transylvania (dir tony gatlif)

How hard is to make a movie these days? In my mind, the dream film-making technique was Eric Rohmer's, who allegedly had a crew of about half a dozen for some of his precise fables. Cinema, the technologic medium, stripped down to its barest minimum; the bride stripped bare by her bachelors.

The cost of film always mitigated against cinema becoming as open a medium as say, music, poetry or art. But now the advent of HD is supposed to liberate the filmmaker. The expense of celluloid and making prints can be done away with, and with the latest hard disk technology, there aren't even any tapes. A film can, in theory, go straight from camera to edit suite.

+++

I don't know what Transylvania was shot on. But the screening was advertised as a digital screening, and the cinematography had the abrasive beauty of digital, rather than the subtler tones of celluloid.

Transylvania wears its rough and readiness on its sleeve, from the opening shots of a blurred car journey punctuated by quick fire stills of local peasants. It is in keeping with a digital ethos whereby all you need to do is ward off the evil eye, cast a beautiful woman or two, add more than a dash of local colour, and lay them on to the bare bones of a story. Done well enough and you have a movie.

This slightly cynical perspective crossed my mind as Asia Argento, playing the exotically named Zingarina, began her journey through Transylvania. The script felt half hearted, no more so than in her showdown with her no-good musical boyfriend, Milan. The director seemed more interested in capturing colour, as depicted in a visually impressive but narratively insignificant gypsy procession, than telling a story of any subtlelty. The impression that Zingarina and her friend were just spoilt Western show ponies lingered, and when Ms Argento claimed to have done 'everything' I was strongly inclined to disbelieve her. It seemed unlikely she'd ever made beans on toast, taught in a primary school, or sat around feeling shy at a party waiting for someone to talk to her. Although she had clearly smashed a lot of plates and presumably broken a few hearts.

It's only when the non-story line of her quest for the lost Romany ends, that the film begins to breathe. Nothing much happens. Zingarina hooks up with Tchangalo, the scraggy-haired modern day peddlar. They wander round Transylvania, getting into scrapes, being menaced by a bear, meeting old folk and not really going anywhere.

Transylvania, thankfully, turns into a shambling road movie. And in doing so, it reveals its origins. What Gatlif does, and clearly what he's seeking to do, is capture a world. This place called Transylvania. Which swallows Zingarina up (she becomes a gypsy) and the viewer with her.

And in the darkness of the communal space which exists between viewer and screen, I mused on a culture which seems as related to the Marsh Arabs as it does to Western Europe. Not a Kustarican fairy land, just a harsh, vibrant beauty which has been preserved as though in aspic by communist isolation and poverty. A land with much music, little advertising, its own codes, plenty of beer, wooden cellos, dodgy priests and the burning of coals.

These things have all been captured by Gatlif in Transylvania. If he'd had a big crew and a potage of trailers, it seems unlikely he'd have been able to preserve the aroma of authenticity which his camera somehow does. If his narrative had been more sophisticated and his points more precise, he might not have captured it either.

As it was I felt like I, along with Zingarina, had been taken to this place I'd never known before. And I envied Zingarina her escape from the confines of the spoilt Western world. And this envy is connected to the wish-fufilment of cinema, because, after all, it is but a fiction. Dreams made out of machines, made out of dreams.

tell no one (dir canet)

Every year, it seems, a foreign language film 'crosses over' and against the odds grabs a sizeable chunk of UK film revenue. Examples that come to mind include Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Cinema Paradiso, In The Mood for Love, Amelie, and most surprisingly, Hidden. British cinematic culture tends not to be too forgiving of other languages (of various forms), and the films that manage to have an impact in the UK market are by and large too good to ignore.

Ne Le Dis A Personne has stuck around. I watched it in a half-full Renoir, several weeks after it's release. It's had good press and the distributors must be pleased. Is it worthy of its success? What marks it out from the other myriad French releases which aren't doing such good box office at the moment?

Guillaume Canet seems like a canny operator. He adapted the script from an American crime novel, and directs with ambition. There's various crowd-pleasing sequences, including an all-action getaway scene, and a team of killers featuring a sadistic female who can assassinate by touch alone. The hook is effective - a man receives an email from his eight-year murdered wife. Is this real, or is he being set up? We want to find out and so does he.

Canet also wittily references recent french political history: the police chasing our hero Docteur Beck are thwarted by a gang of disillusioned multi-racial youths on a housing estate, walk-ons from La Haine, who create a mini riot to divert attention. The villainous, patriarchal Gilberte Neuville, aloof in his corruption, reminds one of the autocratic tendencies and absolute power of seemingly all French Presidents.

