TS Eliot's line that any revolution in poetry must be a return to the ordinary applies to many other things. Take the horror genre. At the end of the 90s mainstream had become so self-ironic, its characters so self aware that an extended shot of a tapeworm of celluloid being sucked into a camera's arsehole seemed like the only new direction it could take. Then came the Blair Witch Project.
The BWP stripped the elements back until all that was left was darkness and unknowing. A trio of film students venture into a huge wood in pursuit of a local supernatural legend. They get lost. After the frustration of this, panic and infighting, the mysterious abduction of one of them, and the unyielding threat of the forest and all it might hide, they meet their doom. Are they being herded to it by forces unseen? Are they just driven to self-destruction by their own exhausted psyches? No answer from the film's abrupt ending. It haunts me to this day.
Fast forward to 2009 and Paranormal Activity appears with the promise of salvation for the genre from point-missing remakes, anodyne Dark Castle showbiz, and the safe sleaze of torture porn. One location, constant point of view camera by the actors. Darkness and offscreen sound. Simple elements handled well. It works a treat...to a point.
Young couple in a new house buy a video camera to pick up what they can of undisclosed weirdness that has been happening to them lately. The woman has already been haunted by an entity which is supposed by a visiting psychic to be a demon rather than a ghost and is associated with her rather than the house (ie moving out won't fix it). Well, the entity is back in town and the more attention they give it the more powerful it gets, from the padding down the stairs and swishing the keys from the table (which my cat could do) to the heavy metal thuds of a determined force of evil at the end. All the while the relationship between the couple is increasingly strained as they fight this thing they seem to know less and less about the more it reveals itself. This is good spooky stuff.
And the execution is expert. The diurnal scenes and any night scenes when the pair are talking more rationally are given rich DV home movie colour and feel safe and familiar. The real deal, though, is the blue and white of the night vision camera as it records the couple sleeping as the entity makes its presence known. The lower right hand corner of the screen during these sequences plays an increasingly important role in the evidence given the viewer as the vision speeds through the uneventful parts and slows to normal when something is about to happen. This and a title on the footage numbering the night of recording instil a sense of real dread.
The diabolical acts are also well conceived. What makes a demon scary? A flame festooned costumed and a pair of joke shop horns? How about a series of tiny acts that might be the normal sounds of people in the house if we didn't know we were looking at the entire household and they're fast asleep? How about the sense that each of these unthreatening deeds are the work of an entity testing its strength in the dimension of the living, getting more and more skilled in the world of its intended victims? All that from a few off screen sounds and a view through the bedroom door to the undetailed murk beyond it. There are some more sophisticated effects and they, too, are kept under tight aesthetic control. The sense is strong that you might never see the demon doing this but one slight glance of it would draw a scream or a gasp. I got a lot of real shivers down the spine during this film. I began watching it on a night when the winds outside raged and the hundred tiny sounds of an old house took voice. I stopped at a safe point and watched the rest during the day.
So that's all good, isn't it? Well, it would be but then the film ended. Without spoilers, this film's ending, a sudden jab of action, negates the effectiveness of the rest of it. It went from a genuinely eerie haunter with the added bonus of substance from the downward development of the couple's relationship (including an intriguing convergence of the two). All solid stuff and then it throws all of that away with the same kind of bullshit with which creatively impoverished writing teams have been stuffing the assembly line horror movies of the past twenty years. This film that, for almost its entire length, stuck to its very confidently loaded guns and successfully straddled the mainstream and guerilla filmmaking threw that admirable achievement into the s-bend in its final ten seconds. It turns every shiver and chill of the previous eighty or so minutes into waterlogged cheese.
Well, the dvd featured an alternative ending which was better but not much. Yet another described in the director's commentary which was better still but overdrawn. The commentary revealed something else that was spookier than anything in the entire film and it had to do with the film's fortunes as an independent feature doing the market festival rounds in its first release cut. Some very big names saw it and immediately mentally recast it with big name stars and higher production values which would have made it little more than a brushed off retread of Poltergeist. Wisely, this was defeated by another very big name who recognised the obvious value of a pair of unknowns in a verite horror (ie he had seen the Blair Witch Project). So it went ahead....except for that ending. No, that had to change. No numbing slow fuse like the anti-conclusion of Blair Witch which haunts across the decades. No, for this genuinely creative entry into a weary genre we get a big loud BOO! Roll credits.
Who was this force, this big name that engineered this creative gelding? Stephen Bloody Spielberg, that's who; the man who had already pillowed the breath out of every one of his proteges in the 80s (does Poltergeist look like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre to you?) so that their every film looked and behaved like one of his; the man who made JG Ballard into a Disney matinee, drained each drop of Alice Walker's power and rendered the Holocaust cartoony, goofy, cute and then washed himself with a vat of tears bought from Walmart. The director of Paranormal Activity thanks Speilberg in the commentary for his suggested ending and it is the sound of someone taking Satan's voucher, good for one career in movies, no unsightly low spots, no bothersome originality to clean up. The great moloch man at the end of the Hollywood foodchain who can turn inspiration into bubblewrap has struck again. I hate Stephen Spielberg.
