the neon demon (w&d. refn, w. polly stenham & mary laws)

Refn’s film has all the hallmarks. It’s shiny, so much so that at times the screen dazzles. It’s shallow, so shallow that the lead is killed in an empty swimming pool. It has hidden depths, which are so hidden that they can only be represented by an abstract, demonic symbol. It’s provocative. So provocative that many critics have fallen for the bait and decried the film’s taboo-breaking, as though the guiding hand was Nietzsche’s. 

Is this the twilight of the gods? It would be hard to make a case. Refn is more of a tease than a terror. There’s a scene of necrophilia but Roeg did this far more dangerously in Bad Timing. There’s cannibalism, but that’s off-screen. There’s very little sex. There’s a soft-porn lesbian shower scene, doused in blood, but it’s so kitsch you suspect that Refn finds this hilarious, not shocking. If anything this would appear to be a film which purports to be about smashing up the family china; but a film that never goes so far as to actually smash up the family china. 

In contrast to received notions of sensationalist films, Neon Demon is stately in its pacing. More Bergman than Fast ’n Furious. The director and editor delight in the wondrous images captured by the DOP, Natasha Braier. Rightly so. This is a cinema of the image and the images are ravishing. There’s some neat dialogue supplied by the playwrights Refn has drafted in, but the plot is wafer-thin and the denouement has no tension. It’s an aggressively semiotic film: a film constructed out of images which are all about what we choose to see. We choose pretty young things. We choose baubles. We choose the surface. Perhaps the film’s most radical moment comes towards the end when one of the characters eats a regurgitated eyeball. Pop will eat itself.

Refn is a provocateur, not a theorist. People might detect allegories of how LA eats its young, or capitalism turns its young into products and then eats them, or how coming of age in a capitalist society is about preparing oneself to become a sacrificial lamb. All these readings and more would seem applicable. Like a Dali painting, the film’s bland but seductive surface allows for multiple interpretation. Which might be its skill, or it might be the Neon Demon’s achilles heel. If heels are something that neon demons possess. 

son of saul (d. lászló nemes, w. nemes & clara royer)

It struck me about five minutes into Son of Saul that László Nemes, the director, probably knows the work of the previous entrant on the blog, fellow Hungarian Imre Kertész. The scars of the Holocaust on the Eastern European psyche still run deep. How is it still possible to make a film about the Holocaust that feels urgent, pressing, of the now? And why is it necessary? 

Son of Saul is brilliantly made, possesses a peculiar beauty, yet still succeeds in conveying shock. The shock is twofold. On the one hand there are the prosaic details of the process. The death, the barbarity, the bodies, the showers, the machine, the complicity. All these things are known, have been visited time and again. By framing his story through the prism of its ‘hero’s’ journey over the course of three days, maintaining a narrow focus, we observe all these things at the periphery of our vision. Every now and again the background leaps out at the viewer. A body dragged across the floor; a bloodstain being scrubbed. Sound and image are employed to make this terrible world come to life, every shot meticulously constructed to portray the heaving mechanism of the concentration camp, a machine of constant movement and barely-controlled chaos. 

The second shock has more in common with the wry observations of Kertész: that within the confines of this hell, a man can retain his values and his humanity, as shown by Saul Auslander’s desire to provide a fit burial for the child he believes (or chooses to believe) is his son. The simple, ludicrous, mission renders everything else secondary. It’s a classic piece of storytelling which is delivered via a masterly use of the cinematic format. 

If the film reminded me of any other, it’s perhaps Mungiu’s Five Weeks. The ability to convey a story with a claustrophobic focus, the bigger picture always present but kept in the background. Like the novel, cinema allows the storyteller to lead you through a world from the point of view of the narrative’s chosen protagonist. Why is it necessary? The urgency of the filmmaking stye succeeds in making Saul’s story feel like something that could be happening today. Nemes bridges the historical gap, creating empathy through shared experience. We don’t look on Saul as a historical figure, but as a contemporary. Cinema revokes history, and a modern audience is compelled to think: that this should never be permitted to happen again. The reasons why it might be necessary to remember this all over again right now, in the second decade of the 21st century, are, sadly, far too evident. 

the artist (w&d michel hazanavicius)

Leaving the cinema there was some debate over whether this is a reactionary film or not. In difficult times, the public takes succour in escapism. A film about silent cinema becomes an unlikely success as we look for anything to take our mind off recession and the collapse of Western capitalism. Into the breach steps a tale from a time when stars were stars and cinema was simpler.

I could buy this argument, but I’d like to offer the counterpoint. Hazanavicius’s film instead compels us to revisit a brief, golden time when the filmmaker’s message wasn’t sullied by language. When the image was paramount. It could almost be seen as a tribute to Derrida. We revisit a less forensic, cynical age, when delight in the image was still permitted to flourish and watching cinema was akin to stepping on the Moon. In this regard it would appear to have something in common with Scorsese’s Hugo, albeit The Artist is a more satisfying, witty film than the old master’s.

So I’m not convinced that The Artist, no matter how enjoyable, is all that escapist. It’s more of a paean to those things we have lost than an invitation to bask in the delights of what we have. Perhaps that’s why it’s weirdly moving. Valentine is a man out of time, losing touch with the world that is to come. A feeling that all of us are constantly condemned to repeat in this hyper-technological age, forever one step behind whatever is just about to emerge and turn the world around again.

I sometimes wonder what it must have been like to have lived a normal life before the invention of the printing press. If you didn’t speak Latin or live in a monastery. Were minds less rich for the lack of information? Did the intellect not sing its own song still in whatever form it took? The Artist reminds us that for all our so-called sophistication, we’re still susceptible to those things which have shaped human perception since before time began. Things such as the other and the heart. And dogs. 

tyrannosaur (w&d paddy considine)

There's a general rule of thumb which has been by and large honoured in this blog never to write about things which include or are created by friends of mine. There's a twin reason for this: the critic's perspective can be compromised when personal feelings are involved, and even if that's not necessarily true, there's also the risk of pissing people off. I don't know anyone who worked on Considine's film, but given the limited scale of the British film industry and the amount of players who have their fingers in this pie, you cannot help thinking that it might be impolitic to say what you really think about it. But anyway...

