REVIEW: All Good Children (2010)

The opening scenes of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs show cruel children torturing animals, Peckinpah’s point being that the ability to carry out violent actions is something innate in humanity and present even in children. A range of paedophobic horror films, particularly The Innocents, represent the loss of a child’s innocence as a frightening and psychotic experience. Puberty and a burgeoning attraction to the opposite sex is often represented in cinema as a challenging and sometimes murderous time – Heavenly Creatures, The Scouting Book For Boys, this year’s The Sea. All Good Children is pretty much a heterosexual version of Heavenly Creatures – aside from some slight differences – and it adds very little.

Dara and Eoin (Jack Gleeson and David Brazil) move to France following the apparent suicide of their mother to live with their aunt Valerie (Laura Persain). Dara soon comes across an English family who live not far away and almost immediately falls under the spell of Bella (Imogen Jones), the young daughter of Julian and Lynne (David Wilmot and Kate Duchêne). They have a brief and idyllic summer romance. When their relationship becomes too aggressive, they are forced apart and Dara is not able to adjust to life without Bella.

Writer-director Alicia Duffy has a fondness for moody arthouse aesthetics and the entire film has been made with that slightly distanced, elliptical tone that has become so familiar now in art films about love and sex. There is probably a bit of a Haneke influence, though without the thematic and intellectual rigour of, say, Benny’s Video – Haneke’s own killer kid film. The early scenes of Dara and Bella’s flourishing relationship are all bright sunshine and Malickian sequences of running through grass and dancing barefoot in forests, though played less for romance since it is unmistakably telegraphed that things will soon turn sinister. By the time a heartbroken Dara begins his transition from innocent kid to nut job, the colour scheme has become muted. Though the distanced camerawork remains throughout, we now see dark cave-like dwellings and rotting animals instead of big, open spaces and sunlight.

The film is both dated and redundant – with a very Freudian view of the romance (and a scene involving blood that recalls Andrea Arnold’s films, particularly both Fish Tank and Wuthering Heights) and a storyline that recalls too many other ‘love is confusing for children and might even be dangerous’ films as well as her own short film The Most Beautiful Man in the World.

The performances from the children are quite good, though Imogen Jones suffers from a necessarily underwritten part as the unknowable object of Dara’s attraction. Jack Gleeson (soon to become infamous for playing King Joffrey in the overrated Game of Thrones series) is very good and holds the film together better than the script or the direction. The parents are all practically silent – see also, again, The Most Beautiful Man in the World. Presumably, Duffy is making the point that parents are becoming more detached from their children and that the unfortunate events in All Good Children are due as much to neglect as puberty. As a result, David Wilmot, as well as Persain and Duchêne, is left with little else to do but offer a restrained, quiet performance and is rather forgettable as a result. Apart from Dara, no one in the film seems to be particularly human.

Just like Duffy’s 2002 short The Most Beautiful Man in the World, All Good Children is a film about the difficulties of growing up, particularly in terms of experiencing emotions that one cannot understand, but it is so distanced and humourless and so self-consciously minimalist and arty that it never really makes you want to care. And by the time Dara goes on his violent rampage towards the end of the film, it feels merely unbelievable. As a feature film debut, it is well put together but it doesn’t seem, on this evidence, that Alicia Duffy has a particularly original voice.

REVIEW: Nymph()maniac Parts 1 & 2 (2014)

Divided into two parts for commercial reasons, but worth seeing in one sitting – most art house cinemas are allowing the option of seeing them together with a short interval – Nymph()maniac has been declared as Lars von Trier’s magnum opus and it certainly feels like a summation of his career, of both the films and the public controversies.

It is difficult to write about what Nymph()maniac is about since it is a highly deceptive film, seemingly about nothing in particular and about everything at once. Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) is walking home when he spots a woman lying in an alley, brutally beaten. She calls herself Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and, refusing medical help, agrees to go to Seligman’s flat for a cup of tea and some rest. Once there, she starts to talk about her life from her first sexual experiences to her adulthood coping with, as she insists on calling it, nymphomania. Insisting also that she is a bad person, her stories are intercut, and frequently punctured, by Seligman’s digressions into all kinds of subjects that seek to naturalise her seemingly extreme behaviour. This digressions move from the art of fly fishing to Bach’s music, to differences between Eastern and Western theology, to mathematics and art.

Nymph()maniac is, in many ways, a highly satisfying art film in the best sense of the term, since it is a fascinating and multifaceted discussion of a series of themes all presented to an audience positioned to watch critically and engage with the subject matter. The film’s Brechtian devices allow the audience some distance from the often intense drama, allowing them to question the events onscreen and come up with their own conclusions concerning what the film is about and what the film is doing. These Brechtian devices are present in many different forms and are often fascinating to detect. The film begins with Joe lying in the alley, snow gently gliding down onto the scene while the camera focuses on the sets, creating a sense of the construction of the scene as opposed to it’s drama. This is also the site of the film’s first major disruption – the sudden explosion of Rammstein’s “Führe Mich” – that immediately throws the audience out of whatever impression they were forming of the film. Taken as a distanciation device, it is a powerful moment of upset that would probably make Brecht, or Godard, proud. It also represents a certain bravery in Lars von Trier’s film, which gleefully subverts the conventions of ‘good’ art, since the sudden inclusion of this song is so disruptive and, ultimately, hard to take. It also reveals how, even from the opening minutes, Nymph()maniac is not afraid to risk losing you.