Dramedy from the mid 80s now enjoying the reputation of rising above slurs aimed at it on first release that it was Network lite. So Amazon had a sale on some of its Criterion titles and I chucked that one in the cart along with the rest. First rainy day, I noted mentally.
So I did. Loose end, finished a short list for SHADOWS, I slip the ol' blu-ray disc into the OPPO.
So, Network lite or something with its own weight? Neither.
James Brooks is a competent if constrained filmmaker but the premise of a triangle of careerism and heart strings with Albert Brooks, Holly Hunter and William Hurt can't be that bad, surely. Well, it is and the problems with it are there in the first sentence of this par. This film plays satire then rom com then serious drama by turns but never twines the threads. If you were to take a handful of marbles and put them in a box and shook the box it would have more coherence than Broadcast News because for all the variations of pattern and size of the marbles they would all be making the same racket.
See that cast list up there? It's virtually madatory casting for the period. Brooks was branching out from his stand up and tv careers into cinema outings, eventually graduating to writing, directing and starring in them (Lost in America, for example, or Defending Your Life). Holly Hunter was taking her Texan drawell from heights in Coen movies to a real mainstream paypacket. William Hurt, post oscar was at that time in everything but a bath, spreading his earnest sensitive new age guy with a fine line in me generation psychobabble as far as it would stretch. Love 'em or hate 'em they were the team to beat.
And wasn't it time for a new Network, anyway? Masterpiece or not (it is) Network was all post-Nixon guilt and boardroom autocracy. Wasn't it time for some Reagenomics to hit the fan? Sure, maybe. Hurt's character of the charmer without stuffing sleazing his way to the top makes him perfectly cast as the very cipher the era nurtured. Brooks' smartarsed hard journalist was poised with wisecracks and effortless integrity to resist the Ron 'n' Nancy show. And Holly Hunter, workably quirky could demonstrate the woman's role in this, hammering at the glass ceiling, folding her neuroses into career-manageable bites. All good, so why doesn't any of this work?
Because none of the drama seems to come out of the interaction of these players but rather seems filled in like a cartoon background when required. Because the comedy is all wisecracks between people who find each other funnier than I could. Because there isn't a second of genuine connection between them. Because smugness and arrogance in their characters is standing in for charm or style or conviction. Because they don't have much of a chance at going for any of that as the film they are part of doesn't have any to begin with.
Holly Hunter bursts into uncontrollable tears after stress. Her colleagues are used to it. No history given nor any destination forthcoming. Just a quirk that a writer remembered. It's stuck on with gaffer tape. She delivers insufferably detailed directions to the drivers of every cab she gets in. Why the cabbies who could radio each other didn't see she ended up in the Potomac is beyond me.
William Hurt had recently won the Oscar for Kiss of the Spiderwoman and carries his character like a demon from Smug Hell, naturally and with palpable purpose. No problem there.
Albert Brooks once again proves that his small role in Taxi Driver was a fluke. He was funny the way office workers are funny with each other. He was also reined in by Martin Scorsese. Brooks is a comedy talent, really, but as a big screen romantic lead he is charmless, dowdy and queasily superior. His lines are witty and should be welcome but they are delivered so self-pleasingly that they are doomed at breath. His is an ugly presence which could never attract one of the opposite gender, even accounting for the hook of personal power doesn't work with him. Imagine being told grievous news by a messenger who smiles as he speaks and then sneers a remark about how much grief you should be showing. Well, that's what Albert Brooks is like in this film. And another thing: Brooks went on to write and direct several black comedies which should have worked a treat except that he cast himself as the lead in each one and had other characters laugh at his wisecracks.
But not even Brooks is chiefly responsible for Broadcast News' offence. Well, not that Brooks, anyway. It's James Brooks, writer and director, perpetrator of two hours of smugness so cloying that the packaging ought to include a toxicity warning. It is the smugness of a time when the attraction between three thoroughly repellent people could be covered by a lazy-minded pisstake on the media. It is the smugness that attempted to convince its audiences that the supposed ethical atrocity committed by one of the characters would turn another against them when the act in question was the very kind of thing the satire was aiming at. (Oh, but that's the rom com part, not the satire part. Bugger off!) It is the smugness that assumes automatic hilarity will ensue from mixing tv news title music with a Broadway musical style tune (and in an excruciatingly protracted scene which travels seven nautical miles beyond its own joke).
