Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975, It/Fr/Sp, 124 mins
Cast: Jack Nicholson, Maria Schneider, Jenny Runacre
Seeing as The Passenger marked a return to form for Antonioni in the mid-1970s and was one of the key films of that decade, it seems remarkable that it’s been away so long. But for the last 19 years or so, it’s been extremely difficult – often impossible – to see. This has something to do with lead actor Jack Nicholson purchasing the rights to the movie and then, for strange, never-fully-explained reasons of his own, forbidding any theatrical showing unless he or Antonioni themselves were present. However, in 2003, Nicholson finally sold the rights on to Sony and here is the long-awaited re-release.
But hold on, it’s not that easy. The original cut of the movie lasted some four hours but Antonioni managed to cut it down to two-and-a-half to appease his American producers, MGM. But for them, only an edit under two hours would be acceptable – a 118-minute version was arrived at, much to the director’s chagrin. This cut was five minutes shorter than the European version, distributed under the title Professione:Reporter, that featured two extra crucial scenes in London. When Sony released their new print in America, eagle-eyed film writers noticed they were distributing the shortest version and complained, forcing the company to strike a new print of the European version. And that’s the one we’ve got now – thank God for critics, eh?
All that information may seem superfluous to some, but it makes for a peculiarly apt history for a film that is itself a jigsaw puzzle of fragments and clues. Like L’Avventura (1959) and Blow-Up (1965) before it, The Passenger centres itself around an enigma but one that is never resolved; the film moves forward not to tie up loose ends in the plot but to expound on the existentialist questions raised by its hero’s actions. Nicholson plays a reporter who is sick of being the ‘same’ wherever he goes, so he trades in his identity for that of a dead man in a hotel room. The remainder of the film becomes a quest to discover the truth behind his new name, but Antonioni is less interested in the answers than in Nicholson’s inability to adapt, to become ‘new’.
Much of the film is taken up with the reporter’s odyssey across Europe – through such exotic locales as London, Barcelona and southern Spain – and one might be forgiven for thinking it a glorified travelogue. But the beauty of these places is a necessary counterpoint to Nicholson’s ennui. At one point, he asks Maria Schneider: “What do you see?” And seeing is the key to all Antonioni’s work. For what we see is stunning architecture, gorgeous scenery; but what Nicholson sees, as he intimates in his tale of a blind man suddenly restored to sight after many years, is only ugliness. The sights change, but the eyes that see them remain the same.
Throughout Antonioni’s patient, fastidiously-choreographed long takes, the shot seems to be sliding away from the protagonist, discovering new vistas or hitherto unseen characters, some re-enacting past events as if in flashback. This technique reaches its apotheosis in the famous penultimate shot, where Nicholson meets his doom as the camera wades out into the afternoon sunshine of a Spanish street. The images are concrete and tactile but the sensation is one of fluidity, of ephemeral lives and moments. It’s almost as if the ‘passenger’ of the title is Nicholson’s character himself, hitching a ride on another man’s identity but not gaining control of the journey, the physical surface of the film reflecting his failure to do so.
Since I first discovered Antonioni through Blow-Up, his films have always had the same effect. It’s as if somebody’s given me a new pair of glasses and I’m seeing cinema – and the world – anew. His approach can be boring, sometimes downright opaque. But days after, you can’t forget the experience. If you’re new to his movies, The Passenger is a great place to start. But if you’re a veteran, you’ll find it holds its own among his finest work.
One of the few directors Stanley Kubrick ever allowed himself to praise was Max Ophuls. For him, Ophuls’ famous camera moves were “more like a beautifully choreographed ballet than anything else”. Yet when Kubrick was asked to list his ten best films in 1963, Ophuls was conspicuous by his absence. This pretty much sums up the critical reputation enjoyed by the director throughout cinema history. Those who have seen his work never fail to fall in love with it, yet he is seldom placed in the pantheon of the greats and, so far, his films have been all but impossible to find on DVD. Now, Second Sight have put that to rights with the release of four of his greatest achievements: Letter From An Unknown Woman, The Reckless Moment, Madame De…, and this, the least known of the four but arguably the most exquisite.
