Various Apocalypses Part 5: The Dark Hour

Spanish film about knowing what you had once it's gone. A group of survivors from an unidentified cataclysm go about their lives, educating their young, maintaining what they can of their life support in what looks like the last available underground bunker.

Frequent sorties are needed to the outside to cull the zomboid hordes who are encroaching and can infect through the slightest contact. The infection works faster than the one in 28 Days Later and when one of the party does get touched he agrees to be shot to death on the spot. Also, there are the invisibles creatures violent and stealthy that move through the bunker and enter any unsecured door with fatal results. This happens during the "cold hour". The reasons for this naming of hours are unclear until the end. As they constitute a massive spoiler I'll leave them out here.

The day to day is being recorded by the ten year old boy Jesus with his mini dv camera. He stands in as unofficial narrator. He is not in every scene nor is his narration. Though it begins looking like one The Dark Hour is is not a found footage piece. The entire film's video look is there (apart from budgetary concerns) to lend a claustrophobic and ugly edge to the setting. Works.

Jesus and his friend Magda visit old timer Judas in the lower bunkers for their education. Though Magda is a little older than Jesus neither can remember the time before the disaster. Judas plies them with tv, cinema and books from the time as well as his own knowledge and experience. The hopelessness of any idea of a return to this state is almost solid. When Judas gives Magda an old makeup kit, her delight is profoundly saddening in the grimy light of her home.

This is a studiously plain film, measuring its action and dramatics with a weary eye on the maintenance of life. Quite a lot happens in its reasonable 90 plus minutes of screen life but the sense that it would anyway is strong. Only when the pressures of the zombies and phantom visitors mount too dangerously to ignore does the flat and pointless existence meet its inevitable and probably final challenge. The rest is spoilers.

Because of the intentional lack of action movie flash and the surprises of the climax it's hard to say much about this film. If it is to be so realistically grim and ugly why have the big signpost character names like Jesus, Judas and Magda? Wouldn't Juan, Salma and Ignac have worked better, considering the end-time theme was impossible to misconstrue to begin with? They stick out like uncorrected writer brainstorm session contrivances. But this is really the worst I have against The Dark Hour, a film that blends its cinematic heritage and welcome morsel of orginality so well that even at its grimmest it manages to disarm. I saw mine on an imported dvd. Maybe SBS?

Various Apocalypses Part 4: Kairo/Pulse

A ship in the ocean. Extreme high shot, perpendicular. Silence. An image of immediately troubling loneliness.

Cut to contemporary Tokyo. A group of twenty somethings worried about the sudden drop in communication of one of their number investigate. His apartment is as it was but there is a vaguely human shaped stain on the wall. For a moment  in the dark this appears to morph back into their friend with a noose around his neck. Then it's just the stain again.

Case by case this seems to be happening all around the city. Suicides and disappearances. A clue appears in the form of a website that imposes itself on users with the invitiation: do you want to meet a ghost? We follow one internet illiterate student (this is 2001) to his university tech services department and meets Harue who tries to sort out the problem of the site which, by now doesn't even need the modem on to appear.

Across town, Michi is trying to work out what's happening to her friends. We see what happens to one of them as he encounters one of the stains on the walls that has come to life. The scene is unrelentingly strange and terrifying, removing all the control we think we have over it at its start until we feel like screaming along with the boy in the room.

In other settings we see similarly disturbing things. One of the worst is made from the simplest of ingredients. A computer screen playing video of a human figure walking across a room. Just before it gets to the other side the loop replays and its back to where it started.

There is little plot to this film as it is not fuelled by plot. It is a situation that once revealed only needs to keep developing. Althought made within the time frame of the big wave of J-horror (1997-2003) it doesn't belong among the Ringus and Ju-Ons with their clock-beating survival or ghost exorcising climaxes. Kairo's brief is the notion of what might happen if we keep ignoring each other, nurturing isolation and loneliness. By the time one character, literally reaching out to her friend, explodes into a cloud of swirling ashes (or is it insects?) we sense we are beyond hope.

Shot on DV which carefully only ever falls short of a film quality image, we are in a world where dark stains can look like people for a few seconds and people who shoot themselves in the head don't seem to even need to bleed anymore. Ghosts wander the streets, indistinguishable from the living. This warm-toned but increasingly grimy world is coming to an end and there is nothing to be done about it.

