At first glance, Todd Haynes’ Safe might resemble that most dreariest of genres, the “issue movie.” Its story of a Californian housewife, Carol, who seems to react to the fumes on the expressway and then to the chemicals used in her local dry cleaners could be a late entry in the swathe of ecological scare stories so prevalent in the ‘80s. But it is precisely when the protagonist moves into a colony set up to combat such ecological problems, that the ambiguity underlying Haynes’ film comes into focus. Not that Haynes chooses to depict the members of the colony as loony drop-outs from normal society. On the contrary, he never judges their actions and even shows how their ostensibly “happy-clappy” society forges what appears to be a new positivity in Carol. But he forces us to question whether what is happening to Carol is physical or psychological. Is she reacting to the chemical make-up of her world or its emotional make-up?
In a series of held tableaux at the start of the film, Haynes isolates Carol in the empty spaces of her life: her cavernous living room, the aerobics hall, the perfectly-kept garden. Her illness doesn’t appear to wreak much emotional devastation; rather the coolness between her and her husband, as evinced in the opening sex scene, is simply exacerbated. However, Haynes is careful never to let the film tip over into sensationalism or TV melodrama. The husband never explodes at her or runs into the arms of another woman. Everything is kept at an even temperature. Similarly, although Haynes has a little fun at the expense of Carol’s peers at the colony – slyly showing the mansion house its leader has acquired through their contributions – he never allows that to become the main thrust of his film. In fact, it is the colony founder himself who tries to show Carol that is a dislike of herself that has led to her being there.
Haynes’ real target here is a society that seems to thrive on breeding fear and insecurity among its members and where the people can only spout the platitudes served up to them by the media. Just as Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine (2002) argues that America’s escalating gun crime is connected to TV’s frenzied obsession with real-life footage of shoot-outs and car chases and the consequent fear it instils in viewers, so Haynes’ film shows us Carol ‘finding out’ about her illness from eco-scare programmes on cable TV. The true climax of the film is a superb scene in which Carol is forced to give a birthday speech to her fellows at the colony. Puffed-up with her new-found knowledge, she embarks on a spirited discourse on environmental illness only to repeat the phrases spilled into her mouth by the colony leader and TV doom merchants. As she realises she hasn’t the wit – or original thought – to continue, her voice trails off. This is the high point of Julianne Moore’s superb performance as Carol, one that effortlessly keeps a patently empty-headed protagonist interesting and sympathetic throughout the film. It’s also a performance that is aware of the essential comic nature of Carol’s predicament as in the bizarre scene at the psychiatrist’s where she stumbles over the word ‘housewife’, quickly correcting it to the media pseudo-phrase ‘homemaker’.
In the end, we seem to see a Carol on the mend. She has given her birthday address, walked home with a ‘nice young man’ who clearly desires her and now she speaks the words ‘I love you’ into a mirror. But there is the intimation of a ‘fall’ here as well – from an affluent homeowner – or ‘homemaker’ – to someone seeking refuge in a six-foot artificial igloo. The word “safe” plays on the mind – is Carol finally safe now and, if so, at what cost? At the cost of family, comfort, and any kind of relationship with the outside world? Haynes cuts the film here, offering no answers. But few American films in recent memory have so coolly and intelligently tackled the very concerns that have permeated down from the media into the minds of the American public. And so few of those have had the courage to offer hope in an ending that seems absurdly closed in by darkness.
Director: Sergei Parajanov
Cast: Sofiko Chiaureli, Melkon Aleksanyan, Giorgi Gegechkori
Russia-Armenia/1968/73 mins
Critic Gilbert Adair called it “a diamond on fire”. The filmmakers of the New Iranian Cinema found its director an inspiration. For years, it became a mysterious Holy Grail for cinephiles. Now it's available on DVD.
Nominally based on the life of 18th century Armenian poet, Sayat Nova, the film is structured as a series of still lifes. In each one, the objects seem to pulsate with life, their colours vibrant, their textures sensible to touch. There are people in these images, but they move through them like automatons or mimes, enacting a ritual series of gestures, as in a dance or masque.
These striking tableaux are rich in symbolism, some of it arcane or deeply personal. Traditional motifs from painting – watch for the many significances of the colour red or of peacock feathers – combine to convey whole sensations, so that a shot of white lace being drawn across a conch chell becomes one of the most erotic in cinema. At other times, the eye is shocked by surreal visual epiphanies that communicate complex ideas exactly: a boy's education summed up by him lying amongst thousands of books drying in the sun, their pages flapping in the wind, or a soul's ascent to heaven by the peculiar sight of sheep lined up on a stone staircase.
