Review: WADJDA

Wadjda wants a bike. She can't afford one yet but that's all she wants. She sells football bracelets that she makes herself to the other girls at school but they aren't going to do it. The next time she's up before the headmistress they are taken away and declared forbidden so that's gone, too. Oh, Wadjda (pronounce it Wazhda) lives in Riyadh, capital of Saudi Arabia and girls there don't ride bikes.

Her father is an occasional visitor as he wanders the social realm in search of a wife who can lift his social status and bear him a son. Her mother works a job across town which makes her dependent on a driver (she's not allowed to drive).

Between school and home there's Abdulla, also about eleven, whose trades taunts with her that are energised by their frankly sweet mutual attraction. There's also the everything shop bursting with all kinds of cheap rubbish inside but puts on display on the footpath a small squadron of kids bikes that gleam with freedom. Freedom has a price and it's way beyond what the bracelets are going to rake in.

So far this might as well get in line with all the other inheritors of Italian neo-realism, a genre that ventured great truths through spare means. For that, all it would have to do would be to follow Wadjda's progress in getting the bike or not and, happy or sad ending, that would fill the checklist. But something else is happening here.

The first scene of this film involved her joining her classmates in a devotional song. She's crap at it and is sent out of the room. A few scenes in will tell you that it wasn't singing but the song. She'll happily sing along to the foreign pop in her room as she twists the bracelets into being. She's just not a joiner. She doesn't reject her family's religion but doesn't express any piety either. When the opportunity to make the ticket price of the two-wheeler compels religion she takes to it with the seriousness of a child making a discovery. Does it make her religious? See the film.

That classroom song is staged as a kind of verite scene of daily life, routine by which we see our heroine in context. It is also a direct tribute to Robert Bresson's Mouchette from 1967. Mouchette, though pretty and capable is a social leper. While she shares her fellow teenager's joy at things like dodgem cars she finds it impossible to truly connect with anyone until an encounter with an older outsider offers a kind of escape. She failed choir practice, too, and was humiliated for it.

Wadjda's intelligence (made electrically animate by Reem Abdulla whose bright grin both knows and cajoles) keeps her apart from everyone in her life and brings to the fore the intelligence of the women who surround her which has long been as veiled as their faces out of doors.

There has been some commentary about this film, the first Saudi film directed by a woman, suggesting that come opportunity was taken to serve the constraints of Saudi society to Western audiences as a kind of neo-realist exploitation flick. As we see Wadjda approach her goal we wonder how much of the freedom she expects of it will materialise and how fleeting it might be as the world around her seems daily to fit her up for silent subservience.

To my mind if there has been any distancing it is that of writer/director Haiffa Al-Mansour who must put her own distance between her own experience and the world of Wadjda, to actively seek an alienness in the familiarity. By the time we see Wadja catching sight of the dangerous liberty in front of her we get the distinct feeling that the same feeling ran rampant in the mind behind the camera that brought this vision to the screen.

Top 10 Intense Films (Anniversary of Eraserhead Premiere)

Not necessarily the best nor even my favourite intense movies. Just the first ten I could think of.

Eraserhead: premiered this day in 1977. My favourite film and the only one I know that Kubrick wished he'd made.






Irreversible: One that doesn't get a lot of viewings because it only really needs the first. The point to the reversed timeline is the eradication of moral identification. It works. It's tough because that works. It's extraordinary.

Martyrs: Starts as a very icky revenge tale but suddenly gets bigger and unblinkingly scary ... as the violence lessens.

Solaris: Intended to be the Sovyeet answer to Vest's decadent running dog 2001 Tarkovsky's exploration of the Lem novel took off into its own universe, entered a haunted house of loss and desire. The ending punches guts.

Two or Three Things I Know About Her: Godard's essay on prostitution for consumption began with a newspaper article but he goes beyond it into a city crammed with fashion colours seared by a nagging whisper of dissent, climaxing not in the supermarket items in a row up like a skyline but in the cosmos he finds in the bubbles and swirls of a cup of coffee.