This film contains my two favourite moments of CGI. A hercules transport aircraft crashing which is as gutpunching as it is spectacular and, more poignantly and a lot less flashily, a figure in the background of a shot, climbing a tower and leaping off. Perhaps I should add a third as we end (this is not a spoiler) with the image that began the film: the gigantic silent ocean rippling on.

Various Apocalypses: Grab Bag

These are ones that I haven't seen for a while and must only remember. Thus I can't give any of them a full review.

 Miracle Mile: Boy meets girl but sleeps through his alarm, waking up to miss his date and take a call from a diner payphone that informs him that of an imminent nuclear attack on the city. Progresses with authentic dream logic but a real sense of urgency. You will not expect the ending. If you find a copy, do NOT allow anyone to spoil it for you.


Day of the Beast: Spanish film from the 90s poses the question what if you knew the apocalypse was coming but nobody believed you and stretches further to ask: then, if you prevented it how could you convince anyone. Mostly comedic but knows when it has to be a horror movie.



Letters From a Dead Man: Soviet era post-apocalyptic dirge doesn't insist on the bleakness that is apparent enough to need no comment. The cause of the cataclysm is, interestingly, operator error. Final scene with the children marching off into a puzzling future, in anti-radiation gear to the strains of Mozart's Masonic Funeral Music is both inspiring and heart-rending.

The Last Wave:Peter Wier's steadily eerie tale of cultural displacement and its consequences improves with repeat viewings, going from a creaky paranoia fable to a haunting warning. Why doesn't he still make films this good?

In The Mouth of Madness: John Carpenter's mashup of Stephen King, HP Lovecraft, Clive Barker, the power of the word can be a little too self conscious about its own cleverness here and there but survives this and the reliably uneven performance of Sam Neill in the lead role. Creepy and paranoid, it's unfortunately neglected among JC's output.

Various Apocalypses Part 3: THE TURIN HORSE

I passed on this one at last year's MIFF. I fell under the mighty spell of the same director's masterpiece Werckmeister Harmonies last decade and considered him incapable of making bad movies. Then I saw as much as I could of the rest. No bad movies but so little else as coherent and powerful as Harmonies. His touted apex, Satantango, has great merit for most of its SEVEN plus hours but cannot compete with the later film for sheer enjoyment of it. Harmonies is a film that features all of Bela Tarr's stamps like expert use of long takes, sumptuous black and white cinematography, a kind of medieval approach to daily life and the absurdity visibly beneath its surface. After The Man from London, Satantango and the great struggle to get through Damnation, I was well tarred and fatigued. So when this came up last year, even though I knew it wouldn't even be shown at ACMI and if I changed my mind later it meant buying a blu-ray from overseas. So....

The title of this film refers to the detail of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's biography that has him collapsing into pity at the sight of a maltreated horse and embracing the animal in tears. When Bela Tarr heard that story his response was: what happened to the horse?

By implication, it went to serve a father/daughter team on a farm in the literally windswept plains of Hungary whose life is difficult, stretching from one boiled potato to the next and going on, getting tougher. This description might make draw a chuckle if you are in any way used to the tradition of cinema that insists on the grind of life, especially in a rural environment. A single instance might suffice to leave the experience with a hearty disdain. But when I say now, that the difference here is that it's Bela Tarr doing it, I mean that if you are tempted to see it you will see something of its own kind in the best possible sense of the phrase.

What's the same as those other films is the casting of plain or gnarled rustic faces, sparse and grunting dialogue and stretches of grinding inertia. What's different is the most decisive item in Bela Tarr's amoury: the long take. Perhaps I should amend that to: use of the long take with the expertise of the specialist. This is not as plain as it sounds.

