Director: Leo McCarey
Starring: Victor Moore, Beulah Bondi, Thomas Mitchell
USA/1937/91 mins
The film that Orson Welles said “could make a stone cry” and the inspiration behind Ozu's Tokyo Story, Make Way For Tomorrow was also director Leo McCarey's favourite of his own films, a project he had to fight for, given its unusually grim ending and its unfashionable subject – old age.
The story concerns an elderly couple – Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi (playing someone 20 years her senior) – who fall on hard times. But their children can't, or won't, support more than one parent at a time, so the couple are forced to separate. But not before they grab one last chance to relive their honeymoon and declare a lifetime of devotion to each other.
What young lovers get to do as much? For, sad though Make Way For Tomorrow may be, it is simultaneously the most triumphant of love stories, a paean to old-fashioned sentiment, laced with McCarey's trademark humour. Comparable to Murnau's Sunrise, another tale of two people torn apart by circumstance, it's Hollywood's toughest – and warmest – masterpiece.
Robert Altman, 1971, US, 121 mins
Cast: Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonois
It was the peculiar genius of Robert Altman (who died last year at the age of 80) to open a Western, not with the strident, masculine score one would expect, but an intimate, mournful ballad addressed to a woman. And the man who is the subject of this ballad trots through the opening shots, not the noble gunslinger of yore, but the incongruous city-slicker figure of Warren Beatty (McCabe), his sharp suit hidden under a bulging fur coat. And the landscape through which he travels is no epic vista of rock and stone, no Monument Valley, but a rain-drenched forest caught in its late autumnal colours.
And it was Altman’s peculiar genius that this genre-bending would determine the form and ethos of the rest of the film. No straight-talking, macho dialogue but the babble of voices barely heard in the bar. No wisecracking dame or saintly pioneer for Beatty to hook up with, but a cranky Cockney whore with a drug habit. And McCabe’s motivation? Not cleaning up the streets or facing down some outlaws, but setting up the best little whorehouse in town. The only whorehouse in town, the only business…
For the desperate, scrappy little gathering of redwood buildings he arrives at is a frontier outpost, trying to scrabble some life out of the harsh environment. This is the beginning of the West, when its heart and soul, its very existence, was up for grabs. And it was Altman’s peculiar genius that the first seeds of community should lie in three uncomely girls, parked in their tent, offering a little bit of pleasure in the wilderness. And McCabe organises them, turns their services into a business. Here is the start of the pioneer spirit, the tradition of the entrepreneur, that will become America’s foundation.
But business can only lead to one thing – competition. And in Altman’s universe, that competition is ferocious, aggressive, violent – it’s administered by the gun. Mercenaries ride into town, and suddenly McCabe is fighting for his life and the settlement’s future. He’s come up against the other side of America’s new-found ambition – the ruthless profiteers who’ll shed blood for a dollar. Who will win and forge the soul of this new country? It was Altman’s peculiar genius that their shoot-out should take place unnoticed by the townspeople, as they race to protect the one other symbol of their world, apart from the brothel, that matters – the church, which is, prophetically, the building both we and McCabe see when he first rides into town. And it was Altman’s peculiar genius that as their bodies fall in the biting snow, the cranky Cockney whore should be puffing away her last drops of happiness in an opium den…
It was Altman’s peculiar genius to have made a film like McCabe and Mrs Miller.
If Jacob Estes’ first film is anything to go by, Deliverance (1972) remains American cinema’s model investigation of the male identity and the violence it can unleash. Not only does Estes quote the infamous “Squeal, piggy, squeal” line in the dialogue, he also imposes whole chunks of Deliverance’s structure and character dynamic onto his story of a group of teenagers on a boat trip. While the former film’s most memorable scene concerns portly Ned Beatty getting raped by rednecks, so this film also revolves around a ‘fat guy’ as victim, this time in the form of George, a lonely, socially clumsy bully who is accidentally killed after the others plot revenge on him. This comeuppance might have more impact if there was any sense of George being dangerous in the first place. But unfortunately, one punch in the playground at the start of the film is all we see being inflicted on Sam – his apparently habitual victim – before we plunge into a payback scenario. Instead, Estes seems impatient to get on with the male rite-of-passage that the journey will become for the other boys.
Sam and his brother Rocky appear to be from a nuclear family background but Marty suffers at the hands of a violent stepfather figure. His friend Clyde has been brought up by two gay men and George is from a single-parent family. So the development of their masculinity is seen in social as well as psychological terms. Throughout the film, starting with an early scene in which Sam challenges Rocky to a series of playful tests - “J-Lo or the girl behind you in class?” – the boys are defined according to their ability to make decisions. Marty’s philosophy is to go “with the best idea you’ve got” and it is his actions that drive the plot forward – challenging the others to a game of “truth or dare” and deciding what to do with George’s body. He constantly chastises the others for their caution and the terms of abuse he uses – “pussies, vaginas, ladies” – all reflect his assumption that such indecision is an essentially feminine trait. Marty, then, becomes redefined as the true bully of the piece, the brutality of his upbringing translating into a destructive machismo.
But this rather simplistic role-reversal generates unsettling ripples across the surface of the film. If decisiveness is equated with aggression, then inaction becomes the only alternative. Neither Rocky, Clyde, nor Sam convincingly stand up to Marty and the film ends abruptly with the youngsters merely accepting their guilt. By effectively castrating the other males of the piece, Estes inadvertently demonstrates that Marty’s ‘do or die’ ethic is the only one guaranteed to get anywhere and therefore, even more worryingly, that the others’ social backgrounds have stunted their masculine development. Furthermore, Estes’ one amendment to the Deliverance structure – the introduction of a female character in the form of Millie, Sam’s girlfriend – is tellingly the least well-developed area of the script. Failing to become anything more than a passive observer, she, too, is seen to be powerless by the end of the film and her frustration only leads to futile violence (killing a snail).