Sayat Nova himself, a bard who spent most of his time in a monastery, was caught between a life dedicated to his faith and one dedicated to his muse, between piety and beauty, between the physical and the spiritual, just like this film. In that constant movement between the sacred and profane, and in its frontal staging, The Colour of Pomegranates resembles the work of Parajanov's contemporary, Pasolini. It's also not averse to the innocent camera trickery we expect of Georges Melies. But ultimately, any comparison withers in the face of its unique achievement. It may be a cliché to say this, but there really is nothing else like it.
Director: Thorold Dickinson
Starring: Valentina Cortese, Serge Reggiani, Audrey Hepburn
UK/1951/91 mins
The rediscovery of Thorold Dickinson continues with the release of the last film he made in England, a complex espionage thriller with echoes of Hitchcock.
Set in the 1930s, it concerns Maria and Nora, two refugees from a nameless European country suffering under a cruel dictator, General Galbern. They're taken in by their father's closest friend, a London cafe owner, and start a new life as British citizens. But a chance meeting with Maria's former lover in Paris finds them embroiled in a plot to assassinate Galbern.
Though it was reportedly the victim of studio interference, the film remains a surprisingly rich and daring study of the politics of violence, implicitly criticising both the upper class sympathy with Nazism and the drastic measures taken by revolutionaries (something that got it into trouble with the British Communist party). It also boasts the expressionistic flourishes for which Dickinson is noted, including a breathtaking, split-second transition from pub back room to sophisticated garden party, all achieved in one shot.
The impressive international cast features an adorable Audrey Hepburn in her first major film role.
Gideon Koppel, 2007, UK, 94 mins
Who is the pre-eminent genius – the founding father, if you like – of British cinema? Alfred Hitchcock? Michael Powell? I would suggest the evidence points to Humphrey Jennings, the wartime documentarist, and most particularly to Listen To Britain (1941), his evocation of a nation in conflict through sound and image alone. Filmmakers from Lindsay Anderson through to Terence Davies have invoked its influence, while its form of cultural resonance through the juxtaposition of recognisable phenomena has become definitive in representations of this country. And now here it is again, with debut director Gideon Koppel’s affectionate portrait of the rural Welsh community where his parents lived, brought to us through a kaleidoscope of moments caught in time and conversations snatched on the fly.
Like Raymond Depardon’s La Vie Moderne (2008), with which it is hard not to draw an invidious but inevitable comparison, Koppel’s film is valuable in giving us an impression of a vanishing world. And here, too, the understanding shown towards a traditional environment is refreshing. Can it be that, in a reversal of fortune, it is the conservative environments of the countryside rather than their urban, multicultural counterparts that are finally offering the most cutting-edge voice in modern film? Koppel has a keen eye and some shots communicate the beauty of this world with uncanny grace – most notably, the lines of sheep gathering in formation on a distant hillside.
But sadly, it is the very Jennings-like quality of the film that works against it. At the end, once the images have faded, these words appear on screen: “I feel forced to speak but not in words.” Fine sentiments indeed coming from a national cinema that has often struggled to loosen itself from literariness and a very theatrical sense of dramaturgy. But the problem with free-form, associative editing – at least, in the hands of a lesser director – is that it works against any sense of cohesion or, put bluntly, any idea of what’s going on. Koppel gives little context to the on-screen action, bar the tenuous linking device of a mobile library, which it seems was “imposed” on him at a late stage and whose rather peripatetic appearances only serve to make the narrative flow seem even more random as opposed to more structured. Depardon, by contrast, worked from a much simpler template – voiceover, set-up and interview – but through which we got to know the people so much better and to feel their problems more acutely.
Curiously, the more verbose and chatty Koppel’s subjects are, the less they actually communicate. Similarly, the more adventurous the director becomes in his manipulation of image, the less emphatic the result. His choice to shoot on 35mm over DV is brave (especially given the low budget) but the concomitant graininess coupled with the frustrating use of cropped, off-centre shots puts the viewer at a distance from the material. We also run the whole gamut of film-school playfulness from alternating colours to trusty old time-lapse photography. The impression is one of a director with too little control over his too many ideas.
But it’s an admirable attempt. And while this memento mori ultimately remains forgettable, I can’t help but applaud its provocation – to remember a world, not after it’s gone, but while it is in the process of disappearing.
