Director: Teinosuke Kinugasa
Cast: Machiko Kyo, Kazuo Hasegawa, Isao Yamagata
Japan/1953/91 mins
From its very first shot, Gate of Hell is a riot of colour and movement. Beginning with the 12th century Heiji Rebellion, it represents the fall of Sanjo Castle through gaudy banners fluttering in a violent wind, ladies-in-waiting running to and fro in clashing kimonos, red and black cockerels fighting in the swirling dust. The body politic as if filmed by Jack Cardiff in full baroque mode.
Director Teinosuke Kinugasa, most famous for his avant-garde experimentation in A Page of Madness (1926), attacks the samurai flick with the same manic gusto he brought to that film, throwing one off-kilter composition after another at the audience, first pulling back into the trees to show off the gloriously-costumed armies at battle, then thrusting into the enclosed space of a carriage where a servant, posing as the Emperor's sister, collapses into the folds of her silken garment.
This young woman (played by Machiko Kyo, famous as the ghost in Ugetsu Monogatari) then becomes the focus of the drama. After the Rebellion is quashed, the peasant samurai who saved her life finds he is besotted with her and asks the Emperor for her hand in marriage, only to find she already has a husband. And so Kinugasa turns from one path to hell – war and mutiny – to another – overwhelming lust – as the samurai does everything in his power, including murder, threaten, and blackmail, to attain the object of his desire.
Winner of both the Palme d'Or and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, it was described by Martin Scorsese as one of the ten best achievements in colour film. All the more reason, then, to celebrate this superb restoration and HD presentation. Every frame is lick-the-screen gorgeous, enough to make any viewer bemoan the fate of those lovely film stocks of the past and regret the lack of expression through colour today. Gate of Hell is another intelligent and satisfying genre piece from the same era as Mizoguchi and Kurosawa, but above all, it's beautiful.
Ghost World’s appearance in the same month as Todd Solondz’s Storytelling may go some way to confirming David Thomson’s suggestion that, at the turn of the century, there’s a burgeoning movement in US indie cinema that – along with Neil LaBute – is not willing to “swallow the white lies any more.” Certainly, Terry Zwigoff’s film mirrors Solondz’s previous effort Happiness in its gallery of dysfunctional caricatures, here mercilessly lampooned by two teenage girls fresh out of high school and determined not to conform. Ghost World also shares that film’s use of garish primary colours – eye-melting reds and greens – that suggest a not-quite-real world, an America that takes its lead from the day-glo brightness of the fast food joints and faux-‘50s diners where much of the action takes place. As such, the film seems to concur with the girls’ shared disaffection with the world around them and relishes their attacks on family, friends and neighbours alike.
But this smug teenage rebelliousness could quickly become tiresome if it wasn’t for the introduction of Seymour, a middle-aged record collector, stuck in a dead-end job and bored with his life. He shares the girls’ frustrations but with an adult perspective and one that is more focused – on the deadening effect of modern popular culture. In one scene, Enid and Seymour go to watch an esteemed blues guitarist perform but he is second-billed to a raucous, out-of-tune, but far more popular rock’n’roll group. It is this sympathy with Seymour’s preoccupations that lifts Ghost World above Solondz’s rather modish cynicism. Whereas the characters of Happiness, for example, are continually humiliated and seem unable to break out of the vicious circles their behaviour creates, Zwigoff and scriptwriter Daniel Clowes allow Seymour to acknowledge his own “geekiness”, to recognise that his anal-retentiveness and collecting habits may be unattractive to women, but that, at the same time, he can’t stop collecting because he loves his music so much. Furthermore, his fascination with old cultural artefacts – such as the racist advertising poster for a restaurant once called Coon Chicken, now tastefully renamed Cook’s Chicken – gives him a greater understanding and knowledge of the hidden roots of the popular culture which marginalises his own pursuits.
Steve Buscemi responds to the complexity of Seymour’s character superbly, never overplaying his more nerdish qualities, and bringing genuine depth of feeling to Seymour’s passion for music and his confusion over how to juggle his relationship with Dana and “friendship” with Enid. Thora Birch also suggests the awkwardness underlying Enid’s brittle, cool exterior. But Scarlett Johansson fares less well as her companion Rebecca, mostly because Zwigoff and Cloves’ script never manages to make her growing conformity seem convincing and her character rather lurches from one frame of mind to the next, while Enid and Seymour develop smoothly.
If there is another fault with the film, it lies in the ending which feels horribly tacked on. We see Enid watching an old man get up from a park bench and catch the bus out of town. The picture fades to black as she looks at the empty bench reflectively…and then rudely we’re thrown into a crude scene where Seymour is seen visiting a bored therapist, only to be dragged away by a comedy nagging mother. The complexity of his character is suddenly undermined, almost as if the filmmakers have decided he is a nerd after all. And as if the audience couldn’t already come to the conclusion themselves, there is a gratuitous shot of Enid packing her bags and leaving town on the bus. It’s a sad compromise in a film which otherwise subtly demonstrates that the fashionable disaffection found in US teen movies can move beyond posturing into a more haunting portrait of the onset of adulthood.
