Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Written by Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan

Directed by Tomas Alfredson

UK / France / Germany, 2011

When the BBC screened the hugely admired adaptation of John le Carré’s Cold War novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy back in 1979, recent revelations were rocking the British establishment. Anthony Blunt, the Surveyor of the Queens Pictures, had recently been announced as being one of the Cambridge Five, the infamous spy ring of the British elite who were recruited into Russian intelligence shortly before the Second World War. The premise that gentlemen of good stock, whom had been educated at Trinity and other prestigious schools, who frequented the same Knightsbridge clubs and Saville Row tailors as the political and cultural elite of the country could be traitorous cads was a damaging blow to British prestige during the Cold War, a wound that was only partially healed by more recent exposés of the cryptographic triumphs of Bletchley Park which arguably won the Second World War. That notion of a lingering malaise, of an infectious presence at the very apex of the elite establishment is subtly embedded in the new film adaptation of le Carré’s novel, already a huge hit critically and commercially, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy looks as if it might clandestinely pilfer the mantle of the most impressive British film of the year from the vicelike grip of The King’s Speech. Well, if you consider a French-financed film by a Swedish director as British, that is.

London, the late 1970’s. The Circus, the spymasters jargon for the highest echelons of the UK’s foreign intelligence service, is formed of five men – the irascible Percy Alleline (Toby Jones) and his three deputies Bill Haydon (Colin Firth), Roy Bland (Ciarán Hinds) and Toby Esterhase (David Denick), all overseen by the senior omnipotence of a man known only as Control (John Hurt). Escalating paranoia and a ‘lack of focus’ appears to have got the better of Control after he orders one of his men, Jim Prideux (Mark Strong) to visit Hungary and debrief a potential defector from the military apparatus, a mission that goes horrendously wrong when he is exposed, shot and captured whilst fleeing the trap. Ousted by embarrassed civil servants on behalf of the shamed Government Alleline has seized Controls throne with his success in running a high level double agent codenamed ‘Merlin’ who is supplying the West with ‘treasure’, and many of the top-tier of spooks and scalp hunters are pensioned off to make way for a new breed of agent. But something’s afoot, and when the alleged traitor Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy) returns to England from an overseas assignment his claims of a paralysing infiltration at the heart of the Circus prompt the civil service masters to convince George Smiley (Gary Oldman), once Control’s right hand man, to abandon retirement and disinfect the organization, an assignment that brings him into play with his incorporeal KGB nemesis Karla.

This may well be the film of the year. In one of the strongest casts that the UK have fielded in a generation, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a tour de force of acting prowess, visual dexterity, labyrinthine plotting and cerebral thrills. The precision with which director Tomas Alfredson, surely now one of the most acclaimed ‘new’ directors after this twin triumph with Let The Right One In, invests the film is remarkable, formulating the twin attack of an interlacing and serpentine flashback inflected narrative with a pervading atmosphere of foreboding and brooding paranoid dread. Gary Oldman as the basilisk like Smiley had enormous shoes to fill given the acclaim that Alec Guinness secured for his performance back in 1979, his reptilian turn of quietly watching and waiting is thoroughly enchanting with his measured and controlled movements, never surprised or shocked, shaken or stirred his voice only raises once during a pivotal scene which strikes with the force of neutron detonation. And what support he has, it seems unfair to single anyone out anyone amongst such a dazzling cast but for me Tom Hardy as the oblique Ricki seals the deal as one of the few emotional glyphs amongst the bluffs and counterbluffs, with Benedict Cumberbatch (with a name like that he must have some relatives in the service?) as one of Smiley’s protégés viewed as a similarly fragile marionette admidst this murky world where no-one can be trusted and nothing is what it seems.

Like the TV series, the film makes no concessions to the audience, there are neither expository scenes nor jargon-defining speeches; quite simply you have to pay attention and keep up as Smiley and his team plunge into a forest of mirrors and counterfeit smiles, with even the specific argot of the spies and their handlers, their language, codes and credo programming an encrypted puzzle that the audience must solve. It’s a world that couldn’t be further away from the globetrotting glamour of Bond, as this sphere of espionage is pungently presented as a parade of overflowing ashtrays, tar stained bedsits, cheap scotch and thwarted ambition. The colour palette is muted and shadowed without descending into the harsh world of noir lighting patterns, a quivering route that suggests a gaunt realism with a paranoid curlicue, all enforced by a remarkably effecious sense of period detail, costume and location. I had some small gripes, firstly that due to the truncated run time the film didn’t have the chance to fully flesh out all the members of the Circus – you could say they were ciphers – which renders the pivotal scene as somewhat anticlimactic, also there is a sense of triumphalism over the final beats (which is itself a brilliant staged montage) which seem at odds with the previous atmosphere of gloomy speculation, but these are miniscule concerns amongst a superb piece of work, equal to both its TV and literary incarnations, a clandestine conquest which prompts one question – what’s Alfredson going to do next?

John McEntee

Rampart

Directed by Oren Moverman

Written by James Ellroy and Oren Moverman

Starring Woody Harrelson, Cynthia Nixon, Robin Wright, Sigourney Weaver, Anne Heche & Steve Buscemi

Two years ago debut director Oren Moverman directed Woody Harrelson to his second Oscar nomination with The Messenger, an under-seen and unappreciated home-front military drama, with next years Rampart, an LA bad-cop drama he may have just provided his muse with a sweltering part that could embezzle the coveted gold statuette come next February. Pilfered from the mind of LA crime savant James Ellroy we’re billy-clubbed into a blistering Los Angeles, circa 1999, and the Rampart division of the City of Angels black and whites are embroiled in a tornado of controversy, following allegations of widespread corruption, witness beatings, suspect kickbacks and violent apprehensions. With twenty-four years on the force David Brown (Harrelson) has a somewhat complicated life – his two ex-wives are sisters (Cynthia Nixon & Anne Heche) who live adjacent to each other with a daughter each from their respective marriages to our hard drinking, adulterous anti-hero. Brown sleeps around and drinks too much, and has been hounded by allegations of impropriety since he shot and killed a serial rapist some years ago, earning him the charming sobriquet of ‘date-rape’ from his law enforcement colleagues. Mocked by his eldest daughter and barely tolerated by his ex-wives Brown’s career is sent into a tailspin after he is taped beating a suspect to near death, and after striking up a destructive relationship with an alcoholic self hating lawyer (Robin Wright) he can only trust his private confidant, a retired cop played by Ned Beatty, an octopi crime figure who knows where the bodies are buried and who may or may not have clandestine motives of his own.

Rampart is aiming more for a sunshine coast The Wire than a nervous Lethal Weapon with its portrayal of a cracked cop under increasing duress, with a sole emphasis on David’s predicament and process rather than scenes of klaxon blaring chases or scolding shoot-outs it is shot on a heavily grained digitial stock which yearns for a gritter Michael Mann Angelino vibe, yet falls somewhat short of its infernal aspirations. The title serves dual purpose as the framing real life story of the CRASH unit controversy of the late nineties, and the notion of a man erecting all the defences he can psychologically and physically muster as he is targeted for past transgressions by enemies unknown. Some detractors have expressed exasperation at the films overt stylistics and it is over-directed to be sure, with some flashy flourishes which occasionally work (the hallucinatory club scene) and some obtrusive moments (an office interogation where the camera pans until the character drops out of frame before cutting to the next character) that distastefully jerk you out of the picture, but Harrelson’s performance is worth the price of admission alone as a haughty emasculated patriarch whose life is slowly coming apart at the seams, as he commands the screen with a lip smacking, desperate hunger. The paranoia builds incrementally and soon Brown comes to trust no-one, even when he reveals his submerged nature in a manufactured execution you wonder whether he has been pushed into this desperate dilemma, as his charm and charisma retain some sympathy for his plight due to an unfocused and poorly portrayed plot point. We should have seen more of both Wright and Beatty which could both be more interesting that their peripheral sketching attests, and brief turns from Steve Buscemi as a aspiring politician and Sigourney Weaver as a purse lipped civilian lawyer seem wasted in the attempt to pursue a genuine, moral hecate. Ellroy is the cartographer of lawmen with skewed moral values enforced by repeated exposure to the hell of the streets, but this translation of his reportage seems diluted, as Brown’s history is intimated rather than explored. Nevertheless Harrelson is superb and seems certain of accolades, and Moverman with his second film repeats an arresting performance, a Yin yang street ambiguity that counterfeits Refn’s Drive, so it seems as if the city of angels still contains golden contraband after all.