We're not smug like that anymore. We can't be. These days even our cynicism has a nervous edge to it when climate-change deniers are referred to as skeptics (and not equated with creationists as they deserve to be) and the apparent homogeneity of political partisanship is allowed a crushing inevitability. When broadcast media is both reviled for barrel-bottom-scraping and declared irrelevant. When a creepy, misty-eyed utopianism enters into what passes for worldiness then the scattergun smugness of Broadcast News looks obsolete, embarrassingly obsolete. It's a styrofoam cup. It's a plastic shopping bag.
So is it just poor time travel? Why is Robert Altman's M.A.S.H. cringeworthy but Catch 22 from the same year with a similar satirical brief still fresh? M.A.S.H. has a larky laddish misogyny that feels violent-minded now. In Catch 22 this attitude comes from within characters rather than from the film as a whole and it is not assumed that the audience will confuse it with anti-authority. Back home, Broadcast News fails where the full-decade-earlier Network continues to compel, draw big laughter and excite.
Network, for all its treasure trove of topical 70s references, is a timeless film whose hints at reality tv and the big, frightening, faceless business behind the ownership of the media. Network functions, despite its overliterate dialogue, because its cast performs at the top of its game and looks like it doesn't know the camera is in the room. Network, despite having some truly vile characters among its dramatis personae, absorbs its audience into its population, allowing time to see something of how each of the major players came by their shape.The newer film cannot compete with any of this. It fails on every point. It is made for its time rather than beyond it. Broadcast News is not Networklite, it's like Network never happened.
Lars isn't just shy he's deep frozen. He looks young and hot (Ryan Gosling) but has to put gloves on to shake hands. His town seems to be in perpetual winter which suits him fine as he goes from work or church back home to the garage of the family home now occupied by his brother and wife.
A workmate shows Lars a website that sells a range of highly realistic sex dolls, out of curiosity, sniggering prurience and a deep, genuine interest. Lars is embarrassed and puts his head down. A few nights later he is in his garage smiling at the big wooden packing crate that has landed at his doorstep. Cut to him waking his brother in the main house with a shyly delighted confession that a girl he met on the net has arrived, is in a wheelchair and really could do with the spare room. Brother Gus and sister in law Karin are so overjoyed at this that they rush off to prepare the room. Cut to the pair of them in stunned silence staring at what we know the next shot will be: a life sized masturbation device in the shape of a girl.
Syllable by syllable the pair cope by playing along as Lars reels off a string of inventions rehearsed ever since he clicked on the BUY button. It's insane but they've never seen him so happy and given before. This leads where you think as person by person in the small town buys into the delusion until there needs to be a knock on the door of the medicine cabinet. The ever magnetic Patricia Clarkson treats the doll but really Lars and thus we get to know his troubled history. Does he find his way out? See it.
There is a lot of opportunity here for this film to forget its serious premise and surrender to the cuteness of least resistance the way that US indy films generically do: all too sudden revelations, character details from the blue, set pieces contrived to the point where they look like tableaux vivant and a range of gratingly obvious tropes designed to divert the viewer from the lack of creativity that they are witnessing. I loathe the Little Miss Sunshines, Savages, and Rushmores etc that serve as the inheritors of the Trusts, Smokes and Sex Lies and Videotapes o' the late 80s on. Not all of those earlier ones worked all the time, I'll admit (eg Hal Hartley's teetering output) but you could bet more confidently on them, sight unseen. Lars and the Real Girl is made in that spirit, its touch gentle rather than precious, its emotion digetic rather than gaffer taped on.
There's a scene in the vile Rushmore where Max is expelled and there's a shot of him in tears. It's shoved in there and passed over. Max, if he had the intellect he's depicted with, should have expected nothing less. His quixotic nature has led him there and Wes Anderson made a decision to try and render him pitiable rather than show yet another act of defiance. But there has been nothing genuinely pathetic in the character prior to this and there is nothing after. Anderson recognised an emotion that would cover a gap and shoved it in like a book into an overstuffed shelf. When Lars begins the slow process of what might be his recovery, using the latex Bianca, there is real pain and hazard on the screen. Nothing we see has come from anywhere we haven't already seen. This is a film that, for all its charm and quirks, is about pain and that, in the end lifts it from its indy ranks and to the level of cinema that doesn't need any claims at all to tell its tales.
In case you're wondering, there is a real girl in this story and she's worth discovering for yourself. Ironically, she is the least credible aspect of the story but even her fascination with Lars is given context and weight; it doesn't just happen.
I was sorry to have missed this at the cinemas a few years back. I'd been impressed with Gosling from his role in Half Nelson. When I did miss it I sour grapesed it by writing it off as a quirky indyfest. I was wrong ... very, very wrong. See.
SHADOWS WINTER PART 1 PROGRAMHERE. Next screening details below.