These factors are welded onto a complex, well-written plot, of the kind they used to make, with hints of Hawks and Hitchcock. There are genuine surprises, and it builds towards a satisfying conclusion, even if the revelatory scene feels unnecessarily stagey within a film that opens with cinematic verve.

Perhaps this is a clue as to why Tell No One ends up feeling like less than the sum of its parts. It ticks so many solid boxes, covers so many bases, that it ends up seeming as though this was the director's main ambition. A strategy that may be commercially effective, but ends up feeling like cinema by focus group, slightly americanised, lacking the auteur's willingness to fail.

Which does not mean there isn't much to enjoy. The director's attention to detail produces unexpected benefits which rub off on his scenes. Francois Cluzet, playing the good Docteur, seems most at home within his hospital scenes. When he is on the point of being arrested, and receives a phone call from his lawyer, he's treating a young colour-blind African child, with the child's mother in the background. We observe the scene through the mother's eyes, which lends it a slice of humour lifting his escape out of the ordinary. Similarly, the Detective chasing him is revealed in one scene to be a keen environmentalist, telling his assistant off for not placing something in the recycling bin. For no clear reason save that it gives a sideways insight into the detective's life, this scene is set in his elderly mother's home, and suddenly a whole sub-structure, lurking beneath the safe conventions of the thriller, shows its face.

the seventh seal (dir bergman)

I called the Bergman aficionado from the Barbican. He said, a little sniffily, so you're going to see it for the ninetieth time. Not being a Bergman aficionado myself, I muttered that I remembered seeing it once on TV when I was 19, but even this was a distortion. I'd seen the opening frames, nothing more.

Max Von Sydow sitting on a Swedish beach playing chess with Mr De'ath himself. Horses up to their fetlocks in whippy Northern waters. An eerie, intellectual gloss permeating the scene.

During these first few frames, imposing though they are, I feared that The Seventh Seal was going to prove too austere, too like a Calvinesque cathedral. Beautiful yet far from heart-warming. Which is the preconceived model of a Bergman film, a filmmaker most know more through Woody Allen's failed attempts to become him than his work itself.

The screen was disappointingly small and the print far from great. I girded my loins and prepared to bathe worthily in the great auteur's gloom, as Max Von Sydow set off with his page to avoid the plague.

If the reader wants to retain the Bergmanesque myth, stop here. Because the film itself fails to honour it. Strange things start to happen. A couple, she beautiful, he a quirky fool, awake in a meadow, play with their child, clown around. A blacksmith loses his wife to a knavish actor, then wins her back in scenes of knockabout comedy. The tone of the film becomes warm, comic, charming.

In a way The Seventh Seal can be summarised as a Black Death Road Movie. Which might have a Tarantino/ Rodriguez ring to it. Bergman's sensibility seems populist. He creates characters who are lovable, and exposes them to danger. The audience roots for their survival. Death seems more of a vengeful sprite than a macabre ghoul. The heavy handed costume and make-up worn by Bengt Ekerot loses any taint of horror, as he plots and plans. This is a character from a medieval morality play, a villain and a rogue, whose gleeful sense of humour is revealed in the film's theatrical closing shot.

The wider philosophical and psychological context of the movie passed me by. No doubt there were things that I missed. Yet, like Beckett, another author whose work is categorised as much by its reputation as its actuality, it would be easy to lose sight of the manifest entertainer at work, were one to dwell too ornately on the significance of the imagery. The title, The Seventh Seal has a portentous ring to it, which the film does not shy away from, but Bergman has been careful to root his fatalism within a kernel of earthy joy. So when Von Sydow is asked by Death at the end whether his stay of execution has been worth while, we, the audience know exactly what he means when he replies that it certainly has.

+++

Note: Less than an hour after writing this I learn that Mr De'ath has caught up with Ingmar Bergman, who shall be playing chess no more.

puffball (dir nic roeg)

At 11pm Nic Roeg came on stage at the Galway Film Festival to present what might well turn out to be his last film. The screening was half an hour late and the cinema was far from full. He said that unusually for him, this film had a beginning and an end, and they came in that order.

It is a long time since Roeg made a film. He's in his eightees now. Puffball was made on a tight budget, with few stars. It's a curious narrative, adapted from a Fay Weldon novel, of Irish voodoo, pregnancies (two, perhaps three, perhaps four) and sex. As might be expected from a Weldon novel, it feels like a narrative told from a female perspective. In between some of the several shagging scenes are shots of sperm flying, as though seen through a microscope, across the big screen.