- John McEntee

Throughout November, SOS staffers will be discussing the movies that made them into film fanatics.

(click here for the full list)

There is really only one place to begin – The Dawn of Man. A montage of prehistoric images denotes the timeless passage of the years and decades, aeons before such concepts existed in the human imagination, as a collection of our simian cousins shelter from the elements, from rival clans and from the lethal predators, a scrabble for sustenance amongst the arid African veldt. One morning the troop awakes to discover that a ominous, obsidian black monolith has appeared in their midst, its presence signalling a terrified rage amongst our forebears, a suspicion of the unknown and incomprehensible. Through association, through a mental leap mirrored in the films narrative we make the association that this mysterious object has ignited a flash of inspiration in one ape, our distant ancestor whom when toying with the discarded thighbone of a deceased tapir makes an imaginative vault forward of his own, to the strains of Also Sprach Zarathustra, to utilize the first tool – humankind is on its way and it’s no accident that our first utensil is used to kill our fellow denizens for food – shifting our diet to carnivore – and to eliminate the aggressive leader of another ape clan, signalling the survival of the fittest through aggression, through belligerence and most crucially through technology…

Through the most ambitious match-cut in cinema history hundreds of thousands of years are traversed in the blink of an eye, in a symmetrical marriage the bone, the first weapon transforms into a orbiting space vehicle, an ICBM launch platform although the Cold War background to the film was eventually jettisoned along with the Martin Balsam voiceover that remains in the original script. Throughout the film Kubrick suggests order, control and rationality through the compositions and editing framework, as with the photo above the aura of an overwhelming, indistinct intelligence lurking behind the screen and consequently is alluded to subconsciously throughout the four acts of the movie – the Dawn Of Man, The Moon and Second Monolith, the Discovery Mission, Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite – which also form a robust spine to the films narrative, a harmonious structure that can be alluded to birth, adolescence, middle-age and death. Those graceful movements of the spaceships gliding amongst the stars as the Blue Danube seduces the viewer are a counterpoise to our uncivilised, brutal genesis, and in these movements there is a majesty to human achievement, an inherent beauty and sense of civilisation that has apparently divorced us from our animal instincts and origins. It bears mention that these sequences are unsurpassed today, they are immaculate some forty years later in terms of SFX and were a quantum leap forward in terms of the craft of film-making in comparison to the B-Movie progenitors that Kubrick viewed as part of his exhaustive research methods.

But with this beauty there is a detachment, a certain aloofness amongst these future scientists and astronauts, almost all evidence of emotion has been supressed – Consider Poole’s response to his parents birthday message, or Bowman’s response to the lethal manoeuvring of HAL or even Heywood Floyd’s controlled pleasantries with his Soviet colleagues – even after a revelation of epoch shattering ramifications, that we are not alone as another monolith, another inert artifact has been discovered buried beneath the Tycho crater on the Moon, rationality and logic reign supreme. After docking at the space station our first character emerges, Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) who is leading the scientific delegation to unearth the origins of the mysterious menhir, and ensure total secrecy of the discovery due to the potential cultural and sociological carnage that would be caused by such a revelation. After delivering an obtuse presentation, thanking his American colleagues for working so hard to maintain the cloak of secrecy a sojourn is made out to the excavation point to inspect this tombstone to human dialectics. It is interesting that the film doesn’t really have a central character – except perhaps HAL but we’ll come back to him – as Kubrick and Clarke didn’t want to be distracted by such hollow narrative conventions, perhaps examining these events on an individuals belief system, instead aiming for a much broader investigation into the ramifications on our species rather than any particular protagonist. It’s a frequently made point but it beats repeating for emphasis, barely anyone had seen the earth from space and of course we hadn’t even reached the Moon by 1968 (I still wonder if that apocryphal story about the Apollo 11 crew is true, them musing over having a joke after they’d reached the sea of tranquility and relaying that they’d discovered ‘something’ to mission control – that would have been awesome as after all they did watch the film the day before blast off I think) and for the most part Kubrick and his crew got most of their predictions right, hiring NASA consultants Frederick Ordway and Harry Lange as technical advisors on the picture certainly paid dividends.

One of the films submerged motifs is sustenance and the theme is slyly inserted throughout the films four movements. The first is during the aforementioned shift from vegetarian to carnivore as we make our first unsteady steps on the evolutionary ladder, secondly during the flight to Tycho Floyd and his companions consume nutrition that is emitted in tepid cubes – we are divorced by millions of years from our hunter gather instincts – and the most basic elements of survival are now mediated by technology. Thirdly Poole and Bowman’s in what now has become a SF staple preparing similarly tepid cuisine during their mission to Jupiter and finally of course Bowman’s crowning meal prior to his transformation to the star child. If the three basic drivers of human instinct are to eat, to find shelter (which throughout the film is again supplied by our technology and tools in our spacecraft that operate as hermetically sealed, purely functional vessels) and to procreate, the latter may seem throughly absent in this cold, mechanical future but it’s present according to some of the more esoteric theories I’ve read on the film, as with the mechanical couplings during the opening titles of Strangelove the space vehicles move through a balletic courtship and certain scenes allegedly echo sperm being absorbed into the fallopian tube and the repercussions of the act are seen three times – Floyd’s phone call to his daughter (that’s Kubrick’s daughter Vivian fact-fans), the creation of a new lifeform in the form of HAL and of course the image of the star child reborn at the film’s climax.

In an echo of the first scene the monolith, now discovered emits a powerful radio signal to the outskirts of Jupiter and we shift to the lengthiest sequence of the film, the Discovery mission commanded by a five man crew, three of whom are in suspended animation to preserve valuable resources and two astronauts Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) and Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea), assisted in their mission by to my mind the masterstroke of the film, as it seems that in our middle age our tools seem to be overwhelming, superseding us and evolving beyond our control, after all any imperfection can only be attributable to ‘human error’ – yes, we’ve finally come to HAL. First of all the coincidence that the acronym Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer just happens to follow the letters immediately before IBM is just that, one of those coincidences and not a submerged joke on the part of Clarke or Kubrick. HAL is the only character with any personality in the film and its no mistake that ‘he’ is the only character whose eyes we see through in frequent POV shots, in what I can attribute to Kubrick’s particularly ironic sense of humor he makes us sympathise with a paranoid, neurotic creature of silicon and steel in this brave new world, not the neutral, humorless figurines of flesh and bone.

A composition that echoes the Stargate, the foreground suffocating the astronauts in the middle-ground, in the background squats HAL in a typically omnipotent pose. During the secret mission HAL malfunctions and makes a faulty detection of a failing satellite dish that would compromise the ships communication links with mission control, a failure that forces Bowman and Poole to consider deactivating the machine. When Poole is in EVA, replacing the satellite components HAL makes a lethal decision – just like his creators in order to survive – and severs Poole’s air supply, prompting Bowman to make a doomed rescue effort and barter for his re-entry to the ship in what has become an all time classic exchange. One classic deserves another as we proceed to HAL’s death, the films one and only obliquely emotional moment – at least in the sense of characterisation within the films world – Bowman disconnects HAL and a emergency message is revealed which details the true details of the mission and the monolith, evidently we must kill our creations in order to evolve. It was this scene and the sequences to follow that arrested me as a child and catapulted the film into my all time favourite position, it is absolutely magnificent and moving, there is a certain irony that the apotheosis of mankind’s achievements to date, the creation of an artificial lifeform and thus the most brilliant and revelatory tool (that phrase again) that our civilisation has crafted almost thwarts mankind’s ecstatic transformation, our pride, paranoia and neurosis being invested into the creations we use to tame and explore our environment. Prior to his passing the neurotic apparatus has also terminated the life support of the three hibernating crew members in what I’d wager is one of the most chilling (no pun intended) kill scenes committed to celluloid, the victims ensconced in sarcophagus that brings to mind Egyptian burial shrouds in another strand of transformation that will shortly be fully realised in the films most challenging sequence – Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite;

A film, like any other successful work of art should ask more questions than it answers in my opinion and it was the hallucinatory final sequence to Kubrick’s visual symphony that still confuses, befuddles and bewitches viewers to this day. That marriage of discordant music and phantasmagoric imagery is utterly unique and unsurpassed to me, I love how it has garnered a wealth of interpretations over the intervening four decades, the visual formations of the planets, moons and stars all suggesting a controlling hand, a sense of purpose and reason to our reality, before plunging into the stargate itself where the visual cues of rotation and alignment explode, shifting from the vertical to horizontal to ignite a sense of being transported to somewhere other, to somewhere utterly alien, somwhere beyond our infantile grasp of the universe. That such a radical non-narrative, abstract sequence got smuggled into a such a big-budget event movie is remarkable, and its forty three year pedigree retains a genuine sense of awe and transmogrification, if you ever see it on the big screen you will be never be the same again, cinematically speaking….

