Director: Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio
Starring: Jorge Machado, Natan Machado Palombini, Nestor Marin
Mexico/2009/New Wave/73 mins
This cinematic message-in-a-bottle from one of the remotest parts of the planet is the most visually arresting film you'll see all year. It's also the least cynical and most compassionate.
Set in the beautiful Banco Chinchorro, Mexico's second largest barrier reef, it's a semi-documentary portrait of Jorge and Natan, real-life father and son, enjoying an extended working holiday with Natan's grandfather, Nestor. Jorge has separated from his Italian wife, so these precious few weeks represent his only chance to bond with his child. They stay in Nestor's palafitte – a wooden hut precariously balanced on stilts poking out of the seawater itself – and help the old man eke out a living as a marine fisherman.
Equally in love with both nature and people, the film's most moving moments come through an attention to bodies and their placement in shot – Jorge holding a protective hand over his son's belly, an arm gripping the side of a speedboat as it races out to sea – and the interaction between Natan and a lost white bird. It's a kind of pure cinema that is wholly unsentimental but completely magical.
Alexandr Sokurov, 2007, Russia, 92 mins
Cast: Galina Vishnevskaya, Vasili Shevtsov, Raisa Gichaeva
When Sokurov’s latest was first shown at festivals last year, its recollection of the troubles in Chechnya was uncomfortable enough. Now, after events in Georgia, it has taken on an unwelcome resonance.
Sokurov has always been fascinated by the history of warfare, its impact on the 20th century lying behind his trilogy of films on the last days of Hitler, Lenin and Hirohito. Here, he fuses that interest with the other side of his work, the transcendental study of familial relationships, as in Mother and Son (1997). Thus, Alexandra’s story rather improbably finds an old matriarch visiting her grandson at his base in the Chechen region, where he and the men who serve under him are under constant fire. Yes, it’s Mother Russia come to visit her boys – and oh, how Sokurov ladles on the allegory. We see young soldiers gaze in wonder at her serenity, part respectfully as she comes to examine their tanks and guns. Age and youth, masculinity and femininity, experience and immaturity are set up as opposites – and you just know who comes out looking best.
A little of this schtick goes a long way and it has to be said that there are several passages of tedium in Alexandra, where we are fed the cinematic equivalent of liberal homilies dressed up as fine art. But Sokurov’s formal approach deserves closer inspection. First of all, his casting of Galina Vishnevskaya is important – she is a very famous opera singer in her native country. And Sokurov sets her down on location in Chechnya, at a real army base, where the crew had to film in genuinely dangerous conditions. So it’s fairer to say that, most of the time, Alexandra feels more like a documentary played out in a fictional framework. The awe of the troops before Galina is genuine – but it’s that of an admirer before their hero. While her sortie in a tank recalls Maggie Thatcher posing at the helm of one back in the 1980s. And the sight of this “national treasure” testing out a rifle and admitting “It’s easy” or admonishing the men to pray for “intelligence” as opposed to victory carries a powerful charge.
Long-term fans of the director may be disappointed, as I was, by the absence of his trademark luminous cinematography. The colours are bleached out, leaving the screen a haze of khaki, yellow and brown, a universe of drabness the better to communicate, I suppose, the lifeless environment of war. This almost monochrome effect is offset by Sokurov’s brilliant use of frames within the field of vision, windows and doorways offering new vistas that allow scenes of action to comment on each other without the need for editing. At times, it’s almost Velazquez-like in its ingenuity.
But ultimately, the lack of sensual stimulation only serves to point up the simplistic nature of the narrative. And with the war kept off-screen and the camera trapped within the limits of the camp and the local town, the audience might feel that, far from transcending the wretchedness of conflict, it’s been confined to barracks.
Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Starring: Chishu Ryu, Shima Iwashita, Keiji Sada
Japan/1962/BFI/112 mins
Ozu's final film, one of his most poignant and haunting works, once again explores the theme that obsessed him: the marriage of the daughter. This time, an ageing businessman is concerned that his child is pushing her own interests aside in favour of looking after him.
It's a film that's so gentle in its restraint that it's easy to overlook how it explores crucial flaws in modern Japan, from the legacy of a crushing defeat in wartime – beautifully summed up by a light-hearted musical interlude in a downtown bar – to the growing consumerism and Americanisation of society. The performances are so exquisitely controlled that a young woman bowing her head and the father's description of his friend as a “dirty old man” are moments that go off like gunshots, carrying an emotional charge that belies the aura of civility surrounding the characters.
The disc contains a significant extra: Ozu's underrated 1948 film, A Hen In The Wind, a surprisingly grim and uncompromising account of a husband rejecting his wife when he discovers she prostituted herself to survive through the War.
Director: Yuzo Kawashima
Starring: Frankie Sakai, Yujiro Ishihara, Sachiko Hidari
Japan/1957/Masters of Cinema/110 mins
Take Mizoguchi's pictorial elegance and feel for period, add some Hogarthian satire, and mix with the sure-footed farce of Fawlty Towers, and you're getting close to the style of this little-known masterpiece. Voted one of the five best Japanese films of all time, it's a historical tale set during the last days of the Shogunate, in which a poor chancer (played by comedian Frankie Sakai) cheats and manipulates the denizens of a brothel in order to stay one step ahead in troubled times.
There's a wonderful cast of characters, including the owners' dissolute son, two warring geishas, and a group of rebellious samurai out to blow up any passing foreigners (consider that the Americans had been an occupying force a few years before the film was released!) Indeed, the whole saga has an Altmanesque sprawl to it, as the action moves with furious pace between the different sub-plots, all the time cheekily pointing up parallels between the samurai world and that of contemporary Japan.
Make no mistake, this film may claim in its prologue not to be about the changing face of modern society, but its broad slapstick conceals lethal attacks on the hypocrisy surrounding prostitution (about to be banned in '50s Japan), the abuse of power, and rampant financial greed at a time of crisis – something which makes it unusually topical today.