Given Roeg's venerable age it is perhaps understandable why he should turn to this material, dealing as it does with the process and continuation of life itself. Roeg has always enjoyed a good sex scene, and the vigour of his mind and cinematic muscle is still evident. The tempo of the narrative seems uneven, and Kelly Reilly's central performance feels at times unfocussed, both of these being flaws of the script more than anything else, but there are still flashes of Roeg's cinematic genius, the laser-like editing that can send shivers up every spine in the house.

The clues to the film's intentions can perhaps be found in Donald Sutherland's cameo. When Sutherland comes on screen, he brings the baggage of Don't Look Now, and Roeg's feverish interpretations of relationships with him. Yet this is an older Sutherland, somewhat mannered in his acting, expressing the need for constant re-invention, as well as a capacity to learn from youth. 'It all starts from now' is a phrase used both by the younger, pregnant Reilly and the older, rennovated Sutherland. Its not hard to see this, and the film's playfulness, as Roeg's rebuttal of looming death. In old age, as in youth, life is there to be re-invented. There are no endings, only beginnings.

Puffball is not Roeg's greatest film. There's some concern over what kind of release it's going to get, and it's far from clearly commercial. The broad humour seems somewhat out of keeping with the intensity the maker of Eureka, Performance and Don't Look Now brought to the screen. But in spite of these caveats, there is still something fascinating, unexpected, taking place on the screen. The film may indeed begin at what appears to be the beginning and end at what appears to be the end, as all journeys do, but the 'what-happens-in-between' bit is never predictable. Roeg shows that his alien cinematic mind is as acute and unconventional as ever.

flandres (dir. dumont)

Dumont comes garlanded as the bleakest of the new bleak. His films lay bare the blank canvas of modernity, where humans are dehumanised, life is oncemore nasty, brutish and short.

Flandres tells the tale of Demester, a young farm labourer, played with bovine assiduousness by Samuel Boidin. Demester has perfunctory sex with the farm owners daughter, Barbe. He seems incapable of understanding what love or tenderness might mean. He is sent to fight in 'the' war, which is taking place in an unnamed Arabic state. There his colleagues kill, rape and degrade the enemy, and are in turn killed and degraded by the same enemy, upon their capture. Demester somehow survives and returns to Flanders to find that Barbe accuses him of killing his fellow soldier, because she had become pregnant by him. He admits the charges, then discovers feelings of love for her.

Along the way there are scenes of rape, castration, abortion and 'hell' as Demester finally describes the war. The director does not appear to want to give his audience an easy ride. Iraq and the pointlessness of our lives are to the forefront of his agenda, and the title and the setting imply that modernity has given us little in the near century since that other senseless bout of killing on the French fields.

And yet... Flandres is curiously watchable. It is not a difficult experience. In these graphic times we are used to extreme imagery, and Dumont never quite succeeds in shocking us. It's true that the early 'farm' scenes are slow, but as soon as the action of war kicks in, the narrative flies along at a lick. In a recent interview, Dumont expressed his hopes to one day make a movie with Tom Cruise, and given the action of Flandres this seems less absurd than I had expected it too.

There's more than a touch of that dry ironist Houllebecq in Dumont's take on the world, albeit a slightly soft-soap Houllebecq, as its hard to see the writer coming up with such a sentimental pay-off. If the director is seeking to portray the bleakness of contemporary living, he's going to have to try a little harder. However, if Flandres is a parable for the way in which there is a residue of humanity and love to be found in even the most embattled, then this film succeeds. At the end we realise that this has not been a tale of insanity and war, rather a touching love story between two misfits, who are left with the rest of their lives to explore what this bizarre but most humane of feelings might mean.

The Pain and The Itch (w. Bruce Norris; d. Domininc Cooke)

Whose pain and whose itch? Questions which one suspects the writer and indeed director would like to be at least hovering around the theatre.

There's some very witty dialogue in Bruce Norris's piece. He writes with a sense of un-self-censored freedom, and the lines explode around the stage like little bundles of fun. The laughs are regular, and as the press suggests, infectious. The Pain and the Itch is also an artfully constructed piece, not a scatter-gun attack on modern mores. As the play comes to a conclusion the origins of Kayla's vaginal itch are neatly elaborated; the cause of the taxi driver's persistence succinctly resolved; a kind of family unity achieved. The play's structure is less comedy or farce than Murder Mystery. The taxi driver is a kind of 21st century Poirot, excavating the events of the night to uncover the hidden truth.