The film’s most pressing motif is vision, how we interpret information through our primary sense, a crystallisation of the Kubrick gaze that runs throughout his work. The editing structure of the films final flow that I have embedded at the end of this post confirms this supposition, as Bowman looks from one stage of his evolution to another in a POV cut to celerity tempo is a brilliant employment of cinematic grammar – a tempo also employed during the stargate sequence – proving that this is an artist working at the peak of his powers. I consider 2001: A Space Odyssey to be one of the all time great works of art, of any medium, ever. Quite honestly who else has attempted to cover the entire genesis, evolution and future of our species in two and a half hours? There are Picasso’s and Michelangelo’s masterpieces of course, but in the field of film, the decisive art form of the twentieth century it is quite simply incomparable. The film is a voyage akin to those of the Argonauts, of Odysseus, Theseus or the Knights of the Round Table in terms of artistic expression, it has the Odyssey sobriquet for a reason I think, from ape to man and then beyond, traversing upon Sibylline possibilities. If you skim through the films original script you can see just how much exposition Kubrick stripped out and that in a sense is the real strength of the film, the audience fills in the blanks, you interpret its meanings and propositions,the viewer draws their own conclusions from its visual structure, its narrative mysteries and staggering divinations. Here is Tarkovsky’s response to the Stargate sequence from his similarly cerebral Solaris, apparently he found Kubrick’s concatenations amusing, his fluctuations from B&W to colour drawing down the epic and cosmological to the mundane and industrial, it’s almost a Soviet political reprimand to the American boasting of its era;

How accurate were Kubrick and Clarke’s predictions? Well, it’s a mixed bag of course but it’s still a pretty good effort I think. Douglas Trumbull’s revelation of missing footage from the film, culled by Stanley after its New York opening back in 1968 have prmpoted speculation of a ‘directors’ cut of the film which is throughly uneccessary. Some things are best left undisturbed, just as Kubrick had his assistant Leon Vitali destroy all the outtakes from his films back in 1999 why interfere with and potentially obfuscate perfection? So that’s my lengthy review but maybe I should have just bowed down to the prowess of 15 year old Margaret Stackhouse whose review – which can be seen here – was considered one of the most intelligent and insightful on the film by Clarke and Kubrick, even as they both refused to be drawn in to any specific explanation of the films – as Stanley said “It’s not a message I ever intended to convey in words. 2001 is a nonverbal experience…. I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content.” – amen to that. But I would be remiss not to close on the final movement of the film, a sequence I still find faintly terrifying (it really, really freaked me out as a kid) in its amaranthine claustrophobia, a human zoo that begets our species final evolutionary metamorphosis, I’m not a religious man but for me 2001 is a seraphic experience in its final fervour, immaculate and impeccable in every way.

- John McEntee

The Skin I Live In

Written by Pedro Almodóvar

Directed by Pedro Almodóvar

Spain, 2011

The hallowed caverns of cinema history are littered with the skeletal remains of mad scientists, those power-crazed maniacs whose unholy experiments are frequently an affront to god and to the more tangible realm of medical ethics. These sneering antagonists are driven by all-consuming desire to avenge a wrong, or save a loved one, or to play the immortal and be damned with the consequences to their perverted souls. From the translocation of limbs and organs in the likes of The Hands of Orlac and The Eye, from the shrieking transmutations in The Island of Dr. Moreau, from the perverted humor of The Thing With Two Heads, or the automaton prophecy of Metropolis, the cinema has reveled in the possibilities of man breaching the bounds of pathological and righteous decency, scorning the absurd moral framework of his era and arguing that to truly evolve and progress such outdated notions as ethics and moral responsibility must be overcome. It’s a theme that Pedro Almodóvar has cloned for his eighteenth feature The Skin I Live In, a loose adaption of Thierry Jonquet’s lurid novel Tarantula where a crazed surgeon launches a twisted revenge scheme to alleviate the bereavement he has suffered. Although the touchstones for this effort are much more aligned with two core cinematic influences – Georges Franju’s Les Yeux Sans Visage and of course James Whale’s iconic Frankenstein, being concerned as they are with the manufacture of a replacement, of an artificial decanting a cherished void, Almodóvar also ventures further afield to alight upon Vertigo in this well crafted but ultimately unsatisfying psych0-thriller.

Brilliant plastic surgeon /scientist Dr. Robert Ledgard (Anonio Banderas) is detaining a curious prisoner in his lavish villa on the outskirts of Toledo, the beautiful Vera (Elena Anaya) is confined to a basement room and fed through a dumb-waiter operated by Robert’s house mistress Marilia (Marisa Paredes) – thus three of Almodovar’s regular actors return in this feature. Robert’s wife was involved in a horrific car accident some years earlier and Vera seems to be her uncanny double, serving as a guinea pig for an experimental form of skin graft that he is synthetically developing, although her pedigree is uncertain it is clear that affection is developing between prisoner and jailor. When Marilia’s estranged son arrives at the Villa during a street carnival (memorably dressed as a tiger in an amusing Almodóvarian flourish) she reluctantly takes him in as he’s on the lam after a high-profile robbery, and soon secrets and relationships of both families are brought to light in a darkly sensuous fashion, as the seed of Robert’s obsession and Vera’s heritage are incrementally revealed.

All the components of classic Almodóvar are present: a vibrant colour palette and tangled family histories, a permeability of gender, a dark sexuality, seductive imagery, a wry sense of humor and an arch operatic flourish. For me, however, the sum didn’t equal the possibility of its parts, perhaps it’s a personal quirk but I find his films to be simply too contrived and manufactured to generate much sympathy, and little in the way of suspense or cinematic frisson are generated by what to my mind is a poorly designed film in terms of its use of flashbacks and zig-zagging structure. Hopping around his characters smothered secrets should result in a keen sense of drama, not bewildered indifference, and what should be major plot twists and shocks are relegated to mere indifference, The Skin I Live In is certainly a stately, handsome film which does entrap the attention but when you can almost guess the next contrivance it does result in a rather tepid experience. The performances are good with Banderas in particular eschewing the moustache twirling, eyebrow twitching clichés of his fore-runners, he’s clearly a driven and obsessed soul whose tortured project is doomed to failure. I also think that like the South Koreans, Almodovar tends to expand his climaxes out to uncomfortable lengths; he has difficulty closing a film appropriately and satisfactorily without providing neat closures, specifically in this case a little more ambiguity on the fate of certain characters would have been far more illuminating and affecting. That said it is a sumptuous visual experience; the geometric designs of his interiors infiltrate the frequently brilliant wardrobes of Paco Delgado, and there is more than enough sex to go around, as someone’s at it just about every ten minutes in this film. This is vintage Almodóvar, so at least the fans of the Spanish auteur will be satisfied.

John McEntee

A Dangerous Method

Directed by David Cronenberg

Starring Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley, Viggo Mortensen, Vincent Cassell

When judged against his peers over recent years Canadian horror maestro David Cronenberg is the film maker who has undergone the most compelling metamorphosis. Where George Romero has suffered in a shambling quagmire offering increasingly putrid returns, where Wes Craven’s chutzpah seems to have been slashed to pieces in a expired franchise, where John Carpenter seems to have hung up his monocle and is content to cash cheques from the increasingly inferior remakes of his works only Cronenberg seems to have evolved in an autumn period of work that has sublimated the flesh and the fury for the psychological study, delving into the minds of his subjects rather than spilling their guts, with a cast list of many of the more daring and dangerous actors of the era.