Director Yuzo Kawashima is often hailed as the missing link between the golden age of Japanese cinema and the New Wave of the 1960s, his brilliant sense of space and structure combining with a subversive attitude towards class and ideas of civility. His humour is often bawdy and in-your-face, and, like his protege Imamura, he revels in the earthy and unbridled energy of the “lower classes” - a spectacular catfight between rival hostesses being the most delicious example in this film. But the anti-authoritarian humanism of the protagonist never fails to shine through the gags.
Up to this point, his work has been totally neglected in the West, and he is long overdue for discovery. Bakumatsu Taiyo-den is a great place to start.
Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006, Mali, 117 mins
Cast: Aissa Maiga, Tiecoura Traore, Helene Diarra
Bamako opens with a man walking through an African village in the twilight hours of dawn or dusk – it’s not clear which. And the image is correspondingly grainy – shot on 16mm, it becomes a blur of light and shadow, a dog barely glimpsed in the darkness of a phone booth. This graininess is a quality carried throughout the film, not only in the visuals, but in the director’s whole approach to the subject matter.
The concept behind Bamako is just beautiful - mount a trial of the World Bank in the courtyard of an ordinary Malian village (apparently, Sissako’s own birthplace). That way, the filmmaker can present a considered argument on how Western nations have helped exacerbate African poverty, with the human victims of their methods on hand to provide a specific context. On paper, it looks like the perfect antidote to the current raft of films examining African problems through white men’s eyes – Shooting Dogs, The Constant Gardener, The Last King of Scotland. But in practice, it just doesn’t work.
Sissako’s problem is that, in narrative as in photography, little is distinct or properly defined. The trial itself has an impressive cast of witnesses – writers, politicians, lawyers – but they barely get to offer more than the customary rhetoric. The occasional fact whizzes by – the massive damage wrought by Structural Adjustment Policies, the way privatisation has impacted on national railways – but none of these are explained fully, so the audience (particularly the Western audience) have no clear idea of what specifically is being railed against. The high point of the film is when an elderly farmer launches into an extraordinary song/rant of despair, which, left unsubtitled, should act as a shockingly pure “statement” of truth, an inarticulate voice from the heart as opposed to precise but jaundiced legalese. But because the trial has been so much unfocused windbaggery, there is not enough contrast for the moment to stand out.
Similarly, the portrait of everyday life around the hearing merely adds up to a series of vignettes. The pomposity of the court is often marvellously undercut by the appearance of a semi-dressed woman coming back from a wash, but the woman in question, like her neighbours, never evolves into a fully-rounded character. A man is dying of cholera - but who is he, where does he fit in? Without more background, his fate need be no more significant to the trial’s case than the difficulties faced by the security guard in keeping out unwanted onlookers. Sissako does have the courage to show that the political arguments are sometimes as foreign to Africans as to their Western counterparts – one man switches off his radio saying, “This trial is getting a little annoying” – but there’s too few such instances where the characters become real, living beings.
The problem, then, is that Bamako is neither one thing or the other. Sissako would have been better off either a) making a courtroom drama, where the cut-and-thrust of testimony and cross-examination could be offset by the unusual setting, or b) making a slice-of-life portrait of the village with the trial in the background acting as ironic counterpoint. But he’s tried to meld the two and only come up with the worst of both worlds. The resultant film feels clumsy and awkward, with too many ideas betrayed by indecisive execution.
Gillo Pontecorvo, 1965, Italy/Algeria, 120 mins
Cast: Brahim Haggiag, Jean Martin, Saadi Yacef
As the crisis in Iraq rumbles on and threats of terrorism still hang in the air, it may seem an odd – or is that very apposite – time to wheel out a film which celebrates the victory of Islamic guerrillas over a white colonial force. Pontecorvo’s film of the Algerian struggle for independence has always been a hot potato – it was banned in France for many years and the graphic scenes of torture inflicted by the French on their prisoners were cut from British and American release prints. It trails an uneasy history of being used by the Black Panthers for training purposes and the US government for developing anti-terrorist strategies. All allegedly, of course. Now resurrected in a restored version, it can’t help but be seen in the light of the equally uneasy developments in the Middle East.
The important thing to remember about Pontecorvo’s film, however, is that, while it is extremely partisan towards the Algerian fighters and not “admirably unbiased” as some critics have claimed, it still recognises that their use of violence causes agony and misery. The scenes where French victims are dragged from a bombed-out café are horrific and never stint from showing the true devastation of the explosion. On the other hand, in this new print, one can see just how far Pontecorvo went in representing the horrors endured by prisoners under the French regime. In other words, it’s a political film that does not load the dice in its favour. It doesn’t omit any details to make its argument easier to swallow – instead, it takes account of both sides’ point of view, and, in doing so, makes its pro-Algerian stance all the stronger and more supportable.
But if this makes The Battle of Algiers sound like dull, didactic agitprop, it’s also worth noting that Pontecorvo puts film first, argument second. The whole thing is driven along by a pounding Ennio Morricone score and is dynamically shot and edited. But it’s no Hollywood blockbuster, either – this isn’t politics served up as melodrama or middlebrow entertainment. In fact, it’s a “naked” film, where the style is shorn of fancy effects and lush cinematography. Pontecorvo was bitterly criticised by Jacques Rivette and Serge Daney, among others, for a particular sequence in his Holocaust drama Kapo (1960), where he was accused of using a long tracking shot to compose a tableau of a woman spreadeagled on barbed wire. The critics felt this “prettification” of misery was abhorrent. In The Battle of Algiers, nothing is elegant, every resource is limited to make the film seem more like newsreel, shot as it is on hand-held camera with cheap stock and using diffused light. Each stretch of action, each murder, each sacrifice is treated with the same bluntness, so that the removal of a veil and the cutting of a woman’s hair can seem as brutal and as shocking as the bomb she will lay in the city streets.
