the limey (d soderbergh, w. lem dobbs)

The Limey includes footage of its star, Terrence Stamp, from another film, Ken Loach’s Poor Cow, to show Stamp as a young man (and handsome devil). Soderbergh cleverly weaves this footage into his film, part of a masterful edit, lending The Limey an instant nostalgia factor. This nostalgia factor is amplified watching the film 25 years after its release. The Limey seems to hark back to a different, bolder era, when filmmakers were permitted a certain licence to indulge and hence enrich what might otherwise have been fairly regulation genre fare. In The Limey, alongside Out of Sight, Soderbergh constructed a pair of whip-smart films which perhaps would struggle to be financed today. Reminiscent of French thrillers like Cercle Rouge or Le Samurai, The Limey makes a virtue of its difficulties: the choppy edit, a la Godard, the playfulness of the dialogue, Stamp’s weirdly monochromatic acting, only broken every now and again by a sly smile behind the eyes. It’s a minor direction masterclass. If this is where film is headed, we thought back in those last of the pre-millennial days, we’re in good hands. 

kafka (d. soderbergh, w. lem dobbs)

I have memories of Soderbergh’s second feature coming out and being an unmitigated disaster, both critically and at the box office. The zietgesity wunderkind of SL&V coming back down to earth with a bump. Perhaps this is a false memory, but in the Soderbergh canon, you don’t offer hear people referring to Kafka. Of course it always helps a film to go in with low expectations, but Kafka, for all its predictability, still succeeded in charming. Perhaps it was the sight of Guinness and the youthful Irons helming a familiar looking cast, featuring one of those zany double acts with Keith Allen and Simon McBurney, the type of humorous conceit which never normally works, but in this case seems to. Perhaps it was the sight of Prague in all its pre-touristy glory. Or perhaps it was just the evident glee of a young director getting to fulfil his dream of making a passion project, all homage to expressionism, Fritz Lang, and so on.

Later in the Cinemateca cafe, Victor appeared. He had a garish orange painting. On closer inspection it showed McDowell from A Clockwork Orange. In that film’s expressionist glory, there lurks perhaps another homage to Lang’s violence. It was too auspicious to pass up, and so I bought the picture for Sñr Amato, who had also chanced to come to the screening of a blousy Sunday evening. Hopefully the picture will find a home on the bright shore of the Maldonado coast, a far cry from the foggy dunes of Prague.