In his latest film A Dangerous Method the origins of psychoanalysis are exhumed in what on paper would seem to be a perfect marriage of subject and celluloid therapist. Vienna, on the eve of the Great War, and the evolution of a nascent medicine known as psychotherapy is slowly accruing more academic prestige due to the breakthrough treatments of Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen). Some younger aspirants can see the potential of this radical break with traditional remedies and are developing their individual bespoke treatments of the sanity deprived, chief among them the ambitious young Dr. Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) who has recently acquired a distressed new patient Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) who has medical ambitions of her own, should her anxieties be relieved by these subversive new treatments. Jung, married into wealthy and respective society by a wife who seems more concerned with providing him a male heir than supporting his neurotic crusade soon finds himself embarking on a radical form of therapy with Sabina, igniting a sexual relationship and abandoning themselves to the earthly desires of the flesh that violate the decorums of polite society, a dangerous method that flirts with disaster.

During his introductory remarks to a matinée audience at this years LFF, Cronenberg explained how his film was culled from the correspondence of the period (in a 20th century precursor to e-mail the great and good would write and receive letters a half dozen times a day) between the three main characters, all genuine historical figures, which he stated as fascinating insight into the period but not necessarily the foundations of a great film. It’s a brave and honest admission, as A Dangerous Method is handsomely crafted with a fine appreciation of detail and place, but like much of Cronenberg’s work over the past decade it’s a sterile affair, an antiseptic dissection of the anxious birth of psychotherapy, orbiting the figurehead of Freud as a distant patriarch, with a miscast Mortensen whom is more novelty than Nouveau. Fassbender breaks a recent streak of powerful performances having little more to do than toy with his phallic pipe in some blankly staged scenes and Knightley is frankly embarrassing to observe in the early spasms of the movie, writhing with a physical and vocal dementia, before growing more certain in the role as her relationship with Jung intensifies. The film seems uncertain of its intentions and the result is an uninvolving, dullen affair, with only Vincent Cassell as something of a film stealer as the rogue seducer Otto Gross, an appropriately named psychiatric maverick who appears as a proto beatnik lovechild of Keith Richards and Jack Kerouac. A scene where Jung and Freud visit America to incubate the therapy movement, arguably a defining moment of the 20th century, is not mined for its historical caliber before the film limps to a dry and emotionally neutered conclusion. In his latest film the method is flawed in this aberrant , minor Cronenberg.

• John McEntee -

Visit the official website for the 55th BFI Film Festival

We Need To Talk About Kevin

Directed by Lynne Ramsay

Written by Lynne Ramsay and Rory Kinnear

UK / USA, 2011

Lynne Ramsay returns to the big screen after almost a decade long hiatus, and talk about returning with a bang. This explosive adaption of Lionel Shriver’s best-selling novel We Need To Talk About Kevin is a taboo busting tale which has the controversial temerity to suggest that perhaps not all mothers instinctively fall in love with their children and not everyone is programmed to be a parent. Having been ousted from a long gestating adaptation of The Lovely Bones, Ramsay seemed to have been exiled into production limbo, and following a series of personal tragedies one wondered if she would ever return to the screen, but not only does Kevin exceed her previous triumphs, it also offers an evolution in her film-making style and dexterity. Quite how such a miniscule-budgeted project was arranged in just a short shooting schedule yet emerges so exquisitely detailed and textured is quite a stunning achievement. This vividly executed film, with yet another astonishing performance from a haunted Tilda Swinton (who must be in the running for a second Oscar) is another superb British film that screened at this year’s London Film Festival, having achieving the dual accolades of the fiesta’s Best Film award and the somewhat dubious accolade of the most potent form of celluloid contraception yet devised.

With her vivid lust for life illustrated in a gluttonous, grue inflected and overly symbolic opening admidst the Spanish La Tomatina festival globetrotting travel agent Eva (Swinton, brittle and brilliant) is forced to put her galvanizing life on hold when she becomes unwittingly pregnant with her partner Franklin (a muted John C. Reilly), a successful East Coast architect. Textured through a cacophonous swirl the film leaps through the various stages of Eva’s pregnancy birth, growth and adolescence of her first child Kevin, in its  early stages the film centres on the horrendous social exclusion of her current life following some unspecified tragedy the film alternately spider-webs throughout her past twenty years, and the true horror of her maternal failures are revealed in incremental, dazzling, interludes. Kevin, played with a malevolent grace by relative newcomer Ezra Miller is a devilish adolescent, a wicked and unnerving young man who may simply have been born bad, alternating between an enthusiastic affection for his father and passing tolerance for his younger sister. But its the fractured relationship with his mother that pulses at the radioactive core of the movie, and suspicions are raised whether Eva’s recollections are entirely accurate through a distressed fog of failure and unreliable reminiscence, as she tries to put her life back together and understand her sons heinous, guilt inflicting crimes for which she may be partially culpable.

From conception to incarceration We Need To Talk About Kevin is a challenging and intimate film with an inquisitive use of colour, an abrasive sound design and soundtrack (by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood) and a withering turn by one of the finest actresses working today. The source material delineates the tale through letters written by Eva to her husband but the film avoids this technique, eschewing a potential use of voiceover in favour of a purely cinematic mix of sound and image, brilliantly edited and choreographed as a dynamic fever dream and shot in sequence to enable the cast and crew to appreciate the building momentum of nauseous anxiety. Kevin may be the most honest character in the piece for all his infernal inflections, lacerating the masks of polite society that he views as a laughable charade, in one particularly agonizing scene of  failed bonding mother and son uncomfortably spend some ‘quality’ time together in a local restaurant which concludes with an excruciating speech that provoked nervous mutterings and gasps at the screening I attended. On a wider scale a soft focus cartography of  Americana is construed as the infrastructure to Kevin’s disaffection and Eva’s unconscious suburban hostility, from the hollow self-help posters in Eva’s Travel Agent office to the infundibular identikit houses to the unified labeling in the supermarkets a noxious odour of a truly American tragedy perfumes the film, although recent events in Norway have horrifically proved that such materialistic and idealistic poison is not confined to the North American continent.

Ramsay has explained that the punishing schedule (30 days) and paltry budget (reputedly £7 million) convinced her to map the film in pre-production to a morbidly dense execution, leaving little to chance, and from the sound design foreshadowing (witness the water sprinklers) to evocative interludes (the Halloween phantasms) an intimate tapestry is weaved, and to the film’s credit it doesn’t have the aura of a coldly manufactured mood piece but feels spontaneous and vigorous, its nervous depositions conceived from incendiary performances, extempore cinematography and an acrid, caustic score. The question of nature versus nurture is raised as it was in the novel, although Ramsay insists she aimed to pontificate but not elucidate on the complex psychology, there is not much ambiguity for me as Kevin is portrayed as a blood brother to Damian Thorne of the Omen films, a manifestly alien brood who only expresses a brief facade of human empathy in one key moment of the film’s closing scenes. The bond between mother and son is never forged, Eva almost seems to resent her pregnancy from initial diagnosis, and these challenges to cultural orthodoxy of the unalloyed sanctity of children and the saintly status of motherhood are a rich source of debate that the film, like the novel, seems certain to foster. A rich, timely and beautifully composed work, We Need To Talk About Kevin is one of the key films of this year’s London Film Festival.

John McEntee

Visit the official website for the 55th BFI Film Festival

The Descendants

Written by Alexander Payne

Directed by Alexander Payne

USA, 2011

It’s hard to believe that it’s been seven long years since Sideways, Alexander Payne’s widely beloved paean to middle aged disappointment, which was so thoroughly embraced by middle aged critics who naturally warmed to a tale of a thwarted writer baffled by the unraveling of life’s rich tapestry, wrestling with his pomegranate demons before bedding a bruised Virginia Madsen. In his follow up film The Descendants, Payne charts similar middle aged angst through the rather smaller demographic of a Hawaiian bred estate agent who discover that his coma afflicted wife was being unfaithful, having been driven into another’s arms due to her unfulfilled appetite for excitement and risk in an otherwise staid and unremarkable life. Obsessed with the identity of the cuckold, Matt King (Clooney, in resigned hangdog mode) enlists the aid of his disgruntled daughters Jess (Amara Miller) and Alex (Shailene Woodley) to confront the culprit, as he simultaneously negotiates the biggest deal of his life, a proposal to sell off his family’s pristine seafront land to some ambitious tourism developers.

What on paper could be a tiresome cliché of a man ‘finding’ himself and making peace with his family unfolds on screen like a Hawaiian hibiscus, graceful and scintillating, with a crepitating script that bursts with genuine pathos. The film is set against a drizzly and overcast tropical paradise, as an early line of voice-over (a favourite technique of Payne) remarks that just because these damaged and sympathetic characters live in a verdant Eden it doesn’t mean their families and relationships aren’t as fucked up as yours. The paradise is invested with a gentle score of authentic Hawaiian ballads which gently set the reflective mood, as Matt traverses the islands and reconnects with his daughters a tangible sense of place and mood is supplicated, the humor and tragedy blending into a genial tropical sojourn.