Jaume Collet-Serra, 2007, UK, 115 mins
Cast: Kuno Becker, Anna Friel, Alessandro Nivola
“The beautiful game” – that’s what they call football, isn’t it? It certainly never seemed that way to me, with its vicious tackling, brutal physical contact, spitting, swearing, fingers up at the ref – not to mention the racism, hooliganism and ruthless corporate speculation off the pitch. And it never felt beautiful on celluloid either – the catalogue of dull football movies stretches into infinity: Fever Pitch, Escape To Victory, When Saturday Comes…
But that’s how the producers of Goal 2 evidently see it. So much so, in fact, that they’ve raised the sport to the level of a fairy tale. The protagonist is one Santiago Munez, a poor Mexican boy, who in the internationally mega-successful Goal 1 (what do you mean you’ve never heard of it?) was picked from obscurity by a talent scout and sent to play in the cosmopolitan paradise of, er…Newcastle. In this instalment (and this one ends with “To be continued…” so there’s going to be a third), he is granted the footballer’s ultimate dream - being signed up for Real Madrid. And that’s about it. There’s a few wispy sub-plots clinging on for dear life – Santiago finds his real mum and step-brother, he falls out with his girlfriend – but the whole film is merely an excuse to showcase life in soccer’s fast lane – real-life pitch action interspersed with hilariously obvious CGI sequences when the actors have to strut their stuff, star player cameos (Beckham, Raul), Lamborghinis, gorgeous girls…
All of which is fine in itself – but is this what the fans want? Soccer enthusiasts invest a lot of time analysing and discussing their chosen obsession – they’re too savvy to be sold a sugar-coated version of the truth. The film glosses over the realities of the transfer market, reveals little of the inner workings at the Bernabeu, and fights shy of exposing the WAG scene. And even I know that Ronaldo and Zidane are no longer resident in Madrid, so what chance a modern blockbuster that feels out-of-date the moment they kick off for the Galacticos on screen? Perhaps the target audience is younger than your average Match Of The Day viewer, but with sex and personal failure writ large throughout, this is a fairy tale with balls, both literal and metaphorical, and not immediately obvious as a kids’ film. The impression, ultimately, is of a vibrant European sports scene watered down for an American audience…
The cast is amiable enough. Kuno Becker is fresh-faced and sympathetic in the lead role and Anna Friel sports a great Geordie accent as his girlfriend. And Rutger Hauer, back from the dead again, looks perfect as the ruthless Dutch coach but gets so little to do that he barely raises his performance above a croak. Mind you, the way these films are going, all three will probably find their careers nosediving into appearances on Big Brother 2009. It’s harmless pap, I suppose, likeable if dim, but when will football break its goalless spell and score a perfect film?
Lucrecia Martel, Argentina, 2008, 87 mins
Cast: Maria Onetto, Claudia Cantero, Ines Efron
When The Headless Woman appeared at Cannes in 2008, it was booed by the international press almost as much as it was lauded by Argentine critics. But it was an Argentine writer and festival programmer, Quintin, who really put the boot in via a devastating critique in the Canadian magazine, Cinemascope. He claimed that Martel's work was that of a self-conscious master, without the freshness or free-wheeling experimentation of a truly individual artist. At the time, I took this review to be the snobbish assessment of an elitist trying to distance himself from the consensus. But now, having seen the film for myself, I'm beginning to think he's right.
The story, such as it is, concerns a middle-class woman, Veronica, who appears to run someone or something over on the road. She drives on regardless. But the incident clearly affects her and her behaviour becomes erratic and listless. She starts to neglect her job and become estranged from her husband. He, on the other hand, subtly tries to help her by covering up the evidence of the supposed accident.
Martel constructs the entire film from Veronica's point of view. The camera seldom leaves her and events are refracted through her confused sense of reality. The result is intensely claustrophobic and purposely frustrating because the audience is never quite sure what has happened and how what is seen is affected by events off-screen. The cinematography plays a crucial role here. Though employing the scope ratio, Martel frames her protagonist tightly in small rooms or in off-centre compositions where the background is often in soft focus. The audience feels a sense of entrapment and of knowledge withheld just beyond the boundaries of their vision.
Martel has also taken great care over the sound design, so that it acts as an aural complement to the sense of disorientation. The film opens with a babble of voices and an overload of information that can't possibly be taken in. The silence after the crash therefore hits the viewer like a physical impact. Later, a crucial sex scene is undercut by a maddening electronic hum that signifies the coupling as an act of distracted desperation rather than amorous longing.