Two men, one young and one middle aged. Experience vs ennui. Duty vs drudge. Sense of purpose and appreciation of place in universe vs ... restlessness and boredom. They're alone on an Arctic island, running a weather station. Sergei thinks of his family while applying his hard won expertise. Pavel plays with the junk from the old missions and tests the radioactive sensor for the fun of it. He comes in from this one afternoon and reports the results excitedly to the old man. Sergei embarrasses him by finding out he'd left the shotgun unloaded. There are polar bears on the island. They can and have killed humans. Pavel has risked both their lives and the mission.
Later, because he's experienced and he can Sergei goes on an unauthorised fishing expedition on the other side of the island. Not a fishing trip, mind. He takes the speedboat and is considerably armed. Pavel is worried but here's his chance to do everything right. He covers for Sergei while making his routine report but the remote operator insists he bring Sergei to the radio. Fudging it, he takes a message. Sergei's family have been in an accident and are facing death in the emergency ward. Ummmmm ...
Sergei comes back in high spirits and ropes Pavel into preparing the fish for salting and curing. Pavel can't get a word in. Several missed opportunities to do so later he shrugs and figures the news will come out soon enough anyway and he has time to think up an excuse. This situation only expands until, when the news must burst out it is accompanied by gun fire.
It was appropriately Anton Chekov who formulated the loaded gun rule which goes like this: if you show a loaded gun early in a story it will need to be discharged before it's over. This one goes one further and extends the unloaded gun at the beginning to Pavel's disassembly as a member of the team. The one moment where he had relevant knowledge that Sergei didn't, he allowed to rot and ferment until it exploded. When Pavel flees to the relative safety of the bear-plagued wilderness he is forced to seek his own power to stay alive but even here his invention is dependent. He needs Sergei or mother earth to furnish him with the means to survive. Without a parent like either of those, he is lost; accepting their worked for bounty or perishing with an impotent curse at his circumstances. It's not just Chekov that this Russian tale evokes but the great demi god of ennui himself the mightless Oblomov who takes the first hundred pages of the novel that bears his name to get out of bed. What might as well be Oblomov's unloaded gun rule is brought to its survivalist end here.
This is a spoilable film and I'll go no further in describing the plot but what remains of it pits these characters against each other. Yes, they develop. It's subtle but it happens and when absorbed it is profound.
This film of misunderstood bonding, low on dialogue but big on thorough and muscular performance, is given such an extraordinary setting that the third character (the landscape now desolate now strikingly beautiful) seems to get all the good lines just by standing there. A powerful trio.
I missed this at last year's Russian Film Festival and am grateful to have been able to see it in a cinema, its natural environment, a place where the image is immersive and the spare plot absorbing. You know when the description of a film alone can make you like it before you see it? I'm a sucker for sea stories and remote settings like islands, jungle outposts or lighthouses. How I Ended This Summer couldn't have lost with me if it had starred J Lo. As it is it turned out to be a powerful thing. Bonus.
Sage Nouvelle-Vaguer Jacques Froste walks the night with stately gait.The sparks and licks of flame get busy in the stove heater. Wine mulls and so should we with these six tales o' wounds and healing.
Click on image for a pdf of the flier for download, viewing and printing.
Friday June 3 8pm ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD (UK Tom Soppard 1989)
"Who'd have thought we were so important?"
So asks Rosencrantz of Guildenstern during the closing moments of this film. Or was it Guildenstern of Rosencrantz? Not even they are quite sure.
They are not sure of much at all which is why their dialogue is made up of questions. Summoned to spy on the crown prince of Denmark, the pair find themselves both bystanders and intriguers in a royal court gone mad. With nothing but their talent for rhetoric, they must find their way out of there, mission or no mission. Not easy when you're up against a philosopher prince (theatre's smartest) but well nigh impossible when reality itself seems to be fleeing at a rate of knots.
Tom Stoppard's exercise in crawling out of writer's block earned him his career's biggest hit to date. Why? Because for all its intellectual rigour (and there's plenty) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is bloody funny. Whether it's the dizzying commentary on a series of coin flips, the incidental discoveries of aerodynamics and steam power, the rhetorical tennis match, or whenever the play of Hamlet itself interrupts the story the comedy goes from Pythonesque absurdity to straight out slapstick. We're talking money's worth, here.
But for all its tricksiness this might have fallen on its own big smug smile if it weren't for the cast. The leads are taken by two of the cinema's hottest properties from the time: Tim Roth and Gary Oldman. Not only do they relish these roles but are clearly delighted to be performing in their own London accents (which their famous roles forbade). The Player King, guide, tormentor and judge to the duo, is cooked to a flavoursome overperfection by Richard Dreyfus, obviously loving the fact that his role cannot be made too theatrical.
This might have been a play but here the film's the thing....
Friday June 10 8pm
TAXI DRIVER (USA Martin Scorsese 1976)
Travis is back from Vietnam but can't settle. The all night porn shows have become boring and walking it off doesn't help. He can't get any peace. Mostly, he drives around the streets of Manhattan which looks like one continuous gutter sticky with nauseating humanity. He might as well get paid for that so he gets his chauffeur's licence and signs on with the cabs. He goes anywhere, any time and anywhere. Well, there's a living in it but that's all that's changed. And then there's Betsy.
