philanthropic teacher since his ‘death’.

There appears to be a pattern here whereby the living are somehow released by these undead people when they eventually find peace in the shadowy afterlife. And this is where we are introduced again to the piano student playingwith much more feeling than she did before. And in the final scenes, when Yusuke’s journey is almost over, he eventually reaches a kind of karmic reunion with his placid wife. JOURNEY TO THE SHORE is a lovingly-crafted musing on death and the afterlife, hampered by the lack of convincing chemistry between the leads who, although impressive in their rather underwritten roles, fail to set the night on fire as a happily married couple and leaving us unmoved by their suffering or by their redemption.

JOURNEY TO THE SHORE tries to be mysterious and intriguing but its failure to achieve this arises largely out of the torpor of its narrative flow that lacks conviction and dramatic punch, coming over as winsome rather than emotionally involving. MT

JOURNEY TO THE SHORE IS RELEASED NATIONWIDE AND ON DUAL FORMAT BLURAY ON 23 May 2016

Un Homme et Une Femme (1966) | Cannes Film Festival Classics 2016

Dir.: Claude Lelouch; Cast: Anouk Aimee, Jean-Louis Trintignant

France 1966 | 102 min | drama

Claude Lelouch (*1937) has so far 59 credits as a director. But before and after Un Homme et une Femme, his sixth film, he has never accomplished an outstanding work; even the sequel, A Man and a Woman: 20 years Later, was a disappointment.

Lelouch will be always measured against this seemingly one hit wonder – even though his oeuvre cannot be totally overlooked. All his life, he was the proxy for Hollywood films; the anti-thesis to the Nouvelle Vague and critics and filmmakers (with the exception of François Truffaut) in his own country never forgave him for this.

At a boarding school in Deauville, two parents, both widowed, meet: Anne Gauthier (Aimée), mother of seven year-old Françoise mourns the loss of her husband, a stuntman, who had a fatal accident on set. The racing driver Jean-Louis Duroc (Trintignant), whose son Antoine is abut the same age as Françoise, lost his wife when she committed suicide, after an accident at Le Mans left him in a coma. Both adults agree that their relationship is a friendship but they gradually lose their obsessions with their dead spouses, Anne after much hesitation, and, encouraged by their children find a way to reconcile their past with a future together.

Un Homme et Une Femme is that simple. Without frills and hardly any budget: after one month of pre-production; shot with only three weeks of principal photography followed by three weeks in the editing suite, Lelouch had to rely on the emotional impact of his leading couple, and, being his own DoP, his astonishing images: a mix of 8, 16 and 35 mm cameras, and an equally originally combination of black-and-white, colour and sepia-tinged colour grading. The result is a dazzling intimacy where the rowling camera translates the rollercoaster feelings of the lovers, against their will, into a spectacular obsessive romantic pictorial broadsheet. Carried by the music of Francis Lai, Un Homme et Une femme is the ultimate romantic obsession: images, like the one of the couple meeting in the station, are part of film’s potent chemistry and history.

But Lelouch’s masterpiece has still some detractors, mainly male ones, who call it – unjustly – kitsch. The lines between the genders are drawn: after a private screening for President De Gaulle and his wife Simone, she was left in tears, whilst the general wanted to know the breed of the dog on the beach. AS

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 11-22 MAY 2016

Chicken (2015)

Director: Joe Stephenson

Cast: Scott Chambers, Yasmin Paige, Morgan Watkins

UK | Drama | 86 min.

First time feature film director Joe Stephenson, who has a track record of TV films, has set this drama CHICKEN in the countryside, creating an eerie, enigmatic atmosphere, but failing to fashion a believable narrative from Chris New’s script, based on the play by Freddie Machin. If that sounds familiar, it is a criticism levelled at many UK productions in recent years that look fabulous and feature strong performances, but fall apart on the narrative front.

Fifteen your old Richard (Chambers) suffers from impaired fine motor skills and severe learning difficulties which make schooling impossible. So he is living with his borderline psychotic brother Polly (Watkins) in a dilapidated caravan. Richard’s main interest in life is his chicken Fiona, and all his love is lavished on this feathered friend. When a couple of new landowners with their daughter Annabelle (Paige) move into the nearby country house, they cut off the electricity to the caravan, hoping the unwanted squatters will move on. Polly, who earns a meagre living as a casual labourer, takes the hint as is only too glad of the opportunity to leave his brother behind – with disastrous consequences for all concerned.

Sadly CHICKEN doesn’t appear to live in the modern world. There are too many plotholes and contradictions in the narrative. Nowadays, two brothers with such inadequate survival skills would have certainly being taken care of by Social Security. But, even more crucially, an intelligent and attractive teenager like Annabelle would hardly pair up with pubescent boy suffering from Richard’s severe impairments. Finally, given Annabelle’s poor relationship with her mother, it is unlikely that her mother would offer to accommodate such a problematic teenager such as Richard, into the bargain. The botched ending, however poetic, leaves the audience even more puzzled. When choosing social realism as a genre, one simply cannot disregard the simplest psychological and social facts. Chambers performance is impressive, his real age of twenty-five makes the narrative even more unrealistic, since he looks exactly the same age as his brother (Watkins.) DoP Eben Bolter does a great job in creating a haunting atmosphere, but his efforts are wasted on this infuriating incomprehensible feature. AS

AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEAS FROM MAY 20 2016

The Dancer (2016) | Cannes Film Festival 2016 | Un Certain Regard

Wirter|Director: Stephanie Di Giusto

Cast: Soko, Gaspard Ulliel, Lily-Rose Depp, Francois Damiens, William Houston, Melanie Thierry

108min | Drama Biopic | France

THE DANCER is the story of Belle Epoque dancer Loie Fuller (1892-1928) who rose to fame at the Folies Bergères and became the protégé and rival of the more famous Isadora Duncan. The debut feature of filmmaker writer Stephanie Di Giusto, the film plays in the Un Certain Regard side-bar of the Cannes this year, more for its distinctively auteurish look and feel (as the strand suggests) than for the rigour of its narrative or performances. Don’t expect to find out more about either of these famous women as the focus here is on atmosphere, visual allure (dreamily lensed by Irreversible and Enter the Void’s Benöit Debie) and turn of the century styling and costumes.

Told as a linear narrative, it stars composer Soko – in the central role of Marie-Louise Fuller, who we first meet during a rodeo where he father Ruben (Denis Menochet) is a professional rider who is killed off early on in the proceedings. Fuller’s artistic leanings are illustrated in her sketch pad drawings and secretly rehearsals of Salome. She has a mane of dark hair but is stocky and rather gauche until, that is, she sets sail for her mother’s home in the Temperance Hostel for Women in Brooklyn and auditions for a part in a play, where she uses her ill-fitting skirt to her advantage during a sartorial mishap and ends up inventing her stock in trade – a strange swirling dance requiring metres of fabirc (not unlike that of the Whirling Dervishes). Yes, this dance catches on when she turns up at the Folies Bergères for audition, and snaffles none other than soigné French aristocrat Louis Dorsay (Gaspard Ulliel) who appears to be looking for a strong and emotionally unavailable woman, having just divorced his wife. And Louis Dorsay is a gift horse of the highest order who not only allows Loie the run of his fabulous villa and estate to rehearse her own team of dancers, but also appears to fall deeply in love and dotes on her every whim, despite their obvious physical incompatibility.

When Isadora Duncan arrives from San Francisco, in the shape of the comely but ultimately bland Lily Rose Depp, whose dancing scenes are deftly edited to make it look as if she’s dancing – it’s actually a stand-in. Things take a momentary turn for the worse, as Duncan appears to adore Loie to her face, but behind the scenes emerges as a manipulative minx with a few tricks up her tutu. Although Soko manages an affecting performance in the final scenes, THE DANCER is enjoyable while it lasts, but ultimately as forgettable as candyfloss. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 12 -22 MAY 2016

Exile (2016) Cannes Film Festival 2016

Director: Rithy Panh

77min | Documentary | France

Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh is critically acclaimed for his documentaries that explore and focus on the aftermath of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. And he speaks with authoritaty: his family were expelled from Phnom Penh in 1975 by the Khmer Rouge. One after another, his father, mother, sisters and nephews died of starvation or exhaustion, as they were held in a remote labor camp in rural Cambodia.

His latest doc aptly entitled EXILE offers more footage from the past and pre-revolution Cambodia but nothing new to the present with the filmed imaginings of a solo man in exile eeking out his existence and going through the motions as he sombrely survives day to day in a pre-fab wooden hut, as he drinks rainwater and forages for insects roasted on an open flame. These are deftly intercut and invigorated with 35ml original footage of lively news cuttings and musical recordings of his beloved country during the ’60s and early ’70s, all illuminated by his initially poetic but ultimately tedious musings on a voiceover narrative. While his plight and suffering is noble and courageous, Panh’s fascinating archive footage is the only worthwhile takeaway here. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 12-22 MAY 2016

Departure (2015) |

Writer|Director: Andrew Steggall

Cast: Juliet Stevenson, Alex Lawther, Phenix Broussard, Finbar Lynch

108min | Drama | UK

An English mother and son make a final journey to their French holiday home in this intense character-driven debut which will appeal to fans of Joanna Hogg with its shades of Archipelago. In DEPARTURE Andrew Steggall shows impressive maturity in understanding life from the middle-aged perspective of parents Beatrice (Juliet Stevenson) and Philip (Finbar Lynch) and their pubescent son Elliott (Alex Lawther) and teenage friend Clement (Phenix Broussard). So often English debut dramas can be gorgeous to look but weak on narrative structure, but Streggall excels in a subtly nuanced rites of passage story sensitively rendered in a palette of soft autumn hues that echo a woman’s tristesse at the dying days of her marriage and the last hurrah of childhood innocence. DEPARTURE is full of nostalgia: its contempo themes of sexual longing, emotional loneliness and loss drifting alongside childhood memories and familial attachments as mother and son cling to a past that held high hopes for a rosy future, now shrouded in uncertainty.

As they arrive at the shuttered lakeside home, it’s clear that Bea (50s) and Elliott (15) bring with them a sense of bitterness and uncertainty. Elliott is detached and petulant: too immersed in the stirrings of his nascent gaydom to be aware of his mother’s depressed state. Bea is tearfully preoccupied and overwhelmed with feelings of anger over her sexually ambivalent and emotionally distant husband and the loss of her cherished home. It’s a toxic dynamic handled with gracefulness by Stevenson (in Truly Madly Deeply mode) and impressive newcomer Alex Lawther (who has the look of a character from a Rupert Brooke war poem, complete with the jacket).

When Elliott spys the slightly older Clement (Phenix Brossard – a younger Denis Lavant) diving into the local reservoir, he is immediately drawn to his vibrant swagger, and intoxicated by his bravery – the water is strictly out of bounds. But Clement is impervious to Elliott’s attempts to engage him in conversation as the boy becomes intrigued with his only local (bilingual) friend. What’s more, Clement seems more sympathetic to Bea’s feelings fuelling a spark of jealousy within Elliott as his obsession grows and a curious ménage à trois develops.

Cinematographer Brian Fawcett (who honed his craft on Venus and Control) cleverly uses his lenses to focus on the subtleties of facial expression and gesture, creating an evocative sense of place in the wooded countryside and local market towns in the ancient terroir of Languedoc-Roussillon. Clement is the breath of fresh air in this buttoned-up threesome, injecting irreverent humour and a sense of combativeness: when Elliott becomes too prissy he comments: “You’re a bit of a cliché – ‘the poet’- brusquely bringing things down to earth. And when the English couple drift into over-sensitivity, Clement pricks the bubble with his bullish earthiness. But he has a more reflective side to his personality and his occasional outbursts mask a troubled sadness. After the pent up scenes of his father’s visit, Elliott’s emotional epiphany is marked by an inspired slow-motion underwater scene scored to Dvorak, bringing a spurt of fresh energy to proceedings in contrast to Bea’s sad plight. Stevenson delivers an affecting finale that will resonate with many women, offering rare insight into the female psyche that refuses to rant outwardly; tending to internalise emotional pain: in some ways her character is the most complex and underwritten. Lawther, who played the young Alan Turing in The Imitation Game provides another typically English portrait of burgeoning adolescent sexuality; finely-tuned, verging on anally narcissistic. Brossard is fabulously feisty and almost feral, and there is strong but underwritten support from Niamh Cusack (as a neighbour) while Lynch does his best as the typically silent and deadly avoidant male. DEPARTURE is absorbing and watchable, and although it could be argued that Steggall lingers a little too long on some of the scenes, he offers a well-crafted and inspired first feature making him a welcome British talent in the making . MT

ON RELEASE FROM 20 MAY 2016

Rester Vertical (2016) | Cannes 2016 Competition

Director|Writer: Alain Guiraudie

Cast: Damien Bonnard, Christian Bouillette, Laure Calamy, India Hair, Raphael Thierry

100min | Drama | France

After winning Best Director in Cannes Festival’s Un Certain Regard sidebar in 2013, for his intriguing thriller Stranger By the Lake, Alain Guiraudie is back in the main competition line-up with another eventful drama entitled STAYING VERTICAL which is set in the wild and wolf-inhabited plateaux of the Southern Massif Central and shares the same dark and absurdist humour as his 2009 outing The King of Escape.

STAYING VERTICAL is also similarly charming and queer oddity, in bost senses of the word that follows its dorkish but likeable hero Leo (Damien Bonnard) an itinerant screenwriter who chances upon a single-mother and shepherd Marie (India Hair), while researching his writing. What starts as a bucolic love story in the farm she shares with her father, the rough-handed ogre-like Jean-Louis (Raphael Thiry), leads to the two fathering a child but Marie soon leaves for pastures new when she realises Leo has no future, leaving her with the baby.

Leo feels fulfilled with this outcome but Guiraudie has more quirky surprises in store for us in the shape of a strange local couple, Yoan (Basile Meilleurat) who he tries to invite for an audition on account of his wolfish looks – and a crabby old man, Marcel (Christian Bouillette), who seems obsessed with talking about anal sex. There’s a feeling that Leo is bisexual but this seems an option he’s prepared to explore rather than a serious predilection. However, he does draw the line when approached by Marie’s father more from the associative perspective rather than the sexual one. And this power of suggestion seeps through Guiraudie’s narrative for most of the film’s modest running time providing both a rich and seductive vein of dark humour and a ruminative meditation for the audience. As in The King of Hearts, all the male characters here share an amorphous sexuality which is both appealing and freaky due to their associative and binding ties, as they are all fathers or father figures.

As the title STAYING VERTICAL suggests, this is a film about coping with what life throws in your direction and particularly in this remote part of France, it explores a poor community who is forced to get along and make the best of things in often challenging circumstances. Once again it also flags up the narrative of sexuality being a fluid and moveable feast where comfort and support is often more imperative than erotic desire and the often graffic sex that takes place is functional rather than glamorised.

Despite its tonal uneveness, Guiraudie’s film contains some powerful political and societal themes. There are moments of wild beauty in the winding roads and bleak hillsides of this unexplored part of France and to reflect this remoteness, Guiraudie occasionally wanders into poetic scenes where Leo visits an alternative healer (Laure Calamy) and shocking ones where he is robbed by the same homeless people who he has helped during his visit to a nearby port. The theme of wolves recurs again and again throughout the film. At first, they ravage the sheep including Marie’s treasured sheepdog and they appear again at the end of the film bringing a satisfying feeling of closure and a chance for redemption for Leo, who up to now emerges as somewhat of a loser, albeit a kind-hearted one, representing a feeling that men are the lost lambs of contempo society: in their quest to be connected with their emotions, they have ceased to fulfill their expectations as the strong protectors of the fold. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 11-22 MAY 2016

Sieranevada (2016) | Cannes Competition 2016

Writer|Director: Cristi Puiu

Cast: Mimi Branescu, Mirela Apostu, Eugenia Bosanceanu, Ana Ciontea, Ilona Brezoianu

123min | Drama | Romania | France | Bosnia

Almost all of Romanian director Cristi Puiu’s films belong to slow cinema and a New Wave movement called meta cinema: and SIERANEVADA, his Palme D’Or hopeful here at the 69th Edition of Cannes Film Festival is no different. In a similar vein to The Death of Mr Lazarescu, this is a rich and rewarding drama that plays out as its protagonists take each moment as it comes during the lengthy pre-prandial preceedings. Intimate in scale yet far-reaching in its implications, the director’s fifth feature explores differing opinions during a family get together to commemorate the death of a patriarch (his father) which occurred the previous year. In Bucharest Lary (Branescu) is at the peak of his professional career as a neurologist, just home from a business trip to deal with the assembled family and the arrival of the priest.

Lary’s mother sexagenarian Nasu Mirica (Dana Dogaru) invites the extended family to the small apartment which she shared with her late husband, Emil. The event starts with the usual smalltalk and bickering and the dialogue is sharp and dilatory, in common with other Romanian New Wave filmmakers such as Corneliu Porumboiu, Radu Jude and Razvan Radulescu (the latter also co-wrote Mr Lazarescu).

This is a meal that never gets started as the narrative grows more complex as a philandering husband (Sorin Medelini) arrives in a cloud of shame followed by Cami (Ilona Brezoianu) with a friend who is already drunk and ten or so members of the clan. Discussions run from the 9/11 conspiracy theories to Communism with Lary and Laura making us feel very much part of the scene thanks to cinematographer Barbu Balasoiu’s eye level camerawork that glides and darts from face to face and room to room of the crampted apartment as political, moral or religious views are tailored and compromised depending on which family group they belong to and has ultimately forged their identity from birth. It’s an occasion where Lary learn a great deal about himself and changing attitudes and perceptions of him from all concerned.

Amusing, complicated and opaque, SIERANEVADA develops Mr Lazarescu further but most of the characters and their backstories are not fully explored – despite its generous running time. Enjoyable though if you fancy a afternoon of Romanian cultural enlightenment in the company of one of the best Romanian New Wave directors currently on the scene. MT

Troublemakers:the story of Land Art (2015)

Dir.: James Crump; Documentary; USA 2015, 74 min.

Best known for his 2007 documentary Black White & Gray, about the relationship between photographer Robert Maplethorpe and Sam Wagastaff, Robert Crump here turns his camera on a group of artists who create Land Art, a movement which grew out of the rejection of gallery culture in late 1960s Los Angeles.

This was a time dominated by the Vietnam War in the US and questions about the identity of the country were asked and artists, always at the forefront of change, asked for radical solutions: not only for politics, but also their own creative output. A group called the s Angeles, led by Michael Heizer (*1944), Robert Smithson (1938-1973), Walter de Maria (1935-2013), Nancy Holt (1938-2014) and Charles Ross (*1937) decided to end “the dictatorship of the gallery owners”, and move out of LA into the desert in order to find space for their Land Art, a technique 3000 years older than oil painting, with images not unlike those found in Stonehenge.

Ironically, one of the gallery owners, Virginia Dwan, the heiress of the 3M Group, helped the artists at the start, as did the Avalanche Magazine, the semi-official magazine of the movement. The enormity and scale of the artwork created can only be imagined when we discover that 240 000tons of rock in the Nevada desert had to be moved to provide an adequate canveas for Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969/70) which involved the digging of two enormous trenches 50 feet deep and 30 feet wide into the rock, for an entire installation spawning 1500 feet.

In 1969 Heizer had to abandon work on the rock installation ‘Levitated Mass’, because the equipment to transport the installation to the LA County Museum of Art could not be found. But he realised the project in 2012, transporting the 340 tons art work from the Stone Valley in California to the Museum, which took eleven nights. Ever since 1990 Heizer has been working on his project City, a huge complex in Lincoln County, Nevada.
Robert Smithson, the tragic hero of the movement, who died in a plane crash in Texas whilst researching his new project at the Amarillo Ramp, created the giant earthwork ‘Spiral Jetty’ in 1970 at the Salt Lake, Utah, measuring 4572 m by 457 m. His wife Nancy Holt, the only woman of the group, had spent most of her time as a peacemaker between the male artists who often had more energy for confrontation than for their art.

In 1978 she filmed the creation of ‘Sun Tunnels’ in the Great Basin Desert of Utah. The installation consists of four massive, 18 feet long tubes, placed in a radius of 26m. There are holes in the tubes, which are aligned to the star signs of Draco, Perseus, Columba and Capricorn. The configuration creates amazing play of light images. Walter de Maria’s Lightning Fields (1977) in New Mexico consists of 400 stainless steel posts, which lighten up during thunderstorms, and change optical effects, due to changes in time and the weather. The rectangular grid’s dimension is 1 mile by one mile. Charles Ross’ began working on he prism sculptures of ‘Star Axis’ in 1971 which places its viewers parallel to the axis of the earth, when walkimg alomg the imstallation. ‘The Star Tunnel’ is the centre of Star Axis, comprising a stairway, ten stories high, to a naked eye observatory, enabling an ever increasing view of the sky.

It goes without saying that these artists were idiosyncratic. While Heizer is a throwback to the American pioneer, who conquered the West, de Maria was a much more gentle and poetic creature. Crump avoids a hagiographic approach, but he manages to convey the utter originality of the artists. TROUBLEMAKERS is a film to be watched: the images of DOP’s Robert O’Haire and Alexandre Themistocleus, as well as the films by Heizer and Holt about their work process, are absolutely out of this world. Together with the documents from the late ’60s showing how the artists gradually left the bars of LA for the wide-open spaces of the deserts, TROUBLEMAKERS is a unique visual journey. AS

RELEASES ON 13 MAY 2016 | COURTESY OF DOGWOOF

Umberto D (1952) | BLURAY RELEASE

Director: Vittorio De Sica

Script: Cesare Zavattini, Vittoria De Sica

Cast: Cesare Battisti, Maria Pia Casilio, Lina Gennari

89min Drama Italian with subtitles

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Umberto D is one of the most famous films of the Italian neorealist movement and successful in its mission to show true life after the second World War, happening to ordinary people suffering from its effects and protesting against poverty and Government cuts in the open streets, where they are unceremoniously moved on by the police.

From a story written and scripted by Cesare Zavattini, Vittorio De Sica directed this touching and deeply moving film that was claimed to be his favourite. And I can see why. Conforming to neo-realist tenets of using non professional actors and outdoor settings, he casts a non-actor Carlo Battisti in the role of Umberto, a decent old man trying to keep his home in a small room amid desperate poverty of Rome. He is pestered by his landlady (Lina Gennari) for the meagre rent. His only friends are his little dog, Flick, and a young housemaid Maria (Maria-Pia Cailio). Filmed out and about in Rome and in the dingy flat he occupies, it is made all the more sombre by composer Alessandro Cicognini’s orchestral score and a stark black and white setting.

The Rome of the early fifties appears dour and worn down with no exciting cafe society or sparkle of the ‘Dolce Vita’ that was to come with the sixties, most of the buildings look dirty and worn down. It’s a scene of unremitting gloom with the only brief lightness coming from the sunny park scene where Umberto offers to give Flick away to a young girl hoping to find him a good home because he can no longer feed him, or himself. There’s no sentimentality attached to Flick: the camera does not dwell on his tricks or his charm, just on the fact that he is devoted to his master and his master to him. This is a sad story told without melodrama or judgement: the only person we judge is his possibly his landlady, who would rather offer his room to cheating couples than allow him refuge.

Considering he has no training as an actor Carlo Battisti, then in his seventies, gives a convincing performance as a self-respecting and well-turned-out pensioner in hat and overcoat, who puts his best foot forward despite his difficulties and never resorts to anger, resentment or self-pity. His facial expressions echo the sorrowful dignity and personal torture of a gentleman brought to his knees by poverty and loss but still preserving with decency and hope. The only time he complains is when, after a long day trudging the streets in search of Flick, who goes missing while he’s in hospital, he returns to the persion and simply says to Maria: “I’m tired”. And that simple comment and his quiet resignation, speaks volumes. At one point there’s an extraordinary scene where he’s on the verge of begging in the street for L2,000 to pay his landlady, and puts his palm out to see if he can beg. Just as a passer-by is about to give him money, he turns it over, as if testing for rain. the timing of this is quite brilliant and, seen out of context, could almost raise a laugh. The other suburb scene is towards the end when, out of desperation, he jumps in front of a passing train.

Somehow the relationship with his dog allows him to express the deep emotions he feels that could not be expressed with a fellow human being and that is the key to the success of the film: De Sica shows how tenderly love us and never judge us; always love us and it’s Flick, the dog, who ultimately redeems his master, allowing us to connect to the pain and suffering of one man and the here the true vulnerability of the human soul is allowed to shine through in this simplest and purist of tragedies. MT

NOW AVAILABLE ON DVD | Bluray

Heart of a Dog (2015) Prime

Apart from a brief foray at Cannes 2019 with her short film To the Moon (2019), Heart of A Dog is still Anderson’s most recent feature, playing out on many levels: documentary, animation, essay and installation – the latter part of the artists’ Habeus Corpi installation which showed in 2015 in New York City.

The star of the show is unsurprisingly a dog (to be precise, six canines were in front of the camera), with Anderson’s own, late companion Lolabelle, a terrier, taking centre stage. Early on the filmmaker dreams of giving birth to a dog, even though she cheated a little in the process, and this is shown in Laurie’s charming pencil sketches. Further musings after the death of Lolabelle lead Anderson to the main subject of her film essay saying goodbye not only to Lolabelle, but also her mother (and always unspoken) her husband Lou Reed, who died in 2013, and whose Turning Time Around plays powerfully over the end-credits.

The overall style is liquid with all segments flowing – in an associative way – into each other. Some strains are picked up again, a case in point is the potent reaction to 9/11 with images of the huge NSA HQ in the Utah desert in Utah (where the recordings of security agencies are made and stored indefinitely). In California Lolabelle nearly became the victim of a circling hawk who mistook her for a large rabbit. Later, Anderson dreams about her dog being in ‘borda’ for 49 days, a sort of liminal state before re-incarnation, as taught by the Tibetan ‘Book of Death’.

But the director is always self-critical: after telling the story of her long hospital stay after a childhood accident when she found herself in a ward with children suffering from serious burns, Anderson remembers censoring her memory and leaving out the “cries, dying children make”.

With quotes from Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, Heart of a Dog is a love letter about letting go – melancholic, but never depressing. It celebrates life and many art forms, the human and the canine spirit, leaving the audience in a contemplative mood. AS

NOW ON AMAZON PRIME

Easy Rider (1969) | Bluray Release

Taking its name from a Bob Dylan number EASY RIDER is the ultimate road movie where two hippies journey across South Western America in a bid to discover themselves and freedom (“What the hell is wrong with freedom? That’s what it’s all about”). What starts as an easy-riding peaceful mission in the spirit of Woodstock, rather than the menace associated with the lawless hoodlum biker gangs of the ’60s, EASY RIDER is not entirely devoid of tragedy by the time the dudes roll into their destination of New Orleans.

Peter Fonda rocks a ‘stars and stripes’ jacket and rides a classic long-barrelled motorbike. While Dennis Hopper opts for the Native American look with tasselled buckskins, full moustache and hippy hair. Gliding through big country landscapes, canyons and mountain ranges they enjoy hospitality where they can, teaming up Jack Nicholson, as a loquacious, well-heeled but naive alcoholic, who joins them on their trip but sadly bites the dust when the trio hit more hostile terrain. The journey includes a visit to a whorehouse where the pair indulge in grass and LSD, all shot in 16m. Hopper’s direction is for the most part fluid and the script trenchant in its depiction of gratuitous violence that occasionally takes on a poetic twist.

The upshot? A visually sumptuous and enjoyable romp that hints at philosophy and folklore, engaging cult and new audiences alike with its musical backdrop redolent of a freeweelin’ America of the ’60s. MT

NOW OUT ON BLU-RAY, DVD AT THE NEW LAUNCHED CRITERION UK LABEL

Mustang (2015) **** On Mubi

Dir: Deniz Gamze Erguven | Cast: Günes Sensoy, Doga Zeyneb Doguslu, Tugba Sunguroglu, Elit Iscan, Ilayda Akdogan; Nihal G. Kolda, Ayberk Pekcan | 97min | Drama | France/ Turkey/Germany/Qatar.

Turkish director Deniz Gamze Erguven has won international awards for her short films. Her feature debut is an emotional and ideological tour-de-force exploring how five sisters fight repression in a small Turkish village: Mustang is a vehement political statement and a great example of female solidarity.

On the last day of school, five orphaned teenage girls have a harmless water fight on the beach with their male friends. After watching them, a sneaky neighbour informs their grandmother (Koldas) and uncle Erol (Pekcan) complaining of “sexual perversion”. The girls are literally barricading into their home, their grandmother dragging the three older girls off for a “virginity test” in hospital. But the draconian behaviour doesn’t end there -‘phones, mobiles, computers and TVs are confiscated, as the girls are forced into frumpy clothes, their grandmother insisting on cooking classes to keep them ‘suitably’ busy, prepare them for marriage and making the house into a “wife factory.

Mustang feels like a story from medieval times but this is rural Turkey in the 21th century Turkey. What makes it so enjoyable is the girls’ ingenuity in the face of discipline. Sonay (Akdogan), the oldest, at least gets the husband she wants: her long-term boyfriend Ekin. But Selma (Sunguroglu) ends up with the clumsy Osman, whom she hardly knows. Ece (Iscan) tries to fatten herself up by eating sweats non-stop to put her future – unloved husband off – but commits suicide in the end. But grandmother and uncle go on regardless: finding a husband for Nur (Doguslu). The two grown-ups share a guilty secret: uncle Erol is has been abusing Nur sexually for quite a while. The youngest Lale (Sensoy), the most spirited of the quintet, finally takes over: whilst the wedding party is outside, waiting for the bride to emerge, Lale and Nur are barricades themselves into the house, before trying to escape to Istanbul.

Shot in the Inebolu, in the North-East of Turkey, with an all-Turkish cast, MUSTANG nevertheless has a West-European aesthetic since Erguven grew up in France. Sexual politics are in the forefront: whilst the girls discuss their bourgeoning sexuality openly with each other, for the grown-ups this topic is a taboo.The grandmother leaves a ’50s “guide for girls” on the kitchen table. And when Selma’s hymen does not rupture during the couple’s first intercourse after the wedding, the enraged parents drag her to a hospital, where the understanding doctor can calm them down. The old woman’s complicity with her son over his abuse of Nur, is unfortunately not only a problem encountered in Muslim countries. Which leads us to the wider implications: the excuse that forced marriages are necessary for social peace in Islam societies (as voiced by the grandmother and her son) is just a scam: Men very much participate in all the “vices” of modern Western culture, they just do not want to give up their privileges: since the repression of women forced to live in the medieval times in 21st century.

DOPs Ersin Gok and David Chizallet evoke a perfect ‘huis clos’ atmosphere in the house: the gloomy images give a feeling of lock-down, with the ugly clothes as prison garbs. And whenever Lale escapes to learn to drive, meeting the friendly Yasin (Yigit) – who teaches her – alas with no success – the sobriety recedes and the colours become bright and joyful. Even the mention of ‘Istanbul’, a heaven of freedom, brightens up the atmosphere in the house. The ensemble cast are outstanding with a dynamite turn from debutant Sensoy: her Lale is so full of vitality, resistance and ingenuity, that in spite of her age, she pioneers the fight for freedom. MUSTANG is not perfect, there are over-melodramatic moments in the football stadium with the girls celebrating in an all-female crowd – but the powerfully passionate, stringent offensive approach Erguven choses, is impressive. AS

MUSTANG IS ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 13 MAY 2016

Green Room (2015) |Quinzaine des Realisateurs | Cannes 2015

Writer|Director: Jeremy Saulnier

Cast: Imogen Poots, Alia Shawkat, Anton Yelchin, Patrick Stewart

94min US Horror

Saulnier emerged on the indie scene at Cannes 2013 with his richly-textured arthouse revenge thriller Blue Ruin. But this latest outing GREEN ROOM feels like he’s slid back into the teenage slasher territory of his debut Murder Party. Whilst being reasonably entertaining, this tale of a punk band who wander into the dangerous clutches of a gang of fascist drug dealers, feels slacker and less convincing with its throwaway gory violence and puerile stab at black humour that will go down well at Frightfest.

Another reason why GREEN ROOM feels less edgy and unsettling is the casting of mainstream actors, Imogen Poots and Patrick Stewart. Although this talent may be more of a box office draw, the result is a film that feels more anodyne despite some macabre moments. For a start Imogen Poots will always impart a Sloaney feel for British audiences and Patrick Stewart pales into insignificance compared with Ben Kingsley, in ‘gangleader mode’. The extreme schlocky violence is another reason GREEN ROOM fails to impress, causing many more eyes to roll, than heads and limbs. The continual meaningless re-makes of Texas Chainsaw Massacre have shown why ubiquitous hacked-off limbs and geysers of blood simply aren’t scary or horrific. Less is always more, where blood and gore are concerned.

The story follows a punk band that have just been on tour throughout the US and haven’t really been coining it. Petty arguments have broken out between band members – bassist Pat (Anton Yelchin) and drummer Reece (Joe Cole); so guitarist Sam (Alia Shawkat) and lead singer Tiger (Callum Turner) are the only ones still speaking when they fetch up at a roadhouse in Oregon. This is extreme right fascist skinhead territory, apparently. After a pretty miserable go on stage, one of the ‘Ain’t Rights’ returns to the Green Room to discover a murder scene. One of the skinhead girls has been stabbed in the head and her friend Amber (Imogen Poots) is frightened to move. In the end, they barricade themselves into the Green Room while venue manager, Macon Blair (Blue Ruin), and the venue’s owner Darcy (Stewart) hang around outside with murderous intent.

There’s nothing inventive thereafter as, gradually, the band members meet their grisly deaths in ways that will unfold for those interested in seeing the film, which, to its credit, is laced with a lacerating black comedy. Dogs are involved but, for once, don’t seem to be involved in the death count. Disappointing and predictable then as an edgy horror outing, but entertaining if outright slasher movies are your bag. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE | REVIEWED AT QUINZAINE DE REALISATEURS | CANNES 14 – 24UI MAY 2015 | CANNES 2015

Scott of the Antarctic (1948) | Bluray DVD and EST release

Director: Charles Frend

Cast: John Mills, Harold Warrender, Derek Bond, Reginald Beckwith, James Robertson Justice, Kenneth Moore, Diana Churchill

105min | Adventure | UK

Here Charles Frend directs one of Ealing Studios’ most impressive productions featuring a sterling British cast and using Robert Falcon Scott’s diaries to recreate in meticulous detail the fatal 1910 expedition to the South Pole. Keeping the doomed mission alive, Herbert Ponting’s actual expedition footage has been used along with location camerawork to re-inspire a journey that was fraught with setbacks. Together with Arne Åkermark’s studio recreations, shot in Technicolor by Jack Cardiff, Osmond Borradaile and Geoffrey Unsworth, this gives a remarkable visual account of what actually happened during those fateful months, 0ver a 100 years ago. Sombrely scored by renowned British composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams, in what later became known as his Sinfonia antartica.

The audience is naturally well aware of the outcome of the tragedy and so SCOTT OF THE ANTARCTIC makes for a patriotic and pitiful watch rather than a tense one. A chronological narrative gradually unfolds showing how a series of errors of judgement led ultimately to the negative outcome: largely attributed to inadequate financing and supplies, the use of unreliable motor sledges instead of dogs and the failure to gauge the weather conditions. Despite this, the film makes a fitting tribute to the abiding stoicism, courage and innate good nature of the British team who obeyed orders, never once complaining, despite their bitter disappointment which could so easily have been turned to triumph with greater preparation and awareness. MT

La Quinzaine des Realisateurs| Directors’ Fortnight 2016 | Latest World Premieres

The Directors’ Fortnight is a Cannes side-bar with a focus on auteur driven drama and documentary features that runs in parallel to the Cannes Film Festival. It was started in 1969 by the French Directors Guild after the events of May 1968 resulted in cancellation of the Cannes festival as an act of solidarity with striking workers.

The Directors’ Fortnight showcases a programme of shorts and feature films and documentaries worldwide.

Divines (2016) | Drama | France | World Premiere

Uda Benyamina comes to Cannes with her debut feature, a drama exploring themes of power and success through the story of a young girl who sets off on a religious pilgrimage but meets love along the way.

Dog Eat Dog (2016) | Crime Drama | US |

Carved from a lifetime of experiences that runs the gamut from incarceration to liberation, Paul Schrader’s Dog Eat Dog is based on the semi-autobiographical novel by American crime writer Edward Bunker (Runaway Train) who also started a criminal career before making it big in the movies. This Ohio set action drama stars Nicolas Cage, Willem Dafoe and Christopher Matthew Cook as recidivists who need to hit one more jackpot before they retire.

Berenice Bejo (The Artist) and Valerio Mastandrea star in Marco Bellocchio’s latest drama based on Massimo Gramellini’s 2012 Best Seller exploring a man’s emotional insecurity brought on by his mother’s early death. With award-winning cinematographer Daniele Cipri on board this promises to be a visual treat.

L’Economie du Couple (2016) | Drama | France Belgium | World Premiere

Joachim Lafosse (Our Children) returns to Cannes with this Brussels-set contempo drama that stars Berenice Bejo and Cedric Kahn as a separating couple with kids, forced to cohabit their beloved marital home due to financial difficulties.

Fiore (2016) | Flower | Drama | Italy | World Premiere

Daphne is in a juvenile detention centre, serving time for robbery, when she falls for another inmate Josh. Their love feeds on exchanged glances and snatched conversations in Claudio Giovannesi’s drama about forbidden love and a strength of feeling that threatens to violate the law.

SEQ 21, J4, Cours de natation Samir et Agathe

The final feature of France Icelandic writer and documentarian Solveig Anspach (who sadly died of cancer in 2015). No stranger to Cannes, her film Stormy Weather was screened in the Un Certain Regard section in 2003, and she won the Piazza Grande Award at Locarno for Back Soon in 2008. The Aquatic Effect is a drama that has Samir Guesmi and Florence Loiret Caille.

Valeria Bruni Tedeschi joins Paolo Virzi for their second collaboration, a comedy, in which she plays mental patient who strikes up a friendship with a woman from a completely different background (Michaela Ramazzotti) while being treated in a Tuscan mental home during the Summer holidays (right).

Les Vies de Thérèse | Documentary | France | World Premiere

Filmed here at her own request by director Sebastian Lifschitz, are the final days in the life of militant feministe, actress and lesbian Therese Clerc, who died in February 2016. She also took part in his 2012 documentary Les Invisibles, which explored the lives and difficulties of older lesbians and gays in French society.

Ma Vie de Courgette | My Life as a Courgette (2016) | Animation | World Premiere

Based on Gilles Paris’ book on the same name, this gorgeously animated family drama is scripted by Girlhood director Celine Sciamma and set in the French Alps.

Mean Dreams (2016) | Thriller | Canada | World Premiere

Canadian filmmaker Nathan Morlando (Gangster) makes his Cannes debut with a thriller set in Northern Ontario and starring Sophie Nelisse and Josh Wiggins.

Mercenaire (2016) | Drama | France | World Premiere

In his coming of age directorial debut, Sacha Wolff stars alongside newcomer Toki Pilioko, when they take off to play rugby in a big city on the other side of the World, and discover that manhood comes without compromises.

Neruda (2016) | Biopic Drama | Arg, Chile, Spain | World Premiere

Gael Garcia Bernal and Alfredo Castro again join forces with Pablo Larrain and his scripter Guillermo Calderon (No) in a biopic that explores the Nobel-prize winning poet’s time as a political fugitive in Chile during the 1940s.

Poesia sin Fin | Endless Poetry (2016) | Fantasy Drama | Chile | World Premiere

Chilean Maverick Alejandro Jodowovsky is back in Cannes with another fabulous family affair. Endless Poetry stars his sons Brontis and Adan and is filmed by multi-award winning DoP Christopher Doyle (In the Mood for Love).

Raman Raghav (2015) | Thriller | India | World Premiere

Vicky Kaushal was the star turn of last year’s Un Certain Regard romantic drama Massan. He returns to Cannes in Anurag Kashyap’s thriller that follows the exploits of the notorious 1960s Bombay serial killer Raman Raghav, played by Bollywood star Nawazuddin Siddiqui. Siddiqui also starred in Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) an epic drama charting the deadly inter-generational blood feuds that once took place in the city of Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh.

Risk (2016) | Documentary | Germany | US

Writer, director and activist Julian Assange has certainly captured the imagination of journalists and filmmakers with his political antics; Alex Gibney –We Steal Secrets – being one of them. Here he forms the subject of American filmmaker Laura Poitras’ latest documentary Risk that takes place in Britain (left).

Tour de France (2016) | Drama | France | World Premiere

An unlikely friendship develops between an ageing art lover Serge (Gérard Depardieu) and young rapper Far’Hook, when they are forced together on a coastal journey from Northern France to Marseilles on the trail of 18th Century maritime painter Joseph Vernet, in this usual comedy drama from French director Rachid Djaidani.

Two Lovers and a Bear (2016) | Drama | Canada | World Premiere

Kim Nguyen’s romantic drama has Dane DeHaan (Life) and Tatiana Maslany as lovers who form a spiritual bond in the remote town of Nunavut, in the Canadian North Pole (below left).

Wolf and Sheep (2016) | Drama | Denmark | World Premiere

With a cast of newcomers, Shahbanoo Sadat tells a tale about a mountain farming community in northern Cashmire and their belief in a legendary wolf with the soul of a woman.

LA QUINZAINE | DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT | TAKES PLACE DURING THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 12 – 22 MAY 2016

I Saw the Light (2015)

Director: Marc Abraham

Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Elizabeth Olsen, Bradley Whitford, Cherry Jones, Maddie Hasson, Wrenn Schmidt

123min | Biopic |

Tom Hiddleston and Elizabeth Olsen are the stars in Marc Abraham’s tribute to US country music legend Hank Williams which takes its title from one of the best loved songs by the singer. The biopic charts Williams’ rise to fame from his 1944 marriage to Audrey, at a petrol station in Alabama when he was just a small time ‘country’ singer, through to his tragic death from heart failure at only 29 as the best-selling, chart-topping superstar headlining the “Grand Ole Opry “show in Nashville, Tennessee (1953).

Abraham’s narrative focus here is very much on Williams’ failed love affairs that started with Audrey and continued with a series of other women, culminating in his second marriage to Billie Jean Jones (Maddie Hasson), as he desperately sought emotional support, fuelled by alcohol and drugs, to sustain him through his short but meteoric musical career.

The film takes its title from ‘I Saw the Light’, one of the most popular songs by the country legend, but another song ‘Lovesick Blues’, would have been more appropriate for a story that fails to distill the spirit and joy of Williams’ phenomenal contribution to the music scene in 1940’s America, concentrating instead on his rather maudlin marital turmoil and succession of sad love affairs, overshadowed by the domineering presence of his widowed mother Lillie (Cherry Jones).

Tom Hiddleston dazzles in the role and the renditions – his tall and willowy frame ideal for the part of a man who suffered from a rare form of spina bifida, leaving him occasionally crippled, bedridden and addicted to painkillers. Complete with cowboy suites encrusted with diamante and an ubiquitous cowboy stetson he really looks convincing, and although he feels miscast, despite sterling efforts, in evoking the folksy charm of a “lil’ ole Southern boy” and part-time philanderer: Williams’ off-piste activities feel cheeky and playfully forgivable in Hiddleston’s take. As Audrey, Elizabeth Olsen has the same hard-voiced, unsympathetic edge to her character as she does in Avengers, competing with Williams in the singing arena, peddling her own canoe and nearly submerging his own showboat in the process as a rather bullish femme fatale who comes to the marriage with a child and has a cherished boy with Williams as they serially split and regroup in a partnership where she appears to wear the trousers.

Ultimately, I SAW THE LIGHT doesn’t carry a candle to recent biopics such as Love & Mercy and even Miles Ahead which have better showcased their artists’ iconic 20th century American success stories. None of the musical numbers here really shine out as the enduring classics that they undoubtedly have become in the American ‘country’ consciousness.

Yet despite its failure to set the musical world on fire, there’s much to be admired in Merideth Boswell’s set design and some stunning set pieces as the luminescent Lousiana landscapes really come alive in the capable hands of Michael Mann’s regular DoP Dante Spinotti (Heat/L.A.Confidential). MT

NOW OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 6 MAY 2016

Evolution (2015)

Dir.: Lucile Hadzihalilovic

Cast: Max Brebant, Roxanne Duran, Julie-Marie Parmentier

France/Belgium/Spain 2015, 81 min.

It is nearly eleven years since Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s memorable debut feature Innocence, which dealt with a teenage girl in a boarding school. EVOLUTION centres this time on a group of boys on the crest of adolescence. Living a frigid existence with their insipid-looking mothers by an eerie seashore, there are no adult males to be seen. Hadzihalilovic presents a joyless antiseptic world where even the meals of strained seaweed broth appear medicinal rather than satisfying. Cinematographer Manuel Dacosses’s spare and pristine interior visuals give the impression of a wide-scale marine laboratory where a sci-fi experiment is underway and the boys are the victims.

Young Nicolas (Brebant) and his mother (Parmentier) live in a dreary community: their spartan lifestyle is marked by robotic rituals: dinner is always followed by the intake of an inky medicine, which appears to be therapeutic. Somehow Nicolas suspects that something is going on beyond the surface of enforced rigour: he follows his mother to the beach at night, where he observes her writhe in ecstacy with other women. Before he can unravel the mysterious plan, he is sent to a dilapidated early 20th century hospital, where some of his friends are also patients. Weird experiments are carried out and one boy disappears completely. Nicolas is befriended by one of the nurses, Stella (Duran), who supplies him with material for his drawings. When the dreadful secret emerges, Stella tries to help Nicolas to escape.

The boys in EVOLUTION have no rights over their bodies, but what emerges is that they are the unwitting victims of some kind of freaky, gender-reversal surgery. The dreamlike atmosphere evokes a past we can not see, but the boys’ dreams suggest that they have been taken away from their real families to take part in a medical experiment destined to help mankind’s survival. But dreams and reality are indistinguishable: the underwater scenes suggest that more sinister plans are underway: perhaps mankind has to become amphibious to survive. The ghastly hospitals are horror institutions located underground and under the control of the sullen – all female – doctors and nurses. Syringes and scalpels take on a sadistic undertone creating a frightening parallel with medical experiments in Nazi concentration camps.

EVOLUTION haunts and beguiles for just over an hour. Hadzihalilovic and her co-scripter Alante Kavaite (Summer of Sangaile) cleverly keep the tension taught requiring the audience to invest a great deal in the narrative before any salient clues emerge – but even then much remains unexplained and enigmatic; not that EVOLUTION wants to be understood. Part of its allure is this inaccessibility, unsettlingly evoking a world far apart from any genre, it is esoteric and anguished in its unique otherworldliness. Too many films feature repetitive images and schematic self-indulgent narratives: how refreshing to find an true original which opens a totally new world in just 81 minutes.

NOW ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS | EVOLUTION |

Truman (2015)

Director: Cesc Gay Writer: Cesc Gay, Tomas Aragay

Cast: Ricardo Darin, Javier Camara, Dolores Fonzi, Troilo (the dog)

108min | Comedy Drama | Spain

This warm-hearted and sensitive ‘buddy movie’ is told with a gentle humour and frankness that will resonate with those familiar with final days of friends or parents who have reached the end of their time together. TRUMAN is a character driven arthouse drama which features two strong performances from Ricardo Darin as Julian, a slightly passive aggressive Spanish actor who is on his way out, and his laid back and supportive friend Tomas who makes a surprise visit from Canada, to be with him. Essentially a two-hander, TRUMAN enjoyably sidesteps sentimentality opting for an honest and deadpan approach but it also deals with the thorny themes that can surface when life and friendship reaches the end of the road.

In Madrid, Julian (Ricardo Darin) is dying of lung cancer and has decided to put his affairs in order, gradually saying his goodbyes as honestly as he can to his friends and colleagues. On the suggestion of his sister Paula (Dolores Fonzi) his best friend Tomas (Javier Camara) pays him a surprise visit from his home in Canada but rather than wallowing in self-pity, Tomas finds his old pal engaging in displacement activities, and more concerned with the re-homing and emotional welfare of his dog Truman (Troilo) than with his with own chemo treatment, which he has decided to terminate.

The two settle into an agreeable rhythm where Tomas accompanies Julian to his old haunts as he ties up loose ends. It’s not all plain sailing here as ructions do develop but are swiftly smoothed over in the best of humour. In one such scene, Julian approaches a couple of colleagues he sees in a local restaurant, pretending not to notice him – clearly they feel unsure and uncomfortable with the Julian’s situation – and Julian flags this up with dignity and aplomb. And it is these kind of touches that make the film feel authentic and genuine engaging rather than mawkish or morbid.

Insightfully written and beautifully acted by its accomplished Spanish cast, what really makes TRUMAN special is the impressively subtle take from Ricardo Darin, who breezes through every scene with a wry and self-effacing candidness that is perfect for a film that seeks to avoid emotionalism but ends up with some incredibly moving moments accompanied by soulfully scenic visuals of Madrid and Amsterdam (where they visit Julian’s son), and a suitably atmospheric score that somehow feels just right.

The only character that feels out of context and is that of Paula, who’s has an awkward rapport with Tomas from a past involvement and puts a spanner in the works in the final scenes that feels forced and inappropriate in the scheme of it all.

Full of philosophy, TRUMAN explores the suffering behind bereavement with a dark humour that makes this drama enjoyable and full of subtle charm.

OUT ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 6 May 2016

The Arabian Nights III | As Mil e Uma Nottes | The Enchanted One

Director: Miguel Gomes | Cast: Christa Alfaiate, Chico Chapas, Americo Silva; Portugal/France/Ger/Switz |125 min.

In part of three of his trilogy The Arabian Nights, entitled The Enchanted One, Portuguese writer and director Miguel Gomes finally moves Scheherazade (Alfaiate) into the centre of this modern retelling of A Thousand and One Nights, set in a a contemporary Portugal haunted by economic decline. Part III consists of three fables that are more interconnected than in the previous section – The Desolate One.

Scheherazade’s own story is told in the outrageously sumptuous Chateau d’If (against the background of high-rise blocks in working class Marseille). The magnificent setting is further enhanced by DoP Mukdeeprom’s resplendent visuals that picture a costume drama that feels more of a f’ilm-in-a-film’ than the previous segments. Scheherazade’s father, the Grand Vizier (Silva) is kitted out in full Ali Baba regalia complete with bulbous headgear. Frightened that his daughter will run out of stories and finally lose her life, he is also lost in nostalgia for his much-loved wife, now dead; and the images of the two women intermingle in his mind. This clearly artificial and theatrical episode echoes Gomes’ Murnau take in Tabu, but it lacks focus, failing somehow to fit into the whole canon.

Leading to the second segment ‘Baghdad Archipelago’, where Scheherazade meets the paddle man (Charloto), who has 200 children, and Elvis, a robber cum street dancer, Gomes suddenly switches to a Godard mode, where multiple texts overload the attention capacity of the audience, particularly the section with subtitles. Inserts like: “From the wishes and fears of men, stories are born” seem clever, but do not add much value. Most of The Enchanted One is taken up by the 80 minute final segment “Chorus of the Chaffiniches” (shot by Lisa Persson), starring again Chico Chapas (Simao in Part II), as a birdsong expert and bird trapper. These bird trappers are mostly unemployed men, and when we one caught in a net meant for the birds, the symbolism is clear. The story of a Chinese girl, told in voice-over, who came to Portugal at the time of the depression, adds a further layer of melancholia to the trilogy’s ending. Still shrouded in enigma and inconclusive, The Enchanted One somehow loses his way, subtracting rather than adding to the whole trilogy.

The structure of Arabian Nights is obviously the main attraction; the narrative, however inventive at times, would not have carried 381 minutes. Gomes has fused Buñuel’s satire, Brechtian allegories and phantasy elements not unlike Fernando Birri in his South American poetic realism. The stylistic variations, sometimes disperse and are often overwhelming, but Mukdeeprom’s images give the Arabian Nights its unique look, and a visual coherence. Whilst the opulence of Arabian Nights is obviously part of its strength, Gomes might have overreached himself a little. He is strongest in the ethnographic chapters, when he shows serous interest in the lives of real people. His choice of popular music, from Rod Stewart to Lionel Ritchie, underlines this argument: his journey between Italian Neorealism and South American Poetic Realism is strongest, when he chooses a pictorial approach. AS

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE IN SELECTED CINEMAS FROM 6 MAY 2016

Talking about EVOLUTION with Lucile Hadzihalilovic

French filmmaker Lucile Hadzihalilovic, won the Jury Prize for Best Cinematography at San Sebastian and Stockholm last year 2015 for her marine-based fantasy Horror outing EVOLUTION. Here she talks to Matthew Turner about how teenage appendicitis sparked the original idea for the feature.

Lucile Hadzihalilovic (LH): Well, at the very beginning it was just the boy and his mother and the hospital and this idea that the mother was taking her son, who is beginning to grow up, to kind of get another child. But I think when I think back to where it comes from, I think it’s a very autobiographical film. It really came from my own childhood, I would say, my fears, my expectations and especially, when I was ten or eleven, there was a moment – so I was going to become a teenager and I had appendicitis, so I had to go to the hospital. And it was just a normal experience, like many other children have. But it’s so strange this thing, that you are in this hospital with adults who are touching and opening your body and cutting something out of it and this strange pain in the belly etc. And at the same time, this idea that I was going to have my period very soon and become a teenager, so I think these were different elements that where linked at that time. So I think it’s based on that time and then my life and this fears about metamorphosis, about pregnancy. So this is where the idea comes from.

MJT: In the hospital waiting room, there wasn’t a big aquarium with lots of starfish in it?

LH: Maybe! Maybe there was and I didn’t remember at the time, but I remember through the film. But it’s funny, because the ocean came afterwards – at the beginning it was just the hospital and I thought, okay, it’s in the city. But suddenly I realised that it should be on the seaside. And of course the ocean brings the perfect setting for the story. And then it also gives room to explore deeper feelings, maybe more primitive feelings and of course linked to the mother, to the womb, so they are a kind of lost paradise but at the same time it’s an amazing place but it’s also kind of scary and really mysterious. And the mysterious aspect of it was really very much what I was looking for, for the film. It’s like a subject by itself, in a way, the mystery of the world and all the changing.

MJT: Where were the locations for the film?

LH: We shot the film in the Canary Islands, in one of the Canary Islands, which is called Lanzarote. And when I wrote the script I didn’t know these places, but one of the producers knew them and he thought that it would be a very good place to shoot the film, for budgetary reasons, but also for artistic reasons. And he was totally right because the great thing in this island is this volcanic seaside, very black and very dramatic and at the same time there is the strength of the sea with the wind and the waves. And this village, which is both familiar and a bit strange. I was looking for this ambiguity, this ambivalence and for me it was very important that the place was very attractive but at the same time gives a kind of anxiety, this feeling of isolation – I think it’s very much about also being isolate, about being separated from the world and still kind of being in the realms of motherhood. So i felt that really, in this landscape. we had really very little to do to have this feeling of being in another reality, very close to ours.

MJT: How do you see the film’s relationship to your previous film, Innocence?

LH: I know that it really looks like there are many, many similarities, to the point where people ask me if it’s like a diptych. I really didn’t think about it like that, because it wasn’t like, ‘I’ve done the girls, now I’m going to do the boys’. It wasn’t like that. It was more again, the very beginning of this script was even before Innocence and it was, as I said, a more intimate story with the boy and his mother. And I thought that it was more interesting with a boy, more striking, more nightmarish, more abnormal. And I also felt that I could portray myself as a boy rather than as a girl, in this situation. If it had been a teenager, it wouldn’t have been the same, but as a child, I thought it worked. So it didn’t come from this idea of a group of boys, it was more like Nicolas and his mother and the boy’s fear, and then I developed the idea of this whole community around them and maybe it has been influenced by Innocence, even if I really tried to go somewhere else with more narrative and this one is more of a genre film. So I tried to do something else, but I really see the similarities and also this microcosm, which is both kind of paradise and prison. And also the weird biology elements. Of course, in Evolution, it’s dark, it’s much darker than Innocence, but there’s also a kind of moment of feeling of liberation and joy, like at the end with the nurse under the water that maybe is a bit similar to that moment with the fountain at the end of Innocence, and then also this water element. And again, it’s a coming of age story. That one is more like a disturbed one, but it was not really on purpose, it just came by itself.

MJT: I certainly think Innocence prepares you for EVOLUTION, in a way. So if you’ve seen Innocence, you’re already prepared for the rhythms and moods of EVOLUTION. So you haven’t considered a trilogy then?

LH: But what could it be now, if it’s a trilogy? I guess that with children, what is interesting for me with children is that I can create kind of a new, different universe, because they are still open, quite new in the world, so they don’t know very much, so they make their own links and they are kind of creative, So I guess what would interest me in other films would be maybe to work on some kind of madness that permits also to create a world by itself. I mean to mix dreams and reality. It’s a kind of artificial narration, I guess, to have a character that guide you to this kind of thing. So with children it’s easy for me to do it. Maybe someone else has to deal with madness or so, I don’t know. So in that way, there could be the third chapter.

MJT: How much research did you do into the mating rituals of starfish?

LH: In fact, we did a lot. I know we don’t see much in the film, really, but with my co-writer, at some point we really developed much more of the script about this universe, who exactly these women are and what their relationship is with the starfish. And we imagined things like the starfish, at the very beginning because it’s a very familiar motif, like these images of children playing with starfish gives the impression of happiness. Then if you really look at the starfish it’s such a strange animal and very far away from the kind of being we are and it has a lot of interesting characteristics that we had a whole back story for, where they could resist radioactivity, they can regenerate themselves, and also it’s a very, very primitive animal that has been on the Earth since…for a very long time – I don’t remember exactly how long. So yeah, we did a lot of research and it was also very exciting to see how they reproduce and what about the larvae and many of these marine creatures are very fascinating because they are so kind of alien. So this is the kind of research we did to feed ourselves, to feed our imaginations, rather than really being very scientific about it. And then I had to cut a lot of things in the script for budget reasons, so many details disappeared. And a few of those things were about the starfish.

MJT: What kind of things did you have to cut out? Was there anything in particular that you were sorry to see go?

LH: At the end, maybe it’s because I really don’t want to be sorry about what I cut, because it’s how it was, but there is a whole other layer in the film that was including other people, other sets, other scenes, more special effects, also, but it was not like one scene which was too expensive, no, it was really a kind of other narrative layer – probably this layer would have brought more explanation, somehow, not really explanation in the way that – it’s not who are the people that are doing these things, it’s more like there are more links, who these women are. But maybe it’s also an element that we have developed through the years because it has been very difficult to finance the film, so many times we had some reaction from people saying, ‘Oh, we don’t understand, why this, why that?’ So at some point the producer wanted me to make it more explicit, etc. So we developed it a little bit more, but also we thought it was a very dangerous path to go down, because it could have just killed the film to explain it all, because at the end it’s so not logical, it’s more like a dream, like a nightmare, it’s more like elements from the unconscious rather than a sci-fi, very logical explanation, and so it was very difficult to do that. But nevertheless, we had many elements and one at the end we had to cut again because it was too expensive. Probably it was all these additional elements that were easier to cut, because then the heart of the project was not really in these things. So it went back more to something more like a nightmare, like a dream, more oneric, rather than a moral, sci-fi thing. So there was just a little hint of it.

MJT: How important is the colour scheme to the film, the use of colours? Are they symbolic in some way?

LH: No, it was more like feelings. For instance, I very much wanted the film to be very colourful, even if we had just black and white landscape outside of the water and not so much colour in the clothes etc. So I felt the sea should be very colourful because when you see these creatures on the water or in the weeds, they have a lot of colours, very strong colours sometimes, and this is what is so exciting about shooting under the water. So I knew that I could have some colours and some kind of exuberant moment in the film. And then there is this colour of the green of the sea, and then that. should help us in the hospital to get the sea back, in a way. So we had these green walls that bring the feeling of the sea from the colour. And then there was of course the red starfish, and red is always a dramatic colour and a very strong one, especially if you don’t have so many other colours, so we had the green and the red of the starfish and then we needed to continue this red a bit, and so we had this red bathing suit on the child and yeah, it’s a way to underline or to dramatise a few moments but it’s not like a symbol.

MJT: Were there any particular visual influences on the film, in terms of maybe other films, or paintings or anything like that?

LH. Yes. I think probably the main influences visually were more like from paintings, from the surrealism, like Chirico (an Italian painter from the ’20s and ’30s), for this village where the presence of the architecture is very strong, very dramatic, this idea of a sunny place with long, enigmatic shadows or things like that. So Chirico and also painters like Max Ernst, Tanguy or even Dali, because they have painted the seaside a lot as a very alien place, but also very organic and I was really trying to be as organic as possible in this film. So yes, I had these kind of visual references. As for films, I didn’t have many references, consciously, I mean – there was one – Who Can Kill A Child? Again, not for the story but for the mood, like this white village, with empty streets and only children, so it was a bit strange. That was maybe the main conscious influence of a film that I had. And then I think there is another one that was very, very different visually, but it was more about the mood, it was Eraserhead. For instance, I always felt that we really shouldn’t have a creature, but a puppet that looked like a baby. It’s really far from being as great as the one in Eraserhead, but this was the reference, not to have the same thing, but to have a very physical presence that looked real.

MJT: What was the most difficult thing to get right?

LH: Well, it was difficult to structure the story, because I really began with feelings, situations, emotions, visuals, sounds and elements, so at some point we really had to make a story out it, to have these images that happen, so there was a difficulty there and I was very lucky to be able to work with Alante Kavaite, my co-writer – she helped me a lot, in structuring all this material. But probably the main problem was the one I was telling you about, when people were saying, ‘We don’t understand this film, what kind of film is it, is it a genre film, is it something else?’ So we really tried to make them understand. For instance, the ending was also – not for me, because for me it was really like what it is in the film, always – we should arrive at a particular place, but it’s not back to reality or it’s not a happy ending. It’s, okay, he has escaped from the island, but maybe now it’s another cycle. But it was difficult because people thought they wanted a kind of explanation or a definitive ending, ‘So, is it that or is it that? Was it true or was it not true? Where are the facts?’ So it was difficult to deal with these things without destroying the film. So the difficulty was really to try in the script to make people understand what the film was about and give a feel for the nature of the film without giving too much explanation. Like, okay, it’s metaphorical but we can’t really explain it or show you what the metaphor is about. It’s not like someone’s dream and suddenly it’s a boy who is in hospital and he’s dreaming of this island, no. But at one point we were kind of being pushed to do things like that, to be more explicit, so that balance was difficult to achieve.