Yes, it's all very impressive – a work of fastidious intelligence, each effect realised with absolute precision. And therein lies the problem. This is “art film 101”, a textbook study, a piece of academic professionalism rather than an intensely personal or idiosyncratic work. It's as though art cinema has become a genre in itself, with themes introduced and developed through recognised schema. Everything connects to everything else in a seamless construction, all i's dotted, all t's crossed. There's not a breath of air in it.
And all teetering on such slim foundations. When it comes down to it, The Headless Woman does little more than explore the psychological trauma of an accident victim. Martel has spoken of the film's allegorical dimension, of the way Veronica represents an Argentina unable to come to terms with its past. But for an outsider, at least, it's hard to read such lofty ideas into this snippet of personal angst. One can't help feeling that the success that followed Martel's first two films, La Cienaga (2001) and the outstanding La Nina Santa (2004), has led her down a blind alley as closed-off and suffocating as her latest work.
Edgar Wright, 2007, UK, 116 mins
Cast: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent
I remember attending an interview with Terry Jones where he talked about the making of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1973). He and Terry Gilliam threw themselves into the project with gusto, relishing the great material thrown up by the team while at the same time determined to craft a “proper” film with impressive visuals and quality sound design. But when they viewed the rough cut, something was wrong – no-one laughed. They scratched their heads and endured a dark night of the soul before realising what the problem was – so thorough had they been in filling the soundtrack with telling period detail that there was no room for the jokes to breathe. It seemed comedy thrived in the absence of perfection…
It’s a lesson that the makers of Hot Fuzz would do well to learn. The team behind the superb zombie spoof Shaun Of The Dead have regrouped for a parody of hard-boiled, tough-talking cop shows and buddy movies. And there’s some good gags, laugh-out-loud moments and spirited playing by an absolute galaxy of British acting talent. But here’s where the problems start. There’s just too many cameos, too many thesps jostling each other for screen space. Clearly flushed with the success of his first film, director Wright has pulled out all the stops here, complementing his impressive cast with breakneck editing, kinetic visuals and thunderous sound effects so loud that I felt blasted back into my seat. It was if the movie was trying to browbeat me into laughing instead of letting the mirth flow naturally.
It also felt like the wrong approach for a project that is essentially a modern-day Ealing comedy – young, ambitious city cop promoted sideways to a little country village where t’locals are up to nay goode. The story plays like a Sunday night episode of Midsomer Murders, albeit one with a sense of humour. And, to its credit, the whodunnit plot is exceptionally well-handled - until the end, when everything goes pear-shaped and the offbeat tale turns into a crude action farce. Indeed, the ending seems to go on for ages and, at two hours, the film is far too long. No comedy should go past the 90-minute mark – there should be a law against it.
It’s a shame because Pegg and Wright are clearly talented, and their collaborators, like Nick Frost, seem glad to be back on board, the latter slotting back into his nice-but-dim sidekick role with ease. But they need to stop trying to impress. Take an ex-Python’s advice – go back to the editing table and strip the comedy down to its essentials. Hot Fuzz feels too much like a rough cut.
Jack Clayton, 1961, UK, 100 mins
Cast: Deborah Kerr, Michael Redgrave, Megs Jenkins
This week sees the re-release of the film I would nominate as the scariest ever made. Based on the Henry James novella The Turn of the Screw, it concerns a nervous, impressionable governess (Deborah Kerr in her finest role) assigned to look after two children in a lofty, old country mansion. They’re a couple of spoilt brats out to make her life misery – or are they? Could it be that they’re possessed by the evil spirits of their former housekeepers, two lovers playing out a deadly romance from beyond the grave? The film couldn’t hope to capture the psychological acuity of James’ writing and it doesn’t try to. But Kerr’s performance is so subtle that the audience is kept guessing as to whether she is the victim, or through her own paranoia, the tormentor of these children.
The real focus of the movie, though, is on the atmosphere of the house and its ghostly inhabitants. Here, Freddie Francis’s beautiful, elegant black-and-white photography comes into its own, creating a phantom stage where a spook can wander across a corridor in front of you and seem as solid as the walls. Director Jack Clayton didn’t enjoy much of an illustrious career after this, his debut feature, but the confidence with which he handles the material means that his name will forever deserve a special footnote in the annals of English film. The set-piece scares – the face at the window, the lady in the lake – stand comparison with the best in horror cinema. It forms a pair with another great ‘60s ghost movie, Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963, also made in England), and both are notable for the way they turn their location into a brooding character of its own and for the way they leave their chill lingering at the end of the film – Deborah Kerr whispering, “The children, the children…”
It’s an odd decision to release this at the height of summer (well, what passes for summer). This is a movie for a blustery November night or to enjoy before a roaring fire on Christmas Eve. But it’s not available on DVD, so catch it now. After all, it’s that rare beast – an English masterpiece.