Betsy seems to walk on air through this Babylon, through streets thick with sleaze to her desk at the office of local liberal presidential hopeful Charles Palatine. Returning to life, he approaches her and, for a brief glorious moment, everything works and then it doesn't. She floats back up to her cloud and he's back down in the sewer. So, Travis gets his gun. Actually he gets a few and a lot more besides, and he realises that to get anything done properly he must aim low.
Martin Scorsese had already made a few powerful films but this one was for real money and he could pick his cast. Robert "you talkin' to me?" De Niro provided the world with the performance he is still judged by, God's Lonely Man, from awkward faux pas to the coal black sheen of a vigilante he delivers everything he has and then some. Narration had grown old by the mid 70s but De Niro's voice of Travis contained no kitsch and reintroduced it to the cinema as pure cool. Appropriate praise for the cast of this film would exceed readable column length but mention of Jodie Foster is mandatory. Foster came to the underage hooker role from a short life that had led from advertising and television to full stardom as Disney's poster girl. As Iris, she is unnervingly worldly but when the child's fear and anger shine through her exterior she owns a screen that includes Robert De Niro at his strongest. That's something.
What to say about this one? Do I continue by going on about influence (on Scorsese and everyone who sees this film)? No, I continue by commanding your presence in front of it so you can see it for yourself. First or millionth viewing will have the same impact. Guaranteed.
Friday June 17 8pm DOGTOOTH (Greece 2010)
Things are wrong from the first scene. A boy exercises to the sound of his mother reading out of whack definitions. The ocean is a large armchair. A zombie is a small yellow flower. With his sisters later he agrees to a harrowing endurance test that one of them proposes.
The trio live in big gleaming luxury, a huge house full of sunlight, Edenic garden with a swimming pool. The grounds are of aristocratic proportions and surrounded by a fence three metres tall.
This is the least of the barriers between the children and the outside world. The title refers to more parental misinformation: they can only leave the home when their canine teeth fall out. Until then it's more of the fable and less of the able. This would be forgivable if the kids were toddlers but they are all approaching adulthood with no sign that the coddling and lies have an end. Oh, on the adulthood business. The father, accepting his powers of retarding the childrens' development cannot change the physical reality of adolescence hires a female security guard from the factory he manages to come by and see to the boy's needs. This she does but also cannot unsee the situation she has walked into and attempts to nurture the seedlings of change. You will not believe how she does this.
This troubling fable of over protection and the futility of closed (a nominee at the last oscars for best foreign film) has been compared to Michael Hanneke. I'd add French filmmaker Bruno Dumont. There is sudden slight violence and bad violence (the worst is implied rather than shown) and hefty servings of unappetising sex. But neither of those filmmakers have ever gone this far into allegory as this film does and does defiantly. If such an unforgiving satirist as Jonathon Swift were alive today to see the European Community and its treatment of the junior partners, the revival of looney tunes religion, the olympian leap widening between have and have not or, more simply, the state of society in this tale's native Greece, he might have made this film exactly the same way. Be bold. Watch.
Friday June 24 8pm Little Murders (USA Alan Arkin 1971)
You like your comedy black, no sugar? Try this.
Alfred (Elliot Gould), an "apathist" photographer, allows his subjects to beat him up figuring that they'll just get tired of it and stop. He's saved from them by the high-powered Patsy who is so troubled by his philosophy that she can't let go of him. Hauling him to dinner at the family apartment brings him into close proximity with dad ("Don't call me Carrol!"), mum (who has so completely made her home that she can scarcely understand anything beyond it ) and little brother Kenny (seemingly too late to join the casting call for Spider Baby).
Patsy proposes to Alfred who accepts because he might as well. Hippy priest (Donald Sutherland) delivers one of the most gleefully anti marriage broadsides at the wedding, causing a riot in the church. Add to this Patsy's disastrous attempts to draw the feeling/living human out of Alfred, the mounting figures for random homicides, and a police force on the verge of hysteria and you have some concentrated satire that can thrill when it doesn't create laughter.
Angry cartoonist Jules Feiffer's play was too strong even for off-Broadway. His picture of a modern urban America is a scene of continual breakdown. The twin responses of surrender or struggle seem equally valid but placed side by side the mix is by turns creepy and hilarious. Mighty comic character actor Alan Arkin(see Catch 22 in the Autumn Part 2 program) is at the helm and also plays the desperate cop Lieutenant Practice at breaking pitch.
They don't make 'em as tough as this anymore but they should.
Friday July 1 8pm THE OFFENCE (UK Sidney Lumet 1972)
A cop brutally bashes a suspect during an interview. As he faces up to suspension and his own grilling his state of mind emerges and it is none too pretty.