Apocalypse Now: How a long and slow film with very little of the warfare it promised on screen can have held my attention like a real life situation for more than twenty times over as many years is puzzling but true. Martin Sheen occupies the screen for most of the film's two plus hours and doesn't smile once.

Night of the Living Dead: Made for $5 in 4X3  black and white when the mainstream was scope in technicolour this still beats all its descendants in grip and economy.

Arsenic and Old Lace: Yep, a comedy, a screwball comedy at that, but one blacker than the hobs of hell as two old spinster aunts find that their career of mercy murders is about to be exposed and don't seem to mind a bit. Moves faster than the human heart until its owner is a few minutes into it.



The Exorcist: Friedkin approached the genre piece as though it was a true story. All the generic traits were discarded, recalling that empathetic pain and fear are most effectively related by making them look real. They do. THEN you get the mystique and dry ice horror because then the alienness of it also feels real.


Repulsion: Catherine Deneuve is driven insane from fear and we're in the back seat. Polanski still had a few gems to make but he never topped this for intensity.

Review: NEBRASKA

Woody Grant is a wintry old man at the end of his life. His wife, long indifferent to him, either ignores him or is in his ear about something. One son has reached middle age on the verge of highly local celebrity and the other works a job failing to sell home entertainment systems to people who just want to browse. One day Woody receives a letter that tells him he's won a million dollars. He starts walking. The place he needs to claim from is one and a bit states away in Nebraska so he needs to get a move on. He does but he keeps getting hauled back by police or the underachieving son and more nagging. Finally, his son who has tried to tell the old man that the win is actually a scam to trick people into buying magazine subscriptions but Woody doesn't seem to get beyond the words WINNER and WINNER printed in gold either side of the big bursting star and pot of gold in the centre of the letter. So they set off.

Ok, you know where this is going. Father and son road trip blending quirky comedy and serious life discussions in a big ol' road movie. All of that is there and is unfortunately emphasised by the trailer. But to say it's more than that is both inadequate and saying too much. It's inadequate as the tale unfolds to reveal layers and sides of characters that delight with the discovery in a finely judged display of narrative and character perspective. Too much because the road trip scenario if done well needs only minimal description. You dig it or you don't. I do. I've been left short changed now and then (Little Miss Sunshine or this same director's About Schmidt) but not here.

This is the America of Robert Frank and The Handsome Family where your cousins' second question after "how are you?" is "how long did it take to drive here?" But we're not having a giggle at the hicks for more than a little handshake phase. These people are as wily as city folk even if their manifest fantasies sadden us at exposure. When, waylaid from the goal by circumstance, Woody and his son David camp at their cousins place in Woody's home town, the story enters a medieval movement as visions of the pot of gold stir the locals to schemes and greed. Darting around this and averting disaster by aborting an interview with the local paper, David learns some poignant things about his father which prey on our minds as we watch the remainder unfold.

It goes where you think it will but boy does it keep you going alongside. Bruce Dern made his career by stepping from one intense centre of gravity after another but Woody reminds me more of his subtle turn in the satire Smile as the small town Vietnam vet made good who really wants the local beauty pageant to embody the new, positive America he thinks he fought for. Here, Woody, at the end of his life holds decades of disappointment in and expresses his later life's desire in greatly reduced form as the simplest of things (go and buy a ticket to find out what they are). Dern will have to pull a Bengal tiger out of a hat to better this as a swansong.

Will Forte as David must find the futility of regret while still young enough to avoid it and old enough to prevent youthful stupidity. We need him between Woody and the venal world with its rustic smiles and wicked thoughts. He gives us a weariness that might yet wake. June Squibb (also in About Schmidt) gives us a hell of a lot more detail that the trailer's cantankery suggested. If there is a little herk herk with the ways of the country there is also the keen-eyed greed of an Ed Pegram (a magnetically bullish Stacy Keach) and a folk songbook's worth of regret and heartache in Peg Nagy's single gaze at Woody as he goes by towards the end.