Michael Bay, 2005, USA, 136 mins
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Scarlet Johansson, Steve Buscemi
This year marks the release of an exciting sci-fi saga set in the near future in which hard-working clones are promised an idyllic retirement on a paradise island. One of their number discovers that this is only a cover story, however, and that the clones are simply exterminated and their bodies recycled for human use. But let’s stop talking about David Mitchell’s best-seller Cloud Atlas and concentrate on Michael Bay’s new blockbuster, The Island, in which Ewan McGregor and Scarlet Johansson play – yes, you guessed it – two clones under the illusion that the city they live in is a safe haven from a contaminated world and that if they win ”the lottery”, they’ll end up on the eponymous island instead of on an operating table having their organs removed for the benefit of the rich and famous.
In truth, Bay’s film feels like a patchwork of every dystopian thriller you can lay your screen-writing hands on, from Huxley’s Brave New World to a 1978 low-budget shocker with the rather wonderful title of Parts: The Clonus Horror. But in fairness to this much-maligned director, he does bring some intriguing new ingredients to the mix. The complex in which his clones live, for example, is like a Utopia for the 16-25 age bracket which Hollywood targets these days, with its sleek, trendy bars, maze of sports activities and attractive branded clothing. But the film suggests that such ephemeral pleasures pall quickly in comparison to the thirst for knowledge about who we are and where we come from. Is arch blockbuster-merchant Bay subtly inciting the kids to follow their ‘70s ancestors and leave consumerism behind to kick against the establishment?
Another element that differentiates his film from the usual dystopian fare is its cheeky vein of sex comedy. The clones have had the concept of sex removed from their minds to avoid obvious complications, so when they finally break out into the real world, there’s much scope for misunderstandings and innocent bafflement at double entendres. Here, Bay makes good use of his stars whose attractiveness is matched by their inherent likeableness and clean-cut image. McGregor, particularly, gets to show off his lighter side when the clones meet his real-life counterpart, a Scots boat designer, who leers delightedly over Johansson. (It also allows McGregor to use his own accent for once, a mercy for those still cringing at his “Alec Guinness” in Star Wars.) In fact, judging by the evidence of this film, Michael Bay demonstrates more flair for comedy than he does for his usual action-drama, so it’s even more disappointing when the last half of the film disintegrates into elaborate car chases and shoot-‘em-up set pieces.
But the real victims of this approach are the ideas thrown up by Caspian Tredwell-Owen’s screenplay. His portrayal of a world where people are farmed for their organs raises questions about the ethics of cloning and modern medicine. The film plays with suggestions of the Holocaust when we see the clones enter an extermination chamber en masse, while the shots of embryo sacs being slashed open when their cargo is no longer wanted are so potent that one could argue that The Island represents Hollywood’s greatest contribution yet to America’s ongoing anti-abortion debate. There’s also the cute touch of calling the city’s law-enforcers censors – an implication that their real-life namesakes are part of society’s way of covering up the truth?
But these ideas are no sooner hinted at than they’re dropped unceremoniously as Bay moves on to the next breathless chase and more giddy camera shots of McGregor and Johansson pounding down corridors. It’s enough to make one wish this prototype could be quietly put down and reanimated as the black comedy it should have been in the first place…
Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Starring: Tatsuo Saito, Mitsuko Yoshikawa, Hideo Sugawara/Chishu Ryu, Haruko Sugimura
Japan/1932-1959/91-94mins
Those who are intimidated by Ozu's reputation as an austere formalist should check out this wonderful double bill made up of his two best comedies. Boisterous tales of young kids rebelling against their parents, they come with fart jokes, slapstick, gossipy neighbours straight out of a Les Dawson skit, and the best – and funniest – child actors in movie history.
1933's I Was Born But... tells how two young boys cope with moving to a new neighbourhood where they have to take on the local bullies, only to lose faith in their father who kowtows shamelessly to his boss. It's a film as sprightly and mischievous as its young protagonists, as anarchic in its use of travelling shots, visual gags and every damn trick in the cinematic book as the boys are in their acts of rebellion against authority.
In his later years, Ozu had a habit of revisiting material he'd previously used as a young man. So it is that 1959's Good Morning – Ozu's 50th film – is a more sober and contemplative reworking of the same story, this time more in tune with the resigned fatalism of the boys' father, played by the ever reliable Chishu Ryu. The story is broadened out to take in the whole of suburban Japanese society and acts as a wry comment on the country's decline into consumerism (the boys rebel this time because they're desperate for a telly!) But it's just as amusing, just as witty and wise in its commentary on human failings, and just as unpredictable – at one point, it becomes a whodunit. Mention should also be made of the gorgeous colour photography which seems to relish the garish if cosy domestic interiors of the '50s.