Tarkovsky spoke of the long takes he used as tools for a very direct audience involvement. Without  dialogue or even characters, think of a shot of a wall. For the first few seconds you wait for something to happen. When it doesn't after a long screen thirty seconds you start to look at the details of the wall, the unevenness of the paint job or the texture of the material and ask yourself if this is tells us about the people who live here, how they touch up the weathered patches or leave stucco or wood grain bare against the elements. You might wonder how well you'd do at maintaining it. Even if you wander off and go through your shopping list you've still engaged with the image and it has been instrumental in your present experience.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Remember His Past Lives is such a case. There is a scene in which a character takes a shower. You see the entire five minute shower. Nothing extraordinary happens. A man washes himself and then dries off. But if you aren't thinking of what a shower is by the halfway mark in this scene you are sitting in front of the wrong movie.

Bela Tarr's long takes frequently strive for this heightened involvement but in more signature mode go somewhere else entirely. He's not the only one to do this but he's one of the best. Through use of extraordinarily painstaking planning his long takes keep to their centre of gravity, following characters or points of focus around the scene, Tarr creates scenes that are both smoothly narrative and wildly virtuous. The opening of Werckmeister Harmonies, where Valoushka is explaining the eclipse using the drunken villagers to create the dance of the earth moon and sun, is a tour de force; not only do you get the breathless feeling of seeing every moment that might have been wasted with a lot of cutting, seing it fresh as performed, but at least the first time, you don't even notice you have been watching one shot. This is a cinematographer's nightmare to light and very difficult to choreograph but there it is on screen with one of the performers playing the role of choreographer himself. At another point we track along beside to characters as they walk for about three minutes in silence. We are looking at Valoushka thinking of what he has just been told. What in a lesser filmmaker's hands might be an indulgence with Bela Tarr is a modus operandi. His films would be boring without this and, even at their most gruelling, they are never boring.

I decided against being clever and noticing the course of the long takes in The Turin Horse and didn't notice a single scene that felt too long or overdrawn. That's only 30 cuts in a two and a half hour film. For reference the shower scene from Psycho has ninety cuts in three minutes.

So, after all that, is it worth it? Yes. Six days in the shared life of a father and daughter on a farm that is between fecund seasons or beyond them. The life is hard, water comes from a well and must be hauled out in buckets and poured into others and then carried back to the house. This takes obvious effort and is a daily task. The father's right arm is paralysed and he needs assistance dressing and undressing. Dressing is important as the gale that blows endlessly outside seems lethal. Dinner, any meal, consists of a single boiled potato for each which is eaten with the fingers (which get scorched by the force of hunger behind them). The horse of the title (if it is) no longer obeys commands or the bit and bridle and must, after great effort, be returned to the stable where it stands and stands and stands.

At one point a Gypsy wagon clops up to the well. The father commands his daughter to remove them as they poach some (obviously scarce water). She is handed a book in exchange for the water. We see her reading it word by word, tracing the letters on the page by the light of the hurricane lamp. It is a bizzarre religious text.

A man from the plains comes knocking, after some of the local moonshine. He reports that the nearby town has blown away and then sets into a monologue about the powerful acquiring and debasing the good and the noble until all is rendered into property. This could apply to the GFC, to the pervasion of social media and its constant and compliant invasion of privacy, or just to the archetypes in the book of Revelation where the bad guys stage false miracles and sew up commerce and social interaction. Keeping it to the principles allows it a necessary timelessness.

The horse's failing life, the depletion of their foodstock and the general drying and weathering of the land by the neverending wind blowing outside force the pair into the brief hope of escape and in one of the most powerful shots we see the failure of even this. At first the sight of the silouhuetted horse vanish over the horizon and then return minutes later seems funny, a replay of a thousand movie jokes but because we have to keep looking and waiting for this action to progress we are left feeling nothing but pity. We return to the farm house with them and wait with them until the last fade out.

Why the Nietschean angle? Couldn't they have just made the movie and called it Life's a Bitch? According to the more mythologised biographies of the philosopher, the incident left the great harranguer and celebrator literally speechless for the rest of his life which he spent drooling away in sanitoriums, staring into light and silence. The first images of the film which emerge as a fade in from the black of the opening titles are of the horse drawing the cart. It's in slow motion and expertly shot, showing the magnificence of the animal, the control of the farmer driving it and the power of the mission to grow food and live by its sale. When this stops so stops the world.