All of which is both extremely clever and also highly entertaining. Which might just be the play's Achilles Heel. The director, Dominic Cooke, who generates fine performances and conducts Norris's dialogue with suitable vigour, has been quoted as saying that he wants the Royal Court to move away from a voyeuristic kitchen sink approach and use the stage as a mirror to reflect and discomfort the audience. And one can see how The Pain and The Itch, an apparently scathing attack on liberal-western-upper-middle-mores might fit into this remit.

Yet, I felt, that the very neatness and confidence of the theatrical experience in some way helped to let the audience off the hook. Leaving aside the fact that it's not hard for a liberal British audience to laugh at and feel little connection with the fault-lines of the liberal US - in fact rather satisfying - it seemed as though the play's qualities in themselves may have been working against its intentions. The Pain and The Itch has all the attributes of the modern Western piece, it wears its cleverness on its sleeve, loose ends tied up, a highly efficient work of art. Whether that structure allows the pain that underlies this piece to see the light of day seems questionable. The pain which is not Kayla's itch, but the death of the taxi driver's wife, and by implication, the other needless deaths which US foreign policy has engendered in recent years. The only time this came through was when the taxi driver turned on his wife's de facto killer and said calmly - 'That is why you kill people', a moment when the man had to confront the fact that his whole way of life was tied up in the actions of the democracy he participated in, with the consequences that democracy has imposed on other people in other lands.

The Pain and The Itch is a great piece of writing. It's staged well. It's does a lot of things brilliantly. The question is whether it does all the things it sets itself up to do. If it doesn't, at least it's laying down some kind of road map showing the extent of what a play can do, and the directions it might have to go in if the Court is serious in its intentions to hold the mirror up to the life of its well-heeled audience.

fanny and alexander (dir bergman)

The Bergman fan summoned me from weekend indolence to come and watch this late epic with him, urging me to book before it sold out. I hadn't seen it in twenty years. The friend had once given me or my wife, he's not quite sure which, the full-length video of the extended version of the film, which was apparently shown on Swedish TV. It sat on a dusty shelf and was never watched.

Sitting down in a half-empty Barbican cinema, I was increasingly glad of that. You can watch a film on TV and the narrative will come across; but not the spectacle. Fanny & Alexander is a big film, in length and detail, and much of that would be lost on a TV screen. The opening sequence, set around an early twentieth century Christmas day in a slightly bohemian Swedish family, lasts for over an hour. It's like watching a tapestry take shape: a stitch here, a stitch there, and gradually the complete vision of Alexander's family comes to life, in all it's bawdy, colourful glory.

This detail is reflected in the film's sets. I don't know there's all that much to say about Fanny & Alexander. I told my friend that I tend to book tickets at the side of the cinema, not the middle, in case I feel the need to flee, and he, a lover of the centre, replied: But this is Bergman! He was right. There was no reason to flee at any point during the course of the film's three hours. Just an invitation to sit back and bask in the physchological portrayals, the occasional surrealisms, the deft pacing of an old master.

So the only revelatory thing I have to offer concerns these sets, the full beauty of which can only be guaged on a cinema screen. The home of the bohemian family, captured in such detail during the first hour, seemed fussy, lavish, Victorian, ornate. The screen is packed to the rafters with rich colours and velvety fabrics. This is contrasted with the home of the wicked stepfather, the hidebound bishop who torments Alexander so. The bishop's home is all austere off-whites, stripped bare walls, an antiseptic minimalism. The point of note is that, at the start of the 21st century, it is the cruel bishop's taste which reflects our notions of civilised living - clean Ikea lines, simple colour schemes. The unruly lifestyle of Alexander's father's family, which Bergman celebrates so vigorously, is allied to out-dated notions of domestic taste; it seems fusty and old-fashioned in comparison with the bishop's bleak modernity.

As noted, the best place to apreciate this is on the large screen. So I am glad I never sat down to watch the video, although, were it still there to be watched, I would now sieze the chance to find out what happens in the other three hours which were ruthlessly cut from the shortened narrative of the cinema release.

zodiac [dir david fincher]

My friends saw Zodiac at the Ritzy. Approximately two hours in, the projector broke. The film had to be abandoned. People were fuming. My friend told me that one member of the audience shouted: I don't want a refund, just tell me who's the Zodiac!