MJT: Do you have a particular favourite scene or moment in the film?

LH: I guess because it was a shot that I was not there for when it was done – it’s probably the underwater shots made by the diver who was like a second unit. So we said we would like these kinds of things with weeds and so on, but I’m not a diver and neither was the DP, so at some point we had to let him do it by himself and.he came back with these amazing images and this was like, ‘Oh, wow’. They were a great surprise and I was so happy about that – I thought it would really bring a lot to the film and it was really exactly what I was looking for. So yes, it’s the underwater scenes that you see right at the beginning.

MJT: The casting is interesting because you have a couple of well-known actors…

LH: In fact, Julie-Marie Parmentier is well known, because she has done many films now, and Roxane Duran is more at the beginning of her career, but she made The White Ribbon with Michael Haneke. I thought of Julie-Marie straught away, because I think she’s really special – I think she is a very good actress and she has different qualities – she can be very attractive, but also kind of ugly, also mysterious and I think you feel like she has a real inner life. I knew that she could be kind of scary, but in a very minimalistic way and I also think that she’s very charismatic and she doesn’t need to have to read dialogue to create something. And it’s a bit the same with Roxane, the great thing with her is that she’s really sweet and she brings a very kind of human element into this atmosphere that works very well. Before meeting her I had thought that the nurse should have been scarier, in a way but when I met her I thought that it was really interesting to have someone so sweet, even if she’s doing sometimes scary things. And she’s a bit like a child, she has something that’s still very child-like, and I was really happy with them. And I also wanted to have this mood, because it’s not about performance, it’s more about the mood they give and they fit very well to this landscape.

MJT: And was it difficult to find Max Brebant?

LH: It was not really easy, of course because there is this aspect of swimming, that was one thing. And then the story might have been difficult for some parents, rather than for the children. What was very good with Max is that, in fact, he was thirteen years old when we did the film, so I think he had this sometimes more mature expression, but also his very tiny body, so he’s kind of fragile. And I really liked him very much,I found him very charismatic and very sweet, in a way, with his big face and small body – he had a fragility and a sweetness that was very interesting. Before shooting I thought that I was going to maybe try to make him express more fear, but it was really difficult and we had so little time to shoot, so we couldn’t spend a lot of time on each scene, so I decided to play it more like a blank expression, as if he was sleeping with his eyes open or something and that, and I think it works at the end because he’s very charismatic, for me, at least. So we found him quite late in the process of casting but we couldn’t begin the casting too soon, because they change quickly at that age, so we just tried to find them six or seven months before shooting.

MJT: What’s your next project?

LH: My next project, I’m a bit scared now of not choosing the right one, or choosing the one that would be too difficult and would take me too many years to find the financing, so I don’t want to talk about it, really, because I don’t want to jinx it, but I’m working on different things.

EVOLUTION IS ON GENERAL RELEASE AT ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 6 MAY 2016

Knight of Cups (2015)

Director|Writer: Terrence Malick

Cast: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Brian Dennehy, Antonio Banderas, Freida Pinto

118min | Drama | US

There is still a great deal to admire here in this saccharine series of simpering stories, largely thanks to Emmanuel Lubezki visual wizardry. But Malick’s style, which scratched the edges of mannerism in To The Wonder, has now broken fully into the confines of cliché in a drama whose intention is to evoke the tinseltown tedium of the Big City seen through the existential crisis and subsequent epiphany of its self-regarding central character, a writer, played by Christian Bale.

Terrence Malick succeeds in offering up another empty experience, ushered in by a pompous voiceover with John Gielgud reading from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and leading to a similarly swirling set of images and thoughts that shaped To The Wonder. emanating from a Hallmark Greetings style storyboard, and ultimately feeling meaningless to the thrust of the narrative. LA’s beautiful people float and tease to a backdrop of glittering sunsets and show-house interiors. Lovers smooch and flirt as they dance into the sea, fully clothed, or run their fingers sensuously through the limpid waters of infinity swimming pools, in luxury locations.

Rick (Bale) is good-looking, narcissistic and – we are led to believe – successful, but his marriage to his medical director wife Nancy (a shimmering Cate Blanchett) has faltered, and so has his relationship with his father (Brian Dennehy) and brother (Wes Bentley). And the tragedy of his trashed apartment, turned over by robbers, is treated with the same dreamlike delicacy of touch as the moments where gorgeous girls trip lightly behind him in their filigree frocks. Despite this seemingly minor setback, Rick continues to caruse and cajole with his coy admirers in a series of glitzy hotels and parties, occasionally contemplating his life in the desolation of the desert or showing his spiritual side by consulting a Tarot reader for guidance.

According to Tarot legend, the Knight of Cups is a charmingly emotional youth who is willing to please, but naive as a puppy. And the problem with Rick is that, by the end of the story, rather than evolving into a real person, he still appears to have the emotional depth and integrity of a new born despite Malick’s desperate attempts to have us believe otherwise, by association with his folie de grandeur lifestyle and literary success. MT

BERLINALE 2015 REVIEW | NOW OUT ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE VENUES from 6 May 2016

Johnny Guitar (1954) Blu-ray release

Director: Nicholas Ray Writer: Philip Jordan. Cast: Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden, Mercedes McCambridge, Scott Brady, Ward Bond, Ernest Borgnine, Royal Dano, John Carradine, Ben Coope | 110min | Western | US

Nicholas Ray saw Johnny Guitar as a first step to independence. Little did he know he would be engulfed in a battle for control of the film with its star, Joan Crawford. She literally had the script re-written during the shoot to please her ego, and to denigrate co-star Mercedes McCambridge who was married to one of Crawford’s former lovers.

Vienna (Crawford), a saloon owner, is nearly bankrupt but she is waiting for the planned railroad to boost her profits. But the townspeople, led by Emma (McCambridge) want her to move on, suspecting her of the murder of Emma’s brother. With her four friends she terrorises the town with a gang led by Dancing Kid (Brady). When Kid’s gang holds up a stagecoach and kills a man, Emma wants to hang Vienna. But she is rescued by her former lover, Johnny Guitar (Hayden), and erstwhile famous gunslinger Johnny Logan. Emma burns the saloon down and after a long chase, Vienna gets her revenge.

The shooting of this cult film with its outstanding colour images by the legendary DOP Harry Stradling (Guys and Dolls) and Peggy Lee’s title song could not have been more problematic. Johnny Guitar was a project for four clients of the Lew Wasserman agency: Roy Chanslor, who wrote the novel of the same name, published in 1953, was the first. He dedicated the book to Joan Crawford, who had just finished her comeback film Mildred Pierce. Script writer Philip Jordan was a front for many blacklisted writers, particularly Ben Maddow, who wrote the The Naked Jungle and Men in War under Jordan’s name. “Just like Wasserman sold film packages, Jordan sold script packages with a guarantee of quality”. Jordan worked with Ray during 1953 in Hollywood, their script run up to 200 pages, Ray depositing thirty pages with Cinematheque Francaise. Shooting started in mid October 1953 at Sedona, Arizona, where Republic had a Western Street, a permanent set. McCambridge, who played the villain, recalled in her memories “I felt I had a certain edge because a gentleman with whom [Crawford] had had some association, to the degree that she has given him gold-cuff-links, was now my husband”.

When Ray was filming McCambridge in the scene where she addresses the posse to hunt Vienna down, he sent Crawford back to camp. But after he finished the scene, he saw Miss Crawford sitting up on the hill watching. “I should have known some hell was going to break loose”. That night, Crawford asked for “five more scenes”, having strewn McCambridge’s clothes all over the road. As Jordan said, “They were on location, and Joan Crawford decided she wasn’t going to make the picture. They were shooting about 2 weeks without her. So Wasserman called me up and he flew out here.”

According to Ray, Crawford “got some crazy ideas. she said she wanted the man’s role.” Crawford commented: “I’m [like] Clark Gable, [but] it’s Vienna who has the leading part”. She threatened to leave for good, and the picture would have been finished. In this case, Republic might have gone bankrupt because they were used to making films for $50 000 and Johnny had budget of $2.5m.

Jordan had to rewrite the way Crawford wanted it: neither the novel nor the script mentioned that Johnny and Vienna had known each other before. And this way added much more weight to their relationship in the completedfkm. Jordan decided to let Hayden play Crawford’s part with her having the shoot-out at the end, killing Emma/ McCambridge. The 44 shooting days were very traumatic for Ray and as he was directing his next film, Run for Cover, he wrote to his actress friend Hanna Axmann: “The atrocity of Johnny Guitar is finished and released to dreadful reviews and great financial success. Nausea was my reward, and I am glad you were not there to share the suffering”. But there was no pleasing Crawford, in her autobiography she wrote, blaming McCambdrige and lashing out at Ray: “The responsibility lies with an actress who hadn’t worked for ten years [McCambridge had won an Oscar two years earlier]. There is no excuse for making such a bad film”. AS

ON BLURAY FROM 20 SEPTEMBER 2021 | MASTERS OF CINEMA

Son of Saul (Saul Fia) 2015 |Grand Prix | FIPRESCI Award| Oscar Best Foreign Language Film 2016

Director: László Nemes

Cast: Géza Röhrig, Levente Molnar, Urs Rechn, Todd Charmont, Sandor Zsoter.

107min Wartime Drama Hungary

László Nemes learnt his craft under the legendary Hungarian director, Bela Tarr. His feature debut is a shocking and claustrophobic thriller exploring the little known lives of the Sonderkommando, Jews who were forced, under pain of death, to clean up the gas chambers during the final days of Auschwitz in 1944.

Clearly, Nemes is an inventive talent in the making. His restless camera tells a secret and conspiratorial story in pin-sharp close-up while in the background, out-of-focus atrocities are seen unfolding in the Nazi concentration camp and its surroundings. The action focuses on Saul (Géza Röhrig), a man whose mission is to herd his own people into massive ovens and lock them in as their pitiful cries and raging emerges.

One boy survives the onslaught, but is subsequently suffocated by a German officer. Saul appears to recognise him as his own son and sets off in desperation to find a Rabbi to say prayers and bury him according to the Jewish faith. A constant whispering and bartering in going on before our eyes, and while Saul is bribing his fellow inmates with golden and precious personal effects (from the dead) jewellery, an escape plan is also brewing.

But unlike his master of slow-motion, Nemes offers up a fast-moving and disorientating action thriller. Sometimes the camera is behind his shoulder focusing on the chattering and internal conspiracy between the inmates, others it focuses on the background, where German officers bait and bully the Sonderkommandos. Dead bodies are dragged by and thrown onto trucks in blurry, soft-focus. In one scene, at entire battle is going on in the hazy distance, where prisoners are being shot and forced into open burial pits as fires rage and gunfire rings out. It feels as it Nemes is running two contemporaneous film sets; one in the foreground and one of horrific slaughter and anihilation in the near distance. There is a remarkable single take, in pristine focus, where Saul carries the body of his “son” into a river and swims to the other side.

This is a work of supreme craftsmanship but also a harrowing and devastating tribute to the Sonderkommandos, who knew their lives would also end in slaughter, when their job was done and Géza Röhrig’s performance rings of both subtle defiance and acceptance. The final scene seems to allow a chink of light and hope into this dreadful darkness, as his face lights up into a gradual smile in the middle of a verdant forest.

Son of Saul serves as a positive revival of the Holocaust with other recent films such as Night Will Fall and Shoah. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE NATIONWIDE | OSCAR WINNER FOR BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM 2016 | FIPRESCI PRIZE WINNER CANNES 2016 | FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW | CANNES 2015

A Flickering Truth (2015)

Writer|Director: Pietra Brettkelly | Documentary | 91 min

In cinéma vérité style, New Zealand director Pietra Brettkelly (Maori Boy Genius) follows Kabul film archivist Ibrahim Arify in his struggle to safeguard the security of the treasured Afghan film archive that has so far avoided destruction by the Taliban both during and after their time in Afghanistan. A FLICKERING TRUTH is a story that will interest film historians and those with a penchant for social culture and heritage.

What makes the documentary watchable is the painstaking passion of those involved in film preservation and cinema history which provides a fascinating window into the country’s past pictured in Jacob Bryant’s superbly crafted visuals and accompanied by a wistfully atmospheric soundtrack by award-winning British composer Benjamin Wallfisch (12 Years A Slave).

Arify is a masterful presence who knows how to deal with the locals when he arrives at the dusty location where film stock is in danger of spilling out and being damaged by the elements. It gradually becomes clear he has a mammoth task on his hands if the archive is to be saved. Under the Taliban (as under Hitler during The Third Reich) film and art were considered a decadent element of Western society and those in charge of the archives were forces to burn stock in massive bonfires. Fortunately, prudent archivists managed to hide their precious films which were remained cunningly boarded up for posterity.

It also emerges that Arify, is also a filmmaker who was imprisoned during the Mujahideen era and fled to Germany to seek refuge. Now back home in Afghanistan, he gently takes his Uncle Isaaq Yousif to task. The old man has been a custodian at the archives for over 30 years, and Arify accuses him and others of not being proactive in film conservation.

A FLICKERING TRUTH unearths some real treasures: apart from vibrant cult classics from a bygone era, the films also show young people dancing to a band during the roaring ’70s with a young Arify playing the guitar. On a more tragic note, archive footage bears witness to the bombing of Kabul in 1992, leading to a challenging and uncertain future for the country. It’s sad to think that some of these films show a past that feels more advanced than the present here in contempo Kabul – we see young boys playing football in fundamentalist attire in contrast to the fashionable Western clothes worn by the male and female ‘disco dancers’ nearly 50 years previously.

Having secured the archive, Arify is off to Germany again, fearing the worst for the future and bidding farewell to the personnel at Afghan Films. Despite the danger of coming face to face with the Taliban, some of the more plucky film archivists have decided to tour the country with a selection of films. The aim is to show the younger generation how their world used to look in a seemingly modern past. But these kids are not the only ones who will look on aghast. And this is where Brettkelly’s documentary moves on to the world stage, transcending its subject, and becoming something much important that resonates at a global level. While sharing the filmic glory days of the past with the Afghan nation, a more fascinating picture unfolds before our Western eyes: that of a medieval landscape and a society that has returned to the Dark Ages in a future where fundamentalism has taken over and women have entirely disappeared behind the veil. MT

OUT ON RELEASE AT CURZON CINEMAS and SELECTED FROM 29 April 2016

Heavens Knows What (2015)

Directors: Benny and Josh Safdie Screenplay: Ronald Bronstein | Josh Safdi | Writer: Arielle Holmes (book)

Cast: Caleb Landry Jones, Arielle Holmes, Buddy Duress, Ron Braunstein, Eleonor Hendricks

94min | Drama | US

It takes one to know one, and former junkie Arielle Holmes has been there and survived to tell the story. HEAVENS KNOWS WHAT evocatively re–creates the drug-adled world of her past in a ‘fucked-up’ and fuzzy portrait of the dark side of addiction in her native New York.

This tension-fuelled cinéma vérité mood piece submerges us in the squallid subculture of flaky friends and foul-mouthed existence. Even love is sordid and brutally raw as pictured here by brothers Benny and Josh Safdie. But HEAVENS is also poetic and tragically moving seen through Sean Price Williams’ soulful city panoramas and Isao Tomita’s trance-like and explosive original music.

The film opens with Holmes’ character Harley and her sociopathic lover Ilya Caled Landry Jones kissing each other on the tarmac before he shuts down emotionally and viciously rejects her without explanation. Clearly out of control, Ilya’s only comfort lies on the moral high ground where he hunkers down with a soiled blanket. Harley’s subsequent suicide attempt leads to her seeking refuge with an older woman and she while attempts to re-connect with Ilya, she joins her other junkie mates shooting the breeze, shooting up and throwing up..

Despite its slender plot and sketchy characterisation of these lost lowlifes, who mostly need a stiff kick up the backside rather than a stiff drink, this is a film that wallows in the angst-ridden atmosphere it successfully creates. Clever acting effortlessly conveys this milieu and you don’t want to go there.MT

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 29 APRIL

Hitchcock|Truffaut (2015) | Home Ent release

Director: Kent Jones

80min | Documentary | US

Hitchcock |Truffaut is a treat for cineastes and mainstream audiences who will appreciate a well-made documentary that gets behind the screen with two of cinema’s legends: Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut. In 1962, after an exchange of letters declaring their mutual admiration for one another, François invited ‘the master of suspense to take part in a filmed interview, via an interpreter, that resulted in the eponymous book that became a film bible for critics, filmmakers and cineastes alike.

Kent Jones has really excelled himself with this epicurean delight for film-buffs everywhere. Not only do we get to meet ‘Hitch’ and Truffaut but also David Fincher, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Wes Anderson and other top-drawer directors opining on the subject of how Hitchcock influenced and formed them, cinematically-speaking. Hitchcock /Truffaut plays out like a masterclass in filmmaking – all in 80 glorious minutes – making you want to rush home and watch Hitch’s entire oeuvre in a darkened room.

To be fair, Truffaut, the young ‘Cahiers’ film critic turned New Wave director, doesn’t really get much of a look-in here. And fate would sadly cut short his career when he died, aged 52, in his directing prime. We see him brimming with enthusiasm as the legendary 63 year old pro holds court with his wry and witty repartee.

Kent Jones honed his craft working in television and later went on to programme the New York Film Festival before winning the prestigious Peabody Award for A Letter to Elia in 2010 and Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows. With Hitchcock|Truffaut, he makes the valid point that the book established the theory that Hollywood fare stands up to the same kind of artistic scrutiny and attention as arthouse films that were being made in Europe at the time. Kent also shows how Truffaut wanted to release Hitchcock from his reputation as a light entertainer when actually he was very much a visually-orientated auteur who ‘wrote with his camera’ and established how filmmaking is very much about controlling and extending time while maintaining the purity of silent cinema and of the image; about creating reality from the manipulation of light and image.

The talking head interviews are informative and to the point; never outstaying their welcome: Olivier Assayas, Kiyoshi Kurasawa, Arnaud Desplechin, Paul Schrader, James Gray, David Fincher and Wes Anderson, all giving succinct pearls of wisdom on how Hitchcock and Truffaut inspired them on the subject of filmmaking and directing. Fascinating footage and clips from both Truffaut and Hitchcock’s films will further add to the cinematic allure and have you trying to guess the identity of each film.

Jones then proceeds to analyse, at some length, Vertigo and Psycho, while offering insight into Hitchcock’s own psyche, and showing how Psycho was a game-changer in the history of modern filmmaking, ushering an era of uncertainty and marking a paradigm shift in perceptions during the early 60s a time of public insecurity as a result of the Vietnam War. Kent shows how the interview left Hitchcock re-considering his controlling methods of working with actors (“Actors are the cattle”) such as when he ordered Monty Clift to look up to the Hotel (in I Confess) when Monty considered it vital to look at the crowd. Hitchcock’s will prevailed but this leads us into another interesting debate.

There is a voiceover narration from Bob Balaban (Close Encounters) which accompanies the documentary, making this an invaluable and complex piece of filmmaking useful both as an academic tool and an absorbing and fact-filled addition to the documentary archive on Hitchcock. MT

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 4 MARCH 2016

https://youtu.be/0JuhPG-YA40

Florence Foster Jenkins (2015)

Director: Stephen Frears Writer: Nicholas Martin

Cast: Meryl Streep, Hugh Grant, Rebecca Ferguson, Simon Helberg, David Haig

110min | Drama | UK

Meryl Streep plays celebrity croaker Florence Foster Jenkins in this chipper tragicomedy about an heiress who financed herself to operatic stardom in 1940s New York.

In common with its real life diva, Stephen Frears’ sentimental celebration of amateur light operatics hits a few bum notes but mostly stays in tune with its central characters; a circle of ageing aficionados, wannabes and has-beens who thrived on puff and tea parties in New York, while ordinary people were fighting the Second World War. Ridiculed for her lack of rhythm, poor pitch and tone deafness, Meryl Streep’s Florence is also bald and riddled with tertiary syphilis thanks to her first husband Dr Jenkins, whom she describes as an alley-cat.

The film opens in her opulent apartment in 1944, with Florence in the happier days of her dotage fawned over by an adoring second husband and manager, failed actor St Clair Bayfield (Hugh Grant), living secretly with his lover (Rebecca Ferguson) in a nearby Brooklyn Brownstone, paid for by his wife. So everything about Foster’s life was fake and yet, naively or narcissistically (and it feels very much like the former with Streep’s sincere treatment) she constructed her own romantic fantasy, perpetuated by disillusion or delusion, and funded by her vast inheritance. Frears’ film is very much an intimate and stagey chamber piece with the occasional foray into the locale (Victorian Liverpool and London). Clever use is made of special effects to achieve the Manhattan backdrop of Carnegie Hall and The Verdi Club, where Florence’s wealthy musical aficionados and luminaries- including Arturo Toscanini – gathered for their tea dances and soirées.

A light-hearted French version of the story Marguerite, transposed her story to 1920s Paris but lacks the emotional arc of Frears’ drama which feels convincing and surprisingly moving with its world class performances from Hugh Grant and Meryl Streep and an eloquently witty script by Nicholas Martin, a writer best known for his prodigious TV work.

So protected from the coal face of criticism courtesy of Bayfield, Florence decides to venture out into the public domain, hiring a talented young pianist Cosmé McMoon (The Big Bang Theory regular Simon Helberg) as her accompanist. After hearing a rousing tribute on the radio, she dedicates the concert to U.S. soldiers recently returned from the war and offers them free tickets. But despite support from her regular fans, and the sympathetic soldiers, press reaction is derisory and ultimately detrimental and Florence sadly suffers a setback.

With her unflattering wig and portly padding – Meryl Streep is a dead ringer for Tintin’s Madame Castefiore. Judiciously, we don’t hear her sing until the second act – allowing Frears and Martin to set the scene and develop the emotional dynamic between the central characters. Although this is a light-hearted role for Streep she delivers it with affection and aplomb managing to be vulnerable and ridiculous at the same time. Hugh Grant is impressive in his first ‘senior’ role swinging into his suave persona with spectacular ease in every scene and evoking a genuinely- felt affection for his wife in each loving gesture while masterfully managing her detractors – he even takes to the dancefloor. But the film’s real discovery is Simon Helberg, whose intricate facial gestures echo every subtle nuance of its tortured inner monologue from anxiety to rank disbelief, while verbally remaining delicately aloof and discrete. Florence Foster Jenkins is an enjoyable romp rather than an elaborate exposé of its eccentric heroine. The film will certainly go down well with the mainstream crowd but may be lost on younger audiences or the more aspiring arthouse crowd. MT

OUT NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE

Demolition (2015)

Director: Jean-Marc Vallée Writer: Bryan Sipe

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Naomi Watts, Chris Cooper, Judah Lewis

101min | Drama | Canada

Québecois director Jean-Marc Vallée has a lively take on deconstructing bereavement in this quirky family saga sewn together by an inspired central performance from Jake Gyllenhaal, as a Wall Street banker and lateral thinker who loses his wife in a car accident that changes his life and adds intensity and insight to the harrowing and often surprising experience of human mourning.

While those around him are falling part, Davis (Gyllenhaal) fronts up well to this personal tragedy until cracks gradually appear in the facade of his outwardly shiny former existence – a fabulous house, wealth and a happy marriage to Julia (Heather Lind)- to reveal that his stoicism actually conceals a secret relief. DEMOLITION opens as a potentially depressing tale of loss that slowly morphs into a darkly humorous and enjoyable journey that transports him from death to destruction, then redemption and eventually emotional freedom. Despite a rather meandering middle section, there is tremendous energy and spirit here that carries the film through to its affecting denouement.

DEMOLITION also features gutsy performances from Chris Cooper, a slightly underwritten Naomi Watts and feisty newcomer Judah Lewis. Jean Marc Vallée always brings some something fresh and frisky spirituality to his filmmaking, as we saw in Cafe de Flore, C.R.A.Z.Y and Dallas Buyers Club. As such, Vallée has an appealing knack of connecting with his audiences through characters whose trials and tribulations bring them to a better place of greater awareness, in stories that inspire and often resonate with his audiences.

The theme of DEMOLITION is a case in point. Scripter Bryan Sipe tackles the thorny issues of disbelief, anger, sorrow and finally acceptance that accompany bereavement with some inventive touches: Davis’ grief is processed ‘out of the box’ and in unexpected and often inappropriate displacement activities; when his boss and father-in-law (Chris Cooper) suggests that Davis take his life apart in order to rebuild it without Julia he responds by dismantling his office computer and destroying his furniture. Instead of tears and tantrums with his friends and family, he destroys furniture and reaches out to complete strangers – an episode with a hospital vending machine ten minutes after his wife’s death leads to a lengthy correspondence with Karen, a customer service adviser (Watts) who ends up becoming part of his life and very much involved in his emotional healing.

DEMOLITION follows a linear narrative but regular DoP Yves Belanger cleverly uses jumpcuts and rapid flashbacks to fill in a backstory that initially leads us to believe that Davis is some kind of sociopath or, at least, suffering from Asperger’s syndrome; clearly he avoids ruminating on his inner demons with a series of personal techniques that keep him in a safe place emotionally – which his family interprets as a lack of feeling for Julia. But the finale seems to bring him to his senses – or even better, and plausibly – a place where his brain is healed so that he is able to feel and react ‘appropriately’ in a finale that is both moving and uplifting. Another tragedy that Davis discovers in the final scenes also brings him emotional peace through a relationship he develops with Karen’s 12-year-old son, Chris (Lewis) – it’s a meeting of minds that cuts both ways in bringing both their characters finally to safety. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE NATIONWIDE

Pink String and Sealing Wax (1945) |Blu-ray |DVD release

Director: Robert Hamer | Cast: Mervyn Johns, Googie Withers, Gordon Jackson | 85mins | Drama | Ealing Studios

In his evocative portrayal of Victorian England, (based on a West End play) Robert Hamer does his best to recreate the draconian outright authority of the family and legal system in an unforgiving tale of emotionally buttoned up men and loose women. In a respectable God-fearing Brighton household a tyrannical husband holds sway. A chemist by profession, Edward Sutton (a masterful Mervyn Johns) has a son David (a peevish Gordon Jackson) who is employed in the business and crosses paths one night with the louche Pearl Bond (an elegant Googie Withers) who is unhappily married to an abusive pub landlord (Garry Marsh) whom she wishes dead. Naturally David has the means at his disposal, but is he desperate enough to help her out. Diana Morgan’s screenplay is a treat along with a sterling British cast, ‘Quality Street’ cossies and perky bonnets aplenty in this black and white Ealing melodrama. MT

THIS EALING CLASSIC IS NOW REMASTERED ON 2K | BLU-RAY DVD & EST ON 25 APRIL 2016 | Part of the ‘Vintage Classics collection’ – showcasing iconic British films, all fully restored and featuring brand new extra content: www.facebook.com/vintageclassicsfilm <http://www.facebook.com/vintageclassicsfilm>

Special Features
• Interview with Joanna McCallum (Googie Withers’s daughter)
• Interview with Melanie Williams (focusing on Women at Ealing)
• Behind the Scenes stills gallery
• Restoration Comparison

PINK STRING AND SEALING WAX is The Digital Film restoration was funded by STUDIOCANAL in collaboration with the BFI’s Unlocking Film Heritage programme (awarding funds from the National Lottery).

Arabian Nights II : The Desolate One (2015)

Director.: Miguel Gomes | Cast: Christa Alfaiate, Chico Chapas, Luisa Cruz

132min |Drama | Portugal/France/Germany/Switzerland

Writer/director Gomes continues on his path of re-writing Scheherazade’s classical stories of Thousand and One Nights with the second part of his trilogy: The Desolate One. After the overwhelming opening salvo of the first part, The Desolate One is perhaps the most audience friendly of the trio: full of humour, self-irony, satire and much less hectoring, the streamlined second part consists of three fables outlining the disgruntlement of Portuguese workers during the financial austerity in the early 21st century, and connecting the present with the past.

Told with subtle irony by Scheherazade (Alfaiate), sometimes residing on a Ferris Wheel, the first tale Chronicle of the Escape of Simao – ‘Without Bowels’ is a gem. Simao (Chapas), an ageing farm worker, who earned his nickname for his life long anorexia, has murdered four women, among them his wife and daughters, and is on the run. In his hideout in the wilderness, he dreams about prostitutes and great banquets. But in spite of his crimes, he becomes a local hero for his Robin Hood style redistribution from rich to poor. Scheherazade blames his crimes on capitalism: “Evil is only a severe tendency of selfishness”.

The second story, titled “The Tears of the Judge” is a burlesque courtroom romp, where the severe judge(Luisa Cruz) presides over a case which starts out with the theft of 13 cows and continues, taking in a series of Chinese mail-order brides, a genie and a machete-wielding human lie detector. The stern judge, who almost loses it due to the complexity and buck-passing of the various witnesses and scenes involving her daughter, who has recently lost her virginity to a man selected by her mother, assuming a guise of domestic servitude which she then relegates her duties. This seems to be a metaphor for continuing misogyny and racial stereotyping in contempo Europe (yet it’s even worse in continents such as Africa, South America and India).

And, if matters aren’t complicated enough, this is the segment that won the ‘Palme Dog’ at Cannes 2015 for Dixie, the Maltese poodle, who here is passed on from one tenant to the next in a housing estate, where even the human residents have difficulties feeding themselves. Somehow there are shades of Chekov in this episode: the eviction notices spread a collective outpouring of melancholia.

Again, DoP’s Mukdeeprom’s sun-dried images are the highlight, producing serenity and beauty in spite of the poverty. Shot on 16mm and 35 mm, his work proves that our eyes, like the film stock, work on an analogue basis. The depth of these images is impossible to recreate with digital, however brilliant the HD. Gomes always tries to change, double and exchange the perspectives: This happens on the levels of images and sound, the mixing of documentation and fiction, the (sometimes overdone) multi-lingual components (which make this part particularly challenging for non-Portuguese-speaking audiences) and finally, in the episodic structure of the whole trilogy, where the actors participate in different episodes underlining the concept of total exchange. The Desolate One is made of legends: yesterday’s and today’s are finding a common platform where Gomes’ poetic realism steers his often unwieldy project to safe shore. AS

THE SECOND PART OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS IS ON RELEASE FROM 29 APRIL 2016 at SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS

Ran (1985) | Shakespeare’s 400th Birthday

Director: Akira Kurasawa

Cast: Tatsuya Nakadai, Akira Terao, Mieko Harada, Yoshiko Miyazaki

162min | War Drama | Japan

RAN is an epic undertaking of extraordinary ambition and the most expensive Japanese film created at the time. Exquisitely delicate, poignantly moving and brutally violent, the wartime drama was Akira Kurasawa’s final masterpiece, his third Shakespeare adaptation – a jidaigeki re-imagining of the literary legend of King Lear – it vibrantly depicts the devastating abdication of a 16th century Sengoku-era warlord in favour of his three sons.

According to tradition, Lord Hidetora (a boldly physical performance from Tatsuya Nakadai) leaves his kingdom to his eldest son, banishing his youngest and most loyal. Tragedy ensues as the eldest son turns against him, encouraged by his wife,, the evil and untrustworthy Kaede (Mieko Harada). Operatic in tone and set on a plain of black volcanic ash, the violent widescreen battle scenes take on a mystically powerful resonance as they play out in silence accompanied by Woman of the Dunes composer Toru Takemitsu’s original orchestral score.

Kurasawa cleverly melds moments of serene beauty – the Buddhist prayer scene on the castle, and Hidetora sleeping under the blossoms of fruit tree – with those of coruscating terror: the horrific blood-soaked images of the burning castle on the slopes of Mount Fuji set against the armies of soldiers who swarm around like coloured ants. There is a searing beauty to the vehement scene where the scheming virago Kaede threatens her brother in law with a symbolic sword, before violently seducing him, demanding he kill his wife and marry her. Much of her performance and that of Hidetora was influenced by Noh theatre, which emphasizes the ruthless, passionate and single-minded nature of these characters. Harnessing the wildness of the weather and some magnificent scenic Japanese locations, RAN – meaning Chaos – was for the most part filmed in long shots with very few close-ups. It also featured hundreds of handmade costumes which took years to design and craft by award-winning designer Emi Kada. Akira Kurosawa is regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. RAN is one of the jewels in his glittering 57 year career. MT

OUT IN SELECTED CINEMAS FROM 1 APRIL | BFI 24 April | BLU-RAY DUAL FORMAT COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA | 2 May 2016

Arabian Nights (2015) | As Mil E Uma Noites | Part 1 The Restless One

Director/Writer: Miguel Gomes

Cast: Christa Alfaiate, Dinarte Branco, Miguel Gomes, Carlotta Cotta, Adriano Luz

Portugal/France/Germany/Switzerland 2015,125 min.

Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes’ three-part epic aims to seduce us with a sorry tale of his native land in crisis due to the economic downtown of the last five years. Is it possible to make a derogatory film beguiling? With ARABIAN NIGHTS not only has he tried to re-invent “political cinema” but also to assimilate a new body of film language where genres are playfully mixed, and the audience is often left gasping in delight, but not always in comprehension.

Inspired by the classic Arabian Nights, Part One is an enigmatic string of stories that aim to encapsulate this time of austerity with an absurdist style embracing socialism realism and surrealism. If you’re hoping for something akin to Tabu (2012) or even Our Beloved Month of August (2008) you will likely be disappointed as this is much more sombre and recalcitrant fare where fables and documentary realism coalesce as often strange bedfellows, infused with the filmmaker’s own anger and sadness peeping through a narrative that gradually makes more sense but still, for the most part, mystifies.

The Restless One begins at a shipyard were the failures of the Portuguese government are apparent at the Viana do Castelo shipyard in Minho: the workers are on strike and a voice-over recounts a past where full employment offered job satisfaction and a meaningful life. As the shipbuilders clash with the anti-strike brigade, the mood turns sombre. At the same time Gomes appears, ruminating on how hornets are destroying the local bee population. Is this a metaphor for the Government and the people?. As if by magic, we are introduced to Scheherazade (Alfaiate), the princess who saved her life each night by telling a tale to make her Sultan wish for another night with her. She is introduced to the sounds of “Perdfidia” (Buñuel), telling three stories to Gomes and his strikers, who listen in rapt attention. The first one is about three bankers who wish for never-ending hard-ons in response to their erectile dysfunction, and end up getting more than they bargained for. The next is about a rooster who nearly comes to a sticky end by crowing at inappropriate moments. The rooster himself then tells a sad story about a love-triangle. Finally, we return to one of the strikers who literally feels sick when trying to tell unhappy tales about his fellow workers. It gradually becomes clear that these wild and disparate stories are all vehicles to describe Portugal’s demise. Gomes tries to re-invent the workers as modern-day crusaders in a fight to save their beloved Portugal. But they are not at all heroic but more melancholic in the style of Kafka – metaphors straight out of ‘The Trial’. Gomes wants the World to view Portugal as a prisoner of capitalism: the stories, old and new, are told to liberate the nation, or least to put off its fate until another day.

In the end, The Restless One has an attractive, experimental charm. Gomes’ choice of DoP, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (who shot Apichatpong Weerasethkul’s Uncle Boonmee), is appropriate for his drama: Mukdeeprom has an eye for details, his sumptuous images creating a unique cosmos of poetic realism. The colour palette ranges from the outrageous to the spooky. The Restless One attempts perhaps too much, but is never dull. It is a fairy tale for our times: often as puzzling, incomplete, enigmatic and contradictory as contemporary life. AS/MT

NOW OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS | ICA | Curzon Bloomsbury

69th Cannes Film Festival 2016 – preview

The 69th Cannes Film Festival presents its most ambitious and diverse selection yet with a Jury presided by Australian Director George Miller (Mad Max); Arnaud DESPLECHIN (Director, Writer – France); Kirsten DUNST; Valeria GOLINO; Mads MIKKELSEN; László NEMES (Director); Vanessa PARADIS; Katayoon SHAHABI (Producer – Iran); Donald SUTHERLAND (Actor – Canada).

Woody Allen’s glitzy festival opener CAFE SOCIETY, starring Kristen Stewart, hits the Croisette on May 11 for a ten day competition line-up with other Hollywood regulars such as Steven Spielberg with his screen version of Roald Dahl’s The BFG (out of competion), Sean Penn with THE LAST FACE starring Charlize Theron and George Clooney in Jodie Foster’s financial thriller MONEY MONSTER.

The American auteurs will also be there to celebrate: Jim Jarmusch with a double bill of GIMME DANGER, an in-depth music biopic with Iggy Pop and PATERSON starring an eclectic pairing of Golshifteh Farahani and Adam Driver and Jeff Nichols with his interracial drama LOVING, based on a polemical legal case that rocked America in the ’50s.

Palme D’Or Veterans, Ken Loach, who celebrates his 80th birthday this year, will be back to cut through the glamour of the Croisette with some stark British social realism in I, DANIEL BLAKE and the Dardennes Brothers with THE UNKNOWN GIRL about a patient who refuses live-saving surgery and the doctor who sets out to investigate why.

Almodóvar’s JULIETA (right) has already opened in Spain to mixed reviews. His most ambitious film to date travels round Spain to tell a tale Hickcockian tale of motherhood and loss adapted from three interrelated short stories by Canadian author Alice Munro from her collection Runaway.

This year Britain has not one but two films in competition: Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank) brings AMERICAN HONEY, that follows a group of teenage workers across America starring Shia LaBoeuf and newcomer Sasha Lane.

In 2014 Xavier Dolan transfixed male audiences with his award-winning saga of sons and mothers: Mommy. Never to be left out of the fun, the 27-year old Canadian maverick is back with two of France’s most happening stars Marion Cotillard and Lea Seydoux in a film that sounds as exciting as his track record: IT’S ONLY THE END OF THE WORLD.

France is the best represented country but their well-known directors are inventively exploring different genres this year: Bruno Dumont brings an old-fashioned Normandy-set seaside comedy starring Juliette Binoche and Fabrice Luchini MA LOUTE, (left) in contrast to his usual menacing dramas. Alain Guiraudie, who shocked and delighted with his gay thriller The Stranger by the Lake, this year brings a more mainstream drama RESTER VERTICAL. After Cannes 2014 success with Clouds of Sils Maria, Kristen Stewart also leads in arthouse filmmaker Olivier Assayas’ PERSONAL SHOPPER: a ghost story set in Paris – offering her two goes on the Red Carpet. Marion Cotillard also stars in Nicole Garcia’s literary screen adaptation MAL DE PIERRES, which has echoes of the classic Madame Bovary and follows a wilful married woman who falls for another man. Let’s see if she can add a twist of magic to this regular plotline.

Paul Verhoeven is a director best known for Basic Instinct and Showgirls. His latest drama ELLE stars the doyenne of Cannes Isabelle Huppert in a drama whose plotline sounds not dissimilar to Catherine Breillat’s 2013 film Abuse of Weakness but her co-star here is Christophe Lambert of Highlander fame.

Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn last dipped his toe in the Riviera rave-up with the spectacular Only God Forgives in 2013. The fabulous thriller starred Kristen Scott Thomas in a standout role but the film had a mixed reception. He’s back with THE NEON DEMON about a model who arrives in LA and discovers vampire and cannibals at play in the city’s fashion world.

The Romanians will there in force with Cristi Puiu’s family saga SIERANAVADA and Palme D’Or winner Cristian Mungiu brings another family-themed drama entitled BACALAUREAT. Germany is also back after a long break on the Croisette, this year in competition with Maren Ade’s intriguingly entitled TONI ERDMANN, that concerns a troubled father and daughter reunion.

Korean auteur Park Chan-Wook has reimagined Sarah Waters’ popular Victorian novel Fingersmith into modern day Korea in HANDMAIDEN.

Philippino filmmaker Brillante Mendoza once rocked the Croisette with his thriller Kinatay which never got a release in Britain, possibly due to its shocking violence. Last year he was awarded Special Mention by the Ecumenical Jury for his sensitive portrayal of Philippino suffering for his feature Taklub. This year he’s back with with MA’ ROSA a drama in Tagalog. At last but not least, Brazilian director Kleber Mendonca Filho, best known for his drama Neighbouring Sounds, brings another drama about flat life to Cannes: AQUARIUS is the story of critic and last remaining resident of an Art Deco building acquired by the developers. Determined not to leave until her death, sounds like this is going to be an intriguing and tense study about who we are and where we belong in time. MT

THE 69TH CANNES INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL RUNS FROM 11 – 22 MAY 2016

Walkover (1965) Walkower | Bergamo Film Meeting 2021

Dir|Wri: Jerzy Skolimowski | Cast: Aleksandra Zawieruszanka, Andrzej Leszczyc, Krzysztof Chamiec | 77min Drama Polish with subtitles

During the 1960s writer and director Jerzy Skolimowski focused on films exploring the ironic aspects and moral dilemmas affecting everyday life in post-Stalinist Poland. His films were the ‘Impressionists’ of an era dominated by the sweeping epics of the Polish Film School.

A debut feature, Rysopsis (Identification Marks: None) 1965 was closely followed by WALKOVER another drama set in his home town of Lodz (and also starring his off-screen partner Elzbieta Czyzewska in the opening scenes).

As Andrzej Leszczy, he represents a ‘New Wave’ hero, a raffish outsider with a certain appeal to the opposite sex. Drifting around the locale, having left the army and about to embark on engineering studies, he is taking part in a local boxing match when he meets Teresa (Aleksandra Zawieruszanka), a government engineer who has arrived in the city to work on a new factory scheme. Under Teresa’s spell (Zawieruszanka looks like a Polish equivalent of Angie Dickinson) goes to the wrong ring for the tournament. And as he sits on the train with Teresa, we see his boxing opponent following on a motorbike, viewed in a superb continuous shot from the rear of the carriage. Turning up later, Andrzej wins the contest in a “walkover” as his rival fails to turn up.

As a metaphor for individuality WALKOVER was a very personal second feature for Skolimowski, who aside from his filmmaking activities enjoyed boxing and poetry, some of which is recited in voiceover in several scenes. The film opens with the face of a woman who will later jump under Andrzej and Teresa’s train, but rather than develop this plotline, Skolimowski’s film segues unconventionally into Andrzej’s story using the furore from the accident as an enticing background introduction to the central story about the couple’s brief romance.

The tragedy of the girl under the train adds additional texture, but remains an undeveloped strand. Perhaps his intention was to use her suicide as a cry for help from the thousands of Poles who felt washed up, directionless and cynical after years of fighting a cause; rather like the troubled characters in Tadeusz Konwicki’s Last Day of Summer. It was certainly his intention to explore unconventional ways of telling a story.

Skolimowski’s drama also seems to suggest the importance of standing up against the tide of change and power. Both Andrzej and Teresa go on to fight their individual battles in WALKOVER. Andrzej perseveres with his boxing and Teresa argues with the factory chief but they both rebel against the tide of industrial Lodz. Although the couple enjoy a night together they remain detached in the scheme of things, alienated further by the stark industrial landscape of Sixties Lodz.

The occasional modernist building sparks interest, such as in the pure lines of the outdoor restaurant scene (title photo), emphasising the pristine black and white cinematography of Antoni Nurzynski. The film also features a meandering, improvised jazzy score by Andrzej Trzaskowski (Night Train). MT

WALKOVER IS SCREENING DURING BERGAMO FILM MEETING’S RETRO OF JERZY SKOLIMOWSKI

Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures (2015)

Director: Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato

Documentary with Debbie Harry, Fran Lebowitz, Brook Shields; USA 2016, 118 min.

Directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (Party Monster, Becoming Chaz) have used an angry comment by Senator Jesse Helms (R) for the title of their portrait of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989): whose death from the complications of HIV, caused Helms to make the controversial complaint, on the House floor, over public money spent on an exhibition of the the photographer’s work, asking people “to look at the pictures’, and calling the dead artist a “jerk”.

Robert Mapplethorpe grew up in the sleepy borough of Queens, New York. He had five siblings, all of them were brought up as Catholics and he showed early promise with his drawings, one of his first was of the Virgin Mary drawn in the style of Picasso. As with Bunuel, this Catholic upbringing would shape Mapplethorpe’s work: his photos of tortured lovers were very much the equivalent of those depicting Catholic martyrs – he simply transferred these icons into his personal world.

After studying Graphic Art at the Pratt Institute, this well-crafted documentary shows how he found his way into photography, at first with the help of Polaroid cameras. At this time in the late Sixties, photography was seen more as a craft than an art form. His first love was the singer Patti Smith, they moved into the famous Chelsea Hotel during their relationship, which lasted between 1967 and 1972; the couple stayed in contact, even after it became clear that Robert was homosexual. Robert then fell for art curator Sam Wagstaff (1921-1987) at a party in 1972, in a love affair that was to last15 years. Wagstaff was Mapplethorpe’s mentor and benefactor, buying a loft in 35 West 23 Street for his lover in 1980 – then worth half a million dollars. The pair were active in the burgeoning BDSM scene in New York. Robert, whose charm was enormous, admitted that his relationship with Wagstaff was only possible because of the curator’s wealth; Mapplethorpe also courted other influential figures, such as the editor of Drummer Magazine, Jack Fritscher. In the last ten years of his life, Mapplethorpe developed a yen for relationships with black men.

“The pictures” – of naked men engaged in sexual acts, or Mapplethorpe’s self portraits with a whip or with horns – Senator Helms was complaining about, are very much in the minority: surprisingly, his floral photographs are much more numerous. But even his most sensationalist work is anything but pornographic: everything is stylised perfection. Mapplethorpe was a master of details, Robert saw himself “as being a sculptor without having to spend all the time modelling with my hands”.

Bailey and Barbato are a little harsh on their subject: it is true that Robert was after fame and money – but this goes for most ambitious people, not only artists. And yes, his sibling rivalry with his brother Edward, also a photographer, perhaps went too far – Robert insisting that Edward should use a pseudonym for his work – but the long interviews with the Edward take up too much time. That said, the directors (and the images of DOPs Mario Panagiotopoulos and Huy Truong) give Robert Mapplethorpe the credit he deserved: he created new ways of seeing and aesthetics, to change the image of photography in his very personal way. AS

ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 22 APRIL 2016

Identification Marks: None (1965) Mubi

Dir: Jerzy Skolimowski | Cast: Jerzy Skolimowski, Elzbieta Czyzweska, Tadeusz Minc, Andrzej Zarnecki, Jacek Szczek | 73min | Drama | Poland

Jerzy Skolimowski’s debut sparked off two sequels (Walkover and Hands Up!); he also plays the leading role of an aimless college dropout kicking through the final traces of freedom before being drafted into the army for military service. Ever the outsider, rather like his compatriot Polanski, Skolimowski explores the motives of his recalcitrant character Andrzej Leszczye who is living with his wife but keeping his options open with a series of other women, hanging around Lódz with his dog (who has contracted rabies, and has to be put down) before jumping on train with his other friends who have been conscripted to the army.

Only 23 at the time, the young filmmaker flexes his artistic muscles with tricks and creative flourishes honed during his final days at Lódz, and the result is here in pristine black and white. Well-made and beautifully edited by one-time feature editor Halina Szalinska, Identification Marks has a lively unstructured score by Krzysztof Sadowski and captures the footloose ennui of Poland’s postwar generation, pictured to perfection in this carefree chronicle of this final day of youth epitomising the Polish New Wave. Skolimowski incorporates some of the footage shot during film school, using stock provided and the skills of his college contemporaries at Lódz. Now, nearly sixty years later his latest EO is running for an Oscar. MT

NOW ON MUBI

Hands Up! (1981) | Rece do Gory | Kinoteka 2016

Director.: Jerzy Sklolimowski

Cast: Jerzy Skolimowski, Joanna Szczerbic, Adam Hanuszkiewicz, Bogumi Kobiela; Poland

76min | 1967/1981 | Poland

Skolimowski shot the last part of his trilogy featuring the anti-Stalinist hero, Andrzej Lesczczy, in 1967. The completed film was withheld by the censors but was finally released in 1981 when he returned to Poland to screen a new version with a prologue of 25 minutes, showcasing his more recent artistic activities.

In 1980 Skolimowski played German photographer Hoffmann in the Volker Schloendorff film Circle of Deceit. Set in Lebanese capital of Beirut, it shows the widespread devastation of the country, but also features the filmmaking process where he discusses with Schloendorff the modus operandi of a German photographer in a war torn country. There are clips from pro-Solidarnosc demonstrations that took place in London and an exhibition of Skolimowski’s paintings in a gallery there. Images of Speaker’s Corner and gloomy shots of contemporary Warsaw round up this prologue that feels like a contempo newsreel of the era.

The original version of Rece Do Gory features the former medical students, now adults, travelling in a sealed-up railway compartment. Andrzej (‘Zastava’) (Skolimowski) is now working as a vet, the hero of Identification Marks: None and Walkover is seemingly taking drugs with his friends Joanna (‘Alfa’) (Szczerbic), Adam (‘Romeo’) (Hanuszkiewicz) and ‘Wartburg’ (Kobiela). But it turns out that they are only knocking back placebos and calling each other by car names; very appropriate for the director of The Departure. Whilst the anti-Stalinist parodies are biting, Skolimowski goes further back in history, lamenting the fact that the train the medics are travelling in could well have been used by the Nazis, deporting Polish Jews into the death camps. Penderecki’s mournful music reminds that Polish history is never far from tragedy. This is underlined at the end when the actors of the original film appear on the screen in the 1981 version – minus Bogumi Kobiela, who died, only 38, in a car crash in 1969.

Whilst it is difficult to imagine how the original version of Rece Do Gory might have looked, the prologue gives us an idea how Skolimowski would have developed as a filmmaker if he would have been allowed to work in Poland. Both parts of the new version are permeated by an overbearing feeling of sadness that connects the past and present states of humanity as a whole: there is little optimism, just different forms of melancholia. AS

KINOTEKA RUNS FROM 7 – 28 APRIL 2016

Macbeth (1971) | Criterion Collection UK

Director: Roman Polanski | Writers: Kenneth Tynan/Roman Polanski

Cast: Jon Finch, Francesca Annis, Martin Shaw, Terence Bayler, Nicholas Selby, Stephan Chase

140min Drama

Who better to direct The Tragedy of Macbeth than Roman Polanski, bringing his customary nihilism to the famous Scottish play: his is an ambitious production but not amongst his best, despite collaboration from Kenneth Tynan on the script. The action opens on a desolate shoreline where young nobleman Macbeth (Jon Finch) is returning from battle, three witches are seen casting their spells in the watery half light of a wintery dusk. The locations were infact Porthmadog and Northumberland but they absolutely conjure up the essence of the story. Most of film is set in dank and dripping moorland or inside shivering castles where the additional effect of howling winds add to the sense of unease – not even blazing open fires can warm this cruel and hopeless saga. Polanski, deeply effected by the recent violent murder of his lover Sharon Tate, clearly made his film more violent than the play (lines such as “Untimely ripped from his mother’s womb” seem particularly cruel and apt) but it could equally have echoed his experiences in Krakow. In any event, Polanski was always going to make a grisly rendering of Shakespeare’s brutal masterpiece. This is very much Polanski’s version: he added a final scene, a variation from the Shakespeare play – where Donalbain is seen skulking off to the Witches’ hideout. This is the sting in the tail, the classic Polanski unhappy ending; offering no hope for redemption. The use of a discordant score from the folk band Third Ear and Gil Taylor’s stunningly photographed scenic set pieces add grim redolence to proceedings and the siege scenes are particularly evocative of doom. Casting off screen lovers Francesca Annis and Jon Finch as the Macbeths, their dark good looks and chemistry permeate the drama. A superb performance from Francesca Annis makes it easy to see how a man can be led to his demise by his own inflated ego and the sexual obsession for a woman who feeds his lust for power (and indeed, her own), as she does as Lady Macbeth here.

In the event, neither of these characters possesses the moral fibre consistent with their regal stature: and this is why the story so perfectly fits into Polanski’s body of work: the professionals seen wanting, brought down by their own petty insecurities. Macbeth is seen as a figure worthy of disdain, a man hoisted by his own petard; a ‘falling King’, rather than a ‘fallen’ one. The film was not a commercial success, and although capable and atmospheric, lacks the precision and perfection of his earlier works, Knife in The Water and Repulsion. MT

THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH IS REMASTERED | THE CRITERION COLLECTION UK | 18 APRIL 2016

Autumn Almanac | ÖSZI ALMANACH (1984)

Director.: Bela Tarr

Cast: Hedi Temessy, Erika Bodnar, Miklos B. Szekely, Janos Derzsi, Pal Hetenyi

119min | Drama | Hungary

Autumn Almanac is a unique film in Tarr’s oeuvre: it falls between the end of his ‘Social Realism’ phase (The Prefab People, 1982) and the first masterpiece of his black and white epics such a Damnation 1988. Exceptionally for Tarr, it is also shot in colour.

A Pushkin quote in the opening credits sets the tone for Autumn Almanac: “Even if you kill me I see no trace/This land is unknown/The devil is probably leading/Going round and round in circles”. Set entirely in a dilapidated villa, this melancholic ‘Kammerspiel’ traces the lives of five very despondent people who have given up contact with the outside world and are going round viciously in a circle of deceit and self deceit. The owner of the house is the matriarch Hedi (Temessy), a sick, lonely woman who is frightened that remaining four residents are only after her money. Initially, we may believe this to be a paranoid phantasy, but we soon start to join her in these negative thoughts. The nurse Anna ((Bodnar) – her carer, and her lover Miklos (Szekely) certainly look out for themselves and the couple’s sex life deteriorates throughout the film because of the increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere at home. Hedi’ son Janos (Derzsi) is too weak to admit that all he really wants is for his mother to die so he can inherit. And the old teacher Tibor (Hetenyi), just wants to steal enough from everyone to drink himself to death. Amid constant eavesdropping, the rooms have become sealed fortresses which are defended desperately. The five protagonists are full of self-glorification, believing their schemes will succeed because their attitudes are justified. After an easy victim is found at the end; and somebody asks innocently and without any irony: “If we lost trust in everyone, what would life be?” we know, that the Devil from the Pushkin quote has taken all, while the remainder of the residents in the house will go on in never-ending circles.

Shot by Buda Gulyas, Sandor Kardos and Ferenc Pap in expressionistic colours (which are literally unleashed on the audience), and different camera angles, Autumn Almanac is Tarr’s first ‘formalistic’ film. The rigour of later films; the long takes and the use of grainy b/w images are still a step away. Here, Tarr treats the residents like fish in a tank: he tries every possible angle to observe them with voyeuristic pleasure: at first, the camera peers subjectively through doors and windows, making the most ordinary actions look subversive. Then he changes, and uses crane shots, making everything distant and removed. Finally, he shoots from underneath the floorboards, creating distorted images that poke fun at all concerned. It feels as if Tarr can’t find enough ways to show the imminent decay. Yet it all ends in a glorious white light: somehow suggesting the newness of life in which the cycle will start all over again.
Autumn Almanac is also the first of Tarr’s increasing pessimistic films, showing units of society – here, the family – completely out of synch; everything cruelly revealed in soulless, nihilistic and endlessly repeating circles. AS

NOW OUT ON DUAL FORMAT BLU-RAY DVD COURTESY OF MASTERS OF CINEMA | EUREKA

Louder Than Bombs (2015)

Director: Joachim Trier Writers: Joachim Trier, Eskil Vogt

Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Isabelle Huppert, Gabriel Byrne, Amy Ryan, David Strathairn

105min Drama

Anyone who has experienced a sudden and controversial family death will identify with the father and two sons in LOUDER THAN BOMBS, a drama exploring bereavement.

The Norwegian director is known for his previous character-driven dramas Reprise and Oslo and August 31st but this is his first film in English, with regular scripter, Eskil Vogt (Blind). He subtly explores the aftermath of the death of a dedicated photographer Isabelle Reed (Huppert), who has spent her career in war zones, shuttling back and forward on the brink of danger. Huppert brings a loving yet detached feel to her part as mother and wife. Clearly though there were cracks in the marital facade before she died, and Gabriel Byrne, as her placid and appreciative widower, Gene, picks these up with tearful concern and he grapples with a trucculent teenager and an academic son, who is out of his depth emotionally with the recent birth of his first child.

This story unravels slowly as Trier gradually fleshes out characters who genuinely feel like people you feel you know. It emerges that Gene gave up his career to support the boys before the tragedy and is now sensitively treading his way through a minefield of feelings as events continually surface to challenge his perceptions of this constantly shirting emotional scenery. Byrne plays him as an appealing, gentle man. Clearly lonely, he is at odds with both his sons and yet desperately tries to reach out in to both of them, while he also tries to find his way into a new relationship with a woman who happens to be his son’s teacher. Although Trier uses some images and techniques to explore the bereavement reveries of his characters, these feel unnecessary and out of place, as he has already proved that he can craft imaginative and authentic types who hold our attention, without resorting to gimmicks.

Huppert’s character threads through the fractured narrative, appearing as dedicated, yet also opportunistic in her need for emotional fulfillment during her overseas career. She also appears ignorant of the effects that her professional life has had on the rest of her family while she has been away, as her focus has been self-absorbed by her need to carve out her own professional niche, very much in common with the character Juliet Binoche played in Haneke’s recent outing A Thousand Times Good Night.

The story turns on the suspenseful news that her ex-colleague Richard Weissman (David Strathairn), is writing a piece in the local paper in tribute to her life, to coincide with a posthumous retrospective of her photos. He has warned Gene (Gabriel Byrne), that the piece is likely to reveal some personal details of their trips together and this causes Gene to reflect on his marriage and put his sulky teenage son, Conrad (Devin Druid) in the picture. As the older son, Jesse Eisenberg, plays his usual neurotic role as Johan, who is academically gifted yet emotionally much less mature that we first imagine. Although there are clearly some misjudged moments, this is an absorbing and at times affecting piece that shows the Norwegian director gradually developing his craft in promising ways. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE VENUES

Desert Dancer (2015)

Dir.: Richard Raymond | Cast: Reece Ritchie, Frieda Pinto, Makram Khoury, Bamshad Abedi-Amin | UK/UAE/Romania/Morocco | 98 min |BIOPIC

Iranian dancer Afshin Ghaffarian fled to Paris in 2009 and his biopic from first time writer\director Richard Raymond’s is straight from the heart. Some may find the film’s directness reductive, but the narrative deals with young, rebellious students and detachment and reasoning are not their strength.

Since the Iranian ‘Revolution’ of 1979, dancing is forbidden under Islamic law, even though it was allowed up til then. As recently as 2014, six Iranian teenagers were punished with 91 lashes for dancing to Pharrell Williams’ ‘Happy’ on a YouTube video. The young Afshin (Gabriel Senior) grows up in this repressive climate, just copying some moves from a bootleg DVD of Dirty Dancing. Afshin is by a supportive teacher Mehdi (Khoury), who runs an independent school in their hometown of Mashhad, and allows him to express himself in front of an audience. Mehdi also exposes his young audience to western theatre, literature and music – even though the co-ed classes might not be particularly realistic.

When Afshin (now played by Ritchie) is a first year student at Tehran University, he meets fellow students in an illegal techno dance club (situated far underground to make the point) and they start a dance group, rehearsing in an abandoned print press. Afshin falls in love with Elaheh (Pinto), the daughter of a dancer with the Iranian National Ballet, who had to stop dancing after 1979, putting all her energy into teaching her daughter, before overdosing on heroin. Elaheh is far better trained than Afshin and she becomes his teacher. Unfortunately, she is also drug dependent; Afshin helping her to break the dependency. One member of the underground group is the polite engineer student Mehran (Abedi-Amin), whose brother is part of a gang of clerical thugs who terrorise the students with batons and knives.

Mehran’s brother finds out about the dance troupe’s plan to put on a performance for a selected audience in the desert – but and he sends him to a place far away from the actual performance. Forced to leave university, he tells Afshin “it was worth it, for one afternoon of freedom”. After Afshin is arrested at a pro Mousavi demonstration, Mehran’s brother makes an attempt to murder him and it becomes clear that he must find a way out of country.

Raymond is very successful in portraying the conspiratorial underground scene of the students: whilst the fear is palpable, there is also a good deal of daring. To criticise this as simplistic is missing the point: young people in any dictatorship – particularly this cultural oppression in Iran – do react simply with gut feeling and this is not a well thought out strategy. To provoke the authorities, kids go for maximum effect, choosing the most apparent examples of the forbidden culture; even if Dirty Dancing and other example of mainstream western culture are objectively not as daring as the would-revolutionaries in Iran think. The dance scenes in the desert are the highpoint of this drama: not just because of Afshin and Elaheh’s passionate dancing, but also the rapt attention of the audience, who, like the dancers, were very much aware of the dangers. DOP Carlos Catalan vibrant visuals help to recreate an atmosphere of unbridled rebellion in a climate of open brutality created by the clerical wing of fundamentalism. The shots in the underground venues and the close-ups with the main couple are particularly impressive making DESERT DANCER entertaining as well as valuable from the insight it offers. AS

DESERT DANCER OPENS ON 22 APRIL 2016

Speedy (1928) | The Criterion Collection UK

Director: Ted Wilde

Cast: Harold Lloyd, Ann Christy, Bert Woodruff, Babe Ruth

86min | Comedy Drama | US.

SPEEDY was Harold Lloyd’s last silent film, and director Ted Wilde (who was nominated for the short-lived Oscar category for Best Director of Comedy Films) would only direct two more films before he died in 1929, a day after his fortieth birthday. It serves as an important and nostalgic tribute to one of the last pockets of New York, where electrification and other mod-coms have not transformed the place into an urban jungle with the loss of human interaction based on trust and goodwill.

Harold ‘Speedy’ Swift (Lloyd) is unable to hold a job down for long, his obsession for baseball causing him to abandon any interest in his varied professions. He lives in New York with his long-suffering girl friend Jane Dillon (Christy) and her granddad Pop (Woodruff), who runs the last horse driven trolley in the City. But Speedy eventually comes good when he saves Pop’s business from the scheming plans of an Electric Trolley company who tries to run his business off the road. Pop Dillon gets a six-figure sum as compensation, which comes in handy for Speedy and Jane who set out for the Niagara Falls with the faithful horse and the half ruined trolley.