It opens with the voice of a dead man speaking to you in the dark. That a film entitled “Pleasure” should open with such a conceit is the first intimation of its genius and the way it will balance scenes of happiness and joy with those of death and despair. The man identifies himself as Guy de Maupassant, and it’s upon three of his stories, all set in the 19th century, that the film is based. In the first, Le Masque, the heady atmosphere of a Paris music hall is disturbed by the presence of a masked man who joins in the revelry only to collapse on the dance floor. A doctor is called and the man’s true identity is revealed… This little gem constitutes 20 of the best minutes of cinema you will ever see, up there with the openings of Hitchcock’s Psycho and Lang’s Ministry of Fear, in that it is utterly self-contained and yet acts as the ideal prologue for what’s to follow. Ophuls’ storytelling is at its most assured here, as the camera whirls amongst the dancers, almost careering into them, capturing their sense of freedom and abandon. But at the same time, it keeps a slight distance from the masked figure, and repeatedly frames his fellow dancers through archways and glass doors, subtly suggesting his estrangement from them. It is only when the doctor returns the man to his home that we are allowed into his interior world, both literally, in the form of his gloomy, silent apartment, contrasting sharply with the noise and vigour of the dance hall, and metaphorically, in the rueful words of his long-suffering wife.
This movement between insides and outsides, between gaiety and repose, joy and regret, is picked up on in the second story, La Maison Tellier, and nowhere more brilliantly than in its opening shot. The camera tracks through a small Channel town towards the local brothel but, unlike its punters, is abruptly stopped at the doorway. It then glides up the façade and around the corner of the house, watching at each window as the Madame tidies up in readiness for the night’s activities. At no point during the following scenes are we allowed inside Madame’s premises, which only adds to our empathy with her clients when, one Saturday night, the brothel is suddenly closed. The camera lingers with the men in the streets before we cut to the reason for their despair – Madame’s invitation to the Communion of her niece in the country. The sequence that follows is one of the most justifiably celebrated in Ophuls’ career. As Madame transports her entire retinue of lovely ladies to her home town, the film enters upon a bucolic fantasy of cart rides through lush country lanes, meadows of brightly-coloured flowers (actually artificial blooms that Ophuls had specially planted for the occasion), an idyllic farm and the simple elegance of a country church ceremony. The irony of a group of prostitutes bringing a community together during the religious confirmation of their children is enjoyed by Ophuls but never overstated. In fact, he manages to make the church service itself a genuinely moving event, despite the inherent absurdity of the situation.
The whole story is one of delicate, subtle moments. A young girl crying over her first night sleeping alone, the prostitutes also unable to settle because of the intense quiet of the country. Most notable is the simple “Thank you” uttered by Rosa (beautifully portrayed by Danielle Darrieux) when Madame’s brother Rivet apologises to her for a drunken pass he made at the Communion feast. This delicacy of touch is thrown sharply into relief by the treatment of the last story, La Modèle, which Ophuls had to adapt hurriedly when the planned third instalment, La Femme de Paul, was rejected by the producer for its risqué material (a man commits suicide when his lover is seduced by lesbians). As Todd Haynes explains in his video introduction on the DVD, the resulting sequence feels more like a broad sketch than the delicate miniatures offered by the first two stories. But strangely, the brash energy of this third piece is wholly apt, picking up, as it does, on the passion of its young lovers and forming a stark contrast with the moods of melancholy and regret in the film so far. Simone Simon plays the kittenish model who turns the head of a young painter only to find him rejecting her when the “honeymoon period” is over. The turbulence of their love affair is complemented by some of Ophuls’ most daring shots to date; the time from their first meeting to their pairing-up is summed up in one swift take while Simon’s attempted suicide finds the camera rushing up the stairs in front of her, plunging through the window and down into the courtyard, all in one fluid movement. (Actually, both sequences have “invisible” cuts, but the ambition behind them remains remarkable and the last has to be seen to be believed.)
Ultimately, the film ends on the grim conclusion that true pleasure can only be found in sadness, and the final shot of the two lovers, now in their dotage and wandering a flat, wintry beach, is one of the most devastating in film. In none of his other works – not even Letter From An Unknown Woman – does this sense of the bitterness of love make itself so keenly felt.