The acting is good, albeit good in that "grand acting" fashion which kind of declares as it goes though customs: 'actors at work'. Everything's slightly mannered; the quest for "truth" in the moment is so worn on the sleeve that there are times when the sleeve is all you can make out. But this is a film made by an actor which is all about the acting, and the actors deliver what's expected of them. Olivia Colman in particular succeeds in convincing in spite of the fact that her character is placed in a dramatic situation that's so wafer thin she's coaxing something out of a near empty tank.

Without wanting to give too much away, she's in an abusive marriage with a character whose name barely registers, played by Eddie Marsan. We know Marsan is not a nice man because he pisses on his wife when she's asleep. Not the most subtle of character notes. But one of the few we're given. Marsan is a borderline psychotic who practices his boxing skills on his wife, played by Colman. He's a really nasty man. Really nasty. Malevolent. A rapist. Who drives a red sports car. Who uses the word "wank". Who lives in a house with extremely bland furniture. He's, let's repeat this in case you, the audience, have missed it, a nasty piece of work.

At which point, you, the audience, might be inclined to ask some questions. Such as - why is Marsan so horrible? Why does his wife, Hannah, not go to someone for help? Why does no one take any notice of Hannah's repeated facial injuries (and has this just started or has it been going on since their marriage started)? If Marsan resembles any filmic character I can think of it's De Niro's in Cape Fear. Where Scorcese was deliberately playing with the idea of a B-Movie villain. But Marsan's character is not a B-Movie villain. Considine's film is in the tradition of British social realism. We're supposed to believe in these characters, this world, this desperate, caricatured grimness. When in fact all we're given are the tropes, the symbols, which, I would suggest, are themselves exploited in the name of 'art'. There's an argument that it's irresponsible to appropriate dramatic symbols (in this instance that of the abused wife, and the sheer quantity of stage make-up Colman has to bear almost becomes clownish) without making some attempt to address the actual origins of these dramatic symbols: ie Marsan's psychosis. It's using the semiotics of real suffering for dramatic ends; because there's nothing real about any of this. And with its emphasis on the 'authenticity' of the acting, the film is almost screaming at the audience that this is 'real'.

So there it is. Another British movie about how grim life is on the supposed hard edge of our society. So far as I'm concerned it wouldn't matter if every movie made in the UK dealt with his theme, if only it were done with a sense of truth and love. Gary Oldman is thanked in the credits. So many films have been made in the shadow of Nil By Mouth, and all of them, this film included, merely come across as pale imitations.

tinker tailor soldier spy (d tomas alfredson, w. bridget o'connor, peter straughan, le carré)

According to someone who works for the producers of this film, it had a lot of trouble getting financing. Which seems surprising. Because if this isn't a gold plated UK film concept then what is? It looks and feels like high quality Oscar bait. Which is both its strength and its weakness.

From an early shot of jet planes swooping over Budapest, pulling back to reveal schoolchildren in a bell tower cheering, it's clear that the director intends to pull out all the stops in order to beef up le Carré's famous text. It takes the folk-memory of a grey seventies London and makes it hyper-grey. The frames drip with what one assumes to be a meticulously graded lack of colour. With its Alpha role call of British male stars, the film comes at the viewer relentlessly, bludgeoning him or her into accepting that, yes, this is film-making at the top of its game.

Alfredson's breakthrough film was also set in the seventies, not that many noticed. HIs measured Scandanavian technique should be perfect for the convoluted, repressed world of British spies. And yet, in spite of its reasonable pacing and careful use of flashback, there's something slightly pedestrian about Tinker Tailor. One could say: that's the whole point, but le Carré's narrative seems to suggest it isn't. Where the British act as though they are insouciant functionaries, seeking to out-functionary their Soviet opponents, the reality is that their Christmas parties are a hotbed of seething passions and intimate tensions. When Firth's Bill Haydon tells Oldman's Smiley at the end that his seduction of Smiley's wife was "nothing personal", you can't help feeling that this could be yet another lie, another false move in the chess game these players have chosen to get caught up in.

All of which hints at the film's major weakness: we don't really know who these people are. With the exception of Smiley's passion for Anne and Ricki Tarr's tempestuous love affair, we learn nothing about their secret motivations and desires. So, when the house of cards comes down, and the denizens of the circus meet their fate, it's hard to care. (Idly I wonder what someone like Welles, with his flair for fleshing out minor characters, might have made of le Carré's book.)

Given this, and given the way in which Alfredson so brilliantly made us care about his vampires in Let The Right One In, one suspects he has been hamstrung by an efficient but prosaic script. Sensibly it puts much of the dramatic tension on Cumerbatch's shoulders as Guillam, but the brief scene where he appears to be cutting his ties with his lover offers a glimpse into the real deceptions and betrayals at work, underneath the more obvious games. The moment Strong's well acted Jim Prideaux catches Firth's eye at the Christmas party offers another hint.

Indeed, the Christmas party scenes, albeit filmed in a studiously observational style, are when the film really seems to come alive. The spooks playing their complex games are suddenly made human. The seventies setting rings entirely true; the shadow of the war fomenting both camaraderie and gloom, with the West far less better off in comparison to the East than it so earnestly believed. In these scenes those of us who were still in our childhood back in those days might catch a glimpse of the country we grew up in, one which is now unmourned and by and large forgotten. For all its slightly strident quality, it's hard not to wish that Tinker Tailor hadn't done more to take us into this world (a la Lives of Others), to make us understand the battles that had been fought that underpinned the battles which these men continued to fight through the Cold War, battles of both a political but also a personal nature.

the skin i live in (w&d pedro almodóvar)

The credits of a film are a sure fire way to assess its production values, as well as to gain some kind of an inkling of the director's attention to detail. The credits for Almodóvar's latest last about a quarter of an hour, suggesting no expense was spared. Towards the very end, after the caterers and the music and the acknowledgments and the artwork and Gaultier and so on, there comes a list of the books featured in the film. This list consists of half a dozen or so books. I'd been trying to spot their titles during the film but the shots were always too quick or opaque. So here they were. Included in the list were Alice Munro and, at the top, Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. I've read neither but I appreciate that the director probably has. The books aren't quoted from, so I presume they don't need to be listed in the credits, but they are. This is both attention to detail and a director mapping out the wider cultural context within which the film has been made.