And this “nakedness” is wholly apt for a film that presents its point of view in similarly stark terms. No woolly liberalism here, but harsh truths – that violence is necessary to overcome an oppressor, is necessary to get the international community’s attention, is necessary to win freedom. And as in Pontecorvo’s much underrated Burn! (1970), the director has the courage to show that the violence will have to be led by those that are capable of carrying it out. Not the diplomats, the talkers, but perhaps the drifter with a history of juvenile delinquence, as is the case here, or the slave who is so recklessly aggressive as to fight back, as in Burn! And in a superb twist, Pontecorvo forces the French audience to recognise themselves in this struggle by making the colonial general an ex-Resistance member, another man who once needed recourse to sabotage and terror.
In other words, this film is informed by the rhetoric of true revolution, not the “champagne socialist” revolution dreamt about by the Leftist intellectuals of ’68. We may see Pontecorvo’s film as an antecedent or even cause of their delusions but let’s not “shoot the messenger”. Ultimately, The Battle of Algiers is a searing indictment of imperialism and the bloodshed it enforces both upon the oppressors and the oppressed. That it remains supremely relevant today is a compliment for Pontecorvo but a bitter reproach for the rest of us.
Agnès Varda, 2008, France, 110 mins
Cast: Agnès Varda, André Lubrano, Blaise Fournier
American critic Jonathan Rosenbaum recently drew attention to the apparent sexism within the French New Wave, and it’s true that, while the movement’s male protagonists such as Truffaut and Godard are still feted on the 50th anniversary, its most notable female member has been pushed to the sidelines. And yet it was Agnès Varda who pre-empted the whole shebang with her first feature La Pointe courte in 1954 and who, in Cleo de 5 à 7 (1961), provided one of its freshest entertainments.
Her latest film ponders the ebb and flow of the group’s fortunes, appropriately so given the predominant imagery of sea and tides. There’s also a lot of mirrors, and we find Varda in reflective mood, piecing together the story of her life and career from a paradoxically idyllic wartime childhood in the resort of Sète to the breakthrough success of the Nouvelle Vague and beyond. The reflections are not just vagaries of memory, however; Varda gives them corporeal reality in the recreations of certain episodes. Some of these are beautiful and touched by fantasy – Varda guiding a sailboat along the Seine – others are mildly shocking and cheekily transgressive – watch out for the hooded lovers.
The whole represents a charming and affecting, if ultimately indulgent, memoir. But the timing couldn’t have been better. As various books and retrospectives look back on the era, Varda’s film represents a valuable personal insight into the group mechanics and personalities involved while, at the same time, being a genuinely moving tribute to one of its most misunderstood members, her husband, Jacques Demy. And even more importantly, it communicates that essential quality of the New Wave that has often been lost or forgotten in the years since – the sheer joy of filmmaking.
Scott McGehee and David Siegel, 2005, USA, 105 mins
Cast: Richard Gere, Juliette Binoche, Flora Cross
The career of Scott McGehee and David Siegel seems to be one of diminishing returns. They first appeared in 1994 with Suture, an edgy, intelligent thriller, but followed it with what can only be described as “soft noir”, a reworking of Max Ophuls’ The Reckless Moment (1948) called The Deep End that dispensed with the luminous black-and-white photography, the suspense and, well, any sense of drama, really. Now it seems the little talent they had has melted away into mush - which is exactly what they’re making.
Not that the premise of The Bee Season isn’t interesting. An adaptation of Myla Goldberg’s novel, it concerns a wealthy Jewish academic who decides to use his obsession with the mystical teachings of the Kabbalah as a way to help his gifted daughter through her spelling bee competition. This, in turn, alienates his wife and son, both of whom are struggling to cope with his domineering religious stance within the family. All four characters are in search of a faith and, as the film develops, it becomes clear that they can only pursue it by rebelling against the father’s own.
This is not, though, an attack on religion – quite the opposite. It’s that rare film that takes faith seriously, even to the point of having characters experience visions and levitate in moments of spiritual ecstasy. Indeed, the sequences where the girl (Flora Cross) transcends the mundane surroundings of the competition hall and sees letters in the form of animated creatures or flowers are the most eerily beautiful in the film. But her revelations only come after a struggle with the oppressive views of her father – the real target of the film is the way patriarchal dogma can stifle other beliefs. And in age of increasing religious tensions, this approach gives the film a pleasing topicality, especially in the equal weight it gives to faiths as far removed as Judaism and Hare Krishna.
And yet, it’s precisely this even-handedness that deprives the film of any dramatic bite. Because it’s unwilling to portray any belief system too negatively, it fights shy of really defining them. And this problem carries through to every element of the narrative. The spelling bee competition is only sketched out in time-lapse montages – there’s no exposition of what this competition actually is, what it consists of, what it means. Consequently, there’s no sense of tension or achievement in the girl’s ordeals. McGehee and Seigel’s approach to drama seems to be so subtle and underplayed as to give the audience no highpoints of conflict whatsoever – thus the whole plays at a monotone level leaving the irritating musical score to carry on an emotional journey all by itself.
The directors – and, one supposes, the critics who, blinded by the film’s worthiness, have given it cautiously positive reviews – would like to believe they’ve crafted an intelligent art-house discussion on religion in the form of a melodrama. Actually, it’s the other way round. The Bee Season is nothing more than a straightforward tale of family strife with knobs on. It comes complete with syrupy happy ending and hugs all round. I can’t help feeling that a more conventional, possibly cruder, mainstream film would have told the audience a great deal more about the subject matter and given them a more satisfying emotional journey. My advice – watch Spellbound, then read a book on comparative religion. You’ll have a much better time.
Director: Fritz Lang
Starring: Dana Andrews, Joan Fontaine, Sidney Blackmer
USA/1956/Exposure/80 mins
A terrific thriller with an ingenious twist, Beyond A Reasonable Doubt succeeds despite (or is it because of?) its rather far-fetched plot. Successful novelist Tom Garrett deliberately plants evidence to frame himself for a murder, so that he can expose the flaws in the capital punishment system. But his plan goes awry, and soon he's facing the electric chair himself.
Now, we're used to seeing Fritz Lang's protagonists as victims of cruel fate, but the fascination of this film lies in watching a man walk into a trap of his own making. The complicated narrative flows smoothly because Lang is at his most stripped-down aesthetically, reducing the story to its basic elements with few directorial flourishes, the pieces locking into place as in a fiendish logic puzzle, a far cry from the florid excesses he'll soon indulge in his Indian Epic.