This is Bela Tarr's avowed final film. If he's as good as his word he might well leave the same legacy as Ellem Klimov whose force majere Come and See really was his last flim as he promised and he continues to be celebrated for it. Disliking most of his mooted masterwork Satantango, I considered him to be among the lucky few to create at least one work of genius in Werckmeister Harmonies. Now I think he's made two.

Various Apocaylpses Part 2: THE RAPTURE

Sharon has a stultifiying job at a call centre, serving the lazy and the idle by linking them to the phone numbers they seek. She's one of many among the dingy partitions. If this were god's job, and according to popular imagination it might as well be, no one would want it. She compensates with nights in Babylon, taking her drugs in the nose and sexual sparing anywhere else, coupling and recoupling. During one such sensual whirl she is mesmerised by the sight of an extremely elaborate tattoo on a woman's back of a pearl in a very odd looking setting. She asks about it and is only further intrigued by its owner's vague answer.

Further investigation leads her to the culty side of the fundamentalist Christian street and soon she finds some of these at the call centre, lunching together in the canteen and speaking in whispers. Outside of work she is increasingly haunted about her own dissolute lifestyle and begins to pursue the path, going from a backfiring slight toetesting to all out epiphany. She drags her most recent regular partner (a pre-X Files David Duchovny) from his own decadence into a dustless Christian marriage. They have a daughter. David suits up and eventually becomes a manager. Things, very bad things happen.

Sharon receives what she is convinced is an epiphany she takes her daughter to the desert, camps out by a mountain and waits for what she insists is the imminent apocalypse. Another non-spoily bad thing happens which brings the local sheriff into the picture. Then the apocalypse happens.

That bit isn't a spoiler as it's in the title. The notion relates to an interpretation of an old testament verse that suggests to the eager reader that at the point of the cataclysm, the faithful of the world will be transported to heaven. Here's the interesting thing about this film's presentation of this: it's literal. Act three is all Book of Revelation with additional dialogue. While the first two acts play like a candid Christian redemption tale the last one rolls out everything from the last book of the Bible as though it's really happening. But is it?

This film is a kind of necker cube. Look at it now and it's receding. Look again and it's advancing. What looks at first like a mega budget school pageant can very easily take on the icy tinge of psychosis. Sharon (Mim Rogers in her career's role of roles) descends through shock into a realm that she sees as biblical and ultimately blissful that you get a real sense that when she does the bad deed (and it is bad) she is aware of it's monstrousness as a human but convinced of its rectitude as a potential candidate for the rapture.

So which is it? Me, I'm an atheist, I'm incapable of accepting the events as literal truth without the same suspension of disbelief as I use with horror or science fiction. When I screened this at Shadows, one of the small but appreciative audience was an Anglican seminarian who praised the film for its "honesty". What she meant by that referred to my introduction which mentioned that writer/director Michael Tolkin, a Jewish-raised atheist who wanted to see what extreme religious belief looked like when played out for real. And it is honest. There are no moments of snidery here and the risk that the audience will only take what it sees one or the other way is clear and enormous. Whether this as a sobering parable of faith or psychiatry you will here find power and thought. It's not just honest, it's brave.

Review: Melancholia

Fade in. The gold and ice beauty of Kirsten Dunst. Her gaze is resigned. Objects fall through the unfocussed light behind her. They are birds plummeting to earth. Charlotte Gainsbourg carries a child and runs across a golf course, her feet sinking into the damp turf and leaving dark holes behind her. A black horse struggles to stand but collapses. A huge blue planet moves into earth like two movie stars' heads coming together for a screen kiss. The world is ending. This is how Melancholia begins.

The opening sequence seemed absurdly long until it dawned that I was watching an overture. I was listening to one, as well. The gigantic plaintive musical theme that I couldn't quite place was revealed with a little googling to be the overture from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. Then, after we see the fate of everyone we are about to see in the film we get a chapter title with the name Justine.

And then we have comedy. An extreme high shot of a narrow winding country lane. Into this small scaled nature moves a huge white stretch limo that is not going to make it from the bottom of the frame to the top without a lot of trouble. Inside the car are newlyweds Justine and Mike (Kirsten Dunst and Aleksander Skarsgard, the Viggo Mortensen you have when you can't have Viggo, also known as Eric the Viking Vampire from True Blood). Both of them have fun trying to get the monster car through the tiny lane. When they finally get to the reception at the mansion owned by Justine's bro-in-law they are met by a frowning sister, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) who reminds them that they are two hours late and the reception is now all but ruined.