That attention to detail is apparent in every aspect of the film. From the casting (Banderas surprisingly watchable) to the art design (Ledgard's home-operating theatre feels just medical enough to be convincing and sufficiently beautiful to adorn rather than blemish the film). As well as the script. In the Anglo-Saxon world there's a lot of talk about the rules of scriptwriting, the do's and the don'ts. Almodóvar drives a train through all of it. The film evolves into an hour-long flashback. A flashback which is repeated and dissected. Cut up in much the same way Banderas' plastic surgeon restructures bodies. It spins a two hour supertanker narrative out of the most absurd of stories, a narrative which has its own logic and obeys its own rules, coming to a grinding halt not with a bang but a whisper.

This is intelligent movie-making on a grand, theatrical scale, the sort of thing Hollywood used to do, once upon a time, but struggles to get away with today. When you boil down the ingredients what's left at the bottom of the petri dish are absurd, even vulgar notions that should make for a preposterous fiasco. (Gender/ mothers/ men dressed as tigers etc.) But the old masters know what they're doing. Film is a kind of sleight-of-hand. Images are slotted together to build up a universe. Stirred with music and editing. The opening fifteen minutes or so of La Piel Que Habito somehow makes you believe that Banderas is a plastic surgeon who has concocted a hyper-resistant human skin out of pigflesh. And is now using these bizarre skills to go about the Frankenstein process of re-animating his dead wife. Step outside the world which is being conjured for no more than a moment and you'd find yourself shouting: It's balderdash!, or other appropriate expressions. But the skill of the film-making keeps you hooked.

When Almodóvar is on top of his game it's a bit like reading a novel by Huysmans or Blaise Cendras or Edgar Allen Poe. He seduces you into entering a parallel world which seems to occupy its own reality, a reality that you, the audience, can participate in. The novelist has the advantage that  he or she does not have to make you see the world they have concocted. The filmmaker truly has to become a conjurer, brainwashing the audience into accepting everything that's put before their eyes. This doesn't have to mean that the brain ceases to work: in the most skilful application of the craft a filmmaker provokes a kind of conscious brainwashing. It's a fine art, and in La Piel Que Habito, the maestro pulls it off.

a separation (w&d asghar farhadi)

My friend Mr Westaway does a great impersonation of Hitchcock talking about the banality of the kitchen sink drama. I could not do it justice in the flesh, let alone in print, but suffice to say that the old master wasn't enamoured of the genre, if that's what it is. From my point of view, UK culture is still overly rooted in a movement that could be said to have emerged from the Court in the fifties, and has persisted in the work of Loach, Andrea Arnold and countless TV dramas which seek to strip back the veil of artifice and expose the 'reality' of contemporary life.

Part of the reason for being resistant to a movement that finds its ultimate expression in the melodrama of the soap opera, is that the film and television industries are mediated by the middle classes, or even upper middle classes, in the UK. No matter how 'real' a kitchen sink drama seeks to be, it will be facilitated by the same people who are facilitating the likes of Cranford, Lark Rise to Candleford and the latest Jane Austen adaptation. The kitchen sinks on show are more likely to come from Habitat than Wickes.

However, that shouldn't be a reason for dismissing the genre out of hand. The small domestic dramas, as Austen was aware, offer an insight into a society's daily lives that grander or more poetic drama cannot. And cinema is an ideal medium for the kitchen sink drama, which is relatively cheap to film and, if done well, depends on the effectiveness of the acting as much as anything else. Which brings us to A Separation, a film where a key aspect of the plot hinges on whether the central character hears what the home help said to his daughter's tutor whilst they were literally standing beside the kitchen sink.

As the title suggests, this is a domestic drama about ordinary people struggling to get by. The premise of the film is that, without any real antagonism, Simin and Nader are splitting up. Their daughter doesn't want them to, but Nader feels he has to look after his Alzheimers afflicted father and this means the family cannot move as Simin wants. As a consequence, Nader has to hire someone to look after his father whilst he's at work. Simin finds someone, a religious woman from a poor background, who happens to be pregnant, not that you can tell. One day Nader comes home and finds his father on the floor with the woman absent. When she gets back he dismisses her, pushing her out of his flat. She loses the baby, and before Nader knows it he's up for murder.

These are the bare bones of a beautifully observed story, which hinges on a moment the viewer's already seen and hence is in a position to make their own judgement. It's very clever storytelling, mostly set within what appears to be a relatively middle class apartment. As the full consequences of Nader's actions begin to be felt, the viewer learns what it means to live in this society, one stifled by poverty and religion, as well as its curious, seemingly ad hoc legal system. However, more than just offering a vivid picture of contemporary Tehran, Farhadi also unswervingly charts the lines that exist in so many cultures between third and second worlds, and the intense pressure ordinary people all over the world feel exerted on them as they try to get by within these faultlines. Simin and Nader have a seemingly pleasant flat, she drives a decent car, their daughter goes to a good school, but all the same its as though society has restricted their potential for happiness, something latent in their situation from the beginning of the film.

Farhadi's film has been seen as a move away from the more cerebral cinematic essays of the Iranian tradition. In contrast to Kastiorami's work its narrative is straightforward. Yet the film is constructed with such delicacy, both in its screenwriting and its acting, that it never feels as though it's in danger of slipping into melodrama. A Separation is an understated and affecting film which appears to get to the heart of what it's like to live in contemporary Iran: it is as a result of its reluctance to shock or sensationalise that the film remains so watchable. I'm not suggesting Hitchcock would have liked it, but A Separation undoubtedly goes some way towards helping to redeem the kitchen sink drama, in part because it is not afraid to show the reality of a middle class kitchen sink; not just the working class ones.

black swan (aronofsky; w. heyman, heinz, mclaughlin)