Detective Sergeant Johnson has been worn skinless by his job and at the end of a gruelling investigation into recent missing girl cases he has been brought to nervous combustion. His own examination reveals things about himself that only lead further into darkness as he comes to understand how completely he has come to identify with the criminals who have increasingly disgusted him.
Sean Connery at the beginning of the 70s found himself in a seller's market and bargained with Universal to allow him some projects that interested him in exchange for another Bond movie. They got Diamonds Are Forever but anyone who saw the real actor under the glitz got The Offence.
This hard as nails psychological thriller was directed by the late great Sidney Lumet. Fresh from helming Serpico, and soon to bring Dog Day Afternoon and the mighty Network to the big screen, Lumet was firing on all cylinders and here rolls back what little Hollywood remained in that kind of work and acclimatises himself perfectly in the cold and damp of the British setting. And Connery is rolling his own star power back to find strength among such UK greats as Vivien Merchant and Trevor Howard. Anyone else brought up on the power of Brit TV in the 70s will recognise most of the cast. It feels like home, it feels like hell. It's also brilliant. Come and see.
Friday July 8 8pm Uncle Boonmee Who Can Remember His Past Lives (Thailand Apichatpong Weerasethakul 2010)
Boonmee is a tamarind farmer in rural Thailand. He is dying of a disease of his remaining kidney. His sister in law has joined him for company for what might be his last days. He has a male nurse to see to his medical needs and a probably illegal Laotian personal servant. Were it not for the closeness of death life in this balmy, insect chorusing agrarian idyll would be perfect.
But death is not such a conversation killer here. Boonmee is deeply Buddhist and thinks of himself less as dying than about to leave his present body.
Talk at the dinner table is about the future, life after Boonmee and it's practical, unsentimental. So matter of fact, in fact, that we hardly notice the ghost of his wife slowly materialising on one of the chairs at the table. Once established, though, they variously take it in their stride or witness it as their worry slowly gives way to acceptance. They then converse as though she's just dropped in for a visit.
That's the kind of film this is. If Dogtooth pits hyperrealism against fable Uncle Boonmee mixes mysticism with a folky documentary style. This is a story of mortality and its acceptance but, further, suggests approaches to reconcilation with the idea. Lest you should think that this sounds grim I'll chuck in mentions of Boonmee's son who, in pursuit of a mythical ape figure caught only in a blurred photo, has become a hybrid man ape figure with glowing red eyes. And what might well be one of the past lives promised in the title, a disfigured princess is courted and seduced by a river carp. Add to this a constant strain of day to day humour and you have a film that stands by itself.
There are passages which do not announce their intention and Weerasethakul's eye can often linger on a given body or object, inviting his audience to share his fascination. There is no pretense to being anything else. There is mysticism aplenty, surrealism, abundant natural beauty and hints at local political history but the surface is so rich that unfamiliarity with these will not detract from viewing. This film is only as difficult as you want to make it.
The shadows lengthen as autumn creeps on. Come in from the chill and enjoy these six tales of breakdown and renewal by the fire. Stay to voice your thoughts with a glass of cheer and some nibbles.
Fenix perches naked on a tree stump in his room at the local asylum and won't come down. When he is gently persuaded to eat some food by the doctor, and then dressed,he recalls what brought him there.The child of two circus performers, he grew up with a mix of wonder and worldliness, developing his own skills as a magician. One night ... Well the tattooed lady has a crush on his father which is seen at just the wrong time by his mother (leader of a cult of an armless local saint) who pursues immediate and certain revenge. As she reaps ... Fenix sees it all. Next stop a tree stump in a cell. And then more vengeance.
When Claudio Argento wanted his own slasher film, still popular in the 80s and long set in generic concrete by various franchises, he wanted it based on the hard reality of a true crime story from Mexico. So he asked the director of two of the strangest films in history if he'd like a job.Well, if he'd really wanted it done more trad he'd have asked his brother Dario, wouldn't he?
Jodorowsky brings the same punchy mix of surrealism, melodrama and time honoured theatrical chops to the project and makes it pretty unmistakably his own. Even his DNA is on screen as his sons play Fenix as a boy and young man (powerful genes those, both look like younger clones of him). Santa Sangre is both his most operatic and narratively disciplined feature, allowing him, through more conventional methods than he'd used till then, to examine some of the deeper themes in the material. Sounds lofty but it actually just adds up to fun. Strange thing to say about what is after all a tragedy but if this filmmaker had pursued convention only boring things would be said of it.
April 29th 8pm PUTNEY SWOPE (Robert Downey Snr USA 1969)
A Brother takes over the ad agency. This happens at the start but I don't want to spoil how.