Despite being two generations younger than Pop and his friends, who are firmly rooted in the 19th century, Speedy is an romantic who yearns for a time where money was the only necessity in society. He is drawn to Baseball, a game which can last four or five hours – with not much happening. When Speedy meets his hero, the legendary player Babe Ruth, and drives him – for free – to a game, his utter joy and adoration knows no bounds.

Whilst the breakneck chase to get the Trolley back in time before the deadline, is makes for an impressive finale, the real highpoint of SPEEDY is a visit to the Coney Island Fair Ground, where the romantic couple enjoy dizzy rides, win a dog and have far too much to eat. Walter Lundin (Safety Last) delivers – quite literally – a firework of images. Those who have had the mixed fortune to spend time with their kids at Disney Park Paris will recognise the firework and light display of Coney Island’s ‘Luna’ Park captured by Lundin. Whilst SPEEDY is not as innovative as Lloyd’s Safety First (1923), it is emotionally much more mature, and its critique of ‘progress at all cost’ is very real and gives the film an humane and insightful aspect. AS

NOW ON BLU-RAY IN CELEBRATION OF THE CRITERION COLLECTION UK LAUNCH | 18 APRIL 2016

Man With a Movie Camera (1929) | Dual format release

Director/Writer: Dziga Vertov

Cinematographer: Mikhail Kaufman | Gleb Toyanski

Documentary Russia

Dziga Vertov was in his early 20s when he took a job in a Soviet news company as a film editor and cameraman working on a communist propaganda series called “Kino-Pravda” which eventually gave birth to the Cinéma Vérité movement. So keen was he, and so energetic in his desire to record real life in 1920s Russia that MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA came as a natural by- product of his ramblings with a camera and his cinematographer brother, Mikhail Kaufman. Dazzlingly innovative for the time, the reason to see this documentary today is for the fascinating record of daily life in the cities of Odessa, Moscow and Kiev.

In 1929, Vertov’s unique selling point for a film that was to screen all over the World before the Second World War and the Iron Curtain came down on Soviet Russia was that it transcended literature, language, sets scripts and actors to record life as it really happened to ordinary people, from early dawn after a Summer’s ‘White Night’ to dusk the following evening.

Vertov and his wife and editor, Elizaveta Svilova, who is seen furiously cutting and piecing together the freshly photographed images to produce startlingly emotional images. Sometimes funny and sometimes mortifying, they reveal an open coffin strewn with flowers and carried through the streets or a woman in the final stages of giving birth.

At the time of its early screenings, the films was exhibited with live musical accompaniment suggested by Vertov’s notes for a soundtrack. This current restored 2K print is scored by the jazzy, percussive beats of Terry Donahue’s Alloy Orchestra, a three-man musical ensemble, based in the US, who write and perform to classic silent films. Enhancing the action but never eclipsing its visual language, Vertov’s documentary is propelled forward at a breakneck speed and the use of double exposures, split screens, irises and various other inventive techniques – at the time considered ground-breaking, but now looking rather quaint and adding to its extraordinary allure. But amazing as they are, the most fascinating thing about Vertov’s film is the ordinary detail of daily industriousness – women going through their dressing routines – making-up, having manicures and haircuts; horse-drawn carriages hastily crossing tram lanes; the elegant deftness of a girl packing cigarettes in a factory, clever ponies working in a coal shaft, bronzed men pumping iron, sleepy children waking up barefoot in the streets – these are the memories that provide a record of the Soviet era – far away from the illusions of Politics and official news propaganda.

But it’s Elizaveta Svilova’s remarkable editing that really makes the film buzz with an energy and a rhythm that’s quite upliting and intoxicating. During its running time of just over an hour, it’s impossible to take your eyes off the screen. MT

Included is the almost unwatchably sad KINOGLAZ short MEAT TO COW that follows the boy in the market asking “how much is the beef?” backwards to the cow being slaughtered, to the Cooperative and eventually seeing him grazing peacefully in the fields. MT

Europa, Europa (1990) Mubi

Dir.: Agnieszka Holland | Cast: Marco Hofschneider, Julie Delpy, Andre Wilms, Delphine Forest; Germany, France, Poland | 112 min | Drama | Germany France Poland

Polish director Agnieszka Holland follows her mentor Andrzej Wajda from Poland to France for this true story of Solomon Perel. Based on his memoirs, it focuses on his extraordinary escape from Nazis Germany and his successful time in the Hitler Youth.

Young Solomon (‘Solly’) (Hofschneider) loses his sister on the eve of his Bar Mitzvah at the Kristall Nacht Pogrom. After the family emigrates to Poland, Solomon flees with his brother to the USSR at the outbreak of the War, but the siblings are separated. In the USSR he fetches up in an orphanage falling in love with the attractive teacher Inna (Delphine Forest). After the Nazi army overruns his village, he burns his identity papers and calls himself Joseph Peters, claiming to be of German blood. The German soldiers take to him, and use him as a translator. In this capacity he helps to interrogate Yakov Dzhugashvilli, Stalin’s son. He witnesses the atrocities of the Germans against the Russian population, but has to stay quiet, since he is now the mascot of his division, under the nickname of ‘Jupp’ given by his protector Hauptmann Kellermann (Wilms). The soldiers deem that ‘Jupp’ should have a good education in Germany, where he joins the Hitler Youth Academy – but not before being seduced by a middle-aged Nazi functionary, Rosemary, who climaxes with an ecstatic “Heil Hitler”.

At the Elite School, ‘Jupp’ then falls for Leni, a member of the “Bund Deutscher Mädchen“ (the female equivalent of the Hitler Jugend). After a particularly vicious anti-Jewish outburst, Jupp abandons Leni, who soon falls pregnant by Jupp’s best friend Gerd. Leni’s mother, well aware that Jupp is Jewish, does not give him away. When the Russians occupy Germany, Jupp is saved by his brother Isaac, as the Russians (rightly) do not believe that a Jew could be a member of the Hitler Youth. Finally Solomon Perel emigrates to Palestine, where he does not have to hide his Jewish identity any more – he can be Solly again..

Jacek Petrycki’s visuals underline the epic narrative with long panning shots and panoramic views of the fighting scenes; the images often reminiscent of Soviet realism. Hofschneider is utterly believable as the naïve boy who has to fight throughout the whole film to keep his circumcised penis from view. Holland directs with great sensibility, struggling to control the rather sensationalist plot. This is not her fault: most feature films about the Holocaust are by nature melodramatic but this should never submerge the tragic events. Often unavoidably cliché-ridden, Europa Europa, is a good example of why – after Lanzman’s Shoah – feature films, how ever well meant, rarely offer new information on the crimes against humanity, and very often detract from the real events by unintended trivialisation. AS

NOW ON MUBI UK

A Woman Alone | Kobieta Samotna (1981) | Kinoteka 2021

Director: Agnieszka Holland Writers: Agnieszka Holland, Maciej Karpinski | Cast: Maria Chwalibog, Boguslaw Linda, Pawel Witczak, Danuta Balicka-Satanowska | 92min | Drama | Poland

The gruelling life of a single mother is the subject of Agnieszka Holland’s humanist but harrowing slice of ’80s social realism. Irena (Maria Chwalibóg|Mother Joan of the Angels) shares her bed and bathwater with her little son Bob (Pawel Witczak) in a small rented room in Wroclaw. The landlord regularly switches off their electricity supply, babies cry endlessly next door and her job as a postal worker is physically overwhelming. To make matters worse, she is forced to care for and support her sick and mean-fisted aunt who lives nearby. So much for communism.

Intimate in scale but far-reaching in its implications, this heartbreaking domestic drama touchingly depicts the close ties of family and the devoutness of religious feelings in a small community; but above all the hopeless desperation of a woman who has no joy, warmth or affection in a miserable existence where she feels neither respected nor valued. The stress of her meaningless life eventually leads her to the town hall where she makes an emotional appeal for better conditions and housing, but is sent packing by the authorities.

Agnieszka Holland shot this sharply critical feature on a hand-held camera shortly before making Angry Harvest. As a woman she is able to empathise with the female need to express feelings of alienation and loneliness in a world where outside emotional demands submerge her central character’s wellbeing. Holland ellicits a poignantly discrete performance from Maria Chwalibóg, who shows how the interest and support of a masculine presence allows her eventually to tolerate her situation and care for her dependents. This support comes in the shape of a disabled younger man, Jacek. Although she is not attracted physically to Jacek (an unglamorous but award-winning role played sensitively here by Boguslaw Linda), she befriends him, disarmed by his desperatation to show her love and just to be with her. The two develop a relationship of sorts that leads them to a brief moment of happiness until they realise tragically this is also a point of no return. MT

KINOTEKA 2021

Our Little Sister (2015) Umimachi Diary

Dir.: Hirokazu Koreeda

Cast: Haruka Ayase, Masami Ngasawa, Kaho, Suzu Hirose

Japan 2015, 128 min.

In his forth film, director Hirokazu Koreeda (Like Father, like Son), has changed his approach: so far he has tackled emotional issues head-on, Our little Sister is a melancholic, elegant and very intimate portrait of a family who bury conflicts behind a deceptively tranquil façade. Our Little Sister has echoes of Kon Ichikawa’s The Makioka Sisters and also happens to be set in Kamakura, a seaside town near Tokyo, were the great Yasujiro Ozu lived and is buried.

The slow-burning story follows three sisters in their twenties living in an sprawling old mansion: The eldest Sachi (Ayase) is a bossy nurse in the local hospital and dominates her younger siblings Yoshino (Nagasawa) and Chika (Kaho). Fifteen years go, the three were abandoned by their parents when their father left for another woman and their distraught mother also disappeared to start a new life. The stress of bringing up her younger sisters has taken its toll on Sachi. Bank worker Yoshino has a string of unsuitable partners, and Chika is in love with her rather immature, eccentric boss, the owner of a sports equipment shop. Sachi is having an affair with a married lecturer whose wife is suffering from depression. But when their father dies suddenly, they are forced to acknowledge his long term carer who is also their teenage half-sister Suzu (Hirose). Sachi immediately takes to the girl but inviting her to live with them as a family, but in doing so further submerges her own needs as a woman and fails to address the natural grieving process of the existing trio who still harbour resentment for Suzu “taking the father away from them”. Suzu herself expresses her guilt and also her feelings of being unwelcome in her new home. All these conflicts finally surface when their estranged mother turns up, wanting to sell the family home.

Less cinematically rigorous than Ozu, Koreeda’s patient approach – showing the conflict arising from the calm exterior of the characters and their traumatic wounds – Our Little Sister is very much in keeping with the master’s style of slow-burning tension. DOP Mikiya Takimoto’s pastel colours and gliding camera movements show nature as the primary healing force for human trauma evoking a wonderful portrait of deceptively peaceful life in the little seaside town. All the performances here are impressive but Ayase is the standout with her often forced Zen-like equanimity hiding a disturbing personality, with strong masochistic tendencies. Koreeda avoids fireworks, keeping the tone gentle and good-natured. Our little Sister is an insightful and moving story of four adult children forced to clear up the emotional legacy of their own terrible parenting. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 15 April 2016 at CINEMAS NATIONWIDE

The Anatomy of Evil | Anatomia Zla (2015) | Kinoteka 2016

Director |Writer.: Jacek Bromski

Cast: Krisztof Stroinski, Marcin Kowalczyk, Michalina Olszanska

117min | Poland 2015 | Action Thriller

In his latest action thriller, Jacek Bromski (One Way Ticket to the Moon) paints a grim portrait of contemporary Poland. After the fall the of authoritarian Stalinist regime, which wanted to control all aspects of life in the country, Capitalism has brought liberation – but over the years, a new elite has developed – as it did during Communism – and those selected few live a rarified existence simply because of their financial means, connected to a global network of incredible wealth.

Professional killer Karol Lulek (Stroinski), has been released from prison on parole but is asked by his former boss, now the Attorney General, to do the classic ‘one last job’ for the authorities who put him away in the first place. This involves collecting 100 000 Dollar and a new passport before he kills the Head of the Central investigation Bureau – who has become an obstacle in a multi-million deal involving American money.

Lulek reluctantly agrees but finds out that his sight is since impaired, making it impossible for him to competently undertake the mission. Instead, he finds a surrogate, the young sniper Stasiek (Kowalczyk) hounded down by a local journalist after he mistakenly killed an innocent citizen in Afghanistan. Lulek retrieves his hidden cash from a hut in the countryside, killing the woman who guarded his belongings. He then murders the journalist, hoping to get an emotional hold on Stasiek for his loyalty and trouble. Stasiek meanwhile, falls for a prostitute Halina (Olszanska) who works in a luxury hotel whence he plans to shoots the CBS boss, while he visits his Opera-singing mistress in the adjoining hotel. Naturally, the plan goes awry with disastrous consequences.

Bromski’s contempo Poland is a divided society where community and solidarity have given way to crass materialism, ‘get rich quick’ schemes and deteriorating human relationships. Values have deteriorated and led to indifference in a society ruled by invisible forces and subdued palette steel grey and brown; from the harshly lit scenes in the luxury hotel to the soulless streets where everything seems to be for sale. Lulek and Stasiek are grasping victims and perpetrators at the same time: each man for himself. Krzysztof Stoinski gives an award-winning performance as Stasiek: his naïve love for Halina giving him humanity and purpose. Bromski masterful direction concentrates on the interaction and motives of the characters; avoiding sensationalism. A sober and subtlely-nuanced study of a country fighting for a new identity. AS

KINOTEKA RUNS FROM 7 – 27 APRIL 2016

Deep End (1970) | Kinoteka 2016

Director: Jerzy Skolimowski

Cast: Jane Asher, John Moulder-Brown, Karl Michael Vogler, Diana Dors, Christopher Sandford

88min | Drama | UK/Germany 1970

Jerzy Skolimowski left Poland after his 1966 film Barrier to direct three German co-productions: The Departure, The Adventures of Gerard and the rather quaint Deep End which was set in London but was mostly shot in Munich, Germany.

In this prescient view of ‘modern’ London, Skolimowski explores the burgeoning power of youth in contrast to age through a mishmash of interconnecting sexual and emotional encounters. Mike (Moulder-Brown), a naive and fresh-faced public school-leaver takes a job in the local public baths. He falls for his colleague Susan (a gamine Jane Asher), who is already involved with an obnoxious fiancé (Sanford) and her old teacher (Vogler), who seduced her when she was underage. Meanwhile, Mike is being harassed by a busty blond client (Dors) who fantasises about George Best while she molests him. When Susan loses a diamond ring given to her by her fiancé, Mike’s hormones are in overdrive as he tries to help her find it and their putative romance has a messy ending.

The Sixties are over in DEEP END and London is anything but swinging: the sleet grey streets a symbol for a down-trodden capital. Despite this, Skolimowski’s dialogue feels fresh and authentic and the detail spot on: Jane Asher rocks white lace-up boots and a yellow plastic midi mac and Moulder Brown, a sports jacket and white sneakers (he cleans the bath with ‘Vim’). Existential angst dominates these characters, each bleaker than the other but the tone is chipper rather than downbeat, often accompanied by the musical strains of The Can and Cat Stevens.

Mistreated by her teacher, Susan uses her fiancé to get even with her next love interest; she is a classic ‘victim turned abused’. Mike is very much the naïve bystander and the work environment alien to him; he is also a victim and, in the end, an abuser out of control. Susan’s teacher and her fiancé are both insecure, preying on Susan and her co-dependence. Diana Dors’ client is a throwback to an era (nearly half a century ago) where many people had no bathroom and were forced to wash in the public baths. Her obsession with football is also significant: long before the sport became a middle class hobby, football and its heroes represented a way out for the working classes, compensating for their dreary life: A visit to the match was a live chance to worship their heroes. Sex Education posters state: “What if a Man could get pregnant” underlining the emotional alienation between the sexes, despite the advent of sexual liberation and the Pill, DEEP END is still marooned in a world Of Victorian values, quite the opposite of the rosy vision of the ‘swinging sixties’, Jane Asher carries the film, a figure of feminine vulnerability fighting her corner in a sea of emotional turmoil that ends in surprising tragedy. MT

SCREENING DURING KINOTEKA 7 -28 APRIL 2016

People With No Tomorrow (1921) | Ludzie bez jutra | Kinoteka 2016

Director: Aleksander Hertz Writer: Stanislaw Jerzy Kozlowski

Cast: Józef Węgrzyn, Halina Bruczówna, Pavel Owerlio, Iza Kozlowska

Drama | Silent | Poland

On the morning of 1 July 1890 the acclaimed Polish actress Maria Wisnowska was found shot dead in her Warsaw apartment. Her killer was a Russian hussar seven years her junior named Alexander Barteniew, who pleaded guilty and was sentenced to eight years of hard labour and exile to Siberia. At the old Powazki cemetery in Warsaw a large monument in white marble was erected to Miss Wisnowska, and when Barteniew later returned destitute to the city he would reputedly be seen laying flowers and weeping over her monument before he eventually died in a Warsaw poorhouse in 1932.

The murder – and the revelations about Wisnowska’s love life that emerged during the trial that followed – were later fictionalised by, among others, Ivan Bunin in his 1925 novella The Case of Lieutenant Yelagin, Stanislaw Antoni Wotowski in Maria in the Bonds of a Tragic Love Affair (1928) and by Wladyslaw Terlecki as A Black Romance (1974). Inevitably there was also a film version: Ludzie bez jutra – the title of which translates literally as People With No Tomorrow – subtitled A Tragedy in Five Acts.

The film was directed by Aleksander Hertz (1879-1928), an important figure in Polish silent cinema who has been described as ‘the father of the Polish Film” and whose name appears in reference books and all the histories but whose films – along with Polish silent films in general – are as rare as total eclipses. People With No Future largely dropped out of film history along with most of Hertz’s other films until an incomplete tinted print was discovered in Germany’s Bundesarchiv in 2003; to be unveiled in Warsaw last December and in London, with a live musical accompaniment, at the Regent Street Cinema as part of the Kinoteka Polish Film Festival 2016.

Although completed in 1919, the sensitive subject of a notorious and destructive relationship between a Russian soldier and a famous Polish woman (their two countries were actually at war between February 1919 and March 1921), resulted in two years of censorship delays, including changes to the title (it was also known as At the Time of the Czars and as The Barteniew Affair) and to the names of the central characters. The premiere was postponed twice before it eventually opened in November 1921 when, not surprisingly, it proved popular. The still reproduced here of actors Józef Węgrzyn and Iza Kozlowska as Barteniew and his fiancée contemplating Wisnowska’s monument, is possibly a publicity picture – and certainly didn’t appear in the print shown at Regent Street – but shows that the film was originally overtly about Wisnowska. In the film as it now exists, the two ill-fated leads are now named Lola Wirska and Alfred Runicz, but the film is vague about the period (it seems to be set before the Russian revolution, but a document is seen bearing the date 1919) – and the surviving version screened at Regent Street ends very abruptly!

Viewed after an absence of nearly a hundred years, People With No Tomorrow plays as a plush, very attractively tinted, if rather stilted soap opera in which Halina Bruczówna as diva Lola Wirska sashays through various elegant interiors – and some handsome contemporary Warsaw locations – in a variety of outfits that wouldn’t be out of place in an episode of Dallas. Wicked Lola doesn’t let the fact that she already has a fiancé interfere with her “weakness for jewelry” lavished upon her by the various male admirers in her wake, whose ranks are swelled by the dashingly-uniformed but unstable Alfred, who also has a fiancée. Alfred in this version of events spends a lot of his time kissing the hand of the object of his obsession but seldom seems to get much further, and after he is challenged to a duel by Lola’s indignant fiancé, his descent is swift. The film throws in a female Iago in the form of Helena Sulima as rival diva Helena Horska (probably based on Wisnowska’s real-life rival Jadwiga Czaki) whose intriguing against Wirska includes engineering the compromising letter that seals her doom. RICHARD CHATTEN.

KINOTEKA FILM FESTIVAL 7 – 28 APRIL 2016

Novecento |1900 (1976)

Director: Bernardo Bertolucci

Cast: Robert de Niro, Gerald Depardieu, Dominique Sanda, Werner Bruhns, Laura Betti, Donald Sutherland, Burt Lancaster, Stefania Sandrelli, Sterling Hayden, Alida Valli, Romolo Valli, Anna Henkel, Maria Monti

317min | Drama | Italy/France/West Germany

Bertolucci’s epic, combining the personal and political during the first 45 years of the 20th century, is set in the Italian province of Emilia-Romagna, were the featureless landscape and the ancient city of Parma are the background for the ongoing rivalry between families: the landowning Berlingheri and their peasant workers, the Dalcò. It is a melodrama featuring moments of extraordinary beauty – Oscar-winning cinematographer Vittorio Storaro’s sumptuous visuals glow with the resplendent luminosity of an Impressionist painting by Manet or Manet. But there is also outrageous cruelty and savage brutality and the performances, particularly by the female characters are often suffused by histrionic outbursts giving this the quality of a Greek tragedy, underpinned by Ennio Morricone’s often doom-laden orchestral score.

In 1901, the year that local composer Giuseppe Verdi died, two boys are born on the estate of the Berlingheri: Alfredo, who will inherit from his father Giovanni (R. Valli) and grandfather (Lancaster), and Olmo, son of Leo (Sterling Hayden) and Rosa Dalcò (Monti). After Alfredo’s grandfather commits suicide in the cowshed, his father dictates a false testament to the local priest, making sure that he inherits most of the estate, giving only an allowance to his brother Ottavio, a playboy, who travels around Italy. The two boys become friends, in spite of their different upbringing, Alfredo hiding from his father, whom he hates.

After Olmo (a softly-spoken Depardieu) returns from the Great War, he is greeted with open arms by Alfredo (a sultry de Niro), who wants to continue their friendship. But everything has changed and his father has since employed Attila (Sutherland), one of Mussolini’s fascists, as a foreman. Olmo warns Alfredo about the danger Attila represents, but Alfredo is only in hedonistic pleasures. After Mussolini takes power in 1922, strengthening Attila’s position, Olmo and Alfredo travel to Parma where they meet Ottavio (Bruhns), Alfredo’s uncle, and his beautiful companion Ada (a gracefully hypotic Dominique Sanda) and the two fall madly in love. Olmo’s partner and fellow socialist, the teacher Anita (Sandrelli), gives birth to their daughter Anita , but tragically dies in childbirth. Devastated by his friend’s loss, which seems to spur Alfredo on to marry Ada. At the magnificent wedding celebration, Attila and Regina (Betti), Alfredo’s cousin, feels jilted and madly jealous, as she hoped to be his bride. In a fit of angry displaced lust, Regina embraces Attila who, in a sexual rage, savagely murders a little boy and tries to pin the blame on Olmo. Alfredo does not stop the fascist mob trying to lynch Olmo, but a deranged young man, confessing wrongly to the murder, saves Olmo’s life. Ottavio, who had brought a white horse named ‘Cocaine’ as a wedding present for Ada, is disgusted and swears never to return to his brother’s house. Attila commits more and more gruesome murders, including a particularly horrendous one of the widow Pioppi (Alida Valli), to secure her home for himself and Regina. The relationship between Ada and Alfredo deteriorates and she finally leaves him, just before April 1945. Italy is liberated and Olmo, who has become a partisan, shoots Attila, celebrating their liberation from Alfredo, the ‘Padrone’, with his daughter Anita (Henkel) and the other peasants. Olmo declares the death of the ‘Master’, but keeps Alfredo alive, “so we all know forever that the Master is dead”. Alone with Olmo, Alfredo states very realistically, “the Master is very much alive.”

NOVECENTO is Bertolucci’s most ‘Viscontian’ film, premiered in the year of the older director’s death. Using a cast, many of whom had worked with Visconti (Alida Valli, Romolo Valli, Burt Lancaster), Bertolucci also explores one of Visconti’s central themes: the sexuality of fascism, here demonstrated in the murderous relationship between Attila and Regina. But in spite of history and politics, 1900 belongs to DoP, Vittorio Storaro (Strategia del Rago, Il Conformista). The childhood scenes of the first part are shot like summer: the colours are drenched, in dream nostalgia. Heavy clouds and torrential rain threaten the early stage of Fascism. The wedding is an icy winter picture, cold, harsh hues echo the deterioration of the relationships between Ada and Alfredo. Liberation brings spring’s acid primary tints; the lighting growing increasingly bright and celebratory. The mass scenes in Parma, during the socialist demonstration, are framed with impressive intricacy. The camera moves, swoops and glides in harmony with Ennio Morricone’s majestic, moving sound track, maintaining Novecento’s status as one of the great epics of film history. AS

NOVECENTO IS FULLY RESTORED ON BLU-RAY COURTESY OF EUREKA FILM AND VIDEO FROM 18 APRIL 2016

The Devil | Diabel (1972) | Kinoteka 2016

Director|Writer: Andrzej Zulawski

Cast: Leszek Teleszynski, Wojciech Pszniak, Malgorzata Braunek

Poland 1972, 119 min.

Banned by the Stalinest censors, who saw a hidden critique of life in contemporary Poland in Zulawski’s second feature, he left his homeland to shoot L’Important: C’est d’Aimer with Romy Schneider in France before going back again for On the Silver Globe, a production that was blighted by the authorities who refused to allow him to finish the fSci-fi outing. In the end, a 146 minutes version was premiered in 1988.

DIABEL is set in 1793 during the Prussian invasion of Poland. Jacub (Teleszynski) lives in a religious prison asylum, having trying to assassinate The King. A mysterious man, clad in black (the Devil played by Wojciech Pszoniak), leads him to freedom but in the process starts making unreasonable demands on Jacub, who suffers from paranoid illusions; seeing life as a feverish dream where he is forced to save his country and family. Not surprisingly, he has had a dysfunctional relationship with his relatives. Returning home, he learns that his father has just died – committing suicide after raping his daughter, who apparently had gone insane. Jacub claims to have had sex (as a child) with his mother, who now works as a prostitute nearby. Meanwhile, his sister is living with his half brother and his bride (Braunek) who is pregnant by Jacub’s best friend. This together with his paranoid state, causes him to go on a rampage of gory killings, accompanied by a nun.

The film feels like Hamlet directed by Wes Anderson; the characters are all deranged and their insanity manifests at some point during the narrative. And Jacub does not see his father’s ghost, as he is living a phantasy nightmare where the boundaries between reality and dream are fluid. His reaction to all this is to kill violently. Andrzej Jaroszewiecz (who was also behind the camera for the abandoned On the Silver Globe) creates this crazed landscape with stunning intensity and a lucid palette that illuminates every gory murder scene in a different way. Whilst the narrative is enigmatic, to say the least, the overall impression is extraordinarily evocative.

Melodramatic performances perfectly fit this bizarre plot: whilst not making sense in a logical way, the weirdness gradually develops an inner stringency – the longer Jacub’s mad reign goes on, the more we tend to see the world through his warped perspective. DIABEL is not a great film, but a very exciting experimental one. AS

KINOTEKA RUNS UNTIL 28 APRIL AT VARIOUS VENUES IN LONDON

Barrier (1966) | Kinoteka 2016

Director: Jerzy Skolimowski

Cast: Jan Nowicki, Joanna Szczerbic, Taddeus Lomnicki

Poland 1966, 84 min.

After finishing BARRIER in 1966, Skolimowski left Poland to shoot the German co-production The Departure with Jean-Pierre Leaud. He returned to his homeland in 1967 to finish his Andrzej Leszezyce trilogy (that started with Identifying Marks and Walkover) with Hands Up, banned shortly after the director locked the final edit. Skolimowski returned to Poland in 1981 and showed Hands Up with a new prologue of 25 minutes. On the surface, the hero of BARRIER seems to have much in common with Andrzej but the comedy drama is aesthetically very different; the dream scenes here are very much reminiscent of early Buñuel – without being as cruel as the Spaniard.

The opening shot is symbolic: we see a half-naked male figure leaning forward on a table, trying to get to a matchbox about 80 cm below him. The man in question tries to gobble up the matchbox with his mouth, then has to get back into his original position, without falling flat on his face. What seems like a scene from a South American torture film, is a student’s prank: The future doctors are trying to find a winner for the petty cash they have collected during the year: the first one to be successful in the matchbox endeavour will get the whole stash. The students chanting in Latin makes everything even more sinister.

Skolimowski was not allowed to play the male lead role like he did in Identifying Marks and Walkover. Jan Nowicki replaced him as the medical student, a dreamer who loves jazz and girls – anything but his studies. “I have sold myself to the state for a scholarship”, he exclaims with humorous self-criticism. In his dreams, society appears as an altered state: not totally different from reality, but with a childlike eye for perfect solutions to ordinary questions. But the horror of the first scene returns and while the students in their dormitory stride along the white corridors, we hear terrible screaming. Suspecting the worst, it soon emerges that there is a dental practice next door to the Hall of Residence. When our hero meets a girl (Szczerbic) working as a tram conductor, two worlds collide: she is hyper realistic and sees life as a scheme where progress is made in little steps. But both have one philosophy in common: their contempt for the older generation (rather like in Deep End), stuck in the past – giving the film its title. Again, Jazz and poetry underline the mosaic narrative: “In this cynical and un-idealistic generation romantic impulses manifest themselves”.

But there is no romanticism, however bitter or twisted – the polemic is too fierce and the surrealism is sometimes so absurd if seems as if Skolimowski wants to escape from an unbearable situation. DoP Jan Laskowski (Night Train), creates dark, sinister images of life in a cul-de-sac contrasting sharply with the bland images of everyday life. BARRIER is Skolimowski’s most complex and abstract work so far. AS

KINOTEKA 7 – 28 APRIL 2016

The Passing (2016)

Director.: Gareth Bryn

Cast: Mark Lewis Jones, Annes Elwy, Dyfan Dwyfor

97min | Drama | UK

Shaky performances and a poorly written script aren’t the only spooks lurking in Gareth Bryn’s promising feature debut, an atmospheric ghost thriller that takes place a haunted cottage in the remote Welsh countryside and home to Stanley (Mark Lewis Jones). During a storm, Stanley comes to the rescue a young couple (Sara/Elwy) trapped in their car and gives them board and lodging while they recover. Sara (Elwy) is grateful and strangely drawn to the reclusive Stanley but her boyfriend Iwan (Dwyfor) is less than pleased by Stanley’s unselfish heroism toward his partner and reacts with hostile jealousy bordering on paranoia, calling his a ‘retard’. It’s unclear where these two came from and they talk in riddles about their past. But Stanley too is hiding something, and Sara is eager to probe his secrets. Iwan’s state of mind gradually deteriorates and in an ugly scene he asks Sara to undress and have sex with Stanley, before storming out.

There are shades of early Polanski in The Passing (YR YMADAWIAD), a Cymraeg language film, that sidesteps innovation relying too heavily on horror tropes alone to create a gripping story. The storyline is too reductive to hold the audience’s attention for its running time. Although Jones’ naive hermit feels believable, the couple’s ‘special’ relationship doesn’t feel authentic: Elwy and Dwyfor somehow fail to grasp the highly ambivalent nature of their characters. DOP Richard Stoddard saves the film from a complete disaster: his images, in- and outdoors, are truly evocative, particularly strong in showing the dominant role of water as an emotional force, in its many forms. Overall, Bryn and writer Ed Talfan should have settled for a medium-length feature which would have played to the strength of their approach and reduced the gaping holes of the narrative. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 8 April 2016

Demon (2015) | Kinoteka 2016

Director: Marcin Wrona Screenwriters: Marcin Wrona, Pawel Maslona

Cast: Itay Tiran, Tomasz Schuchardt, Andrzej Grabowski, Adam Woronowicz, Wlodzimierz Press, Tomasz Zietek, Katarzyna Gniewkowska, Agnieszka Zulewska

92min | Horror | Poland/Israel

Director Marcin Wrona’s tragic suicide haunts this atmospheric tale of possession that opens with a suitably forboding original score from vintage Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki as a ghostly dawn comes to a bucolic village south of Warsaw. It seems a fitting tribute that the film went on to win Best Horror Feature at Austin’s Fantastic Fest

Despite this unsettling start, the mood soon brightens with the arrival of Piotr who has come to marry his girlfriend Zaneta whose rambling family property is the setting for the celebrations and their future home. Clearly the two are madly in love but preparations take a sinister turn when Piotr discovers a some human remains while digging foundations for a swimming pool in the overgrown gardens. Piotr soon forgets about his ghoulish discovery as friends arrive and the wedding gets off to a boyant start; but clearly something is wrong. The tone lurches from heightened melodrama to seething dread as Piotr undergoes some kind of physical transformation involving fits and nosebleeds. Itay Tiran gives an extrordinary physical performance as the bridegroom; writhing, gesticulating and quivering like a man possessed – and clearly he is. But Piotr’s break-dancing histrionics feels like a mere side-show to the high guests’ already hysterical partying enhanced by heavy vodka drinking (a very Polish wedding), dancing and singing to the gypsy-style band. He is only taken seriously when he passes out after an ‘epileptic’ fit. Naturally, Zaneta’s father (Andrzej Grabowski) has his worst fears confirmed – he was always suspicious of his daughter marrying a foreigner – ordering the wedding to continue, not wanting to upset or compromise Zaneta’s day. It soon emerges she is not the only bride at the wedding.

DEMON is an effecting mood piece; a great example of how music, lighting and subtle camerawork can be used effectively in the horror genre. Wrona’s script has a solid premise: that spirits from past lives can come back to haunt and meddle with the status quo. The feeling of tension and unease is dramatically heightened by Penderecki’s fantastic score which together with some breathtaking visuals from cinematographer Pawel Fils, convey a surreal, otherworldly quality to the narrative until eventually lines blur between reality and the supernatural to create a compelling fantasy ghost story rooted in the present. MT

KINOTEKA LONDON | 7 April – 28 April 2016

The Ninth Configuration (1979)

Director.: William Peter Blatty

Cast: Stacy Keach, Scott Wilson, Jason Miller, Ed Flanders

USA 1979 | Fantasy Drama | 117 min.

“I’ve been a lot of places but I think I’ve always known, that I’ll always come back to San Antone”: thus starts author turned filmmaker William Peter Blatty’s THE NINTH CONFIGURATION. Mainly renowned for three novels turned into mainstream movies: Twinkle, twinkle ‘Killer’ Kane (filmed as The Ninth Configuration directed, written and produced by the author); The Exorcist, filmed under the same title by William Friedkin and ‘Legion’, directed for the screen by Blatty himself as Exorcist III. This strange and quirky horror drama, has some ‘laugh out loud’ moments and is so weird it’s certainly worth a watch as a cult outing of the most bizarre (it includes such choice lines as “far too numerous to enumerate”; “the Man in the Moon tried to fuck my sister” and “You wouldn’t know the Devil from Bette Davis”).

Situated in a Gothic castle in the Pacific North West of the USA (along the lines of the one in Polanski’s Fearless Vampire Killers with the same kind of zany humour), Center 18, a Military Psychiatric Establishment, is run by Hudson Kane (Keach), who delivers his lines with deadpan nonchalence. He is tasked with to finding out if the inmates are simulating their illnesses or are truly insane. Capt. Cutshaw (a brilliantly perverse Scott Wilson) has adapted the whole works of Shakespeare for dogs (he has a Hungarian Vizsla), and Lt. Frankie Reno (Miller) is an astronaut, who is obsessed with the existence of God, asking Kane to show him a single act of self-sacrifice, to prove His existence. The medical office, Col. Richard Fell (Ed Flanders) finds out that Kane has murderous phantasies and declares him insane.

When a new inmate Gilman arrives, he points out that Hudson Kane is in fact the notorious Marine Killer Kane. Dr. Fell admits that he is Kane’s brother Hudson and that the killer, Vincent, has taken his personality to make up for his crimes, becoming a healer like his brother. All this was known to the authorities who treated Killer Kane like a laboratory rat in an experiment, leaving Dr. Fell in charge. Soon afterward Cutshaw escapes and in a fight with bikers Kane saves his life giving him the example of self-sacrifice and the proof of the existence of God.

Any film with lines like “You remind me of Vincent van Gogh – either that or a lark in wheat field” (Fell to Kane), is asking for a comparison to a Max Brothers comedy, but there are also strains of Blazing Saddles here. This impression is underlined by the long discussion between Cutshaw and Reno about Hitchcock’s Spellbound. Fuller’s Shock Corridor and Lynch’s Twin Peaks are also in the mix: Blatty directs as if he’s piecing together excerpts from the most outrageous films in history. His religious beliefs are no obstacle to him: he creates Hell on Earth, and gives the most unrewarding character a chance in order to show the astronaut a way to God.

British D0P Gerry Fisher (Highlander) is adept at mixing all genres in stunning images – while the ‘plot’ is more of a hindrance to the enjoyment of script; his is an “all or nothing” approach to filmmaking and the audience will either love it or hate it. A true Marmite film; in spirit and in humour. AS

THE NINTH CONFIGURATION IS OUT ON BLU-RAY, DVD, DOWNLOAD AND ON DEMAND ON 25 APRIL 2016

Strange Heaven (2015)

Director: Dariusz Gajewski

Cast: Agnieszka Grochowska, Bartlomiej Topa, Barbara Kubiak

107min | Drama | Poland Sweden

Dariusz Gajewski’s STRANGE HEAVEN (Obce niebo) delicately tackles the thorny themes of the nanny state and immigration. Agnieszka Grochowska and Batłomej Topa play Basia and Marek, a Polish couple who havee to Sweden with their nine-year-old daughter Ula (Barbara Kubiak). Following very much in the footsteps of Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt it works on an emotional level where basic human rights and dignity (in the real sense of the word) are taken over by the most extreme form of political correctness, masquerading as the law, ignores the needs, wellbeing and wishes of both parent and child.

Ursula is having trouble adjusting to her new school and language (Polish to Swedish is a tall order) and has even been given a new nickname “Ula”. Basia and Marek are also finding life tough in a new country and their relationship is clearly under pressure. A social worker (Ewa Fröling) with time on her hands questions Ula and has come to the conclusion that the girl would be better off with foster parents, forcing her parents into the invidious and painful task of trying to get their daughter back from the vice-like grip of the almost passive aggressive legal system in Sweden.

STRANGE HEAVEN makes for gripping viewing but of the kind that will have your stomach in knots as you work through your own feelings about Health and Safety and the loss of normal social interaction in today’s world. It may appear as if the premise is absurb and far-fetched yet Gajewski is tapping into a growing malaise in our public authorities and welfare system that often beggars belief albeit with a narrative that occasionally overplays its hand to underline the seriousness and implications of where, as a society we are heading. Ism also very perceptive in here in delving into relationships and showing how the dynamics of a healthy family (with often rambunctious ways of resolving and alleviating conflict could easily manifest as unhealthy to the outside world, heaven forbid the beady over-protective domain of the average social workers who are either covering their own backs or ‘learning lessons’.

Grochowska and Topa are a convincing couple, their volatility and harsh words dissolving into loving embraces or laughter (perfectly illustrated in an early scene where Grochowska literally bursts out laughing behind the social worker). As their tragedy dawns on them they are authentic. Topa calmly analytical, while Grochowska indignance in completely understandable, winning her Best Actress at this year’s Gydnia Festival. And Barbara Kubiak – is just right as a little girl who is well-mannered and, like most kids, surprisingly flexible, settling down in her new home and mustering the language – much to the anguish and distress of her parents who are naturally less fluent, at this stage. STRANGE HEAVEN may occasionally veer on the melodramatic but it’s a moving and intense film that resonates for a long time afterwards. MT

SCREENING DURING KINOTEKA 2016 | 7 APRIL

Kinoteka Polish Film Festival | London 7 – 29 April 2016

THE 14TH KINOTEKA POLISH FILM FESTIVAL CELEBRATES THE CREATIVE GENIUS OF POLAND’S LEADING LIGHTS: JERZY SKOLIMOWSKI, AGNIESZKA HOLLAND & ANDRZEJ ŻUŁAWSKI  and some edgy new titles | 7 – 29 April 2016

Celebrating seminal works and latest releases from the contemporary Polish Greats. Meet these revered directors on the big screen and in person for a series of Q&As and screentalks.

J e r z y S k o l i m o w s k i

In London to present his latest film 11 MINUTES, one of Polish cinema’s most iconic figures, Jerzy Skolimowski’s took Polish cinema to a new era that focused on the individual rather than traditional historic themes and ideas. Pushing boundaries and taking audiences on a bold and innovative journey, his latest is no exception; an adventurous rollercoaster full of motion, emotion and suspense. Featuring an impressive ensemble cast, 11 MINUTES is an inventive metaphor for our modern hectic lives, driven by blind chance. The Barbican Cinema will host a special retrospective of three rarely screened classic Skolimowski titles; BARRIER (1966), MOONLIGHTING (1982) and THE SHOUT (1978), illustrating his revolutionary approach and unique narrative style.

Here he talks to us about making films during Communism and his latest thriller 11 MINUTES

A g n i e s z k a H o l l a n d

A former assistant to Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Zanussi, Agnieszka Holland has gone on to become one of Poland’s most eminent filmmakers and the most commercially successful Polish-born director since Roman Polański. Throughout her long and celebrated career she has forged a creative path as an internationally acclaimed filmmaker, including the Golden Globe-winning EUROPA EUROPA and Oscar-nominated IN DARKNESS, who has also shown that she is just as comfortable and adept at working in television, directing episodes for US networks including HBO and Netflix, on groundbreaking shows; ‘The Wire’, ‘Treme’, ‘The Killing’ and ‘House of Cards’.

BFI Southbank presents a retrospective season of Holland’s essential films including screenings of PROVINCIAL ACTORS (1979), A WOMAN ALONE(1981), EUROPA EUROPA (1990) and IN DARKNESS (2011) alongside an in-conversation stage event to discuss her craft as well as a forum presenting her television work.

A n d r z e j Ż u ł a w s k i

Regarded as one of Poland’s most original and controversial directors, who died in February 2016, made his career making films outside of Poland, Andrzej Żuławski’s final film after a 15 year break COSMOS will be screened at the ICA Cinema. Awarded the Best Direction prize at the 2015 Locarno Film Festival, the film, a metaphysical thriller, is a loose adaptation of Witold Gombrowicz’s surreal novel Cosmos. Hilarious, confounding and downright strange (in a good way), Żuławski fans will not be disappointed as the visionary director spins a mysterious web of erotic and psychological intrigue, bringing to mind both his earlier work as well as David Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE which similarly defies any simple explanation.

As a tribute to Andrzej Żuławski, the ICA will screen a retrospective of the director’s earlier work including a newly digital remastered copy of Żuławski’s Polish production, THE DEVIL (1972) which was a victim of PRL censorship for 16 years, THAT MOST IMPORTANT THING: LOVE (1975) starring Romy Schneider as a struggling actress forced to act in erotic films, and cult body horror POSSESSION (1981) starring Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani, whose unquestionably brilliant performance as the emotionally disturbed Anna won her both Best Actress at Cannes and a Cesar award.

N E W P O L I S H C I N E M A

A selection of recent, critically successful contemporary Polish films from the last year including Małgorzata Szumowska’s thought-provoking BODY, which won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 2015 Berlin Film Festival and Golden Lion at the Gdynia Film Festival for Best Film, a darkly comic meditation on grief and reconciliation, using the theme of the corporal and ethereal body to weave together the stories of three interconnected but radically different people attempting to deal with the loss of a loved one. One of Poland’s most popular directors, Jacek Bromski returns to the festival with ANATOMY OF EVIL, an engaging thriller about an ageing mafia hit-man released from prison on parole who is assigned a mysterious assassination, but whom is physically unable to complete the task without help. Marcin Wrona’s atmospheric ghost story DEMON, screens as a tribute to the late filmmaker who died suddenly during the Gdynia Film Festival last year. In Dariusz Gajewski’s heart-stirring family drama STRANGE HEAVEN, Basia and Marek are a young immigrant couple living in Sweden. One innocent lie triggers an avalanche and their daughter is placed with a foster family by social services. So begins a dramatic fight with the cruel machine of bureaucracy to get their child back. Inspired by the true story of Tadeusz Szymków, Maciej Migas’s debut feature LIFE MUST GO ON features a phenomenal central performance from Tomasz Kot (Bogowie) as a feckless actor suffering from alcoholism who discovers he has incurable cancer and only three months to live. He decides to turn his life around and most importantly reconnect with his daughter but is three months enough to fix all of life’s mistakes?

Closing Night Gala

This year KINOTEKA will draw to a big band bang with the UK premiere of THE ECCENTRICS. The Sunny Side Of The Street, veteran director Janusz Majewski’s tale of Poland’s swinging 50s. Jazz loving World War Two veteran Fabian returns to Poland from the UK with the unshakeable desire to launch his own swing band. He puts together an unlikely mishmash of players, including a leading lady whose background appears to be as much of a riddle as his own. But will the ‘king and queen of swing’, with their Hollywood lifestyles, handle the reality of 50s Poland and their burning desire to be a part of the West? Inspired by his own love of swing, Majewski’s film was awarded the Silver Lion for Best Director at the Gdynia Film Festival. The screening will be followed by a swing after-party in the nearby building of the Embassy of the Republic of Poland. With professional dance teachers and Polish jazz band Wojtek Mazolewski Quintet (who created the music for the film) playing live this will be a night to remember. MT

KINOTEKA POLISH FILM FESTIVAL | 7 -29 APRIL 2016

The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015)

Writer| Director Matt Brown,

Cast: Jeremy Irons, Dev Patel, Toby Jones, Stephen Fry, Kevin McNally, Enzo Cilenti, Devika Bhise

108min | Biopic | UK

Jeremy Irons and Jeremy Irons are screen dynamite in this earnest but intensely moving biopic of pioneering mathematicians G H Hardy and Srinavasa Ramanujan.

The Man Who Knew Infinity attempts to make maths as exciting as the discovery of a new plant species or the cure to cancer in this lush and impressively-mounted turn of the century drama. Blinding us with numbers and equations scrawled in chalk across a blackboard, the maths geniuses slave over desks replete with crumpled formula-filled papers and burn the midnight oil to prove their theories in the hallowed rooms of Trinity College of Cambridge, mesmerising us with this arcane subject matter but leaving us none the wiser as to their tangible achievements by the time the credits roll – there is a banal footnote about black holes in the final scene – but how could maths be so emotionally involving and melodramatic as it is portrayed here? The answer is in the personal story of an man who came from obscurity to share the academic limelight with the ‘luminaries’ of the early 20th century – the only one that stands out to most people will be Bertrand Russell.

In Matt Brown’s exquisitely-crafted sophomore drama, Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons are engaging and imminently watchable as intellectual sparring partners: beautifully attired in their hand-tailored tweed and starched collars, they make a formidable and mildly fascinating couple of spiritually-edged geeks. And there is the cherubic Toby Jones looking genuinely benign as another leading light of figures, John Edensor Littlewood. Matt Brown’s script, appropriately for the era and context, contains lashings of racialism and prejudice towards the Indian 25-year-old prodigy who sprung from the backstreets of 1913 Madras with his ground-breaking theories on continued fractions and pure maths to struggle to the heights of English academia – a spiritual vegetarian in a college where the ‘loads of grub’ largely consisted of meat. The Man Who Knew Infinity is certainly appealing for mainstream audiences who enjoy intelligent dramas but those looking for a biopic of greater ingenuity in its specialised subject, might find this a trifle unsatisfying – if so – the indie title ‘Ramanujan’ is likely to have more appeal.

Adapted from Robert Kanigel’s 1991 biography, this is certainly an entertaining story with its blend of exotic Madras settings counterpoised with the ethereal backdrop of pre-war Cambridge. The young self-taught Sri dedicates himself to the study of maths forsaking his job as a clerk; his overbearing mother (aptly named Arundhati Nag) and his newly married wife Janaki (Devika Bhise), to beat a path towards England where, hoping to be published, he writes a letter to Professor Hardy who immediately seizes on his brilliance, offering him tutoring at Trinity, despite the open hostility and racial prejudice of the crusty old dons – amongst the most cantankerous being Professor Howard (Anthony Calf). There, in a cramped single room, he eschews nutritional and emotional support (his mother intercepts his wife’s letters) to tirelessly expound his theories which, he claims, are instinctively enlightened and spiritually inspired by his Hindu religion. Hardy is a hard-nosed academic who has no time for love or religion and is more interested in form and discipline than inspiration and free thought, while the generous-spirited Bertrand Russell (a fine Jeremy Northam) urges Hardy to “let him fly”. That said, Irons plays Hardy as a tremendously empathetic and supportive character and not in the least dry or leaning towards Asperger’s, as one might be tempted to expect. Patel brings an energetic sensitivity to his role, with the delicate elegance of an exotic fawn, he is also feisty and diligent.

But as Ramanujan’s health deteriorates with tuberculosis, the mawkish flashes to Janaki pining on the beaches and temples of Madras start a downward spiral in the dramatic tension. The final scenes of this memorable biopic are deeply affecting: not so much because of Ramanujan’s ailing health, but because of the astonishing impact he steadily makes on his intransigent ageing peers in their ivory towers. MT

ON RELEASE FROM 8 APRIL 2016 NATIONWIDE.

Calamity Jane (1953) | Sing-a-Long

Director.: David Butler

Cast: Doris Day, Howard Keel, Allyn McLerie, Philip Carey, Gale Robbins

101min | USA | Western (Sing-along version)

Director David Butler (1894-1974) was a major Hollywood filmmaker who brought successful family entertainment to the silver screen during the 30’s, 40’s and ’50s with cult classics such as Bright Eyes, Leave it to Beaver and Road to Morocco. In the ’60s he moved on to major TV work with series Twilight and 77. Sunset Strip, adding 90 directing credits to his name.

In Deadwood City, deep in the frontier territory of Dakota, men rule supreme. So it’s hardly surprising that the gun-toting, whip-cracking Calamity Jane (Day) tries to garner attention from her male counterparts – with mixed success. She saves the life of Lieutenant Danny Gilmartin (with whom she is secretly in love), liberating him from the Sioux and claiming “I understand why the Indians don’t want to give up this mountain country, it is so beautiful”. But the men of Deadwood want a real woman with feminine qualities and after travelling to Chicago to find such a ‘dame’ in celebrity singer Adelaid Adams, Jane mistakenly brings back the artist’s dresser, who promptly snatches Danny from under her nose.

There are cringeworthy moments galore in this comedy musical, particularly when Katie re-styles Jane’s home while the duo sing “A Woman’s Touch”. The ebullient Day overcomes most of this with her spirited and rambunctious performance, based on the real life character of Martha Jane Canary, a ‘scout’ who lived in the second half of the 19th century. The glorious technicolor images are a feast for the eyes – shame about the rather obvious back-projections. Writer James O’Hanlon can rightly claim he is the father of the central scene in John Ford’s Who Shot Liberty Valance (where John Wayne shoots the villain for John Stewart), in exactly the same way that Howard Keel shoots Jane’s glass out of her hand. The sing-along version is a great opportunity for audiences to join in with Doris Day’s gutsy heroine.

THE SING-A-LONG VERSION SCREENS NATIONWIDE FROM 8 APRIL 2016

These Daughters of Mine (2015) | Kinoteka 2016

Writer| Director: Kinga Debska

Cast: Agata Kulesza, Gabriela Muskala, Marian Dziedziel, Malgorzata Niermirska

88min | Drama | Poland

Agata Kulesza (Ida) is the star turn of this Warsaw set family drama that never feels downbeat despite its tragic subject matter. She plays Marta, the middle-aged daughter of a woman who suffers a stroke, in the opening scenes, and is admitted to hospital with a touch and go chance of survival. At odds with her sister Kasia (Gabriela Muskala) who initially falls apart, she also has to contend with their overbearing father (Marian Dziedziel) who is not a well man himself.

There’s a faint whiff of humour to Kinga Debska’s graciously crafted dirrectorial debut that gravitates towards the more endearing aspects of ageing parents and hospital life. And luckily Marta never takes herself or her family ailments too seriously. And this ironic treatment lightens the more serious issues that arise when the father, recuperating from an emergency brain operation, becomes obstreperous and difficult to handle, escaping from his hospital ward, not far from his comotose wife, to buy alcohol.

Clearly Debska has experience of family bereavement and she brings this insight and subtlety to a film that never trivialises the difficult business of survival and the mental anguish for all concerned as family dynamics shift in surprising and ultimately deeply moving ways. Both the sisters have their unique coping mechanisms, Marta, the most outwardly robust and irreverent (not dissimilar to her character in Ida), debates with the doctors and smokes dope when the going gets tough. Kasia is more flighty and sensitive – passive aggressive even – praying in church and calling her mother soppy names, much to Marta’s disdain.

Andrzej Wojciechowski’s cinematography makes this family portrait all the more enjoyable with its softly bleached aesthetic and occasional widescreen visuals of the capital and surrounding countryside that take a welcome break from the hospital routine in an impressive drama that clearly marks Debska as a talent in the making. MT

SCREENING DURING KINOTEKA 7 – 28 APRIL 2016

I am Belfast (2015)

Writer|Director: Mark Cousins

Documentary with Helena Bereen | UK 2015 | 84 min.

Returning after a thirty absence to his home city of Belfast, director Mark Cousins (A Story of Children and Film) creates a rambling portrait of the city. Through the mouthpiece of a middle-aged woman wandering the streets, I AM BELFAST reflects on the past, present and particularly future of a city where 3800 lives were lost in sectarian fighting between the early 70s and 90s; and a third of the population, 120 000, simply left.

The cold facts are harrowing, but Cousins’ portrait is a moody, romanticising and often enigmatic feature. Helena Bereen, the woman in question, literally “is” Belfast, ten thousand years old and still going strong, even though late on into the film, the director lets us know, that she really died in the 1950s. These sorts of contradictions are a hallmark of this documentary. Cousins treats the city and its harrowing history like a work of art: open to interpretations, and full of unsustainable optimism. There is street theatre – laying the last bigot to rest – and clips from Jack Arnold’s The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The Titanic, which was built in Belfast, is shown, so are the reconstructed icebergs, which were her undoing, followed by humour along the lines ‘she was okay when she left’. Old newsreels show a bustling place; and two men pass each other near McGurk’s bar, now just a façade: we learn that the owner’s wife and children, among others, were killed in the bombing – followed by a cousin musing “a crime scene, a rhyme scene, a time scene”. Very existential, indeed.

Worst of all is Cousins’ treatment of the sustained violence during two decades: Bereen/Cousins call it a fight between the “salt and the sweet”, never mentioning the organisations of the perpetrators by name. For crying out loud: “Sweet” is hardly a word associated with any of the armies of two religious factions killing men, women and children in the same of the same God. Only once, for a couple of minutes, does Cousins faces reality when he shows the “peace walls”, some of them twenty metres high, which criss-cross the city, keeping Protestant and Catholic apart. Obviously it did not occur to the director that the East German Stalinists, who built the Berlin Wall, called their monstrosity the same name: “Peace Wall”. Instead of spending more time on the Belfast Walls (some of them a combination of five different deterrents), Cousins lets Bereen maunder on about the arty future of the place.

With music by David Holmes, DOP Christopher Doyle falls in with Cousins to create a wishful, mellow portrait of a city which is still, twenty-five years after the civil war ended, anything but peaceful. Cousins’ arty collage is wishful-thinking at best – an historic confabulation at worst. AS

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 8 APRIL 2016 AT BFI SOUTHBANK, BARBICAN, QFT BELFAST, HOME MANCHESTER AND SELECTED CINEMAS AND BFI PLAYER.

The Last Man on the Moon (2014)

Director | Mark Craig | Documentary with Eugene Cernan | 95min | USA.

British based director Mark Craig has made a name with a handful of documentaries featuring racing drivers amongst them Jackie Stewart: The Flying Scot. His portrait of three times space traveller and NASA pilot Eugene “Gene” Cernan is great on visuals but lacks an analytical angle, resulting in a near hagiography of Cernan, who is also his co-writer.

Now in his eighties Cernan was a pilot on Gemini 9A in 1966, a Lunar Module Pilot of Apollo 10 in 1969 and Commander of Apollo 17, the final Apollo Lunar landing in 1972. Leaving his footprints and the scribbled initials (TDC) of his daughter Teresa Dawn Cernan behind, he became an instant celebrity touring the globe for years. Now living in a Texas ranch, Cernan had a rural upbringing and was awarded a BS at the University of Purdue. He became a fighter pilot for the Navy and reached the rank of Captain. Employed by NASA, he was part of a close circle of friends, who even lived near each other with their families. Some of them became victims of accidents – death was never far away for the families of the astronauts.

The documentary is worth watching primarily for Tim Craig’s (Power of Art) visuals which are simply stunning: together with the archive films, the beauty of space is overwhelming. Craig also shows the now deserted launching ramps at Kennedy Space Centre, where weed and grass have taken over, resulting in one moment of unmitigated sadness for the Cernan, a sunny optimist, who voices his regret at revisiting the place of his greatest triumphs. He is still in contact with surviving team members, and they reminiscence about their time in the Navy and NASA. Gene’s firs wife Barbara, who could not stand the celebrity life of her husband and divorced him, is interviewed together with his daughter Teresa, who would have preferred to go camping with her Dad, even though she admits that having her initials on the Moon is quiet cool.

Cernan (and his fellow astronauts) are quiet open about their shortcomings: they know that they short-changed their families, lived “in a bubble”, were the political reality of the country (Vietnam War and the Civil-Rights Movement), did not intrude into their closed existence. “The country was going to hell” said Cernan, but we were not affected. The NASA pilots lived a life of hard training and wild parties: “we worked and played hard”. The ex-soldiers talk equally straight about their service in the Navy, a friend of Gene reminding him “that you were not very good at bombing”. Cernan is still living a hectic life-style, travelling non-stop despite his second wife and her family wishing he would calm down.

Craig somehow loses his detachment to Cernan and the other NASA pilots: he forgets that multi-billion projects like the Apollo missions were not just a dangerous and challenging environment for the NASA personal to indulge their manliness, but political exercises, in this case the space race between the USSR and the USA. Craig fails to touch on the controversy surrounding the selection of pilots for particular missions, which often led to lasting resentment: one NASA pilot accusing Cernan of having stolen his flight on Apollo 17 – a charge Cernan fails to defend. In spite of Craig’s un-reflected “Boys Own” approach, THE LAST MAN ON THE MOON is still a great document of history. AS

The Last Man on the Moon is available on iTunes and On Demand from 15 April http://thelastmanonthemoon.com/
[please insert iTunes hyperlink: http://apple.co/1TTFzC8 ]

Dheepan (2015)

Director: Jacques Audiard | 109mins Drama France

Jacques Audiard’s searing social realism has won him much acclaim with hits such as A Prophet and Rust and Bone, With Dheepan he delivers another fraught drama about an immigrant family who bring their fierce loyalties to one another, and their religious convictions into the grim context of a strife-ridden community of outsiders who have recently arrived in Paris.

Shock and austerity greet them in a place thousands of miles from the soft jungles of Sri Lanka where the Tamil Tigers have taught them how to fight tooth and nail for their beliefs. But the struggle in their new home requires a more subtle form of combat. Suffused with images of the Hindu God Ganesh and sacred Indian elephants, who protect them during the night, daytime sees them facing a sombre scenario of inter-racial strife.

Audiard sets the scene in wartorn Sri Lanka where corpses are being burned after another incursion in Dheepan’s local village. Dheepan (Antonythasan Jesuthasan) and his friend Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan manage to flee by proceeding passports from three of the dead and arrive with an orphaned child, Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby), having passed through immigration, . an interpreter reinventing their unconvincing story so that the two can gain employment as caretakers in a block of council houses. There they meet Youssouf (Marc Zinga) who shows them the ropes of how to get by in their new environment, but their language skills are non-existent. Working as cleaners for another immigrant who is crippled and mostly bedridden, they settle in gradually. Illayaal is allotted a place in a special needs class at school, along with other immigrant children still learning French, but young kids always manage to cope better than the adults.

Using a cast of newcomers, Audiard paints his humanistic study of everyday migration with a colourful palette of vibrant colours redolent of the exotic spice island back home. With the support of regular co-writer Thomas Bidegain, and cinematographer Eponime Menonceau, he also injects a vibe of simmering social unrest to this outwardly cohesive picture of a dislocated community. Despite their surface cooperation and acceptance of the situation, trouble is clearly brewing as racial conflicts emerge, and the mesmerising finale unspools in a way that we could never have anticipated.

Once again, Audiard handles his subject-matter with the dexterity of a seasoned filmmaker evoking his central character as a man of pure instinct, trained as a soldier and operating from a professional point view, while also being an insecure and, clearly, disorientated human being away from home.

Antonythasan Jesuthasan brings a freshness and authenticity to his debut role, and we feel for him. Worth noting is the fact that he is also a real life writer and activist who has been personally been involved with the Tamil Tigers. There’s nothing particularly new or noteworthy about Dheepan, it’s consistent, well-made and watchable, but why it won the Palme D’Or in a competition which boasted memorable features such as Carol, The Lobster, Son of Saul and Youth – while this is almost forgotten – still remains a mystery. MT

NOW ON MUBI

Goodbye, See you Tomorrow (1960) | Kinoteka 2016

Director: Janusz Morgenstern Writer: Zbigniew Cybulski

Cast: Zbigniew Cybulski, Teresa Tuszynska, Grzyna Muszyynska, Barbara Baranowska, Wlodzimierz Bielicki

88min | Drama | Poland

Infectiously light-hearted and expertly-crafted New Wave ‘Dolce Vita’ drama Goodbye, See you Tomorrow embraces the best elements of Polish New Wave cinema including its burgeoning talent: a breezy score by Krzysztof Komeda; pristine visuals of DoP Jan Laskowski, and a dazzling cast including Roman Polanski and Zbigniew Cybulski who also co-wrote the script (the two other writers: Bogumil Kobiela and Wilhelm Mach, along with Komeda would all die tragically by the end of the decade). Perhaps more than anything else, the film epitomises the restless optimism, tinged with doubt, of the younger generation after the war.

Boy – in the shape of Zbigniew Cybulski – meets girl (Teresa Tuszynska), the gamine daughter of a French diplomat. She taunts and teases him in the bars and streets of Gdansk and the beaches of Sopot. They walk, talk, debate politics and laugh during their carefree, free-wheeling flirtation that never really gets off the ground, but paints a buoyant black and white picture of the era. Fun and light-hearted Goodbye, See you Tomorrow captures a moment in time where Polish filmmaking talent flourishes and everything seems possible. MT

SCREENING DURING KINOTEKA 7 APRIL – 28 APRIL 2016

Welcome to Leith (2015) | Home ent release

Dir.: Michael Beach Nichols, Christopher K Walker | Documentary | USA 2015 | 85 min.

