Yella (dir Christian Petzold)

The advantage of going to see a film that has had no hype is that the film can retain the possibility of surprise.

Yella is a film where not a great deal happens, save for a moment when all is revealed to be other than it seems, and a great deal of things suddenly make more sense. To reveal the twist would be discourteous; however to write about the narrative without revealing the twist restricts the critical approach.

Yella is the name of the heroine, played with a honed blankness by Nina Hoss. Yella doesn't say much; in itself a bold anti-heroic move. She suffers from strange mental fits: a glass falls off the table in a meeting and she trips out, an effect rendered almost entirely, and most effectively, through the sound mix. She is pursued by her stalker ex-husband, (played with a honed sociopathy by Hinnerk Schonemann), an experience she finds both terrifying and also strangely unconcerning. Why do these things happen? Why is her life so aimless? The director constantly teases the viewer, playing with the language of cinematic significance, and all is indeed revealed at the end.

Petzold's cinema appears to be one of close observation (like the Argentine Trapero). Yella even riffs on this with a playful scene where the body language of the boardroom is documented and ridiculed. In conjunction with her newfound lover, Phillip, Yella plays a small part in the great game of capital, and sees straight through it. She knows it's a haphazard, merciless game of power, which snuffs out the weak, to whom she is attracted. Her marriage has faltered on the rock of a bad business deal, and her relationship with Phillip goes through a similar cycle. Along the way, the director initiates the viewer, Mamet-style, into the workings of power, a game which Yella has no desire to win.

Yella is a subtle, unshowy film, dealing with big issues of power, death, society and the meaninglessness of the modern condition. It is to its credit that in its unassuming style, it never really lets on that this is what it's doing. The editing and cinematography is plain to the point of ordinariness; it is only in the inner world of the sound mix that the hard edges are explored. In this way the film creeps up on the viewer, like its twist, which when revealed seems obvious, but is so artfully set up that it never crossed my mind until it occurred.

Days later, Nina Hoss's blank expression, in the face of this world she had been granted to inhabit, still haunted.

born and bred (dir Pablo Trapero)

Nacido Y Criado is a simple story. A husband is involved in a car crash in which his wife and daughter are killed. He believes this to be his fault and takes off to a remote part of the country. He gets a job on a remote Patagonian airstrip, makes a couple of friends, doesn't really deal with his grief, doesn't kill himself, and finally reveals the truth to his housemate, an action which precipitates his return to the city.

Pablo Trapero's film does various things extremely effectively. Perhaps most notably in his use of the long take. This isn't a static Hanecke long take. Trapero's camera weaves in and out of the action, watching for a while, then getting involved, then withdrawing. The willingness to leave the camera running, as Hanecke illustrated so effectively in Hidden, creates tension, notably in the scene leading up to the crash. The longer the shot goes on the more we know that something will have to break it, but we don't know what or when that break is coming. However it's also used to establish the quirks of character: the initial breakfast sequence establishes the complete family dynamic in one swooping hand-held portrait, the husband's ability to organise, the child's to chivvy, the mother to complement. Santiago's descent into depression following the crash is often traced with almost painfully slow shots that mirror the pain he is suffering.

Once again, a filmmaker perpared to work against the drift of a fast-edit MTV culture, shows that relentlessness is not an essential ingredient of drama. It's unclear precisely how long Santiago is away in the bleakness of Patagonia. It might be anything from a couple of months to a year. In grief, the film suggests, time is of little consequence. Santiago finds himself trapped in an eternal present. In contrast to his city life, with its design deadlines, all he needs to do in Patagonia is wake up, go to work, drink himself into a stupor occasionally, and stare out of the window which his friend swears at him for leaving open. Only birth and death puncture the remorseless of this present, that and the changing price of rabbit skins offered by the only trader around.

Pablo Trapero's film immerses itself in the snowy bleakness of Patagonia, just as effectively as it immerses us in Santiago's grief. Guillermo Pfenning's performance remains restrained, the director's camera keeping an objective eye on his breakdown, rarely letting it get carried away. In the end, Born and Bred becomes a buddy story, with Santiago's friendships with Roberto and Cacique establishing the conditions for his recovery. Their flaws help him to understand and come to terms with his own, more terrible flaw.

It may be that Trapero's film is probing at the values of his country, contrasting the affluence of the city with the integrity of rural poverty. His cinematography, constrained to interiors in the city, comes alive in the bleak Southern wilderness. But this is a subtle, meditative film, and it seems unwise to draw too many hard and fast conclusions from it's narrative. This point is heightened by the film's ambivalent, understated conclusion, which seems to hover between a future hope and the past's despair.

inland empire (dir lynch)

In Lost Highway there's a corridor in the saxophophist's flat. It's no ordinary corridor. It pulses. It could swallow you up. You watch it like a child, scared of the dark, suspecting that if you go down this corridor and through whatever door lies on the other side, you're in for all kinds of trouble.

In Inland Empire, Lynch hasn't even bothered to show us the corridor. He's gone straight down it and from the moment the film starts, we're there, on the other side.

The film opens with grainy footage from what appears to be a hotel room. A man and a woman with their heads pixillated into a blur. It cuts to a room which looks like a stage set, where three people wearing rabbit heads iron, sit, talk. Canned laughter interrupts them. Back in the room, the woman begins to undress. She says she's scared. Laura Dern's neighbour rings on her doorbell. Welcome to Lynch world.

Which, the film is very clear in stating (in a film that is very clear about little) is also Hollywood. The Hollywood sign makes a guest appearance. Much of the action occurs on a studio sound stage. Dern's death scene, or one of her character's death scenes, occurs on Hollywood Boulevard itself, next to the faded glory of a star's sign on the pavement.

Watching this film is a hunt for clues. One of the clues is that this is a movie about/ within Hollywood, and the reality distortions that place conduces. When you're in a movie you inhabit unreality, which is the stuff of dreams, which is what this film undoubtably is. As Dern leapfrogs from scene to scene, sometimes a movie star, sometimes a character, sometimes a doomed drifter, she often appears to be looking at the action rather than participating in it. Her eyes are the eyes of the dreamer, and Lynch invites us to wander through the rooms of the dreamer's mind.

Which dreamer? Is another question. Who is the Polish girl? What are the Polish characters doing at all? The filmmaker who watched Inland Empire with me speculated that this was the aborted film within the film which the film within the film (which Laura Dern stars in and Jeremy Irons directs) adapts. He might be right, he might be wrong. These potshots at the film's 'meaning' are all we can take, unless we were PhD students doing a full and proper exegisis, as one kind of hopes there one day will be.

Watching Inland Empire hoping to find its 'meaning' feels like a foolish endeavour. Lynch, as in all his work, is smart enough to know that an audience can't help but bring their instinct for plot-resolution with them. Normally he throws them enough bones to make them think they've got a chance of digesting some kind of sense. You don't know what's going on but you can at least hazard an informed guess. Here, the wise course of action is to give up before you die trying. His tongue-in-cheek credits sequence teases the viewer. Inland Empire is self-consciously opaque; non-sense, if you like, tied together by the fact that every frame constitutes a connection with the other frames contained within the material of the film.

No other filmmaker in Hollywood could get away with this sort of gibberish. The very fact that Lynch can throws a fly in the Hollywood soup. Film is not about neat story lines and coherent story telling. It is about an amalgamation of images, knitted together to produce something that looks like a whole, but is as full of gaps as any dream. Only Lynch brings you the gaps. Which makes it more representative of a dream. Which might mean it's more truthful. Or might mean we're but children of the filmic age, and in a hundred years time they'll complain that Lynch was good, if a little obvious at times.

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.

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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.

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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.