I feel more normal today.
Yesterday, walking back solo through Notting Hill, I felt less so.
There may have been many reasons for this, but one of them was Black Swan. Which I had just been to see.
Many years ago, I remember coming out of Venn Street Clapham Picture House having just seen Naked. The only Mike Leigh film that's ever touched a nerve. I felt edgy, watchful. The world that the film had conjured (as much Thewlis' performance as anything else) seemed all around me. In truth it was. I was young. I lived in London. Life seemed transient and precarious.
The circumstances under which one watches a film affect one's reaction to it.
Less than a day later it's easy to look back on Aronofsky's film and laugh at its gaucheness and cliche, and sheer over-the-topness.
Which should not be to forget that I also found myself laughing within the cinema, at Cassel's splendidly seedy manipulator, at the film's exaggerated Apollo/ Dionysis schtik, at a director pushing boundaries with glee.
But the laughter a day later is that of the critics who see the film as at best infantile, at worst, abusive. And it's not hard to see why.
A thick skin and you're insulated against the ridiculous.
Or some feathers, perhaps.
Because this is, in spite of its various absurdities, a visceral film. About things that in the moment seem real but from outside can look ridiculous. Creativity, neurosis, desire.
I don't live in New York and I've never liked ballet. I'm no gamine waif. But somehow, the film, with its remarkable camera work and its shrewd use of music and all the other tricks that it employs, succeeded in bowling me over.
I came out of the cinema and the world, this plush world I walked through, felt borderline repulsive; borderline homicidal.
It's a reaction. I almost used the word over-reaction. But that would be wrong. It was a reaction. To the director's cinematic will.
Art, as this most metaphysical of films (no reason metaphysicm should not also be visceral) relates, is more than the sum of its parts, and should not be afraid of crossing the line unto what might be perceived as ridiculousness.
The ridiculous is out there, and it doesn't do us any harm to touch it every now and again, to lose control, to strive to, or perhaps to actually achieve, the going-beyond the line. Drawn by ourselves or society or god or the universe or physics.
I feel normal now. But for a while last night I didn't. Which is almost entirely to the film's credit.

four lions (d morris, w morris, bain & armstrong)

It's been over a week since I saw the much heralded Four Lions. Which was to be enjoyed. In spite of the fact that the trailers and the sneak previews had already used many of the funniest clips, Morris' provocative humour still packed a punch, and the premise is too perfect for the film not to succeed on some level or another. The notion of making a comedy about a group of suicide bombers, exposing not the fundamentalist but the British roots of their endeavour, is both bold and in a strange way beautiful. The scene where three of the four are in a van driving down to London to do their deed, singing along to the cheesiest of pop hits, Dancing in the Moonlight, captures some kind of ludicrously believable truth. It's in the British psyche to be 'a bit of a nutter'. These are jovial fools, followers of Falstaff as much as Allah, the type of characters who have been celebrated in English literature through the ages.

At the same time, a week later, I'm not sure if the film's conceit quite comes off. The double task of personalising and ridiculing these hapless figures only functions in patches, no matter how hard Riz Ahmed works to pull it off. At times the piece strays into the terrifying realm of 'comedy drama', meaning that it refrains from going for the jugular in the style of Morris' television work. Some of the comedy felt tame, not least in the outtakes that are filtered at the end, and the political messaging has no real clarity. Morris is at his most effective as a Swiftian provocateur, a respecter of no rule, upto and including the injunction that declares we have to care about the characters. In the end, Four Lions might have been more powerful (and more funny) had it followed a Godardian rather than an Ealing Comedy model, although that kind of debate would surely have been anathema in the funding rounds the film would have had to go through.

Nevertheless, I suspect Four Lions shall be looked back on with fondness, in the same way we look back on the likes of Porridge, or Citizen Smith. It's a curious, slightly disjointed film, but one that has the cojones to address and humanise a subject that British culture usually struggles to deal with in anything except the most worthy of ways. It will be interesting to see how it fares abroad.

dogtooth (d. giorgos lanthimos, w. lanthimos & efthymis filippou)

The Dogtooth - do you possess one? Are you likely to lose it at any point? If you do have one and circumstances demanded you had to remove it, how would you do it?

I don't know how the word Dogtooth sounds in Greek, but it sounds perfect in English. The writers of this film have as creative an attitude towards language as they do towards familial perversity. Levi Strauss wrote about the controlling power of language, and the way in which the deranged parents control and distort every day vocabulary offers an immediate insight into how power and information are intrinsically connected. In the parents' world, a zombie becomes a little yellow flower. A cat is a killer. The every day is laced with poison.

This is a beautifully conceived and observed film. No explanation is ever offered for the parents' need to manipulate their children. The conscientious father, played with a furrowed brow by Christos Stergioglou, and his wife have created a terrifying kind of Eden, which is observed with comical attention. Like all Edens, the seeds of its destruction are lurking, but having established the logic of this world, the film succeeds in convincing us that there's no reason why the children should not have bought into it.

Whilst it could have dwindled into becoming an exercise in post modern cleverness (ie How many ways can we reinvent our world?), the persistent threat of violence and fear lend a tension to proceedings. Furthermore, in her coming to terms with her relationship to her dogtooth, the older daughter acquires a terrible heroism, worthy of any Russell Crowe movie, and the film emerges as an eloquent testament to humanity's intractable quest for independence.

In the one interview I've seen online with Lanthimos, he talked about a whole community of Greek filmmakers, also mentioning that the film had, at the time of the interview, not succeeded in obtaining a release in his own country. Assuming the country survives into next week, it will be fascinating to see what else emerges in the wake of this remarkable piece of filmmaking.

i am love (d&w luca guadagnino)

It's a while now since I spent much time in Italy. A country with which I developed a strange, sometimes ambivalent relationship. My theory, which is probably not original, is that as a country it realised a long time ago what life was all about. Having got its empire building out of the way early, its people collectively took stock and decided that they lived in possibly the most beautiful country on the planet, with potentially the finest cuisine in the universe, and arguably the best looking boys and girls in the galaxy. In other words, all the things that really mattered in life were already to hand. Over the centuries they have their occasional moments of aberration, and they also have a keen awareness of the relationship between wealth and power which can help in the acquisition of even more beauty and even finer food, but essentially it's an introspective culture. With so much within reach it has no need to go looking elsewhere.

Generalisations along national lines are, of course, invidious, flawed and potentially dangerous. Which doesn't mean they're going to stop being made. Nowhere more so than in art. Guadagnino's film, for which words such as sumptuous or operatic might have been invented, seems pre-eminently Italian. Quite apart from the impeccable attention to interiors, costume and design; the measured use of both cityscape and landscape; the elegant looks of its attractive cast; the leading lady, Tilda Swinton, falls for a chef, in large part seduced by his way with a prawn. Food is an art too, and it seems completely appropriate that Emma should fall for Antonio's sensibilities as communicated through his lunchtime menu, deliberately chosen to impress.