The DVD
Second Sight appear to have used an old print for this transfer. The picture detail is fine, but whenever the film fades to black or moves into a night-time scene, the fading on the print becomes evident and the resulting flicker can be extremely distracting. That said, I noticed very few blemishes and only one, very fine “tear-line” down the screen that was only noticeable for a few seconds. Where the transfer scores is in the way it captures the “glinting” light on Ophuls’ cluttered mise-en-scène and the sparkly quality of on-screen light sources. The audio quality is excellent throughout.
Extras
The package comes with a good selection of extras, but sadly they don’t provide a great deal of illumination on the film. Second Sight have obviously taken the trouble to dig out a 50-minute documentary on Le Plaisir, but it turns out to be a French equivalent of The South Bank Show and just as banal and pretentious. The director returns to the country location of the film 50 years on and brings together the extras who worked on the film with Ophuls’ PA and assorted film scholars. The photos they’ve kept of the event and which they discuss (at length) in the documentary comprise a second extra on the disc. But their recollections are hazy at best and one pines for a more straightforward assessment of the film’s impact.
We certainly get this from Todd Haynes in his video introduction but, although it’s intriguing to hear what Haynes has to say, he doesn’t really offer us anything we don’t already know or couldn’t have worked out for ourselves. It falls to film scholar Jean-Pierre Berthomé - sitting rather incongruously in an empty movie theatre – to provide more detail in his lecture on the transfer from script to screen. This segment, at least, is intelligent and informative, and exposes the immense difficulties Ophuls had in bringing together a film that looks so effortlessly invented on screen.
Overall
The very fact that this film is finally available is enough recommendation in itself. Second Sight have tried hard to put together a decent package for Ophuls fans, and while the print quality could have been better and some of the extras try one’s patience, few will be disappointed.
Bruce McDonald, 2009, Canada, 96 mins
Cast: Stephen McHattie, Lisa Houle, Georgina Reilly
Welcome to the world's first Barthesian horror film. It was bound to happen some time. Film Studies and genre cinema have been converging for years – look at the opening out of the mother subtext in the Alien franchise. But if they were going to combine into some new kind of organism – like Seth Brundle and the fly – it's perhaps predictable that it would be in the zombie movie. After all, George Romero has been honing the political-allegory-through-flesh-munching-cadavers for over 40 years (and doesn't look like stopping any time soon – the sixth instalment of his Dead series just played at the Venice festival).
But here, Canadian director Bruce McDonald goes the whole hog, not only telegraphing the subtext within the main action (Roland Barthes is actually mentioned in the dialogue) but making it the cause and cure of the zombie infestation itself. It's that tricky beast, language, you see. The first thing we hear in Pontypool is a voice (signifying communication) and it's telling us about the meaning behind the town Pontypool's name (and therefore that of the film's title). The first thing we see is a word – TYPO – made up of the letters of that title appearing in the wrong order. Get those pens out, film students – this is a movie that is demanding to be read.
The story itself revolves around an unemployed shock jock (a man who lives off language, geddit? Are you keeping up at the back?) who is forced to DJ at a hicksville radio station. He turns up in the morning and, from that point on, nothing goes to plan as reports fly in of citizens going crazy in the downtown area, killing people, eating their flesh, and generally being unpleasant. The film never leaves the building – this is a one-set movie with a vengeance (it was partly based on a radio play). This can be justified, and is in some respects to Pontypool's credit, because it means the whole narrative is conveyed through language alone. And the slippery quality of that language – the way lies, fact and rumour can morph into and alter each other – puts the audience in the same tense position as the protagonists, trying to make sense of events outside. Indeed, Pontypool could be said to be the bargain-basement bastard cousin of Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin in that the film represents an act of watching faces while interpreting a complex soundtrack.
But ultimately, the brass tacks reality of this gambit is that there's a lot of talk-talk-talk and little action. It's a relief when a zombie bashes their head against the sound booth glass. And it's not as if the actors are charismatic or distinctive enough to carry off such a tortuous conceit. The film has admirable social and political foundations; in some ways, it's a response to Peter Watkins' idea of the media as a monologue rather than a dialogue, the world of “talkback” radio here finding itself overwhelmed by outside voices rather than being in control of them. And it has witty points to make about the way information is communicated to us – the BBC seems to know more about events than the local people, as in George Bush's Florida vote fiasco. But it's a pity that the director's sense of film language is not as sophisticated as his discourse on the real thing. Such a stripped-down structure needs a filmmaker who can invest an aura of energy in even the most straightforward image, but McDonald's visual sense is terribly flat.