In 2012 Leith, North Dakota, had 24 inhabitants. An ex-boom town, left behind after the oil bonanza was over, only the most stubborn residents remained. To their great surprise, one man bought a property, unseen, for $5000, and promised to buy even more for his “friends”. This man was Craig Cobb (61), leading figure of the American National Socialist Movement (NSM).

Directors Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker followed Cobb while he attempted to turn Leith into a stronghold for his movement promoting racial hatred. By buying up all the cheap property, his aim was to gain control of the town run by Ryan Schock. WELCOME TO LEITH could easily be modelled on a novel by Jim Thompson: the psychotic Cobb wandering the streets of the town armed to the teeth, his house looking like a Christmas tree adorned with Swastikas of all sorts, advertising white supremacy. It’s worth noting that North Dakota’s population is already 90% white, and it is legal in the USA to display the Swastika symbol under the First Amendment, as ruled by the Supreme Court in 1978. Cobb and his sidekick, the much younger Kynan Dutton, took to patrolling the streets armed, and started to interrupt the City Council’s meetings. They also began a hate mail campaign, their main target being Sherill Harper, married to Bobby, the only black person in the town. “What are you doing married to a negro” they asked in a threatening manner, putting up also a sign “No Niggers in Leith”. Another target was Lee Cook and his family, who moved to Leith after their daughter was sadistically murdered, the NSM brigade trying blame racial motives for the crime, and disturbing the healing process for the family. On their “Vanguard News Network” Cobb and Dutton spread vile racist propaganda on the internet, portraying their “take-over” of Leith as a defensive stand on behalf of white people. Cobb, actually on the run for hate crimes in Canada and son of a multi-millionaire, had a DNA test taken, to prove his Aryan heritage. In front of an amused TV audience, it was announced that Cobb had 14% African blood in his veins.With help of the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC), who keeps trace of White Supremacy groups in the USA (and whose funds were cut after 9/11), the citizens of Leith began their fight back, and the rest is history until the present day.

WELCOME TO LEITH has all the qualities of a feature film, co-director/DOP Nichols achieving a true real crime atmosphere, the dilapidated, ghostly Leith the scary background to a story of violence, which could have escalated, had it not been for the solidarity of the town’s citizens. Somehow it seems fitting that the violent racists of the NSM choose a place so haunted as Leith, to build an Aryan model town. Taut and atmospheric, WELCOME TO LEITH captures true evil in the backwater of the USA. AS

NOW ON DVD | Documentary Prize Winner | East End Film Festival 2015 |

Provincial Actors | AKTORZY PROWINCJONALNI |Kinoteka 2016

KTORZY PROWINCJONALNI (PROVINCIAL ACTORS, 1978) is Agnieszka Holland’s debut film. Set in a small town in contemporary Poland, a Warsaw filmmaker (Burski) comes to direct a small touring theatre troupe in Wyspianski’s ‘Liberation’, a patriotic Polish classic. The main actor, Krzystzof, wants to make a name for himself, and tries to influence Burski to stick religiously to the text. But Burski has other ideas: he wants to change the play into a sensational avant-garde version, cutting the text down to the bone. Krzystzof fights the director all the way, but after the premiere, he gives in, making peace with Burski, to save his career. But his marriage to Anka, a puppeteer, is on the rocks. Anka leaves her husband. She too, has come to realise through experience, that advancement in Polish society comes with a loss of innocence.

Whilst Holland’s actors as not particularly sympathetic – and usual gossip about which actress beds the director; the gay outsider and an alcoholic – society is blamed as much as the individual. Anka is shown as an idealistic dreamer who still reads Heidegger, and is ridiculed by her husband. Krzysztof starts using great words like “homeland, human fate and freedom” from the play, to make himself look more intellectual than the rest of the cast, but he is only too ready to fall in with Burski’s interpretation. A personal crisis causes him to run to Anna (whom he had just condemned as naïve), at heart he is a little boy who really wants to go back to the safety of his mother. Contrary to some western perception, PROVINCIAL ACTORS, which won the ‘FIPRESCI’ prize in Cannes, is not a thesis film, Holland declaring “I don’t know how far I have been successful, but in my debut I was less concerned with showing the mechanism of manipulation, and more with presenting human fate, in all its embroilment and entanglement. That is, I tried to highlight the existential aspect rather than a journalistic one. I didn’t want a film with a thesis, though I have sometimes been accused of this”. Although Well-acted and masterfully crafted, this is a great introduction to Poland’s first significant female filmmaker. AS

KINOTEKA 7-28 April 2016

The Sound Barrier (1952) | blu-ray release

Director: David Lean Script: Terence Rattigan

Cast: Ralph Richardson, Ann Todd, Nigel Patrick, Dinah Sheridan, Denholm Elliott

118min | Action Drama War | UK

David Lean pictures ’50s England at its best in this top flight romantic action drama scripted by Terence Rattigan and inspired by the life and times of Geoffrey De Havilland; the British designer and owner of De Havilland Aircraft Company, two of whose sons died testing their father’s own experimental jet plane.
The Comet, the first jet aircraft makes a stunning debut along with the other British star of the skies – the famous Spitfire. Winning an Oscar for sound effects, the film also showcases Lean’s technical capabilities in exploring Britain’s mastery of the airways and of flight technology in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Terence Rattigan’s script was much lauded for examining the relationship between obsession and sacrifice, technological mastery and the costs of pursuing it at the cost of all else and this saves the film from simply being a hagiographic tribute to British aviation. At its heart there is also a tender love story: that of a woman – played by the era’s top English totty Ann Todd – and her passionate desire for her husband, that triumphed despite their twin-bedded sleeping arrangements and this gives the film its dramatic torque. THE SOUND BARRIER typifies man’s unswerving dedication to reach the top whatever it takes, through Ralph Richardson’s maverick captain of industry (Ridgefield) and his daredevil test pilot son in law Tony (Nigel Patrick), who was willing to risk his life for the sake of invention, despite his own impending fatherhood. There is also a superb turn from Denholm Elliott playing against type as Ridgefield’s debonair and clean cut son, Christopher.

The remarkable outdoor setpieces evoke the sense of power and speed of the jets through impressive POVs and long shots and the shuddering supersonic echoes that are palpable to passers by in the streets of a Hampshire town as the test plane ducks and dives. THE SOUND BARRIER is a story of man’s courage, dedication and commitment tempered by humour and even tenderness. Technically impressive, tense and moving this is a true cult classic from the master of British epic, David Lean. MT

OUT ON BLU-RAY COURTESY OF STUDIOCANAL | 11 APRIL 2016

Victoria (2015)

Director: Sebastian Schipper

Cast: Frederick Lau, Laia Costa, Franz Rogowski, Burak Yigit, Max Mauff

138mins | Thriller | Germany

A night out for a Spanish girl in Berlin is a life-changing experience in this self-indulgent ad lib thriller whose unique selling point its shooting, in one single take, by German actor turned director, Sebastian Schipper (Run Lola Run).

Schipper is so focused on his mobile phone experiment that pacing and authenticity falls by the wayside in this woozily kinetic, high octane night ride into danger and then oblivion. It seems our eponymous heroine (Laia Costa) has lost her way and her moral compass in Berlin. The classically-trained pianist is so desperate to meet new friends she is prepared to tolerate any kind of nonsense from the crowd of dodgy guys she meets, who predictably turn out to be wasters at best, criminals at worst. Needing to open her cafe at seven, she is no hurry to prepare to a busy day and loiters around idly, shooting the breeze, until she finds herself in deep water, as part of a heist that endangers her own life.

The star turn here is Frederick Lau as Sonne, a charismatic natural who carries the film through from its dialogue heavy first act through to its dazzlingly dramatic denouement. As Victoria, Laia Costa fizzes with energy and high-spirits, refusing to call time on the one-dimensional guys who constantly push the limits on her good nature. She has a fleeting chemistry with Sonne, but doesn’t have to be there for him through thick and thin, with a gun against her head. Her character is the weakest link in this high-octane thriller that has its moments, but pushes its luck too far. There are just too many plot-holes in Schipper’s narrative. Would such an intelligent woman seriously engage in a robbery with three men she has only just met? Is there no security in Berlin’s banks? In the hotel bathroom, after a tense shoot-out, wouldn’t you not need to use the loo or wash the blood of your hands? These are just a few of the endless implausibilities that make this slick and easy-going roadshow much less clever than it thinks it is, in retrospective analysis.

Schipper tightens the tension in the second act, the shaky camera tracking the action against the fuzzy nightscape of Berlin’s trendy Mitte district and making great use of the natural light of a gradual dawn from 4.30am until nearly 7am. Electronic music from Berlin compose Nils Frahm often takes over the dialogue, driving the action forward with its finger firmly on the pulse. Go for the ride but be prepared to suspend your disbelief. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 1 APRIL 2016

The Absent One (2014)

Director: Mikkel Norgaard Writers: Nikolaj Arcel | Rasmus Heisterberg

Cast: Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Fares Fares, Pilou Asbaek, David Dencik, Danica Curcic, Johanne Louise Schmidt

119min | Crime Thriller | Denmark

Nikolaj Lie Kaas (Angels & Demons) and Fares Fares (Zero Dark Thirty) are just the pair for this gritty noirish thriller that is as stylishly dark as its dirty dealings, and another another criminal case for Danish Department Q, again directed by Mikkel Norgaard. This is a nasty affair involving a double murder of twin siblings in the ’90s which is reinvestigated by the Copenhagen cold-case duo after the teenagers’ father commits suicide in the bath. If you enjoyed The Keeper of Lost Causes (2013) then this should go down well as the second adaptation of a Jussi Adler-Olsen novel in the Department Q series.

Kaas plays Carl Morck the taciturn detective with a permanent scowl, Fares is Assad, his pleasantly open-faced colleague who is rather chuffed to be hitting it off with their latest secretary, a spunky red-head called Rose (Johanne Louise Schmidt); Kaas is not amused “we can’t keep changing secretaries”.

After a brief visit to the country setting of the teenagers’ illustrious public school, we meet the man who served 3 years for their murder, a drug-taking share dealer with a penchant for restoring old Maseratis. Back in the day he confessed to the murders and then somehow got Denmark’s best lawyer (Hans Henrik Clemensen) to defend him. The detectives’ only starting point in the case is a call made by a terrified girl (Sarah-Sofie Boussnina), possibly a schoolfriend of the twins, though she seems to have disappeared now without a trace.

Scripters by Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg have chosen a fractured narrative that flips back and forward, giving us clues about the past, while following the chronological police investigation and the violent activities of the Danish hoods – all tightly edited to ramp up the tension while keeping us on our toes. We don’t warm to the young teenagers, although their bouts of bonking in the leafy boarding school surrounds do give light relief from the dim interiors which, apart from a dash of dark humour, make the THE ABSENT ONE feel rather glum and buttoned down at times, particularly when Rose threatens to throw in the towel after a particularly brutal scene involving a mummified corpse: ” I’m not cut out for this” says she. But who is, in their right minds? And this is Nordic Noir.

But THE ABSENT ONE is watchable largely due to its well-oiled parts, and particularly for Kaas and award-winning Fares who are used to working together and manage to inject a flourish of charisma into these sordid Nordic goings-on. Pilou Asbaeck and David Dencik (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) are also strongly cast as suave but lethal Danish criminals of the upmarket kind. Well-crafted, if not a trifle formulaic, ABSENT‘s plotlines all coalesce to offer a slick and absorbing watch despite throwing its toys out of the pram at the end. MT

SHOWING AT PICTUREHOUSES AND SELECTED SCREENS FROM 8 APRIL 2016

Seymour: An Introduction (2016)

Director.: Ethan Hawke

Documentary with Seymour Bernstein | USA 2014 | 81 min.

Sometimes chance encounters can lead to something extraordinary, and in the case of actor/director Ethan Hawke (Before Sunrise) meeting the concert pianist Seymour Bernstein (*1927) over dinner to talk about the stage fright both men suffered from, it lead to an extraordinary contemplative documentary about music and the meaning of art.

This is a biopic, but we certainly get to know Seymour Bernstein, who abandoned his glittering career as a concert pianist in 1977 at the age of 50, to concentrate solely on teaching. Bernstein’s family home provided no musical encouragement, his father expressed his disappointment with his son by telling friends and family “I have three daughters and a piano”. We see clips and photos from Bernstein’s time in the Korean War where he and a cellist introduced the soldiers to classical music. Then, there is his patron, Mildred Booth, who worshipped his talents in her big mansion: Bernstein fled in spite of being showered with gifts.

But mainly, Seymour is a discourse about music and the role of contemporary art/artists. Bernstein has lived alone for the last 57 years in a large, cosy bedsit in New York. The outside world does not intrude, only his students are allowed in. He is a patient but exacting teacher with a wicked sense of humour, telling one of his students “you are not allowed to play better than me”, after she mastered a difficult passage. As mentioned, Bernstein suffered from stage fright but this was not the main reason for him giving up his solo career: the commercial and competitive aspect of music started to overshadow the actual music played and lead him to concentrate solely on teaching: “I found my creativity as a teacher”. One of his ex-students, the Times art critic Michael Kimmelman, who somehow fell short of Bernstein’s rigorous demands, is told how important personal development is for the artist. Many pianists become ‘stars’, but end up being neurotics, like Glenn Gould, who “was technically perfect, but a total neurotic mess”. Gould told a friend how he crossed his legs on purpose during a performance, to give the critics something to write about. The opposite of Gould is one of Bernstein’s teachers, the British pianist Clifford Curzon, a man without any Ego, who was just interested in interpreting the music. Another point Bernstein makes, is that “male musicians and composers are taught to subdue the feminine”, a very valid point, particularly relevant right now, after watching the macho-ideology of films such as Whiplash.

Apart from reflections about music and its role in society, we watch Bernstein teaching his students, and trying out an endless number of Steinways for his semi-private recital in March 2012. Whilst Bernstein does not embrace any faith, “in all religions, everything depends on the deity”, he believes ‘the universal order is represented through music as an extension of ourselves”. Finally, after playing Schumann’s “Phantasies” as a wedding present to his wife, the pianist Clara Wieck, Bernstein comments ”I never dreamt that with my two own hands, I could reach the sky”.

Ramsey Fendall’s images are gracefully rendered, particularly those in the interior of Bernstein’s flat which are softly lit reflecting the many lampshades in the room, creating a sort of magical impression of the pianist and his world. This is an impressive documentary debut for Ethan Hawke who structure is not always faultless, but somehow enhances the ad-hoc nature of these reflections, which are a rejection of all contemporary populist notions about art and artists in a commercial world. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE IN SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS FROM 23 MARCH 2016

Black Mountain Poets (2015)

Director: Jamie Adams

Cast: Alice Lowe, Dolly Wells, Tom Cullen, Rosa Robson, Richard Elis, Laura Patch

85min | Comedy Drama | UK 2016.

It looks like Jamie Adams (A Wonderful Christmas), had co-scripter Alice Lowe’s Sightseers performance in mind when he cast her as a scatter-brained would-be-poet in this feeble ‘Five Go Mad in Dorset’ style comedy. Black Mountain Poets sadly lacks cohesion but – more importantly – real humour.

The film opens with sisters Lisa (Love) and Claire Walker (Dolls) forcing their way into a camp site with wire cutters. Their bungling effort is spotted by a security guard who uses his mobile to photograph the pair and their get-away car. The car soon breaks down due to lack of petrol, and the sisters then steal a car belonging to the Wilding Sisters, Alys and Terry, who are on their way to a poetry festival. Finding their invitation in the car, Lisa and Clair immediately decide to impersonate the duo and are welcomed by the organisers and five competitors. Richard (Cullen) and Louise (Robson) have been a couple, but Richard, who has not written a poem for seven years, is jealously in awe of Louise, and soon deserts her for Lisa and Claire, giving them his tent, then sharing it with the sisters after a feeble attempts to erect it. Joined by Gareth (Elis) and Stacey (Patch), two not very well sketched out personas; the poets wander through the woods while the Wilding Sisters try to reach the Festival on foot.

In trying to show all the poets as dilettantes in more ways than one, BLACK MOUNTAIN POETS succumbs to an all-out bumbling approach of its own. The poems are dire and so are the pseudo-philosophical interludes: in one example Claire looks up into the sky, confessing disappointment with her life thus far. Instead of laughing, the audience actually feels sorry for Claire and Lisa, who Adams seems to be denounce and vilify – making them the butt of the humour rather than the generators of wit and repartee.

Visually Black Mountain Poets is flat, repetitive and unimaginative. The actors hector their lines, and even Lowe cannot escape the dour tedium. Bring back Carry-On Camping – at least it raised a real laugh. AS

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE NATIONWIDE from 1 APRIL 2016

Captured, but not tamed: The cinema of John Krish

Until quite recently John Krish was one of British Cinema’s best kept secrets. But in recognition of his valuable contribution to British cinema that started in the late ’40s, the BFI has raised the profile of the now retired auteur with a series of interviews at their Southbank Centre and the re-issue of his early work on DVD, putting his films back on the cinematic map.

John Krish was born in London in 1923 and started his film career in his early twenties at the Crown Film Unit where he assisted Harry Watt and Humphrey Jennings. And though he later worked for British Transport Films making propaganda films, he later became an individualistic and maverick director. Noted for his offbeat features Unearthly Stranger and The Man Who Had Power over Women, he was best known for his documentary shorts that are vivid, humane and insightful film essays showcasing British life.

In films such as They Took Us to the Sea (1961) in which a group of children, funded by the NSSPC, are taken by train to the seaside; The Elephant Never Forgets (1953) – a celebration of the final hours of the last South London tram and I Think They Call Him John (1964) that portraits a day in the life of a pensioner alone in his flat; Krish brought dignity, compassion, humour and acute social observation to his subject matter. There is often a moment in a Krish film that crystallizes the inner life of his characters. His powers of observation were well-developed, enabling his camera to evoke the subtlety of body language and expression. Such allowance of pathos – but never sentimentality – was probably one of the reasons Krish never felt an affinity with the Free Cinema Movement of the fifties: Reisz, Richardson and Anderson always kept more emotional distance back then. In I Think They Call him John, an old working class man goes through his solitary ritual of cooking; watching TV and washing up – a routine that has gradually solidified his loneliness. Whist looking out of his window, an unseen motorcyclist roars by. John’s vacant expression conveys so much about the post-war world that has simple passed him by. It is a poignant scene comparable to De Sica’s observations of a retired civil servant in the quietly devastating 1952 film Umberto D.

And the obviously happy faces of children on a train in They Took Us To the Sea (it’s ‘the sea’, not ‘the seaside’ – inferring what is practical over what is pleasurable), are intercut with children who look hurt, puzzled and withdrawn. This is not simply a film about the virtues of NSSPC care, but a nuanced depiction of kids who have missed out on holidays because they can barely comprehend horizons beyond their limited existence in the city.

Krish’s naturalism was always aligned to a quirky and surreal way of seeing. The Elephant Never Forgets has a celebratory joy that recalls the early TV work of Ken Russell: watching it now, it is hard to believe that twenty thousand Londoners could get so involved in the life of a tram, just before it was broken up for the eager scrap merchants. However the repeated use of the music hall song, “Riding Along on the Top of a Car” makes for a gem of a film that moves you to tears. And in Drive Carefully, Darling (1975) we have fantasy experts in white coats operating the brain and senses of a reckless motorist. Yet even such Sci-Fi children’s book illustration is cleverly edited with touching shots of a wife, who won’t see her husband alive again, doing the shopping.

Yet Krish’s most audacious short has to be The Finishing Line (1977). This is a British Transport film about the dangers for children playing near a railway track. By imagining a school’s sports day (a very British occasion) replete with brass band and summer afternoon teas, Krish transcends his public information remit to produce a deadpan horror film. As the children, aided by teachers and parents, compete in such events as racing across the railway track, throwing stones at a train and walking through a long tunnel; the injuries and deaths pile up in a chilling manner that to this day still shock and haunt. The Finishing Line’s graphic violence is always judiciously understated. Krish maintains a cool moralist’s eye. The film’s a nightmarish deterrent for any child considering having fun on a railway track. Occasionally the film teeters on the edge of subversion. Not in the manner of a Lindsay Anderson, with the public school slaughter seen in If…, but a sense in which the authorities (parents, teachers and ambulance staff) calmly manage the games and administer aid in a massacre of the innocents; all the while hinting at darker, unspoken fears about complicity, safety and adult responsibility for its young. Although such unease is subtly generalised throughout the film, it did not prevent Krish’s powerful short from being withdrawn after its TV screening. British Transport had the film banned for twenty one years.

A ban was also placed on Krish’s military intelligence film Captured (1959). Indeed the film so freaked out the authorities that they viewed it as a bad advertisement for anyone wanting to join the armed services. The few permitted screenings (for recruits only) had to be supervised by a senior officer. Captured documents the British soldiers, during the Korean War, who have been captured by the Chinese. The prisoners undergo a stark re-education in the aims and ideals of Communism. One captive (Alan Dobie) is subjected to brain washing, brutal coercion and torture (the uncomfortable water boarding scenes are brilliantly filmed). The film grips like a vice in a tightly framed film noir. Krish also gives Captured complex characters placed in a strongly dramatic storyline. Stereotypes are avoided. Krish frequently points out the need to keep both a collective and individual resistance to interrogation methods. For a divide and rule approach is what the torturers hope to achieve. Indeed it’s the tension between a prisoner who is almost pushed out of the group for suspected enemy collaboration (both ironically rightly and wrongly so) and the victim/torturer scenes, that make for such a morally engaging film. Captured depicts the painful road to travel in order to learn the correct response towards the real enemy, who is always the Chinese and not your fallible fellow prisoner.

Visually outstanding, Captured has many tight and beautiful compositions. Images of an abandoned prisoner; a group of soldiers confined in a hut where fraught conversations are shot with assurance and rigour. Captured is a long short film (65 minutes) in a drama-documentary style and remains a forceful human story transcending its military education aims.

Krish’s feature debut, Unearthly Stranger (1960) is also an unqualified success. The film was shot on a shoestring, but none the worse for it. The film’s direction, writing, editing and photography are finely focussed on the story of a female alien, Julie (Gabriella Licudi), who’s married to a scientist (John Neville) working on a space project. The twist in the tale is that the alien has fallen in love with the man she has been sent to kill. Her displays of emotion mean that tears literally burn her skin. In a haunting scene were the alien wife frightens children in a school playground, there is sense that they are recoiling from her, sensing her otherworldliness. This is almost Village of the Dammed material played in dramatic reverse. And the film has more than a hint or two of Siegel’s Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. As in Captured, its ending is uncertain and uncompromising.

Captured was made as an industry calling card to secure John Krish more work as a features director. But the work never materialised and the film was not publically screened till 2003. Krish’s debut feature, Unearthly Stranger was still very short – seventy five minutes, only ten minutes longer than Captured. Both films concern strange hostile forces that want to take over the world. Captured for its Communist ideas, was generally perceived as strange and hostile to Western values. And Unearthly Stranger’s apprehension as to what exists in the stratosphere, beyond our planet. Their Cold War linkage seemed a natural progression for John Krish’s talent, making us long for more Sci-Fi, psychological horror or even thrillers. But Krish was never cut out to work in the style of Hammer Film; he got stuck with material that was not of his own choosing. A handful of features The Wild Affair, Decline and Fall of a Birdwatcher and The Man Who had Power over Women are comedy dramas hampered by clunky scripts and unsure direction. These films have some positive elements: Acute social observation, a surreal touch and incisive editing made his shorts outstanding. He turned the Public Information Film into an art form by stamping his personal signature on the genre. Those works, and his two not quite feature-length films, are his legacy. A concerned humanist with dark energy and vision; John Krish was really quite special. And he is still with us, now aged ninety two. A recent engaging BFI interview with him reveals a feisty and engaging personality. Alan Price©2016

Three Days of the Condor (1975) | Dual format release

Director: Sydney Pollack Writer: James Grady: Six Days of the Condor

Cast: Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Max von Sydow

117min | Thriller | US

Based on a CIA conspiracy to take over Middle Eastern oil fields, Cold War spy thriller Three Days of the Condor is also a smouldering love story fired by the sizzling chemistry of Robert Redford (as Joseph Turner – The Condor) and Faye Dunaway (Kathy Hale) whose serendipitous meeting occurs when Turner kidnaps her on the run from a group of assassins who have previously shot and killed his entire CIA department during his brief absence from the office to grab some lunch. Turner is training to be a analyst when he gets embroiled in a complex political conspiracy and winds up wondering whom he can trust and who is the bad guy, as he goes it alone. As it happens, Hale falls for her captor and decides to help him – and bed him; exuding supreme sexual allure and vulnerability, as only Dunaway can (she starred in Chinatown in the same year). As Turner, Redford convincingly portrays a decent man whose paranoia leads him into the unknown in a situation where anyone he meets could be a disguised killer out to murder him. During this compelling political thriller, Redford crosses paths with Max Von Sydow’s Joubert, one of the chief suspects in his self-led investigation. The suave Swede is dynamite as the enigmatic antagonist of this classic Sydney Pollack outing, shot by ace cinematographer Owen Roizman (The French Connection) with a sultry seventies score by Dave Grusin, who won a Grammy for his original theme music to The Graduate. MT

OUT ON DUAL FORMAT DVD | BLU-RAY COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA | 11 April 2016

New high-definition presentation
· Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hearing impaired
· Stereo and 5.1 soundtrack options
· Exclusive new video interview with film historian Sheldon Hall
· The Directors: Sydney Pollack, a career-spanning appreciation of the director’s works
· Original theatrical trailer
· 32-PAGE BOOKLET featuring a new essay on the film by critic Michael Brooke, an extensive interview with Pollack, and archival images.

Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party (2015) | BFI FLARE 2016

Director.: Stephen Cone

Cast: Cole Doman, Pat Healey, Elizabeth Laidlaw, Nina Ganet, Melanie Neilan, Daniel Kyri, Joe Keery, Patrick Andreas

87min | Drama | USA

Stephen Cone made his name with multi-awarded breakout drama The Wise Kids. Still only 35, his 7th feature is a coming-out story that revolves around a family swimming pool party in upmarket Chicago where the aponymous Henry is celebrating his 17th birthday.

In this die-hard Christian community, Henry’s parents and the huge majority of guests and friends are born again Christians, their lives guided by (often ostentatious) thankfulness to the Lord – or so it seems. We meet Henry (Doman) for the first time on the eve of his birthday, in bed with his best friend Gabe (Keery). The boys masturbate, Gabe enthusiastically enumerating the sexual high points if he could seduce the class-beauty – but it soon becomes clear that Henry’s sex object is lying next to him. The next day’s birthday party starts off on a dull note; the adults gossiping about goings-on in the church, where Henry’s father Bob (Healy) is a pastor. But the tempo soon changes when stunning beauty Christine (Neilan) arrives, the boys hanging on her every word, and it’s clearly not Gospel. Meanwhile, Henry’s sister Autumn (Ganet), is still coming to terms with the big wide world outside the God-fearing community, after her first year at college – she is also angry with her boyfriend who had somehow talked her into losing her virginity. Then there is Henry’s friend Ricky (Andreas) who had “got aroused under the showers when seeing the bodies of his mates”. He later tried to commit suicide, and at Henry’s party he locks himself in the bathroom and disfigures his face with a razor. Finally, it emerges that Henry’s parents also have a skeleton in the cupboard: his mother Kat (Laidlaw) had an affair with a popular church leader (now dead) his widow Bob in reminiscing about his ‘great character’. Although Bob has forgiven Kat, she wants to move on, but being the sole family member in on her son’s sexual orientation, she asks her husband to give Henry his blessing.

In this rambunctious drama Cone impressively captures Henry’s hypocritical family background, but tries to involve too so many sub-narratives that Henry’s story submerges below the water line. What floats on the surface is his shyness, verging on blandness, and it’s never clear whether Doman, choses to plays him meek and mild or whether he truly is an emotionless cypher. While everyone else is rising to the bait, Henry seems un-engaged, almost distant. Cinematographer Jason Chiu echoes this mood with some insipid visuals, bringing a suitably voyeuristic feel to the underwater scenes. While empathetic to Henry’s feelings, Cone never really delves into wider implications of the issue, preferring to sketch out a story involving a series of social stereotypes. At such HENRY GAMBLE’S BIRTHDAY PARTY works better as a treatise on life in a devoutly Christian community, than as an involving drama of sexual awakening. MT

SCREENING DURING BFI FLARE | UNTIL 27 MARCH 2016

Spirits of the Dead (1968) | Blu-ray release

Directors: Federico Fellini, Louis Malle, Roger Vadim

Cast: Jane Fonda, Brigitte Bardot, Alain Delon, Terence Stamp, James Robertson Justice, Salvo Randone, Peter Fonda

121min | Fantasy Horror | US | Italy | France

The Sixties was a vintage decade for film and TV adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe. There were over 35 productions. Yet in 1969 a remarkable Poe film came and went with very little recognition. SPIRITS OF THE DEAD is a portmanteau piece directed by Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Federico Fellini. Allowing directors of other nationalities to adapt American Horror Gothic is fascinating. So what did two Frenchmen and an Italian bring to Poe? Not complete fidelity to the text but undoubtedly intrigue and atmosphere.

The first film Metzengerstein concerns the rivalry between two families and a brief meeting between Fréderique (Jane Fonda) and her brother Wilhelm (Peter Fonda). When Fréderique fails to seduce her brother Wilhelm, she orders his stables to be burnt down. Wilhelm is killed in the fire and his spirit self-incarnates into a wild black stallion. This sounds dramatically promising. Unfortunately Vadim’s direction is so perfunctory that development is ditched for style. He is more eager to show off his actors wearing skimpy ‘period’ costumes (Jane Fonda’s wardrobe used as a trailer for his next Fonda film Barbarella). Only Claude Renoir’s fine photography redeems Metzengerstein, with a magnificently shot sequence of the stables ablaze.

Next is William Wilson. In contrast to Vadim, Malle’s direction is strong and pointed. The film re-works the theme of the doppelganger/alter-ego. Alain Delon is well cast as Wilson, a sadistic army officer. In confession with a priest, Wilson talks about being pursued by a man of his own image and name. Though the film’s chase scenes are gripping, the strongest sequence is the card game between Alain Delon and Giuseppina (Brigitte Bardot wearing a black wig!). Here Malle employs a manner of suspense, comparable to his first film Lift to the Scaffold. This has little to do with the original story but manages to convey, as does the film’s ending, Poe’s perplexing and morbid anxieties.

Finally we have Fellini’s episode, Toby Dammit. This is a genuine exercise in horror. Toby Dammit (Terence Stamp, at his best) is a famous movie actor disillusioned by his work, drugs, drink and the brittle celebrity bubble he lives in. The devil, in the shape of a young girl in a white dress bouncing a luminous ball, keeps following him. All Toby Dammit cares about is when he’ll receive his producer’s present of a Ferrari. However once the car arrives, the devil intervenes. Fellini creates situations both sinister and funny (the film’s full of jokes about cinema and philosophy) engagingly balanced against the set design horror of a broken Dantesque looking bridge and a victim’s blood dripping on a wire. Toby Dammit is a ‘horror of manners’ that is amongst Fellini’s best films.

SPIRITS OF THE DEAD is uneven: Period drama with a psychedelic edge that flounders, gains its balance and then disconcertingly swings forward to black contemporary satire that is unpredictable, humorous, shocking and occasional visual brilliant. These are not obvious Poe adaptations. I think old Edgar Allan would have approved of their spirit. ALAN PRICE

NOW AVAILABLE ON BLU-RAY COURTESY OF AMAZON.CO.UK

Welcome to the House (2015) BFI Flare 2016

Director: Barbara Hammer | Documentary | 79min | US

Barbara Hammer creates an expressionistic portrait of the fascinating early 20th century American poet Elizabeth Bishop, exploring her love life and her outstanding contribution to the literary life of the era (1911-79) through black and white photos, dreamlike collages and an atmospherically eerie and evocative score. Selective talking heads offer informative and enchanting impressions of their charismatic friend and collaborator who was given to peripatetic wanderings to exotic places where she could give full reign to her lesbian lifestyle during ’30s prohibition.

This is a sensuous and often mesmerizing piece of filmmaking and Ms. Hammer, no stranger to the lesbian subject matter, embellishes her largely experimental documentry with charmingly suggestive incantations often accompanying readings of Bishop’s poetry and verses, some of which are impressively avantgarde: “I’m so hot to trot; I’m so hot to trot”.

Early on in Bishop’s life, it also emerges that her mother was committed to an institution leaving her to the care of grandparents in Nova Scotia where her eccentric (for the era) love life involved affairs with women of all ages from her college tutor to her classmates.

Spending many years in Brazil, she lived a bohemian and often toxic lifestyle near Petrópolis with successful architect Lota de Macedo Soares, on her modernist estate. Here Bishop became an alcoholic and Soares eventually committed suicide with an overdose. Later, at Harvard, Bishop eventually managed to relax into her sexuality, and expressed it through suggestive clothing and louche behaviour with her friends – fellow poets Kathleen Spivack and John Ashbery – in the privacy of her home where she played ping-pong in tight leather trousers.

But the most fascinating revelations come courtesy of her Brazilian housekeeper who paints a vivid and vehement picture of one of America’s most imaginative literary doyennes. MT

SCREENING DURING BFI FLARE UNTIL 27 MARCH 2016

Grey Gardens (1975) | Criterion Collection UK

Director.: Ellen Hovde, Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Muffie Meyer

Documentary with Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and Edith Bouvier Beale | 94 min | USA

In 1973, Lee Radziwill, sister of Jackie Kennedy-Onassis, invited the filmmakers Albert and David Maysles to a 28 bedroom house in East Hampton to meet Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edith; respectively the aunt and niece of the widowed First Lady. This film was later confiscated by Radziwill, but the Maysles returned two years later to shoot an extraordinary portrait of two co-dependent women living, by choice, in utter poverty – a real life Miss Haversham and her daughter. “Big Edie” Beale pursued an amateur singer career and had a beautiful voice (we hear her sing), she also claims to have been very happily married with three adorable children – but after 14 years together, she separated from her husband Phelan Beale when little Edie was 14, retaining the big house a block from Atlantic Avenue. Although Jackie Onassis had previously paid for a clean-up which involved, amongst other things, the removal of over a thousand bags of detritis from the Radziwill’s property – which otherwise would have been declared unfit for habitation – four years on, the place is still an unsavoury hovel resembling a set from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. “Big Edie”s eccentric daughter “Little Edie” (56) is seen wearing a variety of head scarves (due to alopecia totalis) and giving refuge to pet racoons while her pampered cats roams all over the place. After separation, Edie and her daughter became elective dropouts, and continually talk about young Edie’s suitors which purportedly included Howard Hughes and Paul Getty. Their past is wistfully discussed but a not as paradise lost. Young Edie breaks into song and dances frequently and perpetually chants the same rhetorical refrain “When am I going to get out of here?”. Immersion instead of intrusion, the hallmark of the Maysles Brothers works perfectly in this pristine restoration – a portrait of performing artists who made a virtue of their squalor and but failed to avoid fame.

OUT ON BLURAY TO CELEBRATE THE LAUNCH OF THE CRITERION COLLECTION UK SELECTION | 8 April 2016

Only Angels Have Wings (1939) | Criterion Collection UK

Dir.: Howard Hawks

Cast: Gary Grant, Jean Arthur, Richard Barthelmess, Rita Hayworth

USA 1939, 121 min.

Set in a isolated trading port of Barranca in South America, ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS is the typical Howard Hawks film: a woman trying to join the company macho men, who in this case, all seem to have a death wish. The men are pilots working for a small aviation company which is trying to gain a new, lucrative contract. For this to happen, the old clapped out planes have to overcome fog, storms and mountains – and never mind, what happens to the pilots.

The homo-erotic aspect of the male relationships is apparent here as it is in Hawks’ other aviation films. So is the oedipal complex: not for nothing are the younger pilots calling Geoff “Papa”. A film critic wrote to Hawks after the premiere, that he “was going to far”, questioning the reality aspect of the film. Hawks answered, that the story was the pure truth, since it was told to him by a Mexican pilot. Elaborating on this original story, Hawks told with pride an encore, which is indicative of the film’s ideology – and humour: “A friend of the bridegroom put a German aviation equipment under the bed of the newly married couple, to measure their sexual activities, by the bouncing of the bed. When he showed the couple the graph, the bride was so pleased, that she hung the graph of the wall”. This little episode somehow explains everything about the psyche of the director and the misogynist nature of the film.

Pianist cum singer Bonnie Lee (Arthur) is stranded at the airport, nothing more than a ramshackle little building, which houses everything needed, including a restaurant. Pilot and boss Geoff Carter (Grant), misogynist par excellence, introduces himself to Bonnie just after a pilot has been killed. “Joe died flying. That was his job. He just wasn’t good enough. That’s why he got it.” Then he tucks into the steak, the dead man had ordered. Bonnie is overwhelmed by such coldness and the ensuing dialogue shows where the two stand : “How could you do it?”/What?/Eat that steak./What’s the matter with it?/It was his/Look, what do you want me to do? Have it stuffed?”

In spite of this, Bonnie is falling for Geoff, against her better judgement. Shortly afterwards, Joe’s replacement, Bat Mac Pherson (Baserthelmess) arrives. He has once left a mechanic on board of a crashing plane, bailing out himself. He is “yellow” and Geoff lets him have it: “I can send you out in any kind of weather, on any kind of job, and only worry about the ship getting back. On those terms, do you still want the job?” Bat accepts the job, and later regains the respect of his fellow pilots, risking his life, trying to rescue a co-pilot. But his wife Judy (Hayworth), Geoff’s ex-lover, soon makes Bonnie jealous, and sets a story in motion, which ends with Geoff telling Bonnie to toss a coin to decide if she wants to stay with him.

The narrative’s set is claustrophobic, the camera seems to have no room to manoeuvre, the protagonists are pressed together like fish in can. Only Angels have Wings is a ‘Boys Own’ adventure, any social connections are missing. Geoff, like the rest of the pilots, is more in love with death than life, unable to form any lasting relationships with women; they talk in shorthand, and hide whatever emotions they may have.

ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS is best remembered for being the first film starring Rita Hayworth, who was casted more or less against the will of Hawks by Columbia boss Harry Cohen. Hawks complained later that she was not a good actress – how wrong he proved to be. AS

ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS | CRITERION COLLECTION UK | 18 APRIL 2016

Rocco e i Suoi Fratelli (1960) | Dvd | Blu ray

Director: Luchino Visconti

Cast: Alain Delon, Annie Girardot, Renato Salvatori, Katina Paxinou, Claudia Cardinale, Spiras Focas, Max Cartier

Italy 1960, 180 min.

After La Terra Trema (1948), Visconti returned to neo-realism and films exploring the cultural divide between the North and South of Italy as featured, twelve years later, in his operatic length feature: ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS: an acerbic criticism of Italian social reality, “where the split between South and North was never so harsh, the prejudice of the North never so never fundamental, even though it was the era of the Italian economic miracle”.

Based on works by Giovanni Verga, Antonio Gramsci and Carlo Levi (Christ Stopped at Eboli), Visconti asked a team of writers to develop a script which would show “that people from the South who moved to the North for economic reasons would never be treated like brothers, but as strangers and intruders, who would have to do the most dirty work”. As usual with Visconti, the original script team was dismissed and Suso Cecchi d’Amico,Visconti’s favourite script writer, whose story was the basis of Rocco, finished the work with Visconti. As it happens, the split between the two geographical parts of Italy is still virulent today with the “Liga Nord”, a main political party, whose main focus is the separation between North and The Meridione still well-supported even now.

Before shooting began Visconti fell out with his regular producer Franco Christaldi who refused to cast Annie Girardot; instead, for reasons of box-office, he proposed Brigitte Bardot or Pascale Petit – “just fit to be engaged as manicurists”- according to Visconti. Goffredo Lombardo of ‘Titanus’ took over production, after having reluctantly agreed to cast Girardot.

When Rosaria Parondi (Paxinou) arrives with her three grown-ups sons Rocco (Delon), Simone (Salvatori), Ciro (Cartier) and their kid brother Luca in Milan, they meet the in-laws of their oldest brothers Vincenco (Focas), engaged to Ginetta (Cardinale). Vincenco has integrated well, but his newly arrived family is viewed with suspicion by the Milanese family of Ginetta. Vincence, who had been a boxer, secures fights for his brothers Rocco and Simone, but cannot do anything about the harsh living conditions his newly arrived family encounters. But Rosaria, a tough and dominant matriarch, solves this problem, and the family move into one of the high rise blocks on the outskrits of Milan. Simone falls in love with the prostitute Nadia, who lives two flights up. He neglects his boxing, and is beaten up brutally by an opponent. Rocco, on the other hand, takes his responsibilities seriously, even though he hates boxing, he achieves much more than Simone, who is a street fighter by nature. Having surpassed Simone in the ring, Rocco soon takes Nadia away from Simone, who reacts brutally, raping Nadia, even though Rocco has left her, asking her to return to Simone: “You are all he has”. But Simone only wants revenge. Visconti wanted to shoot he now famous murder scene in Milan’s ‘Idrobasa’, but the city council gave him no permission. They accused Visconti of showing no gratitude to the city of his birth. Finally, the scene was shot near lake Fogliano, near Lattina. (In real life, Salvatori married Giradout, the couple had a daughter).

After winning the Grand Jury Prix at Venice in 1960, ROCCO was censored and could not be shown at all in certain parts of Italy. Visconti replied with a long letter to the Italian Minister of Culture, accusing him of “wanting to repress the showing of the film altogether – only the media, the public and the parties of the Left have made it possible to be shown in this censored version”.

DOP Giuseppe Rotunno’s wide screen black-and-white images of the desolate suburb the Parondis inhabit belong to the most impressive portraits of Italian neo-realism and he went to shoot The Leopard for Visconti. His fighting scenes in the ring are equally outstanding, never shrinking away from the brutality of this “sport”, particularly when featuring Rocco, who hates violence and uses the fights to punish himself. Delon is the fallen angel, not sure of his gender orientation, he compensates in taking on responsibility for his family; trying to make up for Simone’s crimes, he even returns to the ring for good at the end. Salvatori finally is the coward, masquerading as the bully. When the police come after him he hides, begging for his mother. Girardout’s Nadia is very much in the ‘Carmen’ mould, sensuous and so full of life, a victim of male brutality. This is one of Italy’s finest films, full of intensity and rich complexity; like the Italians themselves. AS

NOW OUT ON BLU-Ray DUAL FORMAT | COURTESY OF MASTERS OF CINEMA, EUREKA

Women He’s Undressed (2016)

Dir: Gillian Armstrong | Doc 95’

Gillian Armstrong is no newcomer to exploring the lives of fascinating but lesser-known, niche designers: her biopic on Florence Broadhurst – another Australian designer (famous for her exquisite hand-printed wallpaper), and her ongoing documentary experiment with three Australian teenagers (now grown women) such as Smokes and Lollies, Fourteen’s Good and Eighteen’s Better, have received critical acclaim.

Her latest, a documentary WOMEN HE’S UNDRESSED is as much a portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s as it is an exploration of the life of Oscar winning Australian costume designer Orry-Kelly. WOMEN HE’S UNDRESSED plays out as part theatrical chamber piece, making good use of its stylish archival material, photographs and interviews with well known talking heads sharing pithy and gossipy insights.

There are some stylishly imagined scenes performed by actors (Deborah Kennedy plays Florence Kelly and Lara Cox, Ginger Rogers) that take the lid off the fashion side of Hollywood film industry, giving the documentary an entertaining dramatic twist. Despite being largely unknown in his own country, we learn that Orry-Kelly was a prodigious talent who dressed stars in over 280 films during his lifetime including such legends as Baby Face, Casablanca, Some Like it Hot and 42nd Street. He literally transformed actresses like Barbara Stanwyck (in The Lady Gambles) and Ingrid Bergman (Casablanca) creating a range of iconic costumes and stylish rigouts.

Clearly Orry-Kelly was gay, yet little emerges here of the costumier’s private life despite his candid efforts to be true to his ideals and authentic to the last: after marrying Randolph Scott, unlike many Hollywood characters, he made no attempt to cover up his sexuality by marrying a woman (unlike Cary Grant, Rock Hudson and so many others). Although not exhaustive, this is a watchable and welcome insight into Orry-Kelly’s life nonetheless. MT

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO

Speed Sisters (2016)

Director: Amber Fares

80min | Documentary | Palestine/USA/Qatar/UK/Denmark/Canada

First time writer|directorAmber Fares certainly enters new territory with SPEED SISTERS where five Palestinian women take to the race track; their breakneck fight for the title is as competitive as any men’s race.

Street car-racing is a very male dominated sport all over the world, so it is particularly surprising to see five young women drivers competing in Palestine. Proud to represent her country’s sporting prowess, Fares doesn’t hesitate to show the harsh reality of Israel’s occupation. Marah, who lives in Jenin, is very much supported by her parents, her father Khaled being her biggest fan. Her main rival is Betty, who was born in Mexico, Spanish still being her first language. Betty wins the first championship of this documentary, even though a technical fault on her car should have disqualified her – at least that is Marah’s argument. Betty is very much a modern woman, but also is keen on fashion. Her statement, “I am not a tomboy” is fully justified, and she has also internalised the commercial rules of the game, being very much aware of being “a brand”.

The racing drivers are managed by Maysoon, who runs a shop and is engaged to a Jordanian, whom she will follow to Amman where they will race together. Marah can’t wait to leave Jenin, bored with “seeing the same faces”. After gaining permits to visit Israel, Marah comments on the differences between Palestine and Israel – only a wall away. Her father Khaled is still nostalgic for the family home near Tel Aviv, which still lies empty since their departure in 1948. Gradually the scenes on the racing circuit take a backseat as this documentary explores the realities of life in the region including the harsh difficulties of filmmaking and shooting in the middle of a war zone. The third act brings a rude awakening as Betty suffers a setback but battles on again for supremacy. Noor emerges as a fierce competitor, making the successful change to compete professionally for Palestine all over the world.

SPEED SISTERS is another superb example of successful low-budget filmmaking. Fares keeps the ‘Talking Heads’ to a minimum and focuses on the action: the struggle between Marah and Betty is as vivid as life on the war torn Left Bank. The camera is literally in the face of all participants and this spontaneity and directness help to engage the audience. SPEED SISTERS, which won the ‘Finders’ Award at he Adelaide Film Festival, is a small but glittering gem. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 25 MARCH 2016

Disorder (2015)

Director: Alice Winocour

Cast. Matthias Schoenaerts, Diane Kruger

100min. Belgian/France. Thriller

Alice Winocour’s follow-up to Augustine is a mesmerising mood piece lushly set in the Southern French villa of its name, where Matthias Schoenaerts’ ex-soldier Vincent Loreau arrives to guard the wife of a shady Lebanese businessman. Fraught with tension and generating the kind of potent on screen chemistry experienced in cult classic Body Heat and Chinatown between its central characters, the enigmatic narrative is driven forward by a pounding atmospheric score involving no less than nine sound technicians.

Diane Kruger plays the stone-faced wife Jessie, who enjoys this luxury villa lifestyle with her tiny son Ali. But luxury comes at a price and it only emerges later that her wealthy husband is a crooked arms dealer, who gradually disappears leaving her prey to a continuous onslaught of hooded intruders, whom Schoenaerts sends packing. A tight and minimalist script is piqued with the odd dry comment, briefly lightening the suspenseful if rather schematic plotline, whose strength lies chiefly in a powerfully physical performance by Schoenaerts, who gradually brings a smile to Kruger’s tight-lipped Jessie, as their relationship deepens. DISORDER plays its secrets close to its musclebound chest as it unfurls towards an impressive but unsurprising finale. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE | REVIEWED AT CANNES FILM FESTIVAL May 2015 | MARYLAND

The Club | SILVER BEAR winner Berlinale

Director: Pablo Larraín

Cast: Alfredo Castro, Antonia Zeggers, Marcelo Alonso, Roberto Farias

98mins Thriller Chile

Chilean director Pablo Larraín is well-known for exploring the dark corners of his homeland to ferret out a few skeleton’s from the nation’s history. THE CLUB is such a story. There is always a place for his regular collaborator Alfredo Castro in these dark and often gloomy dramas. In this one, Castro (From Afar) gets a leading role hiding out in a windswept coastal backwater as a crusty old paedophile priest, Padre Vidal. And he’s not alone, sharing his grim beachhouse are four other priests, serving time for a variety of sexual misdemeanours in the name of God. Victoria Zeggers is Sister Monica, the young woman who keeps house for these miserable old men whose only pleasure in life is their obsession with a jointly- owned greyhound they race at competitive meets.

Sergio Armstrong’s cinematography captures the wide open emptiness of gloomy seascapes beaten by winds and endlessly suffused by a dank and dreary fog. The old buggers (quite literally) are on their last legs, rationed in their movements and deprived of any kind of physical enjoyment with limited contact with the outside world. It’s a sobering regime but a bearable one, until one night a troubled fisherman Sandokan (Roberto Farías) fetches up in the front garden hurling an unsavoury humiliating accusations at the one of the priests. His gripe, it appears, results from being repeatedly sexual abused in childhood by one of the priests. This toe-curling outpouring is unspeakably filthy and the men of God are mortified by this public take-down that is met the follow day by the arrival of Father García (Marcelo Alonso) with a mission to close down this cosy little seaside set-up. Father García is rather sultry and inappropriately attractive for the job in hand, leaving us wondering about his own motives in the scandalous affair.

THE CLUB is a sinister and suspenseful piece of filmmaking. A palpable tension hovers over proceedings like heavy fog drifting in from the sea; continually threatening but always managing to contain is subversive undercurrents. Guillermo Calderón and Daniel Villalobos contribute to a screenplay that villifies the characters but never completely demonises them, leaving much wit and wisdom for all to enjoy in the devilish den of iniquity. “I am the king of the repressed,” says Father Vidal (Castro). Darrain’s El Club is not an edifying story but an fascinating one. Meredith J Taylor.

ON RELEASE FROM 25 MARCH 2016 | REVIEWED AT BERLINALE 2015

Court (2014)

Writer|Director: Chaitanya Tamhane

Cast: Vira Sathidar, Vivek Gomber, Geetanjali Kulharni, Pradeep Joshi

116min | Drama | India 2014

COURT is a mature and analytical debut for first time director Chaitanya Tamhane, and won him the Orrizonti Prize at Venice Film Festival (2014): Not only does it deal with the disturbingly inefficient court system in India, but also the confrontation of different social classes, cultures and generations.

In Mumbai, in the state of Maharashtra, a folksinger and political activist Narayan Kamble (Sathidar) is accused of causing the death by suicide of a sewer worker: allegedly, one of his songs called for “all sewer workers to commit suicide”. His lawyer, an upper class Gujurati, Vinay Vora (Vivek Gomber, who also produced the film), tries to convince judge Sadavarte (Joshi), that his client is innocent since there is no proof of suicide. But prosecutor Nutan (Kulharni) is adamant about Kamble’s guilt: she uses colonial laws from Victorian times and all sorts of prejudice to convince the judge, asking for no less than twenty years imprisonment for the accused. And although Kamble is a native of Maharashtra, the folk singer is also a lower-caste Marathi. But Mumbai is a huge cosmopolitan city; home to people whose heritage is from other states, at both ends of the social scale. Nutan’s ideology is that of a petite bourgeoise, disliking Kamble for the simple fact that he is a Dalit (Untouchable), whether guilty or not, and she is afraid of any subversive activity (how ever far-fetched) the singer might engage in.

After the widow of the dead sewer worker testifies that her husband never talked about suicide, but was suffering from the sulphur gases of the sewage system, Vora at least gets bail for his client, paying the 100 000 Rupees himself, with no hope of seeing any of the money. But Kamble returns from prison to publish his poetry and is arrested again for breaking the rule of his bail conditions. With a whole month of court holidays coming, Vora tries to save the 65 year-old singer from another prison stretch.

Courtroom dramas are usually full of emotional confrontations and dramatic incidents, but COURT showcases the rather pedestrian system where postponements and archaic laws dominate proceedings. Tamhane claims the idea came about: “When I attended a non-descript lower court in suburban Mumbai, the sheer lack of drama, and the casualness with which life and death decisions were being made, sparked my imagination”. But COURT is much more than a matter of how the law is applied: Vora is clearly a member of the new upper-class, and whilst his parents are traditional and only interested in grandchildren, their son loves his bachelor life. In contrast, prosecutor Nutan is an ordinary, middle class mother who cooks for her family and talks non-stop about groceries.

COURT is an immersive and engaging film: DoP Mrinal Desai’s widescreen images are precise: in the courtroom scenes he uses a static camera, showing the rigid system in all its ponderings. On the outside, everything is lively and fluid, in contrast the courtroom sessions, with their biased rules and incompetent procedures, take up most of the day. Tamhane never forces the tempo, letting everything unravel gradually, including the well-drawn personalities who are full of contradictions arising from a society where the pre-colonial world view and the modern, enlightened but crass materialistic society collide. AS

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE VENUES FROM 25 MARCH 2016
Winner: Orizzonti Award for Best Film and Lion of the Future – Luigi De Laurentiis Award for Debut Film, Venice Film Festival 2014 | More info: www.day-for-night.org/court-film

Iona (2015)

Director: Scott Graham

Cast: Ruth Negga, Douglas Henshall, Tom Brooke, Michelle Duncan, Ben Gallagher, Sorcha Groundsell

87 min | UK Germany | Drama

It may be a truism, but the saying that the second film is always more difficult is again proved right, this time in the case of Scott Graham (Shell), whose IONA, in many ways similar to Shell, is disappointing.

The Aberdeen writer director has set his narrative on a small Scottish island, where Iona (Negga), arrives with her son Bull (Gallagher), to take shelter in the place where she grew up. Bull has killed his violent policeman father raping his mother. The young man is guilt ridden and the religious community on the island gives him some comfort. But this all changes when he falls in love with Sarah (Groundsell), a teenager who is dumb and unable to walk due to an accident caused by the negligence of her father Matthew (Brooke). Sarah’s mother Elizabeth (Duncan), Iona’s half sister, has a very ambivalent relationship with Iona, suspecting her (rightly) of having a carnal relationship with her father Daniel (Henshall). After Bull sleeps with Sarah – enabling her to stand again – his trauma is re-ignited and he runs towards the cliffs, where two men follow him.

IONA is all rather enigmatic, and even when we discover some of the characters’ motivations and relationships, this drama remains rather unsatisfying with an overriding tone of guilt and remorse but few explanations. As with Shell, an extended short, Scott Graham commits the same error with IONA: the narrative feels 0ver-stretched and shrouded in an atmosphere of doom and gloom, from which there is no conclusion. The rationale behind the behaviour of the whole cast is always in doubt, particularly since everyone appears to hiding something. IONA also suffers a structural problem: too often there is a brooding silence; looks are exchanged and the whole tempo slows down, only to explode in the final minutes. DOP Yoliswa von Dallwitz evokes the limpid delicacy of the island landscape achieving the same feel as in Shell – with washed out hues for the scenes in the small, old-fashioned cottages. Dialogue is threadbare thrusting the focus onto the acting with some moving performances from Douglas Henshall and Ruth Negga doing their best to maintain our interest in this rather slim but touching affair. AS

NOW ON RELEASE AT SELECTED ARTHOUSE CINEMAS

Nasty Baby (2015)

Director|Writer: Sebastian Silva

Cast: Kristen Wiig, Sebastian Silva, Tunde Adebimpe, Reg. E. Cathey, Mark Margolis

100min USA/Chile Drama

Sebastian Silva (Crystal Fairy, The Maid) treats us to a feel-good-movie about a gay couple trying to become parents with the help of their female friend – or does he? Set in Brooklyn’s gentrified community of hipsters and would-be artists, Silva’s comedy of manners turns into a nightmare.

Mo (Adebimpe) and Freddy (Silva) would like a baby. Their best female friend Polly (Wiig) is only too willing to help out as her biological clock is ticking overtime. But Freddy’s sperm count is too low and Mo is at first reluctant to produce the sperm, driving the others crazy with his procrastination. Freddy is a would-be artist – like many in the neighbourhood – and tries to produce a performance act for a show, organised by a gallery; his contribution is called ‘Nasty Baby’, where Freddy and his friends take on the roles of babies – Silva lets no doubt arise about how embarrassing his ‘art’ is. When the trio travels to visit Mo’s parents outside New York, the friction between the hipsters from Brooklyn and the traditional lifestyle of Mo’s family becomes apparent in a repressed way – even though it spurns Mo on, to take the plunge. In a hilarious scene we witness the use of the full set of paraphernalia needed for artificial insemination. Whilst focussing on the would-be-parents, we may have overlooked a mentally disturbed character “The Bishop” (Cathey), who harasses people on the street; is clearly homophobic (attacking Polly for visiting the gay couple) and wakes the men up every morning at seven, using his noisy leaf blower – even though there are no leaves left. A friendly neighbour (Margolis) tries to mediate, but something in Freddy snaps, setting in motion a night in which he drags all his friends into a true Shakespearean drama.

Yes, in hindsight, there’s more than one sign of things to come – but hey, our trio is so lovable, that the audience is rooting for them unreservedly. Here we have the ultimate dream protagonists: a mixed race gay couple (with Mo being the peace-loving black teddy bear), a caring health worker (Polly) and lots of funny artist friends who might not do very much, but are so cool. What Silva is asking the audience to do is look behind the easy-go lucky facades presented to us: “It’s just an elitist group that can do and live a life like that. Most people in the world have to do a real job to make money, but in New York you have people doing the most whimsical things”. And he goes even further: “The film looks at how people are being displaced from their original homes, and displaced by rich kids buying everything. This film is a fable and lesson for these hipsters”.

Shot mainly with a handheld camera, DOP’s Sergio Armstrong’s images are truly chaotic, just like the lives of the protagonists. Everyone races around; permanent mobility is seen as a replacement for focus – the only exception is the Abyssinian cat who is more manhandled than petted by Freddy and, exceptionally for her species, not afraid of water – hence the cute scene in the bathroom), . The acting ensemble is impressive, particularly Wiig who tries not to show her vulnerability and emerges as a sort of “Alice in a (as it turns out) very troubled Wonderland”. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 8 APRIL 2016 | NASTY BABY WON THE TEDDY AWARD AT BERLINALE 2015

Girls Lost (2015) |Pojkarna | BFI Flare 2016

Director.: Alexandra-Therese Keining

Cast: Tuva Jagell, Louise Nyvall, Wilma Holmen, Mandus Berg

106min | Sweden | Fantasy Drama.

GIRLS LOST is Swedish writer/director Alexandra-Therese Keining (Kiss Me) screen adaptation of Jessica Schliefauer’s prize-winning novel about three teenage girls who escape constant bullying at school courtesy of a magic drink. Keining uses slick ’80s retro styling and ‘CSI’ type computer graphics to portray the body-transfer scenes which are underpinned by a complex narrative exploring the true nature of sexual orientation.

In a macho school environment, three angst-ridden teenagers Kim (Jagell), Momo (Nyvall) and Bella (Holmen) cling together in a climate of sexual bullying from the boys, and a total lack of protection from their blasé teachers. One evening, Bella finds a mysterious seed that quickly sprouts a flower. After a night of fancy-dress partying (with masks straight out of Eyes Wide Shut), the trio imbibe the flower’s sap in a trance-like gender switching sequence where male actors take over their roles. Bella and Momo experience a boost of confidence when they morph back into their female identities during the daytime, but Kim is happier when she’s a boy. When the ‘male’ trio get invited to a football game Kim meets Tony (Berg), a tough guy from a nearby the estate. The two of them go on a burglary spree; Kim falling for Tony, whose harsh persona belies uncertainty about his own sexual orientation. Emboldened by the magic elixir, the girls seem better equipped to fight off male aggression at school: Kim is the only one addicted to the sap and Momo discovers her feelings for the male Kim, but the sap cannot last forever.

What starts as an adolescent-bonding movie soon develops into a serious discourse about the finer points of sexual orientation. Kim is much more at home in male body than a female one. At the same time, he is drawn to boys, and rejects the female Momo, who has fallen in love with his male identity. What looked like at first as semi-lesbian trio, turns out into something entirely different: The female Momo is clearly attracted to boys (but not the one of the macho-variety she encounters at school), Bella is extremely shy and reticent, and has yet to discover her sexual identity, whilst the male Kim is prone to the male violence his female Alter-Ego hated so much. A big question mark hangs over female Kim’s future.

Keining’s direction is faultless but her script and particularly her dialogue is often trite and over-didactic. That said, GIRLS LOST is a daring and original fantasy drama made watchable by the visual impact of Ragna Jorming’s stunning cinematography. AS

SCREENING DURING BFI FLARE 2016

Welcome to Me (2014)

Director: Shira Piven Writer: Eliot Laurence

Cast: Kristen Wiig, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tim Robbins, Wes Bentley, Joan Cusack

87min | Comedy | US

In Shira Piven’s WELCOME TO ME, a mentally unstable woman becomes an unlikely TV personality. Alice Klieg is what is politely called ditzy: but her borderline bipolar personality disorder goes full throttle when she quits her meds on winning the Mega-Millions lottery. Narcissistic tendencies to the fore, Alice (Kirsten Wiig) buys a 15 million dollar TV Vanity slot: a programme entirely dedicated to herself.

Eliot Laurence’s script perfectly portrays the ‘me me’ generation in this amusing, kooky and off the wall comedy that won’t suit everyone. But if you’re a fan of Wiig and her bizarre antics then WELCOME TO ME will certainly appeal. There’s a strange fascination to her portrait of mental illness that somehow reminds us of many people we actually know. Tim Robbins’ psychoanalyst Dr Daryl Moffet brings his own dry wit to the party taking the edge off Alice’s endlessly cloying self belief in an understated comedy performance of his own. Robbins’ is a welcome addition to the cast and a calm and balanced foil to the ongoing silliness, which includes a scene where Alice floats into her show on a boat and shares her deepest sexual longings. Wiig’s Alice is both vulnerable and attention-seeking with her food fads, putative spirituality and nymphomaniac behaviour. But when Alice steps into her Vet’s scrubs to operate on dogs during the live show there’s a distinct feeling amongst animal lovers that this is a bridge too far.