Hirokazu Koreeda, Japan, 2008, 114 mins
Cast: Hiroshi Abe, Yui Natsukawa, Kirin Kiki
It's fitting that Hirokazu Koreeda's latest film should hit the cinemas now, just as a two-month retrospective dedicated to its influence, Yasujiro Ozu, is mounted by the BFI. Ozu is one of the greatest of all Japanese directors and he specialised in the shomin-geki, or family drama, of which Still Walking is a superb example in its own right.
It takes place over the course of one day in which the Yokohama family hold a reunion on the anniversary of the death of the eldest son. The younger son, Ryo, feels overshadowed by his brother's reputation and is sensitive to comments about his new wife, a widow with child in tow. Ryo's sister, Chinami, is a likeable, scatterbrained but essentially selfish woman who's angling to inherit the paternal home. The elderly parents have problems of their own, intimations of jealousy and resentment bubbling underneath the mother's cheery bonhomie.
Koreeda carefully builds up the connections between each family member, not through obvious set pieces, but through tiny vignettes and subtle repetitions of phrase. So that a middle-aged son noticing a support bar by his parents' bath speaks volumes, while his wife makes the same observation about his shortcomings as his sister will make about their father later on in the film.
There is no social agenda, just the careful peeling away of interpersonal relationships. Such a work would be impossible in contemporary Anglo-Saxon cultures where the nuclear family is now necessarily a sight of dysfunction and comfortable middle-class life must be the subject of political comment. True, the film indirectly touches upon the way men are defined – and define themselves – through work, and how, in Japanese society at least, the woman is still expected to be the workhorse at home. But the real bite comes in the more universal truths it finds in human behaviour.
A lot of the success of the film is down to the outstanding ensemble cast. Hiroshi Abe finds the perfect balance between humility and frustration as Ryo, while the bizarrely named YOU virtually reprises her woman-child character from the exquisite Nobody Knows (2004) and gives a perfect representation of stunted adolescence. But it's Kirin Kiki as the alternately cuddly, then waspish matriarch who really impresses.
But ultimately, Still Walking belongs to Koreeda. He is one of only a handful of directors currently working (Chabrol and Hong Sang-Soo spring to mind) who distil cinema to its essentials. Rather than a rigorous and ostentatious formalism, they offer straightforward narratives told in an apparently conventional manner. But through the composition of shots, the careful placement of dialogue and the structure of seemingly trivial events, their films build up a whole world of unconscious feeling. So that seeming simplicity leads to great depth. This, it seems to me, is the perfect form for the medium, and, with Still Walking, Koreeda can count himself among the finest of its practitioners.
Director: Roberto Rossellini
Cast: Ingrid Bergman, Mario Vitale, Renzo Cesana
Italy/1949/102 mins
Where does modern cinema begin? With Godard? Antonioni? Resnais? No, it begins with an affair. Ingrid Bergman was arguably the biggest female star of the 1940s and Roberto Rossellini the most important arthouse director, following his groundbreaking Neo-Realist work in Rome, Open City (1945). The consequent scandal when they got together saw Bergman ostracised from America for almost six years. But it's how Rossellini used that real-life material in Stromboli that makes it a crucial landmark in film history.
Bergman plays Karen, a Lithuanian interned in a “Displaced persons” camp after the war (just as Bergman herself was displaced both in Europe and in the non-Hollywood culture of Italian cinema). Denied emigration papers to Argentina and desperate to escape, she marries a poor Italian fisherman from the remote, volcanic island of Stromboli and struggles to build a life there. Thus Rossellini develops and complicates the Neo-Realist aesthetic by forcing Bergman to act out a version of what is happening to her in reality – adjusting to a new culture and existence – all photographed with the same pitiless directness and lack of artificial flourish as were his previous films (the brilliantly edited tuna-fishing sequence being an exception).
And it's in the moments alone with Bergman, trapped in the fisherman's cottage, or seeking a way out of the labyrinthine village – moments of dead time where we watch her think and reflect – that we first see the modern protagonist, the investigation of psychology and states of mind breaking free of the constraints of narrative.
One should never underestimate the traditionalist in Rossellini, however, and all this modernity builds to a shockingly religious ending, which was itself controversial at the time. I can only say that, after I first saw it, it haunted me for days and is, for me, one of only a handful of occasions when cinema has reached towards the Sublime. For in this moment, Karen stops trying to buy or adopt an identity, through marriage or immigration papers, and instead decides to confront and fight for the identity within herself. And Cinema finds its identity along with her.