Anyway, the problem really lies in the whole approach to the exercise. What is evident here, as in a lot of contemporary science-fiction and fantasy, is a misunderstanding of how genre works. Genre is like an iceberg. Above the water is a simple story that conforms to a set of conventions – entertaining, straightforward. But that very simplicity, inflected by a good director or an intriguing central premise, allows for a mountain of themes, subtext and connected ideas to build underwater. A good example is Don Siegel's original version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955) which tells a lean, economic tale in just 80 minutes, but which has become a byword in the discussion of conformity versus non-conformity ever since. McDonald, on the other hand, is tipping the iceberg upside-down. He's saying, “Look, here's the subtext, here's the themes, here's some clever reference to topical issues... You know, we've really thought about it.” Which means the audience doesn't have to. There's little left under the water for them to discover. So that a film which foregrounds discussion and communication ultimately leaves its audience with nothing to say.
Wolfgang Petersen, 2006, USA, 99 mins
Cast: Kurt Russell, Josh Lucas, Richard Dreyfuss
After plundering ‘70s cinema and serving up pointless remakes of popular classics, an increasingly desperate Hollywood now resurrects the boring-people-shouting-at-each-other-in-small-places genre, aka the disaster movie. Just who would have thought we needed another Poseidon Adventure, you know, the one in which a boat capsizes and Shelley Winters tries to swim? And yet here it is. Only, this time, we’re not even given the protracted prologue in which we get to know the characters soap-opera style; so cynical is mainstream cinema now about the modern audience that they’ve shaved all that off and just cut to the chase – the big wave appears in the first reel! Which is true – we really want to see the CGI spectacle and loads of people getting killed – but if there are no personalities to follow in the first place, just why should we hang around after the initial cataclysm?
Well, I suppose the appeal of the disaster genre lies in that nagging question: just what would you do in this situation? How would you get off the boat? Now this may be counter-intuitive of me, but I’d head sideways, hoping to find a lifejacket and a breached window and float up to the surface. But these guys head up – towards the solid hull. I was scratching my head about this when I realised something else. In the aforementioned CGI spectacle, director Petersen and his special effects crew at least had the wit to highlight the true nightmare of this scenario – that the electrics would short and the lights would go out. Water rushing in, total darkness – the ultimate test. But for the rest of the movie, Kurt Russell and co wander round in quite nicely-lit sets, thank you very much. And we see loads of fire but no smoke, no toxic fumes choking the trapped passengers. What is the point of going to the trouble of recreating a disaster, with huge, expensive underwater sets, if you’re not even going to make it accurate?! It makes the whole question of how one would escape totally redundant.
Petersen has nothing to offer this genre. He seems to be trapped by the superficial way Hollywood producers judge foreign talent; most famous for making Das Boot (1981), he’s become the “guy who makes sea movies”, like The Perfect Storm (2000). Here, his fatigue and lack of interest are readily apparent. The only points of inspiration are the opening and closing shots, the first a blatant attempt to get one up on Titanic’s famous prow-to-stern CGI glide, and the latter a rather poetic play on the helicopter search lights come to the rescue. But in the emotional stakes, the film is a wreck. It’s clearly telegraphed who will die, so there’s no attempt to build up minor characters and therefore no suspense. There’s the usual hysteria which always brings out the sang froid Englishman in me (like Leslie Nielsen on that plane, I want to get slapping and shouting “Pull yourself together, woman!”) And worst of all is the utter selfishness of the survivors. As with all modern American movies, individuality is celebrated to the detriment of the group – don’t stay behind with those suckers, go off by yourself, despite what the captain says. I almost expected them to break out into a chorus of Dora The Explorer’s “We did it!” at the end, in a burst of self-congratulatory euphoria. I wish I could tell you that they all die – but they don’t. And after watching the movie, I felt as battered and bruised as they did when they emerged from the hull.