Similarly, the other key strand of Estes’ film – its exploration of different ways of seeing – leads to uncertain conclusions. Like the protagonist of Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973), George obsessively records his life, this time on video camera. Estes gives his own cinematography the same jerky, handheld feel, so that it has the quality of “documentary” to which George aspires. But these two strategies of representation are later thrown into relief by a third, the police interview camera. It captures Sam’s first, profound statement against his brother; neither of the other film documents contain such solid evidence. George’s quest to reveal the “inside” of his mind only stretches to showing a never-ending spiral and the audience receives similarly scant enlightenment from Mean Creek itself. In trying to explore the mentality of the bully, Estes fills his film with imagery that corresponds to that of George’s home movie – cutaway shots of the river and passing wildlife. But these images are left to swirl around – like the weed in the turbulent waters of the opening credit sequence – without being anchored to any firm insight, reinforcing the suggestion that Estes has come up with no clear connection to the object of his enquiry.
George fantasises that one day his video musings will be found and interpreted by more “highly-evolved beings”. Certainly, the audience of Mean Creek will wish they were on a higher plane of understanding to draw any meaning from this ambitious but ultimately misguided drama.
Director: Fritz Lang
Starring: Alfred Abel, Gustav Frohlich, Brigitte Helm
Germany/1927/150 mins
It's strange to think that one of the best-loved silent films, Fritz Lang's dystopic vision of a future society, has up till now only been available in a heavily edited and confusing version. But thanks to a miraculous discovery in Argentina, 25 minutes of lost footage have been restored and Metropolis can be seen almost in its entirety for the first time since 1927.
The added material expands three sub-plots which cast new light on the power struggles in the city. It also ups the action movie quotient, prolonging the great flood at the climax.
But the principal pleasures of Metropolis remain the same. The vast sets and extraordinary production design are a mixture of the avant garde and, to the modern eye, the charmingly retro, with biplanes fluttering over a web of steel bridges. Lang's depiction of factory workers reduced to a macabre dance of robotic movements became the definitive representation of the mechanised world.
Best of all is Brigitte Helm, playing both the saintly Maria and her diabolical robot double, a half-winking, demented monstrosity, who whips high society into a frenzy with her “Whore of Babylon” dance routine. Seldom have sci-fi and the erotic blended so successfully.
JJ Abrams, 2006, US, 126 mins
Cast: Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Michelle Monaghan
If Mission:Impossible III were a brochure for boys’ toys, it would be a five-star winner. It’s like that moment when you’re been battling through the Sunday papers only for one of those leaflets to drop out advertising lots of daft gizmos and gadgets that serve absolutely no purpose and which you’ve just got to have. The ingenuity on display here is fantastic – from pocket pens that measure how far down it is to the ground to amazing mask-making machines. And the director JJ Abrams takes great relish in displaying them in a run of exciting set pieces. The scene where Agent Ethan dons a mask in order to impersonate the villain is so technically impressive that I genuinely couldn’t tell if it was Cruise under all that latex or whether the editor hadn’t cannily spliced the film together to enable the actors to switch places.
But unfortunately, it’s not a brochure, it’s a film – and that’s where the problems start. You’d think that a franchise based on something as fun as the original TV series, with gorgeously cheesy catchphrases like “This message will self-destruct in five seconds”, would itself be a light-hearted blast. And when Abrams is let loose on the action, it is. Ethan receives the aforementioned message through the viewfinder of a dinky portable camera – a scene so ludicrous I take my hat off to the Cruisemeister for keeping a straight face – and later on, he dresses up as a priest sporting a crucifix that’s actually a bomb. Wonderful tongue-in-cheek silliness.
But oh, no, where’s this story coming from? Ethan is about to embark on a serious relationship full of strained meetings and moody silences? Corruption in the ranks? Surreptitious comments on US foreign policy? No, JJ, the ingredients don’t mix – don’t drown the zesty taste in heavy sauces. And the lesson of every James Bond film (which MI has surpassed in technical if not entertainment terms)? Match the villain to the action. But the baddie here is so thoroughly evil, so beautifully played – Seymour Hoffman sails through the film as if realising that winning an Oscar was easy after all – that the balance of the film tilts in his favour and a Saturday night popcorn flick suddenly feels dark and murky. And don’t introduce emotional weight if you can’t handle the consequences. It’s all very well creating complex characters but when they blow people away for the first time in their lives and don’t bat an eyelid, you’ve lost any chance of conviction.
But, hey, there’s an action hero or heroine lurking inside all of us and, if we agree to ignore the plot, MI3 will be the success everyone’s predicting. And while there’s hundreds of better films that have secured a place in my memory, I’m still trying to work out just how Ethan swung onto that glass building…
Raymond Depardon, 2008, France, 86 mins
A documentary on French farmers might not be everybody’s idea of a great night out but Raymond Depardon has a knack of turning this material into something beautiful and universally affecting. For the past decade, he has been visiting the remote Cévennes region of central France and crafting periodic portraits of the inhabitants and their way of life. The third in this Profile Paysans series, Modern Life also looks set to be the last, as the farmers have now reached the brink of collapse and their offspring have rejected their parents’ traditions for a more cosmopolitan lifestyle.
For this reason alone, the film is a valuable artefact - a portrait of a vanishing community, like many in the west, brutally ignored by a contemptuous and uncomprehending urban majority. Depardon, though, is not interested in the political realities faced by the farmers; he seldom asks them direct questions about economic pressures or government policy, something for which he has been criticised. But I value his more subtle approach where he simply engages his subjects in light conversation, allowing them to dictate the course of discussion and therefore hold forth on their own terms. These are taciturn people and the results will win no prizes for witty banter. But what emerges is a truer portrait of their nature, where one casual aside can reveal volumes. It allows the viewer to get to know them as individuals rather than as representatives of a social group.
One particular interview sticks in the mind. The youngest son of a long-standing peasant family has been cornered into taking over the estate after his siblings have flown the coop. We first see him posed with his parents and their dog, and here, Depardon’s judicious use of framing comes into effect. The son is noticeably pushed to one side while the patriarch takes centre stage and stares defiantly into the lens. Later, Depardon approaches the son as he works the fields on his tractor. Throughout the ensuing dialogue, which seems to last forever, the man seems to say hardly a word, but communicates everything – his solitude, his frustration at being left behind, his inability to escape the farm, his desperate attempts to score work elsewhere. It’s all in the movement – fiddling awkwardly with the tractor controls, staring off into the middle distance, refusing to look the interviewer in the eye. The result is the single most haunting sequence in the last year of film.