Clooney delivers the gags with his customary skill and plays the wounded schlep with convincing delicacy,  and a welcome bit part of Robert Forster as his gruffly critical father in law was a pleasant surprise. The real discovery, though, is Shailene Woodley, who reminds me off a younger Reece Witherspoon minus the preppy panache, with her genuine screen presence and an instinctive grasp of comic timing I’m predicting that she’ll go far. During a BFI  hosted screen talk at the festival, Payne mourned the lack of funding for the middle-budget comedies in which he excels (although fans should be reassured that he has two imminent projects for which funding is secured), and whilst  The Descendants probably won’t set the box office alight it has a beating heart, a deft sense of humor, and is worth an  ’aloha’ from fans of intelligent, mature cinema.

- John McEntee

Visit the official website for the 55th BFI Film Festival

Directed by Richard Jobson

UK, 2011

The title of Richard Jobson’s second film, one part political screed and one part disturbing documentary on the terrible Iraq debacle serves twin purposes – to witness the hypnotised fashion in which a sleep-walking population was seduced into supporting the war by a complacent media, and to honour the dead and wounded, both emotionally and physically, who have suffered in the appalling carnage of the past eight years. The film straddles that fine line between documentary and fiction with Jobson scribing fifteen soliloquies, some moving and some harrowing reports from the home and foreign fronts that he has culled from years of interviewing over 200 servicemen and women who served and some who have perished in a brutal war that already seems to be receding into the history books.

After a context-setting text crawl, a series of actors and actresses perform their speeches, shot as spectral heads framed against a black background, the design evoking voices from beyond the grave, as dissolves and framing adjustments complement the dialogue and serve to break up the static imagery. Although the design does get repetitive Jobson has the sense to bookmark each sector with a cut to an interior or exterior scene, taking us to the soldiers home, to their friends or their families, illuminated in stark black and white photography as they silently stare to the camera and elucidate the true consequence of war. These sections ambit across a range of military personnel, from medics to infantrymen, snipers to bomb disposal  experts, to provide a full portrait of impressions from the experienced warriors to the wet-nosed noobs, all given voice through a procession of authentically accented avatars. Some of these sections work better than others, the sniper’s speech for example is horrifying but somewhat diluted when followed by a poorly written socio-economic themed observation on the comparisons between an officer who prefers to play Górecki when given access to his squads stereo while his working class men prefer the likes of The Streets or Oasis – this seems neither pertinent or revelatory.

The cumulative effect is of a hell on earth where any romantic notions of conflict are soon expunged from any new recruits raised on a diet of arcade games and Schwarzenegger movies, and the film has a powerful punch that will leave some reeling. I’m not sure why Jobson chose to translate his interviews into more manufactured dialogue as perhaps the original discussions would have been more emotionally wrenching than his overtly mannered stanza’s, and the piece has a feel more akin to political theatre than giving voice to those who have paid the ultimate sacrifice. Closing with a direct assault on Tony Blair, the chief architect of the UK involvement in the war by counter-posing his unrepentant 2010 testimony to the Chilcot sub-committee on Iraq with the suicide of a PTSD afflicted army victim The Somnambulists is less documentary than a political screech, which is unlikely to convert the unconverted, but remains as a powerful testament to a concealed crusade with motives more commercial than moral.

John McEntee

Visit the official website for the 55th BFI Film Festival

Shame

Directed by Steve McQueen

Written by Steve McQueen

UK, 2011

New York city hasn’t looked so beautifully cold and ironically isolating for quite some time as it does in Shame, Steve McQueen’s second collaboration with everyone’s favourite actor Michael Fassbender, the recipient of the best actor gong  at Venice for his brave and penetrating performance of a sex addicted advertising executive in a hyperboreal Big Apple. In his sparse Manhattan apartment  Brandon (Fassbender) spends his evenings detachedly  consuming hardcore porn on the Internet inbetween random, affection starved pick-ups in local bars and clubs. His computer at work has been quarantined for potential infection, an investigation that leaves him imperceptibly shaken for easy to guess indiscretions. Every night, like an automaton, he is seduced by the flickering flesh thrusting on his laptop screen (many of the interactions in Shame are mediated through technology) as he ignores repeated voice-mails from a pleading female, whom we later learn is his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan), a struggling musician, who needs a place to stay for a few days. Arriving home one night Brandon discovers his sister in his shower having let herself in, and he reluctantly agrees to put her up for a few days. Although there is a hesitant affection between the siblings soon broader hints at a more complex past are exposed, Sissy seems similarly emotionally mutilated, after having a pathetically pleading conversation with a boyfriend to take her back she rebounds by inappropriately sleeping with Brandon’s boss David (James Badge Dale), placing more mental strain on her afflicted brother. As Sissy’s visit continues Brandon’s thwarted addictions begin to overwhelm him, although the possibility of a office romance which could provide genuine companionship and warmth shows potential in thawing his icy, insulated id.

Shame embraces the distant, austere style of Bresson and early Schrader; like an East Coast twin to that sun-drenched West Coast of American Giglio the film is ascetic excavation of a man in deep psychological distress, expressed through character in conflicting context. McQueen has not fully abandoned some the more declamatory instincts he utilised in Hunger (the piss-washing single take, the central pivot long dialogue scene) but they are more tempered and refined in Shame, and the film feels more instinctive and less formalist which in turn engages the viewer more closely with Brandon’s plight. McQueen likes long takes and three scenes in particular are some of the finest cinema of the year; a long frigid jog through the  nocturnal New York streets, a confrontation between Brandon and Sissy in the apartment with an outbreak of vivid emotional violence, and a revelatory rendition of New York from Mulligan in a downtown bar which is simply phenomenal. Indeed, it’s in the performances that Shame should be most proud of itself, as both Mulligan and Fassbender seem dangerously fragile and even slightly dangerous, and McQueen coaxes complicated and compelling renditions from them which are complemented by his taut, corruscating direction.

A Pandora’s box of potent themes arise, the distancing and isolation of modern life, and its stresses upon the psyche?  More directly a blistering attack on the psychic fall-out of easily accessible pornography? An autopsy on the devastating cost of addiction, need and desire? Unfortunately these questions are slightly eroded in a grinding climax when the film moves into slightly predictable territory given both characters psychological fugues, with a uneccessary flirt with one dramatic convention which is obvious and a little impotent. Regardless, Shame is weighty, serious, adult film-making and a  hardcore, essential text of 2011.

John McEntee

Visit the official website for the 55th BFI Film Festival

Rampart

Directed by Oren Moverman

Written by James Ellroy and Oren Moverman

Starring Woody Harrelson, Cynthia Nixon, Robin Wright, Sigourney Weaver, Anne Heche & Steve Buscemi

Two years ago debut director Oren Moverman directed Woody Harrelson to his second Oscar nomination with The Messenger, an under-seen and unappreciated home-front military drama, with next years Rampart, an LA bad-cop drama he may have just provided his muse with a sweltering part that could embezzle the coveted gold statuette come next February. Pilfered from the mind of LA crime savant James Ellroy we’re billy-clubbed into a blistering Los Angeles, circa 1999, and the Rampart division of the City of Angels black and whites are embroiled in a tornado of controversy, following allegations of widespread corruption, witness beatings, suspect kickbacks and violent apprehensions. With twenty-four years on the force David Brown (Harrelson) has a somewhat complicated life – his two ex-wives are sisters (Cynthia Nixon & Anne Heche) who live adjacent to each other with a daughter each from their respective marriages to our hard drinking, adulterous anti-hero. Brown sleeps around and drinks too much, and has been hounded by allegations of impropriety since he shot and killed a serial rapist some years ago, earning him the charming sobriquet of ‘date-rape’ from his law enforcement colleagues. Mocked by his eldest daughter and barely tolerated by his ex-wives Brown’s career is sent into a tailspin after he is taped beating a suspect to near death, and after striking up a destructive relationship with an alcoholic self hating lawyer (Robin Wright) he can only trust his private confidant, a  retired cop played by Ned Beatty, an octopi crime figure who knows where the bodies are buried and who may or may not have clandestine motives of his own.