You can understand the frustration. After about two hours of this two and a half hour film this really did seem to be the only reason left for watching to the end. The most charismatic character had shuffled off an age ago to become a drunkard on a boat; the obsessive cartoonist's marriage was done; the copper was already a has been. All this and we were still a good twenty minutes from discovering the identity of the killer.

Which kind of explains why, worthy, intelligent, and well-made though it may be, Zodiac fails to follow in the footsteps of Fincher's finest work. There are too many protagonists. It's a movie that can't seem to decide whose movie it is. It seems as though Jake Gyllenhaal's cartoonist should be the epicentre of the action, but his journey is constantly interrupted by the cops and the pressmen and the red herrings.

All of which also takes a long time to tell. Zodiac is never quite dull, but it's hardly gripping either. I saw it on a wet Sunday afternoon in Fulham, which seems about right. It contains time, rather than absorbing it. The problem lies in the script. It's adapted from Robert Graysmith's books on the Zodiac. Graysmith is the obsessive cartoonist played by Gyllenhaal in the movie. But where literature can freely skate across timeframes and societal change, cinema often struggles. The screenplay seems to want to keep it all in, and the movie seems over-extended as a result. It can't contain the changes that occur in the various characters' lives. After two hours, all's that's left is the question the film begins with: Who is the Zodiac?

The Night of The Sunflowers (dir Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo)

There's a study to be made in the art of the fractured narrative. Who's to blame? Inarittu? Robbe-Grillet? Laurence Sterne? Virginia Woolf?

No doubt it's been made many a time and perhaps Jorge Sanchez-Cabezudo would like his film to be included in the next update. Working within a unity of place, time and action, the film breaks down 48 hours of misadventure into seven chapters, each time looking at the story from a different character's perspective.

Initially, this has an engaging feel. A brutal rape doesn't quite come off. The tension of the opening chapter spills over into the next one, as the woman's husband comes to her rescue after exploring a pot-hole. The action shifts backwards and forwards in time and the audience is looking for clues, waiting for the full picture to be revealed. The trouble is that the more that's revealed, the less interesting the narrative becomes. Other characters - a crooked policeman and his elderly father-in-law - emerge, their dramas taking over the film, eclipsing the taut tensions of the visiting couple, who are impoverished and then marginalised.

In the midst of this it's hard not to feel the deconstructive tendencies are getting in way of the narrative rather than enhancing it. A film which initially feels like a psychological drama turns into a neo-Deliverance then a study of the decay of rural Spain and then a family drama. If the film could carry off this mish-mash of ingredients, it might have been remarkable. As it is they seem to weigh it down, and the film seems to lose its way. The final shot of the serial rapist, ensconced in his armchair, suddenly back in the movie he left over an hour ago, none the wiser, seems almost an acknowledgement of the lack of headway.

The Lives of Others (dir Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)

Having seen the film on Friday, I then read an article in the paper explaining that the premise the film describes is historically inconceivable. All of which goes to show that there's no need for historical accuracy in the telling of a good story, and perhaps, furthermore, that if you want to get a film made at all, you're going to have to mess around with the truth, because audiences rarely head to the cinema to discover 'the truth'.

Having said which, whilst The Lives of Others grants some insight into what it's like to live and operate within a police state, and offers a pleasingly drab portrait of the DDR (a world without apparent advertising which has its charm), there appear to be other issues at play within the narrative.

Not least the notion of performance. This is a film with three lead characters: a Stasi agent; a writer; and an actress. All three of these characters perform, to varying degrees of expectation. (One of the nicest conceits in the film is that the Stasi agent, seeking to cover up for the writer, actually writes his purely theoretical play for him.) When the Stasi agent interrogates the actress, they are both performing to an audience. Their respective performances will determine their fates, so they believe, and these layers add a potency to the drama. At this point it appears that the director is suggesting that in order to survive within the old DDR, everyone was forced to become an actor of some kind or another, though this is an existential truth applicable, one suspects, to all societies.

The telegraphed conclusion of the film, with its four temporal leaps, denotes a narrative that has points to make and isn't afraid to interrupt the narrative impetus to make them. The natural climax is long gone before the credits roll. History, it seems to be saying, isn't all about the moment, its ramifications drag on, annoyingly, into the unknown future. The fact that the above article suggests the filmmakers have chosen to romanticise the historical facts adds another layer; the ignorant audience believes this might really have been so, but in fact this is history as performance: a what might have been, rather than what really was.