Cynically dismissed as “left-wing conservatism” by Sight and Sound, Modern Life, along with Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours (2008), actually represents a new movement in French cinema which is concerned with investigating how the liberal establishment and globalisation are impacting on the idea of home and national identity. They both share a concern with the fragmentation of the family, both as an individual unit and as a microcosm of the wider community. That they investigate such themes without tendentious sermonising or judgment of their subjects is to their great credit. That they are also beautiful, affectionate and thoroughly intelligent is a miracle. Let’s hope that, unlike the world receding into the sunset in Modern Life’s rapturous final shot, this kind of filmmaking goes on for a long time to come.
Sergei Bodrov, Russia/Mongolia/Germany, 2008, 120 mins
Cast: Tadanobu Asano, Honglei Sun, Khulan Chuluun
There’s one thing you should know about the Mongolians. They love Genghis Khan. No, scratch that – they worship him. After all, the ruthless war lord who saw his people conquer a fifth of the world was hailed by none other than Time magazine as the “man of the millennium”, as they’re only too proud to tell you. On a recent visit through the country via the Trans-Siberian Express, I was amazed to see what looked like a vast pile of gleaming steel in the middle of the endless barren plains, literally nowhere; our guide informed me it was a statue of their hero. Given that it could only have been erected since 1991, when the country won its fragile independence from China, and that this is one of the poorest, least-visited nations in the world, such a grand gesture is testament to their pride in his memory.
Ironic, then, that this blockbuster portrayal of his earlier life comes from Russia – the other superpower that hems Mongolia in – with lead actors taken from China and Japan (who seem to have their own fixation on Genghis, having recently churned out an epic biopic of their own, and whose resurgent nationalism is now causing sweeping concern across the whole of East Asia). A fact that hasn’t gone without comment from the Mongolians, who have criticised everything in the film from this culturally insensitive casting all the way down to the extras’ horse-riding technique! It’s also ironic that this “Asia pudding” (as we say Euro pudding) put together by the powers that were once under Genghis’ command should offer so positive a portrait of the great man himself.
But then there’s one thing that you should know about the Russians. They are heavily influenced by the “Strong Leader” theory – that a large country of dissolute groups and conflicting interests - like their own - needs the iron fist of a central authority figure to hold it all together. Hence the respect for Vladimir Putin that the West fails to comprehend. And hence why Bodrov’s film is such a good-natured spectacle of a hero getting his just revenge on his enemies, and not an examination of the progress of a tyrant.
The story follows the young Khan from boyhood, where he sees his father murdered, his mother disinherited and his family eventually cast out from their tribe. Throughout, Genghis is very much a victim, not an oppressor. Somehow, he contrives to survive, process a vendetta against his nemesis, become a living legend and unite the hordes of Central Asia into one giant army. But the key word there is “somehow”. The film never really explains how our hero manages to do this. In a narrative that’s as wild and untamed as the Mongolian landscape, events don’t link up to provide a convincing account of the accretion of power. Genghis spends almost the entire movie on the run, locked up, or isolated in the wilderness, far from any channels of power. He frequently has to hunt down his wife, torn from him by successive patriarchs (though, in a fascinating insight into Mongol attitudes to family, he simply accepts the children of her forced liaisons as his own, making the squirming double standards of The Searchers seem hysterical – or is this just Bodrov over-glorifying Genghis’ humanity?) Time and time again, he finds himself in a certain death situation only for the film to fade to black and move forward a few years to find him alive and well. It’s as if he has a guardian angel watching over him. And sure enough, Bodrov introduces a mystical element to Genghis’ powers in his association with Tengri, the thunder god and Mongolia’s governing spirit. Even in the climactic battle – brilliantly staged by Bodrov – Tengri comes to the Khan’s aid, throwing down his lightning (which all Mongols fear, apparently) to cow the enemy. But this has the effect of undermining Genghis’ stature even further – he can only win through divine intervention.
The closing credits music gives it away. A blasting rock guitar crashes in as the Khan seals his victory and sets off to take over the world. This is “punk epic”, stylised cinema to match the anachronistic Mohican sported by Genghis’ too-modern looking blood brother, Jamukha. The editing is scissor-sharp, the labyrinthine opening tracking shot a declaration of “show-off” cinema, the spurts of blood caught in mid-air recalling such gore-fests as 28 Days Later. And it’s no surprise to find the cinematographer is Sergey Trofimov, who shot the hyperkinetic fantasies, Night Watch and Day Watch. As such, it’s a full-blooded, immensely watchable saga that captures the landscape throughout the seasons in all its dazzling splendour. But, unlike its protagonist, it never manages to be anything other than ordinary, a stock blockbuster to file under Lawrence of Arabia-lite. And the horse-riding is terrible.
Director: Philippe Falardeau
Cast: Mohamed Fellag, Danielle Proulx, Jules Philip
Canada/2011/95 mins
This Oscar-nominated film joins a growing number of works, including Laurent Cantet's The Class, that are concerned not so much with the problems encountered in the modern classroom – delinquency, disobedience, general teenage unpleasantness – but the teachers' own inability to deal with them.
Such films usually end with an uplifting message in amongst the messiness of lives carrying on. But Falardeau's film packs some unexpected punches that disorient the audience as much as the children they're watching; at the beginning, a young female teacher hangs herself and the man who replaces her is clearly on the run from an ambiguous past in Algeria.
Falardeau uses this unusual scenario to investigate the different kinds of violence done on young minds; from the dictates of an authoritarian teacher to the unintentional callousness of a headmistress whose “hands-off” approach to respecting children's space leaves them without comfort and warmth when they need it the most.
The whole is treated with admirable matter-of-factness and Falardeau has the bravery to leave many issues unresolved at the end. Nevertheless, it remains an extraordinarily positive portrait of committed people succeeding against the odds.