Rampart is aiming more for a sunshine coast The Wire than a nervous Lethal Weapon with its portrayal of a cracked cop under increasing duress, with a sole emphasis on David’s predicament and process rather than scenes of klaxon blaring chases or scolding shoot-outs it is shot on a heavily grained digitial stock which yearns for a gritter Michael Mann Angelino vibe, yet falls somewhat short of its infernal aspirations. The title serves dual purpose as the framing real life story of the CRASH unit controversy of the late nineties, and the notion of a man erecting all the defences he can psychologically and physically muster as he is targeted for past transgressions by enemies unknown. Some detractors have expressed exasperation at the films overt stylistics and it is over-directed to be sure, with some flashy flourishes which occasionally work (the hallucinatory club scene) and some obtrusive moments (an office interogation where the camera pans until the character drops out of frame before cutting to the next character) that distastefully jerk you out of the picture, but Harrelson’s performance is worth the price of admission alone as a haughty emasculated patriarch whose life is slowly coming apart at the seams, as he commands the screen with a lip smacking, desperate hunger. The paranoia builds incrementally and soon Brown comes to trust no-one, even when he reveals his submerged nature in a manufactured execution you wonder whether he has been pushed into this desperate dilemma, as his charm and charisma retain some sympathy for his plight due to an unfocused and poorly portrayed plot point. We should have seen more of both Wright and Beatty which could both be more interesting that their peripheral sketching attests, and brief turns from Steve Buscemi as a aspiring politician and Sigourney Weaver as a purse lipped civilian lawyer seem wasted in the attempt to pursue a genuine, moral hecate. Ellroy is the cartographer of lawmen with skewed moral values enforced by repeated exposure to the hell of the streets, but this translation of his reportage seems diluted, as Brown’s history is intimated rather than explored. Nevertheless Harrelson is superb and seems certain of accolades, and Moverman with his second film repeats an arresting performance, a Yin yang street ambiguity that counterfeits Refn’s Drive, so it seems as if the city of angels still contains golden contraband after all.

- John McEntee

Visit the official website for the 55th BFI Film Festival

The Skin I Live In

Written by Pedro Almodóvar

Directed by Pedro Almodóvar

Spain, 2011

The hallowed caverns of cinema history are littered with the skeletal remains of mad scientists, those power-crazed maniacs whose unholy experiments are frequently an affront to god and to the more tangible realm of medical ethics. These sneering antagonists are driven by all-consuming desire to avenge a wrong, or save a loved one, or to play the immortal and be damned with the consequences to their perverted souls. From the translocation of limbs and organs in the likes of The Hands of Orlac and The Eye, from the shrieking transmutations in The Island of Dr. Moreau, from the perverted humor of The Thing With Two Heads, or the automaton prophecy of Metropolis, the cinema has reveled in the possibilities of man breaching the bounds of pathological and righteous decency, scorning the absurd moral framework of his era and arguing that to truly evolve and progress such outdated notions as ethics and moral responsibility must be overcome. It’s a theme that Pedro Almodóvar has cloned for his eighteenth feature The Skin I Live In, a loose adaption of Thierry Jonquet’s lurid novel Tarantula where a crazed surgeon launches a twisted revenge scheme to alleviate the bereavement he has suffered. Although the touchstones for this effort are much more aligned with two core cinematic influences – Georges Franju’s Les Yeux Sans Visage and of course James Whale’s iconic Frankenstein, being concerned as they are with the manufacture of a replacement, of an artificial decanting a cherished void, Almodóvar also ventures further afield to alight upon Vertigo in this well crafted but ultimately unsatisfying psych0-thriller.

Brilliant plastic surgeon /scientist Dr. Robert Ledgard (Anonio Banderas) is detaining a curious prisoner in his lavish villa on the outskirts of Toledo, the beautiful Vera (Elena Anaya) is confined to a basement room and fed through a dumb-waiter operated by Robert’s house mistress Marilia (Marisa Paredes) – thus three of Almodovar’s regular actors return in this feature. Robert’s wife was involved in a horrific car accident some years earlier and Vera seems to be her uncanny double, serving as a guinea pig for an experimental form of skin graft that he is synthetically developing, although her pedigree is uncertain it is clear that affection is developing between prisoner and jailor. When Marilia’s estranged son arrives at the Villa during a street carnival (memorably dressed as a tiger in an amusing Almodóvarian flourish) she reluctantly takes him in as he’s on the lam after a high-profile robbery, and soon secrets and relationships of both families are brought to light in a darkly sensuous fashion, as the seed of Robert’s obsession and Vera’s heritage are incrementally revealed.

All the components of classic Almodóvar are present: a vibrant colour palette and tangled family histories, a permeability of gender, a dark sexuality, seductive imagery, a wry sense of humor and an arch operatic flourish. For me, however, the sum didn’t equal the possibility of its parts, perhaps it’s a personal quirk but I find his films to be simply too contrived and manufactured to generate much sympathy, and little in the way of suspense or cinematic frisson are generated by what to my mind is a poorly designed film in terms of its use of flashbacks and zig-zagging structure. Hopping around his characters smothered secrets should result in a keen sense of drama, not bewildered indifference, and what should be major plot twists and shocks are relegated to mere indifference, The Skin I Live In is certainly a stately, handsome film which does entrap the attention but when you can almost guess the next contrivance it does result in a rather tepid experience. The performances are good with Banderas in particular eschewing the moustache twirling, eyebrow twitching clichés of his fore-runners, he’s clearly a driven and obsessed soul whose tortured project is doomed to failure. I also think that like the South Koreans, Almodovar tends to expand his climaxes out to uncomfortable lengths; he has difficulty closing a film appropriately and satisfactorily without providing neat closures, specifically in this case a little more ambiguity on the fate of certain characters would have been far more illuminating and affecting. That said it is a sumptuous visual experience; the geometric designs of his interiors infiltrate the frequently brilliant wardrobes of Paco Delgado, and there is more than enough sex to go around, as someone’s at it just about every ten minutes in this film. This is vintage Almodóvar, so at least the fans of the Spanish auteur will be satisfied.

John McEntee

360

Directed by Fernando Mierelles

Written by Peter Morgan

It’s not difficult to see why the organisers of the 55th London Film Festival selected the new film by Fernando Mierelles, the spherically titled 360, as the opening night gala film. As well as being written by British scribe Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon, Hereafter) and starring three of the UK’s most successful acting exports in the forms of Anthony Hopkins, Jude Law and Rachel Weisz the film also presents a global tale than spans four continents, in a fashion that echoes the festivals international remit, considering its strands devoted to World Cinema, Cinema Europa, French Revolutions, New British Cinema, and many other experimental and historical programming frontiers. It also doesn’t hurt in having a few fantastically beautiful people to power the necessary red carpet star wattage for the all important gala publicity and punditry, it’s such a shame then that such a prestigious festival with a growing reputation in the celluloid calendar has seized upon such a tiresome film to champion its charms, as 360 is yet another entry in the now tedious list of ‘we’re all in this together’ movies which is as mildly unpleasant as the vacuous politicians who parrot such inanities.

Loosely adapted from Arthur Schnitzler’s play La Ronde, the film has sex and its consequences as its central themes, as it opens appropriately enough in a seedy and gloomy Vienna. An ambitiously sultry call girl (Tereza Srbova) is having her glamour shots photographed by a lecherous pimp as her concerned younger sister Anna (Gabriela Marcinkova) looks on in concerted anxiety. Through a narrative branching that quickly diffuses the films focus and empathy the ardent hooker  is soon dispatched to meet a new client at an opulent hotel, and hey presto that salacious adulterer turns out to be none other than Jude Law, who evidently feels the need to cheat on his stunning wife Rose (Weisz) who in turn is banging some Brazilian photographer whom she has met through her high profile media job. The photographers infidelities has led his girlfriend Laura (Maria Flor) to flee home on a flight where she meets Anthony Hopkins, and then slightly drunk she hits on newly released serial rapist Tyler (Ben Foster) during a stopover break in a winter coaxed Denver – I’m not making this up. Further compounded the narrative the film skips, through conceited connections to Hopkins speech at an AA meeting where we met Valentina, (Dinara Drukarova)  a Soviet holidaymaker whom is lusted over by her boss (Jamel Debbouze), his desire thwarted as being a good Muslim he cannot covet a married woman. Katrina’s husband – as clearly there are not enough characters to go ‘around’ at this point – works for a scary Russian crime lord who orders him to get a call-girl, bringing us full circle as I’m sure you can you guess who that might be? Like sticky ships passing in the night  the film leapfrogs around the globe, from London to Colorado, Leipzig to Paris, in an intricate web of coincidence that never risks being anything but mildly diverting, whilst prompting a mental equivalent of connect the dots as you speculate on who and how will be conjoined next.