There's an intriguing cast, too, with Dana Andrews, Hollywood's most underrated leading man, as Garrett, and Joan Fontaine, of all people, as his bewildered fiancee.
Kim Jee-Woon, 2005, Korea, 120 mins
Cast: Lee Byung-hun, Shin Mina, Kim Young Chul
In his last film, A Tale Of Two Sisters, director Kim Jee-Woon turned the horror genre inside-out, crafting a twisty-turny narrative that totally undermined the audience’s sense of reality. Now he’s taken on the gangster pic, but anyone expecting similar pyrotechnics is going to be disappointed – this is a much more straightforward tale. In fact, it’s an old chestnut: dapper troubleshooter, Sunwoo, is asked by a Mr Big to look after his wayward girlfriend. But Sunwoo takes her side in affairs of the heart and finds himself on the receiving end of a bitter – and extremely violent – retribution.
Kim knows how to deliver a compelling, exciting and often wryly humorous entertainment. There’s a terrific gallery of rogues in this film, from Kim Young-Chul’s ice-cool boss man to Kim Roi-Ha’s shaggy-haired bouncer. But it’s Whang Jung-Min’s performance as an uncontrollable son that steals the show, his offhand sadism recalling Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. The action sequences are handled with tremendous flair, although, of course, they’re so wildly-over-the-top as to almost generate laughter. As is typical of this kind of movie, the hero has to endure so much physical punishment, the viewer is left wondering whether the modern thriller is not, as they say, gratuitously violent but rather gratuitously masochistic. And while we’re at it, how many times can a man be shot, beaten over the head and buried alive and still be able to win the day with a well-aimed kick? Perhaps a medical advisor should be on set in future to advise on human stamina…
But this is the formula that most moviegoers recognise these days, the one where the good guys can always rise wearily to their feet and fight another day. And therein lies the problem with Kim’s film – it doesn’t offer anything new. Since Old Boy and Sympathy For Mr Vengeance, we seem to be inundated with violent, provocative thrillers from the East, which are all very polished and amusing but increasingly familiar and predictable. Kim tries to spice up the mix with a light-hearted coda that suggests either a new angle on the hero or that his story is the dream of a mind preoccupied with macho posturing. But it’s all too little, too late. Instead, Bittersweet Life feels like someone has pieced together a jigsaw of great set-pieces and narrative twists without imbuing the whole picture with its own distinctive vision. It’s showing at the ICA as part of their “Brilliant Korea” season, which asserts that this country’s output is the new event in world cinema. But if Korea is to take its place at the top, it needs to be represented by more adventurous, more original product than this.
By way of my own coda, I should add that after the screening I attended, I overheard two fellow viewers enthusiastically discussing the movie in the Film section at Borders. For almost ten minutes, they compared the relative merits of Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, Roger Moore’s Bond and Bittersweet’s hero. I felt a little out of my depth but I can report that they concluded Bruce Lee was still the man.
Gary Tarn, 2006, GB, 75 mins
The Portuguese novelist, Jose Saramago, took one chapter to describe the loss of sight in his novel, Blindness, and so powerful was his account that I felt physically sick on reading it. Filmmaker Gary Tarn has a true story as his raw material - that of a painter blinded by thieves – and yet the result is nowhere near as piercing.
Not that Hugues de Montalembert’s tale isn’t extraordinary. A successful artist based in New York, his life was turned upside-down when a junkie broke into his house looking for cash and, in the ensuing confusion, threw a base into his eyes. He lost his sight almost immediately. It’s the classic standby of melodrama or schlocky horror films, isn’t it – the painter who loses his eyes? But Montalembert’s stoic acceptance of the situation and his absolute refusal to let it ruin his life is powerfully expressed through his own narration and gives the film a refreshing vigour, far from the maudlin sentimentality of similar projects. There is no sense of any self-pity and the quiet, intense way he pulls the pieces of his existence back together is genuinely inspiring.
But Tarn struggles to come up with a worthy visual complement to this account. We get dislocated shots of New York seen from above or psychedelic light shows during the onset of blindness. Sometimes images are cued by words in Montalembert’s narration, but they veer from being tritely literal to bizarrely opaque. And what’s with the endless muzak, that mainstay of US cable documentaries, left there as if the filmmakers doubt whether any audience will listen to just the bare word? So often,the film feels like background wallpaper as we concentrate instead on the far greater intelligence of Montalembert himself. His comments on the ‘hierarchy’ of seeing are fascinating. He asserts that painters really see while most people don’t take time to absorb their surroundings. More intriguingly still, he relates how becoming blind made him almost invisible to others – not seeing translates into being unseen – but that this became an advantage when friends felt they could therefore confide in him more. Compared to these observations, Tarn’s work seems banal and desperate.
One gets the sense of an ingenue filmmaker biting off more than he can chew–setting himself the task of representing blindness without any formal strategy. Ultimately, attempting to marry avant garde and realistic images only results in a kind of blurred vision.
Director: Catherine Breillat
Cast: Dominique Thomas, Lola Creton, Daphne Baiwir
France/2009/New Wave/80 mins
Once upon a time, Catherine Breillat seemed the great agent provocateur of French cinema, with explicit sex and feminist polemic her key weapons. So her move into fairy tale territory may come as a surprise to some.
But the story of Bluebeard, the infamous wife killer, allows her plenty of scope to develop her themes of gender conflict while immersing the viewer in a glorious never-never land of turreted castles and wild French countryside. Breillat also resurrects her familiar structure of two warring though eternally bonded “sisters”, here the impoverished daughters of a deceased nobleman who fall prey to Bluebeard's advances. But there are two other “sisters”, children reading the story in the 20th century, who provide an amusing commentary on the action with winningly naturalistic performances.
Vilko Filac's cinematography is the real star here, evoking the work of Nestor Almendros, and capturing the natural light of the region exquisitely. But Lola Creton is beautifully poised as Bluebeard's teenage bride, and the whole is a masterful exercise in adaptation, both a faithful reproduction of the tale and of its effect on the reader's imagination.