All of this lives in a landscape of powerful black and white cinematography that Alexander Payne took from colour hi-def into that pallette of Robert Frank and added a grain-noise filter the way that big hitters in the 90s added vinyl crackle to their digital recordings. Add a purpose-built score of gently lapping jazz and folk to whisper around all that fading agriculture and a greatly diminished Mount Rushmore and you get something designed to the last pixel that feels as real as roadside mud. I've liked most of Payne's movies like Election and Sideways but I've never known any to settle from the injections of quirk and self-conscious gravity as this piece, without overweening, without easy sentimentality. This is a masterpiece.

Review: BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOUR

Adele is a teenager in one of France's provincial centres. Her interests are existential literature and self-definition. The second of those is the tough one. She tries a boy. Doesn't work. On the way to dumping him she sees and can't stop seeing a slightly older girl with blue hair. After taking a tantalising pass from one of her female schoolfriends and then getting rebuffed for taking it too seriously the next day she suspects she has found her path. When she walks out of a gay friend's party and into a girls only bar Bluehair glides down to the rescue from the pit of bulls and cougars and the rest is history.

Kinda. Adele and Emma (Bluehair) share a love stronger than the most ferocious of peer group onslaughts and one more nurturing than all of the literature to which Adele has professed devotion. And we get to see it in daily sunshine and nightly dimmed bedroom glow. And see it and see it and see it.

Every review of this film cordons off a moment for the sex scenes. They are clearly erotic to begin with and that has more to do with their role in intensifying the relationship, same as in real life. As cinema there is a completeness to them which goes against the initial sense to become more observation than celebration, more Kubrick or Matthew Barney than 9 1/2 Weeks. While the eroticism greys down into Masters and Johnson laboratory conditions plainness at no time is the spectacle remotely pornographic. This is a film that lingers rather than states, inviting us to stand nearby and absorb it. The wonder of it is how seldom the epic running time feels laboured. The sex is not laboured, no more than the loose ramble of the conversations or the insistence on scene-length closeups. Part and parcel.

But this film is more than mere aesthetic approach. The tale of the two women moves with a kind of stately verite. Apart from the sudden caesura that seems to take us across years while feeling like a single scene, the pace is decorous and encourages examination. Examination is important here as we are going to go beyond genre where the love at the centre of the love story is tested to destruction but strong enough to defy the divides of oceans or death themselves and into the uncomfortable realm where it is denied unto death. If we liked the erotic spring we are going to have to live with the wintry pain as well.

That, for me, is where this film is at its strongest. While it has served above and beyond the call of love story duty in the first half it settles down to live with the harder stuff. When love turns into affection management and personal administration. Adele continues to serve as painter Emma's muse, starring in life size high impact canvases. Adele finds her vocation in teaching preschool where she finds constant bright fulfillment and the eye of the (h)unque in residence. The latter follows her through days of fete-ing as the face of the inspiration of a rising local artist and the realisation that her biggest impression on Adele's social circle is the pasta she feeds them with. The fiercely independant mind we saw in her adolescence is allowed only grazing in this new role. It's not that Emma has no  problem with this, it's that she doesn't notice that it has happened.

In a more mainstream film, Adele would emerge from this experience full of fight and corner Emma over with a spiky argument about being trivialised, reduced to a likeness on canvas and spaghetti chef. All we need to see the the size of the serving dish and hear the praise for the food which arrives at the point where the champagne has created a mass appetite. Adele begins to look around and we don't wonder as we see Emma's eye wandering and her body language preparing for a transfer of affection to someone else. Then, when we get the big confrontation we don't need to hear dialogue from Husbands and Wives because we feel as sad and tired as the characters.