Gary David Goldberg, 2005, USA, 98 mins
Cast: Diane Lane, John Cusack, Christopher Plummer
What to do with gifted, Oscar-nominated actresses who’ve crossed the rubicon of 40 and reached the prime of their life? Hollywood’s answer: stick them in a romantic comedy for divorcees. The latest victim to appear in a long line of adaptations of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus is Diane Lane, whose performance in Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful was so committed that even the Academy couldn’t ignore it. But that nomination confers upon her the status of star and there are few roles being written for female performers of this age and calibre. And so Lane finds herself carrying this dreary rom-com about a newly-divorced woman back on the dating merry-go-round who has the unfortunate luck to find herself tackling every ineligible bachelor in town before coming across John Cusack at the dog park.
Ah, yes, the charisma-free Cusack. There’s a good book to be written explaining why this actor has cast such a spell over both mainstream and independent directors. Indeed, Must Love Dogs’ director David Goldberg was apparently so enamoured of Cusack’s talent that he let the actor change his dialogue at will. The story goes that he received back 35 pages of corrections. You wouldn’t know it. Cusack’s mission seems to be to make the dialogue as low-key and cliché-free as possible, working against the usual fluff found in these films. Goldberg follows his cue and underplays almost every scene. But that means all the romantic punch is taken out of the couple’s encounters and any chemistry is stifled at birth.
And there’s no point getting all postmodern with your material if ultimately it stills includes such classic stand-bys as the loveable Oirish father figure, the cute dog and the obligatory race against time at the end to tell “the one” that you love them. Except that there’s no clock ticking away at all here and certainly no reason for Diane Lane – Diane Lane! – to jump into a river and flail after a seemingly disinterested Cusack in his handmade canoe. The pained expression Lane carries throughout the film is just screaming, “I’m too damned intelligent for this – get me out of here!”
But what’s really disturbing about such films is the uncomfortable questions they raise about modern storytelling. For example, what is it about Americans and the father-daughter relationship? Why does almost every film featuring a strong female protagonist have her actions thrown into relief by a loveable patriarchal figure with no mother – either dead or divorced - in sight? And then there’s the lifestyle issue. Lane’s character is recently divorced and a primary school teacher, yet she lives in a mansion and drives a car that looks like it’s been nicked from the back lot of a James Bond movie. The attempts at making this romance more realistic do not extend to showing people with no money, it seems. And indeed, they need it, the amount of time they’re on the Internet. Even if you didn’t know that the ubiquitous PerfectMatch.com was an actual website, you’d still feel that the film was an extended advertisement for all the ways that little home computer can make your life so much more exciting.
It’s not so much a case of product placement as a wholesale agenda for the modern woman. Nowhere is this more acutely felt than in the main thrust of the storyline – that Lane absolutely must find a new partner, irrespective of her own apprehension at the idea. In the most beautifully-played scene in the film, she blithely tells Cusack that her estranged husband simply “stopped” loving her. But the poignancy of that moment is undermined by a film which finds every friend and confidante mercilessly pushing her onto the next fiasco of a date and shows her sobbing in the shower when another dolt proves unavailable. It’s almost as if those staid public information films from the ‘50s telling women what to cook and how to behave had been adapted for a hip contemporary audience but that one inviolable truth remained – a woman just has to have her man.
Director: David Volach
Starring: Assi Dayan, Ilan Griff, Sharon Hacohen
Israel/2007/74 mins
Winner of the top jury prize at the Tribeca Film Festival, this is an intimate portrait of life amongst a family of Haredi Jews. It was made by writer and director, David Volach, who grew up within this ultra-Orthodox community before rejecting it as an adult. As such, the film is both sympathetic towards its characters while also being quietly scathing of the stifling laws under which they live.
It centres around young Menahem Eidelmann, the son of the local rabbi, a much revered religious leader who is so immersed in his faith that he has become estranged from his own family. When they take a trip to the Dead Sea, this neglect will have tragic consequences for Menahem...
It's a slight story that gains its power from sensitive performances and subtly potent imagery that makes a change in the light on a beach feel like the most devastating moment of loss. One of the most impressive debuts of recent years.
Director: Werner Herzog
Cast: Michael Shannon, Willem Dafoe, Chloe Sevigny
USA/2009/91 mins
For some reason, Herzog's companion film to Bad Lieutenant hasn't received much attention. But it's a similarly bewildering shaggy dog story, full of wit and lunacy and peculiar animals – flamingoes and ostriches this time round. It's also produced by David Lynch, and if the combination of Lynch and Herzog doesn't get your mouth watering (and mind boggling), then cinema may not be your thing.
The narrative adopts a Citizen Kane-like structure as cop Willem Dafoe tries to piece together from witnesses' stories why a budding young actor has run his mother through with a sword. The result is a portrait of the everyday world as hopelessly insane, where an average joe becomes an Aguirre-style visionary and cops approaching a hostile gunman, hands held aloft, look as if they're at an evangelical rally. Michael Shannon is magnificently eerie as the killer, yet at the same time, genuinely sympathetic, so much so that the film also acts as a surprisingly tender account of mental instability.
It's not Herzog's best work, but it's definitely worth a watch. And the flamingoes are fabulous.
Remember that old kids' game where you'd take turns in telling a story, the first player setting up the scenario, and then each person thereafter embellishing or twisting the narrative as they pleased? Well, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's debut feature is something of an adult version. He and a small documentary team take their camera on a journey through Thailand, interviewing people from all walks of life, and coaxing personal anecdotes from them, before asking them to take part in constructing a story. This concerns a young handicapped boy, his teacher, and the mysterious object that drops from her skirt, and is recreated by actors on screen as the film progresses.
The director has said that the idea came to him from the “Exquisite Corpse” paintings of the Surrealists, in which each artist would work on one section of a picture without ever seeing the whole until the end. But the comparison to a children's game is more apt here, not just because Apichatpong's film is so sprightly and so playful – he cheerfully gets an old granny drunk before she tells her part of the story, and gleefully breaks the fourth wall, showing how his young actor is desperate for a KFC meal when the shooting's done – but because it is the schoolkids he interviews at the end of the film who prove its most anarchic participants, and who the director lets wrestle the film from his grasp.