Jean Renoir, 1932, France, 85 mins
Cast: Michel Simon, Charles Granval, Severine Lerczinska
Kicking off the National Film Theatre’s two-month retrospective on French director, Jean Renoir, is Boudu Saved From Drowning, the film that marked both the peak of his relationship with actor Michel Simon and the first full fruition of the themes and styles that would characterise his work throughout the 1930s.
A riotous though good-natured comedy of manners that slides between farce and social comment, it tells the story of a tramp who is taken in by a well-meaning middle-class family only for him to seduce every woman in sight and generally cause havoc. The frank approach to the seduction scenes and the almost laissez-faire attitude to sexuality still seem refreshingly modern, as does Simon’s performance, which breaks through the acting conventions of the time to seem raw and naturalistic – as if a man really had been thrown off the streets into the studio. For modern viewers, it’s akin to the discovery of De Niro in Mean Streets or Depardieu in Les Valseuses, where the physical presence of the actor felt so powerful, so untamed, that it seemed it could break out from the confines of the film. But Simon arguably maintained this level of expression more successfully throughout his career, even up to such later works as Walerian Borowcyzk’s Blanche (1971).
The sense of immediacy in his performance is complemented by Renoir’s direction, which opens up the stage play on which Boudu is based. He films in long shot on location to give a wider sense of the off-screen world in which the drama takes place, and, for interior scenes, uses in-depth staging and subtle camera movement to allow a greater degree of movement for the actors. The impression is of a film breaking free from the edge of the screen to interact with the spaces around it – a perfect approach for a work whose theme is the disintegration of a bourgeois family in the face of an attractive outsider.
It’s an approach Renoir will develop and perfect in another class drama, his masterpiece La Regle du Jeu (1939), also showing in this season. But if you’re discovering the director for the first time, Boudu is a great place to start – it’s warm, funny and boisterous, the kind of spirited film that liberates Renoir from the rather stuffy reputation forced on him by academia and proves him a populist director for any era.
Fabrice Du Welz, 2005, Belgium, 90 mins
Cast: Laurent Lucas, Jackie Berroyer, Philippe Nahon
Backwoods horror has become a peculiarly successful sub-genre all of its own. From the rednecks of Deliverance to the cannibal family of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it has presented a rich history of terrors awaiting the unsuspecting city boy, pandering as it does to urban cinephiles’ ingrained phobia of wide open spaces and the yokels, bumpkins and, in the case of this rare European variant on the theme, cow-abusers (bovosexuals?) that populate them.
For its first 40 minutes at least, Fabrice Du Welz’s contribution to the genre breathes fresh air into its tired conventions. True, we get the classic breakdown in a rainy forest late at night with the hapless driver being led by an apparent madman to a creepy inn. But then the innkeeper leads him to a tidy, clean room and abruptly bids him good night. No hint of rural menace whatsoever. Indeed, as the following day dawns, it seems our hero, Marc Stevens, has landed in an idyllic retreat with a jovial landlord who also happens to be a mechanic and ex-comedian.
This is where the film hits its stride. Jackie Berroyer, in a brilliant performance as Marc’s host, Bartel, dominates every one of his scenes, playing with our preconceptions by being both distant and nervously amusing. Du Welz’s background in TV comedy comes to the fore here, as he introduces a disconcerting light-heartedness that sets the audience up for a blackly comic pay-off. And Benoit Debie’s clever cinematography further unsettles the viewer by moving between the bright, attractive landscape outside and the murky, low-lit interiors of the hotel.
But – of course – all is not as it seems. The innkeeper’s bonhomie hides an obsession with his missing wife and soon Marc is forced to take her place. It’s a role the victim is powerless to throw off when the other villagers come to share Bartel’s delusion. As the situation spirals out of control, The Ordeal reveals itself as an allegorical portrait of a world without women in which their absence has reduced men to little more than wild beasts. Furthermore, there’s a suggestion that the whole scenario could be the nightmare of Marc himself, a singer and entertainer at rest homes who casually dismisses the advances of his elderly admirers. Is his assumption of the role of vulnerable female in a male domain a Kafkaesque projection of guilt, to atone for rejecting them?
And if you were wondering about that title (Calvaire/Calvary), don’t worry – the Christ imagery is about to kick in with a vengeance. In fact, the film is nothing so much as a perverse Christmas story in which an innocent reaches the inn one night only to find himself reborn as the Ideal Woman – Gloria – for every man in town. The fact that every character also puts on a performance at some point only underlines the sense of roles being cast in a twisted Nativity play. And that’s not all – the ordeal of the title puts one in mind of the 40 days and 40 nights spent in the wilderness and there’s a gory crucifixion to endure before the end credits roll. Du Welz is certainly ambitious – Calvaire feels like the whole Gospel in one go.
Sadly, what also kicks in is the protracted, gratuitously nasty violence and the barrage of references to films like Straw Dogs and particularly Texas Chainsaw, from which Du Welz not only lifts one whole scene but even specific shots. The film declines into a messy bloodfest without the integrity to fully explore its many themes and therefore make good on its early promise of overturning genre expectations. Ultimately, the audience is left feeling they’ve gone through a cinematic ordeal – and with no return…
Jacques Rivette, 1974, France, 192 mins
Cast: Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier
Leaf through any screenwriting manual and suddenly it appears as if film is confined in a straitjacket – one called narrative. There are rules to follow, acts to put in place, story structures to adhere to. But what if one were to step aside from these edicts and ask the unthinkable – why does film need narrative? And if it does, why does it have to be so restrictive? Why must it enclose the other elements in the tight embrace of cause-and-effect and not act more like a washing line, a device on which to hang the intriguing elements of performance and place?
Then there’s the other bugbear of the struggling scriptwriter – characterisation. Under no circumstances must the protagonists behave “out of character”. But just what does that mean? Can we really say after only 90 minutes that we know a person? We would think such an idea ridiculous in real life, yet it’s perfectly acceptable in a movie theatre. But again, what if we imagined a cinema where characters could change on a whim, transform, go from caterpillar to butterfly in the click of a finger?