Seijun Suzuki, 2006, Japan, 111 mins
Cast: Zhang Ziyi, Joe Odagiri, Mikijiro Hira
In the latest issue of Sight and Sound, Tony Rayns recalls how cult director Seijun Suzuki once claimed his stablemate at Nikkatsu Studios, Shohei Imamura, was incapable of making the ‘programme pictures’ that Suzuki churned out in the ‘60s to support his colleague’s ‘art films’. It’s for these quota quickies that Suzuki has become immortalised – fast and furious gangster pics with a dash of post-modern pop culture and off-kilter imagery. But the question remains – is Suzuki capable of making those ‘art films’ himself?
An answer of sorts may lie in his latest offering, Princess Raccoon, a gaudily-coloured musical whose non-stop effervescence belies the fact that its maker is in his early eighties. The story, such as it is, concerns a young prince exiled by his father to a magic mountain where he meets and falls in love with a princess who’s also a raccoon. Or something. It’s nothing so much as a crazy reworking of Romeo and Juliet’s star-cross’d lovers, except that the sensibility behind it is even more bewildering than the story. Imagine Japanese folklore treated with the self-conscious artificiality of Kwaidan or An Actor’s Revenge as directed by Fellini trying to make Eric Rohmer’s Perceval Le Gallois. With songs.
The visual bombardment is relentless – oh, yes, this is one of those films where critics will be reaching for the words “dazzling” and “invention”. But avoid such films; after all, if you’re dazzled, then you’re not seeing clearly. And believe me, 20 minutes of this and your vision will be blurring with the greatest headache this side of your 18th birthday. I’ve never seen so many critics fall asleep or race to the toilet as they did in the screening I attended. Yet will there be bad reviews? I can’t help feeling that Suzuki’s cult reputation is so strong, few would dare speak out against it…
And after all, this is fun, isn’t it? It’s your art, mister, with a reassuring dash of silliness. No Angelopoulos solemnity here – there’s music and colour, Japanese rapping and song-and-dance numbers. It’s part of that new breed of kitsch art – see Thai Westerns, see Kung Fu comedy – that lets the cinephile off the hook by giving them the illusion of sharing in another culture while simultaneously switching their brains off. And didn’t Kitano do all this in one scene – the tap dance finale to Zatoichi – while also crafting a haunting and exciting Samurai drama at the same time?
Larry Charles, 2008, US, 101 mins
Cast: Bill Maher, assorted religious idiots
Your reaction to the “cast list” above should pretty much determine whether you go and see Religulous. If you’re amused, book a ticket now; if you’re outraged, stay well clear. But it’s important to note that these are “idiots” we’re talking about. US comedian Bill Maher sets off on an odyssey to confront some of the most extreme examples of religious mania that Larry Charles can throw at him and basically take the piss out of them. The result is a documentary that purports to be tackling “religion” but only succeeds in ribbing a few individuals. When Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 appeared in 2004, I was surprised by some of the criticism it received, putting it down to political differences on the part of the reviewer. But the argument went that, in making such an unsubtle diatribe, Moore was undermining the very liberalism he wanted to promote. Having watched Religulous, I’m beginning to understand that sentiment.
For a long time, I have felt that Western governments demonstrate a moral and intellectual cowardice in the face of religious fundamentalism. Maher’s call to secularists to stand up for their beliefs is most welcome. He makes intelligent points – that atheism has a right to be offended too, that freedom from religion is the privilege of a developed civilisation. And he backs these up with impressive evidence. The film is very good on the history of faith – check out the similarities in representation between Jesus and the Egyptian god Horus – and scientific research – a neurological scientist has found that the brains of religious people seem considerably smaller. But frustratingly, the film doesn’t explore these lines of enquiry in depth and flits between them randomly, failing to build them into a coherent case.
Maher is at least brave enough to tackle the two most controversial religious questions of our time – the debate over Darwinism and Islam’s relationship with the West. His visit to a Creationist museum, where waxwork cavemen stand side-by-side with model dinosaurs, perfectly exposes the need of people who happily use the other achievements of science – mobile phones, nuclear power – to suit the facts to their beliefs and not their beliefs to the facts. And, after the hoary old sport of Christian baiting that takes up most of the film, it’s telling that the section on Islam is the most serious and sensitive. His interrogation of a Muslim rap musician sees Maher at his most engaged and the decision to excerpt the film for which Theo Van Gogh was murdered is highly commendable, prompting the question of why Western governments are so timid in protecting such controversial art. Maher even dares to look into the extraordinarily complex situation regarding the Mount in Jerusalem, the place where the tension between the three Western religions reaches its apogee and the conflict between Jew and Muslim is at its most abrasive.