James Marsden plays the head of the TV station who cow-tows to Alice’s whims hoping her money will finance his ailing TV station while his study director (Joan Cusack) is just appalled and strung out by having to tolerate the endless drivel. Occasionally wince-worthy, endlessly bizarre and sometimes funny: WELCOME TO ME will go down well if you’re looking for light-hearted relief over the Easter break. Mental health is no laughing matter and, out of respect, Piven’s narrative always teeters on the brink of tragedy in this clever portrait of mainstream madness MT

WELCOME TO ME IS ON GENERAL RELEASE and EXCLUSIVE TO TO Sky Store on March 25.

Sworn Virgin (2015) | BFI Flare 2016

Director: Laura Bispuri Writer: Elviria Dones

Cast: Alba Ruhrwacher, Flonja Kodheli, Lars Eidinger, Emily Ferratello, Luan Jaha

90mins Italy/Albania Drama

‘Swearing Virginity’ is an ancient practice that still exists today in remote areas of Albania. Young women sacrifice their physical and emotional freedom in order to enjoy the privileges and rights only accorded to men, who enjoy complete independence and command the respect of the womenfolk in their community .

In Laura Bispuri’s sensitive feature debut, the sworn virgin in question is Hana Doda, played convincingly here by well-known Italian actress Alba Rohrwacher (Best Actress at Venice last year for HUNGRY HEARTS). As ‘Mark’ Doda, she eventually decides to leave her mountain home and seek refuge and a new life with her sister Lila (Flonja Kodheli) in Italy, after spending a decade of deprivation in a mountain village.

In Milan life feels very different for ‘Mark’, as she gradually adjusts to the modern world and a future of freedom, while constantly revisiting her painful past, seen in flashback. Feeling awkward and alienated by these new surroundings, it is never full explained why she continues to use her male name and dress as a man after arrival in their home. Teenage niece (Emily Ferratello) realises that things are not normal, despite her mother’s protestations to the contrary, and appears understandably hostile and questioning. Lila’s husband also seems to treat ‘Mark’ with a certain degree of frostiness, particularly when he sees the sisters experimenting with a new bra. It is only when she meets a life guard (Lars Eidinger) at the local swimming pool that Hana’s female longings start to awaken and her femininity blossoms.

Laura Bispuri adopts a less is more approach to her slow-burning narrative: dialogue is minimal, both in Italian and Albanian, and a stark steely blue aesthetic lends an aura of sombre frigidity to the narrative, keeping the tension simmering while details slowly emerge as the film unspools. SWORN VIRGIN is Based on a novel by Albanian writer Elvira Dones, the medieval practice stills survives today in backward mountain areas where brides are taken fully veiled by their husbands so they are unable to find their way back home. A bullet is included in their dowry by the bride’s father, just in case they fail to please their intended spouses. MT

Now SCREENING DURING BFI FLARE FESTIVAL until 27 MARCH 2016

ERLINALE 5-15 FEBRUARY 2015 – ALL OUR COVERAGE IN UNDER BERLINALE 2015

Flare is 30! | LGBT Film Festival 2016 | 17-27 March 2016

FLARE is 30! And to celebrate, the BFI is offering a chance to see the latest films from a flirty selection – appealing to the arthouse crowd and gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgender cineastes alike.

Kicking off, quite literally, with the World premiere of THE PASS, Ben A Williams footy-themed drama, stars Russell Tovey and Arinze Kene as Club lovers, in both senses of the word, who come together during an away match thousands of miles from home. And to close, SUMMERTIME [La Belle Saison], Catherine Corsini’s passionate portrayal of Paris during the ’70s where Cecile de France and Izïa Higelin star as two very different women who fall in love against the feminist street protests in the French capital.

This year screenings benefit from the EASTER BREAK and will continue on the day after this Closing Gala (Easter Sunday 27 March) with a Second Chance Sunday devoted to 2016 Festival best-sellers and a selection of LGBT archive gems from the Festivals’ history. Every ticket on Second Chance Sunday will be offered at the discounted price of £8. As a highlight of the day, the BFI will show the film that tops a brand new critics’ and programmers’ poll of the top 10 global LGBT films of the last 30 years. The result of this BFI poll and all the films screening on Second Chance Sunday will be announced soon.

Between 17 – 27 March most screenings will be accompanied by Q&As and a chance to meet and debate with visiting talent including Silas Howard, the first trans director on Emmy and Golden Globe-winning Transparent, who will be in London to regale us with his experiences. Special Presentations include Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, an in-depth and uncompromising portrait of the life and work of the legendary photographer Robert Mapplethorpe by award-winning World of Wonder duo Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (Inside Deep Throat); Rebel Dykes, a work-in-progress screening event of Harri Shanahan and Sian Williams’ documentary which explores the forgotten ‘herstory’ of lesbian punk London in the 1980s. Jacques Martineau and Olivier Ducastel (Jeanne and the Perfect Guy, Drôle de Félix) will also be there in the wake of their Berlinale world prem Theo & Hugo, a finely crafted and provocative French drama.

Of the 50 features screenings, be sure not to miss the following Gala Specials, and highlights from the festival strands HEARTS, MINDS and BODIES.

DEPARTURE British director Andrew Stegall’s touching debut about a mother (Juliet Stephenson) and son Alex Lawther (The Imitation Game) struggling with their relationship. Barak and Tomer Heymann’s touching drama WHO’S GONNA LOVE ME NOW? fresh from Berlinale, which explores the family dysfunction of an HIV positive Israeli finding an adoptive second home in London as a member of London Gay Men’s Chorus. And from the Cult Classic strand CALAMITY JANE at the BFI IMAX will celebrate everyone’s favourite cowboy/girl Doris Day with this dazzling new digital restoration presented on the biggest screen in Britain.

H E A R T S includes films about love, romance and friendship.

FROM AFAR – Lorenzo Vigas’ Golden Lion 2015 winner at Venice Film Festival;

THE GIRL KING – Mika Kaurismäki’s 17th century lesbian costume drama, set at the court of Queen Christina; CAROL Toddy Haynes’ masterful lesbian screen version of Patricia Highsmith’s novel stars Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara; DESERT HEARTS a cult classic lesbian ’80s love story as vibrant as ever, the only lesbian film shown at the 1986 edition; WHOSE GONNA LOVE ME NOW a gay Jewish man’s journey to find acceptance and stability amid the perils of hard drugs and HIV

B O D I E S features stories of sex, identity and transformation.

THE CHAMBERMAID LYNN – Ingo Haeb’s disturbing German story of a hotel-cleaner who becomes a fetish sexworker; NASTY BABY a Brooklyn-set adoption story with a tragic twist; SWORN VIRGIN – Laura Bispuri’s startling drama stars Alba Rohrwacher as an Albanian whose transition to living as a man involves complex cultural traditions..

M I N D S features reflections on art, politics and community

THE TRIAL OF SIR ROGER CASEMENT a chance to catch a rare screening starring Peter Wyngarde as a man executed for treason in the ’60s; WELCOME TO THIS HOUSE Barbara Hammer explores the life of Pulitzer prize-winning author and lesbian Elizabeth Bishop; WOMEN HE’S UNDRESSEED a genius Hollywood costumier’s life is told through the stars he dressed and undressed: Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe; KA BODYSCAPES Jayan Cherian’s sophomore drama explores themes of oppression and rebellion in the southern Indian province of Kerala, through the adventures of a young bohemian artist on the cusp of fame

While films and film cultural are at the heart of the BFI, the atmosphere at Southbank brings people from far and wide. This year the hugely popular BFI Flare Club Nights return (Fri 18, Sat 19, Thu 24, Fri 25 and Sat 26) at Benugo Lounge and Riverfront with our favourite DJs and newfound friends including Pitch Slap!, Sadie Lee and Jonathan Kemp, Pink Glove, Club Kali, and for Closing Night Bad Bitches and Unskinny Bop.

www.bfi.org.uk/flare

High-Rise (2015)

Director: Ben Wheatley

Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller, Luke Evans Elizabeth Moss, James Purefoy, Keely Hawes

119min | Drama | UK

J G Ballard would turn in his grave if he saw Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of his 1975 novel High-Rise. It has Tom Hiddleston as Dr Robert Laing who lives in one of those arrogant ’70s brutalist tower blocks: nowadays these soaring monoliths belong to offshore buyers, bought as investment vehicles and mostly lying vacant. But Ballard, echoing the classic British class system, had the rich occupying the best penthouses while the poorer residents got the lower floors. A doctor, Laing is somewhere in the middle with one of those high walled balconies where he sunbathes naked, trying to keep the status quo as the ‘squashed middle’. There’s no need to leave the building – all the shiny mod cons are on site – but in this microcosm of society the pecking order goes gradually awry: the ‘lower’ classes try to move to the superior flats and as the delicate ecology of this ‘garden pond’ goes septic, mayhem ensues. J G Ballard was a clever chap. But Wheatley ain’t so bright.

The first problem with co-scripter Amy Jump and Wheatley’s film is the lack of visible contrast between their classes. Nowadays, everyone looks the same whether they’re rich, poor or middling. Without this crucial delineation the narrative comes unstuck – unless you’ve read the book (and luckily they’ve got producer Jeremy Thomas on board to ensure the film gets out there). When the building services start to malfunction (lifts break down, water leaks and so on), the residents only cooperate with their fellow men in getting water and going about the building. It starts with Richard Wilder (Luke Evans), a lower floor aspiring resident who makes a bid to move higher in the status quo, leading his co-residents into rebellion. Crass and rather beligerent, he is also a conspicuous alpha male who enjoys his wild parties and blaring music. Hiddleston keeps his head down: suave and pleasantly poker-faced, adapting chaemelion-like to every situation, he seems the only character with any calm self-possession (poor squashed polite middle classes); Sienna Miller’s Charlotte Melville is his female admirer (spying him from her flat above): quick-witted and cannily pragmatic, she also swims with his tide. Wilder’s wife, Helen (Elizabeth Moss) is the vulnerable earth mother who men just want to protect. Jeremy Irons (Royal) the building’s architect, pontificates from the more luxurious penthouse; he saw his project as a vanity statement and “crucible for change”.

There’s so much glorious material here: and a fabulous cast who do their best (while others wanders aimlessly about) but Wheatley’s HIGH-RISE is a structureless hiding to nowhere replete with aimless plotlines as Wheatley and Jump flounder around in their mammoth budget to create a towering inferno of crude and lurid style over substance ending in a multi-story muddle just waiting for the wrecking ball. At best a creative experiment; at worst a never-ending nightmare that far overstays its welcome at two hours: It may have taken forty years for High-Rise to make it to big screen but this is one disaster movie that’s a disaster in every sense of the word. MT

OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE

Marguerite (2015) | Competition | Venice Film Festival 2015

Director: Xavier Giannoli

Cast: Catherine Frot, Andre Marcon, Denis Mpunga

France, Czech Republic, Belgium 2015, 127 min.

Xavier Giannoli’s portrait of the Roaring Twenties in Paris is neither a satire nor a celebration of the artistic life of the era; best described as a study of lonliness and self-delusion – even Catherine Frot’s stirring performance as the eponymous chanteuse cannot save this ill-advised and overlong drama from descending into tedium.

Frot, who has seen much better days in films like La Tourneuse de Pages, has to sing her heart out to keep the film alive. Her character is obviously a terrible singer, paying her way on the concert platform with her own enormous wealth. Her unsupportive husband George (Marcon) usually arrives too late at her concerts – his sports car always ‘giving up the ghost’ at the same spot – a running gag used too often. But then, repetition is the main curse of MARGUERITE: her black valet Madelbos (Mpunga) tries again and again to con her audience and journalists with bribes to attend these embarrassing soirees, the singer flirts with younger men, and the flower arrangements to mark the ‘greatness’ of her performances grow to monstrous proportions. Instead of emotion, we get pantomime; instead of characters we have caricatures and, worst of all, every move is telegraphed.

The opulent production design makes one one wonder how costs could have been spent more wisely and the dreadfully contrived ending sends everyone rushing home before the final credits have rolled – just to escape this unspeakably noisy, over-bearing and unimaginative caricature of a film where the only laughs are involuntary, directed at the majority of unfortunate collaborators. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2-12 September 2015

Three Farmers and a Son (2016) | Diagonale Festival of Austrian Film, Graz | 8-13 March 2016

Director: Sigmund Steiner | Austria | Documentary | 72 min

Sigmund Steiner is the son of a farmer — and he wants us all to know it. Barely a moment into his feature-length debut THREE FARMERS AND A SON, he tells us in a quiet, reflective voice-over of his father’s trade and of his own bemusement at the longstanding notion that, for a farmer, tending to one’s land takes priority over one’s family. In the hope of coming to a better understanding of what is to him such a disconcerting idea, Steiner turns an inquisitive and attentive eye to the separate toils of three autonomous agricultural workers. Receiving its world premiere at the Diagonale, Austria’s national film festival held each year in Graz, Steiner’s finely poised essay-doc is a triptych of intimate portraits on the one hand, and a richly rendered landscape film on the other.

We establish each of Steiner’s three protagonists through a series of observational scenes. Matthias tends to a field of potatoes, shrugging a philosophical lament at his own son Dominik’s apathetic view of agriculture (Dominik shuffles next to him, hands in pockets, while double-chinned Matthias points to the flat expanse of earth behind them with his thumb). Fellow farmer Martin fells spruce trees: mammoth trunks land with dull thuds on a forest floor. Herbert, meanwhile, stands over a lamb as if its pending slaughter is a sacrifice to the heavens more than a routine task of economic necessity. “Thank you,” he calmly mutters seconds before shooting a bolt gun into the animal’s skull and slicing its throat. (Just another authentic slaughter scene on the arthouse circuit, but at least Steiner gets that inevitability out of the way early.)

Steiner intersperses such scenes with more contemplative, postcard vistas (sunrays cutting through clouds, the outlines of treed hills intersecting one another). All three farmers also give their time as interviewees, answering the filmmaker’s questions about their work, the extent to which it continues family customs and their concerns over what happens next, in the hands of an increasingly indifferent younger generation. Herbert in particular is nothing if not grateful for the down-through-the-generations traditions he’s had passed onto him, and dedicates himself to the task with an almost religious commitment. In one touching scene, we see him topless, silver-stubbled and sweaty-browed from the midday sun (head causing shadows on his own chest), as he reminisces about his own dad and about the one shared father-son moment that he remembers.

Born in the Upper Styrian town of Judenburg in 1978, Steiner studied under Wolfgang Glück and Michael Haneke at the Vienna Film Academy, and counts fiction shorts as well as experimental non-fiction in his wide-ranging portfolio. The steady framing of this impressively visual documentary most recalls his work as the cinematographer of Barbara Kaufmann’s shorts, such as 23 WINDOWS TO THE COURTYARD (2011). Like that 25-minute citywide ode to quieter, semi-private pockets of Vienna, THREE FARMERS evokes a vivid, even dramatic sense of place through shifts in natural light and a sensitivity to local sound. Look out for sun-kissed flies buzzing aglow against soil-brown pastures in one late-afternoon shot.

THREE FARMERS’ German-language title is HOLZ ERDE FLEISCH — literal translation, “Wood Earth Meat.” Bare necessities abound: it’s all earthen browns and olive greens here. Shooting in CinemaScope, Steiner demonstrates a sharp instinct for composition throughout: the opening image, of three distant (and distinct) hills at dusk, neatly cues the narrative’s tripartite structure. Later, silhouette figures on a horizon foregrounded by an avocado-coloured baize help reflect the filmmaker’s obvious appreciation for such earth-bound, year-round labour and for the topographical character of the space that defines such ritualistic patterns: its tones, its timbres, its colours. Indeed, but for the opening voice-over, one might have guessed from this evidence that Steiner was, in fact, the son of a painter. MICHAEL PATTISON

REVIEWED AT DIAGONALE | Festival of Austrian Film| March 8–13, 2016, Graz, Austria

Copenhagen Architectural Film Festival 2016 |10 – 20 March 2016

COPENHAGEN ARCHITECTURAL FILM FESTIVAL is back for its third year. From 10-20 March 2016, Denmark is host to the biggest architecture film festival in the world, taking place in three cities: Copenhagen, Aarhus and Aalborg.

Amongst a selection of well-known classics and recent releases, the festival will be screening some lesser known treats:

FOUR SHORT FILMS on Architecture, landscape and film history:

Yuri Ancarani’s work at the Venice Biennale IL CAPO plays with the extraction of marble as a kind of theatrical choreography. In SLEEPING DISTRICT Tinne Zenner creates a cinematic correspondence with moody images while John Skoogs latest work SHADOWLAND goes on excavation in Hollywood’s topography. Eva Kolcze uncover the architectural brutalism and binds its concrete buildings with 16mm film materiality of ALL THAT IS SOLID.

TELOS: THE FANTASTIC WORLD OF EUGENE TSSUI (2014)

Can architecture be a piece of nature? Meet an limitless resistance architect.

EUGENE TSUI is a radical visionary. Among his projects are The Ultima Tower, a proposal for a three-kilometer high skyscraper in the shape of an inverted spinning top and room for a million residents. Tsui indtænker its highly speculative architecture in great cosmetic mo-ecological contexts where as a contemporary surrealist inspired by natural forms. In trying to build a more sustainable architecture, which he calls ‘biological design’. Kyung Lee directs, writes and films this amusing biography of an eccentric and visionary architect.

ANNABELLE SELDORFF, ODILE DECQ, FARSHID MOUSSAVI, KATHRYN GUSTAFSON AND MARIANNE MCKENNA. Five different architects with only their gender in common. Does female architecture have defining feature and how is distinguished from that designed by men. A series of shorts about architecture’s sexual peculiarities – or lack thereof.

The display is introduced by architect and associate professor at KADK, Merete Ahnfeldt-Mollerup who b.la. will put the film in relation to architectural education, where more and more women are trained and equalizes the subject’s gender imbalance inside .

BUNGALOW (2002) 84min

Starring Trine Dyrholm, who has just won a Silver Bear for Best Actress at Berlinale 2016, BUNGALOW is Ulrich Kohler’s psychogeographical exploration of alienated mid-European youth seen through the eyes of a German soldier who goes AWOL one summer during hostilities.

CONCRETE LOVE Recorded over several years, a documentary exploring the life of the 95-year-old winner of the Pritzker Prize, Gottfried Böhm and his architecture obsessed family. Filmed by his son and architect Paul Böhm, who will lead a Q&A after the screening.

Grand Theatre, Wednesday. 03.09 pm. 19:00 (opening film)

Grand Theatre, Friday. 03.11 pm. 16:40

Cinematheque, Wednesday. 3.16 pm. 21:15

COUNTING (2015)

Jem Cohen takes his camera on an whimsical tour of an urban voyage in this essay film which offers an amusing voyeuristic take on the street life in 15 towns from New York City, Istanbul, Moscow, Cairo and Porto to London.

SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR (2000)

Another urban symphony that examines, through a drama of interconnecting characters, human vulnerability and our basic need for companionship and connection in the increasingly-alienating urban communities we inhabit. Roy Andersson writes and directs. MT

FULL FESTIVAL PROGRAMME

https://vimeo.com/cafx2016/trailer

Anomalisa (2015)

Writer| Director: Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson

With the voices of: Jennifer Jason Leigh, David Thewlis, Tom Noonan

90min Animation | Comedy | US

Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich) is joined by stop-motion specialist Duke Johnson for this gloomy but watchable dystopian tale, which raises the odd laugh in spite of its depressing outlook.

Michael Stone (Thewlis), a small celebrity and author of a Customer Service bestseller, lands in Cincinnati to speak at a congress. In the bland hotel Il Fregoli, he feels lonely and ‘phones his ex Bella, a woman whom he left abruptly 11 years ago. They meet in a bar and we are shocked to hear her speak with the voice of Tom Noonan. Michael tells her about his unhappy marriage and Bella runs off, frustrated. Back in the hotel, Michael still feels depressed so he knocks on a few doors and eventually meets Lisa (Lee), the only woman with a female voice. After much drinking, he seduces her and promises her the Earth. Disillusioned the next morning, he returns home to his wife Donna and his little son.

There something very intriguing about ANOMALISA despite its banal premise and is largely due to the fascination of the puppets. Endearing and rather cute, they have soft downy looking faces and move a round with a jerkiness that reminds us of the TV series ‘The Woodentops’. Sometimes the upper end of their faces sometimes becomes unhinged, so we can see the electronics of their brains. The women all look more or less the same and the individual male characteristics are not much more developed facially, although Michael’s intimate parts are fully formed. Everyone lives in a state of emotional regression and there are clearly anger management issues resulting from emotional stress of 21st century and talk in cliches picked up on TV or from advertising. Michael is a banal character who is disconnected from reality or the consequences of his actions: when he picks up a present for his son, he ‘overlooks’ that he is in a sex-toy shop, presenting his son on his return with an antique Japanese sex doll, which secretes sperm in the hand of the minor.

Kaufman is, as usual, very clever: The Fregoli syndrome is a psychiatric term for a paranoid development which allows the person afflicted to see all his attackers as one being. One of the causes of the condition is the long term use of anti-depressants. There are hilarious moments in Anomalisa, when Lisa sings a heartbreaking version of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” by Cindy Lauper in Michael’s hotel room. But overall, Anomalisa suffers from a detached approach where the audience is not always sure if Kaufman is laughing at or about his protagonists. The puppets are stunning, but the whole experimental atmosphere feels too orchestrated and contrived. A maximal aesthetic effort contrasts with a rather lightweight and schematic narrative but worth seeing for its original look. AS

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE

Eureka (1983 ) Bluray | DVD release

Director: Nicholas Roeg Screenplay: Paul Mayersberg Writer: Mashall Houts (Who Killed Sir Harry Oakes)

Cast: Gene Hackman, Theresa Russell, Rutger Hauer, Jane Lapotaire, Mickey Rourke, Ed Lauter, Joe Pesci, Cavan Kendall, Corin Redgrave The story of a man richer than Getty, stranger than Hughes

130min | Thriller | UK US

Nicholas Roeg is a living legend: his films are unique in finding ways of portraying man’s struggle with the mysteries of the universe; in viscerally capturing what it is to be human: Walkabout; Don’t Look Now; The Witches; The Man Who Fell to Earth. They are all romantically sexual, visually audacious; formally superb, thematically adventurous and always powerfully acted and intense as here with this fascinating mix of European and American talent – Mickey Rourke, Joe Pesci and Rutger Hauer at their elegant best before they went for seedier roles, a delightfully graceful Jane Lapotaire and Theresa Russell, the sensual jewell in the crown. Gene Hackman is captivating and masculine in the lead, rocking a rather ill-advised yellow tint in his receding coiffure, he is nonetheless the svelte hero of this impressive fantasy drama. He also gets some dynamite lines: “I’m the most dangerous man I know – once I had it all, now I just have everything”.

EUREKA is a complex tale about greed, power and passionate love. And Roeg certainly knows what it is to be in love and how to express that potently through his characters. Based on a true story, in 1925, a man (Jack McCann-Hackman) finds a rich source of gold after being empowered by a supernatural lover in the magnificent opening scenes – a ‘mystic Meg’ (Helena Kallianiotes) who has the wonderful line: “we had all the nuggets we needed between your legs”. Becoming the richest the man in world however is not the answer to his dreams, as more complex issues start to emerge in this imagined utopia.

From the icebound snowscapes of the Yukon we fast forward to a sultry Caribbean Island of Eureka where Jack now holds sway in the Colonial splendour of 1945. Married to a soignée Coco Chanel lookalike Helen (Jane Lapotaire), the couple no longer have sex so she passes her time reading the cards in hope of inspiration (“You don’t want your fortune told, you’ve got a fortune” quips Jack). They have a daughter Tracy (Jane Russell) whom Jack is obsessed with physically and emotionally but, despite still being daddy’s little girl, she has fallen madly in love with Rutger Hauer’s Claude Maillot Van Horn, a statuesque roué whom Jack falls out with on a regularly basis amid scenes of hilarious violence involving meat cleavers and vituperative exchanges. Strangely, Tracy is also deeply in love with her father but she is sexually in hock to Van Horn. The serpentine narrative is driven forward by Jack’s almost psychotic belief that everyone is after his money: and they are in their various ways.

EUREKA is fascinating stuff: the elegant costumes, spectacular set pieces with cleverly devised supernatural and voodoo elements often threatening to topple the intoxicating narrative but pacing and editing never allow this to happen; Roeg deftly mixing moments of raucous melodrama with some quieter more meditative scenes. Theresa Russell keeps things exciting both in and out of the bedroom with her extraordinary range of looks (designed by the talented Marit Allen – Eyes Wide Shut and Brokeback Mountain), appearing sexually alluring one minute; kittenishly coy the next and elegantly vivacious in the explosive final court scene. Russell had just married Roeg at the time and was only in her mid twenties but clearly possessed an amazing maturity and feminine allure for one so young.

Paul Mayersberg’s script is fantastic: full of witticisms, truisms, all endlessly engaging and Roeg brings a scintillating vision to the party with his larger than life characters: women who really know how to exude love and sensuality and men who are masterful and powerfully driven despite their human weaknesses. Hackman and Russell hold sway with their magnetism and extraordinary charisma in this intensely watchable, often complicated, but extremely rewarding rollercoaster. MT

OUT ON DUAL FORMAT BLURAY AND DVD COURTESY OF MASTERS OF CINEMA EUREKA | 21 MARCH 2016

Next to Her (2016)

Director: Asaf Korman Writer: Liron Ben-Shlush

Cast: Liron Ben-Shlush, Dana Ivgy, Yaakov Dniel Zada

90min | Psychological drama | Israel 2014.

NEXT TO HER is a startlingly honest first hand account of one woman’s experience caring for her mentally handicapped sister. In her screenwriting debut Israeli actress Liron Ben-Shlush avoids sentimentality and voyeurism to offer a candid and often moving drama exploring the coal face caring for the physically challenged.

Apart from her day job as a site manager for a school, Chelli (Ben-Shlush) has cut herself off from the world to be her sister Gabby (Ivgy) primary carer. The two of them live in a small, desolate flat where they share everything, including a bed: they even bath together. Gabby has the mental age of a two year old, and needs permanent supervision. When Chelli’ mother visits, Gabby plays up, and head butts her. It seems that only Chelli is able to contain Gabby’s unruly behaviour. But the social worker is not happy that Gabby is left alone for many hours a day, and arranges a place in a day-care centre for her. Chelli is slightly miffed when she discovers Gabby likes the centre and has bonded well with Sveta, a leading member of the staff. Suddenly, with more time on her hands, Chelli arranges a date with Zohar (Zada), the PE substitute teacher at her school, who still lives with his mother at the age of 34. Chelli is keen on sex and irritated that Zohar gets on well with Gabby. After Zohar moves into the cramped apartment, Chelli’s jealousy gets worse when she finds out Gabby is pregnant and throws Zohar out, without even looking for an alternative scenario.

Every relationship in a caring capacity, professional or private, is defined by the interdependency between carer and patient. This goes particularly for relationships of this kind between family members where boundaries are even more easily transgressed. Although she lacks freedom, Chelli is very much in control of the relationship and Gabby is dependent on her for everything. It is only too human for Chelli to feel superior – and to enjoy this feeling. When first Sveta, then Zohar show that they have an emotional input with Gabby, Chelli feels challenged. Without giving Zohar a chance, she abruptly reduces the relationship with her sister to the status quo, where she has total control of her symbiotic bond. Zohar has a similar interdependent relationship with his mother, mirroring Chelli’s relationship with Gabby. After Zohar moves in, the space seems to shrink even more, and Chelli has a job on her hands trying to in vain to get Gabby used to sleeping alone.

DOP Amit Yasour Ron Zikno evokes the claustrophobic oppression of this domestic set-up with dark, brownish hues that lighten up when the action moves out to the roof terrace of the block of flats or the school grounds. Directed by her real life husband, Asaf Korman, Ben-Slush and Ivgy interact impressively, the latter having made an in depth study of the mentally handicapped to prepare for her part which she pulls off impressively. Korman directs with instinctive sensitivity, trying successfully to keep the middle ground between film action and the real life events they are based on. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 11 March 2016

The Witch (2015) | LFF 2015 | Best First Feature

Writer|Director: Robert Eggers

Cast: Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie, Anya Taylor-Joy, Harvey Scrimshaw

90mins | Horror | US Canada

THE WITCH is a genuine horror story set in the Puritan heartlands of New England in the early part of the 17th century. Sumptuously-mounted with meticulous attention to detail and atmosphere, Robert Eggers’ rigorously-scripted indie debut successfully tells a tale of witchcraft suggested by the prevailing climate of religious hysteria and folkloric belief, that touches a family of devout Christian settlers.

In this indie curio, which scratches at the edges of mainstream horror, writer-director Eggers orchestrates the atmospheric setting, unnerving score, morose tone and fervent performances to create a film that is more laudable and impressive than particularly errifying or surprising. Precision framing and gorgeous period costumes also go to give THE WITCH serious arthouse appeal although it is unlikely to shock the usual horror crowd.

The story is set about fifty years before the Salem Witch Trails. It concerns a family who have been exiled from the mainstream Puritan church and close community over some religious difference of opinion. Vowing to make a go of things with a small farm deep in the forest, the father (Ralph Ineson) nevertheless seems ill-prepared for the task ahead with the birth of their latest child keeping the slightly histrionic mother (Kate Dickie) preoccupied with her small twins Mercy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson). Meanwhile young son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) is capable of looking after the livestock with the help of his teenage sister, the open-faced and pleasant Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy). But the baby suddenly disappears during a full moon, seemingly carried off by a red-cloaked stooping figure who is later seen anointing her decrepit naked body in blood and gore.

To put these events in context, the 17th century was still a dangerous time to live outside established community settlements. Native Indians roamed New England and folklore created a climate of suspicion and fear. Infant mortality was extremely high, but the mother is unable to overcome her grief as it spills over affecting the wellbeing of the family. Their situation deteriorates as household items go missing, the goat sickens and the weather turns inclement and food supplies dwindle. To help the disconsolate father, Caleb and Kate venture into the forest to look for food with the rifle. All they find is a strange rabbit who evades their bullets. The pair become separated and Caleb finds himself outside a cottage where a tousled hair siren beckons him in. At this point the narrative swerves away from the witches and focuses on the family as it starts to implode. Threats of violence are bandied about and the mother starts to point the finger of blame at Thomasin, accusing her of witchcraft.

Eggers’ script has plenty of old English personal pronouns flying around and the religious fervour steadily ignites with some remarkable outbursts from a superb cast who embrace the tragic events with escalating hysteria in scenes of mounting melodrama. To to his credit, Eggers keep things plausible :THE WITCH could serve as a timely metaphor for the state of the family in the 21st century. MT

SCREENING DURING LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 7 -18 OCTOBER 2015

Frackman (2015) | Human Rights Watch Festival 9 -18 March 2016 | London

Director: Richard Todd; Documentary with Wayne Pratzky

90min | Documentary | Australia

Director Richard Todd introduces us to the Australian Anti-Fracking movement with a documentary that features an unlikely hero and is much less less concerned with facts than Josh Fox’ Gasland. Instead, the controversy is infused with humour, a sense of adventure and even a real love story. And although FRACKMAN sometimes echoes the spirit of Crocodile Dundee, Todd nevertheless tells a frightening story.

Wayne Pratzky is in his forties and has spent most of his life surfing and partying. “I wasn’t born into this kind of thing. I used to cut down tress, drive a diesel four-wheel drive and harvest kangaroos. I’m the worst environmental activist the world’s ever seen”. Somehow around his 40th birthday, he saw the light and became a farmer near Chinchilla in Queensland, Australia’s second largest State. When CSG (Coal Seam Gas) companies like Halliburton (Involved in the Deepwater Horizon explosion) and Schlumberger made moves to start fracking on the Tara Gas Field, Pratzky protested but officials of the Queensland government denied him – and all his neighbours – any rights to stop the drilling. Shortly afterwards some children on estates near the Tara field became ill due to the emission of poisonous gas (hydrogen sulphide) 24/7 from the pastures. Frogs died, and the water of the gas fields was unfit to drink. Gratzky and his friends joined the Western Downs Alliance, part of the Anti-Fracking movement in Australia. The continent is covered by gas fields that are 18 times the size of Great Britain. And every year the industry needs 22 billion litres of water – for which they pay zero!

Gratzky went into overdrive and the protesters started to block roads to stop the huge lorries with the drilling equipment. Fines of 50000 Australian Dollars (roughly £250k) did not deter the protesters, who donned white jump suits with the message “No fracking Way”. They protested in Sydney and collected samples from the gas fields to prove contamination of the environment caused by abnormally high values of heavy metal, arsenic and lead in the ground and water. Queensland’s environmental inspectors were no help to Gratzky and his friends either: they took the side of the companies. In the nearby harbours, the fishing industry suffered too, since the poisonous water was pumped into the ocean, killing, among others marine life, half the dolphin population of the area.

But now for the romance: Gratzky had met Pennsylvania girl Wendy Atkinson, over the internet, whilst looking for campaigners, and their relationship deepens, while the struggle continues. FRACKMAN takes the form of an adventure story, narrated by Gratzky. The illegal operations by night, and huge road blocks are straight out of a feature film, or better, a Marvel comic where Gratzky with his white jump suit fits in easily. But there is enough content to show the serious aspects of Fracking, and the images of the poisoned water and the dead fish are frighteningly sad. DOP Dan Schist’s panorama shots showing how the countryside is ruined by the drill towers are particularly evocative. FRACKMAN is perhaps not a documentarian’s dream, but is somehow more effecting because it engages our empathy – a rare and clever thing. AS

SCREENING DURING HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH FESTIVAL

Experimenter (2015) l Dvd and Digital release

Director|Writer: Michael Almereyda

Cast: Peter Sarsgaard, Winona Ryder, Taryn Manning, Anton Yelchin, Tom Bateman, Jim Gaffigan

98min Biopic Drama US

Peter Sarsgaard leads with a haunting and humanistic performance in this serious and well-crafted biopic of the controversial social psychologist Stanley Milgram who grew up in America, the child of Romanian and Hungarian Jewish refugees.

Cleverly reminding us of the Holocaust without placing it at the forefront, Michael Almereyda elevates this absorbing film with Ryan Samul’s subtle cinematography and Deana Sidney’s restrained set design that never allows it to feel dry or technical. Set in ’60s Yale, a subtle love story simmers below the surface, that of Milgram and his wife Sasha, elegantly portrayed by Winona Ryder. Meeting in a lift during the opening scenes, they pursue a rapid, low-key courtship, both immediately recognising their suitability as marriage partners due to their Jewish roots.

Milgrim’s notoriety was largely the result of “the machine”, a device that he used to illustrate his experiments on human obedience to malevolent authority. During his debatably unethical study, he tricked ordinary people into delivering electric shocks to unseen subjects in another room, Even though there was no coercion, practically all of them continued with the experiment despite the cries of pain that emerged from the room. In reality there were no electric shocks, but Milgram wanted to prove that people would continue inflicting pain, just because they were told to. The scientist was also known for proving the “six degrees of separation” rule through a Harvard mail experiment.

Peter Sarsgaard gives a melancholy performance but one which manages to be both seductively sinister and authoritative. Quoting from Søren Kierkegaard (“Life can only be understood backwards, but it much be read forwards’), he is quietly spoken and detached yet full warmth and acceptance for both his co-workers and his wife and children; never coming over as condescending or boffin-like. The only thing that marrs EXPERIMENTER is the appearance of an ill-advised beard that sprouts suddenly on Milgram’s face after the birth of his two children; adding an unintentional comic element to the proceedings. There is also a scene that features a man playing William Shatner in the TV movie The Tenth Level, that was loosely based on Milgram’s book. Sasha claims that this character turns him into a “goy” (non-Jew) where in fact Shatner is Jewish, and Sarsgaard is not.

The central theme of the film continues to be the main central experiment and the stark and unbelievable reality – backed by science – that most people continued to press the button, ‘harming’ their fellow men, despite their sheer abhorance of the facts and their subsequent disbelief. Highly recommended. MT

EXPERIMENTER IS OUT ON DVD AND DIGITAL RELEASE FROM 29 FEBRUARY 2016 here

REVIEWED DURING THE UK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL 2015 | NATIONWIDE 7 – 22 NOVEMBER 2015 | MORE FROM THE PROGRAMME here

Miss Hokusai (2015) | home ent release

MISS HOKUSAI (SARUSUBERI: MISS HOKUSAI)

Dir.: Keiichi Hara

Animation with voices of Anne Watanabe, Yukata Matsushige, Shion Shimizu; Japan 2015, 90 min.

Miss Hokusai is based on the real lives of the late 18th century painter and graphic artist Katsushika Hokusai and his daughter O-Ei, who is now emerging as the primary crafter of most of her father’s work, while less than a dozen of her own exclusive paintings survive today.

Director Keiichi Hara (Colorful) has set his episodic anime (based on the manga of Hinako Suguiura) in Edo (now Tokyo) in 1814, where Hokusai (Matsushige) and his daughter O-Ei (Watanabe), live the life of true and carefree bohemians, whose only concern in life is their art.

Hokusai was a convivial bon viveur who indulged in pleasures of the flesh and was not afraid of rich and noble clients. O-Ei also spends time caring for her much younger sister O-Nao (Shimizu), who has been born blind. Her father blames himself for her blindness – “I stole my daughter’s sight” –and avoids contact his younger daughter, out of shame. The scenes between the sisters are moving and extremely innovative in their execution, particularly those in the snow. After O-Nao’s death, O-Ei clings even more to her father; her clumsy romantic episodes revealing that she was not very fond of men. In real life, she married the artist Tomel around 1819, who expected her to keep house. Instead, she laughed at his not very skilful work and the marriage was short-lived. O-Ei returned to live and work with her father and after his death lived like a vagabond and little is known about her final years.

O-Ei is the portrait of a stubborn and strongly independent woman who found male society of the 18th century intolerable. Her artistic efforts were largely unrecognised and her father appears to have been cold and emotionally distant character causing O-Ei to escape into her own world of myths and fables. Her father (known to friends as Tetsuzo) frequently visits the boudoir of a restless courtesan, who he calms with a version of art therapy: Rather unconventionally, O-Ei spends a night with a geisha in a vain attempt to capture the heart of trying of one of her father’s best students, the painter Tsutsui.

Katsushika Hokusai’s most famous painting “The great Wave off the coast of Kanagawa” purportedly influenced the work of western painters such as Monet and Klimt, and also inspired Debussy’s “La Mer”.
Miss Hokusai’s intricate artwork proves again that anime/animation is not a genre, but an art form in its own right. Hara daintily celebrates the charm of late 18th century Japan in this strongly feminine interpretation; the naïve narrative perfectly complimenting the free flowing movement of all the characters, while also serving as testament to the repression of female artists all over the world at that time. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 5 FEBRUARY 2016 | MISS HOKUSAI
Coming to DVD, Blu-ray and Collector’s Edition 25th April

Kes (1969) | Sadfest 2017

Dir: Ken Loach | Cast: David Bradley, Brian Glover, Freddie Fletcher, Lynne Perrie, Colin Welland

110min | UK | Drama

Ken Loach’s family drama KES is social realism at its best. The essence of all things English conflate in a raw and passionate picture of sixties South Yorkshire where a wiry young boy called Billy Casper (played by David Bradley, a newcomer chosen from hundreds of boys) fights a humble underdog status strengthened by his devotion in training a wild kestrel found in the woods. KES has a luminous honesty that shines out in vivid colours and heart-breaking truth. This is really how the sixties used to be and Loach brings it all to life, just as you and I remember it: the brutal discipline at school, the respect but covert recalcitrance we felt for adults (seen in the giggling outburst following by welling tears during the caning scene). When Mrs Casper(Lynne Perrie) is talking to her friends in the pub, her naturalistic performance crackles with quiet despair. Loach coaxes utterly brilliant performances from his newcomers that puts even his hastily flung together agitprop I, Daniel Blake, in the shade. This is a film that zings with emotion, and is the spryness of real life.

Based on Barry Hines’ book A Kestrel for a Knave, this bluray restoration brings out all the vibrancy of the original as the English landscape looks more luminous as Billy masters the patient art of falconry while Colin Welland’s encouraging teacher looks on in quiet fascination (he had spend a week teaching to gain empathy with the boys). Brian Glover (who actually worked at Broadway Grammer) is comical as a the football teacher who insists on winning every move. Freddie Fletcher plays Billy’s elder brother as a a bristling bully. A film that feels prescient of a dark future that came from a decent place. MT

SADFEST 3-5 MARCH | GENESIS CINEMA

KES IS OUT ON DUAL FORMAT DVD/BLURAY FROM 7 NOVEMBER COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA LABEL

A Kiss Before Dying (1991) | DVD release

Director: James Dearden Writer: Ira Levin (Novel), James Dearden

Cast: Matt Dillon, Sean Young, James Bonfanti, Sarah Keller

95min | Crime Thriller | US

James Dearden’s drama of Ira Levin’s novel doesn’t hold a candle to Gerd Oswald’s 1956 version but Matt Dillon makes a chilling psychopath as Jonathan Corliss, a Philadelphia student with ideas of making it big. In order to realise his dreams he decides to marry money in the shape of rich heiress Dorothy Carlsson (Sean Young), but things don’t go according to plan and he ends up murdering Dorothy and moving on to her younger sister Ellen (also Young), who becomes obsessed with investigating her sister’s death. A strong support cast of Max von Sydow (Thor Carlsson) and Diane Ladd (Mrs Corliss) fail to save this rather lucklustre affair although Sean Young is captivating in her twin roles despite winning two ‘Razzies’ in the Rasperry Awards in 1992. MT

One of Six Hollywood classics released on UK DVD on 21 MARCH 2016 courtesy of SIMPLY MEDIA

A NIGHT IN THE LIFE OF JIMMY REARDON (19880 | ARABELLA (1967) | THE AFFAIRS OF SUSAN (1945) | AIR CADET (1951) | A MAN CALLED GANNON (1968)

Per Amor Vostro (2015) | Anna | CINEMA MADE IN ITALY WEEKEND

Direct0r: Giuseppe M. Gaudino

Cast: Valeria Golino, Massimiliano Gallo, Adriano Giannini, Elisabetta Mirra, Daria d’Isanto, Eduardo Cro

109 min | Italy France | Drama

Director and co-writer Giuseppe M. Gaudino (Round the Moon between Earth and Sea) delivers a typically Italian tale of woe and a sensitive character piece for Valeria Golino, one of Italy’s best loved actresses. Anna is a mother of three, a martyr to her family who is clearly depressed. Overloading the already confusing narrative with various subplots, Gaudino chooses a mannered style which oscillates between moody black and white images and colourful phantasy sequences, leaving Golino to struggle with her subtly nuanced performance amid a fog of artistic experimentation.

In Naples, Anna is in her forties and lives with her teenage children Santina (Mirra), Cinzia (D’Isanto) and Arturo (Cro), the latter being deaf, and her violent out of work husband Gigi (Gallo), a failed singer, whose has previously led his family to near ruin. But a criminal streak run throughout the whole family: Anna served time in a juvenile prison to cover up for an adult relative, who would have had to spent ten years behind bars. Now working in a TV studio, she writes dialogue prompts for the amateurish cast of a TV soap opera that stars another Italian favourite Adriano Giannini (as Michele). In a brief spell of euphoria the two become lovers but gradually black clouds drift in (literally and metaphorically) when a friend, whom she replaced at work, is murdered. But that’s not all: her family is again plunged into financial trauma affecting the lives of her neighbours.

Valeria Golino moves elegantly through this drama with impressive grace and serenity despite her purported mental instability and Matteo Cocco’s appalling black and white images and freeze frames which lend and air of artificiality to the whole undertaking: they lack any crispness because they have been probably shot originally in colour. In an attempt to evoke feelings of helplessness, her bus becomes flooded with water. Other artful gimmicks include clouds of ink which gather whenever Anna looks out of her window into the Bay of Naples. Obviously, Gaudino is trying to convey Anna’s mental illness in these symbolic sequences but the results are often overbearing and provide no real insight into her troubled mind. An often repeated kitsch-colour scene shows her as an angelic child, having to ‘fly’ from her window down to the yard on a secured rope. But despite her unhappiness she feels a responsibility to her kids, despite Santina’s turning against her on the grounds of her lack of enterprise in acquiesing to her difficult past. Valeria Golino won the Silver Lion for Best Actress at last year’s Venice Film Festival for her portrayal. She is the only reason to watch this over-ambitious, but flawed drama. And, of course, Adriano Giannini who is superb as the quintessential Latin Lover, with his raffish charm and come to bed eyes. AS

SCREENING DURING CINEMA MADE IN ITALY | 10 – 14 MARCH 2016 |

Goodnight Mommy (2014) | Ich Seh, Ich Seh

Director: Veronika Franz/Severin Fiala Producer: Ulrich Seidl

Cast: Elias Schwarz, Lukas Schwarz, Susanne Wuest

99min Austria (German with subtitles)

The Austrians are very good at taking ordinary life and turning into horror at Venice this year. In the same vein as Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997), Ulrich Seidl’s (Im Keller) wife and collaborator, Veronika Franz, makes her directorial debut with, along with Seidl’s nephew, Severin Fiala, in this vicious and expertly-crafted arthouse piece full of malevolence and wicked twists, set in a slick modern house buried in the Austrian countryside.

In the heat of summer, nine-year-old Elias is enjoying the school hols with his twin brother Lukas (played superbly by debut actors of the same name). They appear normal boys: swimming, exploring the woods, and keeping giant cockroaches as pets. But in the pristine lakeside home, their TV exec mother has made some draconian changes. After a relationship breakdown, she is recovering from facial surgery and bandaged up literally like a ‘mummy’, in a draconian new regime (to assist healing) she has banned all friends from visiting the house while her recuperation takes place in total privacy. Nothing wrong with that, but the boys misinterpret her behaviour as a sinister sign that things domestic are going downhill and start to wonder whether this is an imposter or really their mother. The more they question her for re-assurance, the more fractious and distant, though strangely vulnerable and scary, she becomes. Reacting against her instinctively, the boys become convinced that their former warm and affectionate parent is a strange intruder, and decide to take control of the situation with a series of unpleasant and downright vicious tests.

Franz and Fiala create an atmosphere of mounting suspense with clever editing, minimal dialogue and the use of innocent techniques that appear more sinister and unsettling when taken out of context: window blinds that appear to signal morse code; a bloodshot eye in the bathroom eye; crunchy biscuits that sounds like cockroaches – all harmless in themselves yet unsettling and this startling paean to unbequemlichkeit, in this context. Martin Gschlacht’s cinematography switches between lush landscapes, sterile interiors and suggestive modern art to inculcate a sense of bewilderment and unease. Susanne Wuest is perfectly cast as the icy, skeletal blond matriarch with menace. The use of several characters to enforce local religious traditions and sensibilities help to ramp up tension and subversive humour: the overweight Red Cross couple, the sinister Sexton and a Catholic priest. The innocent boys transform into everyday psychopaths due to their lack of early maternal love or support, bring to mind those terrible kids from The Shining, The Innocents and even Cronenburg’s The Brood. With the complex manipulation of sound and music, this is a very clever film which contrasts images of visceral revulsion with those of serene beauty, as reality and fantasy start to blur. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE | REVIEWED AT VENICE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2014

Best Foreign Language Oscar Winner 2016 | Son of Saul (2015)

MUSTANG, SON OF SAUL, A WAR, THEEB and EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT were the five contenders for the Academy Award 2016, BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM. All concern the evergreen theme of conflict: Three are poignant stories told against a backdrop of War. SON OF SAUL: the memories of a Hungarian Jew forced to end the lives of his compatriots during the Second Word War: A WAR is the story of a normal family man caught up in a war thousands of miles from home and THEEB, Jordan’s first ever Oscar contender, a ravishing desert drama that takes place during the First World War. MUSTANG looks at an ongoing war of another kind and follows a group of Turkish girls who stand up against male subjugation in a male dominated society. Finally EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT is a black and white fantasy adventure that straddles two different generations of a journey exploring lost traditions and cultures, touched by the horrors of Colonialism. And the winner is SON OF SAUL.

MUSTANG | France | 2016 | 97mins | Drama

EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT | Colombia | 2015 | 125mins | Drama

SON OF SAUL | Hungary | 2015 | 107min | Drama

A WAR | Denmark | 2015| 115min | Drama

THEEB | Jordan | 2015 | 100min | Drama

Rossellini and the War Trilogy

Rossellini’s War – an exploration of a 20th century war trilogy by Alan Price

There are very few war trilogies that dramatise and document a nation’s history throughout the significant stages of a war. The most famous is probably Andrej Wajda’s trilogy: A Generation, Kanal and Ashes and Diamonds chronicling Poland’s occupation. The least well known trilogy is Rossellini’s early fascist war achievement: The White Ship, A Pilot Returns and The Man with the Cross, all set in Italy. For the British we have the Humphrey Jennings’s documentaries, Fires were Started, Listen to Britain and Diary for Timothy. Although not officially regarded as a trilogy, it is possible to make out interesting thematic links. As for the American cinema, Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front, A Walk in the Sun and Pork Chop Hill have been lumped together but they are set in different wars and countries, Germany in WW1, Italy in WW2 and Korea.

When it comes to Rossellini’s Rome, Open City, Paisà and Germany Year Zero; we have two films that deal with Italian Fascism and Nazism’s effects on Italian society plus a third film about the civilian population of post-war Germany. So does the description trilogy really apply here too? Maybe not as a comprehensive war history for the Italians but, perhaps more interestingly, how Rossellini – having established neo-realism along with other hybrid elements – allowed himself to question this label and depart from an obvious neo-realist agenda. The term neo-realist is often misleadingly applied to Rossellini’s films of the 1940s. Certainly his films are very real, acutely placed on the streets and vibrate with his mix of professional actors and ordinary people. Yet consider his style of neo-realism. It embraces moments of Expressionism, heightened naturalism, Brechtian theatricality and an anguished challenge replete with spiritual yearning and existential doubt.

Certain critics of Rossellini once complained that his neo-realist principles were betrayed in Germany Year Zero (1949) and abandoned thereafter. And that Rossellini, the serious filmmaker, was diminished. Surely this criticism can be compared to the early sixties view that Bob Dylan’s renouncing of folk music was an artistic mistake. Did Bob Dylan ever completely abandon folk: he was always far bigger than just a folk singer. Whilst Rossellini (even more than De Sica) was seen as the godfather of a ‘pure’neo-realism and was, until quite recently, never forgiven for supposedly abandoning his principles, so much of Rome Open City (1945) has a vivid documentary realism, especially in the famous sequence where fascists raid a block of flats as they search for resistance fighters. The photography, editing and camerawork, despite Rossellini’s poor film stock and equipment are very impressive. Later films like The Battle of Algiers (1965) or even Gomorrah (2008) owe much to Rossellini’s staging.

Yet even the verisimilitude of Rome, Open City is punctured by absurdist comedy. The resistance worker priest, played by Aldo Fabrizi, pretends to reside over the last rites of an old man who is not dying at all. He has been knocked unconscious from a blow to his head by a pan. The soldiers arrive just before weapons have been hid under the man’s bed. After this ‘comic relief’ Rossellini presents us with the tragic death of Pina (Anna Magnani). She is shot running after the truck carrying her lover Francesco (Francesco Grandjacquet). The arbitrary nature of her killing is one of the most iconic depictions of death in cinema history. It is a civilian death amidst the ‘fog of war’ and is heartbreaking. Of course this is quintessential neo-realism. Yet Pina’s death is not only juxtaposed between the humorous (almost Hollywood) business with the priest, but followed by a female informer having a lesbian relationship with an older German woman – this could be seen as a reaction against the middle-class, escapist “white telephone films” of the thirties – and the horrific torture of resistance worker Manfredi (Marcello Pagliero). The later is a scene that is aesthetically in the manner of a Renaissance painting of a crucified Christ. Not forgetting other elements of melodrama that propel the film, Rome, Open City is a hybrid of styles departing from its neo-realist base.

A great disruption of narrative is present in Paisà (1946), most noticeably in its second act: A drunk, black American GI (Joe from Jersey) tries to communicate with a young Italian boy but neither can speak each others’ language. Staged in an almost Brechtian manner; Joe, seated on a pile of rubble, bemoans his lot in the army. Gradually sobering up he says, “I don’t want to go home. Home’s a shack.” and then falls asleep. The young boy steals the GI’s boots. The next day, Joe discovers the boy and forces him back home in order to retrieve his boots. Home turns out to be a desolate network of caves where families are living in dire poverty. Feeling both guilty about war’s destruction and also empathetic – his shack and their caves will still be around a long time after the war – the GI forgets his shoes, gets back into his jeep and drives away. Such narrative abruptness continues throughout Paisà up to the film’s climax on the River Po, where the resistance fight it out with the German army.

Rossellini is a master at directing the physical displacement of individuals and the movement of crowds in wartime. Yet his raw, disconcerting documentary-like and awkward breakage of action in Paisà isn’t simply adhering to some neo-realist manifesto for filmmakers, but continues as a prominent force in Rossellini’s post war films with Ingrid Bergman. Here in his controversial film Stromboli, Ingrid Bergman’s flight from the intolerable conditions of the island of Stromboli creates another form of rupture. Her spiritual breakdown asks for some sort of belief in order for her to continue living. Rossellini’s next film Europa 51 sees Bergman depicted as a quasi-martyr/saint/Christ like figure who is adored by a neo-realist crowd of poor people that might have strayed out of De Sica’s Miracle in Milan.(right)

Germany Year Zero (left), the final film of his rough trilogy, is set in post-war Berlin as the city’s population attempts to survive the cities economic and material destruction. At the time his audience and critics were upset and confounded as to why Rossellini had shifted focus to the fate of the former enemy. This was certainly a bold and controversial thing to do. An interesting comparison to make would be with D.W.Griffith’s film Isn’t Life Wonderful (1924, depicting the homelessness and ration queues of Germany after their defeat in WW1). Yet Germany Year Zero’s harsh neo- realism masks a darker psychological tragedy. The devastated cityscape of Berlin has a bleak and often surreal nightmarish look. The film depicts the reality of survival: selling a gramophone record of Hitler’s speeches to British soldiers, an old man goes into hospital to receive more food than can be provided at home, and the slaughtering of a horse by crowd desperate to eat. Yet the film’s most disturbing story is the physical death of a child, alongside of the spiritual death of a boy denied a proper childhood.

Thirteen year old boy Edmund (Edmund Meschke) is placed under extreme pressure by his bartering for goods on the black market. He’s an innocent child turned into a hunter/scavenger enduring the impositions and demands of his family and neighbours to supply their needs. The child has become an unwilling ‘father to the man’ in a world where a new man or woman, untainted by Nazism, has not yet been born. Edmund is covertly persuaded by an ex Nazi school teacher and pederast that the weak most perish and the strong survive. At this point the film makes an audacious departure from neo-realism. Without resorting to crude melodrama, Rossellini shows Edmund poisoning his father. Patricide as a release from the burden of care and the strengthening of the family is hardly a prominent concern of neo-realism.

The last twenty minutes of Germany Year Zero (1948) features some of the most sublime scenes ever committed to film. Edmund wanders the ruined streets to his death. His suicide is a devastating critique of a morally bankrupt society. The real poison is not the one he has given to his father (that act is bad enough) but the taint of an ideology that cannot yet allow its children to live as normal children (There are scenes of groups of children conniving on the black market or about to be sexually abused).

Rossellini does not give us a political Marxist analysis of Edmund’s fate. His death is oddly serene (in tone very like the death of the peasant girl Mouchette in Bresson’s Mouchette). Edmund’s suicide is a terrible act of despair, yet not totally bleak, for there’s a hint of spiritual renewal for others after Edmund as a woman in the street holds the boy’s dead body in a religious manner.

The subject of Rossellini’s War Trilogy is certainly War. Yet Rossellini: the Known and Invisible Consequences of War (cumbersome though that sounds) might be a more apt description. How can fighters and civilians move intelligibly through the chaos of war; can the bringing of peace mean authentic renewal? Germany Year Zero, the most disturbing of these three masterpieces, poses that question.

ROME, OPEN CITY is screening at the BFI on 29 January 2022 | introduced by Dr Julia Wagner | Also on BFI Player

Among the Believers (2015)

Director.:Hemal Trivedi, Mohammed Ali Naqvi

84min | Documentary | Pakistan/USA 2015

Indian documentarist Hemal Trivedi joined Canadian born filmmaker Mohammed Ali Naqvi for an insight study of Jihadi incubator cells as a reaction to the death of her friend in the Mumbai terror attack of 2008. The result is a chilling portrait of the Red Mosque cleric Abdul Aziz Ghazi who has declared war on the rest of Pakistan and is fighting to impose the Sharia law on the whole, secular state.

In Pakistan there are over a thousand Madrassas (seminars) led by the Red Mosque cleric Abdul Aziz in Islamabad, whose benevolent appearance during the documentary cannot mask his true focus: to overthrow the secular government of Pakistan with force. He is permanently surrounded by machine gun-carrying goons, their number in double figures. He wants to impose Sharia Law all over the country, and where better to start than with the young. ‘Students’ at the Madrassas range from four to sixteen. During this time they start to memorise the Koran on a daily basis from dawn to nine pm. Obviously, the younger ones cannot understand anything of what they are repeating endlessly, whilst shaking violently. The number of Aziz’s followers is put at 40 000, and it is difficult to understand how such a small minority can terrorise a country of nearly 200 million; but they do. Book and DVD burning is one of their weapons in their fight against Music, TV and sport. But Trivedi and Naqvi also show the longing of the young students at the Madrassas, to leave the strictly guarded institution and join their peers outside, who are watching cricket, the national sport of Pakistan, on TV.

The aim of Aziz and his followers is clear: to breed a new generation of Taliban fighters, akin to those who committed the Peshawar attack in 2007, where 132 were killed. Since then, the Taliban have destroyed 1200 state schools and over 50 000 people have been killed in Pakistan alone. After the Peshawar massacre, the military government of Pervez Musharraf put Aziz behind bars for 2 years, when he tried to leave the Red Mosque in Islamabad, surrounded by government troops, in a Burqua. And since January 2015, Aziz is under house arrest, after 145 students and teachers of state schools were killed in December 2014 alone.

AMONG THE BELIEVERS is told through the story of two young students Talha and Zarina. The latter one escaped the Madrassas by climbing over the wall to be re-united with her family in a village where the chief Tariq, has set up a school. Zarina is keen to re-join this school but it is closed down after attacks of the Taliban, Zarina, hardly fifteen, is married off by her impoverished parents. Talha, even younger than Zarina, has been put into the Madrassas by his parents for the same reasons: poverty is driving the parents of many children to offload them into the hands of the clerics. But Talha, unlike Zarina, loves the life in the Institute simply because he is fed regularly. His parents – the children are allowed one visit home per year – can see how much their son has changed, but it is too late: he is willing to become a martyr for the course. Nuclear physicist Perez Hoodbhoy seems to be the only person, brave enough to oppose Aziz on TV. The absence of any government figure in this documentary is proof of the successful terror of the Taliban.

DOPs Habib Ur Rehman and Haider Ali are literally in the faces of the participants. Close-ups, particularly of Aziz, dominate together with panoramic views of the poverty stricken countryside. The images of the book/DVD burning are very frightening, a reminder what may happen, if Aziz and his followers get their wish of “having Sharia laws all over the world”. Among the Believers is intense and very frightening indeed. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 11 MARCH 2016 at BERTHA DOCHOUSE AND VARIOUS ARTHOUSE CINEMAS NATIONWIDE

King Jack (2015)

Director| Writer: Felix Thompson

Cast: Charlie Plummer, Cory Nichols, Christian Madsen

98mins. Drama. US

Slim yet watchable and charismatically captured by writer director Felix Thompson in a feature debut that won Festival Audience Award at Tribeca this year KING JACK takes place one low-key summer in leafy New York state.

Charlie Plummer plays the Jack in question, the put-upon youngest son of a working class one parent family, who must fight or fall between the cracks, in this poignantly-painted social realist drama.

A visit from his younger cousin Ben (Cory Nichols) gives Jack a chance to pull rank and turn the tables on the little boy in a charmingly protective way never extended to him by his tough older brother or his over-worked depressive mother. This arthouse pleaser is authentically told, the touch is light, fresh and honest, the tone gently playful without ever resorting to sombre sentimentality or hard-edged intent; although the occasional bursts of violence are sharp and short-lived. Not a great deal happens that we haven’t seen before: childhood boyish pranks jostle with pubescent longings and ‘i’ll show you mine if you show me yours’ gameplay, as the boys get to know the local more mature girls. But it’s a winning formula that will keep teenage audiences on tenterhooks and the arthouse crowd immersed in its soft-peddle dramatic tension and its rites of passage storyline.

Plummer gives it his all as a free-wheeling, sensitive 15 year old boy perpetually harried by his brother Tom (Christian Madsen, clearly the son of Michael) with his mother an absent figure in most of his days. He is also bullied by a local mob led by a bolshy Shane and his mates. Keen on a local girl Robyn, (Scarlet Lizbeth) he’s persuaded to take a picture of his penis, which puts him in the line of fire for more humiliation when Shane and his gang attempt to get the better of him once and for all.

KING JACK was supported by The Sundance Institute, and its moody camera work and dreamlike framing, by DoP Brandon Roots, gives the piece the sultry feel of a summer softened by the warmth and verdant background of its Hudson Valley setting. Bryan Senti’s occasional guitar-led score is often softer than the action it accompanies. MT

NOW ON RELEASE FROM 29 FEBRUARY 2016| REVIEWED DURING LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2015

James White (2015) | DVD / Digital Release

Director: Josh Mond

USA Drama 88mins

Having produced the likes of MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE (2011) and SIMON KILLER (2012), Josh Mond makes his directorial feature debut with JAMES WHITE, whose bland, personifying title suggests a continuation of the previous character studies’ low-key naturalism. Taking its name from its ‘just like you or me’ protagonist (Christopher Abbott), JAMES WHITE is a moving, nuanced portrait of a twenty-something Manhattanite trying to find his place in a world that appears to be dealing him several cruel hands at once. At the beginning of the film we learn James’ father has recently died; at the weeklong Shiva, to which he shows up wearing a casual, black hoodie, James meets his father’s new wife, of whom he only heard first mention weeks previously.

