This year’s London Film Festival had a curious prologue for me. While punters were taking their seats for the Opening Night Gala, I was being whisked to the Prince Charles by a friend to see a “thoroughly recommended” film. It turned out to be an unmitigated disaster. Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day stars Frances McDormand of all people as an English governess, desperately in need of a job, who finds herself in the service of a flighty young American actress. That this sounds like the plot of a 1930s quota quickie is no coincidence – the film is so “old-fashioned”, it feels like it has fallen through a loophole in time with the mores and style of that era completely intact, as if the evolution of cinema hasn’t budged an inch since then. We didn’t walk out because we were a dozen people from the exit, but also because I couldn’t help gaping in fascinated horror – as one looks at a car crash – at this strange anachronism. So people still make films like this? (Or is it just the British who still make films like this?) What’s the point of it? Who is it for?
By contrast, the Festival offered a whole series of works that engage with the modern, both in terms of the society we live in and the way it’s been reflected in art. It kicked off for me with perhaps the most radically challenging of these – Catalan director Albert Serra’s Birdsong. A retelling of the Three Wise Men story, it finds them ambling aimlessly round the desert, discussing whether they can walk across clouds and trying to get to sleep in uncomfortable bushes. Meanwhile, Mary and Joseph hang out at the stable discussing the weather. There’s a solid, earthy reality about these mythologised characters which has led to comparisons with Pasolini (who filmed The Gospel According To St Matthew in Neo-realist style). But this is lazy journalism – in fact, the tone of Serra’s film is very different, with a gentle absurdist humour both undercutting the action and pointing up the charming simplicity of its protagonists’ faith (a more apt comparison would be with fellow Neo-realist Roberto Rossellini’s Francis, God’s Jester). Shot in black-and white, in a variety of stunning locations, and according to the long-take aesthetic, it’s the work of a brilliant new filmmaker finding out what he can do with the medium. He’s not quite there yet – this is only his second picture – but Serra is one to watch.
Birdsong was an eye-opener, but it was the three films that followed that characterised the Festival for me and the direction cinema is currently taking. Terence Davies’ Of Time And The City is an idiosyncratic history of Liverpool, 2008’s European Capital of Culture, and an evocation of his ’50s childhood there. Raymond Depardon’s Modern Life is the third in his films about French farmers struggling to maintain their traditions and way of life. While Chinese director Jia Zhangke’s latest, 24 City, interviews workers at a now defunct armaments factory and intersperses their testimonies with fictional accounts written for actors. All three films are documentaries of a kind, but they play with Grierson’s definition of the medium – “the creative treatment of actuality” – to the extent that they are transformed into something not merely personal, but poetic.
Davies’ narration holds the audience in a first-person perspective so that we see the archive footage through his eyes. But his brilliant conjunction of elements – Peggy Lee’s rendition of The Folk Who Live On The Hill set to a montage of tower-block construction – allows universal stories to open out from the material. Depardon’s approach is simpler but no less admirable. He structures his film round a series of visits to local farms and one-to-one interviews with his subjects. But he allows them to talk on their terms, only asking straightforward questions about day-to-day maintenance and never browbeating them with discussions of politics or economics. Thus their viewpoints are revealed subtly, without the antagonism of both them and the audience which you’d expect from a more polemical director. On the other hand, Zhangke’s method pushes documentary to its furthest extreme, deliberately juxtaposing fictional narratives with on-the-spot footage of the factory’s demolition, in order to convey the human drama underlying the hard economic fact. All three films operate within the realm of non-fiction, but their different approaches show how fascinatingly pliable this category of cinema can be. It’s also intriguing to see three works from three totally different societies – Britain, France, China - converging in their portrait of working-class people under strain from ignorant bureaucracies whose arbitrary dissolution of their communities has such a devastating impact on their culture.
It’s this interplay of the personal with real-life problems that is the most fruitful area of exploration for contemporary cinema and it was also in evidence in Lisandro Alonso’s magnificent film, Liverpool. It follows an Argentine sailor taking shore leave to visit his ailing mother living in a godforsaken outpost in the Tierra del Fuego. It’s another long-take movie with little dialogue and little happening, but I can only say that I found it one of the most powerful portraits of solitude that I’ve ever seen at the cinema. All the more so because, halfway through, the film leaves its protagonist behind to linger among the community he has rejected. Alonso conveys so much purely through surface detail – the claustrophobic shipboard cabin perfectly represents the closed-in perspective of a lonely mind. And no film in recent memory has made such use of the physical elements – you actually feel the biting cold. But it’s the equal sympathy given to both the sailor’s aimlessness and his family’s plight that defines the movie.