But to put it into perspective, there are 1 billion Muslims in the world and only 14 million Jews. This is only one of several mind-blowing statistics in the film which actually constitute its greatest contribution. For instance, Maher exclaims on the “astonishing” amount of people in American society who no longer subscribe to any religion – a mere 16%. That he thinks that figure is so high is offset by the fact that 93% of scientists are of the same inclination.
Where Religulous fails is that it is precisely of and for such a society. The opening montage gives it away – a rush of soundbites and apocalyptic shots edited at MTV speed. It’s aiming for a satellite TV audience, the same “uninformed” population Moore was targeting in Fahrenheit 911. Those who already have an investment in the subject will find nothing they didn’t already know. The whole thing is played for entertainment value, from the choice of a wise-ass comedian as presenter (and he’s not particularly funny) to the way interviews are cut so only his jokes survive. There’s no sense of any real dialogue. Indeed, the film favours Maher so thoroughly, that it ends up being just as one-sided as an evangelical rant.
It’s both messy in terms of its content and its structure. It doesn’t know what it wants to be – a comedy? a documentary? – and, more crucially, where to aim its attack. Maher commits the classic error common to atheist proselytisers of conflating individual faith with organised religion. It’s all very well attacking “fairy stories” like the Virgin birth and Jesus’ miracles, but the crucial problem is how such beliefs become dogmatised in the interests of social and political oppression. Which is why the film should have targeted orthodox religious leaders and not the gallery of nutcases we’re presented with. Like Michael Moore before them, Charles and Maher could have done with focusing their anger; just laughing at people does not constitute an argument.
Ultimately, the problem with Religulous is that it scores its finest point in the first five minutes. Visiting a truckers’ church in the deep south, Maher starts to question the congregation about their beliefs. One burly guy at the back stands up and growls, “If you question my God, I’m outta here.”. And so there it is; having a religious calling means freedom from debate, freedom from self-explanation. “My right is your wrong”: the message of the film in a nutshell, making everything afterward rather redundant. It seems that in a multicultural, multi-faith society, absolute individualism only leads to absolute intolerance.
Ben Garant, 2007, USA, 84 mins
Cast: Carlos Alazraqui, Mary Birdsong, Ben Garant
Review by Alan Smithee
Remember the Police Academy films from the 1980s? Well, imagine they were updated as a spoof reality TV show…and were even less funny. It doesn’t seem possible but that is Reno 911: Miami.
Apparently based on a “successful” Comedy Central series from the States, the movie revolves around a squad of harebrained cops from the sleepy US city of Reno who suddenly find themselves the only cops left in the whole of Miami after their colleagues are poisoned by terrorists at the National Police Convention. I know, I know, you’re laughing already. But wait, you haven’t been introduced to the cast of characters. There’s one cop who’s a bit gay, one who’s very gay. One woman has big tits, another has a massive arse. One bloke’s a psycho, the other’s a bit thick. That’s the level of humour throughout. The opening gambit is a ten-minute sequence (well, it feels like ten minutes) where our hapless chums chase a chicken across a road and then try to shoot it. Other highlights include characters coming across colleagues having a wank or topless Russian models heaving their stack at the camera in the service of a five-second joke.
There’s nothing wrong with goofball comedy, even the kind like this, aimed squarely at the virginal, testerone-addled 14-year-old. Jim Carrey, Jack Black and Sacha Baron Cohen have arguably made careers out of it and, on occasion, spun their vulgar yarns into gold. But those comparing this mush with Borat have clearly missed the satire of the latter. After all, satire’s a word of more than one syllable - such verbal complexity has no place here. And you can forget any idea of subversive comment – few movies, even in the service of politically incorrect humour, have paraded so many misogynist and homophobic jokes in the space of 84 minutes. Roy “Chubby” Brown would have been proud.
Bizarrely, Reno 911 and its crazy cops seem to have cleaned up across the Pond, but I would rather suffer 14 years at Her Majesty’s pleasure than have to sit through another second of it ever again.