But if we really wanted to see emotional violence we have to wait until the first meeting of the pair after their separation. The longing barely visible through their restraint swells and bursts through like a demon on the rampage, giving us a sex scene that, fully clothed and unfulfilled, is the most powerfully erotic of all of them. It is also heart-rending. We are looking at what feels like the final act of pure attraction between these two lovers and find the energy exciting only long enough to be gutted by its ultimate emptiness: burning love by programmed robots. This is a common scene in real life but I've never seen it so powerfully realised in fiction. It is the single strongest moment in this film so well supplied with them.

If you looked at the poster for this or any other promotional material and formed the impression that it was a low-substance wish-wash you might want to watch it if only to revisit the lesson about first impressions. It's not just French and pretty faces. This is a serious study of human attraction, youth and experience and features some of the strongest performances and visual direction you will see all year. These are three screen hours which do not quite feel long enough.

Not the 2014 Autumn Pt 1 Program

But if it were I'd title it "Absorption"

So it's the end of summer and as I ventured out to get some nosh for later tonight when I sign off on the project work for the evening and settle in to something on screen I again was plagued by the sense memory of making my way through the dusk of Collingwood to the ABC Gallery with a backpack stuffed with bread, dips and cinema. My weekend is going to be pretty active and social so this Friday in will be just for me (and probably self-mercifully gentle). So, instead of the salmon 'n' salad  I decided to get a bake at home turkish loaf and dips and a bottle of something red and South Australian. On the way home, thinking of what I might watch after drawing and editing I thought I might concoct another hypothetical Shadows year starter program. So here it is. Sorry it's not for real (only place I'll be screening these is at home) but you can have some fun hunting these 'uns down for yerselves.

Berberian Sound Studio
Brilliant, closeted English sound artist Gilderoy whose best work has been in his shed plummets into the intimidating vortex of Italian filmmaking. He's used to modest but rich nature documentaries but finds himself creating the sounds of extreme torture and constant violence. Will he get out alive? The answer might just surprise you in the third act.

Le Beau Serge
Francois, struck with TB, returns to his native village for the better weather and also, who knows, to say adieu at the place he began. He reconnects gratingly with his old friend Serge who, feeling robbed of his potential as a youth by a cul de sac marriage has become the town drunk. As Francois gives in to the teenage siren, Marie, it dawns on him that he might be creating a point of last ditch competition in his old friend. Chabrol keeps the atmosphere in a strange corridor between verite and mystery as this tale of hobbled promise and fleeing youth slithers to its end.

A Field in England. A rag tag crew of deserters from the English Civil War find themselves in a field planning on escaping not just the war but the death penalty for desertion. The Sudden appearence of the magisterial stranger makes it seem as though there has been no chance involved in their assembly as they set to locating a treasure buried in the field. This odd psychedelic western out of water has much to say on concepts like loyalty and faith and then, when we least expect it, about survival and ambition.

Umberto D
A classic for perfectly good reasons. It's a genuine classic. Umberto D is a retiree sinking into debt and dependence, unable to run ahead of the forces that the younger life around him press. Is it just pride that keeps him hanging on to an increasingly futile thread or is there another trick that this old dog will need to learn? Extraordinary film from the rich and influential Italian neo realism.

In a World
The guy who owned that phrase in the Hollywood trailers has passed on to the great coming soon in the sky and everyone back on earth wants his job. Carol works as a voice coach, teaching Hollywood stars how to do accents. Her father has passive aggressively kept her down all her life. He does voiceover work as well. The rising stud of the voice over is growling sonorously around as well. Barry, the sound guy has always liked Carol. This mumblecore fantasia works in ways that it shouldn't. Gina Davis' verbal slap towards the end is both funny and sobering.