The most charitable review I’ve seen so far refers to 360 as Love Actually without the jokes, which I think you’ll agree is a horrifying proposition – well, it was terrifying with the jokes but I digress. The film seems to have the lofty ideals that are expressed in the likes of Babel and the Morgan-scribed Hereafter that we are now a global community, mediated through ubiquitous communication channels and devices (mobile phones and computers feature heavily in the film with the Russian henchman’s ring-tone abetting nervous titters at my screening) yet aren’t the gaps between us widening? Or something. Ugly linking techniques such as a plane dovetailing from one scene to the next and a redundant uses of split screen framing bludgeon in the ‘message’ (whatever it’s supposed to be), and where a vast canvas of players was strummed so effectively in the likes of Magnolia or Short Cuts this film has no interesting characters to examine, a problem exacerbated with the limited run-time making anything more than a paper thin skim across a surface simply impossible. Considering its title 360 concludes after a period which feels elongated to minuatory tedium, on a shockingly contrived confrontation in a glamorous hotel suite, as the end title design even decides to remind us that hey, it’s the ‘circle of life’ – give me Love Actually any day.

John McEntee

Visit the official website for the 55th BFI Film Festival

The Awakening

Written and Directed by Nick Murphy

Starring Rebecca Hall, Dominic West & Imelda Staunton

UK, 2011

No, the horror remake strand hasn’t reached out to encompass the 1980 Charlton Heston horror The Awakening, where an archaeologist has a spot of bother with a mummy’s spirit possessing his daughter, with this debut feature writer / director Nick Murphy is instead taking us to London in the early 1920’s, the capital still in mourning under a shroud of gloom as the horrific hostilities of the First World War envelop the survivors and the bereaved. Florence Cathcart (a fiesty Rebecca Hall) is a prototype Dana Scully, a rationalist, atheist, successful author whose efforts to  expose fraudulent spiritualists and purveyors of false séances to grieving victims mask her own sacrifice, having lost her beloved fiancé on the fields of Flanders. When she is approached by limping veteran turned school teacher Robert Mallory (Dominic West) to investigate the death of a child at his remote boarding school she resists his plea until a unconscious drive lures her to the school to face an unexpected challenge. A young boy has been literally scared to death by the supposed spirit of a another soul whom was taken in childhood, and with the assistance of both Robert and local house mistress Mrs. Hill (Imelda Staunton) Florence is soon prowling the halls and classrooms of the eerie institution, with her traps and trinkets designed to expose the truth…

This efficient chiller clearly has its genesis in the likes of the Henry James classic The Turn of The Screw and such ghostly fare as The Innocents and The Haunting of the early Sixties, and whilst it doesn’t quite reach the scream inducing heights of those appartions it has enough scares to keep one’s spine positively tingled. The film builds a slow, melancholic aura through the slow reveal of the school and its inhabitants blood stained history before the scares are unleashed, and the press audience I saw this with were soon bouncing up and down out of their seats like a parade of epileptic jack-in the boxes. Having seen her profile rise with an eye catching turn in last years Oscar nominee The Town Hall clearly ain’t afraid of no ghost and she acquaints herself admirably, with a powerful drive to discern the truth overlaying a fragile core which yearns for affection, a carapace which may be obscuring a wounded guilt that has been her burden for many years. If you’re a fan of these tales then the early dialogue will signal some of the twists and wanes of the gothic narrative, although this make proceddings a little predictable the thrills and spills are repetitive enough to keep you squirming  with one moment, the deployment of the genre fave spooky Dollhouse, being particularly stupefying. Bravely the film doesn’t rely solely on the creaking corridors and lurking darkness to prick the soul, and some of the horrors are staged under the light of a muted sun, where some more corporal horrors stalk the grounds of the mysterious school. Any fans of 2001′s successful The Others or the recent Spanish susto The Orphanage (with which the film has some strong echoes) should enjoy The Awakening, and only the most hardy of souls will be treating themselves to that triple bill this coming Halloween.

- John McEntee

Visit the official website for the 55th BFI Film Festival

]]> http://www.soundonsight.org/55th-bfi-london-film-festival-the-awakening/feed/ 0 http://www.soundonsight.org/bfi-55th-london-film-festival-martha-marcy-may-marlene-one-of-the-most-assuredly-original-films-of-the-year/ http://www.soundonsight.org/bfi-55th-london-film-festival-martha-marcy-may-marlene-one-of-the-most-assuredly-original-films-of-the-year/#comments Sat, 08 Oct 2011 02:11:29 +0000 John http://www.soundonsight.org/?p=85975 [Read the Rest]]]> Martha Marcy May Marlene

Directed by Sean Durkin

Written by Sean Durkin

Starring Elizabeth Olsen, Sarah Paulson, Hugh Dancy, John Hawkes

Even from its title the film Martha Marcy May Marlene suggests a fracture of psyche, a yearning for identity that provokes a young woman’s hypnosis and subsequent evasion of a sinister cult in the American hinterlands. The debut feature of Sean Durkin the film has already attracted favourable comparisons to Malick’s Badlands, another celebrated first feature, with its fairy tale patina aligned with more corporal horrors it was one of the smash raves at January’s Sundance festival where it immediately picked up a global distribution deal with Fox Searchlight after a series of rapturous screenings. Whether or not this is the herald of a major new American talent only time will tell, but on the strength of this astonishing debut I know where I’m placing my bet, as it is certainly one of the most assuredly original films of the year.

Martha (a revelatory Elizabeth Olsen, of the kiddie friendly Olson twins no less) is a fragile young women who mysteriously flees a remote farmhouse deep in the Catskill Mountains. After calling a nameless relative at a local truck stop she is approached by a young man, another inhabitant of the farm, who smoothly and perniciously warns her of the consequences of abandoning her kin. Safety is temporarily assured when Lucy (Sarah Paulson), her soon to be established older sister takes her into her summer home whilst gently quering her whereabouts of the past two years, as wider hints of their shared history and difficult past relationship is progressively revealed. Lucy has recently married Ted (Hugh Dancy), a wealthy young architect whom has little time for Martha’s critques of his alleged consumerist values and it soon becomes apparent through her socially transgressive behavior – bathing nude in the local lake, interrupting their lovemaking sessions without any sense of privacy, a paranoid certainty of being observed  - that she has not simply fled from a failed romance, and darker forces have been exploiting her frail emotional security. As her behavior becomes more and more erratic Lucy and Ted are forced to consider professional incarceration and an attempt of re-programming her anima, if her surrogate cult sisters and brothers don’t find her first….

The devil is often in the detail, and  it is the ambiguities and opaque conditioning of Martha Marcy May Marlene that make it so bewitching, as you are never quite sure of the subjective truth of Marcy’s viewpoint, of her recollections or potentially programmed opinions, so the film levitates in a woozy dimension caught between this world and the next. That dreamy, slightly bewildered aura is achieved through an astonishing performance from Elisabeth Olsen whom in one stroke has obliterated her child star persona, she has that slightly fractured, imperceptibly damaged and hesitantly dangerous aura of a younger Maggie Gyllenhaal, and in the films frequent close-up reaction shots her soul bearing eyes become entranced by affection or terrified into paralysis by the communes activities, it’s spellbinding film-making through imagery that recalls the frescos of Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. These communions and much of the film is captured with short, flat lenses that flatten the foreground and recede the background planes into focus stripped blurs, an apt visual metaphor for the world of Marcy internalizing her life at the expense of the exterior world and her previous life. It’s exhilirating to witness such an original, unusual and unreliable central character, and telling her story through the literary equivalent of the unreliable narrator keep viewers on their toes, maybe Olsen has managed to transmit some of her personal experiences of growing up in as a bubble wrapped superstar moving from adolescence into a confused and dazed adulthood?