All this implies a case of style over substance, a criticism easy to make of an introspective culture. However, Guadagnino directs with a concern to ensure that his audience do more than merely gawp at his pretty pictures. Swinton herself is not actually Italian, but Russian (somehow cleverer than her being English, for reasons too complex to explore here), someone who has learnt to be as Italian if not more so than the Italians themselves, so much so she claims to have forgotten her Russian name. This allows the script some leverage to break away from its Italian-ness, to step back and comment on the way the culture runs the risk of becoming solipsistic. In addition, there's a subplot about the the family business being sold out within a new, borderless world of capital, which threatens to render nationality (and tradition and even loyalty) meaningless. There may be something pretentious about this strand, with its echoes of The Godfather, but it is indicative of a filmmaker seeking to be bold, to explore the themes that underpin the aesthetics and beliefs upon which the world of the film would appear to be founded, aesthetics and beliefs that lead to Emma's eventual expulsion/ flight from the family bosom.

I Am Love isn't scared to run the risk of being flawed, (the final sequence seems oddly melodramatic, like something out of a Colombian telenovela), but that's an indication of its ambition. Whilst a beautiful film, its also a meditation upon a culture of beauty, which is perhaps the superficial of the world, rather than the essential. (Don't tell Keats). Its boldness extends to its cinematography and its editing, which seeks by and large not to dwell on the scenarios its created, but throw them away, in so doing imparting a lack of reverence which counteracts all the careful composition of the director's screen, and breathes life into something which could so easily have been moribund, seemingly just for show.

double take (d. johan grimonprez)

To what extent does the ending of a film reveal the truth of what has gone before? Where some throw their ending away, Grimonprez goes to town as the credits roll on Double Take. A story which seeks to connect Hitchcock with the cold war with the notion of the double and death, ends in a flurry of images from the Cold War and beyond, the very last being Rumsfeld outlining his 'known unknown' speech. No matter how entertaining and curiously nostalgic it is to see Rumsfeld presented as the film's final image, it doesn't really seem to enhance the audience's understanding of what has gone before. If anything, it would seem to further put in question the filmmaker's understanding of what he's tried to reveal over the course of the last 80 minutes.

The theoretical basis of Double Take is the idea of Hitchcock meeting his double in a hotel room either in 1962 or 1980. This is a lovely idea, one which is strengthened by a quotation from the director stating that if you meet your double, you have to kill them before they kill you. Suspense, drama, violence - everything you need from a homage to Hitch. In theory. In practice, although a doleful voiced actor impersonating Hitchcock talks us through their meeting, not a lot seems to happen, either during or as a result of the meeting. The piece rather spuriously threads footage of a meeting between Nixon and Kruschev through the film, with the implication being that Hitchcock had something to do with the Cold War. Whilst this affords the director the opportunity to ransack archives and show the creation of the Berlin Wall, the development of advertising and its godmother, television, the exact nature of Hitchcock's connection with all this remains nebulous.

As a result, Double Take ends up feeling like a showy A-Level essay, packed full of ideas, with no real coherence or thesis connecting these ideas. Somehow, Tom McCarthy is wrapped up in all this, and the script also references Borges, but the director never seems to capture the intellectual dexterity of these writers. Rather, it's a kitchen sink piece, throwing it all in, fiction, faction and documentary. And what you end up with is Rumsfeld's known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. The latter seemingly the guiding principle behind Double Take.

anti-christ (w&d von trier)

Thought #1 on walk back through Notting Hill, the size of the stucco facaded houses still catching me by surprise. Every film of Von Trier's could be viewed as some kind of Situationist provocation, less of a film and more of an artwork. And Anti-Christ is no exception.

Except for Thought #2 which occured before it all kicked off in the final part of the film, which is that Von Trier identifies and tackles subjects that few filmmakers are brave enough to go for. In this case the power of nature and the potential differences between a female and a male consciousness. (Which might exist, and be more subtle than preferring shopping to watching football or chardonnay to rioja, or any of the other neutralised terms in which that difference has come to be permitted within a consumer culture.) Among other things. If you removed the graphic sex, and the somewhat operatic prologue, there's a serious treatise looking to be made, no matter how much the fireworks would appear to distract.

Thought #3: the film's dedicated to Tarkovsky, which many will consider a cheek of itself, but there's also echoes of Antonioni and obviously Don't Look Now, as well as Mercy and probably a few hundred horror flicks I've never seen. His engagement with the medium is so much more absolute than any of his contemporaries. My brother gave me the box set of his first three films for Christmas, and its astonishing how visually and technically assured a filmmaker he was from the beginning. His relationship with Dogme was always a game within a game; and in Anti-Christ his capacity to conjure astonishing imagery goes hand in hand with Dodd Mantle's shaky, edge of the bed camerawork. All of which contributes to the constant presence of the filmmaker behind the lens, playing with his audience, challenging and provoking them and sometimes laughing (with or at) them - in particular in the beautifully cheeky talking fox moment. Von Trier is as Brechtian as Godard, whilst also being as big a showman as Tony Scott. The contradictions are part of his charm.

I have just written and scrubbed Thought #4 which was along the lines of whether the film, in all its excessive dramatic glory, is any good or not. You're going to be a fairly strange type of character if you get through the final scenes and say that you enjoyed them. Then again, as Von Trier is well aware (he sometimes makes porn films), the things that disturb are just the flip side of the kind of things people watch for their most basic pleasure. They're all images, so what's not to like? (The scene with Dafoe being dug out of the mud seemed to even hint at Ian's fate in Blasted). For every Von Trier film I like there's one I don't like (mas o menos). In a way that's all part of the game which the director is playing, reminding you that he's on his side of the fence and you're on yours, and through that act of reminding bringing us closer together. It's not about liking what's going on: it's about the taking part. And it's pretty hard not to feel as though you've participated in something, no matter how gratuitously gruelling, along with the poor actors Dafoe and Gainsbourg. This is not far off being cinema as mud wrestling, and what else should we want cinema to be?

35 shots of rum (d. claire denis; w. denis & jean-pol fargeau)

That rare joy of going to see a film about which you know nothing, and finding yourself transported to a place you never imagined you'd visit...

Denis' film takes place in a world of Parisian immigrants. Initially we meet Lionel, who drives a metro train, and his work colleagues, all of them black. Lionel lives with his daughter, Josephine, in an apartment block which contains their extended family, although it's never altogether clear how Noe and Gabrielle are connected. The narrative dances on the line of abstraction; the connections between the characters are never stated. In the coda scene, Lionel and Josephine, so close that they sometimes seem like lovers, travel to Lubeck and meet Josephine's aunt, before laying flowers at her mother's grave. Whether her German mother's relationship with Lionel was long lasting or brief is never clear; what is clear is the depth of the relationship between the aunt and Josephine. As though Denis is stripping back all the detail of race and nationality, homing in on the emotional ties that supersede everything else.