The Devils
Ken Russell let loose on a gross miscarriage from the marriage of church and state. Russell's at his peak here stretching the bounds but also observing the virtue of them as 17th century nuns go demon wild for the good of the realm. Puzzled? Actually, it makes perfect sense when you see it. Great cast and music score rounded off by the big screen debut of Derek Jarman as art director (boy did he earn his keep with this one!). Russell could do with a fresh look after his critics all but buried him at the end of the 70s. He really did a lot of good as a cinevisionary. Here's his masterpiece.

Review: Dallas Buyers Club

In one of those shots you can feel and smell as well as see Ron Woodroof has farmyard quality sex with a rodeo groupie while keeping an eye on the bullriders he runs a book on. They leap and buck through the bars under the bleachers while he does his own out of sight. Then, fleeing the wrath of the rodeo betters he's just hustled he finds his cop brother and punches him to get arrested into the safety of the squad car and drives out of trouble. When he gets through the door he collapses as a shrill tinnitus ring erases all other sound.

Waking up in hospital the red blooded Texan is told he is less red blooded than whatever colour blood goes when the t-cell count drains. He is HIV positive. He has thirty days to live. His resistance to the idea of having the "gay plague" outpunches the one about him only having a month of life left. That goes for all of his friends as well. Ron is a man's man. Women are functional before they're human. His friends are entirely male, resemble overweight Steve Zahns with moustaches, and their rejection of him matches his own priorities: his imminent death is obscured.

The first part of this film is given to acceptance. He has to admit his condition and treat it and somewhere along the line admit his identification with people he lately reviled. In true Hollywood form this is amped up by a confronting example in the form of the transexual Rayon whom he meets in hospital. After a number of screenwriting seminar moments (Rayon beats the shirt off Ron at poker and massages Ron's severe leg cramp etc) the two begin a truce that we know will turn into a friendship before too long.

The second part of the film is given to the campaign for effective treatments available elsewhere in the world to be made available in the U.S. This is made necessary by the opposition from the bureacracy to Ron's quasi smuggling of treatments from Mexico and then overseas into the U.S. Having started the loophole club of the title he finds himself plagued by officialdom and is soon grandstanding at meetings and in courtrooms for the cure.

If I sound dismissive here it's only to get the obvious points out of the way and concentrate on the central drawcard of this movie which is the combined performances of Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto as Ron and Rayon respectively.

McConaughey has spent the last swag of screen roles shedding the skin of a career of featherlight rom coms. I haven't yet seen Killer Joe but Mud and the HBO series True Detective provide very strong evidence that this shirtless wonder from the 90s and 00s has stepped into his craft. While any actor would happily sign up for the obnoxious monster that Ron is at the start knowing that his redemption is close at hand. McConaughey does this but restrains himself from the big reveal in the same way that we are trusted as an audience to observe the changes in his relationship with his circumstances. The theme in chief in getting this done is Ron's anger which goes from the initial explosions with collateral damage to delivery as streams of ice through a well-turned charm. Frail unto death, sick and pale, marred by crimson scabs, the Ron who stands up to the oafish departmental zealots is a weapon designed and developed in a personal laboratory. He is his defiance.

By contrast Jared Leto is all surrender. The cosmetic display his Rayon affects in his own (longer term) defiance fades before we are aware of it until his venous complexion covers him like a dark blue vine. From the flamboyant strut at the onset to his stark death on a hospital trolley his life's battle was never enough. Leto's weightloss is confronting but the pain of the attack on his resolve is clear as he eventually fades and falls into silence. The failure of the tough gravity beneath all that camp hurts more than the already painful moment of vulnerability in the scene with his father when he presents himself in the garb of the world that has rejected him (wearing it like a hairshirt) but it's the toughness that we keep. Considering this and the undersung Chapter 27 for which he larded up to play John Lennon's killer Mark David Chapman and gave us real torment behind the dead eyes and crippled voice, Jared Leto might well be written off as the pretty boy that could .... but he's worth a lot more attention.