Madison Avenue, late 60s: Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy have both fallen to assassins and Vietnam looks like it's never going to end. I'd add Nixon's in the Whitehouse but he isn't. Instead there's a dwarf into bondage (so maybe Nixon is in the Whitehouse). Enter Putney Swope, token African American on the board of a big advertising firm.
First order of business, rename the agency to Truth and Soul. Second, fire the board of directors, keeping one token white guy. Third, make ads so out of whack with convention that they slaughter the competition. But Putney's astuteness and force have bigger troubles than business rivals as everyone from the Panthers to the President wants a piece of him.
Robert Downey Sr's broadside against the advertising industry is as angry and funny as Network is against television and rightly ought to be recalled in the same thought. With the kind of pace and constant invention that would render so much American satire of the coming 70s classic, Downey pumps it full of prickly one liners and shoots in a cool verite black and white. The ads themselves are in rich technicolor and while hilarious in context, reach beyond their era to today.
This is how Mad Men should finish when it gets to the end of the 60s. If George Romero hadn't succeeded in his advertising career he might have made something very like this.
Screens with The Deal.
May 6th 8pm THE NIGHT PORTER (Lilliana Cavani Italy 1974)
Max's nights at the Vienna hotel where he works are quiet and easy. One night a woman he recognises appears in the crowd in the foyer. He tries to avoid her but their eyes inevitably meet. She recognises him as well and her smile falls from her face.
The flashbacks dress Max in the black uniform of the S.S. and the woman, Lucia, in the stripes of a prisoner. The closer we get to both the harder it is to tell victor from victim. When Lucia's initial panic and anger bring a confrontation centre stage more than expected gets dredged from the nightmare of the past and aspects of the weird bond emerge as powerful as they had been. The gang of shadowy ex war criminals Max is reluctantly part of are going to have their own ideas about this.
Liliana Cavani's Night Porter is about an abuse of power and its troubling reception by the victim. It is in no way an attempt to explain the holocaust or exploit it (Lucia is pointedly not identified as Jewish, for example). It's far more like Stockholm Syndrome. The swastika here stands more as an instantly recognisable power that is seemingly absolute and invincible. Here is the power exchange in any relationship taken to an extreme.
But none of this might have been apparent were it not for Cavani's steady vision of the costs in such a story, nor the power of the two leading performances by Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling. This story can be disturbing but is never a trail to watch. If you emerge from the experience troubled and thoughtful then you really have seen it. If this seems forbidding it shouldn't: The Night Porter is a transcendental film.
May 13th 8pm
CONFESSIONS (Tetsuya Nakashima Japan 2010)
Yuko quits her teaching job. She tells this to her cheering class and explains that after the death of her small child she cannot continue in the profession. She tells them that she knows it was a murder rather than an accident and that the murderers are in the room. When she then tells them that her revenge has already begun she is not being figurative. Chaos ensues.
Well it would except that, after the intial shock there is a knid of erosion to the bullish social order of the class. Who are the killers and who was the stoolie who told? The group is revealed to have always been a collection of vulnerablities and threats.
If you are thinking Heathers meets Battle Royale keep thinking it but go further. If you are lucky enough to have seen the breathtaking poetic epic of bullying All About Lily Chou Chou you could stir that in there, as well. This vengeance tale tells of a retribution by pervasion, attacking the weeds from the roots which is where we are invited to witness it. Through the confessions of key players we learn a lot about the ambitions of the kids but also the barriers that prevent them. Competition and failure reign supreme.And never has nascent criminality looked so seductively beautiful as here.
Radiohead and The XX provide a score that goes with the glassy rain and grey skies and opera blares with the sunshine.
May 20th 8pm EL NORTE (Gregory Nava USA 1982)
Brother and sister Enrique and Rosa are getting through their youth in their small farming village. Enrique knows only the life he has and Rosa is looking forward to what might come of her admirer's admiration. Around the dinner table they feast as well as they are able and talk of the wonders of the north, gringo land with its cars and money and real flushing toilets in every house.
You work the crop and come home to a happy family, dream a little and get up to do it all again. Simple. Well, no. This is Guatemala and they are Mayan descended natives. The U.S. backed dictatorship installed decades before is still in place and still muscling in on the land and freedom. Ricki and Rosita's father is about to do something about this when the meeting he goes to turns into a massacre.
After the would be insurgents the militia turn their attention to all the natives and cart them away somewhere other than good. Rosa and Enrique barely escape and now must flee. Where though? No one likes an indian here. El Norte, of course, where everyone can be rich and happy. Oh boy......
El Norte was called the first independent epic and seldom has a two word combination so aptly described a film from conception to reception. There might be a few clunkers in the dialogue and sourced soundtrack music but the scope of the vision with its clear, underlying themes of the trickle-down misery bestowed by the land of the free, allow this story both the simple lines of folk art and the breadth of a saga. Moments of Latin magical realism appear almost in ambush, adding to the riches. And the two leads, playing their own ethnicity, evoke an easy empathy. David Villalpando (Enrique) said of the film "El Norte became a powerful fighting element, grew an audience, searched audiences, and left the theatres to tell its truth."