Takeshi Kitano, 2005, Japan, 112 mins
Cast: Takeshi Kitano, Akihiro Miwa, Ren Osugi
Directors used to dream of getting their name above the title. Now, one has put his name in the title – will this be the ultimate auteur vanity project? Certainly, “Beat” Takeshi’s latest is all about himself. Not only does he play dual roles but the film explicitly riffs on the different public personae attributed to him in Japan – the respected actor, the hard man veteran of several Yakuza movies and the mischievous prankster with a schoolboy sense of humour. The story – if it could properly be called one – finds Kitano playing a jaded star appearing in an overheated melodrama who chances upon his exact double, a struggling extra rehearsing for the same film. During a particularly painful make-up session, Kitano falls into a dream and “imagines” the life of this alter ego, a grocery store clerk who works his way to becoming the trigger-happy macho hero the actor has played so often.
Detractors might argue that it’s indicative of Kitano’s egoism that he can only imagine his counterpart becoming like him, but this would miss the self-parody inherent in such a scenario. In a recent interview with Sight and Sound, the director remarked that he was now “embarrassed” by his old Yakuza flicks and Takeshis’ marks a concerted effort not to just to make fun of that image but to destroy it altogether. Never has a cinematic self-portrait contained so much self-loathing. It opens in World War Two with “Beat” cowering before an American GI, then cuts to the climactic gun battle of one of his films where he somehow remains unharmed in a hail of bullets. This is then shown playing on a TV in the mahjong parlour where Kitano is the eternal loser. This superb sequence sets the tone for a film that constantly subverts the myth of Takeshi’s invincible hero and, by doing so, attacks the film’s real target – Japanese ideals of masculinity. It’s no coincidence that a movie riddled with actors posturing and puffing themselves up as hard men and wise guys begins with the country’s most crushing and humiliating defeat in wartime.
Takeshis’ is effectively, then, Kitano’s Stardust Memories, the film in which Woody Allen seemed to turn on his fans and criticise their adulation of him. But it’s also a kind of 8½ in which the director examines his own craft and techniques. The editing in particular calls attention to itself, with jarring flash-forwards upending the audience before the film doubles back to show the process of how the characters get to that moment. And the whole piece, filled as it is with repeated gags and recurring motifs, resembles nothing so much as a dazzling stand-up comedy routine a la Eddie Izzard – which shouldn’t surprise given Kitano’s early history as part of a double act.
In fact, the formal development of the narrative acts as an alternative autobiography. Ideas or dreams are then turned into rehearsals by the film’s cast of performers, then become “reality”, and then are subverted and shown to be illusory. This follows the trajectory of Kitano’s career – from early successes to confirmed status as male hero-worship figure to parodic reflection on all that has gone before. It’s almost as if the accomplished actor is talking back to his younger self, with warnings and reflections on his time to come.
Ultimately, Takeshis’ feels like an artist taking stock. It’s one of those turning-point films where a director has reached an impasse in their inspiration and is looking for new avenues to take. Such movies are commonly rejected by critics as failures and this is definitely Kitano’s sloppiest and least satisfying work, with the last 25 minutes being especially tedious. But to dismiss such efforts is to hinder filmmakers from reinventing themselves. The fact that Kitano’s most fantastical film to date is the most naturalistically lit is just one intimation of the way this director could surprise us in the future. And when those later masterpieces come, as I confidently predict they will, Takeshis’ will be seen as a vital step in their direction.
Martin Scorsese, 1976, USA, 113 mins
Cast: Robert De Niro, Cybill Shepherd, Jodie Foster
It’s back – the film that has adorned many a lad’s DVD shelf, that gave us that iconic image of De Niro pounding the New York streets alone, that created its own catchphrase: “You talkin’ to me?” But here’s a thought – does this most beloved of cult movies feature the most racist shot in cinema history? We all know the storyline – a psychologically damaged Vietnam vet, Travis Bickle, gets a job with the New York cabs and is so frustrated by the “filth” on the streets that he resorts to rescuing a teenage hooker from her pimp. But the nature of that frustration is seldom touched upon in the “boy’s own” manner in which the film is usually discussed.
The moment I’m referring to takes place in a café as Bickle takes a break from his shift. He looks round furtively at his fellow diners and we cut to an extraordinary travelling shot that soaks up the exotically-dressed black clientele. Then we cut back to Travis’s face and register his intense, furious eyes - eyes full of hate. What’s disturbing about this sequence is that there is no need for any articulation of racist feeling; we understand what Travis is thinking merely through the movement of the camera and the composition of the shot. Later, Scorsese repeats this trick, when Bickle’s chat with a colleague is interrupted by a black man laughing and shouting in the street. For one brief second – caught in exquisite slow-motion – Bickle holds the man’s gaze. And once again, we get the uncomfortable feeling that we are not just seeing as Bickle sees, but as a white man looks at a black man.