Though light-hearted, both films cut to the core of Ozu's philosophy, providing unsentimental but moving portraits of the different generations, where each person's concern – whether it be how to steal some rice cakes or cope with impending retirement – is treated with equal weight and dignity. Tokyo Story they're not – but they're equally sublime.
Paolo Sorrentino, 2008, Italy, 117mins
Cast: Toni Servillo, Anna Bonaiuto, Giulio Bosetti
What do we mean when we say a film is “stylish”? Do we mean it’s visually impressive? That it plays fast and loose with freeze-frames, jump cuts, time-lapse photography and other items in movie’s bag of tricks? Or do we mean it has a funky soundtrack to counterpoint the quickfire dialogue? If so, Paolo Sorrentino’s third feature, Il Divo, is stylish with a capital S. Its portrait of the Machiavellian Italian politician and seven times Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti comes on like House Of Cards directed by Quentin Tarantino. The various protagonists circle round each other or meet clandestinely firing off witticisms like so many actors rehearsing their roles in Jackie Brown while political opponents are dispatched in bloody shootouts. Indeed, at one point, Andreotti and his cronies roam the corridors of power in true Reservoir Dogs slo-mo.
But what if we’re more ambitious in our definition of “style”? What if we take it to mean the whole conceptual framework of a film, the aesthetic and formal strategies adopted being the key producers of meaning? Now Sorrentino’s work doesn’t appear clever so much as shallow and opportunistic.
It’s been said by many reviewers that you have to understand Italian politics to appreciate Il Divo. Well, I knew precious little about Andreotti going into this picture, so perhaps I’m at a disadvantage. But I’m also aware that I knew just as little about him coming out of it. It might be argued that Sorrentino has hijacked Tarantino’s traits to make an ironic comment on a political system that is permanently two steps away from the pompous absurdity of the Mafia. But that shouldn’t mean that the characters feel like two-dimensional grotesques or that the complexities of court intrigue can be satisfactorily explained in black-comic vignettes replete with punchline.
There is a long tradition in English art of using caricature to satiric effect – think of Hogarth, Swift, Dickens. But the blunt instruments that satire offers are always wielded with a strong sense of righteous anger or desire for social reform. Sorrentino, by contrast, seems like a naughty child who has discovered in this grim true story the perfect vehicle for tongue-in-cheek putdown or crowd-pleasing shocks. Like a restless flibbertigibbet, he twirls from one exciting camera move to the next, shedding any extraneous nuance that might get in the way.
Indeed, all the important exposition is achieved through headache-inducing infodumps of text at the beginning, astons appearing on screen as each character is introduced. The fact that a similar amount of text is needed at the end to relay how everything turned out is indicative of the way Sorrentino avoids any political complexity in the development of his narrative. His imagistic tomfoolery is too magpie frenetic to want to get bogged down in something as pedantic as the way his country’s system works. So that, in seeking to put a gloss on uncomfortable truths, the film ironically feels as superficial and mercenary in its desire to please as the very politician it demonises.
Dir: Walerian Borowcyzk
Starring: Marina Pierro, Gaelle Legrand, Pascale Christophe
France/1979/114 mins
Who's the best director that won't appear in Sight and Sound's Ten Best Films poll this September? The man who made Emannuelle V? The man who appalled arthouse audiences by showing a young lady in various states of undress being chased around an 18th century garden by a guy in a gorilla suit? The very same.
Walerian Borowczyk started out as a respected animator, before moving successfully into live-action features that – arguably – degenerated into soft porn. But throughout, his films retained a fascinating and utterly unique directing style, that flattened out both the spatial and psychological dimensions till his work appeared not so much modern as archaic, more like a medieval tapestry or hieratic art. Fiercely sensual, focused as they are on the tactility of objects and, um, beautiful women, his films also display a predilection for absurd humour, much of it at the expense of the church, which he attacks with the same gleefulness as Bunuel, and preening macho men, who fall victim to the schemes of their more intelligent muses.
Immoral Women is one of Borowczyk's lesser-known films, but it still displays all the best elements of his approach. It's made up of three stories. The first, Margherita, investigates the sex lives of the Renaissance painters in a way that would make Vasari faint. It also introduces a rather twisted “hall of mirrors” sequence that recalls Borowczyk's most brilliant and disturbing animation, Les Jeux Des Anges. This sense of the macabre is even more keenly felt in the second story, Marceline, which features a girl being pleasured by her pet rabbit, a rape in a sheep pen, a suicide, and a whole new way to serve up lamb for dinner. Finally, Marie is a patently ludicrous kidnap story with sight gags out of Laurel and Hardy and a bit of bestiality thrown in for good measure.
No, it won't take its place beside Citizen Kane and Vertigo, but it's another earthy, comic masterpiece from this poet of the erotic.