This is what Apichatpong is looking for – the power of people to take a control of a narrative in a country where often the political narrative takes hold of them. His first interviewee is a woman who was virtually sold into slavery by an impoverished father. Her words are intercut with photos of the latest presidential candidates smiling down inanely from billboards. Throughout the film, each new “player” puts a twist on the story that reflects their own lives and desires – the first woman creating a portrait of the domestic stability and mutual support she yearns for, the kids at the end relishing tearing that to pieces and seeing it spiral into sci-fi weirdness and bloody revenge. But each segment still carries the DNA of its predecessors and patterns repeat; later, the teacher's boyfriend will try to sell her charges into slavery in Bangkok.
As such, Mysterious Object At Noon is nothing less than a metaphorical travelogue through a nation's psyche, putting the facts under the microscope by examining its fantasies. The contrasting imaginations of the storytellers are representative of the complexity of viewpoints in Thailand itself: urban v rural, superstition v modernism. And Apichatpong finds a wealth of directorial styles to match, from a bizarre sequence in which a boy hides a woman's body in a plastic closet – her head lolls about a lot – to a beautiful held shot of the teacher, standing in a restaurant backroom listening to radio propaganda, that sums up a whole history of a country in barely three minutes.
The Disc
Lovers of the lush colour cinematography found in Apichatpong's later, more renowned films such as Palme d'Or winner, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), might be disappointed that Mysterious Object is in grainy black and white. And grainier than it should be, actually, because, as is explained at length both in the accompanying booklet and documentary extra on the disc, the film was shot on 16mm and then blown up to 35mm, but the original 16mm camera reversal print no longer exists, and the restoration shown here had to made from the 35mm negative. This means some loss of detail in the image, which rather sweetly, Apichatpong waxes philosophical about in an interview extra, and it's a philosophy which has clearly been taken up by the restorers, who worked in tandem with the director on this release. Several “errors” have been left uncorrected and, in the train sequences in particular, tramlines are clearly visible on screen. But for this viewer, the kind of ghostlike, occasionally overexposed feel of some images actually adds to the dreamlike quality of the film.
Mention should also be made of the excellent new 5.1 surround mix present on the disc alongside the original Dolby Stereo track. It really adds to the documentary sense of the film, suddenly pitching the listener into these diverse, now all-encompassing environments, and enhances Apichatpong's device of playing ambient sound from one location over the events occurring in another, thus meshing them together thematically.
One further point: the print the restorers worked from had burnt-in English subs rather awkwardly placed on a black border at the bottom of the screen. These have been kept because removing them digitally “ran the risk of introducing artefacts” in the image. They don't spoil one's enjoyment of the film.
The Extras
There's a wonderful essay from the ever reliable Tony Rayns in the accompanying booklet which relates his own significant role in getting both this film and its director the international attention they deserved. Apparently, Apichatpong ran up to him in a cinema lobby, pressed a VHS into his hands, and begged him to watch it; Rayns thought it one of the most significant debut films in decades. Such things as legends are made of.
Sadly, the extras on the disc itself are not quite so amusing. There's an extremely awkward interview with the director in what seems to be a West London garden, in which Apichatpong gamely answers – in cautious English – questions from a rather embarrassed-looking gentleman with an absurdly deep voice. They both look cold. It's all very odd and not terribly enlightening. But there is a charming cat.
Apart from the aforementioned piece on the restoration, the only other extra is a short film, Nimit (Meteorites), made in 2007. Suffice to say, it's not one of the director's masterpieces, and seems more like an avant garde home movie, or part of an installation piece, than a fully realised work.
Jared Hess, 2006, US, 92 mins
Cast: Jack Black, Ana de la Reguera, Héctor Jiménez
Mucha Lucha!
If that phrase means nothing to you, then you’re probably not one of those people who sneaked home early from work to catch a cult children’s cartoon of the same name on afternoon TV, one set in the world of Lucha Libre. And if that phrase means nothing to you, then the new comedy starring Jack Black is going to be something of a culture shock. Lucha Libre is a bizarre form of wrestling – think the ‘70s antics of Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks crossed with the ‘glamorous’ world of WWF and Mexican carnival. The key difference is that each competitor wears a mask and the ultimate humility they can suffer is to have it ripped off in front of the baying audience.
For Black’s character, Ignacio, this would be particularly excruciating as concealing his identity is paramount. In real life, he’s a monk in charge of a group of hungry orphans, and wearing stretchy pants and beating up beefcakes is not part of his holy vows. But he’s obsessed with wrestling and, together with his street urchin pal, Esqueleto, he decides to enter the biggest Lucha contest in the area.
We’re in School of Rock territory here, with this film shamelessly trying to ape the winning set-up of that film, with Jack Black again in charge of a group of oddball kids and in defiance of stern authority figures. But the world of Nacho Libre is completely virgin territory for American comedy and so it has a fresh and original feel. True, most of the jokes revolve around Black’s rotundity or his silly Hispanic accent, and bizarrely, the set-piece wrestling sequences are actually the least amusing moments in the film. But there is a kind of innocent joy about the whole thing – recalling the daft antics of Benny Hill or the Carry On team – that means it’s impossible to take against. Ultimately, it’s pure, silly, unadulterated fun, and in an era where film comedies are becoming ever more cynical and knowing, that at least is refreshing.
Basically, what I’m saying is, I liked it, and have a hunch it may be this year’s greatest guilty pleasure. And if nothing else, it’s introduced to the world the marvellous trash classic that is Beck Hansen’s (aka Mr Loco’s) opening song, Real Religious Man, which I’ve not been able to get out of my head since seeing the movie. So, altogether now…
I am, I am
I know I am
I think I am….
Kirk Jones, 2005, UK, 97 mins
Cast: Emma Thompson, Colin Firth, Kelly Macdonald
Whatever happened to Emma Thompson? At one point, she seemed the all-conquering heroine of British cinema, moving effortlessly from comedy - The Tall Guy and her long-forgotten TV series Thompson - to period costume drama and her Oscar for Howard’s End. She and Kenneth Branagh were the golden couple of Brit drama and, as Thompson rolled towards her double triumph as screenwriter and lead actress in Sense and Sensibility, it seemed they could do no wrong. But British journalists have never felt comfortable with homegrown theatrical talent and those very connections with cosy, respectable, middle-class drama saw her being cruelly dismissed as a “luvvie”, suited only to roles with clipped accents in bonnets. Thompson fought against this image, appearing with Schwarzenegger in Junior, playing the President’s wife in Primary Colors and then taking roles in hard-hitting TV shows like Angels In America and Wit. But these are little-known in the UK and Thompson seems to have been away from our silver screens for some time.