We sense from the awkward welcome he extends to the stepmother he never knew that James is loyal to his own mother, Gail (Cynthia Nixon), whose pale complexion and wig-hidden bob hints towards a recent bout of chemotherapy. Asking Gail to fund a vacation so that he can have some thinking space, jobless James retreats from immediate responsibilities to a coastal resort with his pal Nick (Scott Mescudi), where he meets Jayne (Makenzie Leigh), a high school student also, by coincidence, from New York City. When his vacation is cut short by a phone call from Gail revealing she has been re-diagnosed with cancer, James continues his relationship with Jayne, but the pressures of having to care for his mother weigh increasingly heavy.

Mond handles the tonal shifts of this extremely mature story with deft precision. Though sober, the film is never austere: it neither banishes comedy nor milks the tragedy that caring for a terminally ill parent entails. Though Mátyás Erdély’s cinematography—previously showcased in Sean Dirkin’s TV series SOUTHCLIFFE, in addition to this year’s SON OF SAUL—often privileges Abbott/James with shallow-focus compositions, his notably widescreen framing evokes a wider social fabric to which the protagonist is only intermittently aware.

The strength of Mond’s drama rests upon two fundamental realisations. Firstly, that there is much dramatic potential in a premise built around an otherwise antiheroic male whose everyday experiences compel him one way (hedonism, listlessness, laziness) while the universal banality of a parent being diagnosed with cancer pulls him another. Why? Because starting from an ordinary character forces an astute writer-director to ask questions that an exceptional circumstance doesn’t (e.g., if James were, say, a remarkably promising artist diagnosed with premature sight loss, we can only imagine the dramatic liberties taken). Secondly, that it’s in the way you tell a story that determines its believability.

Here, Mond includes otherwise superfluous details that enliven rather than distract from his fictional universe. In terms of character, consider the choice to have Scott Mescudi, better known under his music-making moniker King Cudi, play Nick as a homosexual. While deleted scenes elaborated on this more, the omissions de-sensationalise the supporting character’s sexuality so as to re-humanise it. Add to this Mescudi is black, and it’s refreshing to watch a film that resists the more obvious issues-based agenda. It helps that Mescudi’s performance is excellent. For evidence that he is an actor of outstanding subtlety—encompassing both body and facial control—look no further than three separate and very different moments: when he trudges toward camera in his work uniform and declares with deadpan hyperbole that he wants to kill himself; immediately after, when he browses a store on an acid trip; and when he confronts his best pal in a hotel room, physically stifling James’ pent-up aggressions.

Mond’s brand of naturalism is also helped immeasurably by Abbott, promoted to leading man here after much smaller roles in MARTHA MARCY and A MOST VIOLENT YEAR (2014). The Connecticut-raised actor forms a plausible chemistry with each of his fellow cast members, not least of all Nixon, with whom he shares many a poignant moment. Chief among these is that heart-achingly prolonged take in which James calms his mother during a middle-of-the-night bathroom visit by getting her to imagine she’s somewhere else, somewhere exotic, away from all the shit unfolding at home. MICHAEL PATTISON

NOW ON DVD | Digital | Reviewed at LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL | 5 – 15 August 2015 l London Film Festival 2015

The Benefactor (2016)

Writer|Director: Andrew Renzi

Cast: Richard Gere, Dakota Fanning, Theo James, Clarke Peters

90min | Drama | US

Richard Gere is back as the richest swinger in town. A kind of ageing Bill Gates, the successful batchelor iss using his millions to help sick children in Philadelphia together with best buddies Bobby (Dylan Baker) and Mia (Cheryl Hines). But tragedy leaves him the sole survivor of a car crash while the three are out driving and suddenly all he has left is their teenage daughter Olivia (Dakota Fanning), who blames him for the accident.

Fast forward five years and he’s morphed into a jovial bohemian who now looks like a cross between Gandolph and Karl Lagerfeld. Olivia is back in the story, pregnant and partnered with a pleasant young doctor, Luke (Theo James) and keen to reconnect with an old guy who was close to her parents. One hair cut later and some exquisite tailoring and Franny (Gere) is leading the band at the hospital opening shindig where James is now working as the latest doctor on the team. Never one to be stingy, Franny is buying the couple Olivia’s childhood home as a present. But when the trio swing up to the empty property in Franny’s vintage Mercedes, the young couple are distinctly shocked and strangely underwhelmed. Olivia accuses him of being too dramatic. And it’s true: Franny is a character desperately wanting to be loved but without really loving. Gere plays him as an ebullient maverick who drinks too much and loves to play the slightly cheesy fool. Fanning plays her usual intense and enigmatic blond, looking limpidly into the distance, often on the verge of tears. James is sardonic, in his usual standoffish way. In trying to create the same chemistry he had with Olivia’s parents, Franny makes himself unpopular, forcing his unwelcome fatherly condescendence on them and feeling utterly unauthentic in the process. The rather sketchily-drawn support characters do their best but it all feels quite threadbare and hollow. Gere’s character is the only one that’s fully fleshed out: a cleverly-disguised control freak who hides his abusive narcissistic neediness behind a flashy cloak of bravado. Controlling the couple by a series of never-ending gifts and largesse, he holds them in the palm of his hand. Gere is hopelessly miscast here, but an actor like Robin Williams would have been just right.

Things get worse as the films plays out, with Fanning, a capable and strong actress, literally being faded out of thr storyline, as the remaining mismatched gruesome twosome of Gere and James finding themselves lost in a drama that just becomes tedious. Despite Renzi’s best intentions THE BENEFACTOR slowly disintegrates, its promising elements overtaken by Gere’s antics as an unconvincing antihero in a drama that has lost its way. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 27 FEBRUARY 2016

Brooklyn (2015) | DVD BLU release

Dir.: John Crowley Script: Nick Hornby Novel: Colm Toibin

Cast: Saorse Ronan, Domhnall Gleeson, Emory Cohen, Jim Broadbent, Julie Waters, Jessica Pare, Fiona Glascott, Brid Brennan

Ireland/UK/Canada 2015, 111 min.

In this lush and impressively-mounted drama John Crowley (Boy A) goes for an epic but somehow falls short but Nick Hornsby’s screenplay cleverly captures the zeitgeist of a tight Catholic community in Southern Ireland in contrast to the promise of new horizons in Brooklyn during the fifties.

Adapted from Colm Toibin’s novel, Saiorse Ronan stars as Eilis Lacey, a young ambitious Irish woman with few prospects beyond working in the local village grocers, where the bitter-tongued owner (Brid Brennan) gives her a difficult time. Ellis’ sister Rose (Glascott), already marked by an illness, is saintly enough to forego the opportunity to emigrate and stays to look after their widowed mother (Jane Brennan), while Eilis sails to the New World and New York.

In Brooklyn, Ellis finds a home in the boarding house of Ma Kehoe (Walters), who supports the newcomer, appreciating her classy naivety. The local Catholic priest (Broadbent), also keeps an eye on her, financing her evening studies in bookkeeping as things fall into place. Falling in love with an Italian plumber Tony, Eilis starts to blossom in her new home. But after a family tragedy she travels back to Ireland, where he sophisticated and confidence impresses the locals and upper-class Rugby player Domhnall Gleeson (Farrell). No longer a one-trick pony, Eilis has to decide between two men and two continents.

Despite being shot in Montreal, BROOKLYN is truly at home in 1952: François Seguin’s sumptuous production design, on both sides of the Atlantic, is flawless. Hornby’s script reduces the story to moving moments between the lovers and the sisters, laced with occasional wit (Julie Walters provides this with aplomb). Even if we overlook the lack of references to the Korean War and the general climate of the Cold War, BROOKLYN goes for the saccharine. Young Eilis falls on her feet in a series of lucky breaks, surrounded by an army of kind souls. The standouts are Julie Walters as Ma Kehoe, Emory Cohen who sensitively evokes young love and Jenn Murray, as Dolores, the only sardonic young girl in the bunch. Positive Catholic values seep through in a world where everyone seems to be well-intentioned, only wanting the best for this ‘damsel in distress’. Her development from a shy teenager to the “Vogue look-alike” after her return from New York, is never really explained, but Ronan handles the part with considerable skill, transforming to a woman with the confidence supplied by Tony’s love. But the script does rather stretch the imagination back in Ireland where Domhnall’s posh family tries to enhance their son’s chances with Eilis, and a job in accounting is miraculously served to her on a plate.

DOP Ivan Belanger’s images are soft-lensed primary colours, a picture-postcard of the fifties. The slow motion walks and runs remind us of the 70s; everything, city or countryside, is photographed like a travelogue – an achievement, considering Brooklyn’s status as a homestead for emigrants. Performances are totally in line with the sugary sentiments, the close-ups prove that the world is a good place, bereft of anything which could contradict the feel-good factor. Crowley has succeeded in creating a world of dutiful Catholic souls in Ireland and Brooklyn, beavering away for the good of mankind, creating a feel-good-factor which never really existed. BROOKLYN is an upbeat charmer that slips down like silk when the reality was actually made of nylon. MT

DVD | BLURAY | DIGITAL RELEASE|

Stranger (2015) | Asia House Film Festival 2016

Writer|Director: Ermek Tursunov

Mikhail Karpov, Roza Kharyrullina, Erzhan Nurymbet

Drama | Kazakhstan |

STRANGER is Kazakhstan’s Oscar hopeful, a sweeping historical and folkloric parable that sees a fearless outlaw retreating to the hills during the country’s Soviet occupation. Set to a lively mix of folk and electronic music, STRANGER is also strong on visual impact but Murat Aliyev’s magnificent widescreen cinematography of the country’s snowbound mountains and sun-baked scenery cannot sustain the film’s lack of momentum or narrative vigour and its rather vapid, underwritten central characters remain unconvincing.

In a similar vein to Turkish director Reha Erdem’s 2013 feature JîN, that followed the exploits of a young Kurdish guerilla (Deniz Hasguler), Kazakh writer and director Yermek Tursunov explores the travails of a resistance warrior Ilyas (Yerzhan Nurymbet) who decamps from his childhood village after losing his parents during the 1930s Soviet hostilities, and settles for a precarious, nomadic and spiritual life in a mountain retreat where his only companions are the local animals and wildlife. But Ilyas is gradually to fall from grace for refusing to join the cause at the outbreak of the Second World War.

This is a worthy and watchable portrayal of a slice of Kazakhstan’s past. That said, the historical background of STRANGER is quite patchy. It appears that Kazakhstan was traditionally home to nomadic tribes who had lived under their own traditions and mores for centuries until the Russian Empire claimed the territory at the turn of the 20th century and subsumed it into the Soviet Union during the 1920s. During Stalinist collectivization in the late 1920s and 30s, the Kazakh’s nomadic life was threatened as farms were forced into collectives to provide food for the burgeoning industrial cities of the motherland, resulting in the death from poverty and starvation of millions of locals. Dissidents deported from Russia, fetched up in the region where they lived also lived a bleak and rootless existence, as seen in the character of Roza Khairullina. But the main fault with STRANGER is a our lack of empathy for any of these characters who appear so faceless and sketchily drawn that by the final showdown we couldn’t care tuppence for any of them. MT

SCREENING DURING ASIA HOUSE FILM FESTIVAL | STRANGER IS KAZAKSTAN’S 2016 OSCAR HOPEFUL

Asia House Festival | 22 February – 14 March 2016 | London

ASIA HOUSE FILM FESTIVAL takes place from 22 February to 5 March showcasing the latest from Japan, China, Kazakhstan, Myanmar and Afghanistan. The highlight this year is STRANGER (Zhat), Kazakhstan’s official submission for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 2016 Academy Awards. A beautifully shot outdoors epic set in 1930s Kazakhstan, the film charts one man’s search for freedom set against the historical backdrop of the country’s darkest years. Tursunov and the film’s producer, Kanat Torebay, will host a Q&A session following the screening.

Other films to watch out for include the European premiere of Tursunov’s latest film LITTLE BROTHER (Kenzhe). A sleek, contemporary hitman thriller that pictures the future of Kazakhstan through the eyes of two siblings. Tursunov will participate in a director Q&A after this screening.

Also of interest is the Chinese workplace drama FACTORY BOSS, an engrossing depiction of the ‘Made in China’ hallmark, delving deep into the country’s manufacturing culture from the perspectives of the workers and the executive suite. The film’s lead actor, Yao Anlian, won the Best Actor Award at the 2014 Montréal Film Festival.

A last but not least, Japanese director Shunji Iwai’s latest is the THE CASE OF HANA AND ALICE (Regent Street Cinema on 27 February). A gently comedic prequel to Iwai’s 2004 live-action film Hana and Alice, it’s shot in an innovative anime style using real actors and sets. Other films to be screened include THE MONK (2011) , MINA WALKING (2015), 40 DAYS OF SILENCE (2014) and the documentary STATE OF PLAY (2013).

ASIA HOUSE FILM FESTIVAL | FOR THE FULL PROGRAMME

NUNCA VAS A ESTAR (YOU’LL NEVER BE ALONE) | Teddy Award |Berlinale 2016

Director: Alex Anwandter; Cast: Sergio Hernandez, Andrew Bergsted, Gabriela Hernandez, Jaime Leiva; Chile 2016, 82 min.

A tribute to Daniel Zamudio, a Chilean gay man who was brutally murdered in 2012 by neo-Nazis, musician Alex Andwandter’s directorial debut is a tight and claustrophobic study in grief, loneliness and betrayal.

It follows Pablo (Bergsted) a young man still living with his father Juan (S. Hernandez), who manages a mannequin factory. The two have little in common and a poor emotional rapport since Pablo “showed a limp wrist”, indicating a lack of manliness in a society dominated by macho-values and masculine role models.

Whilst his father works long hours, Pablo takes ballet lessons and hangs out with his longterm friend Felix (Leiva) and Lucy (G. Hernandez), who has a crush on him. When Pablo and Lucy are chased by two homophobic young men, who, with the help of Felix, corner Pablo and beat him so severely, that he falls into a coma his father is naturally distraught, but worse is to follow: due to a glitch the health insurance is declared partly invalid. Then an old “friend of the family” admits she asked Felix and the men who beat Pablo up, “to be nice to the gay man, because he is different from you”. Juan loses it and confronts Felix, who denies any wrong doing. Juan, having raised Pablo single-handedly from a boy, can’t take any more. Having been lonely for most his life – after his much younger wife left him – he decides he has to change his cautious way of life.

Far from being an over-excited melodrama, YOU’ll NEVER BE ALONE is a concise, ruminative and claustrophobic study in grief, betrayal and loneliness. Darkness (literally and contents wise) dominates: in a world of semi-daekness, and all the interiors feel oppressively, particularly the ghostly shop window mannequins factory, which seems to be underground. Juan has retreated into an inner world; his house is neglected, and Pablo’s room, is more like a prison cell. The hospital corridors, where Juan meets a helpful nurse, are more like a morgue than a place for the living. DOP Matias Illanes captures at atmosphere of tension which plays like the endgame of a relentless chess match where the players are slowly and tortuously extinguished. Sergio Hernandez carries himself like an old fashioned hero from a ’40s film noir: beaten already, before the first blows rain down on his son. This harrowing, mournful and forlorn debut is relentless and leaves the audience heartbroken. Far from being an melodramatic meltdown, YOU’LL NEVER BE ALONE is ruminative and dark in tone and texture, locked down in a world of negativity and isolation. AS

BERLINALE RUNS 11 -21 FEBRUARY 2016 | FORUM SECTION | MORE COVERAGE UNDER BERLINALE 2016

The Beat that My Heart Skipped | Mubi

Director: Jacques Audiard | Cast: Romain Duris, Aure Atika, Emmanuelle Devos, Niels Arestrup | 108min |French

In THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED Jacques Audiard ((Rust and Bone) turns the story of James Toback’s 1978 Fingers into a profound and gritty study of alienation and redemption experienced by Tom (Romain Duris) a petty Parisian crook who is caught up in a web of dodgy property deals, inherited from his father (a masterful Niels Arestrup). Essentially a decent bloke, Tom is desperate to get on the straight and narrow so he can focus on his real dream; that of becoming a concert pianist. Romain Duris is superbly watchable here as Tom, balancing the two sides of his life with tangible nervousness in a drama as taut as the strings of his treasured piano. MT

NOW ON MUBI

Invention (2015) | Berlinale 2016

Director: Mark Lewis

78min | Documentary | Canada

With INVENTION Mark Lewis creates a visual masterpiece of the built environment. Moving silently and stealthily through urban landscapes, his voyeuristic camera pictures architecture from every angle, sometimes in reverse, sometimes from above from Hitchcock’s famous God’s eye perspective. His wide-angle lens glides round the structures exploring and exposing elevations and staircases, planes and surfaces, light and darkness, spiralling round and panning into hidden corners in this intoxicating exposé of the places where we work, play and walk. This is cinema at its most visually exhilarating; psychogeography in full swing.

In his visual anthology Toronto-based visual artist Mark Lewis takes us on a whirling tour of cityscapes moving effortlessly through Paris, Sao Paulo and Toronto. From famous corners of the Louvre Museum to the modernist buildings of Oscar Niemeyer in Brazil and Mies van der Rohe in Canada, INVENTION offers a whirling tour of cityscapes. Lewis eschews a formal narrative or any sound in this calm and contemplative take on the buildings we inhabit, the squares where we meet and the spaces where we congregate. A paean to our physical environment, INVENTION shows how our built environment can effect the way we think, work, live and relate just as crucially as the weather.

INVENTION is an exhilarating experimental work, a contemporary take of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, inviting us to explore and contemplate the world we live in while we’re not there and from a purely visual stance along the lines of Heinz Emigholz’s Parabeton only much better: it’s a cinematic journey through space and form. MT

REVIEWED DURING BERLINALE 11-21 FEBRUARY 2016

Des nouvelles de la planète Mars (News from planet Mars) | Berlinale | Out of Competition

Director: Dominik Moll (Lemming, Harry, He’s Here to Help)

Cast: François Damiens, Vincent Macaigne, Veerle Baetens, Jeanne Guittet, Tom Rivoire

France | Belgian | Drama | World premiere – Out of competiton

When Francois Damiens floats in from Space to his comfortable flat in Brussels, we immediately warm to his laid-back character: a philosophical, divorced dad and the star turn of Dominik Moll’s latest (but not weirdest) comedy feature.

As Philippe Mars he makes the best of his tedious life fathering two insolent kids and ocassionally watching his anchorwoman ex wife on the television. Good-natured in the extreme he’s the sort of guy who picks up the dogpoo left by wayward pooches and makes light of it. And when his work colleague accidentally chops his ear off with a meat cleaver, he’s also the sort who lets this colleague overstay his welcome in the spare room, after he breaks out of his mental hospital on the auspices of feeling uncomfortable amongst the other weirdos. But gradually it takes this sort of psychotic psychopath to bring Mars to his senses and say goodbye to his mediocre existence and realise: there’s more to life than this.

Sharply scripted by co-writer Gilles Marchand to highlight today’s more irritating aspects, this surreal and seriously hilarious Belgian French affair will go down well with audiences everywhere. Some poetic realist touches (his dead mum and dad are often beamed up in miniature, offering warm parental advice), and dream sequences where he floats in a spacesuit add to upbeat absurdity of it all and show that Mars’ life is spiralling seriously out of control, as he rapidly becomes a doormat to all and sundry; including his sister and his unwelcome guest’s new girlfriend Chloe (Baetens), an animal activist who joins in the rampant abuse of his kindness.

Practically everyone in his Mars’ life has personality disorders, but Mars just tolerates them all good-naturedly, allowing them to exploit him at every turn: his precocious daughter Sarah (Jeanne Guittet) tells him to ‘get a life’, his son Gregoire (Tom Rivoire) turns vegetarian and barely congratulates him on his 49th birthday, his sister drops her dog off against his wishes and his boss (Julien Sibre) knows Philippe asks him to share his office with troubled misfit Jerome (Vincent Macaigne/Eden), which leads to the ear incident (he carries the meat cleaver to ‘calm him’ but clearly this fails to work.). And as a final indignity he’s forced to pussyfoot around the courting couple of Peta-style activists in his own home. But when these animal lovers announce they are planning to blow up a nearby poultry-processing plant, Mars puts his foot down.

Moll’s dramady soon descends into a delicious dark comedy with cartoonish moments as the entire crew, including the downstairs neighbour (who used to be Valerie Giscard d’Estaing’s chauffeur), head off to boycott the new factory. NEWS FROM THE PLANET MARS is a cheery crowd-pleaser loud that is all about a decent man retrieving his rightful place as head of his family. MT

BERLINALE 11-21 February 2016 | follow our coverage under BERLINALE 2016

Hawks and Sparrows (1966) | Uccellacci e uccellini | Blu-ray

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini Writers: Dante Ferretti, Pasolini

Cast: Totò, Ninetto Davoli, Femi Benussi, Umberto Bevilacqua, Renato Capogna

89min Comedy Drama Italy

Pasolini’s eighth film has all the charm and innocent humour of Italy in the sixties but while managing to take on and delicately express some serious human and philosophical themes of that era: the power of the Catholic Church; left-wing intellectualism (Pasolini was a confirmed Marxist); pregnancy out of wedlock; poverty and class conflict.

Ninetto Davoli plays a teenager walking through the neo-realist landscape of Lazio – near Rome – accompanied by his formally-dressed father (the famous comedian Totò), on their way to a metting. During their walk they bump into a crow, a pregnant woman, and other allegorical figures who each represent one of the themes of the piece.

During their long journey on foot, the crow tells the story of how St. Francis instructed two of his disciples to spread the Word of God and to love one another, while the son and father become the disciples (Fra Ciccillo and Fra Ninetto): Toto the more faithful one, while his son is the more lascivious of the pair. The crow relates various biblical parables as a group of travelling actors enact the various characters. The neorealist setting is rendered in a delicate and beautifully framed starkness that elevates the humour to something rather tragic and appealingly absurd, as Pasolini gently plays with tonal nuances, in one of his more abstract but idiosyncratically Italian works, also said to be his favourite film. Ennio Morricone’s opening score accompanies Domenico Modugno who sings out the film’s credits. MT

Hawks and Sparrows is now on BLU-ray and dual format DVD rom Masters of Cinema.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne (1981)

Dir/Wri: Walerian Borowczyk | Cast: Udo Kier, Marina Pierro, Patrick McGee, Gerard Zalcberg, Howard Vernon | 92min | Thriller | Polish German

There have been many striking film and TV adaptations of Stevenson’s novel. Favourites are Mamoulian’s Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde (1931) and Baker’s Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971). Borowczyk’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne joins the illustrious list. Although Mamoulian’s film remains the best adaptation, Borowczyk’s treatment is the most radical, having a ferocious energy bordering on the transgressive.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne is a claustrophobic film that rarely departs from Jekyll’s house. Patrick Magee plays an army general. Udo Keir is Dr Jekyll. Clement Harari a priest, and Howard Vernon another doctor. These four pillars of the Victorian establishment, supported by their female guests, are depicted as controlling and repressive. At a dinner-party debate Borowczyk pierces their conversation with brief flash-forwards to the rapes and murders to come. These are not just the crimes of Mr Hyde but the imaginings and acts of some of the guests.

The ‘voyeurism’ of Dr Jekyll’s fiancée Miss Osbourne (Marina Pierro) is a key sequence in the film. The shift from a predatory male to a curious prolonged female gaze is not only radically different for a horror film but teases us with its overlay of ideas. A conventional director would have depicted a passive and increasingly frightened Miss Osbourne but Borowcyzk’s subtle direction of Marina Pierro conveys amazement and fascination as to what her future husband’s antics. When Jekyll prepares his potion he knocks it back and adds it to his bathwater, writhing and splashing in the bath to become Mr Hyde (Gerald Zalcberg, radiating a sub-human menace). Miss Osbourne is beguiled by the transformation process. Even after Hyde tries to kill her, she is not so much intent on understanding Jekyll but becoming a Hyde-like creature herself.

There are now two versions of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne. Viewing the dubbed English version, the acting appears stilted and sometimes pushes the film into the sexy slease category into which Borowczyk’s later films were unfortunately promoted. Watching the French version (with English sub-titles) brings a greater seriousness of tone suggesting an art movie merely dressed up as a horror film. But both accounts are the same cut of the film with its often extreme violence and after effects (Borowczyk occasionally lingering too long on unpleasant details).

What also makes Borowczyk’s adaptation so outstanding is its visual style. Beautiful soft-hued photography, fabulous framing, composition and lighting have a creepy nightmarish charge combined with Bernard Parmegiani’s electronic score, that haunted me for days afterwards. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne is a terrific European horror experiment. Very much in the spirit of Stevenson’s dark text it captures the author’s sense of repression by the stripping “of these lendings and springing headlong into liberty.” whilst never succumbing to an inevitable Victorian moralising. Like Herzog’s vampire film Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), evil triumphs with a libertine flourish. Borowczyk’s film frequently evokes the fetishism of Buñuel and the surrealism of Borowczyk’s own early animated films. It’s all quite amazing. Alan Price.

NOW OUT ON Dual format BLU-RAY |DVD

Smrt u Sarajevu / Death in Sarajevo (2016) Bergamo Film Meeting

Dir: Danis Tanović | ‘Cast: Jacques Weber, Snežana Vidović, Izudin Bajrović, Vedrana Seksan, Muhamed Hadžović, Faketa Salihbegović-Avdagić, Edin Avdagić | Drama | France / Bosnia Herzegovina, 85’

In DEATH IN SARAJEVO Danis Tanovic returns to his roots to pick the festering scab of Bosnia’s bloody past with a film that will have little appeal to those beyond its boundaries, unless devotees of Balkan history.

Punchy and to the point, the Oscar winning director wastes no time in getting down and dirty with a rather dusty and dog-eared snapshot of history taking place on the centenary of the assassination of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand, the death that catapulted Europe into the First World War. In a ‘luxury’ debt-ridden hotel, built for the 1984 Olympics but now looking rather tired and hasbeen, the manager Omer (Izudin Bajrovic) is avidly preparing for a VIP dinner. Always on the move, his efficient head receptionist Lamija (Jennifer Lopez-a-like Snezana Vidovic) is strutting around in high heels making sure everything goes to plan, while downstairs her rotund mother Hatidza (Faketa Salihbegovic-Avdagic) rouses colleagues into strike action over unpaid wages.

Loosely adapted from Hotel Europe, a play by Bernard-Henri Levy that was recently performed in Sarajevo by Jacques Weber, the man himself returns as a version of himself, to address the assembled dignitaries. On his arrival, Omer assures the Frenchman of the hotel’s gold plated credentials and illustrious former guests such as Bill Clinton and Angelina Jolie, before the French retires to polish up his oratory. The hotel’s less public areas also harbour a collection of brutal Bosnian gangsters, who are doing their drug-related stuff in basement corridors while upstairs Omer tries to maintain a brave face on impending doom. On a rooftop location, Robert Paxton-style news reporter Vedrana (Vedrana Seksan) is debating Sarajevo’s war-torn history with a Serb nationalist (Muhamed Hadzovic) who oddly has the same name as Ferdinand’s assassion, Gavrilo Princip, but is infact a distant relative. Naturally, Princip was a divisive figure in Bosnian politics and Vedrana lays into the young Serb in a vituperative onslaught. He too is bitter and the pair wrangle, making their scenes together feel like a preachy lecture where sparks fly but attempts to clarify history remain mired in anger and reproach.

Despite the director’s best efforts, this potential noir thriller feels overly didactic, lacking the subtle nuance that could have made it the slow-burning psychological thriller suggested by its edgy posterwork. All the elements are there: intrigue, gangsters, suggestive locations and a sexually predatory lead, but it lacks the dramatic torque to make it really gripping and suspenseful. In the event, it feels tediously confusing rather than satisfyingly complex, seeking to raise a gritty debate without bringing anything new to the table. If you hoped for clarification – none is offered; if you hoped for entertainment – you get a punch on the nose. DEATH IN SARAJEVO entices us to a party but the bouncers send us briskly home. MT

BERGAMO FILM MEETING 2022 | EUROPE, NOW DENIS TANOVIC SPOTLIGHT

Mavis! (2016)

Director: Jessica Edwards;

Documentary with Mavis Staples; USA 2015, 80 min.

In her first feature documentary, director/writer Jessica Edwards charts the life and career of Mavis Staples, born 1939 in Chicago. Mavis started her career in 1948 as part of her father’s Gospel group ‘The Staples’, and later, after the demise of the group, as a solo entertainer still going strong today: after 65 years, the last thing on her mind is retirement.

Mavis grew up on Chicago’s South Side, sharing a neighbourhood with Sam Cooke and Curtis Mayfield. Her father, Roebuck ‘Pops’ Staples (1914-2000) had emigrated from the South, and it took Mavis a while to find out that whilst she and her siblings (brother Pervis, sisters Cleotha, Yvonne) were singing Gospel, Dad’s guitar was pure ‘Blues’ – he had not forgotten his Missisippi roots. And neither did he forgot his harsh upbringing in the racially segregated South, were black women had to cross the pavement when a white person was walking towards them.

‘Pops’ and the ‘Staple Singers’ got in contact with Dr. Martin Luther King during the American Civil Rights Movement at the beginning of the 1960s. Around the same time, Mavis and her family met the young Bob Dylan, not very famous then, and the “Staples” performed his “Blowing in the Wind”. Dylan fell for Mavis and asked for her hand in marriage. But nothing came of it. Mavis shrugs her shoulders today with the throwaway comment: “We may have smooched”. For his part, Dylan is a lively interview partner, full of admiration for the ‘woman who got away’. Mavis was only married for a short time in 1964, but, as she explains: “I had the perfect father, no man could measure up to him”. Today, on her single career which started in 1994, she is nearly always accompanied by her sister Yvonne, “who enjoyed managing the group much more than singing”. Mavis’ long career, which led to musical co-operations with Prince, among others, led to her first “Grammy” in 2011 for the album “You are not Alone”.

Edwards succeeds in showing the feisty nature of the singer right from the beginning, at a live concert in her hometown of Chicago, and later at the Newport Folk Festival. Old concert clips from the latter and Wattstax, show that Mavis has not lost any of her bubbly energy and her empathy with the concertgoers is as strong as it was in Sixties. Newsreel and TV clips give us a glimpse of the musical history of the USA; a few too many “talking heads” only succeed in getting Mavis! closer to a feature length running time. As is often the case, less would have been more: Mavis Staples is far too much a forceful personality and has more than enough talent – she does not need the hagiographic approach Edwards chooses. AS

OUT ON RELEASE FROM 19 FEBRUARY 2016

Lost in Karastan (2014) | DVD release

Writer|Director: Ben Hopkins

Matthew Macfadyen, MyAnna Buring, Noah Taylor, /Richard van Weyden

91min | Comedy |

Paweł Pawlikowski has a wicked sense of humour – he waxes satirical here again as he did in a similar vein with his documentaries Tripping with Zhirinovsky and Serbian Epics, although as co-writer of LOST IN KARASTAN, a comedy ‘Eastern’ directed by Ben Hopkins, the satire is less subtle, more in your face. It follows a British filmmaker who fetches up in the Caucasus to attend a retrospective of his own films. Wacky and watchable, along the lines of Borat with more style, thanks to Matthew Macfadyen in the lead role as Emil Forrester and Xan Butler (Noah Taylor) as his hard-drinking fellow guest from Hollywood, LOST IN KARASTAN is a well-crafted and bizarre B-movie; the locations (Tbilisi, Georgia) give it street cred and a touch of exotic panache. The story is so plausible, it could almost be real. Well almost! MT

OUT ON DVD from 29 FEBRUARY 2016

Brothers of the Night (2016) | Berlinale 2016

Director|Writer: Patric Chiha, With: Ebba Sinzinger, Vincent Lucassen | Documentary | 88min | Austria

Brothers of the Night are just that. In an underworld, against the backdrop of the Danube and Vienna’s skyline, these sultry little leather-clad pixies come from Roma origins in Bulgaria to try their luck and make a fast buck as bisexual prostitutes with over-inflated opinions of themselves and their sexual allure but gathering strength, comfort and a sense of community from their close brotherhood, far away from home. Cigarettes and mobile phones are their props as they coyly toy with the camera in Patric Chiha’s contempo snapshot of the Austrian capital’s underbelly.

Lacking a formal the documentary simply meanders through the various stories of these Bulgarian adventurists who arrive in Vienna in search of ‘normal’ work dreaming of a city paved with gold. But it doesn’t take them long before they realise that there’s easy money to be made in the sex trade and so they quickly slip into a life of nocturnal seduction, selling their bodies to all sorts without a qualm; ‘doing business’ with straight men, gays and the transgender brigade, in a bid to support their kids back home and wives they often no longer love. Klemens Hufnagl’s opening wide angle shots of the Danube give way to more exotic and vibrantly filmed intimate interior scenes where the boys talk candidly to the camera and to each other, recounting their sexual adventures with a certain sense of pride as they trade and exchange tips on how best to leverage their sexual favours and make money ‘between the sheets.’ An eclectic soundtrack of ethnic and classical music elevates this spicy insight into Vienna’s Roma community, but offers little more than mild titillation for the LGBT crowd . MT

BROTHERS OF THE NIGHT PREMIERES AT BERLINALE 2016 | PANORAMA DOKUMENTE STRAND

The Here After | Efterskalv (2015)

Director: Magnus von Horn

Cast: Ulrik Munther, Mats Blomgren, Alexander Nordgren, Loa Ek, Wieslaw Komasa

100min | Drama | Sweden | Poland | France

It’s not easy to forget or forgive the past as a young man discovers in Magnus von Horn’s haunting Scandinavian Polish debut THE HERE AFTER. Lodz graduate von Horn clearly learnt his stuff in the legendary film school. The strength of his psychological drama is that we have no idea what has happened when John (Munther) is picked up by his father Martin (Blomgren) after serving time in a state institution. Clearly John has a violent past and Martin is a control freak. But John also shows signs of infantile regression when he is with his much younger brother Filip (Nordgren) who seems to be emotionally more mature than his older brother. When John goes back to school, we get an inkling of what might have happened: nearly all his mates are extremely hostile to and the teachers have no success in their arbitration. Then half way through the film, after John is attacked by a middle-aged woman in a supermarket, the audience start to get a clearer picture.

Secretly visiting the house of his victim, John meets Malin (Ek), who joined the school when John was away, and does not know much about the case. Surprisingly, John opens up to her: “They say I was like in trance, but I remember everything about it”. John seems to have had a special relationship with his grandfather (Komasa), but the old man is hardly talking any more and shoots the family dog, instead of calling a vet. When some of the boys throw stones through the windows of the John’s family house, he attacks them, and is brutally beaten up. Losing Malin’s trust after arguing with her, he confronts the victim’s mother in her home.

Instead of showing us the well-known world of Swedish conflict solution by talking and understanding, this is an extremely hateful and unforgiving environment, where only the teachers are ready to preach tolerance. The huge majority of students and their parents want John gone from the moment he returns. As for John, rehabilitation is near impossible: he lives alone with his guilt – his father just wanting to prove a point in having his son back at home, without really loving or even understanding him. His little brother Filip is torn between pity and fear that the shadow of guilt may fall on him too.

Malin is curious at first, but when the pressure of her peers gets too strong, she too abandons him as her ambivalent feelings are not strong enough to sustain a relationship under the circumstances. Using a palette of washed out hues, IDA cinematographer Lukasz Zal works his magic on the Swedish countryside that looks and cold and unwelcoming as the environment John finds at home and at school. The harsh lighting is a metaphor for the malice-ridden narrative. Munther, a pop star, is powerful in his understatement, and frightening when he loses his temper. THE HERE AFTER is a chilling and immersive account of crime and punishment. AS

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE

Deadweight (2016) | Berlinale 2016

Director: Axel Koenzen Writers: Axel Koenzen, Boris Doran, Horst Markgrave

Cast: Tommi Korpela, Ema Vetean, Manuelito Acido, Archie Alemania, Jeanne Balibar, Frank Lammers

78min Finland | Drama

Axel Koenzen’s debut feature sets sail on the high seas where a Finnish Master steers his cargo vessel into the stormy waters of a crisis.

This realist drama has echoes of two recent marine-based films: Fidelio: Alice’s Journey and Mauro Herce’s documentary Dead Slow Ahead bringing us bang up to date with the harsh realities of life in the commercial shipping industry where time is the essence when meeting cargo delivery deadlines. Tommi Korpela plays the poker-faced captain in this paradoxically straightforward set of events that slowly draws us under its spell. Koentzen has also cast revered French arthouse actor Jeanne Balibar as a medical officer who joins the ship to investigate an accident at sea whose ripples will have increasingly far-reaching ettects in this voyage from Savannah (US) to Rotterdam.

We first meet the hooded Ahti Ikonen as he slinks into view and lingers suspiciously before boarding the vessel, in a scene that cast aspersions on the nature of his intentions. But he soon takes professional charge and we are swept into the daily rigours of life on board: the intricacies of machinery, stock-checking and general workings of this vast vessel. The predominantly Filipino crew are keen to get home and are ready to do overtime to finance their growing family responsibilities. Relaxed; they chat, play draughts and watch TV but it soon emerges that there has been an accident during lashing the large containers on board. This is a task primarily reserved, under union rules, for trained dockers rather than crew, but to make up time and get the vessel to Rotterdam for her deadline, it appears that union rules have been flouted with crew members undertaking the onerous job with and that one of them has suffered a blow to his head. All this emerges in a matter of fact way and low key way and James (Manuelito Acido), the man in question, is calm and lucid but expresses an angry desire to rest. He is later found dead. Judging by his disgruntlement with his wife – expressed in idle conversation in the locker room – it’s assumed this is a suicide rather than an accident but Koentzen leaves it open.

Whether Ikonen is being coldly professional or merely ambivalent is a question that plays on our minds throughout this taught but alienating feature. James’ death will have serious consequences for Ikonen and his second officer Martinescu (Ema Vetean), who initially bear up stoically but are gradually haunted by regret during a boozy evening of karaoke with the other crew members.

Cinematographer Alexander Gheorghiu’s sparkling images play around creatively with some inventive touches including occasional blackouts which serve to further alienate us and ramp up the tension in this slightly unnerving yet remarkable debut. MT

BERLINALE 11-21 FEBRUARY 2016 | FORUM | BERLINALE 2016

Bolshoi Babylon (2015) | DVD release

Director: Nick Read | Documentary | UK | 86min

Internecine politics fail to dampen the ardour of Russia’s finest export and barometer of the superpower’s national health in BOLSHOI BABYLON

British director Nick Read (The Condemned) explores the bizarre case surrounding the acid attack that nearly blinded Bolshoi Ballet’s artistic director Sergei Filin in this tight and well-paced documentary whose unprecendented access to the inner workings of the ballet and enticing clips from recent productions (Swan Lake, Boris Godunov, Traviata etc), are sure to entice balletomanes and cineasts alike.

But this is not the only salacious aspect of a film that grows more intriguing by the minute with its revelations about the Bolshoi and its attempts to overcome a never ending battle to survive both in and out of the theatre confines. Interviews with its new company director Vladimir Urin, principles such Maria Allash and Maria Alexandra and ballet masters Boris Akin and Nicolai Tsiskaridze paint a bloody portrait of the physical and emotional rigour required to stay the course by all involved with Moscow’s hallowed cultural edifice.

It gradually emerges that the acid attack, in 2013, was ordered by dancer in defence of his girlfriend’s lack of promotion due to favouritism by the powers that be, headed by Filin and that left him with extensive third degree burns to his face and partially blind in one eye. Not only does this confirm rumours of violence and corruption in contemporary Russian society but it also upholds long-held beliefs and stereotyping in the West. Pavel Dmitrichenko, a soloist, admitted to hiring his neighbour to attack Filin due to jealousy and resentment. Vladimir Urin, polishing up his own profile courtesy of the filmmakers, reveals that many are interested in influencing the future of the national treasure, not least President Vladimir Putin and Prime Dmitri Medvedev, who appears in a startling interview where he claims the Bolshoi is a sort of guided propaganda missile of national heritage that is sent abroad to influence and profit the mother country.

This is a commercial film but also one that will make you jump on the nearest plane to Moscow to experience the Bolshoi for yourselves. What emerges it that the arguing, bitterness and jealousy is the ‘raison d’être’ of the Bolshoi, defining them firing up the enthusiasm, professionalism and creative brilliance of these highly emotional artists. The only criticism is the brevity of the beguiling ballet footage of the troupe performing seen both backstage and from the Bolshoi Theatre presidential boxes. MT

NOW ON DVD

https://youtu.be/_TK8uth06SQ

Remember (2015) |

Director: Atom Egoyan

Cast: Christopher Plummer, Bruno Ganz, Dean Norris, Martin Landau,

95min Thriller History

Atom Egoyan still has the power to pull an emotional punch, and even though REMEMBER doesn’t quite hit the highs of Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter it is a classy war-themed thriller with a relevant twist to its tightly scripted tale of revenge.

Christopher Plummer’s towering performance transforms this rather stolid affair into an emotional tour de force as Auschwitz survivor Zev Guttman who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, and confined to a home after the death of his second wife Ruth. With time on his hands and the help of his fellow inmate Max (Landau) he hatches a plan to hunt down a former concentration camp guard Rudy Kurlander who lives under an assumed name in the USA. Rudy’s journey takes him from Canada to Ohio, then Idaho where he finds out that the Kurlander in question has already died. But his son (Norris), a state trooper, is an ardent Nazi like his father. who just a cook in the SS. Finally, in California, where Zev’s son Charles (Czerny) catches up with his father, henseems to have found the right man – but his name is not Kurlander.

REMEMBER’s rather formal structure is given an inventive, surprise-ending and Plummer holds our attention with his utterly believable turn as a dementia-ridden family man with a killer instinct, clearly homed during his war experiences and although Egoyan’s strict linear narrative takes some of the suspense away, he transforms little details into meaningful images: observations of the modern consumer world seen through the eyes of a septuagenarian make this feel real and even humorous, breaking up the sombre subject-matter. REMEMBER is old-fashioned but engaging – just the right film to see with the whole family on a Sunday afternoon. AF

ON RELEASE FROM 19 FEBRUARY 2016 |REVIEWED AT VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | now SHOWING AT LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2015

Nakom (2016) | Berlinale 2016

Director: T.W. Pittman, Kelly Daniela Norris

Cast; Jacob Ayanaba, Grace Ayariga, Abdul Aziz; Ghana/USA, 90 min.

NAKOM is the first feature film from Ghana ever to screen in Berlinale and a very worthwhile contribution is it too. Co-director Pittman spent two years collaborating with the US Peace Corp in the village that gave the film its title.

Iddrisu (Ayanaba) is enjoying his medical studies in the big city: his work is promising and he is happy with his girlfriend. But then, out of the blue, he finds out his father has been killed in a motorcycle accident, and being the oldest son of the family, has to return home. A mountain of family debt emerges when going through his father’s affairs and the family farm is run down. Confronted by the old, traditional set-up, Iddrisu finds life at home very problematic. His uncle suggests toughly: ‘I can marry your mother and throw you out of the house, if I want to’. Iddrisu is appalled to see how young women are treated in the village; and he feels himself regressing: he is a newcomer, who is out of touch. Gender roles and a strict hierarchy mean that Iddrisu has to make a big decision.

NAKOM was a challenging film to make. The four month shooting was made extremely difficult for various reasons: firstly, the Kusaal language, spoken in Nakom, has no written equivalent. It meant that the co-producer had to work with the non-professional actors, relying the script orally. Also there was no electricity in the village, so the producers considered moving the set to the nearby town of Pusiga, but finally, the production remained in Nakom, using a generator, which had to be buried underground because of its noise. Casting was a problem due to the scarcity of local actors and the onset of the rainy season which meant that the narrative had to be shot in reverse when the landscape was lush and green.

Cinematographer Robert Geile creates a magnificent sense of the place: the serene, picturesque countryside provides refreshing contrast from the hustle and bustle of the city life, evoking a visual story of Iddrisu’s transit from the modern world to that of deep-seated traditions and old-fashioned customs. The spontaneity of the performances is infectious making NAKOM a fresh-feeling and absorbing testament to neo-real tradition. AS

BERLINALE 11-21 FEBRUARY 2016 | MORE COVERAGE UNDER BERLINALE 2016

Michel Franco | Interview |Best Script Winner | Chronic | Cannes 2015

John Bleasdale talks to CHRONIC director Michel Franco about his latest film:

In 2010, Michel Franco’s grandmother suffered a stroke and was confined to bed for several months until her eventual death. The nurses brought in to care for the patient caught Franco’s attention and became the inspiration for his new film Chronic, starring Tim Roth as David, a palliative carer whose devotion to his patients sees him cross the line of professional objectivity. The film bagged the Mexican filmmaker the best screenplay prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival where it screened in competition and where I had the opportunity to speak with director and screenwriter Michel Franco.

How did you prepare for the film?

The main research came with my personal experience with my grandmother. There were different nurses working shifts, some got fired, some went away. And so in six months I saw a parade of nurses and that’s when I decided to work on the story. Originally, it was supposed to be a female character in Mexico. Then I met Tim [Roth] and we got along and we started to research the movie together. Changing the gender was easy. It’s almost the same story, nothing changed. Changing it for the States, however, it changed a lot. Things work a little differently there. Society is different but also the medical rules are different, so I spoke to a lot of nurses and Tim did as well. Sometimes, Tim would call me and tell me he’d found something interesting and if it was good I would include it in the script. Sometimes I was about to shoot something and Tim would say no this would be done this way. His hands would be in a certain position and we also had nurses on set to help us keep it realistic.

Tim Roth’s character David is a man with his own problems, we learn.

It was interesting to build this character as deeply as possible. If we didn’t get into his mind or his past the film would only be a series of anecdotes about his patients, rather than a character study. Also when you talk to nurses you also hear these kinds of stories. A question which is not answered in the film is whether or not he started working before or after he had his own problems. It’s important to me for the audience to wonder how the personal life changes the work.

The character doesn’t like talking about what he is doing, especially to the patient’s families.

Most of the nurses I met speak openly about what they do. But it was interesting to draw a line with Tim’s character between how dedicated David is with his own patients and how he doesn’t spare any energy with other people. It is strange to talk about it because then I’ll explain more about the film than I should. Yeah, he has a difficult past, so he likes to escape from himself, so he fantasizes. What is more interesting is how he gets involved with the patients even when he’s not with them, how he’s thinking about them and involved in their worlds. That I did find happened with the nurses. When I spoke with this one nurse, I asked her ‘When you leave the patients and their illness and you go home to your own family, do you forget about it?’ and she said no she was always thinking about it. And she even liked it to some extent. That was strange to discover. These nurses are addicted to this suffering, but it isn’t that they enjoy it, it’s just a strange relationship to suffering.

As in your earlier work, you use a mainly static camera to tell the story. What informed that choice?

I wanted to move the camera but I couldn’t this time. My cinematographer Yves Cape, who works a lot with Dumont and Claire Denis, had a slider on the first week because we were going to do some small, subtle camera movements, mainly because I wanted to change, I wanted to make a different movie, but then I was like ‘fuck it, don’t impose your needs as a director onto the movie. Stop thinking about whether your making the same movie or not and just do what is best for the movie.’ As with my previous films, it’s a way of keeping it simple and pure and giving the audience their space to make their own conclusions. I’m putting the audience in the room.
Why would it need movement? Normally the standard is to move the camera, but in my case, I realized the film needed few camera movements. I want to respect the audience in terms of not manipulating them. Keeping it small, there is no music, little dialogue, no camera movements, we’re not cutting to close ups. It’s as pure as I could do it. And the long takes with the static camera give the actors the opportunity to explore deeply into their interactions. There are actually a lot of Steadicam shots that I am happy haven’t been discussed at all.

The old and the ill tend to become invisible but you are very bold and honest in the way you show them. Was it difficult to decide what to show and what not to show?

I always try not to show more than is necessary but at the same time if you have to see somebody naked or going through something difficult just show it. Sometimes it’s more interesting to have things off camera. It’s more intuition than a discussion. To know how to play it. Sometimes I had a clear idea how to do it and sometimes I would find it on set. My idea wouldn’t work so I’d try a different approach.

These days you live longer and you die longer. Do you have to prepare or ignore it?

On the one hand it’s better not to think about it, because it’s frightening, but on the other hand I made a movie about it and so… but I mean the fact is it is eventually going to happen. It’s part of life so it is better to embrace it and of course it should be approached with a different perspective.
Some people are luckier than others. Many are forgotten. Rich people are forgotten too. Some have lots of relatives. It’s luck. It’s not an easy subject.

The ending is shocking. No spoilers, but when did it come to you?

When I was writing the script I was surprised that the character did that but it made sense to me totally, it couldn’t finish any other way. And I had material so that I could edit it another way if I wasn’t convinced when I saw it, because it was bold and not a common way to finish, but it would not be fair to finish it in any other way. It takes 90 minutes to get there, but hopefully for the audience maybe after a day thinking about it, it should make sense. When you end the movie easily, it doesn’t stick in the audience’s mind. When you leave the conflict more open and the emotions it makes the audience work harder. There are more angles to it. What is interesting cinematically is that the ending is ambiguous. It isn’t actually ambiguous: if you look at it closely, I think it’s very clear but it’s like in life even if you see things clearly, if we were to watch the same event now we would all have different view points. We’ve been with this character for ninety minutes and then he does that…

And the topic of sexual harassment comes up.

David is dealing with naked people, he’s cleaning them and touching them, and maybe something else happened that isn’t on screen but that is up to every audience member. But even if that happened I wouldn’t judge. David says of his patient, ‘I never harmed him’, and he never did anything wrong, but at the same time if this nurse was working with someone you love and you learn that they’re watching porn and lying here and there, he’s crossing a line. Can you stay professional and not cross the line? I think it’s good that he crosses the line, he’s human that way. It is a hard position to be a care giver. A doctor comes and goes, the care giver lives there for a year or years, sometimes they end up marrying their patients. It happens. When David gets sued, they say you’re manipulating the patient, I didn’t want to go too far, but there is a hint there to what the family might be thinking.

Are they jealous?

Of course they’re jealous. Suddenly the father is crying in this stranger’s arms and is closer to the nurse than the daughter.

Families are seen throughout the film as fairly indifferent or incapable.

I didn’t want to pass a judgement on them, but yes. I’m not blaming it on the relatives. No one knows how to deal with death, but these nurses do and they enjoy it. David isn’t an angel, I’ve tried to make him more than that. And every family he comes across is different. John’s family are so involved and are even trying to tell David how to do his job. They get in the way, which happened a little with my grandmother. My aunts are crazy and they would fight with each other because they were too involved. I had that experience unfortunately, otherwise I would never have made this movie. Why would you think of such a thing?

David’s role of a father. Your previous film After Lucia (2012) also has a grieving father as a main character.

So far it has happened to me every time I shoot a film. I try to do it differently, but one day I got to the set with Tim and I told him ‘Fuck! We’re doing the same film.’ It’s a totally different story and situation but the main relationship is a father and daughter. I don’t know. I’m really worried. Some directors are trying to find their voice and they consciously repeat themselves and it’s bullshit, it should come by itself.

CHRONIC IS ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 19 FEBRUARY 2016

Boris Sans Beatrice (2016) | In Competition | Berlinale 2016

Director: Denis Côté

Cast: James Hyndman, Simone-Elise Girard, Denis Lavant, Isolda Dychauk, Bruce LaBruce

Drama | Canada

In upmarket Montreal, Boris Malinovsky is a successful company director and an alpha male. Tall and striking, he struts around his lushly landscaped country house in hand-tailored suits – but something is wrong. His wife isn’t speaking to him: a valued politician in the Canadian government, she has retreated to a darkened room suffering from a mental problem. But Boris doesn’t realise: he is the problem.

Denis Côte’s foray into psychological drama is a stylishly photographed and peerlessly framed affair that gets to the heart of alpha manhood with clarity and aplomb. Telling its simple story in a series of slick tableaux, straightforward narrative is not over-talky or complicated by subplots; but it holds our attention on its macho anti-hero and his bare-faced arrogance, drawing us into the plot by the strength of its compelling visual power and a dynamite central performance from James Hyndman. But like Hitchcock, Denis Cote is masterfully in control of his film, the look and visuals worked out months in advance of filming.

While his wife is on leave, Boris is keeping himself company with a beautiful blond (Dounia Sichov plays Helga) and the bedroom services of his wife’s Russian carer (Isolda Dychauk) until he gets a strange message from a man who wishes to meet him, offering friendly advice. This stranger is none other than Denis Lavant who who appears out of the darkness, like a God from a Greed tragedy, warning him to play fair if he wants his wife back. Haunted by flashbacks of Béatrice (elegantly played by Simone-Elise Girard) in happier times together, Boris has an emotional crisis: but his massive ego won’t let him believe that he’s wrong or that his flagrant flirting is creating distance from his wife, his daughter and his mother. But this uber man isn’t all bad: strength and single-mindedness have helped him achieve success; he badly needs the women in his life and realises that to get the women he really needs back- he must change.

Côté collaborates with a predominently female team: Jessica Lee Gagné’s sparkling cinematography makes this a multi-textured visual feast and Louisa Schabas’ with production design offers a mesmerizing zen like feel to this absorbing character crisis. Combining satirical precision with some elegantly rendered mise en scenes, Côte takes a long look inside the mind of a man who is forced to admit that business success is not the only way to Nirvana. Gradually dismantling Boris’ character, Côté tells a tale of human redemption with acuity and panache. MT

BERLINALE 11 -21 FEBRUARY 2016 | FOLLOW OUR COVERAGE UNDER BERLINALE 2016

Muito Romantico (2016) | Berlinale 2016

Director: Melissa Dullius, Gustavo Jahn | Cast: Melisa Dullius, Gustavo Jahn, Lilja Löffler

72min Drama | Brazil| Germany

Melissa (Dullius) and Gustavo (Jahn) are sailing on a cargo ship in the South Seas, travelling from Brazil to Berlin, Germany, to start a new life. In Berlin, they visit flats in Wedding, Neukölln and Mitte, letting the audience know the exact rent and the payment for gas electricity. These data are the only realistic ones in this filmic collage that sees film and reality merging before a portal to the universe opens from which the main protagonists will merge with the cosmos.

Muito Romantico’s opening lines are quoted from a long text by the German transcendental writer Maria Luise Kaschnitz from 1963, titled “Wohin denn ich” (Where to for me) from 1963. Kaschnitz, who travelled widely with her archeologist husband, was a rarity in the post-war literature scene of the Federal Republic as her work was considered very “un-German” for the time, and had very much in common with the poetic realism of South America, where she spent a great deal of her life.

Melissa and Gustavo meet Veronica (Löffler) in Berlin for the first time having corresponded during their long voyage. As the couple get to know Berlin; Gustavo on a bicycle, Melissa, who gets lost, on foot, they related the changes that have taken place in the city since unification, mentioning a slogan which was painted in the ruins of the old ‘Anhalter Station’: “People who build bunkers, also build bombs”. But soon they disappear into each other losing interest in the city, and expressing their creativity in painting and decorating their flat. They come across a Japanese woman and a male painter, who asks Gustavo “to forget parties and alcohol, and concentrate on art”. Later Gustavo reads loud from a book, “declaring that the end of Romanticism has come, and people have to accept it”. A black cat sits on their bed, looking very aloof. The use of red is a motif that occurs throughout this dreamlike piece: in furnishings or objects: Gustavo suggests “all materials have memories”. Towards the end, the screen is totally black for a while, afterwards Melissa crawls through a hole in the wall into their bed. Images, reminding us of Rorschach tests appear, before the couple escapes into another world.

MUITO ROMANTICO is a poetic collage that deals with memory and space, history and art, longing and alienation; predominantly shot by DOP Viile Piippo on 16 mm or Super 8, with the number of frames per minute changing frequently, and a lighting which lends a surreal and very painterly feel. Symbolism is used but in a very playful way that adds to the enjoyment of this rather vague but unique and innovative experiment. AS

BERLINALE 11-21 FEBRUARY 2016 | MORE COVERAGE UNDER BERLINALE 2016

Europe, She Loves (2016) | Berlinale 2016

Director: Jan Gassmann | Documentary 100min | Switzerland, Germany

Jan Gassmann examines the success or failure of the European Union through the lives of four ordinary couples in their respective European cities

In Tallinin, Veronika and Harri make ends meet with their three children and pet dog. Whilst he is a car mechanic, she, a waitress, is supplementing their income as a dancer in a bar. The past makes their live difficult: Artur is Veronika’s son from a former relationship, and Harri has difficulties bonding with him, even though he makes an effort in the end. Harri too has a daughter and will meet the 13year old for the first time. The family spends a lot of time in front of the TV, the atmosphere is often strained, but it is not a lack of love, so much, as the harsh economic the circumstances surrounding them.

Karo and Juan have just met in Sevilla and their sex life is naturally active. But the first signs of jealousy emerge in an argument about his ex-girlfriend. Childless, they spent most of their time in bed, discussing plans to emigrate, which he rejects “because I love to be in Sevilla”. But the economic hardship might make him change his mind. Life for them is discussing, making love and enjoying the outdoor life in this romantic city.

Thessaloniki like the rest of Greece is in turmoil; teetering on open civil war. After a murder committed by the fascist ‘Golden Dawn’, massive demonstrations call for revolution. Penny, and her much older boyfriend Nicolas are constantly arguing: she wants to leave the country with him, whilst he wants to stay. Even the cat, Evita, is used as an object of strife: when Nicolas feeds her gourmet food, Penny explodes, because she believes the cat is getting to fat. Penny also accuses her partner of seeing his ex. But it all boils down once again to economics: she is a waitress, he delivers pizza. The outcome of the emigration debate, one feels, will make or break their relationship.

In Dublin Siobhan and Terry live very much like a retro-couple of the Sixties: drugs and music dominate their life, their lovemaking is often affected by their drug habit. They seem surprisingly happy, treating their cat like a baby and forgiving each other’s transgressions with regularity. Tending their vegetable garden on their roof, where the washing is drying: this is bohemia! Unlike the others, they do everything together, even feeling sick after another drug binge. The most content of the four, though interestingly the poorest. These two have closed the door on reality and the future, living on borrowed bliss in world of their own.

All these couples are interesting in their own right, but Gassmann destroys the narrative momentum by cutting from one to the other, a structural technique that simply doesn’t work in this context. And do we really want to see other couples making love at length in a documentary? These extended sessions simply feel like voyeurism and add nothing to what is otherwise a thoughtful and insightful study AS

BERLINALE 11 – 21 FEBRUARY 2016 | COVERAGE UNDER BERLINALE 2016

Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict (2015) | DVD VOD release

Director: Lisa Immordino Vreeland

96min | BIOPIC | US

Playing out like a speed date with the most important artists the 20th Century – Vreeland’s doc is packed with juicy secrets and fascinating insight into one of the world most accomplished art patrons: Peggy Guggenheim.

Art lovers and social voyeurs will be thrilled and inspired by this engrossing biopic that reveals Peggy Guggenheim as an enthusiastic and appealing maverick who used her meagre fortune to amass one of the most eclectic art collections ever – Peggy Guggenheim — Art Addict, follows the bumper crop of remarkable documentaries – along with The Best of Enemies, Listen to Me Marlon, Janis Little Girl Blue and Hitchcock/Truffaut making 2015 an epic year for American documentaries.

It’s hard to imagine a life more interesting than Peggy Guggenheim’s: born in 1897 to a fabled Jewish dynasty who had immigrated to the USA from Europe and were all “off their rockers”; her mother had a wealthy banking background and her beloved father drowned on The Titanic leaving Peggy somewhat compromised financially and socially in her peer group. Paddling her own canoe, she became a trend-setting “lone wolf” (her words) with a keen eye for a bargain and a gargantuan sexual appetite that was only matched by her addiction for acquiring edgy art.

Vreeland’s film is stuffed with facts and fascinating footage but never feels didactic or ‘learned”. Expertly collated and gripping from start to finnish, it whizzes through Peggy’s eventful life during one of the most pivotal eras of the 20th century, making a natural companion piece to her 2011 debut doc: The Eye Has to Travel that tackled her own aunt, the socialite, Diana Freeland.

Here Freeland shares what is purportedly the last interview with Peggy Guggenheim, recorded before her death in 1979. And what makes this special is the audio footage that accompanies the photos and video clips that give a real sense of Peggy’s personality and the people she met and engaged with; often intimately. Interviews with present-day art world personalities and professionals flesh out the exploration to provide a three dimensional experience that transports us back to the 20th century world of modern art. The suave art historian Sir John Richardson dishes the dirt. Curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist and dealer Larry Gagosian also share their views; Marina Abramovic opines on the merits of patrons versus collectors; and Robert De Niro waxes lyrical on his parents who were both artists – and rather good ones at that – and showed their work courtesy of Peggy. Her other claim to fame was the nurturing and patronship of Jackson Pollock, whom she “discovered” and supported for many years.

Vreeland divides her straightforward linear format into four main sections: growing up in New York’s rarefied circles; to Paris, where she met and slept with as many artists as she could, settling in London where she had two kids Sinbad and opened the Guggenheim Jeune gallery with the artistic mentoring of Marcel Duchamp; back to Paris where she turned her hand to collecting “Degenerate Art” before Hitler denounced it; an unfaithful marriage to Max Ernst, who “didn’t give a damn for her”; and back to New York, where she set up the Art of This Century Gallery and became closer to her wealthy uncle Solomon who was responsible for New York’s famous Guggenheim Museum. Her dotage was spent in Venice amongst dogs, lovers and more artists: Vreeland captures the essence of Peggy and enthralls us in the process. MT

DVD and VOD on 22 February 2016 courtesy of Dogwoof

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Chronic (2015) | Winner Best Screenplay | Cannes 2015

Director: Michel Franco

Cast: Tim Roth

92mins. Drama. France

With loneliness and life expectancy increasing, Michel Franco’s third feature – a thriller entitled CHRONIC, seems entirely relevant but has deeply worrying implications. Don’t be put off by the subject-matter, the reason to see this slick psycho-drama is Tim Roth’s entrancing turn as a serial care-giver working in America. Set in an upmarket suburb of some West Coast town, Franco evokes an unsettling vibe from the opening scene where Roth, as David, appears to be watching a house from the privacy of his parked car. Franco holds this scene for just long enough for us to realise that this is not normal, bringing to mind Michael Haneke’s Hidden. David is looking after a terminally ill AIDS sufferer called Susan and this is where she lives. We first meet him, caring for her every need with an assisted shower. Smiling and serenely tolerant, David is the sort of nurse that anyone would wish for. He even attends Susan’s funeral shortly afterwards, but crucially seems evasive when her niece invites him to have coffee, claiming coldly that it wouldn’t be “appropriate”. Chatting to some strangers in a bar he tells them about the recent death of his wife ‘Susan’ from AIDS. David has other patients, each one gives his undivided attention often staying over and relieving other carers during their shifts. Totally dedicated to their wellbeing, it then emerges that he has his own apparently tragic backstory.