Kathy Hill, 2006, UK, 35 mins
“All art is quite useless.”
So said Oscar Wilde, and judging from the opening of her film, Kathy Hill is reading from the same page. Her quest for the Muse – or the seed of inspiration in artists’ work – is motivated by her fascination with “things that seem to serve no purpose, like beautiful paintings.”
But if art is useless, then so it seems is any attempt to explain its origins. Witness the impressive array of talking heads Hill assembles – ranging from film producers to Rutger Hauer and the lead singer of Then Jericho. She asks them to define their own muse and they stumble around trying to pinpoint it, only to reel off unconvincing stories of balls of light or magpies flying across gardens. At times, the documentary feels like it’s skirting the borders of New Age dreaminess, not helped by the occasional kitsch shot of young ladies in togas, meant to represent the original nine Muses of Greek mythology. But just as art is quite useless and at the same time thoroughly noble, so to are the responses Hill elicits. There’s something rather touching and sweet about watching a creatively successful person lost for words as to the source of their own genius. And it’s refreshing to find that their vague and rather desperate answers are still so much more edifying than the authoritative information Hill gleans on the real Muses from selected academics.
Furthermore, Hill subtly indicates the sources of her own inspiration. The camera pans across a Greek sculpture during her opening monologue, in which she ponders the vagaries of human creativity, only for there then to be a sublime cut to a cityscape viewed from the air at night. The seemingly random patterns of electric light forced into grid-like shapes intimate a whole new area of human endeavour, another kind of creative beauty. And this is supplemented by little epiphanies throughout the film – shots of the setting sun or incandescent, “orgasmic” waterfalls of neon signs.
Still, Hill makes some curious choices. She starts her quest in Hollywood for no apparent reason and roams the streets asking poor members of the public what they understand by “Muse”. (Intriguingly, the Americans look non-plussed while, later on, their British counterparts all get the answer right – is Hill having a little surreptitious dig at our Transatlantic cousins?) Her peregrinations do pay dividends occasionally; it’s fascinating to find that one woman interprets “creativity” as setting up a neighbourhood watch scheme and an eco-friendly charity. Hill offsets these man-on-the-street views with experts discussing the historical contexts of the Muse. But she fails to follow up on the more interesting arguments on offer, such as the discussion of the Muses’ gender and the subjugation of earlier female cults in favour of a more patriarchally-friendly one. She also seems to prefer stories of ‘divine’ influence without relating them back to the original Greek concept of the artist being gifted by the Gods and therefore becoming hierarchically superior to his fellows. And while we’re at it, isn’t this a rather anti-humanist view of the creative process?
In all, the film feels on surer ground when it moves to Hill’s second question – “What sacrifices have you made to be an artist?” Now, any graduate student will tell you that, strictly speaking, this is not in the remit of the film’s title, but the responses are far more moving. There is no more poignant moment than Rutger Hauer’s consideration of the lot of an actor – constantly alone, removed from family and friends, slowly alienated from both. Here, Hill has achieved a rare insight into a star’s life that most interviewers wouldn’t go anywhere near. And the British musician who visibly crumples at the question, bitterly warning any young pretenders of the hardships to follow, becomes the heart of Hill’s sympathetic analysis of the artist’s position in society.
So strong are these moments that it makes one wonder why Hill burdened herself with the cumbersome motif of the Muse and didn’t just make a more straightforward piece on artists and their relationship to their work. Nevertheless, what remains is a an illuminating, if often cautionary, series of tales from the creative spectrum, giving a fascinating insight into the artist’s world.
Armando Iannucci, 2009, UK, 105 mins
Cast: Peter Capaldi, Tom Hollander, James Gandolfini
They say satire ends up aping the very people it attacks. So it’s fitting that the first filmmaker to really tackle Blair in a feature-length comedy should be Armando Iannucci, who resembles nothing so much as a New Labour city boy fascinated by the culture of spin. And it’s also fitting that his first film should, as part of UK cinema’s desperate desire to hook the US market, be a carefully calibrated portrait of that “special relationship”.
But there is nothing compromised about Iannucci’s vision. The transfer of his award-winning BBC series The Thick Of It to the big screen has not blunted its satirical edge nor softened its wit. For a start, Iannucci has abjured the star option and bravely retained the same cast. They all do him proud, not least Peter Capaldi, who is simply outstanding as the foul-mouthed, Alistair Campbell-like press secretary, Malcolm. Here, he finds himself tidying up after the Secretary of International Development, Simon Foster, who has inadvertently got himself involved in Washington’s agitations for war in the Middle East. The action flicks between the UK and the US as the two governments secretly conspire to conjure up the requisite “intelligence” to force a vote in the UN.