When we ask these questions, our notions of cinema start to break down, or at the very least, bring it closer to the other art forms. For, if performance and gesture assumed priority over plot, we’d get film resembling theatre. And if narrative was reduced to a line or rhythm on which the film played and improvised, we’d approach the freedom of dance or jazz…
Welcome to the cinema of Jacques Rivette.
He was one of the key figures of the French New Wave – a Cahiers du Cinema critic-turned-filmmaker like Truffaut and Godard – and from the very start, he tilted his lance against the windmills of cinema convention. He had two main ploys – setting his film against the background of theatrical rehearsals, and the suggestion of a conspiracy surrounding the cast. This allowed him to produce a consciously enigmatic story line that didn’t have to resolve into anything definite and could therefore remain loose. The emphasis on acting meant his performers had space to improvise, bringing their own personalities closer to those of their characters.
At first, the results – in such works as Paris Nous Appartient (1961) and L’Amour Fou (1968) – were laboured and not a little tedious. But in the mammoth 13-hour Out 1 (1971), the prodigious length of the film gave Rivette’s ideas room to breath and the margins between performance, fantasy and reality began to blur. When Celine and Julie first appeared in 1974, its light-hearted tone caused some critics to dismiss it as a jeu d’esprit but, in fact, it’s the summit of Rivette’s experimentation.
Once again using some of his favourite actresses – Juliet Berto, Bulle Ogier, part of the best repertory company ever assembled in European film – Rivette spins off a yarn about two women playing a bizarre game in the sunny streets of Paris. They may be best friends, they may be complete strangers. Their escapades bring them to a mysterious house where the same melodramatic story plays out again and again, as if ghosts were running a season of the same play. And to become part of the plot, the women need to suck on a particular sweet…
As I said, narrative is dispensable. But the performances, the droll yet eerie atmosphere, and the subtle coordination of ideas are not. Quite simply, it’s one of the most extraordinary films ever made. David Thomson reckons it the most groundbreaking film since Citizen Kane and Jonathan Rosenbaum recently picked it as one of his 100 best films. That’s good enough for me. But that’s not to say this is an easy film. Rivette’s method often engenders longueurs and the meaning of certain sequences can be downright opaque. But let yourself drift into it and it takes over your mind. And if that sounds downright hippy, well, this film shattered more preconceptions of cinema than Easy Rider could ever dream of.
Director: Majid Majidi
Cast: Mohammad Amir Naji, Amir Farrokh Hashemian, Bahare Seddiqi
Iran/1997/Miramax/84 mins
From the opening shot of two children's shoes being mended to that of a boy's blistered feet being pecked at by goldfish, Majid Majidi's film is one which makes ravishing visual epiphanies out of the mundane and everyday.
Its story is simple – nine-year-old Ali collects his younger sister's precious pink shoes from the cobblers only to lose them on the way home. Because his family are too poor to buy another pair, this simple event has huge ramifications, pushing Ali to do everything from disobeying his parents to taking part in a televised sporting contest in order to get the shoes back.
In this respect, Children of Heaven follows in a tradition of subtle and intelligent children's films from Iran, like Kiarostami's Where Is The Friend's House? and Panahi's The White Balloon, which send the young protagonists out on quests through the streets, allowing the director to show many different areas of society. This film, particularly, is as much a portrait of the capital city of Tehran as it is of one family, its impoverished backwaters and startlingly modern gated communities all shot on location in a neo-realist style reminiscent of Bicycle Thieves. Throughout, Majidi keeps the camera at children's eye level so we see everything from their perspective, even to the extent that adult faces can be cut off by the edge of the frame.
The children give winning performances and the film became the first from its country to receive a Best Foreign Film Oscar nomination. Over a decade on from its original release, it deserves to be rediscovered.
Andrew Adamson, 2005, USA/New Zealand, 140 mins
Cast: Georgie Henley, Tilda Swinton, Jim Broadbent
I remember going to see Star Wars – The Phantom Menace when it was released amid the laughter and derision of the critics. And yet, when that familiar music blared out and those yellow letters began crawling up the screen, I was transported back into being the five-year-old for whom Star Wars was his first overwhelming cinema experience. And I felt a similar reaction watching The Chronicles of Narnia as little Lucy (Georgie Henley) tumbled through the fur coats of a wardrobe into a magical world of ice and snow. The years fell away and I was sitting reading CS Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe all over again.
That this new mega-budget film captures the spirit of that book is reason enough to be cheerful. But it can’t afford simply to be an exercise in nostalgia. Following hot on the heels of the most successful Harry Potter film to date, Narnia has got to prove its worth as a new franchise in the now crowded arena of popular children's fantasy. The ace up its sleeve is that Lewis’s original novels combine the cosy, innocent whimsy of Harry Potter with the quests and battles of Lord Of The Rings. Oh, yes, director Andrew Adamson has been studying his Peter Jackson, all right – the film comes replete with a full-scale CGI battle, as gryphons, centaurs and minotaurs tear each other apart in the beautiful New Zealand locations. Not that this writer has ever cared much for CGI. Sophisticated though it now is, the viewer can still see the joins and there is no substitute for the corporeality of a model or made-up actor, who may look hokey but is at least there, a palpable presence on screen. The stop-motion heroics of Ray Harryhausen are much missed.
But this is a minor niggle. The important point is that the film has both a grandiosity of scale and a sure grasp of the emotional interplay between its characters. Everything feels right – from the wonderfully exciting sequence at a frozen waterfall to the curiously eerie moment when the faun, Mr Tumnus, lulls Lucy to sleep as sprites play in the fire. And that perennial bugbear of the English-oriented children’s film – the lack of good young actors – is compensated for by the rightness of the casting. They may not be budding Anthony Hopkins or Judi Denches but the children here are at least sweet and suit their roles more closely than the unfortunates who played in the BBC TV series of the 1980s. It’s intriguing, though, how a large-scale American production put together in New Zealand has stayed faithful to the conventions of middle-class Britain and employed four well-spoken posh kids as their heroes. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the Harry Potter phenomenon is the way it has opened the floodgates once again for the 1950s-style public school yarn in the era of Ant and Dec and MTV.