And yet... the first ten minutes of the film are slow and cryptic; extended shots of Paris from the cab of Lionel's train, a gradual introduction to the characters. Then there's a scene in Josephine's university. She's studying (presumably) politics and development; a classful of immigrants from the South discussing Stiglitz and the possibilities of restoring the balance between third and first world. The scene ends with a student talking about Fanon, (and suggesting that many of these students would not have read him) stating that revolution will not occur because of any coherent plan, but because those who are about to revolt have run out of air to breathe. The scene (reminiscent of Zabriskie Point) slots into the film like a fly in the ointment, establishing the political context of the film's character's lives, only for the politicized approach to be then discarded as readily as it's taken up.

Instead the focus turns to the slow unwinding of the relationships of these four sympathetic, dysfunctional figures, a dance that comes to life when they're stranded in a late night bar together, and they dance with one another. They dance to the unlikely sound of The Commodores 80's hit, The Night Shift, and the scene has echoes of the haunting scene in Ozon's 5x2. Dance, a language freed of words, might be the purest form of drama, and as the song plays itself out, each of the characters has their hearts revealed, and all the melancholy that underpins their lives and tangled loves is played out in a weirdly moving dumb show.

I haven't seen Beau Travail, I know nothing of Denis' work, and truth be told 38 Shots of Rum is one of those film that defies intelligent criticism. Because it's doing something that seems almost intangible, or magical, or what you will, and that magic operates entirely within in a cinematic lexicon. If you wrote the scenes out on the page, they might not amount to much. But assembled as they are, with a deliberate, elliptical pacing, they're transformed into some kind of revelation, of how a small corner of Paris lives, and how we also live, wherever we are.

milk (d. gus van sant, w. dustin lance black)

The friend with whom I went to see this film found it moving - as we walked out into the night she said something about it being a wonderful film, then looked in my direction and saw I wasn't responding and said - oh, didn't you like it?

It wouldn't be accurate to say I didn't like it, but it did feel like a bit of a mess. The film itself got me thinking about all the issues it wanted me too (and even researching why the poignancy of Milk's achievement is just as great today), but it also got me thinking about what makes a good film, a good story, a good biopic. If not in that order.

Milk's story is inspirational, and in the exhortations to change, and the film's emphasis on minorities, possesses a seemingly conscious hint of Obamisation. It's one of those stories that needs to be told, and Penn's performance as Milk is impressive, capturing the fey steeliness which Milk discovered in his forties. Van Sant threads archive footage into his narrative, and the sequence when Milk first arrives in Castro with his boyfriend has a verve and energy which seems to conjure up that heady time, on the cusp of the sixties' end. Milk's transformation from rakish hippie back to clean-cut businessman who could fit into the machine, also seems indicative of the sacrifices the minority/ counter culture had to make to secure representation and status, a process which also seems to have reached a logical conclusion in the election of the US' new president.

However, and I'll comment on that word in a moment, the screenplay seems to struggle to keep up with the succession of events which comprised the last ten years or so of Milk's life. Boyfriends come and go, (there were more who were edited out) and Milk tries year after year to win political office. The confusing details of Proposition Six are fought and defeated, whilst Milk learns to become a politician, making strategic alliances and campaigning on populist issues, such as dog shit. Somewhere in it all, yoked together by the recorded monologue Penn/ Milk makes in the event of his death, there is the narrative of a man overcoming his own insecurities, his own struggle to come out, as well as his fascination with the edgier side of gay culture (personified in the film by the underdeveloped suicidal boyfriend, Jack Lira). This story - the story of the man as well as the activist - keeps getting in the way of the other story, which is the story of the activist as martyr, and to my mind these stories (and perhaps others as well) ended up cluttering the two hours of screen time to such an extent that, charismatic though many of the characters depicted were, as well as being beautifully acted, the whole never hung together, and the movie seemed to move along like a car caught in the wrong gear.

However... I spend all my days dwelling in the portals of Character, Narrative, Premise and those other touchstones of the orthodox script. Scripts are constantly being skewered on the railings of my 'however'. And it is, in part, by these terms that I choose to judge Milk. Whereas my friend found herself absorbed in the simple story, which is, without doubt, moving and uplifting. Which is all that matters, as films are not made in search of perfection, rather, they seek to strike a chord with their given audience. And there's not much doubt that Milk does this. Given this my cavils seem kind of beside the point.

+++

Briefly, on the subject of biopics. This is a curious phenomenon, and one perhaps has different rules to the usual objectives of dramatic cinema. Where most films are seeking to make entertainment, the biopic is more concerned with writing history. Which is an elusive thing to capture in a narrative-friendly fashion, (ay there's the rub), as history doesn't conform to the rules of storytelling, which recreates truth to meet its own ends. (Apologies for the amount of brackets, but please imagine a whole host of notes in the margin, or a flurry of inverted commas packaged around almost every thought herewith expressed.) Milk's flaws (in my eyes) are perhaps nothing but the determination of history to refuse to let facts work in a programmed, machine-like, manner. Given all this I started to think that it's almost impossible to create a dramatically satisfying biopic. And then I remembered how much I enjoyed Che: Part 1, earlier this month; and then, as I write, I recall how much I took from The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, which is when all's said and done, a biopic. The trick, of course, is to be subjective, and also, to have no fear of distorting the apparent truth in the quest for those truths which are not so apparent, which do not lie on the surface. If that's what you're looking for.

waltz with bashir (w&d ari folman)

Hot on the heels of Hunger comes Waltz With Bashir, another piece dealing with near-forgotten episode from the eighties. Oddly both pieces summoned up similar memories of being in the library of Freddies, as the house I lived in was somewhat comically named. The library was primarily used as a snooker room, but the papers were also laid out there, and 1982 was around the year when I first began to take a regular interest in the wider world. The massacre of Sabra and Chatila affected me. I cut out a picture from the paper, not dissimilar to the images at the end of Folman's film, and kept it in a yellow hardback book I had been given for Christmas (selected essays of Bernard Levin). 