Jean Renoir, 1951, USA, 99 mins
Cast: Patricia Walters, Radha Shri Ram, Adrienne Corri
Received wisdom has it that Renoir’s great period of filmmaking was in France in the 1930s, with such masterpieces as La Grande Illusion and La Regle Du Jeu, and that his move to California during the years of Occupation saw a decline in his work. But the re-release of his first colour film, The River, proves this to be wrong. It’s based on the novel by Rumer Godden and concerns a middle-class British family living in imperial India. It’s also a tale of young love in which three girls are thrown into emotional turmoil by the sudden appearance of a handsome American stranger.
So far, so Barbara Cartland. And indeed, Renoir makes no attempt to hide the romantic nature of the material, nor does he exploit it for a critique on colonial rule, something for which he has been criticised. But this is to miss the point of the artist Renoir has become. During the War, Renoir spoke of his newfound disillusionment with French politics. The subversive edge of his earlier films, many made in support of the Popular Front, slowly gave way in such films as This Land Is Mine (1943) and The Southerner (1945) to a more patient understanding. These latter films, both massively underrated, replaced a humanism that pushed for new political ideals with one that sought instead to contemplate and understand – put simply, replaced the dynamism of youth with the wisdom of age. Critics have always preferred the former. But Renoir saw no need to issue polemics when all that concerned him were people. As he famously said, “Everyone has his reasons,” be they Indian or English.
It’s this sympathetic gaze that informs the whole of The River. It revels in the beauty of the landscape – Renoir insisted on filming on location and in Technicolor– and in the beauty of its female protagonists. It sees the spirit of India in a dance – when Radha, a priestess in real life, performs at her wedding. It captures without embarrassment the sometimes gauche performances of its inexperienced cast – Renoir’s affection for them matching the generosity of spirit he shows to the characters in the story. It’s a serene gaze, so powerful and yet so forgiving, that it can even turn a slushy romance into a haunting and uplifting work of art.
Ti West, 2005, USA, 80 mins
Cast: Tom Noonan, Wil Horneff, Vanessa Horneff
Ti West’s new ultra low-budget horror starts with a delightful homage to the Elvira-style presenters of late-night TV. Filmed with an almost Ed Wood-like sense of camera movement and mise-en-scene, this segment finds Tom Noonan playing a bored-looking ghoul introducing the latest in a series of tacky creature features. The twist is, it’s the film we’re about to see. And true enough, the plot is straight out of the bargain basement bin – four teenagers lost in the middle of nowhere after dark with monsters on the loose!
And yet…something’s different. Our plucky heroes are not blue-eyed boys or tight T-shirted bimbos straight off a daytime soap but normal people – the young actors are given naturalistic, believable dialogue and underplay accordingly. The film may be cheap but the director uses this to its advantage. Shooting with what seems like only available light on digital video, he creates an environment of murky darkness where the few shafts of light are hemmed in by threatening shadow. And West, clearly a devotee of the genre, revels in upending his audience’s expectations. He plays on their knowledge of horror convention by introducing all those elements usually denied to characters out in the wilderness – a friendly cop, a mobile phone ringing during a chase, some other teens passing in a fast car who, rather wonderfully, play no further part in the action. And the shocks often derive from keeping essential pieces of information from both the protagonists and the audience.
If The Roost has a problem, it’s that of geography – ironic for a film whose atmosphere is so dependent on its setting. Time and again, we’re not quite sure where we are. The barn where the action takes place is a complex space and it’s only after some time that we realise it is made up of different levels and contains several rooms. West does this deliberately to further disorientate his audience but it undermines key sequences of suspense. When the main section is suddenly filled with bales of hay, it should be a great “What the…?” moment but the audience is just left confused.
And it just isn’t scary – unless you have a phobia of bats (personally, I think they’re rather lovely creatures). The reason lies in the fact that West wants to have his cake and eat it. He presents us with an intelligent, cliché-free story but at the same time wraps it up in the safe embrace of some post-Scream irony. Which conveniently means that if the film doesn’t deliver, the director can make the excuse that it was only meant to be a bit of postmodern fun anyway. Herein lies the problem of the modern horror film – it’s too in love with its own history. For all its original touches, The Roost can’t help acknowledging its debt to Blair Witch and Jeepers Creepers, films that are vampire-like in their ability to generate versions of themselves. What the genre needs now is a young Van Helsing to put them to rest and offer us something new – sadly, Ti West is not that man.