Fragmented time structures and jumbled narratives are nothing new, even before the technique was abused ad nauseam by a wake of filmmakers’ aping Tarantino’s narrative pilfering for his influential Pulp Fiction (1994), but the mark of a true artist is how these fractures and saltations incrementally reveal key information and detail, through a technique that in itself reflects the characters emotional and psychological core. In Marcia¼ the beautifully executed match-cut flashbacks are fluently weaved into the film, which slowly paint a portrait of deteriorating anxiety. The wider questions of why Martha would embrace this dark, surrogate family are left unasked and the film is all the more powerful for it, as both sisters hesitantly attempt to reconnect and Lucy patiently unearths the details of her sisters ordeal some truly affecting and gripping scenes evolve between the two actresses, both of whom are on nigh perfect form. John Hawkes acquits himself admirably as Patrick, the coolly malevolent cult leader, although the degeneration into a Manson or Koresh like demagogue is expected his journey is throughly convincing, with an execution of quiet menace and psychological brutality. American independent films over the past few decades often seize upon overly quirky characters or deliberately obtuse narratives (hey, let’s make a film about having sex with mom? Heck, my families crazy ‘cause my granddad is a sex mad pensioner who keeps saying ‘fuck’) but Martha Marcy preaches a sermon of quiet perfection, and you simply must commune with one of the most vibrant films of the year, with it’s brave and divisive finale you’ll be chanting hallelujah.

- John McEntee

Visit the official website for the 55th BFI Film Festival

 The 55^th BFI London Film Festival announced the shortlists and juries for the 2011 Festival Awards this week, heralding a star studded extravaganza that is due to take place at the prestigious LSO St Luke’s on 26th October.

The Best Film Award celebrates original, inventive and distinctive film-making in the festival – given that they are competing in a field of roughly 200 films this is quite the achievement. The initial shortlist was drawn up by Artistic Director Sandra Hebron (sadly in her final year as festival director) and the programming team, and will be judged by a impressive collection of industry figures including the Oscar-nominated director John Madden, Emmy and Golden Globe winner Gillian Anderson, the BAFTA-winning writer and director Asif Kapadia, Oscar-nominated and BAFTA-winning producer Tracey Seaward,  writer Andrew O’Hagan and the Turner Prize-nominated YBA and film director Sam Taylor Wood OBE.

This year’s shortlist is:

360, Fernando Meirelles, UK/Austria/France/Brazil

THE ARTIST, Michel Hazanavicius, France

THE DEEP BLUE SEA, Terence Davies,UK

THE DESCENDANTS, Alexander Payne,USA

FAUST, Aleksandr Sukurov,Russia

THE KID WITH A BIKE, Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Belgium/France/Italy

SHAME, Steve McQueen,UK

TRISHNA, Michael Winterbottom,UK

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN, Lynne Ramsay, UK/USA

Interesting to see four British directors in the list, with a clutch of exceptionally strong films in previous festival reactions are anything to go by…

The award forBest British Newcomer honours new and emerging film talent, recognising the achievements of a new writer, producer, director, actor or actress.  This year’s jury comprises the BAFTA-nominated actress Anne-Marie Duff, actor Tom Hollander, producer and director of the National Film and Television School Nik Powell, Oscar-nominated and BAFTA-winning producer Andy Harries, Radio 1 and Channel 4’s Vue Film Show presenter Edith Bowman and Oscar-nominated and BAFTA-winning producer Stephen Woolley.   Jury chair Andy Harries said “Tomorrow’s UK film business is all about the young and exciting talent that is emerging today. There’s loads of it and the annual London Film Festival remains a brilliant showcase for really great new actors, directors and producers to shine.”

The shortlist for Best British Newcomer is:

Nick Murphy, Director, THE AWAKENING

Tinge Krishnan, Director, JUNKHEARTS

Candese Reid, Actress, JUNKHEARTS

Nirpal Bhogal, Writer/director, SKET

Aimee Kelly, Actress, SKET

Tom Cullen, Actor, WEEKEND

Chris New, Actor, WEEKEND

D.R. Hood, Writer/Director, WRECKERS

The Jury for the prestigious Sutherland Award, presented to the director of the most original and imaginative feature debut in the festival includes Turner Prize nominee Phil Collins, producer Andrew Eaton, director Joanna Hogg, BAFTA-winning director Peter Kosminsky, actress Saskia Reeves, Hugo Grumbar, managing director (International) Icon UK Group, and film journalist Tim Robey.   Peter Kosminsky said “I’m absolutely thrilled to have been asked to join this year’s Sutherland Jury by the BFI. The support of the BFI London Film Festival is a vital lifeline for new filmmakers struggling to achieve visibility in a crowded cinematic world. I am delighted to play a small part in assisting new talent to break through in this way”.

The previously announced Sutherland shortlist is:

CORPO CELESTE,Alice Rohrwacher, Italy/Switzerland/France
ETERNITY,Sivaroj Kongsakul,Thailand
HERE, BradenKing,USA
THE HOUSE,Zuzana Liová,Czech Republic
LAS ACACIAS, Pablo Giorgelli, Argentina/Spain
LAST WINTER, John Shank, Belgium/France
MICHAEL,  Markus Schleinzer,  Austria
MOURNING,  Morteza Farshbaf, Iran
SHE MONKEYS,  Lisa Aschan,  Sweden
SNOWTOWN,   Justin Kurzel,  Australia
THE SUN-BEATEN PATH,  Sonthar Gyal, China
WITHOUT, Mark Jackson,USA

Joanna Hogg said “‘I love the BFI London Film Festival. It’s a thrill and a privilege to be judging The Sutherland Award.”

The Grierson Award for Best Documentary, a partnership between the Grierson Trust and the Festival, recognises outstanding feature-length documentaries of integrity, originality, technical excellence or cultural significance.  The Award is presented in commemoration of John Grierson.  Two-time BAFTA winner Adam Curtis will chair the jury, which also includes documentary filmmaker Kim Longinotto, Mandy Chang of the Grierson Trust, and Charlotte Moore, Head of Documentary Commissioning at the BBC.

This year’s shortlist is:

BERNADETTE: NOTES ON A POLITICAL JOURNEY,Lelia Doolan,Ireland

BETTER THIS WORLD, Katie Galloway, Kelly Duane de la Vega,USA

THE BLACK POWER MIXTAPE 1967-1975, Goran Hugo Olsson, Sweden/USA

DRAGONSLAYER, Tristan Patterson

DREAMS OF A LIFE, Carol Moley, UK/Ireland

INTO THE ABYSS: A TALE OF DEATH, A TALE OF LIFE,  Werner Herzog

LAST DAYS HERE, Don Argott & DemianFenton,USA

WHORES’ GLORY, Michael Glawogger, Austria/Germany

On chairing the Best Documentary category, Adam Curtis said “It is a great privilege and I am really looking forward to watching all the films and I am also hoping that somehow the films will help me make a bit more sense of what is happening in the world at the moment because frankly not much else on television or the cinema is doing that at present”.

 DAVID CRONENBERG & RALPH FIENNES TO RECEIVE BFI FELLOWSHIPS

At this year’s ceremony, the BFI will bestow its highest honour, the BFI Fellowship, on David Cronenberg and Ralph Fiennes. The original and provocative Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg is internationally renowned for films exploring the darker impulses and inner lives of his characters. His distinctive films have gone beyond the science-fiction genre and have had a powerful and enduring influence on contemporary filmmakers. His impressive list of credits includes The Fly, Videodrome, Scanners, Naked Lunch, Crash, Eastern Promises, The History of Violence and premiering at this year’s festival, A Dangerous Method.  David Cronenberg said “This is a monumental, in fact overwhelming, honour, and my being the first Canadian to receive it makes it all the sweeter. British cinema has been a potent inspiration for me, and to be associated with this particular group of filmmakers is tremendously exhilarating.” – funny how a film-maker reviled for his alleged sub-porno nightmares such as Shivers and Rabid is now firmly embraced – and rightly so.

Ralph Fiennes is one of Britain’s pre-eminent actors, who has achieved a singular career in which he manages to command equal respect among theatre-goers, lovers of art-house film and audiences for international blockbusters. With Coriolanus, featured in competition in the Berlin Film Festival 2011 and selected as a Gala screening in this year’s LFF, he has made a bold and critically well received transition to film directing. In addition to his portrayal of Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter films, his extensive acting credits include The End of the Affair, The Reader, Strange Days, Spider, Quiz Show, The English Patient, The Constant Gardener and Schindler’s List. Ralph Fiennes said “I’m extremely honoured and delighted to be given this fellowship by the BFI”.