And this Renoiresque generosity of spirit also infects Koreeda Hirogazu’s new film, Still Walking. Here, Koreeda – one of the most underrated directors in the world today – revives the tradition of the Shomingeki, or family drama, perfected by Yasujiro Ozu. He depicts a family reunion and the mild traumas taking place therein - the friction between a father and his son, the shadow of the elder son’s death, the manipulative efforts of the daughter to gain control of the parents’ house. The twists in the drama are subtle and nuanced by delicate use of mise-en-scene. Nothing is emphatic, everything kept light. Which is why this gem of a film may well fall under the radar. In a world where the highbrow disdain the mainstream and seek out rigorous, formally-challenging work and the multiplex crowd won’t go near a subtitled film, such crowd-pleasing efforts from non-English language cultures are in danger of being neglected.
However, they’d be forgiven for ignoring the two duds I saw at the Festival which demonstrated all too glaringly how Hollywood does not have a monopoly on bad taste. Philippe Grandrieux’s Un Lac was rather embarrassingly presented by Jonathan Romney as at the cutting edge of contemporary cinema, but after the sensitive responses to harsh reality in the previous films, it seemed desperately shallow. It’s that hoary old chestnut of the isolated family visited by a “handsome stranger” and the daughter’s a virgin and…oh, I’ll leave you to plot the rest. These people are stranded in a wilderness apparently, but the girl still looks like she’s stepped out of a Vogue advert. And there’s a lot of handheld camerawork to give it a physical immediacy – modern film is all about the “body”, you know. Portentous nonsense.
As for Spanish experimentalist Pere Portabella’s The Silence Before Bach, the music was beautiful, of course, and there were some intriguing ideas on how to approach Bach’s genius at a tangent. But ultimately, I felt I was being sold a bag of tricks with little depth behind it and quite a lot of keep-’em-sweet treats like two minutes of a girl in the shower. She looked great but I fought hard to think of a reason why she had to be so nude for so long, and eventually gave up trying.
Elsewhere, the beauty of the London Film Festival is that it acts as a kind “Best of…” compilation from the year’s more important events – Cannes, Berlin, Venice. The word on the street was that this had been a bad year for film. But as critics had celebrated last year as a renaissance when all I saw was middle-range tat like There Will Be Blood, I was willing to take a risk that the reverse was the case this time around. And I was right. Many auteurs staggered out of Cannes reeling from audience disappointment or having been damned by faint praise. Chief among them were the Dardenne brothers with their new film, The Silence of Lorna, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan with Three Monkeys.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see why they failed. In both cases, the directors have consciously moved their cinema in new directions, particularly into the realms of melodrama, and critics are notoriously impatient with turning-point experimentation from their idols (just as they also get bored with minor variations on the same theme – always conscious of fashion, always on the look-out for a new wave). Three Monkeys especially is a brave new world for Ceylan – a brutal, fairly gruelling story of crime and infidelity in a blue collar family. It’s hard to like, but to say it’s a “bad film” shows a lack of aesthetic judgment. The control of visual composition and sound design is as strong as before, and Ceylan has daringly compromised the beauty of his former films for a more fractured, expressionist digital image. Dream scenes crash disarmingly into the mundane spaces, while the build-up of tension is never less than true to its characters’ psychology and milieu.
The Silence of Lorna, meanwhile, is a masterpiece. Don’t believe those who say it’s more of the same with some far-fetched plot twists. Rather, it’s a compelling vision of life on the bread line which, like the documentary trilogy above, slowly and subtly burrows deeper to reveal a more poetic truth. At first, it plays like a routinely gritty portrait of an immigrant trying to get by in the West – marrying a junkie to get the passport, sacrificing everything to set up a coffee shop – before changing tone and register to investigate the interior guilt and pain of its protagonist through a fantasy building in her head. Critics were put off, I think, because these contemporary masters of social realism have stepped out of the boundaries of that limited (narrow-minded) genre and responded to the stronger, human impulses that underlie the socio-political reality. I welcome this new direction in their work, however, and, if one looks hard enough, it’s clearly where they’ve been moving all along.
But the last film I saw at the Festival was the best. It, too, got a fairly muted reception earlier this year. And it, too, presents a portrait of modern life that works by bouncing the culturally specific off the universal and familiar. Hong Sang-Soo is a celebrated Korean director whose films, to my knowledge, have never been on general release in this country, overshadowed as they are by more popular fare like Park Chan-Wook’s thrillers. But Night and Day is so gorgeous, it deserves to be his breakout hit in the UK. Its hero is a slightly naïve fugitive from Korean justice who holes up in Paris and finds himself romantically involved with a Rohmeresque bevy of beauties. The humour is light and charming and the film matter-of-fact in its style. No self-conscious stylistics or shots that act as endurance tests. But bubbling under the surface is a dark vein of satire and cautionary ideas about irresponsibility and misunderstanding. No film since Rossellini’s Journey To Italy has so fruitfully played with our perception of the protagonist and the knowledge that it is impossible, in cinema as in life, to fully expect to know someone in the space of two hours. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the extraordinary dream sequences which are without precedent in being neither flagged up as such nor filmed in any way differently from the surrounding narrative. The effect is disconcerting and strange, yet in no way unpleasant. Instead, it’s the hallmark of a work that is formally audacious as if in passing, mining its protagonist’s subconscious in the clothes of the everyday. Which is, ultimately, what this Festival was all about.