It’s this alignment of the spectator’s perspective with that of a disturbed racist thug that has upset some critics and made them question Taxi Driver’s morality. But looked at another way, isn’t it incredibly brave for a filmmaker to so immerse himself in that mentality that we can ‘see’ as that character? Taxi Driver has become so much a part of popular culture that its true value has become obscured. Because, first and foremost, it is a subversive film, forcing its audience into a viewpoint it summarily dismisses but, at the same time, showing how that viewpoint lingers close to the surface of their own prejudices.
Let’s not forget the political content of the film. Betsy, the object of Travis’s desire, works for a politician campaigning on a law and order ticket. When he and Bickle meet, their attitudes toward crime seem alarmingly similar, the cab driver’s ruthless concept of vigilantism not so far removed from the senator’s pat ideas of “people’s justice”. Like that other great misunderstood movie of the 1970s, Dirty Harry, Taxi Driver puts its audience in the awkward position of questioning the delicate margin between social justice and personal revenge. The politician’s name is also significant – Palantine, in old parlance, a knight in shining armour. Bickle becomes an alternative knight, come to the rescue of Jodie Foster’s underage hooker, just as he sets himself up in competition with all the other men in the film, including her pimp, Sport. The names recall different kinds of masculine values against which Bickle’s is set as the nominal hero. So Taxi Driver is also an interrogation of male sexuality and the self-destructive violence its fantasies incur.
And finally, Travis is no dumb animal. In fact, he’s an artist, a writer charting his own downfall, in diary and in voiceover. Here, scriptwriter Paul Schrader’s voice comes swimming to the surface – he based the screenplay on his own obsessions with guns and pornography at that time – and dominates the film in the same way other authorial voices, like Herrman’s magnificent score and De Niro’s assured performance, push Scorsese’s to the margins. Ultimately, it feels like their film rather than his, but Taxi Driver stands the test of time as one of the most remarkable achievements of ‘70s US cinema and a film that can still unsettle a 21st century audience.
Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Starring: Setsuko Hara, Chishu Ryu, Haruko Sugimura
Japan/1953/136 mins
Every ten years, Sight and Sound magazine polls critics around the world to find out their ten best films of all time. In the last such poll in 2002, Tokyo Story came fifth. It was underrated – it should have come second, after the director's own Late Spring.
Ozu is commonly described as the most “Japanese” of directors. Absolute nonsense, of course - he's the most universal. For what is Tokyo Story but an echo chamber of everyone's thoughts on family, of every parent's concern for their child's future, of every child's need to break away and the mixture of guilt and relief that follows?
Ozu represents these themes through the simplest narrative possible: an elderly couple visiting their grown-up offspring. But each child has become a care-worn adult – a busy neighbourhood doctor or penny-pinching beautician – that finds their doddering relatives an unwelcome intrusion. So they are moved on, Lear-like, until they end up in the tatty tenement flat owned by their daughter-in-law, Noriko, who lost her husband, their second son, in the war. Ironically, she is the only one who shows them any compassion. (There are so many similarities to the protagonists of Early Summer (also released this month), even down to the names, that this could be considered the same family moved on two years, or High Summer, if you like.)
It's a slight tale, but it's sustained by a remarkable complexity of characterisation and a sure eye for the telling detail – the way the eldest son playfully calls to his pet after hearing of his mother's illness, a hairstyle suggested by the beautician as “stylish” later worn by the hostess of a backstreet bar. There are allusions to characters' pasts – the father's alcoholism, the waspish eldest daughter's childhood innocence – that colour what could have been sentimental archetypes. In all, there is a powerful sense of life lived, stretching out beyond the screen.
This must have been a very personal project for Ozu, who never married and lived his whole life with his mother. But its beauty and clear-eyed understanding make it accessible to all. An essential purchase.
Louis Leterrier, 2005, France/USA, 87 mins
Cast: Jason Statham, Alessandro Gassman, Amber Valletta
You know those Orange commercials in which some poor celebrity tries to convince a panel of salesmen to back their project, only to find every idea twisted into an excuse to use a mobile phone? Have you ever suspected that this might not be a satire but actually the way films are run? Take Transporter 2, for instance. It’s not just that cellphones are omnipresent throughout – it’s the fact that when one packs up, Jason Statham merely reaches into his glove compartment to find four more neatly stacked and waiting! And the product placement doesn’t stop there. The opening shot gorges itself on Statham’s car, lit to full advantage and standing improbably alone in a gleaming multi-story car park. Then we cut to…a state-of-the-art watch in glorious close-up.