Folman's film is about many things, and I'd hope he'd recognise the purpose of my introductory flannel. Like McQueen's film, he is looking at the way history is constructed, which also means the way in which we choose to either remember or forget that which has gone before. The film explores his own memories of being in Beirut as an Israeli soldier at the time of the massacre. As such it is also a film about memory - including one diverting sequence where a psychologist explains the human tendency to construct, even invent memories, noting that memory is an active, ongoing project for each individual. Folman, whose autobiographical story the film tells, has blocked out any recollection of being in Beirut, and the film narrates his mission to recover his memory, thereby erasing a collective amnesia on his country's part about the role it played in this war crime.

Any news we receive about Israel nowadays is tied up in its role in the geopolitical struggle that country was always heir to, and how it is conducting that struggle. In the midst of this maelstrom, its hard not to feel that Jewish culture, such a key component of European culture, gets forgotten. Folman's film reminds us of a heritage which its easy to feel has been lost since Judaism found a home. Folman's mission is a humane, rational enquiry. He talks to his psychologist, who makes the connection between the death camps of Beirut and the camps of the Holocaust, and the implicit Nazification of Israeli foreign policy at that time. These are bold points, made with a light touch, as pretty images float across the screen.

Which, of course, is Waltz With Bashir's USP. How does a factual essay about war crimes; Jewish identity; and memory, get a mainstream release? It does it by making itself as an animation. Folman's drawings are witty, pretty, striking and thought-provoking. The animation allows him to recreate a city in the midst of civil war, and describe the invasion of Lebanon by the Israeli army. It also allows him to include several fantasy and dream sequences. The poetry of the images buys him space for the more banal documentary talking heads images (which nonetheless exude a quirky fascination in comic strip form). After Persepolis, I was somewhat wary of the notion of an animated political film, but Waltz With Bashir uses the medium to remarkable effect, not least because of the quality of the animation itself. But more than this, the choice to make the film in an animated form allows the director to clandestinely smuggle issues into the cinema which he wouldn't be able to do any other way.

Waltz With Bashir is a brave film. Art cannot redeem the mistakes of the past, (and the film's sudden shift of tone at the end might be a nod to the limits of the power of artistry), but it can contribute to an understanding of what has gone before. Furthermore, it is also part of the discourse of history, and by refusing to let his personal amnesia lie, Folman might have gone some way towards helping his collective nation recognise the responsibility it bears for its part with regard to Sabra and Chatila, a responsibility it would normally prefer to be clouded in the fog of long-lost memory.

gomorrah (d. matteo garrone, w. saviano, bracucci, chiti, di gregorio, garrone, gaudioso)

Gomorrah is adapted from a book of the same title, written by Roberto Saviano, detailing the activities of the Camorra, one of Italy's still functioning crime syndicates. Saviano, who's only 28, has spent the last two years of his life in hiding. You can imagine one way to make a whole raft of enemies for life is to write a book exposing Mafia activities in Italy, without any sentimental overtones.

Gomorrah interweaves several different storylines to show different aspects of the criminal syndicate, aspects which don't appear to have any connection, as though the heads of the hydra wouldn't recognise one another if they met. It doesn't glamourise the world in any way. Rather, it tries to show how the illegal profits it pursues are part and parcel of the world of business. One section is set in the world of pattern cutting and knock off designer wear (at one point the tailor rather touchingly sees Scarlett Johansen, in another world, wearing one of his creations); another based around a group who bury toxic waste in the countryside. The film also dwells on a large, specific concrete housing estate, following the story of a young kid who gets sucked into the violence of a war between opposing factions. The housing estate makes for an interesting counterpoint to that shown in Import/ Export: once again it's a kind of frontline in the battle between a harmonious affluent Europe and a dangerous, warring underworld, threatening the social fabric. However, as opposed to the estate in Import/ Export, presented as some kind of hell, the houses on Gomorrah's estate are something people personalise and cling to. There's a pet monkey in one house and a remarkable long lens shot of a swimming pool on the roof. This is territory that people are prepared to fight over, and in some cases, to die for.

In its quest for what feels like authenticity, Gomorrah repeatedly underplays the drama, rather than ratcheting it up, as so often the case in mob movies. The stresses that ordinary people, caught up in a war which they know no way of avoiding, are described. The man who delivers the money to families on the estate, who realises the time has come when he needs to start wearing a bullet proof vest, or the tailor who takes his life in his hands when he gives the Chinese factory lessons in pattern-cutting. When the Comorra is your world, you don't get to choose whether you want to play or not. One of the strongest moments comes when the young boy is forced to betray his friend's mother. Up to now, it had been all about dressing up and driving around in cars, playing at being a man: all of a sudden the stakes are brutally altered.

Perhaps the most intriguing storyline is the one that follows two young men who decide they want to be their own bosses. In an early scene, they boast about being 'Tony Montana' from Scarface. In a compelling scene they steal cocaine from a group of African dealers, and later some guns from the Comorra. They possess the kind of insouciant, charismatic criminality which, in another, less honest film, might have seen them go right to the top. However, in Gomorrah, they're just deluding themselves. This is the Mafia like it really is; not like they show it in the movies.

blue tower (w&d smite bhide)

Blue Tower is another film which suggests that the most interesting movie-making coming out of the UK is taking place in the obscure margins of the independent sector, where the demands of genre and accountancy hold less sway.

Blue Tower is a low budget film which has taken three years to get from production to completion. It's a quirky film, set in Southall, a predominantly Asian corner of London. The lead character, the febrile Mohan, is a second generation Asian played with edgy unease by Abhin Galeya. However, whilst this may be a British film steeped in Asian Britain, capturing aspects of that culture, this is not its raison d'etre. At its heart Blue Tower is an acute character study of a man whose apparently stable life is slowly falling to pieces, as his marriage, his car, his inheritance and his social world all gradually disintegrate.

Mohan's last remaining relative is his aunt, Kamla. Inidira Joshi captures the bedridden widow in all her vanity, luxuriating in the power contained in the money hoarded in shoe boxes in her cupboard. She's sent a white NHS nurse, Judy, who Mohan falls for, beginning an affair which seems like further evidence of his alienation. Mohan realises how far his life has slipped from its predicted course when the Red Tower, a reassuring sight from his local skyline, is replaced by a vast, threatening blue gasworks tower. The towers look like something out of a De Chirico painting, each possessing a looming inanimate force, the planets of Mohan's fragile solar system.