The parallels with Iraq are obvious, but Iannucci never forces the comparison; only a few buried references in the dialogue to "assisted suicide" and Clare Short’s infamous justification for doing the “wrong thing” tip the viewer off. Instead, this clever, oblique satire targets the culture that led to such decisions. The intricacies of political debate are nowhere to be seen; the focus is on playing the media and the smokescreens needed to maintain credibility. Thus Iannucci could be accused of sidestepping the appalling reality of going to war. But that’s the point – the establishment has become so amoral as to treat this as a side issue.
Tom Hollander’s minister frets and prevaricates about the right phrases to use, the right time to stand up at a meeting, while the Prime Minister himself is completely absent throughout. Meanwhile, press secretaries are given free reign to terrorise MPs and ride roughshod over the concerns of people, unlike themselves, who are voted for by the electorate. And these poor souls – very much last place in the scheme of things – are only represented in cameo by Steve Coogan, giving an hilarious turn as a constituent banging on about a garden wall. Laughing at such “pettiness” leads to the one and only caveat I have about the film – that, in its fascination with Malcolm’s backstage exploits and belittling of the “ordinary man on the street,” it almost glamourises spin as a sophisticated form of politics.
But Coogan’s subplot is also important for the way it throws the events in Washington into relief. British politicians on the world stage can be undone by the trivial agenda of one bloke in Northampton. Iannucci points up how antiquated and desperately inadequate such a system is when the country involved is making decisions of global import. The pathetic reality of Britain playing the role of world power is also brought home in the two finest scenes in the film, where Malcolm confronts his US nemesis Linton Barwick (an excellent performance from David Rasche) and finds himself clinging onto delusions of grandeur in the face of his administration’s clear status of lapdog to American interests. Here, Iannucci’s dialogue is at its most sparkling, keeping up the tempo and tone of a fast-paced comedy with an undercurrent of genuine tension.
It’s that combination that underpins the whole enterprise. Make no mistake – this is an angry film. It may wear the sharp-suited clothes of jocular cynicism, but that only serves to point up the lack of moral indignation in its characters. They represent a system divorced from any sense of ultimate responsibility – where only what is said, and not what is done, is of any importance. In the end, the document challenging the war is modified to become the very intelligence that will swing the vote. What more chilling metaphor could there be for the conversion of politics of value into politics of contingency – Blair’s true legacy?
David Lynch, 2006, US/Poland, 180 mins
Cast: Laura Dern, Justin Theroux, Jeremy Irons
Wake up. Wake up. Come on, the dream…I mean, the movie’s over. Wake up.
Eh? What? What’s wrong?
Come on, wake up. We’ve gotta go.
Look… It’s not me who’s waking up, it’s you who are falling back asleep.
About an hour into watching Inland Empire and the screen seemed to jump, the print appeared to jar and we were parachuted into a scene which felt like it was almost halfway over. What had happened? Had the projectionist made a mistake? Were the reels the wrong way round? The film suddenly stopped making sense. Events were referred to that had not taken place and the protagonists were now loved-up in bed with barely a pre-coitus kiss in sight. I felt completely lost – and this from someone who thought Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive made perfect sense. Perhaps I had unwittingly recognised the pivotal point of David Lynch’s new film, the moment where he finally abandons a linear narrative (linear in terms of a progression of congruent moods rather than successive plot points) and goes all-out for Surrealist chaos. Whatever the answer, that’s the abiding impression left by Inland Empire – that you’ve just missed out on a vital piece of information, that something significant occurred at the corner of your eye.
This three-hour opus marks the culmination of a movement in Lynch’s work. Starting with Blue Velvet, the director began crafting modern horror films where the monsters were sexual jealousy and identity loss, and the settings were dreamscapes where everyday towns morphed into crepuscular mazes and faces dissolved into the semblance of others. This vision finally led to a masterpiece in Mulholland Drive (2002), but whether, in Inland Empire, it has reached its peak or a messy afterlife, is a moot point.
The film is, in fact, a virtual reconstruction of its predecessor – same themes, same characters, same type of narrative trajectory – except that the dual roles played by Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring in the former film are now telescoped into one, Nikki Grace, played by Laura Dern. Nikki is an actress who wins a part in a film, only to discover that the first version of the project was apparently cursed and that its two leads, playing an adulterous couple, were eventually murdered. Cue the start of a burgeoning romance between her and her own on-screen partner and suddenly identities start warping and dovetailing into each other. Like the two actresses in Mulholland Drive, Nikki finds her sense of self spiralling downwards into a hell of alter egos, personal failure and sexual compromise.