The third in the principal triangle of performances here is Jennifer Garner who is written a lot less than the other two but warms the role up with enough genuineness to make it real but she is just too overshadowed. It's important to have her character there as a medical voice that is clearly not of the corporate-backed orthodoxy but she is written for this more than a person in the life of. That Garner raises this to a performance rather than a forgivable deliverer of lines is to her credit.

One issue that made me wince also had to do with casting. The FDA is represented by the same beefy Texan throughout and each time Ron comes up agin the lah Mr Clipboard appears as though he's Satan in a Christmas pantomime. And why is Ron's cop brother there every single time Ron tuggles with the boys in blue? This is Dallas, not Mayberry, there is more than one police station in the town. Now, both of these cases might have been forced by the budgetary bugbears plaguing this production and/or a perceived need for continuity representing the powers that be but set against the might of the central performances they look filled in rather than crafted. The scene in which it is important that Ron and brother meet in line of duty begins with a cop unknown to Ron. This begins very poignantly and leads to an equally affecting moment but those are pivoted on the miraculous appearence of Ron's brother in the squad car.

I'm going cut this movie some slack, though, as it did great battle against spare means to find a very natural voice for its crucial tale. Can't afford a long shoot? Do it inside a month. Cranes and tracks too costly? Get handheld down to an art so it isn't self-congratulatory. Can't pay a composer? Source a few minutes of deftly chosen (non-period) retro and use that ... now and then ... instead of some smothering Hans Zimmer overwrought string section to tell you what you should be feeling. Get it?  This film was forced to be lean 'n' mean and in doing so found plenty of room for appropriate emotion. If someone dies crushed at the end of a life of struggle just bloody show it and we'll do the emoting. That's why I prefer this to the similarly themed Philadelphia from the 90s despite that film's merits: we know it's sad and angering, show us why we should also feel kinship. Don't manipulate us with orchestras, leave us no room for anything but empathy. Then we're there. And so I was, welling up more than once and, oddly enough, happy to do so ... a proud witness to a callous diers blub.

Review: 12 YEARS A SLAVE

A well-to-do New York musician is tempted by a lucrative touring gig, dined, and wined and wined more before waking up in chains and transported to the south and sold to a plantation owner as a slave. Oh, the musician is black and it antebellum USA. Not nice. As the title gives it away, he lives for a long time this way and is either freed by paperwork or death in the end. Apart from a slight blend of tenses at the start to allow us a view on his citizenship's ownership we get a representation of a time line for a long time. Linear, is the word.

I remember coming out of Casino with a frown. The reason I loved Goodfellas and was unmoved by the later film was this patchwork linearity which all but prevented sufficient motion between the screen and the audience to allow for some empathy. I saw the artistry but couldn't care less. 12 Years a Slave doesn't have this effect and it took me until after the credits rolled to work out why. It has to do with the work of another great director whose influence is signalled in the first minutes of screen time.

First, a little about why I like this director. I am yet to see his debut feature Hunger but what I've heard of it is borne well through his second, Shame. In the latter film a slight premise is examined as much through mise en scene as it is through dialogue and performances. This works to such an extent that it allows for a greater reliance on the blend of look, performance and speech than in even the more edgy of mainstream fare. As a cinema experience it lies somewhere between a series of tableaux and a conventional narrative film. Director Steve McQueen began as much of an installation artist as a filmmaker. This might remind the cinestorians among ye of David Lynch but for once in comparing one director to a favourite of mine I'm not thinking of him.

After we fade in from the various corporate badges we are in a field of tall green cane. A middleaged man dressed for warm weather is demonstrating how to use a cane knife. His accent obscures his words so much that he sounds like he's imitating bird life. Reverse shot reveals a group of twenty or so young black men and women in plain sack like clothing. There is fear in their eyes. The overseer is hard to understand yet they will face pain if they don't do as he says. A young affluent white couple observe. Slavery.

Six unsubmerssible units later (with a few necessary joins) we are sitting through the credits. With me? We are Kubrick's film about slavery.