He was right.
May 27th 8pm CATCH 22 (Mike Nichols USA 1970)
Yossarian flies in bombers. Bomber command keeps raising the bar on the number of missions he has to fly. He thinks of staging insanity to get sent home. But only a sane man would want to get out of extra duty. Catch 22.
And it's not just the war. Well, maybe it is as the business interests of the staff officers begin pervading all corners of life on the base and then beyond it, increasingly demanding loyalty above flag and nation. The war, borne of national and economic interest has created further interest. There is no such place as outside the system. Or is there?
Mike Nichols' punchy and funny interpretation of Joseph Heller's savage satire of warfare and duty keep the absurdity controlled to see it clearly enough to know it in the dark before letting it out of the gate to run free. Alan Arkin veers between hysteria and grounded sanity as Yossarian who must keep his wits against the increasingly wayward reality around him picks off its victims one by one. Speaking of actors, you want a cast? Try this: Tony Perkins and Martin Balsam together again for the first time since Psycho, a creepily suave Richard Benjamin, contemporary comics Bob Newhart and Charles Grodin, the mighty Orson Welles, and Angelina Jolie's dad (some guy called Jon Voight).
The dialogue is kept tough but open to changes in texture. Glimpses of surrealism blend seamlessly with the kind of hard and important look that American cinema of the 1970s would command. And for each moment of whimsy there is a counterbalanced horror: there's cute Nately but sobering Snowden.
Always a risk, this retelling of the early life of John Lennon does something refreshing: it keeps focus on the central issue of the young Lennon's torn emotional life, being raised by his aunt and only finding out his mother lived locally when in his teens.
Aaron Johnson in the lead plays a young, cocky, charming and hot tempered teenager rather than a nascent rock star. His aunt Mimi runs her lower middle class home strictly but not coldly. Kristen Scott-Thomas presents a woman containing a tide of heartache and disappointment by providing her ward with a clean home that is welcoming if not always warm.
Anne Marie Duff plays Julia, Lennon's mother whom he hasn't seen since a traumatic day of his childhood. She's wild and warm and constant fun offering all the freedom in the world to her newly returned son as long as she doesn't have to take too much responsibility for him. Duff shows the danger in the fun, allowing a teetering instability into every scene she's in. And mention ought to be afforded David Morrisey for playing Julia's second husband, tolerant of the upheaval his young family suffers at the entrance of the intruder to the point of formlessness. His anger is palpable but so is his concern for her sanity. He's not soft, he's just good at walking on eggshells. It's a strong and thankless performance.
Just as the scouse accents are not overdone for these people between the proletariat and bourgeoisie who are attempting to step above mucky commonality, the Beatles content is so understated that when asked for a reminder of the group's name toward the end, John simply answers: "would you care?" No B word there. Similarly, there isn't a single instance of a title of a Beatle song nor any line from one inserted into the dialogue. Showing the gates of Strawberry Field or the Penny Lane street sign are blissfully permissable.
Lennon's epiphany on seeing Elvis on screen is believable, he doesn't explode but you can see he's riveted and calculating at the same time. When he gathers a gang of boys to light up in the loo at school, calling them to be his group, he's not so inspired as starting somewhere. The scene rings with schoolboy excitement and derision and, as with some later moments in the story illustrates something very accurate about bands forming and managing their membership: people are chosen by personality and fit over ability.
I've never been in a band nor ever observed one that recruited someone just because they played well. Come on, you're between 16 and about 25, you're playing some version of rock music; you are not going to get anyone who's too old or nerdy or straight or socially or culturally wrong, regardless of how well they play. There is nothing reprehensible about this, it's the way of the genre and it says less about rock being a musically clueless music but one that can easily be built from little: to this day I'd rather hear Jonathon Richman than Genesis for that very reason. When the significantly younger Paul McCartney plays a word and riff perfect version of 20 Flight Rock it's impressive but he's encouraged more for his pluck. He fits. It's a good scene as it goes against the grain of the rock bio without a breath of spite.
Scenes of the Quarrymen playing on stage are far slicker than they would have been but the point of them is to show Lennon's commitment and showmanship. Depicting the cold and uncomfortable reality of a rock gig at that level runs contrary to purpose of the film. The ones in Backbeat are a lot truer to experience (if heightened for fiction) because it *is* about the young Beatles. This is a film about a teenager fighting his way out of a damagingly confusing situation. One way he finds to do this is through a door he has little trouble opening.
You could say that this didn't have to be about Lennon at all but that it is is important. It has a curious effect of deconstructing the pop god. Soberingly it might remind viewer's of the turbulent mind that pointed a pistol at him in 1980 and squeezed its trigger.