The reception has cost Claire's husband John (Keifer Sutherland) so much money he never names the sum but continually introduces the topic into conversation. Justine's father (John Hurt) is a happy drunk whose sad resignation to his life's failure gives him a shambling dignity. His ex and Justine's mother Gaby (Charlotte Rampling) is an arid and bitter woman who is bursting to let everyone know what she thinks of marriage. Justine's boss (Stellan Skarsgard, Aleksander's father: not relevant but we're going through family relations so what the hell?) is still at work in his wedding tuxedo sending his bug eyed nephew after Justine to get a tag line for an ad.

Etc etc ... A complex sprawling told in more or less real time with use of shaky cam digital video. Sounds like blergh? Maybe but it proves compelling. The mass of inter-relations and microplotting that give this chapter its Pieter Breughel the Elder earthy grandeur is all backdrop, though. This isn't Festen nor is it attempting to be. At the centre of this happily chaotic celebration there lurks a dark spirit. Justine proceeds to alienate everyone present (everyone!). It takes her a while but she goes about it patiently and certainly. By the end she is alone.

Chapter 2 is Claire. Charlotte Gainsbourg talks to her husband Kiefer Sutherland about her fear that the big blue planet Melancholia is about to fly by the earth will really collide with it, rendering everything they are and know to space dust. He tries to reassure her that that won't happen and as an amateur astonomer is keenly looking forward to the event. In these doubting days the family takes delivery of Claire's half sister Justine who is so deeply into her affliction that she has to be coaxed to lift her foot to step into the bathtub. As Claire forages in every human corner for hope, Justine, in chilling resignation, tells her that there is no justifiable hope and that they must give up to the inevitable end of days.

There are directors who never seem to go out of fashion and whose whole body of work is labelled good in polite society. The Coens are in this group. There are others whose work features an exception either way. People who loathe David Lynch will usually give him Blue Velvet or Muholland Drive. And there are director's whose place at the top of conversants' admiration has long been cold and vacant, regardless of their output since. Lars von Trier lives here.

He has been generally out of favour since Breaking the Waves back in the mid 90s. And then there was Dogme 95 which kept him there. And then there was a series of foot in mouth gaffes at press conferences that had him virtually put a "kick me" sign on his own back. The most recent one of these was his rambling admiration for Hitler's architect Albert Speer which turned both weird and sour as Kirsten Dunst beside him quite visibly wished she was somewhere else (Youtube it!).

For me, I take von Triers' films one at a time. I don't hate any outright but some I don't care much about. What I do like is his steady hand at melodrama (see also Almodovar for this as a redeeming feature) his ease with experimentation and the warm and deep results of his direction of actors. I took some pains above to list some of the cast because it's a splendid one and unusual for such roll calls, not one is wasted nor allowed to phone it in.

I've enjoyed Kirsten Dunst as a screen presence since the Interview with the Vampire way back when and have found that she drives even indifferent vehicles well (Mona Lisa Smile). Along with the Gyllenhall siblings she is among the most compelling of her screen generation, lifting whole films with little effort. Even though she is in such fine company here and the playing is more ensemble than individual, her performance centres the whole two hours twenty minutes.

That is important to this film because, although it has been dismissively called Festen meets Armageddon, Melancholia is neither social realism nor sci fi. All told this film is not about a wedding gone wrong nor an interplanetary disaster it is about depression. The grinding black defeat of depression is present in every frame and its host is Kirsten Dunst's performance. Whether facing off the lens in the first shot with an unblinking gaze of certainty, swaying drunkenly by herself in the golden-hued crowd at the reception, chugging a great quantity of cognac straight from a bottle of Hennessy XO, suddenly crying into her favourite food at the dinner table or quietly preparing her sister and nephew for the end of the world, Dunst holds us with her glacial precision. There is no warmth in this embrace but we don't want to disengage, so powerful, so pitiable, so pure. This is a fable of depression and has at its heart the kind of simple message that all fables must carry. In this case a single word will do: Cope!