Bhide's narrative is peppered with twists and turns which ensure that Mohan's eventual fate, whilst always heading in the direction one would have expected the gods to have ordained, is never clear-cut. The unpredictable lurks around the corner both for him and the audience. At the same time the film offers a succinct portrayal of the world Mohan seems to be striving to escape, the Balti house loafers and the vainglorious family patriarch who is his father-in-law (who lives in the ironically named 'White House'). Bhide has an easy flair with set piece scenes, the Indian party and the excursion to the Southall horse market standing out in particular.

Blue Tower is far from perfect. There may be one or two narrative twists too many, and there's some of the inevitable whimsicality of a first time director. However, the film brings out a succession of impressive performances, and the relationships, no matter how heightened their circumstances, are always convincing. Above and beyond this, there is something inordinately refreshing in watching a film that's trying to do something different; that's not giving the audience what they expect. Its an Asian film that's prepared to offer a critical take of Asian family life; it's a film set in a clearly defined community which is all about the lead character's deeply individualistic journey.

Through it's carefully constructed account of Mohan's trials and tribulations, Blue Tower helps to re-examine the notion of the marginal in our society, moving beyond recently established understandings of that term. Mohan seems to no more identify with his 'Indian-ness' than his 'English-ness'. He's as lost as a Camus anti-hero, desperately hoping that someone (in this case a cunning but not obviously intelligent white NHS nurse) will help him find a way out of the labyrinth. As it describes Mohan's fate, the film opens up a vista for the issues that will confront a globalised culture when it moves beyond the second, third or fourth generation, and a 'national identity' will have become even more of a fragmentary concept.

Although it explores these notions in the most entertaining of fashions, the film's willingness to play with narrative and genre expectations could well mean that Blue Tower proves to be a hard sell for its producers. But, unless these films are made (and as mentioned above it seems like the only place they're liable to be made in this country right now will be in the low-budget sector) how is an audience ever supposed to find out whether or not it might have an appetite for something off the beaten track? Blue Tower's idiosyncrasy may not intially appear be a commercial asset, but it's what marks it out as a film with a distinctive cinematic verve which will resonate long after the candy floss has been forgotten.

persepolis (d&w vincent paronnaud & marjane satrapi)

The following sounds like a fascinating premise for a movie: a teenage punk girl growing up in the Ayatollahs' Tehran. Featuring, in the english language version, the voice of Iggy Pop. Animated, so that the flights of her fancy can come to life.

If only Persepolis has stuck to this brief. The pictures, based on Satrapi's comic strip, are charming. Recent Iranian history is more than fit material for a major animated film. Everything's in place.

Unfortunately all the right ingredients don't make for a compelling film. Part of the problem is that Persepolis is actually the first chapter in Satrapi's autobiography. Autobiography is not the easist subject matter for a film. Good autobiography (eg Proust) rambles, follows blind alleys, has no great need to stick to narrative conventions. The most important moments in a life might have nothing to do with the most dramatic moments. A fascinating life can make for a tedious autobiography, and the dullest of lives might make for the most exciting. From what the film discloses, Satrapi has lead a reasonably interesting life, but except for the Iranian context (and her near run-ins with the revolutionary guard make for the richest material) there's nothing crying out to be documented.

In the manner of autobiography, the narrative does indeed potter around, from Tehran to Vienna and back again, via one or two failed loved affairs and the inevitable family ties. As a book this might not matter, but as a film it lacks structure. Perhaps this relates to the difference between reading and watching, I'm not sure, but no matter how pretty the pictures, if they appear to be telling us a story and then don't, they run the risk of becoming tedious. I also got the feeling that the animation didn't help to develop or sustain tension. It's hard to think of great animated drama, on celluloid at least. Animated action perhaps (Manga), comedy clearly (Disney), even philosophical treatise, (Waking Life). But when it comes to drama, it's hard to reproduce the tension of a face captured on film, with line and pen.

This seemed most evident to me in the scene where the Revolutionary Guard bust a party which Marjane attends, leading to a rooftop chase. In theory, and in the hands of someone like Mungiu, this scene should have been gripping, but in practice it just felt like another mundane episode, with little tension at all.

However, Mungiu would no doubt have edited this story down at script stage. As it stands Persepolis feels like a compendium of stories and history lessons that don't quite hang together, no matter how rich the ingredients.

garage (d. Leonard Abrahamson)

The more you know about a film, the harder it becomes to review it. The main reason this site started with theatre reviews and has had few since is that most of the plays the critic sees are created by or feature people he knows. As soon as a hint of friendship creeps into the equation, it gets a whole lot harder to criticise without encumbrance. Not just because you don't want to offend; but also because the work of art is likely to be clouded by the penumbra of personality, the lens through which you perceive it.

With regard to Garage... A couple of years ago I found myself drinking Guiness in a pub in Old Compton Street with the screenwriter of Garage. Great company he was and all. Told me about this next film he was writing, set in a village somewhere, a guy in a garage, and I forget the rest. Sometime around then I caught the DVD of Adam and Paul, first thing of a hungover Brixton morning. I enjoyed its candour, it rough edges, its laconic tone, all of which are attributes that could be discerned in the screenwriter himself.

Garage shares all these things. It does something smart, which is to place the least heroic of figures as its protagonist. Pat Shortt's Josie is the kind of anti-face and anti-figure cinema was also made for. Loping along with his lop-sided grin and dodgy hip, trapped in an endless childishness, more at home with the kids than the adults. Without his performance the film seems unimaginable.

The film doesn't rush things. It's based around the eponymous garage where cars are still rare beasts. The script gives a nod to the new Ireland, suggesting that the garage itself will soon be knocked down for real estate, but otherwise it belongs to a sleepy world which has yet to be colonised by winners of the Irish boom, French novelists, or English escapees. The narrative hinges on one moment, and even this and its consequences are underplayed.

Whether the film is too slow, or whether it sacrifices its dramatic power to an aesthetic insinuation (much as Josie is brought down), I couldn't say. There is a pathos to Josie's final scene, but it felt like a cold-hearted pathos. We never get quite under the skin of this bovine man, friend to the clodhopping horse. We always look at him with the eyes of the fifteen year old.

Perhaps if I hadn't drunk Guiness with the man in a Soho pub I'd be saying Garage was a minor masterpiece of understated drama. Or perhaps I'd be saying it pulls its punches and doesn't have the potency it might have had. Which ever it might be, Garage is definitely an antidote to much brittle British film-making, and allows itself to boast a central performance that possesses something out of the ordinary. Never has a man looked more different not wearing his Australia cap to wearing it.