This is James Bond for the boys’ toys generation, an advertiser’s dream where the emphasis is not on characterisation and plot but on vehicular masturbation. Planes, buses, jet skis – they all enter the chase somewhere. Fittingly, Letterier’s style of direction is hyperactive and non-naturalistic, aping the slick world of TV commercials. The trademark mix of violence, gadgets and - well, curiously, not sex, as Statham shows an English reserve on that point – is sent wildly over-the-top. This works in the film’s favour when it comes to the action sequences which are so ridiculous even the most dour spectator will find themselves laughing along. So rejoice in the melon-fisted punch-ups, helium missiles in a doctor’s surgery and a particularly deft way to get rid of a car bomb.
Just don’t expect much of a hero. We’ve come a long way from the suave urbanity of 007 and the “vest” films of Bruce Willis, the cocksure if vulnerable working-class joe. Now we get a Ross Kemp lookalike trying to do an American accent. Statham can pull off the moves all right but his strong and silent routine isn’t fooling anybody – he’s hiding about as much personality as a Streatham bouncer. And there’s no conceivable reason for someone like Amber Valletta to fall dizzily into his arms.
Ah, yes, the lady of the piece. She’s married to a top-level politician heavily involved in fighting drug racketeers. But she prefers the chauffeur’s…er, rugged charms. In this respect, the film belongs to that tradition of American action movies in which the selfless acts of the hero are thrown into relief by the introduction of a nasty, rich WASP who only cares about his reputation and wealth. Here, though, that character happens to be the father of the boy whose kidnap precipitates Statham’s quest. It’s slightly disturbing to note how clearly the kid places more faith in his violent rescuer than in his law-abiding – and therefore impotent – parent. In drawing a comparison between these two father figures, Transporter 2 seems to be advocating force over diplomacy as the best means of action and the tough guy as the best role-model for Junior. Then there’s the paean to the loner. You can never trust the police or the authorities in these kind of films. They’re hopeless. No, you need a one-man army, an individual with, of course, generous access to armaments. There is perhaps no more disturbing undertone in the modern thriller – that society cannot be relied upon, it’s every man for himself. And don’t the eyes of gun manufacturers everywhere just light up at those words…
But you can be too serious about these things. If Transporter 2 was interested in messages, it would have a hero who can string more than two sentences together. It’s not – it’s interested in car chases, CGI-enhanced stunts, girls with big guns and miniscule underwear and well-pressed suits. And on all those counts, it delivers.
Director: Andrzej Jakimowski
Starring: Damian Ul, Ewelina Walendziak
Poland/2007/95 mins
Andrzej Jakimowski starts his second film with a dedication: “To my sister who made me sit on top of the wardrobe”. And there's clearly an autobiographical element to this charming tale of a young boy, Stefek, growing up in a sleepy provincial town. His sister, Elka, is both substitute mum and teacher of life's mysteries, the “tricks” of the title being her way of stimulating good fortune; in a typically marvellous vignette, her careful placement of some leftover lunch leads to a meal for a hungry dog and an even hungrier tramp. When the siblings' estranged father turns up one day at the train station, Stefek decides to use these tricks to draw him back to the family...
Ewelina Walendziak (a Polish Scarlett Johansson) is particularly memorable as Elka, while ten-year-old Damian Ul gives one of the best child performances in recent memory. Adam Bajerski's cinematography captures the summer light beautifully, and this is a rare modern film where every character is likeable and treated with sympathy. An understated gem.
Ever since it won the Prix du Jury in Cannes, discussion has centred on what the relationship is between the two seemingly disconnected halves of Weerasethakul’s extraordinary film. And, as with any “puzzle” film, the clues mount up. The first half concerns itself with the burgeoning love affair between two young men – Keng, a soldier, and Tong, a less worldly-wise villager. The same actors go on to play a soldier and his quarry, a shaman in the form of a tiger, in the second jungle sequence. So maybe this second half is a metaphorical replay of the first, a fable-like retelling of one man’s pursuit of another? Certainly, there are many parallels between the loveplay acted out by the young men in the first half and the game of cat-and-mouse in the jungle. Although Keng is clearly more experienced then Tong in the gay scene – as evidenced by his conversation with a fellow cruiser in a cinema lavatory – it’s Tong who gets to lead him on just as the shaman teases the soldier into his trap; the roles of hunter and hunted are blurred. And, in both stories, there is a constant movement between attraction and pulling away, as Tong first rejects then indulges Keng just as the shaman first runs from the soldier, only to finally draw him into his world.