To reveal anymore about David would ruin this deliciously-paced, well-mounted drama with its stylish visuals and tightly-scripted plotline, for which it won Best Screenplay at Cannes this year. Despite a rather unsatisfactory finale, CHRONIC mulls over is a minefield of thorny and complex moral dilemmas that Franco weaves into his plotline leaving us to draw our own conclusions about David, his patients and the pitfalls of all aspects of the contempo care system. CHRONIC is spine-chilling in the most subtle way possible. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL RUNS UNTIL 2015 | Best screenplay winner | Cannes 2015 | NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 19 FEBRUARY 2016

The Second Mother | DVD RELEASE (2015)

Dir.: Anna Muylaert

Cast: Regina Case, Karine Teles, Camila Mardila, Lourenco Mutarelli, Michel Joelsas

Brazil 2015, 114 min.

The tranquil life of an upper middle class family in Sao Paulo is turned upside down, when the daughter of the housekeeper Val (Case) comes to stay. As it turns out, Val is the lynchpin of the family, and nothing will ever be the same again after Jessica arrives. Writer/director Anna Muylaert (Collect Call) tackles themes of class, family, education and wealth in a narrative driven drama, carried by the brilliant central performance of Regina Case.

Val left her village and her baby Jessica behind when she went to work for Dr. Carlos (Mutarelli) and his wife Barbara (Teles) in Sao Paulo. A decent salary meant Val could afford a good school for Jessica. Now she has come to Sao Paulo, to sit an entrance examination at the very competitive architecture exams at the prestigious FAU. Fabinho (Joelsas), the son of the house, is the same age as her daughter, but the opposite of the success-driven Jessica: he idles his time away with friends and still goes for nightly cuddles with Val, who more or less raised him, feeling much closer to her than to his careerist mother. Dr, Carlos is a decadent ex-painter who has given up on life, and spends much of the day in bed, even proposing to Jessica. Fabinho too falls for Jessica, who successfully ‘upgrades’ her lodgings from a mattress in her mother’s small room, to the much bigger guest room. Jessica does not follow her mother’s orders of subservience to her host family (‘you say ‘no’ when they offer you something, because they expect you to decline’). She even asks for the “better” brand of ice cream, reserved for family members, whilst Val and her helper Edna have their own, cheaper brand. Dona Barbara (as she likes to be called by Val) finally snaps: after Jessica has a swim in the pool with Fabinho and a friend, she orders the water to be drained and replaced from the pool, making a lame excuse of having spotted a rat. It’s clear that life will never be the same again now that Jessica has made her presence known in this rigid class-based society.

Apart from Case, the ensemble performance is very strong, particularly Teles’ Barbara, who acts the part of the “modern”, successful woman, giving interviews about progress in society, despite being able to cope with the fact that her cleaner’s daughter is more successful than her pampered son. Her husband, having inherited wealth from his hard working father, is remote from his family, only interested in lusting after Jessica. In spite of his utter laziness, Fabinho is the most sympathetic member of the family, his good-bye to Val is heart-wrenching. But Val and Jessica are not just victims of the system but women who make their own decisions, will ultimately shape their lives. With an English title that is much more pertinent than the original “When will she come back?; ex-film critic Muylaert delivers a serious critique of inequality in contemporary Brazil in this fast-paced, subtle and amusing tour-de-force. AS

NOW ON DVD

Berlinale 2016 | The Golden Bear is ready to roar | Specials

The list of Competition titles is now complete for Berlinale Film Festival which runs from 11 February until 21 February 2016. The first of the three main festivals in the annual film calendar, the BERLINALE started in July 1951, but since 1978 it has taken place each February in order to steal a march on Cannes Film Festival (in May) and Venice (in August)While Potsdamer Platz is the central hub for press and audience screenings, new films are bought, sold and negotiated at the nearby European Film Market (EFM) which has its home in the magnificent renaissance building Martin-Gropius-Bau, one of Berlin’s premier art museums. (right: Spike Lee’s CHI-RAQ in competition).

Running since 1987, the TEDDY AWARD is the only official LGBTIQ film competition and this year presents its 31st Edition. The other sidebars during the Berlinale are:

BERLINALE SHORTS – innovative styles in domestic and international short films. Films in the category compete for the Golden Bear for the best short film, as well as a jury-nominated Silver Bear.

PANORAMA – new independent and arthouse films that deal with controversial subjects or unconventional aesthetic styles and are often LGBT themed.

FORUM – includes experimental and documentary films from around the world with a particular emphasis on younger filmmakers. There are no format or genre restrictions, and films in the Forum do not compete for awards. FORUM EXPANDED is included in this strand.

GENERATION – short and feature-length films aimed at children and teenagers. Films in the Generation section compete in two sub-categories: Generation Kplus (aimed at those aged four and above) and Generation 14plus (aimed at those aged fourteen and above). Awards in the section are determined by three separate juries – the Children’s Jury, the Youth Jury and an international jury of experts – whose decisions are made independent of one another.

PERSPECTIVE DEUTSCHES KINO– the focus here in on the latest trends in German filmmaking and emerging filmmakers.

RETROSPECTIVE – classic films previously shown at the Berlinale Competition, Forum, Panorama and Generation categories. Each year, the Retrospective section is dedicated to important themes or filmmakers.

BERLINALE CLASSICS – a series focussing on cult classics with HOMMAGE honouring the life work of directors and actors.

BERLINALE SPECIAL – out of competition films that have a particular resonance or newsworthy theme.

CULINARY CINEMA – films that explore cuisine and food-themed topics.

NATIVe – films dealing specifically with the environment or endangered communities.

T H E M A I N C O M P E T I T I O N S E L E C T I O N

Boris sans Béatrice (Boris without Béatrice) | Canada
By Denis Côté (Vic+Flo Saw a Bear)
With James Hyndman, Simone-Elise Girard, Denis Lavant, Isolda Dychauk, Dounia Sichov
World premiere

Genius | United Kingdom / USA
By Michel Grandage
With Colin Firth, Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Laura Linney, Guy Pearce, Dominic West
World premiere – first feature

Alone in Berlin | Germany / France / United Kingdom
By Vincent Perez (The Secret)
With Brendan Gleeson, Emma Thompson, Daniel Brühl, Mikael Persbrandt
World premiere

Midnight Special | USA
By Jeff Nichols (Mud, Take Shelter)
With Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst, Adam Driver, Jaedan Lieberher, Sam Shepard
World premiere

Zero Days – documentary | USA
By Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side)
World premiere

Cartas da guerra (Letters from War) | Portugal
By Ivo M. Ferreira (Na Escama do Dragão)
With Miguel Nunes, Margarida Vila-Nova
World premiere

Ejhdeha Vared Mishavad! (A Dragon Arrives!) Iran
By Mani Haghighi (Modest Reception, Men at Work)
With Amir Jadidi, Homayoun Ghanizadeh, Ehsan Goudarzi, Kiana Tajammol
International premiere

Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea) – documentary | Italy – France
By Gianfranco Rosi (Sacro GRA, El Sicario – Room 164)
World premiere

Hele Sa Hiwagang Hapis (A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery) | Philippines / Singapore
By Lav Diaz (Norte, the End of History, From What Is Before, Melancholia)
With John Lloyd Cruz, Piolo Pascual, Hazel Orencio, Alessandra De Rossi, Joel Saracho, Susan Africa, Sid Lucero, Ely Buendia, Bernardo Bernardo, Angel Aquino, Cherie Gil
World premiere

Kollektivet (The Commune) | Denmark / Sweden / Netherlands
By Thomas Vinterberg (The Hunt, Submarino, It’s All About Love)
With Trine Dyrholm, Ulrich Thomsen, Helene Reingaard Neumann, Marta Sofie Wallstrøm Hansen, Lars Ranthe, Fares Fares, Magnus Millang, Anne Gry Henningsen, Julie Agnete Vang
International premiere

L’avenir (Things to Come) | France / Germany
By Mia Hansen-Løve (Eden, Goodbye First Love, Father of My Children)
With Isabelle Huppert, Roman Kolinka, Edith Scob, André Marcon
World premiere

Quand on a 17 ans (Being 17) | France
By André Téchiné (Les Témoins)
With Sandrine Kiberlain, Kacey Mottet Klein, Corentin Fila, Alexis Loret
World premiere

Smrt u Sarajevu / Mort à Sarajevo (Death in Sarajevo) | France / Bosnia Herzegovina
By Danis Tanović (An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker, No Man’s Land)
With Jacques Weber, Snežana Vidović, Izudin Bajrović, Vedrana Seksan, Muhamed Hadžović, Faketa Salihbegović-Avdagić, Edin Avdagić
World premiere

Zjednoczone Stany Miłosci (United States of Love) | Poland / Sweden
By Tomasz Wasilewski (Floating Skyscrapers)
With Julia Kijowska, Magdalena Cielecka, Dorota Kolak, Marta Nieradkiewicz, Łukasz Simlat, Andrzej Chyra, Tomek Tyndyk
World premiere

24 Wochen (24 Weeks)
Germany
By Anne Zohra Berrached (Two Mothers)
With Julia Jentsch, Bjarne Mädel, Johanna Gastdorf, Emilia Pieske
World premiere

Chang Jiang Tu (Crosscurrent)
People’s Republic of China
By Yang Chao (Passages)
With Qin Hao, Xin Zhi Lei
World premiere

Chi-Raq
USA
By Spike Lee (Malcom X, Do the Right Thing)
With Nick Cannon, Wesley Snipes, Teyonah Parris, Jennifer Hudson, Angela Bassett, John Cusack, Samuel L. Jackson
International premiere – Out of competition

Des nouvelles de la planète Mars (News from planet Mars)
France / Belgium
By Dominik Moll (Lemming, Harry, He’s Here to Help)
With François Damiens, Vincent Macaigne, Veerle Baetens, Jeanne Guittet, Tom Rivoire
World premiere – Out of competiton

Inhebbek Hedi (Hedi)
Tunisia / Belgium / France
By Mohamed Ben Attia
With Majd Mastoura, Rym Ben Messaoud, Sabah Bouzouita, Hakim Boumessoudi, Omnia Ben Ghali
World premiere – First feature

Mahana (The Patriarch)
New Zealand
By Lee Tamahori (The Devil’s Double, Die Another Day, Once Were Warriors)
With Temuera Morrison, Akuhata Keefe, Nancy Brunning, Jim Moriarty, Regan Taylor, Maria Walker
World premiere – Out of competiton

Saint Amour
France / Belgium
By Benoît Delépine, Gustave Kervern (Mammuth, Le grand soir)
With Gérard Depardieu, Benoît Poelvoorde, Vincent Lacoste, Céline Sallette
World premiere – Out of competiton

Soy Nero
Germany / France / Mexico
By Rafi Pitts (The Hunter, It’s Winter)
With Johnny Ortiz, Rory Cochrane, Aml Ameen, Darell Britt-Gibson, Michael Harney
World premiere

B E R L I N A L E S P E C I A L G A L A S at the Friedrichstadt-Palast

The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble – documentary | USA
By Morgan Neville (Twenty Feet from Stardom)
European premiere

The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger – documentary | United Kingdom
By Colin MacCabe, Christopher Roth, Bartek Dziadosz, Tilda Swinton
World premiere

Where To Invade Next – documentary | USA
By Michael Moore (Fahrenheit 9/11, Bowling for Columbine)
European premiere

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A Quiet Passion
United Kingdom / Belgium
By Terence Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives, Sunset Song)
With Cynthia Nixon, Jennifer Ehle, Keith Carradine, Jodhi May, Catherine Bailey, Emma Bell, Duncan Duff
World premiere

Creepy
Japan
By Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Journey to the Shore, Tokyo Sonata)
With Hidetoshi Nishijima, Yuko Takeuchi, Teruyuki Kagawa, Haruna Kawaguchi, Masahiro Higashide
World premiere

Den allvarsamma leken (A Serious Game)
Sweden / Denmark / Norway
By Pernilla August (The Legacy –TV series, Beyond)
With Sverrir Gudnason, Karin Franz Körlof, Liv Mjönes, Michael Nyqvist, Mikkel Boe Følsgaard
World premiere

Miles Ahead
USA
By Don Cheadle
With Ewan McGregor, Don Cheadle, Keith Stanfield, Michael Stuhlbarg, Austin Lyon
International premiere – First feature

Berlinale Special at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele

National Bird – documentary
USA
By Sonia Kennebeck
World premiere

BERLINALE RUNS FROM 11 UNTIL 20 FEBRUARY 2016

Orthodox (2015)

Dir.: David Leon | Cast: Stephen Graham, Michael Smiley, Giacomo Mancini, Rebecca Callard, Christopher Fairbank, Oliver Woollford | 93min l UK 2015 |

David Leon’s debut feature film debut ORTHODOX is really about the struggle of a Jewish man to keep his identity and make a living, whilst personal choices threaten to derail him. It has the same main cast as his 30 minute short film of the same title in 2012.

ORTHODOX has “Jewish Identity drama” written all over it: a young man secretly craves the approval of his father and the community, but his temperament is set against any compromises: he is a fighter, not only with his fists, but due to his determination to find his own way in life which is always undermined by his lack of judgement, leading him to pay for his guilt by keeping by committing criminal acts to keep himself in business.

Growing up as a orthodox Jew in North London, young Benjamin (Woollford) is teased and beaten by his school mates and takes up boxing to defend himself. This brings him into confrontation with his religious father, who disowns him, after his son insists on taking up the sport as a profession. The adult Benjamin (Graham) is over-compensating for his refusal by running his father’s butcher shop, which is running at a loss and that also alienates him from the Jewish community. Even though his wife Alice (Callard) hates Benjamin’s boxing in illegal fights to make ends meet, he is driven by self-destruction. Benjamin also totally misjudges the motives of the callous Shannon (Smiley) who is employed by the leaders of the Jewish community (among them Goldberg (Fairbank), to do the dirty jobs relating to tenant issues. Shannon simply delegates the harassment of the tenants to Benjamin – but after he burns down supposedly empty house, he finds himself in jail for the murder of a family. Shannon, who denounces him anonymously to the police, lusts after Alice and starts to threaten her. Together with Alice he is the victim of a systematic betrayal by the religious establishment, preaching humanity but persuading their profit-orientated activities with cold-blooded criminal means. When Benjamin returns from prison, he relies on more dirty jobs from Shannon, whom he still trusts. But when Benjamin meets young Daniel (Mancini), he also seems to be repeating all Benjamin’s mistake working for Shannon.

DOP Si Bell create a landscape of darkness, every location is imbued with gloom: the dilapidated estates, Benjamin’s home, the meeting place of the Jewish Elders and the boxing school where Benjamin picks up Daniel are all doomed, places of transition, soon to be abolished. The only light is in the flashbacks with young Benjamin: even though he gets beaten up, he stands up and fights back. Later on, all his strength has been sucked out of him, mainly by Smiley’s Shannon, a towering example of sheer creepy beastliness, reaching a level of Shakespearian proportions. Orthodox is a raw, uncompromising peace of drama featuring the destruction of man by a hypocritical religious establishment. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 19 FEBRUARY 2016 \ REVIEWED DURING THE UK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL 7 – 22 NOVEMBER 2015

Renoir: Reviled and Revered (2016)

Director | Cinematographer: Phil Grabsky | Documentary | UK 2016 | 87 min.

Phil Grabsky brings together the contrasting elements of the work and life of Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), an early Impressionist painter who later turned his back on the movement he helped to establish – and the American millionaire who obsessively collected his work, Albert C Barnes.

Superbly photographed by David Bickerstaff at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia where part of the documentary is set; we learn how tailor’s son, Pierre August Renoir admired Manet and Corbet as a young man and instead of joining his friends for lunch, he visited the Louvre; rather like Sisley, Monet, Pisarro and Degas, who “learned more from their visits to the museum than at art school”. The group, and particularly Renoir, owed their living mainly to the art dealer Paul Durande-Ruel, who acquired over 1500 paintings of the father of the future filmmaker Jean Renoir. The art dealer in turn sold nearly 181 of these to Albert C. Barnes, founder of the Art Collection in Philadelphia. All these paintings at the Barnes Foundation are post 1880, a time when Renoir broke with the Impressionist movement after a visit to Rome, where he decided to give “up spontaneity in favour of something more solid”, the watershed being “Luncheon of the Boating Party” (1880/81), where on of the revellers was his future wife Aline Victorine Charigot, whom he married in 1890.

But after a few years, Renoir would return to a more expressionistic form, as in “Grandes Baigneuses (1897). Five years later, the painter developed rheumatoid arthritis, which in the end forced him to employ helpers, after he moved to the villa “Les Collettes” in Cagnes-sur-Mer at the French Riviera in 1907. During WWI, two of his sons were wounded, and his wife died of cancer. But his paintings, admired by Picasso and Matisse – the latter, who also moved to the South, visited Renoir at to show the older man his work – did not reflect the turmoil of war or his family life, instead he continued to paint serene portraits of mostly naked women in nature, such as “After the Bath” (1910). He was a prolific painter of the female body, which he often depicted as being passive and available.. His comments are, unfortunately equally misogynist (“Women should not think too much”), and critics called the women in his paintings “brainless and porcine, just available for men”. In one of his paintings, he showed two well-off men, flirting with young women, who were obviously financially worse off than them – a critic denouncing Renoir “because these women would become mistresses, not wives.” But Renoir, for whom the female body equalled nature, hoped that his paintings would be properly judged by future generations: “They will take fifty years to settle”.

The documentary suffers sometimes from too many talking heads and the long sequences of visitors at the Barnes Foundation, discussing rather banal aspects of the paintings, do not help either. But it captures the moment when is the moment when art history was in the making: Renoir’s ”The Artist’s Family” is x-rayed, to prove that Renoir over-painted a part of the picture, where he himself was standing with his wife and three children (among the future director Jean Renoir with an extravagant hat). Alas, no proof was found. The most moving aspect of the doc is the depiction of an older man still practising his skills despite his debilitating. While academic, Grabsky’s documentary offers a fascinating look at Renoir’s work, allowing the viewer insight into the Banes Foundation’s extensive collection. AS

OUT ON RELEASE AT SELECTED CINEMAS FROM 16 February 2016. See the film here

Janis: Little Girl Blue (2015)

Director Amy Berg | Producer: Alex Gibney | Narrator: Cat Power | Documentary US

In her biopic of the maverick artist Janis Joplin, which has its premiere here in Venice Film Festival, Amy Berg offers up a treasure trove of musical footage and interviews to flesh out a voluptuously generous portrait of an American sixties singer who sang from the heart and was tenderly in touch with her emotions: “maybe ambition is a quest for love, lots of love”.

Janis Joplin’s life was cut short when she died on October 4th, 1970 at the age of only 27, in the midst of a musical odyssey that had started to take a promising professional turn. In an era where most women were being housewives and mothers, Joplin was pushing out the boundaries of a musical career. Berg focuses on Joplin’s overwhelming desire to engage and interact with her audience rather than to be a star standing alone on a stage: “I like Music because it comes from emotion and creates emotion”. And this emphasis on her music as a gift to inspire is what ultimately makes Berg’s documentary JANIS: LITTLE GIRL BLUE a winner on a human level.

With JANIS, Amy Berg is becoming somewhat of a star herself on the documentary stage. Deliver Us from Evil, and the upcoming Prophet’s Prey are recent examples of her remarkable ability to communicate difficult stories in a fascinating and absorbing way. Her films play out with the tension and resonance of great drama and by avoiding endless facts and figures, they illuminate their subject matter in appealing and comprehensive ways. And JANIS is no different. What we take away here is a portrait of a likeable, non-conformist who was dedicated to her craft and had the ability to inspire and impress everyone she met. Janis was not known for her physical beauty: she was once voted “Ugliest Man” by University of Texas male students – an episode that understandably crushed her – but her electrifying enthusiasm charmed and seduced men as she developed her craft. And although her life ultimately ended in tragedy, Janis had almost conquered her demons and come to terms with her unhappy early years as a woman who was, clearly, very different from her peers.

So Joplin emerges as a young woman who found she had a voice in her late teens. In the narration by Chan Marshall (Cat Power) we discover that she left home after university in Austin, Texas to go to San Francisco where she dated both men and women on the music scene and quickly became addicted to Methedrine, which sent her back to dry out at her parents’ back in Texas. After joining a popular band Big Brother and the Holding Company, she formed close links with Pig Pen and Country Joe McDonald in an industry that was dominated – and still is – by strong male personalities. There is a recurring motif of a train running down a track and this seems to celebrate Joplin’s spirit of always moving on to new challenges in the unknown, After a dalliance with the Kozmic Blues Band she went on to play at Monterey Pop and Woodstock, almost made a film with D A Pennebaker and gradually drifted on through a haze of drugs, drink, friends – Dick Cavett and Bob Weir (Grateful Dead) stand out – and lovers who remember her with great fondness and joy. There are frequent personal letters to her parents and her sister, who also appears on camera.

With JANIS, Amy Berg has distilled an intimate elixir of this charismatic force of nature, who wore her heart on her sleeve. When all is said and done – and the circumstances of Joplin’s tragic death are thankfully only mentioned briefly – what stands out is the tale of a pioneering woman who was loved and admired by everyone and who got better at the craft she valued most in her life. and that’s the most important part. This is not just a biopic for Joplin fans but for anyone fascinated by the music scene of the sixties. MT

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE | reviewed at VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2015

Rotterdam Film Festival | Award Winners 2016

ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL kicked off on 27th January in the Dutch major shipping port. Of the 250 features on offer, over 100 were world or international premieres. We’d like to point you in the direction of some worth watching out for in the 10-day jamboree and the coming year. All the winners are here

5 OCTOBER Polish director and photographer Martin Kollár’s cinematography is the reason to see this impressive documentary debut. What unfolds in this silent story of a man preparing for life-changing surgery is an absolutely captivating journey across Europe shot with great verve, tenderness and humour. 5 OCTOBER features the director’s 52-year-old brother Ján in centre frame with a moving narration comprised only of postcards, mementos and the relentless count-down that rises up unimpeded from his journal. With a “flip of the coin” probability of surviving a necessary but very complicated surgery, Ján embarks on his own Easy Rider momento mori odyssey as we slowly discover what he’s running away from.

ALBA is an extraordinary debut from Ecuadorian director Ana Cristina Barragan. Macarena Arias is the standout here as a pre-teenage girl who goes to live with her solitary father while her mother is in hospital. Barragan tackles themes of bullying, relationships and shyness as Alba (Arias) is forced to bear the humiliation of frequent nosebleeds and wearing a corset to straighten her crooked spine. With minimal dialogue, a tentative bond slowly develops between daughter and father as Alba blossoms cautiously. This strikingly mature and poignant debut comes from a country that until the beginning of this century had only made one film a year. Young leading actress Macarena Arias is one to keep an eye on. She manages to bring a rare intensity to this tender coming of age tale.

BELLA E PERDUTA A paean to Italy’s faded glory, this poetic imagined drama and essayist documentary is set in magical Carditello Palace, once owned by the Bourbon dynasty. The fictional clown Pulcinella comes across the real-life Tommaso, self-appointed guardian angel of the palace. Evokes the decaying splendour of Italy’s rich and magnetic past.

The Palace is in decay and has been stripped clean by plunderers. The local farmer Tommaso earned his nickname ‘Angel of Carditello’ by guarding the estate and restoring it out of his own pocket. Documentary maker Pietro Marcello saw here the start of a journey through the provinces of Italy in which he would examine the state of his country: stunningly beautiful yet in decay. But when Tommaso suddenly dies, this true-life fairytale comes to an abrupt end, pushing Marcello in a new direction. He introduces the crazy Pulcinella, a figure from 17th-century commedia dell’arte, anglicised as Punch. A journey that is smaller in scale yet greater in effect than the journey Marcello first wanted to make.

Serbian director Bakur Bakuradze grew up in Georgia and studied in Russia. In BROTHER DEJAN He bases his central character loosely on the Bosnian-Serbian General Ratko Mladic, but sidesteps important issues of politics in order to explore those such as good and evil. Much more important in this sober and observing story is the question: Can a man like Stanic really start to understand in his last years of life? BROTHER DEJAN explores several months from the life of Dejan Stanic, a general wanted for war crimes during the Yugoslavian Civil War. At first managing to stay out of the hands of justice, he flees to neighbouring Slovenia with the help of his old compatriots, due to political changes. With his heavy beard and slovenly appearance, no one recognises Dejan Stanic as the one-time war hero/criminal. A simple excuse is enough for him to be able to move around an isolated mountain village in relative peace; he pretends to be an old friend of one of the inhabitants, Slavko, whom he supposedly met many years ago at a health resort. Slavko’s house is his last hiding place before Dejan finally leaves the country. The loneliness forces him to start thinking, for the very first time, about his own past.

21 NIGHTS WITH PATTIE is an intriguing title for a film that blends black comedy with fantasy and magic realism. Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu’s provocatively entitled Vingt et Une Nuits Avec Pattie certainly rolls off the tongue better in French, but this is a tricky tale to digest in any language, and after two longs hours and a final act that lets it all hang out, you may well come away wishing the brothers had left it at that: a boozy French drama with a touch of ‘Midsomer Murders’ and a dash of discretion.

Plunging into the bosky hillsides of Languedoc Rousillion, Caroline (Isabelle Carré) arrives at her mother’s bohemian retreat on a blazing hot August day. The two were not close in real life and her mother is now lying ‘in wake’ in the cool stone cottage, and Caroline must arrange her funeral. Despite this morbid event, the tone is light-hearted; almost jubilant and even more so when she meets Pattie (Karin Viard) the caretaker and best described as ‘une femme mûre’, who regales her with explicit tales of her recent sexual conquests with various local lads. Later on the corpse of her mother disappears, leading to a police investigation that drifts into a Savannah-style ghost story and an erotic awakening for the bewildered Parisienne.

Best described as a suspense thriller, 11 MINUTES explores themes of fate and paranoia. Set in the sweeping urban spaces of contemporary Warsaw, it could also be entitled Crossover, dealing, as it does, with eleven minutes in the lives of a random bunch of characters whose lives collide in the centre of the capital. Wildly frenetic and octane-fuelled, the action unfurls chaotically with moments of surreal beauty and hard-edged passion. Invasion of privacy insinuates the narrative in the shape of security cameras, webcams and mobile phones which track the protagonists during this frenzied few minutes of precision filmmaking.

Thrilling, bewildering and at times quite exhausting to take in, Skolimowski’s dramatic storyline is not the most involving or satisfying of experiences. Like a vintage wine, this is a multi-layered tour de force whose infinite subtleties will emerge with each viewing. The mesmerising set-pieces are brilliantly crafted and certainly amongst the most extraordinary action sequences ever committed to film. The final moments are simply breath-taking and mark out Jerzy Skolimowski as a director who, after 50 years, is still quite clearly at the top of his game. MT

Locarno FIPRESCI winner SUITE ARMORICAINE sees directori Pascale Breton returning to her birthplace in Rennes, Britanny where her main character Françoise (Valérie Dréville) intends to teach at the university. Evoking memories of her lively time as a student by clever use of flashbacks and archive footage, Breton lengthy narrative explores the relationship between Francoise and a student Ion (Kaou Langoët), who, for less nostalgic reasons, is there forget his troubled childhood. But teacher and student turn out to have more in common than expected. Stunningly set in the the heavily forested Breton landscape, Breton’s story switching between the two protagonists and it slowly becomes clear how much they are linked together. Key moments are shown twice, from the perspective of the teacher and of the student. This results in a personal and nostalgic story with avant-garde elements. A dreamy constellation in which Pascale Breton muses and reflects on the time when mobile phones had not yet been invented. MT

ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 27 JANUARY UNTIL 7 FEBRUARY 2015

Homme Less (2015)

Director: Thomas Wirthensohn

Cast: Mark Reay, Thomas Wirthensohn,

87min Documentary US

“Follow your bliss but be prepared to live your nightmare”

Mark Reay is on the hoof: a good-looking older model (think a hawkish Richard Gere) who works as a freelance photographer on the streets of New York by day before hunkering down on Manhattan rooftops for a night’s sleep.

Austrian director Thomas Wirthensohn (a model himself, who met Reay in the ’90s and makes his debut here) shows how those with a seemingly sophisticated lifestyle by day turn their hands to a game of survival by night on the streets of their native City. But far from being downbeat, HOMME LESS offers fascinating voyeurism on man’s battle to stay alive in the fast lane and on a shoe string; but by no means in the gutter. And that’s what’s unique and yet universal about Reay’s story.

Today’s urban lifestyle makes it feasible for a growing community of freelancers to spend their days hot-desking at Starbucks, Cafe Nero or, even better, a classy hotel where one can enjoy their extensive bathroom facilities for the price of a beer or a flat white. Reay is a one man band whose contacts and candid camera allow him backstage coverage of New York fashion week. Health insurance and a bank account, come courtesy of his actors’ guild membership, ensuring the minimum of protection from the harsh US realities of the US where there is no National Health to fall back on. Apart from hanging out with top models, he is also a specialist in tarpaulins – advising us to chose the less crackly ones when sleeping under the stars.

Simpatico on the outside, Reay is as tough as nails, a self-confessed “loser and a jerk” who thinks about sex a great deal but knows damn well never to wear that on his sleeve; clearly lacking in self-esteem, like many artists. Not a disillusioned romantic perhaps, but Reay is certainly a man whose has given up on love and ‘having a life’ despite outwardly being appealing to the opposite sex. Somehow he could cobble together a mainstream existence but something tells you he quite he enjoys the footloose freedom of the urban fox.

HOMME LESS is an enjoyable watch with its sublime rooftop reveries, breezy jazz score (by Eastwood and Mcguire) and veneer of sophisticated respectability – not to mention killer views from the top. As much a portrait of contempo New York and its challenges, HOMME LESS gradually morphs into a sensitive character study of middle age; its regrets and fears for the future, seen through the eyes of a highly gifted artist and wanderer: a mercurial man called Mark Reay.MT

TO COINCIDE WITH LONDON FASHION WEEK HOMME LESS IS OUT ON RELEASE FROM 12 FEBRUARY 2016

The Survivalist (2015)

Writer|Director: Stephen Fingleton

Cast: Mia Goth, Martin McCann, Douglas Russel, Olwen Fouere

104min Fantasy thriller UK

Stephen Fingleton’s monsyllabic fantasy thriller imagines an hostile, post-apocalyptic future where mentally fragile survivors are forced to forage and fend for themselves in the fertile wilderness. Trusting no one they grimly barter food, lodgings and even sexual favours as they eek out a grim existence.

Martin McCann plays an unattractive, unyielding man who allows a woman and her teenage companion to share his meagre smallholding on condtion the younger sleeps with him. But its an unhappy household where the women gradually plot against him as an atmosphere of uneasy hostility stealthily permeates their silvine tranquility. A judicious use of silence allows the ambient sounds of nature to make their presence felt: running water; rustling leaves; bated breath; stifled screams all add to an unnerving sense of doom and edgy anticipation in a world where ferility still holds the trump card from a female perpective. Elegantly framed and suberbly crafted THE SURVIVALIST is a triumph of ‘less is more’ filmmaking. In one scene, Damien Elliott’s camera hovers above the verdant woodland evoking an almost unworldy sense of forboding as eventually the three are forced to close ranks in another battle for survival when the threat from an encroaching enemy brings tragedy in its wake. MT

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 12 FEBRUARY 2016

Trumbo (2015) | LFF 2015

Dir.: Jay Roach

Cast: Bryan Cranston, Diane Lane, Helen Mirren, Louis C.K., Elle Fanning, John Goodman, David James Elliot

USA 2015, 124 min.

Jay Roach (Game Change) has filmed the battle of Hollywood script writer legend Dalton Trumbo (1905-1976) against the fanatical witch hunt of the ‘House of Un-American Activities Committee’ (HUAC), which cost him and other members of the filmmaking fraternity their jobs, and, together with other victims in the teaching professions, civil service and the military, in many cases their lives.

Roach tries not to portray Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) as a martyr – which seems about right, after all, he got his career (and his two Oscars) back; his family, thanks to his wife Cleo Beth Fincher, stayed together – but many victims of Senator McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade were not so lucky.

We meet Trumbo in the mid forties at his ranch house north of LA, ostentatiously living the good life with his wife and three children – he was after all one of the best scriptwriters in Hollywood, earning close to a million dollars a year. This lifestyle did not collide with his political beliefs, he was a member of the Communist Party of the USA between 1943 and 1949; like many of his fellow intellectuals he was drawn to communism, since the pre-war USA government supported the fascist regimes in Hungary and Spain, whilst turning a blind eye to the “German American Bund”, a Nazi organisation in the USA, supported among others by Walt Disney. Trumbo became one of the “Hollywood Ten”, who did not reveal names in front of the ‘HUAC’ hearings in 1947, and served eleven months in prison in 1950 for “contempt of Congress”. (In the correctional facility in Ashland, Kentucky, he met Parnell Thomas, one of the members of the HUAC committee, who served time for fraud embezzlement).

After his release, Trumbo had to sell his house, since he was blacklisted with countless others. He moved with his family to Mexico; on his return to LA in 1954 his neighbours made him feel very unwelcome, throwing garbage into his pool. By then Trumbo had not only re-started his scriptwriting career, using the names of others as front, but had also helped fellow victims to do the same. Sure, their salaries were meagre, but they still did good work: Trumbo was responsible for the cult classic Gun Crazy (1950) produced by Frank King (John Goodman), who swings his baseball at an agent, who wants him to stop Trumbo and others writing for him. Trumbo himself worked like possessed, and his family life suffered enormously – he would not even attend the birthday celebrations for his daughter Nikola (Fanning). His wife Cleo (Lane) had to put up with a rather dictatorial husband, who took to alcohol and Benzedrine.

Trumbo, whose scripts for Roman Holiday (1953) and The Brave One (1956) had won Oscars (which were collected by front writers), tried to fight the blacklist with others but one of his main foes was the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Mirren), a vicious anti-Semitic campaigner, who blackmailed the, mainly-Jewish, bosses into keeping the blacklist alive. Only in 1960, Otto Preminger (Exodus) and Kirk Douglas (the co-producer of Spartacus) finally killed the blacklist, supported among others by the powerful “American Legion”: Trumbo’s name was on the credits for both films; a year later President Kennedy walked through the picket lines of “American Legion” supporters, to watch Spartacus. In 1993, Dalton Trumbo received the Oscar for The Brave One in person, his wife Cleo collected the one her late husband won for Roman Holiday in 2011.

Roach’s TRUMBO is often funny, particularly in the middle part when he is writing with other blacklisted writers in a factory style process, to make ends meet. Mirren is fantastic as a vicious Hopper, her over the top performance, again, draws some laughs so does David James Elliot’s John Wayne who, attacking Trumbo, is reminded by him that he spent the war on beaches filming, shooting just blanks. But the fate of Arlen Hird (Louis C.K.), who suffered many years whilst fighting lung cancer through the 50s, is portrayed with great sensibility. Overall, a populist approach (which still is informative) to Trumbo and the ‘Blacklist’, is an clever option, because it will attract a new and younger audiences who might not be drawn primarily by the story, but the stars of the film. This way, they will learn about a very important chapter in film history. And that is worth a few slapstick moments – purists will anyhow have seen the 2007 documentary TRUMBO. AS

NOW ON GENERAL RELEASE | REVIEWED DURING LONDON FILM FESTIVAL UNTIL 18 OCTOBER 2015

Amazonia (2013)

Director: Thierry Ragobert Writers: Stephane Milliere

83min Documentary France | Brazil

AMAZONIA is Brazilian helmer Thierry Rogobert’s enchanting and eye-popping 3D docudrama filmed entirely in the Amazon jungle. Crafting an absorbingly tense adventure story, AMAZONIA follows Kong, an endearingly cute baby cappucine monkey, who is left to his own devices as the sole survivor of a plane crash that leaves him stranded deep in the Brazilian rainforest.

From the opening sequences we instantly bond with Kong. As his bewildered little face looks up at the camera, our natural instincts come to the fore with a strong desire to protect him on his journey as he fends for himself in the wild. Apart the natural ambient sounds of the forest: rain and random predators, Rogobert’s film is entirely unscripted providing viewers with a rich visual canvas of vibrantly and exotic flora on which to meditate on Kong’s eventful journey and its surprising outcome. David Attenborough will be proud!. MT

NOW OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE | REVIEWED AT VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2013

Youth (La Giovinezza) |(2015) Prime Video

Director: Paolo Sorrentino | Cast: Michael Caine, Harvey Keitel, Rachel Weisz, Paul Dano, Ed Stoppard | 118 Drama Italy

Sorrentino’s second film in English, YOUTH, opens with the Sicilian director’s signature razzmatazz and rhythm: a girl singing on a revolving bandstand in a luxurious Swiss mountainside Hotel, possibly Davos. This is where Michael Caine, as retired conductor Fred Ballinger, is meditating the future – missing his wife, but not his music. Joined by his film director friend, Mick (Harvey Keitel) their contemplate life and their married kids, Lena and Julian, (Wiesz and Stoppard).

YOUTH is a leisurely-paced drama that feels like a languorous troll down memory lane punctuated by explosions of dramatic choreography and entertaining vignettes from Jane Fonda, who plays an actress friend of the men; a voluptuous prostitute who services the male guests, and a couple who sit in silence at dinner, and an obese footballer who can barely breathe.

This riff on the pleasures of physical and emotional love has a three-stranded narrative that explores Lena’s sudden break-up with Julian, who has supposedly found a better lover (she spends the rest of the film talking about her own bedroom skills to anyone who’ll listen). Mick is meanwhile putting the finishing touches to a film script with the ‘legendary’ Brenda Morel (Fonda). Paul Dano, plays another filmmaker guest and stooge for Fred as the two shoot the breeze on the subject of fame and being type-cast for one’s previous successes.

YOUTH works best in the scenes involving Keitel and Caine who create some touching emotional moments and pleasant comedy. Caine is especially good as the staid yet sensitive ageing conductor – he’s similar in some ways to Toni Servillo’s Tito di Girolamo in Consequences of Love, Sorrentino’s first and most satisfying film to date.

Very much a case of style over substance, Youth occasionally feels like a series of interesting moments strung together rather than a satisfying whole. That said, it looks fabulous, Luca Bigazzi continues to wow us with some dazzling camerawork including a magnificent sequence of St Marks Square, and Venice sinking into the sea. There is plenty to enjoy performance-wise thanks to the sterling talents of Keitel, Caine and the rest of the starry cast, Youth is great while it lasts but instantly forgettable once the credits have rolled. MT

NOW ON PRIME VIDEO | CANNES 2015 PREMIERE

The Last Diamond (2014) | Le Dernier Diamant

Writer & Director: Eric Barbier

Cast: Yvan Attal, Berenice Bejo

108min. Drama. France l Luxembourg

Place Vendôme (1998) was the last memorable Antwerp-set diamond-themed heist thriller – it starred Catherine Deneuve as the wife of a wealthy dealer, played by Jean Pierre Bacri. Eric Barbier updates the genre with this slick and shiny vehicle starring Bérénice Bejo (The Artist) as another glamorous business woman; in control of the world’s most famous diamond.

THE LAST DIAMOND (Le Dernier Diamant), has been hiding its light from UK audiences since its release last year and is now making a sparkling appearance courtesy of Frank Mannion’s distribution company Swipe Films. Yvan Attal (The Serpent) and Bérénice Bejo (The Artist), make for a pleasing pairing in the classically crafted crime caper which provides solid entertainment right up to its final dénouement and is best described as a Gallic Thomas Crown Affair.

While on parole from prison, suave professional safecracker, Simon (Attal) gets dragged into a spot of extracurricular crime with his sidekick Albert (Jean-Francois Stevenin). His goal is the theft of the famous Florentine diamond – purported to be worth €40 million (the real gem disappeared during the Second World War) – he uses his sophisticated charms gain the trust of the wealthy young heiress Julia (Bejo), who has put the diamond up for auction, following the mysterious death of her mother.

Barbier’s first two acts revolve around well-laid preparations for the heist, as the lead couple’s on screen chemistry builds to a sizzling climax, convincingly creating a subtley nuanced romantic sideshow to the crime caper, as Julia falls for Simon’s cunning dexterity in finding his way first into her boudoir and then into her heart. Meanwhile, the robbery takes place just as Julia is discovering Simon’s duplicity while the plotline twists into unexpected territory providing some tense final scenes. There’s nothing particularly new or daring about THE LAST DIAMOND: what ultimately carries it all along is the piquant romance between Julia and Simon, who, against his better judgement, steadily finds himself involved in a love affair he didn’t quite bargain for. Attal is spectacular as the sociopathic swindler, blending boyish vulnerability with bouts of brutal violence, his cigarette ‘schtick’ adding a certain loucheness to his urbane swagger – Attal is somewhat maligned as an actor despite his excellent chops; (as seen in Leaving, Rapt and Regrets and The Serpent) and he carries the film here providing sterling entertainment but never over-playing his touch, even when things go awry. Off-screen he’s also captured the heart of Charlotte Gainsbourg.

Cinematographer Denis Rouden’s classy visuals take us on a joyride through the Benelux countries with a sophisticated spin round Antwerp’s upmarket diamond district, thrumming to Renaud Barbier’s upbeat original score. This is a punchy thriller with plenty of heart and soul despite the glib twinkle in its eye. MT

OUT ON RELEASE at SELECTED CINEMAS FROM 29 January 2016.

Bande À Part |Band of Outsiders | (1964) | BFI Retrospective

Cast: Anna Karina, Sami Frey, Claude Brasseur, Louisa Colpeyn | 95 min | Drama | France

BANDE À PART, shot in 25 days and based on the pulp novel “Fool’s Gold” by Dolores Hitchins, was project that Godard embarked on to support his marriage with Anna Karina. The pair hadn’t worked together since Vivre sa vie. Godard called his production company “Anouchka”, his pet name for Karina, and he gave the character she played Odile, after his late mother.

At an English language school in Paris, two petty swindlers, Franz (Frey) and Arthur (Brasseur) fall in love with Odile (Karina). Arthur lives with the enigmatic Madame Victoria (Colpeyn) in the suburbs, where a mostly absent Mr. Stolz has a huge amount of cash hidden in his cupboard. Franz and Arthur want nothing more than to bed with Odile – apart from stealing the money. Their clumsy plan backfires, they kill Madame Victoria, and while Franz and Odile escape to South America to start a new life, Arthur and his uncle kill each other in Madame Victoria’s garden before the money, now hidden in a dog’s kennel, is stolen by surprise.

Godard had run out of producers and had asked Columbia, Paramount and UA to give him 100.000 $ to make a picture. All questioned the high figure Godard was asking for and when he explained that this was for the whole production, only Columbia agreed to take him up on the project. Godard gave them a choice of three topics: the first about a woman leftie, the second about a writer and the final topic about the Hitchins crime novel: they obviously picked the latter. With such a small budget,, the studio did not even bother about a script.

The director’s poetic voice-over re-tells the story from the emotional point of view of the three main protagonists, in a narrative full of quotations, references and in-jokes. But instead of being all-knowing, the voice-over soon loses the plot – the characters are coming into their own. It gives the impression that Godard was filming in perpetual motion. Everything and everybody moves in silence: in a scene at the ‘Café Madison’, there is no sound for a minute, followed by the now famous dance scene of the trio, a polonaise copied by many, amongst them Hal Hartley and Quentin Tarantino. The film is symbolised by the three of them racing through the Louvre. The images are rush by: money, pistols, death, Odile’s stockings as masks, Shakespeare and always the leafless trees, set against a dark November sky. Raoul Coutard’s images literally shot on the run, like he had done during the Indochina war.

Again, Godard was in opposition to everything – even though the film turned out to be very much a neo-classical in style: “This movie was made as a reaction against anything that wasn’t done. It was almost pathological and systematic. A wide-angle lens is not normally used for close-ups? Then let’s use it. A handheld camera isn’t normally used for tracking shots? Then let’s try it. It went along with my desire to show that nothing was off limits.” For once, film and reality coincided: during the shooting, Karina and Godard got back together again, moving into a new apartment in the Latin Quarter, Karina admitting “It’s true: the film saved my life. I had no more desire to live. I was doing very, very badly. This film saved my life”.

Watching Bande À Part the for the first time in 1965, as first year students – we all admired the sequences when the actors read colportage stories from newspapers – we thought that it was vey cool. According to Raoul Coutard “there was no real script. Jean-Luc would show up with whatever he had written for the day. We’ve end up filming that. If he hadn’t written anything, we would not have filmed anything.” The newspaper stories, as it turned out, were just paddings, when the master had not written enough…. AS

SCREENING DURING THE GODARD SEASON AT THE BFI FROM JANUARY – MARCH 2016

Vivre sa Vie (1962)

Dir.: Jean-Luc Godard

Cast: Anna Karina, Sady Rebbot, Andre S. Labarthe, Brice Parain

France 1962, 85 min.

VIVRE SA VIE is a decisive step in the development of film aesthetics – but it is also the result of the emotional turmoil between its director Jean Luc Godard and the film’s star, Anna Karina, whose marriage had been very much on the rocks when filming started in February 1962 in Paris.

Karina, ten years younger than Godard, had met the actor Jacques Perrin whilst filming Le Soleil Dans l’oeil on Corsica in September 1961, where she celebrated her 21st birthday. During the shoot, Karina decided to leave her husband, Godard, for Perrin: “I admire Jean-Luc very much. But he’s of another generation. Whereas Jacques is my double”. On the night of November 21s Godard destroyed all their belongings in the flat they shared and left her. Karina, who reportedly had taken barbiturates, was taken to hospital. Godard and Perrin met for a duel with dice, then settled for poker, but when journalists crowded their table, nothing was decided. Whilst the papers reported over the Christmas period that Karina would marry Perrin, Godard and Karina got back together in January 1962 and he announced that he would direct her in VIVRE SA VIE – with Godard deciding that Karina didn’t need to be paid as they were living together (!).

Godard was a great admirer of Berthold Brecht (Cahiers had run a special edition dedicated to him), and VIVRE SA VIE was to be a tableau of 13 chapters, with the master of ceremony introducing every one. Godard obviously had Brecht’s ‘Three Penny Opera’ in mind” and wanted “to shoot only on location, but without making a film of reportage”. But the director abandoned not only the master of ceremony idea (replaced by inserts about the chapter contents), but also changed the ending: instead of a sardonic ending – Nana becoming a rich luxury prostitute -, she is killed at the end of chapter 12, now the last one. Needless to say, that Karina was furious, the shooting was halted to for a few days.

After the camera lingers for a long time on her back, Nana (easily deciphered as an anagram of Anna) tells Paul (Labarthe), the husband she had left, leaving her child behind “I want to die”. She has dreamed for a long time of becoming a film star and tells everyone that she has acted in a film with Eddie Constantine: Karina, Godard and Constantine acted un-credited in Varda’s Cleo. She shouts at Paul: “If we get back together, I will betray you again.”

Nana, who works in a record shop, is always broke, unable to pay her rent and humiliated by the concierge and her assistant. She sinks into prostitution, first as an amateur then, after meeting the pimp Raoul (Rebbot), as a professional. Her lonely and dreary existence is shown as heart-breaking; whilst waiting in street for a customer in Port Mailliot she is standing under a shop hoarding called Hans-Lucas (Jean-Luc in translation). Meeting a philosopher (Parain) in a café, Nana is told the story of Porthos, who was murdered. After meeting a young artist engrossed in a book by Edgar Allen Poe, (voiced-over by Godard) Nana falls in love and wants to start a new life, but is literally sold by Raoul to another pimp in a street.

Raoul Coutard’s triste black and white images and long takes, mostly over three minutes, evoke what Godard had in mind: “I was thinking – like a painter in a way, of confronting my characters head-on – as in the paintings of Matisse or Braque”. Godard seems to circle his environment, like a researcher, but he always returns to Karina: from the back, the front, the side and even in parts. She is his universe, but he can’t decipher her. Still, the search alone seems to make him happy. In an experiment in language, Nana is trying to intonate a sentence in different ways; Godard shows that there is no absolute truth in our words, and he always returns to her vulnerable face with the Louise Brooks haircut.
VIVRE SA VIE won the Special Jury Price and the Critic’s Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1962. AS

ON LONG RELEASE AS PART OF THE JEAN LUC GODARD RETROSPECTIVE AT THE BFI UNTIL MARCH 2016

The 33 (2016)

Dir.: Patricia Riggen;

Cast: Antonio Banderas, Juliette Binoche, Rodrigo Santoro, Juan Pablo Raba, Laurence Golborne, Gabriel Byrne, Bob Gunton, James Brolin;

Chile/USA 2015, 127 min.

Mexican director Patricia Riggen’s account of the dramatic rescue in 2010 of 33 miners trapped for several months in Chile’s Atacama gold and copper mine is – like the cast – a mixed affair. The decision to shoot in English somehow robs the film of authenticity, and the strictly linear narrative does not help much either, since the outcome is already common knowledge.

Before the 33 miners go down on that fateful day, some of them are superficially introduced in their hometown of Copiapo: There is the expectant father who argues with his wife about the gender of the baby (born just in time for his rescue); the philanderer, whose wife quarrels openly with his mistress before he sets off and there is the troubled Dario Segovia (Raba), who sleeps on a park bench while his sister Maria (Binoche) sells the best empanadas in town. The explosion in the mine is impressive, the men running for their lives very realistic. But we return soon to stereotypes and clichés: overground, the Chilean Mining Minister (Golborne) is moved by Maria’s outburst and sets the rescue operation in action (shown as a selfless act, not a publicity stunt for his upcoming candidature in the 2013 presidential election), helped by mining experts Andre Sougarret (Byrne) and Hart (Brolin) and pushed by President Sebastian Pinero (Gunton). At least underground, where Banderas’ “Super Mario Sepulvoda” is taking over, rationing food and keeping the peace, heterogeneity is assured, even though the interaction is too often predictable. The joyous ending is played triumphantly to the full, but again we are left wondering why Maria and her brother cannot connect at first under such uplifting circumstances.

One wonders if Riggen should not have taken more risks, as in the scene when the starving miners, in a dream sequence filmed to Bellini’s “Norma”, imagine being served their favourite food by their beloved women. This breaks the predictability of the action and emphasises the strongest point of The 33: DOP Checco Varese’s images. But the script (written by a committee of five) and the international cast undermine any attempt at realism, let alone tackling the media circus in the “Camp Hope” set up at the entrance to the mine. As the final credits acknowledge, the miners were never paid compensation and the company was cleared (against all evidence) of criminal negligence, so one would have expected a little more input on these topics and less on grandstanding. And finally, it is really disappointing to see the worst clichés of yesterday’s macho world repeated in a film directed by a woman. AS

ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 29 JANUARY 2016

A Touch of Zen (1970) | DVD blu-ray release

The Daddy of all martial arts films, King Hu’s impressive A TOUCH OF ZEN has been sparklingly restored to its full glory in this Ming Dynasty masterpiece. Perhaps the most influential wuxia outing, it showcases the genre’s golden age and its magnificent set pieces and thrilling fight sequences incorporating Peking Opera wizardry and traditional characters without feeling dated, thanks to King Hu’s clever staging. What starts in the realms of fantasy slowly becomes a political thriller and finally a mystical drama featuring a Zen Buddhist monk called Hui-Yuan. Absolutely breathtaking. MT

AVAILABLE IN A LIMITED EDITION (2000 UNITS) THREE-DISC DUAL FORMAT EDITION FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE UK ON 25 JANUARY 2016 courtesy of MASTERS OF CINEMA EUREKA

Warriors (2015) | DVD release

Dir.: Barney Douglas | Documentary | UK 2015 | 83 min.

Some stories simply prove that, once again, reality is stranger than fiction: WARRIORS, Barney Douglas’ debut documentary serves the maxim brilliantly. The tale of a group of Maasai warriors from Kenya who learn to play cricket, travel to London, (nearly) play at Lords and break the tradition of FGM in their village is a saga full of adventure, progress and, very much, beauty. The latter point is important, because the breath-taking beauty of the young female and male Maasai youngsters (coupled with the magnificent landscapes) make WARRIORS also a feast for the eyes.

It all started when South African zoologist Alya Bauer went to Il Polei village, in the Laikipia region of Kenya, to study the behaviour of baboons. As a cricket fan, she missed the game, but shortly afterwards had the local village children playing her beloved sport. Soon, the young Maasai warriors from the neighbouring villages joint in as Ngais, one of the young men who became a leading player, said “bowling is the way we throw the spear”. Much training had to be done but it finally paid off when the Maasai warriors were invited to London to play in the “Last Man standing” competition for amateur cricket teams. The two best teams would play the final at Lords, the holy shrine of world cricket. Whilst the Maasai team missed the final by a few runs, their time in London made them even more motivated, to spread the message of cricket in their region: so far they have reached 24 primary schools and five secondary schools.

But cricket is not the only mission of the young men: Female Genital Mutilation has a strong tradition in Maasai culture, girls are “circumcised” as early as eight, so they can become child brides for richer, much older men, who pay handsomely with livestock. But not only are these girls mistreated by their husbands, they also lose out on secondary education. The Warriors hold talks with the village Elders to break this brutal tradition, and finally the old men of the village agree not to “circumcise” their daughters any more as the youngsters of the village confirm that they will only marry non-circumcised brides. A joyful mother of one of the cricket players declares that her youngest daughter would be the first female in her family not be circumcised.

DOP Ben Wilkins’ clear and bright images of the mountains and wild animals are integrated in the narrative, serving at a metaphor for pure beauty, untouched by men, not simply postcard idylls. The animation is very much in the style of the naïve culture of the Maasai, who believe that they came straight down from the heavens when the earth was created. Sun and heaven are their central focus, and are always mentioned in discussions. WARRIORS is an exception: a real life fairy story with sumptuous vision and beguiling music by the director and Ali Gavan. AS

WARRIORS is available on DVD and iTunes from 25 January 2016 www.warriorsfilm.co.uk #WakeTheLion

Taxi Tehran (2015) | Berlinale 2015| GOLDEN BEAR 2015

Director: Jafar Panahi | With: Jafar Panahi

82mins Drama Iran

The third film to be released by Iranian director Jafar Panahi, since being placed under house arrest, plays out like a living, breathing video essay on the director and his work. But it also manages to capture so much about Iranian filmmaking, and cinema as a whole. Panahi takes us on a dense, multi-layered cab ride through the streets of the capitol; a thought provoking journey, packed with warmth and humor, and dotted with the sort of fleeting moments- some chance, some not; that make Iranian film so sublime.

Filmed entirely from small portable cameras in a Tehran taxicab, Panahi plays it all quasi-documentary as an undercover cab driver. On his 90-minute spin around the city’s streets, the director picks up a motley crew of passengers, many of whom offer little winks to the director’s past work.

The first argument about justice, we’re told, is taken from CRIMSON GOLD. Then there’s a blood covered man who must be rushed to hospital; a man with a bag of counterfeit DVDs; two old ladies in a rush with some goldfish; and the director’s niece trying to make a “distributable” film herself. The soft-spoken Panahi just sits and takes their confessions.

Through these conversations, the film throws up a number of questions about the role of the filmmaker, and whether or not it is right to follow any sort of moral code. When his niece enters the cab she recites the cultural ministry’s statute of what makes a film “distributable”. Then, just moments later, the girl attempts to direct the events of a little street-side drama so that her film will follow the code. The next passenger in the cab is a lawyer who has defended cultural dissidents, and Panahi has her show up with a giant bouquet of roses. It’s clear where his allegiances lie.

With Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, now both living in exile, the director is one of the last remaining lights of that old guard to stay home. And TAXI has retained many of the fine elements that made those directors’ New Wave films so great. The idea of automobiles as a center for conversation; the lightning in a bottle effect of filming children who seem oblivious to the lens; and the belief in cinema as a transcendental medium and one which can connect us, no matter how varied our situations are.

By putting himself in front of the camera, as well as behind it, is the film a touch too narcissistic? Perhaps. That said, Mr. Panahi has been collecting major plaudits since his house arrest took effect, and TAXI might just be the best of the lot. Rory O’Connor

REVIEWED AT BERLINALE 2015 | 30 OCTOBER 2015 NATIONWIDE

Coriolanus | BFI Shakespeare on Film Season

Director: Ralph Fiennes Screenplay: John Logan

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Vanessa Redgrave, Brian Cox, Jessica Chastain

UK 122mins

Ralph Fiennes brings this bloody epic bang up to date with a hard-hitting bodyblow of a film. Universal themes of political uncertainty, social upheaval and war were never so relevant as they are today. Fiennes tackles them with skill and assurance in his directorial debut of this overlooked Shakespeare play, skilfully adapted for screen by John Logan. Brian Cox plays a world-weary Menenius, a belligerent Fiennes swaggers about in combat gear as Coriolanus. His passive wife is the tepid and ubiquitous Jessica Chastain. But we’re never in any doubt as to who actually wears the trousers: Vanessa Redgrave as his powerfully commanding mother, Volumnia. Meredith Taylor ©

SCREENING AS PART OF THE SHAKESPEARE SEASON | BFI | APRIL-MAY 2016

Attacking the Devil: Harold Evans and the last Nazi War Crime

ATTACKING THE DEVIL: HARRY EVANS AND THE LAST NAZI WAR CRIME

Dir.: Jacqui Morris, David Morris; Documentary with Harry Evans

99min UK Doc

Siblings Jacqui and David Morris’s documentary is as much about the man who led the campaign, Harold Evans, as the Thalidomide scandal itself, which Evans uncovered in a ten-year battle as an editor of The Sunday Times from the mid Sixties onwards. The campaign brought not only some justice to the drug victims’ families, but helped to change the press law in this country.

Evans helmed the newspaper from 1967 and 1981 and had already started a campaign for the introduction of Cervical Testing in his previous position as Editor of The Northern Echo. The Thalidomide campaign, which lasted over ten years, is perhaps the best example of investigative journalism in this country. It all started long before Chemie Grunenthal, a German pharmaceutical company, created Contergan (the German name of the anti-sickness drug) and marketed it worldwide from 1957 onwards in over 46 countries, resulting in the birth of over ten thousand deformed babies, after their mothers had taken Thalidomide.

What makes Attacking the Devil such an impressive documentary aside from its mind blowing revelations; is the editing which deftly integrates original interviews, news-reel studies of the surviving children into a fast moving film, which is aesthetically closer to a detective thriller than a conventional documentary

Contergan/Thalidomide is very much connected to Otto Ambros, a German chemist, who was a lifelong friend of Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler. In 1938, having joined the NSDAP, Ambros became a member of the IG Farben board, and an expert on poison gas (Sarin). in this capacity he reported to Hitler personally. The “IG Buna Werk IV” in Auschwitz saw him visiting the KZ and its workforce of Forced Labour no less than 18 times between 1941-44. Ambros, being a keen advocate of using KZ inmates for work, was imprisoned after the war, and sentenced to eight years in 1948, but was released in 1952, after which he joined Chemie Grunenthal, where he met “old friends” like Dr. Schenck (Inspector of Nutrition of the SS) and SS Captain Dr. H. Baumkotter, Chief Medical Doctor for the Concentration Camps Mauthausen, Natweiler-Stuthof and Sachenhausen. Ambros also worked as an economic consultant for Chancellor Adenauer, and the industrial magnate Friedrich Flick, who had also been released from prison early.

In 1959 Grunenthal received its first reports that Thalidomide caused nerve damage. The drug, sold over the counter, required now a prescription. It was still marketed aggressively, the label proclaiming that it could “be given with complete safety to pregnant women and nursing mothers, without any adverse effect on mother and child.” More than ten thousand mothers gave birth to babies with horrible deformities, before Thalidomide was banned in 1962 in the UK.

The UK manufacturer Distillers Biochemicals Ltd.(now Diageo), came to an inadequate compensation settlement with a minority of the victim’s families in the UK. Evans campaign in the Sunday Times alerted David Morris, an art dealer whose daughter Louise was one of the victims. He tried to persuade the parents not to agree to the “40%” settlement proposed by Distillers, which meant that they would only receive a fraction of the money owed to them. The Treasury then took over to bring the scandal to a quick end: Morris lost his child, now a “ward” of the Treasury.

What happened next is remarkable in a film that cleverly balances facts and tension to create an absorbing and satisfying piece of filmmaking.

Perhaps the most harrowing moment of the documentary is the witness quote of a soldier who had liberated Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp and had seen the same deformations in his own niece nearly twenty years later. Chemie Grunenthal had always claimed that it had lost its documents that showed where and when the first human trials of drug were conducted. “The patents suggest that Thalidomide was probably one of the number of products developed at Dythernfruth or Auschwitz-Monowitz, under the leadership of Otto Ambros in the course of nerve gas research”, said Dr. Martin Johnson, head of the Thalidomide Trust in England. AS

OUT ON 22 January 2016
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Fixed Bayonets! (1951)

Dir.: Samuel Fuller

Cast: Richard Basehart, Gene Evans, Michael O’Shea, Richard Hylton

USA 1951, 92 min.

There is a shot of Samuel Fuller on set, cigar in one hand, raised automatic pistol in the other; it looks like he’s going to fire his pistol, instead of shouting “Action!”. The photo could have been taken on the set of FIXED BAYONETS!. Whilst a real war was raging in Korea with losses on the American side mounting, 1951 saw Fuller shooting a combat film about the war, in a studio covered in snow.

Fuller saw active service during the Second World War and he later wrote: “My yarn included stuff I’d lived through on the front lines; such as the risk of frostbite in freezing weather; an officer’s misgivings about having to order his men into danger and a soldier’s fear about pulling the trigger. ‘You take care of her’, says one of my characters, looking at his M1, ‘and she’ll take care of you’. I’d heard my sergeant say that again and again. There is nothing romantic about the infantry. If you survive, you’ll be proud of having been a foot soldier, until the day you die”.