Nanny McPhee is, then, something of a comeback vehicle as she returns to the dual role of screenwriter-star. An adaptation of Christianna Brand’s Nurse Matilda books, the film concerns a mysterious nanny with special powers brought in to control some typically irksome British child actors. Thompson dons make-up, mousy wig, an unflattering black dress and bizarre false tooth and still manages to work her magic. Without ever softening the image of this sometimes cold and abrasive character, she manages to convince the audience that she deserves the children’s trust and affection.
Similarly, her script – though obviously derivative of both Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music – does not renege on presenting the darker elements of Brand’s books and balances scenes of riotous naughtiness with the loss of the children’s mother. In fact, death is curiously omnipresent throughout the film. Colin Firth’s father figure works at the local mortuary - a key scene between him and his eldest, Simon, takes place over a prostrate corpse. And when not embalming clients, Firth rejects the company of his offspring to talk to the spirit of his dead wife.
This sense of the macabre is complemented by a refreshingly subtle play on the idea of appearances. As Nanny McPhee helps the children overcome their father’s indifference, so her visage changes from that of an old crone to Thompson’s own, more glamorous self, thus implying that awareness of others enables us to see them more positively. Kelly Macdonald’s scullery maid also undergoes a change of clothes and deportment but this is revealed as a mask for her true character. And the wicked stepmother-to-be’s gaudy idea of marriage attire is pointedly contrasted with Nanny McPhee’s more pure, snowy-white ideal. None of this is spelled out in the dialogue, so the younger audience is pleasingly left to work it out for themselves.
Sadly, director Kirk Jones’ approach to this artful screenplay is as tasteless as the stepmother’s wedding dress. Taking his cue from modern American children’s fantasies like Cat In The Hat, he drenches the exaggerated production design in bright colour and allows the jaunty musical score to drown out almost every scene. The result is a relentlessly bombastic experience that stifles the more emotional strains of the story. Jones would have been better off crafting a gentler, more traditional family drama rather than this hyperactive cartoon, thus enabling the comic set-pieces to stand out in a narrative that is here all set at the same frantic pitch. Ultimately, one can’t help feeling that the hard work of the head girl has been let down by an incorrigibly naughty schoolboy…
Timur Bekmambetov, 2004, Russia, 114 mins
Cast: Konstantin Khabensky, Vladimir Menshov, Galina Tyunina
If you’re in the mood for a bizarre hybrid of The Matrix and Buffy The Vampire Slayer Russian style, then Night Watch is the film for you. Only, take a couple of headache pills with you as Timur Bekmambetov’s directing style is as dizzying as that sales pitch.
His saga of warring angels – light and dark – fighting over the soul of a young boy in modern-day Moscow has become a huge box-office hit in its home country and already spawned a sequel. But it’s now entering a market saturated with hi-octane, effects-heavy blockbusters – has it got anything new to offer? At first, Night Watch comes on like a Lord of the Rings wannabe with two great armour-clad armies clashing in an indistinct time in the Earth’s past. But then, it smartly segues into the dingy environs of a modern housing block where a man is seeking the services of a witch to get rid of an unwanted child. Such a brilliant gear change in narrative might augur well for an enigmatic thriller if it wasn’t for a Biblical-style voiceover that bluntly sets out the Good vs Evil structure of the plot.
This becomes the pattern of Night Watch – a series of good ideas thrown together in the hope the combination will add up to something more original and striking, only for the whole to collapse under direction that is either too literal or wantonly obscure. Bekmambetov belongs to that “film school” group of directors who think they must show they are “directing” at all times, throwing every trick – jump cuts, slo-mo, time-lapse photography – at their audience in an attempt to impress them, only to confuse them thoroughly. It’s like watching Wong Kar-Wei on acid. At one point, we follow the trajectory of a tiny bolt falling for what seems like aeons from an aeroplane down through the clouds into the lift shaft of a tenement building. All very impressive, but it advances the plot not one jot and holds up the pace considerably. And when the film moves into its most intriguing arena of conflict – the “Gloom”, a parallel dimension through which angels, but not humans, can move – Bekmambetov steps up the gimmick quota. The drone of unearthly mosquitoes eerily evokes its presence, but the endless play with slow-motion action and voiceover just bewilders the audience at a point when they need to be most clear about this new environment.
In fairness, the director is working with a script that is itself muddled and over-ambitious. There’s about three films in one here – a modern variant on the vampire mythos, with nods to Interview With A Vampire and the aforementioned Buffy, an Oedipal drama with a father unwittingly discovering a long-lost son, and a disaster movie concerning a crippled jet. Even at 114 minutes, the film just can’t cope with this narrative overload. The airplane subplot does provide a fantastic climax with the craft heading into a Moscow plunged into darkness by a power cut – but it comes two-thirds of the way in. After that, the remaining plot strands have to be mopped up and, although the film strives for an admirably ambiguous and downbeat ending, the resolution of the protagonist’s fight for his son is not as potent as that exciting action sequence and is offset, anyway, by a concluding voiceover that basically tells us everything will be all right, anyway. After all, they’ve got to leave room for a sequel…
One last, unequivocal plus point – as someone who has worked in the subtitling industry, I can only applaud the ingenuity with which the production team have made this most functional of aides stylish and attractive in an attempt to appease a notoriously caption-phobic public. Whatever else might be said about Night Watch, its font-changing, screen-busting subtitles must be ranked the best for any film ever. That’s something…isn’t it?
Director: Michael Whyte
UK/2009/105 mins
Anyone who was moved by Philip Groning's Into Great Silence, a study of the monks at Grande Chartreuse, should check out this homegrown counterpart. Michael Whyte spent a year filming at the Carmelite nunnery in Notting Hill and has produced a compelling portrait of the women's lives there.
Whyte has a telling eye for detail – the rubber-soled sandals poking out underneath a habit, the groceries being ordered off the Internet – while his editing acts as a subtle commentary, cutting from a discussion of death to a sunlit corridor, a shadowy doorway at the far end.