But it’s not only the narrative differences (and parallels) that are intriguing here. There are distinct shifts of tone and visual style between the two tales. The first is mostly urban in location. It is also relaxed and contemplative in style, full of long, static takes carrying little dialogue. The impression is of a series of tableaux, “slices of life” from Tong’s world. In this sense, the visual aesthetic of the first tale aligns it very strongly with the East Asian school of directors like Hou H’siao-H’sien and Jia Zhangke. In the first half of the film, shots seem to exist for their own sake, as opposed to being part of a clear narrative trajectory, allowing Weerasethakul to indulge in many digressions, such as the delicious sequence where Tong duets with a restaurant singer.
With the second half’s move to a jungle environment comes a greater uniformity of image and a more streamlined approach to storytelling. The jungle is as beautiful as it is impenetrable to the eye and the film focuses in on the minutiae of the hunt – on Keng’s inspection of tracks and his preparation of traps. But with this shift to a less urban style of story comes the introduction of elements more typical of the folk tale or legend; Keng can now communicate with monkeys and he sees spirits emerge from animals (courtesy of some exquisite special effects). As such, just as Keng is drawn into the shaman-tiger’s world, so the audience is drawn into a different form of cinematic storytelling. And this contrast of rural and urban, folk story and modern narrative, allows Weerasethakul to raise further questions. For, in both cases, the actor playing Tong is the embodiment of a more traditional, less cosmopolitan figure than his opposite. Keng is the outsider intruding into a world where he is unsure of the rules – a well-paid soldier, happy to have his photo taken with a corpse, glibly chatting up radio operators on his walkie-talkie – who comes into contact with a world detached from the mercenariness of modern living. Are Keng and Tong representations of the old and new Thailand, contrasting traditional attitudes with a more westernised influence? At the end, Keng relinquishes his spirit to the superior figure of the shaman; under its skin, this shape-shifting film may be a subversion of modern values and a reaffirmation of the past.
Sergey Dvortsevoy, 2009, Kazakhstan/Russia, 100 mins
Cast: Askhat Kuchinchirekov, Samal Yeslyamova, Ondasyn Besikbasov
The decade began with one eye-opening portrait of an isolated community – the now forgotten Inuit drama Atanarjuat:The Fast Runner (2000) – and now it's ending with another – Sergey Dvortsevoy's account of life on the Kazakh steppes. It's a culture of nomadic farming that is in danger of disappearing, yet stretches right across Central Asia and is much the same in far-off Mongolia. The director, a former documentarist, was so keen to capture its authenticity that he based his cast and crew there for over a year and forced his actors to live as a family for a month before shooting started.
The story itself centres round Asa, a young man discharged from the navy who returns to the home of his sister and her shepherd husband. To obtain his own flock of sheep, Asa must get married and he sets his sights on the only local beauty around – but she is less than enthusiastic... It's a slim premise for a film but it acts as an efficient thread around which Dvortsevoy can weave his vignettes of the everyday life in that environment.
And it's hard to recall from recent memory any film that has such a physical impact on the viewer. The sound design is incredible: as a storm whips up, the wind feels like it's coming from behind and round the camera, almost swirling by your side in the movie theatre. The eye is scorched by visual epiphanies, like a dog casually munching on a bone while lightning streaks down towards the horizon. Animals and children are omnipresent and, unusually, given as equal weight as the adult characters. Their unpredictable nature is allowed to run riot – the kids bawl and shriek and run over to stage left, the livestock nudge actors' faces and go where they will. Instead of making them adapt to camera, Dvortsevoy pushes his cinematographer to let them determine the flow of the scene.
And then there's the sheep births. Anyone at all squeamish should avoid this film, as should those who see animals as little, fluffy bundles and not mucky, solid beasts whose relationship with the farmer is as intimate as it is matter-of-fact. Two actors deliver lambs during the course of the movie and both occasions involve the creature being given artificial respiration. And Dvortsevoy insisted on the real thing, so it's one take, in real time. By the end, the character's relief onscreen is matched by that of the audience. Sean Penn never had to do this for an Oscar.
Tulpan may be from a distant corner of the world but its concern over the decline of rural communities is now being reflected in many films on the international circuit – think of Raymond Depardon's Modern Life or the recent British film sleep furiously. Arguably, never before has the notoriously urban-centric medium of cinema been so precoccupied with life in the sticks. Here, it's the old story of the lure of the city and its well-paid jobs denuding the country of its youth. Asa is torn but eventually chooses the plains rather than the streets. So that, if Tulpan manages to raise anything more than ethnographic interest, it might be seen as the first revolutionary cheer on behalf of nature, family and tradition. Which, in Dvortsevoy's hands, become revelatory in their sense of freedom...