As it turned out, the army showed FIXED BAYONETS! in their training schools. ThE unwilling hero is Corporal Denno (Basehart), part of a company of 48 men – pretending to be the whole division – so that the rest can retreat in safety. Denno is not too keen on killing, but when all his superiors are killed he has to reluctantly take over the command of his unit. Fuller again: “I know there is nothing dirtier than rear-guard action, but in his case it’s 48 men – unlucky men, maybe –giving 15000 men a break. The 48 men must use their ingenuity to pretend to be a much larger force, in order to buy needed time”.

This does not sound a heroic story, and even though the soldiers call the enemy “Reds” and “Commies”, they are never caricatured or demonised. Very much in the style of Steel Helmet an independent production of the same year which got Fuller the contract at Fox (“Zanuck being the only mogul who was not interested in money”), FIXED BAYONETS! tells the little stories which go to make up the film: such as Denno being told by Sergeant Rock (Evans) “You are not aiming at a man. You are aiming at an enemy, once you are over that hump, you are an infantry man”. The scene where a man is rescued from a minefield is both suspenseful and ironic – Fuller never let’s the audience forget the sheer terror of war.

Shot on a single set, a mountain covered in snow, Lucien Ballard’s black-and-white photography is stunningly evocative, particularly the crane shots which are not –as often happens – used for effect, but to keep the focus on the terror to survive. In a small, non-credited role, we catch the first glimpse of a certain James Dean. AS

NOW OUT ON DUAL FORMAT COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA

www.amazon.co.uk

Grazing the Sky (2015) | DVD release

Writer|Director: Horacio Alcala

Cast of the Cirque Du Soleil | Documentary | Mexico | 87min

Imagine if all you ever wanted to do was dance with a circus wheel. That was Jonathan’s dream. Bailing on his English literature studies, he joined the Cirque Du Soleil and the circus ‘Cyr Wheel’ is now his life. Directed and produced by Mexican film-maker Horacio Alcalá, GRAZING THE SKY uncovers the secret world of circus dancers as they explore their passions and the motivations behind their highly-skilled craft.

Interviewing for a production of Cirque Du Soleil, a Canadian iniative that has now become famous everywhere with its various permutations and themes, Mexican helmer Horacio sets out to discover new recruits for the troupe’s production. We meet these performers in audition, offering their artistry from their respective discplines interwoven with their various ethnic backgrounds from Palestine, Holland, Spain, Canada, Brazil. On the other end of the journey, Australian gold-medal gymnast, Damian Istria, about to retire from Cirque Du Soleil after a life-time career.

GRAZING THE SKY does take itself a bit too seriously at times, coming over a tad inauthentic: the artists opine about their “passion” as if they’re reading a script, rather than talking naturally and this gives the documentary the feel of a glossy filmed advertisement for Cirque de Soleil. It also gives the impression that the performers are somehow looking at their craft as a therapy that has saved their lives rather than a serious professional vocation, which clearly it is.. That said, the technical credits are superb with slick and inventive cinematography from David Palacios, giving the piece an intense and magical feel at times. The idea started as the brainchild of Patrick Flynn, Company Manager for Cirque Du Soleil, and shines a light on the many ways that dancers find their vocation into today’s circus industry – a far cry from the past where the only way in came from family connections.

But the dancers do become a family of sorts, bonded by shared experience and expression that takes them all over the world where they perform the various techniques with equipment from Saar Rombout and the Cyr wheel, with which Jonathan Moss is now one of the top dancers. The only other criticism here is the lack of footage for the other Cirque Du Soleil skills such as juggling. But Horacio’s documentary offers worthwhile insight into the contemporary world of the 21st century circus: the travelling caravans and performing animals have (thankfully) now moved on. MT

OUT ON DVD from January 25th 2016

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Backtrack (2016)

Director|Writer: Michael Petroni

Cast: Adrien Brody, Sam Neill, Bruce Spence, Jenni Baird, Olga Miller

90min Supernatural Thriller Australia

A rain-soaked Sydney is the setting for Michael Petroni’s schematic supernatural thriller where a bereaved psychologist is traumatised by visions of the past after the tragic death of his daughter. Adrien Brody is stunningly intense as Peter Bowers, the anxious but sympathetic therapist and Sam Neil is masterful and fatherly as his tweed besuited superior Duncan, offering professional support as he struggles to keep his sanity and marriage on track. The loss of his daughter opens him up psychically to a series of patients who appear to be ghosts from the past, including one who is a dead ringer for his little girl.

Off he goes to his family home in New South Wales to gain clarity. No one seems pleased to see him, least of all his heavy-drinking ex policeman father (George Shevtosv) or his teenage mate Barry (Malcolm Kennard). A series of flashbacks depict a local rail accident decades previously and memories start to resurface suggesting Peter was to blame for the accident and he quizzes his father who led the police investigation.

An atmosphere of mounting tension seethes throughout this slick and beautifully crafted thriller that makes good use of its Australian rural scenery and a haunting original score by Dale Cornelius. Despite the rather contrived plot that feels spookily familiar, Brody and Neil hold things together and the clever fractured narrative serves to keep us guessing why Peter is not the only person responsible for the train tragedy. Adrien Brody morphs into an impressive action hero in the final scenes managing the same appealing vulnerability that won him his Oscar for The Pianist. MT

BACKTRACK IS OUT ON GENERAL RELEASE FROM 29 JANUARY 2016 courtesy of ARROW FILM

Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) Blu-ray | DVD release

Dir: Alain Resnais

Cast: Emmanuele Riva, Eiji Okada, Stella Dassas, Pierre Barbaud, Bernhard Fresson

France/Japan 1959, 90 min.

HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR is widely considered the first ‘true’ film of the French Nouvelle Vague, Yet Alain Resnais’ romantic drama is in many ways very different from Godard’s Au Bout de Souffle (1960) – Resnais’ debut is much closer to Andre Bazin’s description of an ‘impure film’, compared with those of his collaborator’s of the movement: Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer or Truffaut.

For a start Resnais’ approach was more radical, and he moved much further away from the classical film structure than the other directors in French New Wave movement. According to his script collaborator Marguerite Duras :“he asked me to write literature, forget the camera. His idea was to film my script like a composer treating a piece of writing – like Debussy did with Materlincks ‘Pelleas et Melisande’ ”.

The only requirement from the Japanese co-producers was that one episode of the film be set in Japan and the other in France. Françoise Sagan was approached to write the script but she showed no interest. Duras and Resnais agreed that no contemporary film about Japan could be made without mentioning Hiroshima. Since the Japanese film “The Children of Hiroshima” had said everything what was to be said about the horror of the first nuclear bomb, Duras tried a very a different approach: Her script was more or less a permanent dialogue, or better, two monologues, which only rarely become a true dialogue.

A French actress (Riva) and a Japanese architect (Okada) meet in Hiroshima and spend a night together in her hotel room. They make love and he tries to keep in vain her for a few days longer in the city, but they are both married and their relationship has no future. During the night, she remembers her first love: a German soldier (Fresson), whom she loved in her hometown of Nevers, and who was shot on the day of the city’s liberation. As a punishment, her hair was cut by enraged citizens and her parents (Dasas/Barbaud) hid her in the cellar. Basically, their meeting in Hiroshima is a discourse about time and forgetting: She has forgotten Nevers, as she will Hiroshima and this love of her: “Je t’oublierai, je t’oublie deja! (I will forget you, I’ve already forgotten you”) she tells her lover.

Hiroshima, Mon Amour is not a film about a war, or about love. It is a film about the actor’s two lovers: both of the relationships are defeated (in different ways) by war. War only intervenes in short scenes, but it dominates the life of the actress; it has formed her, like her two lovers. The most important aspect of the film, is not its moving images but the photographed emotions. This way, the scenes in Nevers are not ordinary flash-backs, but moments of a memory which is short: as shown in the parallel montage of the hands of the German soldier: first when they are in bed, than after he has been shot. But immediately we flash back to the hotel room in Hiroshima. Sometimes to the two levels meet: after the camera travels through the streets of Hiroshima, we are suddenly confronted with a street sign in Nevers. This is not about the two cities, but the actor’s struggle to remember and forget. Resnais’ next two films Last Year in Marienbad and Muriel, Hiroshima is a thesis on time and forgetting, exploring the function of memory very much like Marcel Proust did with In Search of Lost Time.

Riva and Okada are impressive, their understated ‘non-acting’ perfectly cohesive with the “gliding” black and white images of Saché Vierny and Michio Takahashi; and Georges Delerue’s mourning score: whilst other directors of the Nouvelle Vague wanted to liberate film from theatre and literature, Resnais wanted to create film as a medium that encompassed other art forms. AS

WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL CRITICS’ PRIZE CANNES 1959 | RELEASED ON BLU-RAY FOR THE FIRST TIME ON JANUARY 18TH, 2016

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Blu-ray tech specs: Cert: / Total Running Time: 90 mins approx / Black and white / Feature Aspect Ratio: 1:37:1 / Feature Audio: 2.0 Mono DTS HD Mater Audio / HD Standard 1080p / Region B / French language / RRP: £

OUT 1: Noli me Tangere (1971) | The Jacques Rivette Collection

Dir.: Jacques Rivette

Cast: Jean-Pierre Leaud, Juliet Berto, Michelle Moretti, Michael Lonsdale, Bernadette Lafont, Bulle Ogier, Francoise Fabian, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Alain Libolt

773min Drama France 1971

OUT 1: SPECTRE, France 1974, 253 min. (A shorter version of Out 1, but with scenes omitted from the long version.

Known as the ‘holy grail’ of films largely due to its unavailability to the public after a one-off showing, Jacques Rivette’s OUT 1 shot in six weeks between April and June 1970 in Paris and with a running time of 773 minutes, premiered as a-work-in-progress screening in Le Havre on 10 October the following year. It then more or less disappeared until recently. There were just a few screenings of the long version: 1974 Rivette had edited a short version of a mere four hours at film festivals in Rotterdam and Berlin, but in December 2015 a new copy was shown in the USA. And whilst the secondary literature about OUT 1 grew to an extent that it could compete with the film marathon; very few people actually have seen the epic with its themes of conspiracy, paranoia, mystery, suspicion, absurdity and changing and doubling identities.

This is cinema shot during a journey of rediscovering film as an art form of improvisation. The title is programmatic: Out (as the opposite to the popular ‘in’), One (as the first film of many), and ‘Noli me tangere’ (Don’t touch me) scribbled on one of the original film canisters. Split into eight episodes between 80 and 100 minutes, OUT 1 was supposed to be shown on TV, but ORTF decided against this and considering that Aeschylus and Balzac are the main pillars of the ‘narrative’, it might have been the right decision. Trying to write a synopsis, how ever exhaustive, does OUT 1 no justice – this is cinema one has to ‘live’ with. During the screening in Le Havre, the audience talked about the protagonists as if they were personal friends, and many in the audience felt bereft at the end of the performance, the characters had become a part of their life. OUT 1 was a metaphor for the fallout and failings of ‘May 1968′ when the movement split into competing groups. In this way, OUT1 is a critique of Rivette’s debut film PARIS NOUS APPARTIENT (1961), sharing the conspiracy theme with OUT 1.

OUT 1 was Rivette’s fourth feature and it was a break with everything he had done before. Having grown tired of writing scripts, the idea was to direct a film that evolved in a realistic way, like everyday life. Rivette commented “a week before shooting began, I was faced by the need to find some way of representing all this, and urgently – if we weren’t to waste the six weeks’ filming provided for by the budget – so we had to have a planned shooting schedule. I spent two days with Suzanne Schiffman. [co-director]. One afternoon she asked me about the characters and she filled up thirty or forty pages in a notebook. Then we looked at each other and said: what are we going to do with all this? We tried to take each character in turn, but nothing came of that, then suddenly I think it was she who had the great idea: we must draw up a bogus chronology – because after all a story does unfold in time – indicating an arbitrary number of weeks and days on the vertical lines, and the names of the characters going the other way. From that moment… it was very odd but this sort of grid influenced the film a lot. The great temptation was, not to fill in all the squares of course, [but] after that it became like a game, like a crossword. Actually it was done very quickly.”

Two theatre groups, led by Lili (Moretti) and Thomas (Lonsdale) are rehearsing different Aeschylus plays: “Seven against Thebes” and “Promotheus Bound”. Lili and Thomas had been a couple before, and their split is only the first of many. On the periphery of the theatre groups, Colin (Leaud) and Frederique (Berto) make a living as conmen, and even though the two are the main carriers of the narrative, they only meet once very briefly. Colin believes that there is a “Group of Thirteen”, men and women, who are a secret society, based on characters of three novellas by Balzac. Frederique steals letters from Etienne (Doniol-Valcroze), who is playing chess with himself, which prove that the members of “The Thirteen” are communicating.

Another main protagonist is Emilie (Ogier), who, under the name of Pauline, runs a meeting place for the group, whilst searching for her husband Igor, who has gone missing six months ago. Eric Rohmer has a great cameo as a Balzac expert, who helps with the very much needed plot exposition, since Colin receives messages with cryptic references not only to Balzac, but also Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark”. After Renaud (Libolt) joins the “Seven Against Thebes” production, first as an assistant, he takes creative control from Lili, who withdraws. After Renaud steals a million Francs from a racing bet, which was supposed to fund the production of the play, he disappears, the play is cancelled, and the members of the group hunt Renaud all over Paris. Frederique finally meets the man who Honey Moon is in love with: it turns out to be Renaud. In spite of them having a sort of “ritual wedding”, Frederique suspects that Renaud is part of another secret society, even more powerful and dangerous than “The Thirteen”. She warns him, but he shoots and kills her. Meanwhile, Lucie de Graffe (Fabian), a ruthless lawyer, has joined the group around Thomas, to discuss the lack of progress of finding any real clues to the existence of “The Thirteen”. Finally, Colin looses interest in the chase, and Thomas and his group retreat to Emiie’s seaside house in Odabe. Thomas, who had summed up the situation before, telling Lili’s friend Elaine “You don’t really know why you are a one of the ‘Thirteen’ and neither do I, but we are not supposed to admit that”, has a drunken episode at the beach and is left behind, whilst the last shot is of Marie, a member of the Thebes group, still searching for Renaud, in front of a statue of a golden Athena in Paris.

Rivette was proud he only wrote the messages which propel the plot. Apart from this, the actors were asked to define their characters, making the action personal and improvised. Pierre William Glenn’s images remind us very much of early Rene Clair films: Paris as a backdrop to some magical fable. Indeed, one can say that the city is used as a big theatre set for a cinema of illusions, where the bubbles burst, only to be replaced by new half-dreams. Saying that OUT 1 is magic and poetic realism, is not enough: it seems to glide into our sub-conscious, by evoking infantile fears and desires.
In trying to explain, why the audience forges such an uncommon attachment to the film and wants it never to end, Alain Menil points out, “that just as the secret society of the ‘Thirteen’ is organised around the secret of their inactivity, just as the theatre troupes of Lili and Thomas cohere around the absence of work, of a play to perform; the community of OUT 1 is formed around something that isn’t there: the experience of the film, the film as experience, takes place somewhere between the reality of the performers interacting in a specific time and place; and the phantasies of the characters that exists in the non-place and subjective time of the spectator’s imagination”.
In other words, a game of projection and transference takes place, like a brilliant innovative session with your psychoanalyst, striding along in a Paris of enigmatic beauty. AS

OUT ON DVD AND BLU-Ray FROM 18 January 2016 COURTESY OF ARROW FILM

Special Features

· Limited Edition Blu-ray & DVD collection (3,000 copies)
· High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) and Standard Definition DVD presentation of all films from brand new 2K restorations of the films with Out 1 supervised by cinematographer Pierre-William Glenn
· Original mono audio (uncompressed PCM on the Blu-rays)
· Optional newly-translated English subtitles for all films
· The Mysteries of Paris: Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 Revisited – a brand-new feature length documentary by Robert Fischer and Wilfried Reichart containing interviews with actors Bulle Ogier, Michael Lonsdale and Hermine Karagheuz, cinematographer Pierre-William Glenn, assistant director Jean-François Stévenin and producer Stéphane Tchalgadjieff, as well as rare archival interviews with actors Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Michel Delahaye, and director Jacques Rivette
· Scenes from a Parallel Life: Jacques Rivette Remembers – archive interview with the director, in which he discusses Duelle (une quarantaine), Noroît (une vengeance) and Merry-Go-Round, featuring additional statements from Bulle Ogier and Hermine Karagheuz
· Brand-new interview with critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who reported from the sets of both Duelle (une quarantaine) and Noroît (une vengeance)
· Exclusive perfect-bound book containing new writing on the films by Mary M. Wiles, Brad Stevens, Ginette Vincendeau and Nick Pinkerton

The Assassin (2015) | Best Director Award | Cannes 2015

Director: Hsiao-hsien Hou

Cast: Qi Shu, Chen Chang, Satoshi Tsumabuki

12omin Taiwanese Drama

Taiwanese director Hsiao-hsien Hou has brought a Palme d’Or probable to the Croisette with his stunning drama THE ASSASSIN. This is a serious and sumptuously composed masterpiece – in the true sense of the word. Hou brings a sense of uncompromising formal brilliance to the wuxia material. THE ASSASSIN is a work of spiritual resonance and historical importance, it is also visually orgasmic.

Set during the Tang dynasty, the story opens as a young girl played by Shu Qi undergoes training to be an assassin. But her female sympathies stand in the way of her killing instinct and after failing an important mission, she is sent back to her hometown. Some time later, she is again tasked with killing an important governor (played by Chang Chen) who is questioning the Emperor’s authority. The task involves a moral twist: not only is the governor her cousin, but also her first love.

Mark Lee Ping-Bing’s stunning visuals create a sparkling jewel box in every frame. The magnificent landscape showcase lush forests, mist-filled mountains and precipitous gorges in this remote and the often hostile terrain. But this is not the classic martial arts slasher movie and the killing sprees are spare and discrete. This is the domain of the highly disciplined and spiritually-trained Grandmasters, experienced recently through the work of Wang Ka Wai. But Hou’s martial arts sequences have their own brutal and breathtaking beauty and are nonetheless powerful for their distinct lack of gratuitous blood-letting. There is a serene and graceful delicacy to this filmmaking which is both tear-wellingly beautifully and satisfying austere. A sequence involving black magic is particularly sinister, making THE ASSASSIN a captivating masterpiece in elegance and restraint, holding his head proudly in the starry firmament of Taiwanese filmmaking. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL RUNS UNTIL 24 MAY 2015 | IN COMPETITION | CANNES 2015

Addicted to Sheep (2015) | DVD release

Writer|Director: Megali Pettier

With the Hutchinson Family

90min UK Documentary

It takes a French woman to capture the quintessential Englishness of country life in a Pennines farming community. And she does so with a feeling for the ‘terroir’ that could certainly make sheep-rearing catch on, especially if you’re not afraid of hard work and yearn for a simple family life in the big outdoors, caring for animals and relish locally grown produce. Tennant farming couple Tom and Kay have found their idyll in the glorious open spaces of the Cumbria and Yorkshire, where they lease a farm, in true English feudal style, from Lord Barnard.

Documentarian Magali Pettier grew up on a farm in Brittany and is now based in the North East England, where she has made ADDICTED TO SHEEP, her debut feature. Collaborating with the Hutchinson family and their three young children, she chronicles both the pleasures and the pitfalls of rearing special breed sheep.

Although Pettier injects charm and gentle humour into her story, this is no cuddly picture of furry lambs but a visceral and at times harrowing look at our atavistic relationship with animals that is deeply rooted in the English rural tradition: you may need a dictionary to understand the arcane language of sheep farming. Pettier’s framing and creative camerawork adds visual poetry to this down to earth portrait of the harsh and gruelling realities of living on a farm. Tom and Kay face the same struggles as any couple: paying the bills, raising their kids and planning for retirement while running a precarious ‘cottage’ industry with the aim of making an annual profit out of their livestock, whose ‘sole aim is to die’. But their existence has its compensations: a ready supply of nutritious food, fresh air and the joys of nature in comfortable farm amidst some really magnificent countryside.

Capturing the daily grind from snowy winter scenes through to late summer on the farm, Pettier cuts between shots of Tom Hutchinson pulling a bloodied and stillborn lamb from its mother to idyllic panoramas of wildflower meadows, where his tiny daughter paints the landscape and dreams of becoming an artist. In a school full of local kiddies, the talk is focused on the future where all the children want to work in the farming industry when they grow up.

Pettier does not attempt to be philosophical – this arthouse gem connects in a simple yet effective way to the global narrative of survival for small communities all over the World, showcased in similar British documentaries Village at the End of the World (2012) and The Moo Man (2012). ADDICTED TO SHEEP raises the crucial and timeless issue of the food we eat being connected with farmers who really care about their livestock and produce rather than large corporations who rob them of their profit margins and ultimately threaten our health, wellbeing and the future of British farming. MT

NOW ON DVD | ON GENERAL RELEASE IN SELECTED CINEMAS FROM 28 AUGUST 2015

Legend (2015) | Netflix

As Reggie Kray, Tom Hardy essays the classic bad boy rise and fall narrative of genre familiarity. As Ronnie Kray, Hardy bears an uncanny resemblance to Patrick Marber. Unfortunately the filmmakers didn’t have the foresight to get Marber to do a rewrite of the screenplay.

Real life is messy, though arguably more dramatic. Working Title, who excel in chocolate box exports of the Union Jack, truncate and clean up the timeline of the brothers, and Reggie’s relationship with Frances, to a neat conventional structure, taking liberties with documented facts for the sake of a reductive and restorative three act structure.

Narrated from beyond the grave by Frances, as a sort of cockney sparrow cousin of Bridget Jones, all with a garish sense of retro-knowingness and provincial cool and a script full of some real exclamatory corkers “It was time for the Krays to enter gangster legend”. Its soundtrack, a wholly predictable mix of Green Onions, In the Mood and Hermans Hermits, literally illustrating, for those opening weekend punters who can’t be bothered, the wedding scene with Chapel of Love, the relationship turning sour with Helen Sharpiros Lonely Last Night, and her suicide with Make The World Go Away (a new version by Duffy, who may be the only authentic thing in the film).

No subtlety is allowed here. Ronnie’s schizophrenia is too complex for the flat white mainstream to handle, so instead they ramp up his madness way past 11, an absurdist idiot savant pitched somewhere between Tommy Cooper and Derek & Clive, complete with liberal and comedic use of the c-word. Spanking a Y-fronted young teen with a carpet beater, his sexuality is also far too abstruse a subject for its audience – better to grab some laughs with carry on up the camping instead. “Barbara Windsor was in here the other night”, Reggie tells Frances, as he seduces her with the nightlife. And at a Hackney orgy, John Sessions, as Lord Boothboy the perverted peer, enquires of a young lad “Do you like it down the hatch?”

Chazz Palminteri, a proper American actor who has played proper American gangsters with Robert DeNiro and Woody Allen, is brought in to please the studio and as an attempt to give weight to two brief cameo scenes of wretched expositional dialogue, apparently as Sicilian Mafioso Angelo Bruno, who comes out with clunkers such “London is going to be the Las Vegas of Europe”, then warning Reggie that Ronnie’s a loose cannon and “we need you to do something about Ron”, leading to Hardy’s very EastEnd reply “I can’t do that – he’s my bruvva”. Dum, dum, dum…

The Krays (1990) an earlier film with the Spandau brothers Kemp, a Buñuelian masterpiece by comparison, dealt largely with their mother Violet, played by Bille Whitelaw, and her unconditional love of her little monsters. Violet gets little screen time here, save for a scene where she berates Frances for making a bad cup of tea. Instead, Tara Fitzgerald is lumped with the thankless mother in law role. Elsewhere, other facts are inexplicably sexed up into bad movie scenes – Jack the Hat McVitie is shown having a doorstep scuffle with the accountant (David Thewlis) in a botched attempt to kill him – in reality his wife answered and said that he wasn’t in, so McVitie just pocketed the money and went home. Further licences are taken with scenes that are so dramatically convenient its laughable to believe they happened like that.

LEGEND, beyond the gimmick of Hardy’s doubletake, and though he does have some tender moments as Reggie, is nonetheless a simplistic 4th form Jekyll and Hyde sketch, with the soap opera plotline of a man, an alpha male, trying and failing to be saved to the straight and narrow by the love of a good little dolly bird, who he ultimately destroys, and who in turn inevitably destroys him. Apparently no CGI was utilised, instead using stand-ins and old fashioned angles for Hardy’s dual role, though one would have thought the 30 million budget would have afforded the blurring out of double glazing in Stoke Newington’s Cedar Court. @Robert Chilcott

LEGEND IS NOW ON NETFLIX

Beauty and the Beast (2014) Prime Video

Director: Christophe Gans | Cast: Vincent Cassel, Lea Seydoux, Andre Dessollier | 99min. Fantasy Drama. Germany, France

Jean Cocteau’s original was a pioneering piece of magic made when he turned his hand to filmmaking during WWII. With very limited resources, the result was enchanting and eerie. Even with a large budget (and filmed in Babelsberg where Metropolis and The Blue Angel were shot) this latest version of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST doesn’t conjure up the same mystique, but is a lavishly-imagined if over-the-top frolic from Christophe Gans that spans both Renaissance and Napoleonic eras. It has Lea Seydoux as a gentle Belle and Vincent Cassel as her fiercely masculine Beau yet elegantly pathetic Beast – essentially an asshole who turns into a nice guy. Andre Dessollier is magnetically impressive as the kindly father. Because all the leads were versed in mime and method acting the piece really benefits from their acting chops and makes the production a success, if you can overlook the overzealous CGI. Narrative-wise Gans has developed Cocteau’s original here, with co-writer Sandra Vo-Anh adhering faithfully to Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s book to explore the origins of the Prince’s curse and its connections with the forces of nature. The result is more a children’s fairytale than Cocteau’s enchanting and subversive outing but there are some dark moments too. You can compare the two now on international platforms. MT. 111min.

ON PRIME VIDEO

Life (2015) | DVD blu-ray release

Director: Anton Corbijn Writer: Luke Davies

Dane DeHaan, Robert Pattinson, Joel Edgerton, Ben Kingsley, Alessandra Mastroardi

111min Drama US

Dutch director and photographer, Anton Corbijn, is best known for his 2007 biopic CONTROL, it was also his most emotionally-involved work as a director. LIFE is a character piece on the legendary James Dean and his formative relationship with the photographer Dennis Stock (Robert Pattinson) after he was assigned by Life magazine to create a series of photos to capture the imagination of the American public and launch this new edgy and camera-shy star. US actor, Dane DeHaan steps up to the challenge of playing the legendary fifties actor with moodiness and aplomb, conveying his troubled and unsettling persona with conviction and feeling.

Corbijn shies away from the traditional biopic style drama in attempting to show how this troubled human being became an icon and how it affected him as a young actor making his way in early fifties Los Angeles. Dennis Stock is another artist also searching for identity and success from a different yet equally difficult start in life. Married with a wife and young son, he is driven by anxiety and the will to succeed but also support a young family. Whereas Pattinson’s Stock is hungry for success, DeHaan’s Dean is a chilled and laid-back individual who almost avoids success, shunning the limelight and preferring to stay in bed with his girlfriend, Pier Angeli, an actress who has already achieved stardom. Ben Kingsley is mesmerising in cameo as Jack Warner, head of Warner Brothers and Dean’s boss.

LIFE follows the pair on a trip to Dean’s native Indiana where they reconnect with his farming roots and his homespun, God-fearing folks. Meanwhile, Stock is under pressure not only to deliver the goods to his editor but also to be a responsible father to his young son back in New York. LIFE is a sensitively-crafted and well-performed drama and avoids hagiography. At nearly two hours, Corbijn’s film never outstays its welcome, leaving you wanting to stay longer and experience more of this fascinating period in film history. Meredith J Taylor

REVIEWED AT BERLINALE 5-15 FEBRUARY. FOLLOW OUR COVERAGE UNDER BERLINALE 2015 | NOW ON DVD / Blu-ray

Everest (2015) Prime

Dir: Baltazar Kormákur | Cast: Jake Gyllenhall, Emily Watson, Josh Brolin, Jason Clarke, Elizabeth Debicki, Keira Knightley | 121min Action thriller

Icelandic director Baltazar Kormakur attempts to scale the highest peak but doesn’t quite reach Nirvana here in a thriller based on real events (always a tricky premise when those affected are still alive). Everest wraps a series of lukewarm love stories in the grip of an icy disaster movie, based on an attempt to scale Mount Everest in 1996. For once the 3D format actually brings to life the vertiginous peaks, hellish chasms and lofty mountain scenery of Nepal but somehow the human elements are less impressive.

The action shifts between a group of gung-ho mountaineers bent on proving themselves, leaving their disappointed partners back home trying to grapple with real life. And although Kormakur spends a long time at basecamp building rapport with his characters, none stands out with a personality to make us care if they succeed or fail. Jake Gyllenhaal is billed as the star of this ‘epic’ drama but is cast as a neanderthal nice-guy so cool he ends up frigid, quite literally. Josh Brolin starts out fighting fit but will limp back to his Texan roost where his wife (Robin Wright) is the one really wearing the trousers. Keira Knightley is there with her signature grimace and a bump to keep her grounded, while her on screen partner Jason Clarke gets to lead the expedition (as Rob Hall) in a ridiculously patterned romper suit. In a bizarre twist, there are no heroes but plenty of fall-guys – in the true sense of the word.

Ostensibly, climbing is now a commercial exercise, and there are plenty of organisations in the Himalayas making money out of their punters’ desires and dreams: And we’re talking big money to the tune of $65,000 a pop. Clearly there are risks as well as rewards and the former outweighs the latter. Rob is responsible for ensuring he delivers – not only for the clients but also for his bosses: As Emma Watson’s stolid base-camp administrator Helen (who job is to be the lynchpin) points out: “it’ll be bad if we don’t get any climbers to the summit again this year”.

As an experienced mountaineer, Rob is the consummate professional. Despite his unwise sartorial choices, you feel safe with him but spooked out by his climbing advice: “Human beings aren’t built to function at the cruising altitude of a 747.” The other clients in the group are Doug Hansen (John Hawkes) a part-time postman, and Yasuko (Naoko Mori), the token woman. And to give the expedition glowing press coverage there is well-known journalist Jon Krakauer (Michael Kelly, who also features in Amy Berg’s Prophet’s Prey) who went on to write about the ill-fated expedition.

Jake Gyllenhaal is oddly cast as Scott Fischer, a laid back guru leading a competing team, who ends up drifting off into the snowy outback as an also-ran. A perfect storm is to alter the course of their odyssey with unsurprisingly tragic results that make for some gripping viewing, and Kormakur doesn’t disappoint in icy ground already covered in Kevin Macdonald’s 2003 documentary Touching The Void. The ascent is always easier than the descent where summits are concerned: the euphoria at reaching the summit leads to slackness in safety procedures and mistakes are inevitable on the way down A fatal flaw in the timing of Rob and Doug’s descent leads to tragedy – but whether this is due to human error or just an Act of God with the ‘mountain making it’s own weather’ is never determined.

Everest is an entertaining watch but its human backstory is as disappointing as that of Kormakur’s previous outing The Deep that loses its way in slushy characterisation so as not to upset the real people affected. Go for the terrific view. MT

NOW ON AMAZON PRIME | TOUCHING THE VOID is on MUBI

Le Mépris (1963) | Cannes Classics 2023

Dir: Jean-Luc Godard | Cast: Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance, Georgia Moll, Fritz Lang, Jean-Luc Godard | France/Italy 1963, 103 min.

For JL Godard LE MÉPRIS was just ”a film without mystery, an Aristotelian film, freed from appearances [it] proves in 149 shots, that in cinema, just like real life, there is nothing secret…there is nothing to do but live – and film”.

Godard’s producers, among them Carlo Ponti and Joseph E. Levine, must have been quite shocked by the austere outcome; they insisted on an additional scene, showcasing Brigitte Bardot’s beauty, only to be outmanoeuvred by the director himself.

Based on Alberto Moravia’s novel “Il Disprezzo’ (The Ghost at Noon), this film about filmmaking starts with the basics: a dolly on rails follows Georgia Moll’s Francesca Vanini who walks towards the camera. Her husband Paul (Piccoli), was supposed to entice a mass audience. But Godard simply subverted the call for any form of eroticism, letting Camille ask Paul which parts of her anatomy he loves the most – the obvious answer is everything. Meanwhile she lies unruffled and statuesque as he lists her body parts. Strangely, these are the only happy moments Camille and Paul will have enjoy during the whole film. When Paul, a scriptwriter, later meets the American producer Prokosh (Palance) in Rome’s Cinecitta, Camille feels her husband is pimping her out to the arrogant, misogynist and dictatorial producer who exclaims: “I like Gods, I know exactly how they feel”. In addition, he is treating his well-educated assistant and translator Francesca Vanini (Moll) like a slave.

In a preview theatre with Fritz Lang – as himself, Paul and Camille bear witness to Prokosh going off on one. He is unhappy about Lang’s rushes, so he reacts by kicking the film rolls around the room and then has Vanini bend over so he can write a cheque for Paul on her back while shouting: “When the Nazis heard the word culture, they drew a revolver; I am only writing a cheque”, Prokosh hands Paul the cheque: ten thousand dollars to pay the mortgage for Camille and Paul’s flat in Rome. When Paul grudgingly accepts the cheque, he loses his wife.

In a breath-taking 34 minute sequence in the couple’s flat, Godard follows the unravelling of their relationship with tracking shots which show the growing distance between the couple. These finally unravel in one frame in two different rooms, divided by a wall. Paul slaps Camille i, she hits him back, he retreats, but it is too late: Camille shouts angrily: “When you were writing crime novels, we were broke, but that was fine with me”.

The love next where they conducted their relationship, has soon become a millstone round their necks. Paul still believes he can save his marriage but seems to have learned nothing: when the film crew moves on to Capri, Paul again leaves Camille, against her will, alone with Prokosh, who obviously fancies her. This time Camille retaliates: she kisses the producer in full view of Paul. Then she packs her bags and leaves for Rome, Paul terminating his contract with Prokosh. To humiliate Paul even further, Camille allows Prokosh to drive her to Rome. Their journey ends in a fatal crash, which is not shown, Godard makes fun of mainstream movies by showing the dead bodies all mangled in grotesque positions, with the last words of Camille’s good-bye letter to Paul superimposed: “Take Care. Adieu. Camille”.

LE MÉPRIS ends with a beautifully serene shoot in Capri, where Godard acts as Lang’s assistant in capturing the scene when Odysseus returns to Ithaca. As Godard pointed out “the film is shot entirely in real locations, both exteriors and interiors, honest and authentic”. One of them is the gorgeous villa of the Italian author Curzio Malaparte on Capri, designed by Alberto Libera, it sits like a space ship in the sun. In the panorama shots, the film crew with their equipment look entirely out of place. Movie posters of Hitchcock’s Psycho and Nicholas Ray’s Bigger than Life among others, decorate Paul and Camille’s flat; but the main honour goes to Roberto Rossellini: Apart from the poster of his 1961 film Vanina Vanini (sic!), the group visits a cinema to hear a singer perform. We notice that Paul and Camille are sitting on the edge of their respective aisles, and after they all leave the cinema, we see Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia advertised in big letters on the cinema front.

Raoul Coutard’s scope camera produces three different sets of colours: in the opening sequence of the couple in bed, soft, warm colours dominate. Then everything changes to cold, icy mages. Lang’s film takes, which he shoots as an actor, are dominated by classic colours, appropriate to the content of the film. Godard employed no less than five future directors for the project: Suzanne Schiffman (Script Supervisor), Charles L. Bitsch (Assistant director), Bertrand Tavernier (Publicity), Luc Moulett, whose book on Fritz Lang Camille reads in the bath and Jacques Rozier, who shot a documentary about the making of LE MÉPRIS.

But there is also a very personal moments for Godard: Camille buys herself a black wig making her look just like Anna Karina (Godard’s first choice to play Camille) two years later as Natacha von Braun in the car with Eddie Constantine’s Lemmy Caution at the end of Alphaville: only then it was the beginning of a love story, this is the end. George Delerue’s plangent music, which accompanies this scene, offers a haunting memory in this story of money versus art. The film is proof that even though Godard’s films frequently ended in a cul-de-sac. He would become one of the most important directors of the second half of the 20th century. AS

CANNES CLASSICS 2023 | ON 4K UHD, BLU-RAY, DVD & DIGITAL ON JUNE 26

Tangerine (2015) Home ent release

Writer|Director: Sean Baker with Chris Bergoch.

Cast: Kitana Kiki Rodriquez, Mya Taylor, Karren Karagulian, Mickey O’Hagen, James Ransone, Arsen Grigoryan

88min Comedy Drama US

TANGERINE is what you’d expect from a slice of downtown Los Angeles street life seen through two black, transgender prostitutes: spunky, raucous and rude. But the disenfranchised characters in Sean Baker’s microbudget indie hit are always warm and good-humoured. Shot entirely on iphones with the use of anamorphic adapters, and no worse off for it, TANGERINE bristles with a vibrant street energy and a freshness that reinvents its Highland setting of donut parlours and meaningless malls with a jaunty score composed of ambient, techno, hip-hop and even Armenian folk music.

Baker’s 2012, Starlet, pictured the unusual pairing of an old woman and a porn star in-the-making and TANGERINE offers a similarly sleezy snapshot of a Christmas Eve in LA where cross-cultural denizens rub along – but only just. Sin-Dee Rella (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) is celebrating her release from a spell in prison to discover that her pimp and boyfriend Chester (James Ransone) has been unfaithful with a white woman. Her best friend Alexandra (Mya Taylor) breaks the news over donuts and coffee, and the two venture forth in a ferocious ‘no holds barred’ onslaught to track down the culprit Dinah (Mickey O’Hagen), who they then pounce on in a local brothel.

And while Alexandra is touting for custom for her singing soirée at a local club, Sin-Dee is dragging Dinah around town by the hair. The Armenian element comes from a parallel strand involving a bisexual taxi-driver, Razmik (Karren Karagulian) whose customers include a native American with a headache, a woman who has just had her dog put down and a couple of guys who throw up on the back seat. Married with a baby, Razmik has a penchant to blowing trans-gender prostitutes in his passenger seat. It emerges that the going rate in LA is $80, but Alexander gives a 50% discount to a local punter “cos it’s Christmas Eve”. But only if he comes quickly!

When Razmik tries to escape the family Christmas lunch, his mother-in-law (Alla Tumanian) and wife Luiza Hersisyn), inject a note of old school tradition putting the story firmly in perspective, and they all cross paths in the donut diner where Sin-Dee is having a showcase showdown with her slipper ex (James Ransone), Dinah still in tow.

This upbeat, feelgood farce certainly tells it like it is, with a script that has been cobbled together with interviews and ideas from local transgender prostitutes, to give authenticity. Performances are dynamite across the board, especially from Sin-Dee who is appealingly sassy in a blond wig and white shorts. Never hard-edged or malevolent, TANGERINE retains a natural humour reflecting the pride and dignity of both locals and sex workers plying their trade in this shady part of sunny LA. MT

NOW OUT ON HOME ENTERTAINMENT , TANGERINE WON AWARDS AT KARLOVY VARY, PALM SPRINGS, TRAVERSE CITY, DEAUVILLE AND RIO DE JANEIRO |. READ OUR INTERVIEW WITH THE DIRECTOR HERE

Five indie films to watch out for in 2016 | Part I

As the film year gets underway there’s plenty to look forward to indiefilm-wise. Last year was all about strong performances and once again 2016 starts with the old professionals leading the way and some great new talent on the block taking us into the Spring. Documentaries are becoming more and more popular as they act as a sort of cultural exchange between countries, and in this list the American filmmakers really come up trumps.

But back in Europe, Sorrentino’s first film in English, YOUTH, opens with the Sicilian director’s signature razzmatazz and rhythm: a girl singing on a revolving bandstand in a luxurious Swiss mountainside Hotel, possibly Davos. This is where Michael Caine is meditating the future as retired conductor Fred Ballinger; missing his wife but not his music. Joined by his film director friend, Mick (Harvey Keitel) they contemplate their lives and their married kids, Lena and Julian, (Wiesz and Stoppard respectively) and indulge in witty truisms. YOUTH is a leisurely-paced drama that feels like a languorous stroll down memory lane punctuated by explositions of dramatic choreography and entertaining vignettes from Jane Fonda as a actress friend of the men; a gorgeous prostitute who services the male guests; a couple who sit in silence at dinner (like the pair in Consequences of Love) and an obese footballer who can barely breathe.

Weaving through the evergreen themes of ageing, memory and the continued fulfillment of physical and emotional love, the three-stranded storyline explores Lena’s sudden break-up with Julian, on the grounds that he has found a better better lover, (she spends the rest of the film justifying why she’s good in bed to anyone who’ll listen), a visit by an emissary from Her Majesty requesting a private performance for Prince Philip of his “Simple Songs” and Mick’s efforts to complete his film script with the ‘legendary’ Brenda Morel (Fonda). As a side show, Paul Dano, plays another filmmaker guest, empathising with Fred on the subject of fame and being type-cast by previous successes. YOUTH works best in the scenes involving Keitel and Caine who create some tenderly emotional moments and pleasant comedy. Caine is especially good as the staid yet sensitive ageing conductor – he’s rather formal, similar in some ways to Toni Servillo’s Tito di Girolamo, the lead in Sorrentino’s Consequences of Love, Sorrentino’s first and most satisfying drama. ON GENERAL RELEASE 29 JANUARY 2016

AMAZONIA is Brazilian helmer Thierry Rogobert’s eye-popping 3D docudrama filmed entirely in the Amazon jungle. Crafting an absorbing and tense adventure story, AMAZONIA follows Kong, an endearingly cute baby cappucine monkey, who is left to his own devices as the sole survivor of a plane crash that leaves him stranded deep in the Brazilian rainforest.

From the opening sequences we instantly bond with Kong. As his bewildered little face looks up at the camera, our natural instincts come to the fore with a strong desire to protect him on his journey fending for himself in the unknown wild. Apart the natural ambient sounds of the forest: rain and random predators, Rogobert’s film is entirely unscripted providing a rich visual canvas of vibrant and exotic flora on which to meditate on Kong’s eventful journey and its surprising outcome. David Attenborough will be proud!. OUT IN FEBRUARY 2016

In JANIS: LITTLE GIRL BLUE Amy Berg offers up a treasure trove of musical footage and interviews to flesh out a voluptuously generous portrait of the American sixties singer who sang from the heart and was tenderly in touch with her emotions: “maybe ambition is a quest for love, lots of love”.

Janis Joplin’s life was cut short when she died on October 4th, 1970 at the age of only 27, in the midst of a musical odyssey that had started to take a promising professional turn. In an era where most women were being housewives and mothers, Joplin was pushing out the boundaries of a musical career. Berg focuses on Joplin’s overwhelming desire to engage and interact with her audience rather than to be a star standing alone on a stage: “I like Music because it comes from emotion and creates emotion”. And this emphasis on her music as a gift to inspire is what ultimately makes Berg’s documentary JANIS: LITTLE GIRL BLUE a winner on a human level. OUT ON 5 FEBRUARY 2016

Slim yet charismatically captured by writer director Felix Thompson in a feature debut that won him the Fesitval audience award at Tribeca this year, KING JACK takes place one low-key summer in leafy New York state.

Charlie Plummer plays the Jack in question, the put-upon youngest son of a working class one parent family, who must fight or fall between the cracks, in this poignantly-painted social realist drama. A visit from his younger cousin Ben (Cory Nichols) gives Jack a chance to pull rank and turn the tables on the little boy in a charmingly protective way never extended to him by his tough older brother or his over-worked depressive mother. This arthouse pleaser is authentically told. The touch is light, fresh and honest, the visuals breathtakingly limpid and the tone gently playful without ever resorting to sombre sentimentality or hard-edged intent, although the occasional burst of violence is sharp and short-lived. Not a great deal happens that we haven’t seen before: boyish pranks jostle with pubescent longings and ‘i’ll show you mine if you show me yours’ gameplay, as the boys grow up and get to know the local more mature girls. But its a winning formula that will keep teenage audiences on tenterhooks and the arthouse crowd immersed in its soft-peddle dramatic tension and its rites of passage storyline. OUT ON 26 FEBRUARY 2016

HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT is a treat for cineastes and mainstream audiences who enjoy a well-made documentary about the auteurs of the 20th film. Although intended as a companion piece to François Truffaut’s eponymous book (that followed his 1962 interview with the ‘master of suspense’), it really concentrates on Hitchcock; his methods and his musings. Director Kent Jones has really excelled himself here with an epicurean delight for film-buffs everywhere. Not only do we get ‘Hitch’ and Truffaut but also David Fincher, Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, Peter Bogdanovich and other top-drawer directors opining on the subject of how Hitchcock influenced and formed them, cinematically-speaking. It plays out like a masterclass in filmmaking – all in 80 glorious minutes, making you want to rush home and watch his Hitchcock’s entire oeuvre in a darkened room. OUT ON 4 MARCH 4, 2016

JANUARY – MARCH ON THE INDIE FILM CIRCUIT | PART 1

https://youtu.be/0JuhPG-YA40

The Revenant (2015)

Director Aléjándro G. Iñárritu Writers: Mark L Smith Cinematographer: Emmanuel Lubezki

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Will Poulter, Domhnall Gleeson, Forrest Goodluck, Brendan Fletcher

156mins | Adventure | US Mexico

Mighty and mystical THE REVENANT is a harrowing tale of revenge and survival that touches on the emerging arrogance of the early 19th frontiersmen towards the local Native American tribes they discover as they pushed westward. Magically poetic and brutally savage it travels beyond the realms of mainstream American filmmaking with every frame evoking the mystery of the ancient with the mastery of modern visual techniques. Director Alejandro G. Iñárritu and his DoP Emmanuel Lubezki have created a glorious and visceral portrait of man’s struggle to survive in the wilderness and his obduracy in overcoming the natural world. Leonardo DiCaprio carries the film in a performance infused with his charismatic strength and vulnerability. The other great performance is from Nature itself.

Iñárritu and his team inhabit the open space for most of the film’s 156 minutes’ running time, during which both ethereal silence and feral sound is a key player. Ryuichi Sakamoto’s atmospheric score occasionally adds an ominous twist here and there as the Lubezki’s camera slinks around at a snail’s pace uniting man, nature and beast in one magnificent revolving universe and savouring melting ice peaks; iridescent sunsets; floating mists: prowling paws; even the breath of its striving hero as its clouds the intimate lens: this is a film to savour for its moments of peace; its echoes of the wild and its pitiless ferocity. The director showcases nature as its most hostile and majestic: at one point a rifle shot actually triggers a distant avalanche: Kubrick and Konchalovskiy would be proud.

Set in 1823 in the Rocky Mountains, twenty years after the first expedition to America’s unknown western portion had been sent by Jefferson (to draw up a new map of the territory and establish trade with the local Native American tribes) Iñárritu and Smith’s script is based on real people, as well as loosely on those from Punke’s 2002 novel, which charted Glass’s gruelling, monosyllabic journey more precisely.

The story opens as a local Pawnee tribe is savagely routed by a group of white fur trappers. Iñárritu refreshingly uses arrow warfare as a swift and deadly savage twist on the usual ‘smoking guns and war hammers’ mode. Hugh Glass (DiCaprio) is a frontiersman travelling with his son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck) and Captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson), and valued because he has had the benefit of Pawnee culture (through his dead wife whose spirit we see in regular existential and dream sequences as she encourages him to “keep breathing”) and is equipped with a grasp of the lingo, customs and lay of the land.

But the drubbing severely curtails their fur trading mission and with winter’s arrival and their strength and supply of pelts sapped, misfortune continues to dog the party: Glass has the misfortune to be mauled by a recalcitrant mother grizzly bear (an extraordinary piece of ultra-realism) while taking a pot shot at one of her cubs, in a scene that is both shocking and faintly humorous. Despite Captain Henry’s doctoring attempts, Glass’s wounds prevent him from walking and, with Henry going on ahead, he has to be carried by a cantankerous John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) and a pubescent Jim Bridger (Will Poulter) who abandon him to die, half buried in a shallow grave. Glass’ struggle to survive takes over the coruscatingly eventful second act and this is where DiCaprio emerges an action hero harnessing his precious knowledge of the terroir to scavenge, scrape and scrounge his way across the wilderness.

As Fitzgerald, Tom Hardy is the weakest link in the cast in performance that’s almost outstanding in its tawdriness compared to his previous offerings. Spouting incoherent, bumbling gibberish in a non-descript accent from under his headscarf, he fails to alarm or even excite as the antihero, dragging down every scene he inhabits. As Glass makes his way to the fort, Fitzgerald’s duplicity emerges, forcing him to de-camp for a second time, Glass in hot and heavy pursuit: “I ain’t afraid to die anymore. I’d done it already”.

You might be forgiven for thinking that Alfonso Cuaron’s hand is involved in THE REVENANT. There’s the same doggedness about the human struggle and the same mystical, ethereal quality that elevates the action/adventure premise to some more meaningful; although Iñárritu’s piece lacks the whiff of humour that lightened Gravity – forgive the pun. Gleeson is both honest and appealing as the Captain, adding a faint air of charm and gentility to the proceedings.

Locations-wise we’re transported to Canada and finally remote snowy regions of Argentina, where the final scene takes place in untouched snow and using the chilling sombreness of natural light, thanks to Lubezki’s short lens wizardry. THE REVENANT is a film that stimulates all the senses: watch, look, listen, feel and be awed. MT

NOW ON NETFLIX

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) | blu-ray release

Director: Peter Yates

Cast: Robert Mitchum, Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Helena Carroll

USA 1973, 102 min.

Peter Yates (Bullitt) pictures George V. Higgins’ aponymous novel in a dank and sleazy Boston where persistent rain evokes an atmosphere of melancholy that hangs very well with the last days of its hero’s demise.

Higgins was Assistant Attorney General of Massachusetts, before his first novel ‘The Friends of Eddie Coyle‘ catapulted him into a writing career. All his protagonists would primarily be identified by their language; his crime novels were lengthy dialogues with characters lost in the seedy underbelly of society, as they roamed around like James Joyce personas.

Eddie Coyle (Mitchum) is not even a has-been: he is a small time hoodlum who sells used weapons. In late middle-age he has no future and his wife Sheila (Carroll) and children face welfare if their ‘breadwinner’ has to serve a two-years stint in jail for driving a lorry with illegal goods. Enter AFT agent Dave Foley (Jordan), who tells Eddie: “You help uncle, uncle helps you”. Eddie has been already been rapped on the knuckles after his stolen weapons were traced back by the police. Turning snitch to avoid prison, he calls on chum and bartender Dillon (Boyle) who moonlights as an agent for the local contract killers. With friends like this, Eddie’s future is indeed as bleak as the local weather. Coyle supplies weapons to the Scalise/Van gang, who take a bank teller’s family hostage, before committing the heist. Eddie himself gets his weapons from Jackie Brown, whom he shops to Foley. But even this not enough: Foley wants more, but when Eddie gives him Scalise and Van, he is 24 hours late: somebody has squealed before him. On orders from the big boss, Dillon lures Eddie into a trap at an ice-hockey game of the Boston Bruins.

Victor Kemper’s camera trails slowly through the pool halls and house trailers of a desolate Boston: the colours are washed out like Coyle’s life. Mitchum’s Eddie limps through a living a nightmare, the bottle his only crutch to a desperate demise. He carries the film, towering above everyone and everything: an old-fashioned noir hero, lost in a low-life. The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a fine treatise; an elegy on a slow death. AS

NOW OUT ON DUAL FORMAT BLU-RAY COURTESY OF EUREKA MASTERS OF CINEMA

Jean Luc Godard Season | BFi January – March 2016

A major season dedicated to one of the godfather’s of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard, is coming up at the BFI from January – March 2016. The season will feature over 100 examples of his vast and varied output, including feature films, short films, self-portraits, experimental TV productions and a number of rarities.

So expect an extended run of LE MÉPRIS from 1 January – introduced by his former wife Anna Karina on 16th January. She will also be there to chat to audiences about her role in VIVRE SA VIE (1962) and BANDE À PART (1964), both on extended run at the Southbank main screen.

LE MÉPRIS | Cast: Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance, Georgia Moll, Fritz Lang, Jean-Luc Godard | France/Italy 1963, 103 min.

For JL Godard LE MÉPRIS was just ”a film without mystery, an Aristotelian film, freed from appearances [it] proves, in 149 shots, that in the cinema, just as in real life, there is nothing secret…there is nothing to do but live – and film”. His producers, among them Carlo Ponti and Joseph E. Levine, must have been quiet shocked by the austere outcome, they insisted on an additional scene, showing the physical beauty of its star, Brigitte Bardot, only to be outmanoeuvred by the director.

Based on Alberto Moravia’s novel “Il Disprezzo’ (The Ghost at Noon), this film about filmmaking starts with the basics: a dolly on rails follows Georgia Moll’s Francesca Vanini who walks towards the camera, whilst the opening credits are not only shown, but also read out loud. A Bazin quote reminds us, that “film substitutes a world that conforms our desires”. “The follow-up scene of Bardot’s Camille, laying naked on her belly, and her husband Paul (Piccoli), was supposed to entice a mass audience and was shot after the film was finished. But Godard simply subverted the call for any form of eroticism, letting Camille ask Paul which parts of her anatomy he loves the most – the obvious answer is everything – whilst she lies unmoved and statuesque during the long enumeration. Strangely, these are the only happy moments Camille and Paul will have during the whole film. When Paul, a scriptwriter, later meets the American producer Prokosh (Palance) in Rome’s Cinecitta, Camille feels that her husband is pimping her out to the arrogant, misogynist and dictatorial producer who exclaims: “I like Gods, I know exactly how they feel”. In addition, he is treating his well-educated assistant and translator Francesca Vanini (Moll) like a slave girl.

Whilst sitting in a preview theatre with Fritz Lang – as himself, the director of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’, the film being produced, Paul and Camille witness a terrible strop by Prokosh, who, unhappy about the rushes shot by Lang, kicks the film rolls around the room and then has Vanini bent over, to write a check for Paul on her back changing the script into a more populist version. Shouting “When the Nazis heard the word culture, they drew a revolver; I am only writing a check”, Prokosh gives Paul the check: the 10 000 Dollar are supposed to pay the mortgage for Camille’s and Paul’s flat in Rome. When Paul accepts the check, however reluctant, he looses his wife.

In a breath-taking 34 minute sequence in the couple’s flat, Godard follows the unravelling of their relationship with tracking shots which show the growing distance between the couple. These finally unravels in one frame in two different rooms, divided by a wall. Camille is slapped by Paul, she slaps back, he retreats, but it is too late: Camille shouts angrily: “When you were writing crime novels, we were broke, but that was fine with me”.

The flat, which was to cement their relationship, has become the albatross killing their love. Paul still believes he can save his marriage and seems to have learned nothing: when the film crew moves on to Capri, Paul again leaves Camille, against her will, alone with Prokosh, who obviously fancies her. This time Camille retaliates: she kisses the producer in full sight of Paul. Then she packs her bags to leave for Rome, whilst Paul terminates his contract with Prokosh. To humiliate Paul even further, Camille lets Prokosh, whom she despises, drive her to Rome. Their journey ends in a fatal crash, which is not shown, Godard making fun of mainstream movies, just showing the dead bodies in grotesque positions, with the last words of Camille’s good-bye letter to Paul superimposed: “Take Care. Adieu. Camille”.

LE MÉPRIS ends with serene filmmaking in Capri, where Godard acts as Lang’s assistant in shooting the scene when Odysseus returns to Ithaca. As Godard pointed out “the film is shot entirely in real locations, both exteriors and interiors, honest and authentic”. One of them is the gorgeous villa of the Italian author Curzio Malaparte on Capri, designed by Alberto Libera: it lays like a space ship in the sun, in the panorama shots, the film crew with their equipment look like aliens at work. Movie posters of Hitchcock’s Psycho and Nicholas Ray’s Bigger than Life among others, decorate Paul and Camille’s flat; but the main honour goes to Roberto Rossellini: Apart from the poster of his 1961 film Vanina Vanini (sic!), the group visits a cinema to hear a performance of a singer. We notice that Paul and Camille are sitting on the edge of their respective aisles, and after they all leave the cinema, we see Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia advertised in big letters on the cinema front.

But there is also a very personal moment in Godard’s LE MÉPRIS: Camille buys herself a black wig making her look just like Anna Karina (Godard’s first choice to play Camille) two years later as Natacha von Braun in the car with Eddie Constantine’s Lemmy Caution at the end of Alphaville: only then it was the begin of a love story, this is the end. George Delerue’s mourning main tune, which accompanies not only this scene, is the haunting voice in this story of money versus art, which ends in the loss of love.
Le Mepris is prove, that Jean-Luc Godard, even though he ended sometimes in a cul-de-sac whilst re-inventing the cinema, is still the most important director of the second half of the 20th century. AS

BANDE À PART Cast: Anna Karina, Sami Frey, Claude Brasseur, Louisa Colpeyn | 95 min | Drama | France

BANDE À PART, shot in 25 days and based on the pulp novel “Fool’s Gold” by Dolores Hitchins, was project that Godard embarked on to support his marriage with Anna Karina. The pair hadn’t worked together since Vivre sa vie. Godard called his production company “Anouchka”, his pet name for Karina, and he gave the character she played Odile, after his late mother.

Watching Bande À Part the for the first time in 1965, as first year students – we all admired the sequences when the actors read colportage stories from newspapers – we thought that it was vey cool. According to Raoul Coutard “there was no real script. Jean-Luc would show up with whatever he had written for the day. We’ve end up filming that. If he hadn’t written anything, we would not have filmed anything.” The newspaper stories, as it turned out, were just paddings, when the master had not written enough…. AS

VIVRE SA VIE | Cast: Anna Karina, Sady Rebbot, Andre S. Labarthe, Brice Parain; France 1962, 85 min. *****

VIVRE SA VIE marked a decisive step in the development of film aesthetics – born out of the emotional turmoil between Jean Luc Godard and the leading star, Anna Karina, whose marriage had been very much on the rocks when the cameras started to roll in February 1962 in Paris.

Karina was ten years younger than Godard. She had met the actor Jacques Perrin whilst filming Le Soleil dans l’Oeil on Corsica in September 1961, while celebrating her 21st birthday. During the shooting, Karina decided to leave her husband for Perrin: “I admire Jean-Luc very much. But he’s of another generation. Whereas Jacques is my double”.

On the night of November 21st, Godard destroyed all their belongings in the flat they shared and walked out. Karina, who reportedly had taken barbiturates, was taken to hospital. Godard and Perrin met for a duel with dice, then settled for poker, but when journalists crowded their table, nothing was decided. Whilst the papers reported over the Christmas period that Karina would marry Perrin, Godard and Karina had reconciled by January 1962 and Godard announced he would direct her in Vivre Sa Vie – without a fee – as they were living together.

Godard was a great admirer of Berthold Brecht (Cahiers had run a special edition dedicated to him), and Vivre Sa Vie was to be a tableau of 13 chapters, with the master of ceremony introducing every one. Godard, obviously having Brecht’s ‘Three Penny Opera’ in mind” wanted “to shoot only on location, but without making a film of reportage”. But the director abandoned not only the master of ceremony idea (replaced by inserts about the chapter contents), but also changed the ending: instead of a sardonic ending – Nana becoming a rich luxury prostitute -, she is killed at the end of chapter 12, now the last one. Needless to say, that Karina was furious and the shoot was stopped for a few days.

Nana (easily deciphered as an anagram of Anna) leaves her husband Paul (Labarthe) and child with the words: “I want to die”. She has dreamt for a long time of becoming a film star, and tells everyone that she has acted in a film with Eddie Constantine. (Karina, Godard and Constantine acted un-credited in Varda’s Cleo). She shouts at Paul: “If we get back together, I will betray you again.” Nana, who works in a record shop, is always broke, she can’t pay her rent and is humiliated by the concierge and her assistant. She slips into prostitution, first as an amateur, then, after meeting the pimp Raoul (Rebbot), as a professional. Her lonely and dreary existence is heart-breaking; waiting in street for a customer in Port Mailliot she is standing under the company sign: Hans-Lucas (Jean-Luc in translation). After meeting a young artist, she falls in love and wants to start a new life, but she is literally sold by Raoul to another pimp in a street.

Raoul Coutard’s triste black and white images achieve, in long takes, what Godard had in mind: “I was thinking – like a painter in a way, confronting my characters head-on – as in the paintings of Matisse or Braque”. Godard seems to circle his environment, like a researcher, but he always returns to Karina: from the back, the front, the side and even in parts. She is his universe, but he can’t decipher her. Still, striving to understand her seems to make him happy. In an experiment in language, Nana is trying to intonate a sentence in different ways; Godard shows, that there is no absolute truth in our words, and he always returns to her vulnerable face with the Louise Brooks haircut.

VIVRE SA VIE won the Special Jury Price and the Critic’s Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1962. AS

SCREENING DURING THE GODARD SEASON AT THE BFI FROM JANUARY – MARCH 2016

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Competition Line-up

Berlinale Special Gala

Dir: Erik Poppe | Writers: Harald Rosenlow-Eeg, Jan Trygve Royneland | Cast: Jesper Christensen, Anders Baasmo Christiansen, Karl Markovics | History Biopic | Norway | 133′

Royalty makes a stand against Hitler in this solidly-crafted and deeply humanist Oscar hopeful from Norwegian director Erik Poppe.

Dir: Lili Fini Zanuck | Writers: Stephen “Scooter” Weintraub, Larry Yelen | Music Biopic | 213′

Fans of Eric Clapton will certainly know the facts behind the ’god of guitar’s’ eventful life. In her flawed but emotionally penetrating rock-doc, Lili Fini Zanuck’s poignantly conveys the years of heartache behind this fated and fêted musician.

Tatiana Huezo’s structurally-flawed second feature explores the timely phenomenon of human trafficking and migration through the interweaving stories of two women in Mexico.

Generation 2018: On true fairy tales and magical realities

Generation 14plus

303 | Dir: Hans Weingartner | Germany | World premiere

Generation Kplus