As with the nuns' own timetable, the film is structured around different services, most notably those of Easter, where one tiny, quivering flame in the darkness multiplies to become the many candles in a night-time procession.
All these activities are intercut with sensitive interviews with the women themselves and the odd shock moment – the sudden buzz of a chainsaw in the garden, the sight of a dead nun's face – which jolt us into realising this is less a hushed retreat than a living, working community.
Director: Bahman Ghobadi
Starring: Negar Shaghaghi, Ashkan Koshanejad, Hamed Behdad
Iran/2009/106 mins
Rock bands? Underground music? If your idea of Iranian cinema is the contemplative work of Kiarostami, this film will come as a surprise. It does for Tehran what Blow-Up did for London in the '60s, capturing a city at a time when it's really swinging. That might sound odd, given the recent political crisis in the country, but Ghobadi gives us a fascinating insight behind the veil drawn by Ahmaninejad and reveals a youth culture brimming with energy and passion.
He follows singer-songwriters, Ashkan and Negar, as they try to obtain passports for a crucial concert in London and form a band by cherry-picking musicians from different rock groups. This slight story is really just an excuse to showcase each group in turn, but the music is sensational and each performance throws a different light on the pop culture scene. Ashkan and Negar specialise in indie rock, but Ghobadi covers the whole spectrum of modern music, featuring heavy metal, romantic ballads, and Persian rap. The result is a political cinema with genuine charge and intelligence but that feels like a house party.
Richard Eyre, 2006, UK, 92 mins
Cast: Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett, Bill Nighy
It’s February again and time to wheel out Dame Judi for another chance to win the Oscar. And yet again the vehicle is one of those homegrown, superficially controversial but ultimately very cuddly and middlebrow dramas so beloved of British film producers (cf. Mrs Henderson Presents, Iris, Last of the Blonde Bombshells, etc, etc). Everything is correct and in its place – a contemporary subject taken from a modern novel, a stellar cast of top-notch performers very consciously “Acting” for all their worth, and a witty, literate script which lingers just this side of being genuinely acid and subversive. Watching it, I couldn’t help being reminded of Nick James’ article about our national cinema in the January issue of Sight and Sound. He began by announcing a renaissance of great films and up-and-coming directors, then summing up the problems facing them, and then conceding that none of what they were producing was that good in the first place. Oh, dear.
It’s a shame because there’s an impressive array of talent on offer here. Zoe Heller’s original novel - about the affair between an art teacher and an underage boy in her class and the way it is observed by a lonely older teacher uncomfortably obsessed with her young colleague – cleverly co-mingled fiction with journalistic reportage, the details of the case being modelled on a real incident. And Patrick Marber (of Closer fame) is the perfect choice to adapt it to the screen. He revels in the wicked asides of Judi Dench’s character, using the drip-drip contempt of her lonely, old spinster as a mask from behind which he can inveigh against the crass Trisha-culture of modern Britain and its ramshackle education system. His screenplay spits out gobbets of truth, skewering the self-interest of the tabloid press in its hysteria over paedophilia and the way that moral uproar allows it, not so much freedom, but a tyranny over its victims. And it lays open glaring but often conveniently ignored questions – if sex with a 15-year-old is so utterly evil, how come, in five month’s time, say, on the event of their 16th birthday, it becomes legally acceptable? And do we feel as disgusted by a female paedophile as a male one? When asked if they’d like to have had a teacher that showed them ropes, I’m sure most men would find themselves saying, “Yes, please, Miss”!
But it’s at its best in the portrayal of loneliness. Few films tackle this last cultural taboo of our society – it doesn’t make for snappy dialogue or great action. Marber, however, pinpoints its excruciating pain without sentiment or censure. He creates vignettes of dead time and little moments of euphoria, when the older teacher's worth, or even mere existence, is finally recognised by an acquaintance. Eyre complements these sections with cruel portraits of Dench slumped in the bath or burying her beloved cat - all in muted, daggy colours.
Ultimately, though, the script sets up this complex portrait only to betray it in the final reel. At first, her bitter antagonism to the world at large acts as a challenge to the audience, but the ending brings her into line with popular viewpoints, dismissing her as a harmless crank with psychological problems. This is the pattern for the whole film, to plane off the sharp edges so it can ultimately be accommodated at the local Multiplex and the Academy’s gong show. A glance at IMDB shows it has received the R rating in America for “aberrant sexual content”, a surprising description of a film with little nudity and which lacks the courage to flesh out its sex scenes and relay the full extent of their pleasure. Why isn’t Marber allowed to be as biting as he was on TV? Why is his attack curtailed so much by cautious producers that the end product feels like yet another script by committee? And why, oh why, is ex-theatre director Eyre still let loose on film – a man whose approach is so pedestrian that to describe it as “point-and-shoot” would be far too complimentary?
Just think what Claude Chabrol would have done with this material. And with these actresses! Judi Dench is, of course, marvellous, relishing the bile of her bitter, cantankerous hag, but Blanchett matches her in a more difficult role, both less sympathetic and somewhat underwritten. Her cool, intelligent demeanour nicely offsets Dench’s powerhouse performance and Nighy’s bizarrely over-the-top one. Yes, there’s a good film waiting to get out here, but the ambition of its makers is not up to that of the story.
The clumsy caravan of British cinema trundles on…
Kelly Reichardt, 2006, USA, 76 mins
Cast: Will Oldham, Daniel London, Tanya Smith
What is it about US indie films that they borrow all the wrong elements of European movies in their straining to be regarded as art? Kelly Reichardt’s film Old Joy features the whole repertoire – long, contemplative shots of the surrounding countryside, understated acting, cod philosophical stories shovelling meaningful themes onto a perilously thin storyline, all topped off with a Ry Cooder-esque soundtrack. It’s as if the superficial elements of arthouse are thought to bestow some magical charm on the material.
In reality, there’s nothing wrong with the classic American mode of storytelling, as exemplified by Hollywood, as long as it’s applied with intelligence. Reichardt’s story, though, is self-consciously a slice-of-life and too flimsy to be called a narrative. It centres around two friends, Kurt and Mark, both stumbling through the no-man’s-land of their thirties, who set off for a camping trip in remote Oregon. Mark is about to become a father, while Kurt has not yet left off from the wanderlust of his youth.