Review of the DVD
This tough but affectionate portrait of life on the Kazakh steppes is not only entertaining but a valuable record of a culture on the verge of extinction.
After completing his national service, Asa returns to the home of his sister and her shepherd husband. He desperately wants his own flock of sheep, but tradition demands that he must get married first. So he sets his sights on the only local beauty around – but she is less than enthusiastic...
Former documentarist Dvortsevoy went to extraordinary lengths to capture the everyday reality of this environment, filming on location for over a year and forcing his cast to live together as a family. The cinematography and sound design capture the volatile climate and the film is crammed with visual epiphanies, like a dog casually munching on a bone while lightning streaks down towards the horizon. But the most memorable scene is a live sheep birth, filmed in one take, where the actor had to deliver the lamb himself for real. Not for the squeamish, but an unforgettable, uplifting coup de cinema.
David Lynch, 1992, USA, 134 mins
Cast: Sheryl Lee, Moira Kelly, Ray Wise
“It really was not fun.” Such was David Lynch’s typically understated assessment of the reception Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me received at Cannes in 1992. Critics booed and jeered and the reviews that followed chastised him for cashing in on a show whose story had already been thoroughly digested over the course of some 30 episodes. Now we knew who had killed Laura Palmer and why, just what was the point of this prequel?
The answer lies in a photograph – the portrait of Laura herself that haunted Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks and was the icon of innocent femininity behind which the series dug to find a more grisly, sordid truth. Fire Walk With Me is, in its turn, an enquiry into that very series. From the moment a woman performs a bizarre mime that FBI agents are encouraged to read as a code, Lynch primes the audience to interpret the movie as a series of signs. Nothing is to be taken for granted. A lakeside vista is revealed to be a blow-up photo and the background of the opening credits becomes static on a TV that is promptly smashed with an axe – a brutal indication of the distance the film is putting between itself and the original show.
Lynch’s traditional milieu is the small-town America immortalised in the photographs of William Eggleston. The diners and caravan parks found in his work are recreated lovingly here and Lynch adds an element of ‘50s pastiche with slicked-back hairstyles and sitcom décor. Everything is soaked in primary colours from the bright reds of a pick-up truck to the blue of a school locker room. The result is a world that looks distinctly less than real, almost too good to be true, in opposition to Eggleston’s aim of capturing modern America as it is. Instead, Lynch is trying to show this image as a fake, a mask to hide ugliness. Frequently, interiors are filmed like stages, with actors posed like subjects amongst the furniture, but the effect is one of increased artifice. In fact, Lynch’s very assumption of Eggleston’s style serves only to identify it as a phantom world where the homespun archetypes emerge as ogres and villains.
Colour is not treated naturalistically but as a key to states of mind. Thus, blue becomes the hue of nightmare and invades the screen whenever Laura is menaced by her father. Sound, too, is exaggerated with the soundtrack music allowed to completely drown out the dialogue in a key scene at the strip club. Lynch originally added subtitles but these appear to have been removed on the UK DVD release. I would argue, though, that the sequence works better without them. Because the audience can only hear certain phrases or words over the din, the sense rather than the content of the conversations is conveyed, just as the rumblings and eerie crashes behind other scenes create an air of menace that is only understood subliminally.
The overall effect is one of a dream where the relationships between characters are registered in the unconscious rather than in explicit plot developments. In this sense, Fire Walk With Me marks Lynch’s first step in the direction of Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, where the narrative unfolds according to dream logic. Though these films are more controlled and successful, it’s gratifying to find in their prototype a greater arbitrariness in the connections made between nightmare and waking life.
It’s commonly acknowledged that Lynch’s true subject is the corruption hidden under the surface of small-town America. Even so, Fire Walk With Me is his darkest film to date, in which the familiar coffee-and-doughnuts kookiness gives way to a disturbing – and surprisingly acute – study of incest and its psychological effects. But despite this subversive edge to his work, Lynch can never quite let go of innocence. This may be a world in which Santa Claus only exists as a code word for cocaine, but the angel that comes to redeem Laura at the end is very real. Indeed, the evil that inhabits Lynch’s stories can only exist precisely because there is a concomitant force of Good. And herein may lie the real clue as to why Lynch repeatedly returns to the Americana landscapes of William Eggleston – he wants to believe in them. As a director, he is often cast as the dark poet of US cinema, but, in fact, he is its eternal child, digging away at its myths to expose the dream behind the nightmare – just as Laura finds redemption follows her ordeal.