And that’s not all the film has retained. Preserved from the novel are its wartime setting – the Blitz is convincingly reconstructed – and underlying Christian allegory, particularly prominent in the humiliation and sacrifice of Aslan – a sequence which some toddlers may find distressing. The emotional journey of Edmund, who scarred by his father’s absence falls for the temptations of the Witch, is also well charted. But it’s those half-remembered details from childhood readings that this version gets so right: the loveable beavers (gorgeously voiced by Ray Winstone and Dawn French), the box of Turkish Delight, the lamp post… All of which make Chronicles of Narnia not just a Christmas present for the youngsters but one for their mums and dads as well.
Orson Welles, 1941, US, 119 mins
Cast: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore
The most significant DVD release of the year so far is that of the '60s BBC interview series, Face to Face. In it, journalist John Freeman grilled the glitterati of his day for half an hour under a harsh spotlight with the camera trained in merciless close-up on their face throughout. The result was that the audience could “interrogate” the interviewee through observing their most minute reactions, trying to decipher their “real self” from the clues so carefully extracted by Freeman. And it struck me, watching the new print of Citizen Kane from the BFI, that this film is the precise cinematic equivalent: an attempt to understand a man's life through the words and pictures that have built up around him. Only, this time, the man under investigation is the same one asking the questions: Orson Welles himself.
It's often been suggested that Kane is a sly satire on William Hearst, the great media tycoon. And it's fascinating to reflect on just how topical it was. Art gets divested of its contemporary relevance as time goes by to the point where it becomes cosily “universal”. But Welles was right on the button with shots of Kane standing with Hitler and declaring that war will never come, sour reflections on recent American history in the form of the war over Cuba and the Wall Street Crash, and also Kane's efforts to become a New Deal-esque senator for the Democrats. But the intervening years since the film's release have also taught us that Kane is best read as a self-portrait – and an uncannily good one at that. For it was Welles' peculiar genius to offer an autobiography before the event.
He was only 25 when the film started production, a media prodigy with several successful radio and stage projects behind him. What is less well known is that his childhood background was similar to Kane's; he became the ward of a physician when his parents died just as Kane becomes the ward of a wealthy banker, and this guardian was called Bernstein, the name Welles gives to Kane's business manager. But though this early life is sketched in, it's the future Welles is concerned with, and the film opens with a man staring into a crystal ball. The life that unfolds before us, in a tortuously labyrinthine narrative, is that of a brilliant young man who, out of all the potential careers ahead of him, devotes himself to a quixotic cause: the running of a newspaper. Just as Welles – whose interests and abilities took in magic, politics, oratory – finally settled on the magpie world of film, seeing it as the ultimate “train set”, a treasured toy like a childhood sledge. And the reason for both men's indulgence is the same – they want to tell the “truth”. Crucially, they are idealists.
But their idealism runs into something wholly inimical to it: success. These two young upstarts become lauded and rich. And this is where Citizen Kane takes off: Welles predicts his own decline. He maps the course of the inevitable hubris arising from achievement and shows Kane spiralling downwards into petty egotism, dirty little affairs, wrong turnings, eventual ruin and an empty afterlife as a once-famous giant feeding off the ghosts of fame as vampires live off other people's blood. Welles himself did go on to make other great films (The Magnificent Ambersons, Touch of Evil, Chimes at Midnight) but his reputation is undeniably that of a director who limped away from the studios into a messy exile of self-financed and often half-finished pet projects.
However, it's the way Welles brings this story to the screen that has drawn the most attention. And rightly so. We could talk about Gregg Toland's extraordinary deep-focus photography that holds several planes of action in view at once and allows for editing “within the camera” as opposed to conventional cuts. We could mention the superb (and often overlooked) sound design that rhymes the fading cadences of an opera singer with the whine of a dying filament in a light bulb. But we still wouldn't be anywhere near grasping the full scope of its technical achievement.
To do that, we need to appreciate what Welles was really attempting to make in Kane – an epic. Not just epic in terms of scale or large sets or the breadth of detail its script tries to encompass – though it is epic in those ways as well. No, epic in the literary sense of the word: a summation of all human knowledge and experience – art, politics, love, history. In other words, the artist's vision of the cosmos distilled into one work. The story itself concerns a man trying to exert complete control over his environment – over the flow of news and information, over the running of his society and over the affections of those close to him. And this is mirrored in Welles' own attempt to master the medium of film and harness all its potential to his own vision. Thus Citizen Kane is a compendium of forms – German Expressionism, newsreel, Griffithian grand narrative – and an encyclopaedia of genres – melodrama, newspaper flick, social issue movie. Hell, there's even a musical number! While the opening is like a horror film, with one eerie window lit in a dark Gothic castle, and the picnic scene looks like something out of King Kong, just as Kane's gigantic staged rally reminds one of the great ape's theatre appearance in New York. As such, Kane was not so much original as a summation of everything cinema had achieved so far and therefore a pointer to its future.
But, of course, Kane's desire for total mastery eventually comes to nought; his various friends and acquaintances supply their testimony about his life and therefore have the final word. And this composite biography comes together through that other great ace up Citizen Kane's sleeve – the script, co-written with Herman Mankiewicz. It's so effortlessly brilliant that many commentators have underrated its contribution to the film's success. Take one small example – the fact that Kane's paper is called The Inquirer and its rival The Chronicle. There, in a nutshell, is two different approaches to the writing of history: one proactive, asking questions and determining the truth, the other reactive, reporting known facts. When Kane's wife rebels against him and picks up The Chronicle at the breakfast table, it's not just a pithy piece of screwball comedy but a telescoping of the entire thematic trajectory of the film – the way Kane loses control over his own self-image and how this passes to those around him.