It’s in these two characters that the film finds what merit it has. Both are played superbly by Will Oldham and Daniel London, whose haunted faces say far more than the sparse dialogue. Indeed, this is a film of faces – natural, careworn faces – untainted by makeup or false glamour, the kind that used to inhabit the movies of the ‘70s and give a taste of the real America beyond Mulholland Drive. Reichardt carries this sense of reality through to her observation of the landscape with its truck stops, gas stations and industrial sites – the in-between places that most movies ignore. It’s a shame, then, that these are filmed so flatly, the cinematography being uninspiring and sometimes unevenly framed, surprising given the director’s background in the visual arts. And it’s also disappointing that one of the increasingly rare breed of “countryside” films should fail to give this environment any character of its own. Perhaps this ‘unspectacular’ quality is intentional, an evocation of the normal and everyday, as in the English photographs of Martin Parr, but the result is less affecting.
It’s apposite, though, that Reichardt’s film should recall the ‘70s, because it is, in effect, a distant response from the 21st century to that long-lost era. Kurt and Mark are children of that decade, and Kurt, at least, is desperately trying to uphold its counter-culture ethos, his life a daisy chain of weed, parties and hippy retreats. But it’s a life increasingly hemmed in by the new world, as embodied by the background of radio programmes bewailing the Neo-Con order and its weak Democrat counterpart. In a sense, the two friends represent the shattered dreams of their parents’ generation, the “old joy” of the title worn thin. The resurrection of their friendship becomes a thawing of the conservative frost that has settled on American lives, nowhere better evoked than in the ten-minute sequence at a hot springs bath in the forest – an epiphany of silence and running water – where the men reach a kind of rapprochement. Indeed, this is a “quiet” film, where the muted soundtrack stands as a rebellion against the modern barrage of sound, both in movies and in life (though, sadly, the film feels it necessary to flag this up to the audience in the dialogue). But such retro beatnik sentiments become just that – sentiment – a kind of American Pie nostalgia for old record shops and life on the road.
Ultimately, Old Joy runs out of things to say. As a slice-of-life, it has its virtues. It certainly doesn't pretend that its wispy vignette of American life has as much universal significance as those in the excruciatingly crass Babel. And its observation of male friendship is unusually tender, allowing a closeness between the protagonists that touches on, but doesn’t necessarily teeter into, the old cliché of homoeroticism. But one can’t help feeling that there’s a reason why the characters communicate so little – because neither they nor the director have any answers to what their lives have become.
Sergio Leone, 1968, Italy, 165 mins
Cast: Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Claudia Cardinale
In 1968, one man set out to make the ultimate western. It was both a farewell to a dying genre and a complete reworking of its conventions, a hymn to its myths but one that undermined its ideals. It took two legends from the classic years (Jack Elam, Woody Strode) and killed them off in the first scene, reintroduced a hero (Henry Fonda) and turned him into the blackest of black-hatted villains. It revelled in a primal morality of brute, masculine force and finished with the triumph of a woman. And it was popular. But many serious cinephiles rejected it – the spaghetti western, of which this was the apotheosis, was “impure”, an intellectual European riff on a world close to American cinema's heart, a tongue-in-cheek revision of a nation's founding texts.
Now, 40 years later, the film is being re-released, self-evidently a classic. What's changed? The answer lies in the dimension over which Sergio Leone was a complete master: time. In the first place, the western never went away. Instead, it fed off the new ideas injected into it by Leone and Sam Peckinpah, and the enthusiasm of new auteurs like Clint Eastwood and Kevin Costner, to the point where Once Upon A Time In The West feels less like a grand tombstone than a crucial milestone in a contemporary art. Furthermore, Leone's influence as a director spread across cinema, his arthouse treatment of familiar genre tropes stimulating figures as far apart as Quentin Tarantino, Michael Mann and Hong Kong action directors like John Woo.
But what precisely does that “influence” consist of? Again, the treatment of time. Leone's slow, hieratic shootouts gave his films the feel of an opera or a masque, one critic christening them “a dance of death”. Action became extended, the instant hit stretched out to eternity, simultaneous acts of violence choreographed and edited so as to become discrete events. Woo's gun ballets start here. But it's not just the set-pieces that are prolonged; everything is in slow-motion. The very first sequence of Once Upon A Time... (and if films are judged by the quality of their opening and closing scenes then this film must be the best ever made) expands the familiar “hoods lying in wait for the hero at the train station” into a small playlet of its own. Except there are few words; instead an eerie symphony of everyday sounds, a kind of musique concrète, accompanies their taciturn vigil, an extraordinary precursor of Ennio Morricone's magnificent score, with its own themes – again like an opera – for each individual character.
As a child, I fell in love with Leone's first trilogy, the “Man with no name” films starring Clint Eastwood. I adored their offbeat humour and outrageous gunplay (especially those crazy ricochet sounds), all present and correct here. But I also found them extremely moving, the end of each film engendering a significant sense of loss. It's hard to pinpoint the reason, but again, it lies in the approach to time. Leone's pacing, that of a sun-drenched rider at noon in Death Valley, helps gives the impression of a West that is eternal, a world of endless desert, one-horse towns preserved in aspic. Like Jack Torrance in The Shining, they've always been there. In the climax to Once Upon A Time... , we flashback to the original crime (original sin?) that kickstarted the revenge saga of the present. A giant stone arch stands in the middle of...nowhere...a vast echoing valley of burning sand. The cowboy villains are like figures from the Old Testament. For Leone, the West is a world of myth, where the heroes are roaming gods and their opponents fallen angels. The dissolution of that world, portrayed as a necessary evil, feels, then, like an eviction from Eden, a ruthless push into modernity.
Now, in a period when culture has turned into a mush of relative values, Leone's work seems more robust than it did before, the humour less prominent than the aura of social compromise, the much-berated violence less cynical than the tap-tap-tapping on Claudia Cardinale's back. It's a movie that's come of age. But the question is, have we aged with it? Have the intervening years of decline in genre entertainment matured or regressed our ability to appreciate it? Has time been kind to us?