This is not a tribute by McQueen. If there were quotes from Full Metal Jacket I didn't notice them. This is even more than influence; it is applied Kubrick. At each stage of Solomon/Platt's mental double life as an educated observer and humanity-stripped victim we are led through scenes that filter mainstream convention through an alien eye, recreated history that is less realistic than it is interesting. There is a frightening undercurrent to the opening scene described above and we share the fear by feeling the starkness of the situation: there is no sentimentality to cloud or comfort.

The thing is that McQueen has come to this through hard work rather than film school. He has arrived here rather than aspired to a share of glory and this is the difference between understanding and plagiarism: a Tarrantino likes showing off; McQueen has a job to do. The practicality of applying Kubrick to a long linear narrative is that the force of the artifice allows a more objective involvement than with more regular fare.

Spielberg failed in the comparable Schindler's List by insisting on character polarity which he took to counterproductive lengths: Schindler was so reprobate that his newfound humanitarianism seems engineered and Amon Goeth is so charming, boyish and violent he becomes far more attractive as a screen presence. The "one more" speech of the former is thus rendered as believable as an oscar speech against totalitarianism and Goeth's unceremonious dispatch is warmly funny.

Here, Ford, the first plantation owner, is shown as benign but only within his system, he is a kinder slave owner who seems never to have doubted his right to forced labour. Epps, who might have been Speilberg's villain, is here a man whose enjoyment of his own power and near unrestrained surrender to his own biology make him a spoiled brat with a cattle whip. The fact that his vulnerability shows in the ingested tenderness when drunk or poignantly when he lifts his illegitimate daughter to his side with the pleasure of a parent are enough to tell us, more importantly than a scene staging his good side, that he does not perceive any fault in himself. That is instructive. It doesn't take a grandstanding scene to show that Tibeats' bullying is borne of his knowledge of his mediocrity as a tradesman, it's folded into the flow and we have no trouble seeing it.

These are people whose historical circumstances do not compel them to be essentially good or bad but to expect them to act against their personal architecture would be our fault. This would change if the film were more conventional and we'd expect more of a psyche test for each player but here we witness nature plus culture and it is for us to understand rather than condemn. Drill Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket is not a bad guy, he's a drill sergeant, he has to be like that: Epps is a living nightmare but you can see why.

Chiwetel Ejiofor at the centre shows us Solomon's acceptance of the contradiction forced upon him. His early heroic declaration that he doesn't want to survive but live undergoes a rapid expansion of definition as soon as his captivity becomes slavery. His struggle is to keep Solomon alive within the shell of Platt (the identity assigned him by his captors) despite not knowing if he will ever be able to free the man within. The various failures and successes he observes around him in the press of the coercive life that victimises them are atomised and incommunicative. Solomon must stay as still as a mouse playing dead while Platt functions. Which one is life and which mere survival? Not always easy to tell when the suppressed one might never be wanted by the world again. His moments of action have consequences (including an excruciating sequence which feels like forever and made more unnerving for all the life that surrounds it) that allow us to withhold our judgement on him for hiding his true self. Finally, because of this, we feel for him with our minds before our hearts; we feel for him more profoundly than we would in something more mainstream.

Like Schindler's List, 12 Years a Slave is offered knowing its audience agrees with it. The test for any such work is how extensive is its reach beyond its setting. Nazis are bad, can you be a good person under their rule? Slavery is bad, how do you keep your humanity? Etc etc. Solomon lives as Platt the same as dissidents in Stalin's Russia or Pran in The Killing Fields. Because of this 12 Years a Slave is curiously closer to John Frankenheimer's Seconds or Roman Polanski's The Pianist than Schindler's List as it does not flinch from the effect of its historical moment upon its characters (all of its characters) even to flirt with sentimentality. There's no point in declaring McQueen a new Kubrick. I think he's a cleverer artist than that. But, boy, if you wanted to know how Stanley saw slavery ...