But the differences between the two films are significant. Gone is the lush cinematography of old to be replaced by the gritty coldness of digital video. From the warm, womb-like interiors of Hollywood, the audience is blasted into the biting fresh air of the “real” world. And this “real” world makes itself felt in other ways, too. While Mulholland Drive’s lovelies were trapped in the never-never land of Sunset Boulevard, Laura Dern’s character finds herself teetering out onto the real thing, loitering with the hookers, the homeless and the drunks, pissing their lives away on the very pavements that bear the names of the stars. It gives her fall from grace a more socially aware charge than has been found in Lynch’s work before. Though, intriguingly, whereas the darkness in this film is more profound than any Lynch has ever touched upon – dealing, as it does, with the effects of domestic violence, poverty and prostitution – yet the ending is his most transcendent and optimistic. One should never underestimate Lynch’s inherent innocence and his belief that Good may well triumph after all…
However, behind the innovations lies a lurking suspicion. Isn’t this Alice Through The Looking Glass for the 21st century – in which a woman plunges through portal after portal into other worlds and other selves – building a tower of ideas onto precariously small foundations? Has Lynch merely constructed a vast puzzle movie or the reductio ad absurdum of that hoary old chestnut, the actress getting “lost” in her role? Isn’t this just Mulholland Drive Version Two, only more distended and overblown? Certainly, the economy of that film has been lost and Lynch’s trademark tricks feel either overcooked – the endlessly rumbling soundtrack – or needlessly drawn out – Nikki’s weird conversation with a Polish neighbour.
Ultimately, any review of this film must end on a personal, and therefore frustratingly ambiguous, note – after all, we’re each of us trapped in our own inland empires. And for me, a little Surrealism goes a long way. This digital scrapbook of a movie needs some tidying up, the non-narrative experiment having turned into an audiovisual riot. Like Kitano’s Takeshis’ (2005), this feels like a turning-point film, where the director is shedding his old skin and playing with the medium in an effort to find a new direction. But I can’t help feeling that Lynch has only backed himself into a corner. I left the cinema somewhat disheartened, but I woke up the next morning reeling with ideas about half-remembered scenes. Had my unenthusiastic response just been a bad dream? Had I witnessed the first ground-breaking masterpiece of the new millennium? Reader, I still don’t know – the nightmare of uncertainty goes on.
Dir:Ivan Passer, Czech Republic, 1965, 74 mins
Cast: Karel Blazek, Zdenek Bezusek, Vera Kresadlova
It was once described by its own producer as “the most boring film ever made” and was banned in its country of origin for 20 years. Yet one fan claimed to its director to have seen it 60 times and a certain Boston professor used it as an antidote to recurring feelings of suicide. It is, as Jonathan Rosenbaum said of Vigo's L'Atalante, a work whose greatness “rests on the simple gratitude it makes you feel for being alive” and remains one of the secret best films ever made.
The set-up couldn't be simpler – a musician visits his old classmate in the country and volunteers to play with the local orchestra. The film follows the 24 hours leading up to the concert, and is in itself a delightful “pastoral symphony”, switching between passages of bucolic beauty, as the city slicker and his trendy girlfriend discover the countryside and its charming denizens, and slower interludes when the quiet desperation of rural existence becomes apparent.
Above all, it is a rare film of embarrassment, delighting in the awkward moments that arise in everyday life – a child turning shy when introduced to an adult, then later raising hell over a chicken dinner. Or a chicken nesting under a car. Or an old buffer needing a pee at the church wall. At one point, the grizzled veteran of a funeral band declares that people find it easier to cry than laugh; this movie chooses to laugh, finding the absurdity in small-town manners, but preserving the undertow of sadness beneath.
What is remarkable about Intimate Lighting is the way it portrays community as a body of individuals utterly isolated from each other, but searching for connection. In one superb edit, Passer cuts between a lone female gardener, raking grass in her bikini, to an elderly lady (perhaps the woman she will become) gyrating with the same movement of the hips, but this time to the tune in a dance hall, as she weaves alone through the crowd. She is lost in her own world, as is the drunk who cuts across the band's trumpets to belt out a half-remembered song. Throughout the film, characters find true communication through music, which drowns out the petty sniping and arguments that erupt between them. And the music takes many forms – a houseful of snoring suggesting the commonalty between old grandfathers and sexy young girlfriends better than any dialogue.
The movie ends in a freeze frame – a dinner party caught raising their glasses and waiting for the liquid to reach their lips, a still life of people trapped in dead-end lives waiting for the miracle of release. But if that makes it sound pompous or lugubrious, nothing could be further from the truth. Rather, this shot is the final link in a chain of gentle Monty Python-esque vignettes. Director Ivan Passer has said he wanted the film to be something that is re-visited, rather as one revisits parents or relatives; you know what they're going to say, what they're going to ask about you, the same rituals recur again and again, a routine preserved in aspic – but it's so comforting and so nourishing.
Second Run's typically superb Blu-Ray package comes complete with essays by Trevor Johnston and Phillip Bergson, an interview with Passer (who seems amusingly bewildered by the film's success) and the director's first short film, A Boring Afternoon, a little gem which shares all of the attributes and pleasures of the main feature.