Though some have tried to pounce on the script's literary quality as evidence for undermining the director's claims to authorship, its dazzling structure, use of flashback and strain of ironic nostalgia are all Welles. Indeed, if one were to compare him to any other figure in the arts, it would not be to another filmmaker, but to a writer: Dickens. Think of Kane's gallery of grotesques and larger-than-life characters, and of the oversized world they inhabit – in one scene, Bernstein seems dwarfed by a chair which reaches beyond the top of the screen. And think of the outlandish conceit of a boy brought up by a bank and vast fortunes inherited from an unknown benefactor. It's Great Expectations all over again. In this sense, Welles seems the perfect bridge between the grand narratives of the past and the postmodern playfulness of the present. While Citizen Kane, though 70 years old now, will always seem like the ghost of cinema to come.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2006, Turkey, 101 mins
Cast: Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Ebru Ceylan, Nazan Kesal
Fans of Ceylan’s last film, Uzak (2002), will remember its cold, distant protagonist – a successful photographer enduring a creative block who finds it impossible to extend any warmth to his visiting cousin. So they might be forgiven for thinking they’re looking into a mirror image with his latest work. Once again, the story centres around a gifted intellectual struggling to complete a photographic project who feels his relationship is falling apart. Only, this time, the character is played by the director himself and the object of his desire/frustration by his own offscreen wife, Ebru Ceylan. So an uncomfortable aura of autobiographical introspection settles over the narrative.
The opening scenes, set during a working summer holiday in the resort of Kas, brilliantly outline the couple’s breakdown in only a few shots and dialogue exchanges. The beauty of an ancient temple is broken by a sustained yawn, meaningful looks are exchanged over distances, a petulant row breaks out in front of close friends. Moments of intimacy or rapprochement are snatched away from the audience or revealed as a sham. Ceylan’s use of editing is ingenious here – at one point, a monologue is revealed to be a conversation when the wife suddenly comes into view, and an intimate kiss is cruelly exposed as a fantasy when the dreamer wakes blinking in the sunlight.
This sequence sets the tone for the whole film, as it follows the man, Isa, around Istanbul and eventually out to wintry Eastern Turkey where he discovers his wife is now working. Words are dropped into conversations that only reveal their true significance later on; “Serap” is mentioned, but we have to wait till a chance meeting in a book shop to realise that she is a possible lover. When Isa eventually courts her, their tepid conversation erupts into a violent, and hilariously over-the-top, sex scene, which at first sight appears to be a rape, and then through a cut is registered as the start of a fling. The fetish object in said scene is a peanut – undermining any notion that arthouse films are pompous and sombre in one fell swoop, the push-me-pull-you way Ceylan plays with our perspective being a perfect metaphor for the protagonist’s own sense of confusion and misdirection.
And throughout, Ceylan never softens Isa’s emotional coldness, neither as a director or as an actor. He is becoming one of modern cinema’s finest explorers of male intransigence – watching how, through work, class and social status, men close in on themselves, becoming selfish, unable to connect, unable to reach out, unable to understand why they might be the subject of laughter. Ceylan has often been compared to Abbas Kiarostami – perhaps because of geographical and cultural proximity as much as their use of long takes and amateur actors – but it’s true that they frequently concentrate their films on gloomy introverts, Climates most closely resembling Kiarostami’s “Artist in crisis” trilogy – Close-Up, A Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us. (Is there a case for saying these two directors appeal to the West more than their compatriots because of their interest in the very Western ideas of ennui and individual disaffection?) But a more apt comparison would be with Michelangelo Antonioni, whose corpus of work represents a veritable encyclopaedia on modern alienation, and whose compositional use of architecture, both modern and ancient, closely resembles that found in Ceylan’s film. Furthermore, the lick-the-screen gorgeous cinematography and attention to sound detail recall the perfectionism of that other European giant, Andrei Tarkovsky. Except that Ceylan’s visuals are more keyed to the sensual rather than the spiritual – the viewer able to see, taste, smell, every bead of sweat on Ebru Ceylan’s skin (one of the most erotic shots in recent film), able to distinguish every snowflake in the final scene.
The film ends on a dedication – “For my son”. A private film, then? A cautionary tale told by the family for the family? There’s no doubt its pain is intense and the acuteness of its feelings born from familiarity. But there are observations here that are universal and that pertain to any marriage or relationship anywhere in the world. So, wrap up warm – the cold bites but the truth bites harder. This is one of the finest films in years.
Director: Carlos Saura
Cast: Ana Torrent, Geraldine Chaplin, Monica Randall
Spain/1975/BFI/110 mins
Quite often, the difference between a “good” film and a “great” one is the presence of just one small touch, a little detail or production decision, that sticks in the mind. Francois Truffaut, for example, commented that the reason Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers became that lugubrious director's breakout success was simply that the walls of the house in which it was set were bright red, creating a warm, womblike atmosphere.
Carlos Saura's Cria Cuervos is an undeniably great film, but it wouldn't be so memorable if it wasn't for an infuriatingly catchy pop song, Porque Te Vas, that plays at intervals throughout. It's the favourite ditty of little Ana, one of three girls in a middle-class, Madrilena family, whose father has just died, she believes, from poison she put in his bedside drink (actually bicarbonate of soda). This father is an obvious analogue for Franco, who at that time was in increasing ill health, and the film follows the sisters through the aftermath of his passing, as the faint wind of freedom starts to stir within the house.
And for some reason, that song – a big hit in the Spanish pop charts and one you'll be humming for days after seeing the movie – captures that precarious sense of freedom so beautifully. It's cheesy and lively, with a youthful freshness, but its lyrics are melancholy (the title translates as “Because you're going”). And it's these same qualities that animate the face of Ana Torrent, the extraordinary child actress who plays Ana, and who had previously played a similar role in Victor Erice's Spirit of the Beehive. At one point, Saura captures her in what is arguably one of the most powerful close-ups in cinema history, her eyes staring into the middle distance in an attitude of frozen wonder, a perfect symbol of a country still trapped and stagnating but looking forward uncertainly into a brighter future.
Saura himself got lost in that future, overshadowed by the flamboyant confidence of Almodovar and forgotten by film culture. But this BFI release should help reinstate him as a major figure and the savage poet of the Franco era.