The film is a discursive, dialectical work that offers a multitude of perspectives and arguments over one significant, unifying theme. As a result, it may appear to be about nothing – a meaningless exercise in brutality – though it is the arguments and the digressions and the film’s refusal to simplify its themes into easily digested titbits that makes Nymph()maniac worthwhile. While Joe recounts her life story – unreliably since her stories (told in eight chapters) seem to be based on objects littered about Seligman’s room – she could be seen to be confessing her crimes in a final act of masochistic penitence. Either this or she is gleefully asserting her nymphomania, wanting to shock the intellectual Seligman. Seligman, however, insists on drawing parallels between her behaviour and a variety of subjects, including art, architecture and mathematics. Gainsbourg subtly conveys a degree of annoyance, flustered that the frequent shock tactics in her storytelling only seem to invigorate Seligman’s intellectual curiosity. Only towards the end of the film is Seligman properly appalled (on the subject of Joe’s pity for paedophiles) and Joe gleefully argues her position, seemingly changing his mind on the subject.

This seems, to me, to be key to the understanding of the film. The film is loaded with references to Lars von Trier’s previous work and to his public appearances. Seligman’s comment that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are too frequently confused would seem to be a gesture towards the controversy surrounding von Trier’s Nazi comments which had him declared persona non grata at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011. He also recreates the controversial scene of child death from Antichrist as well as that film’s themes of female sexuality as monstrous. The film has Joe’s husband Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf) suggest she see other men in order to help their sexual relationship as well as having Joe have a spontaneous orgasm played as a religious experience, both suggesting Breaking The Waves. Joe’s shock tactics, if that is what they are, may represent what are perceived as von Trier’s own shock tactics. As a result, the figures of Joe and Seligman can almost be seen to be two strains of von Trier’s own personality – just as, in Melancholia, Justine’s (Kirsten Dunst) depression seemed to represent von Trier’s own. But what of that? Lars von Trier is a filmmaker who airs out his own issues and thoughts via fictional means. In Nymph()maniac, Joe also tells stories, the veracity of which are often in doubt. Seligman’s frequent parallels with art suggest that Joe’s problems are far from unique and that art – be it music, writing, architecture, fly fishing – offers, to a degree, comfort for one’s problems. In other words, Seligman’s interpretations naturalise Joe’s issues, the shocking and the mundane alike, and helps her to come to terms with them and Nymph()maniac is primarily about the regenerative power of art. This would seem to certainly be the case towards the end of the film in which Joe is left feeling, though not entirely convinced, assured and positive about the future. However, in a shock ending, so frustrating since the film had suddenly seemed to find a heart and something positive to say, von Trier gives a lie to such simplistic notions about life and art, suggesting that there is ultimately no answer. It is, however, a great moment, reminding us of the use of Rammstein in the beginning of the film, puncturing our need for art to say something affirmative and our need for an empathetic figure that we can all get behind – a ‘good’ man in ‘good’ art.

As it is, Nymph()maniac remains a difficult but fascinating film that can either mean nothing at all or is brimming with ideas and themes. This review constitutes only the first impressions, since I have only seen the film once, and barely scratches the surface – especially since it hasn’t even mentioned the film’s representation of nymphomania or female sexuality in general, the use of brackets in the title in place of the ‘o’, the performances (Shia LaBeouf’s dodgy British accent as another Brechtian device (?), the awkward actor changes between young and old versions of Joe and Jerome another (?)) or the scene in which Joe tries to have sex with two African men that she is unable to understand, which feels horribly racist and probably requires a whole other review. It does, however, suggest that Nymph()maniac is a complex work, a fascinating if uncomfortable watch and quite possibly von Trier’s most challenging film.

REVIEW: Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013)

Blue is the Warmest Colour (or La Vie d’Adèle, Chapitre 1 & 2) has had a long journey from it’s premiere in this year’s Cannes Film Festival to rapturous applause to it’s cinema release, marred by a variety of controversies and a firm critical backlash. It is now probably impossible to watch the film without consciously positioning oneself on one side of the ‘male gaze lesbian sex’ debate. Other issues, such as co-writer and director Abdellatif Kechiche’s working methods seem answered by the Palme D’Or win and the applause that both Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux have been awarded for their performances.

The film is a nearly three hour long story, which could easily be expanded further and further like Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel series, detailing the journey of Adèle’s (Exarchopoulos) sexual awakening and maturity. Beginning with Adèle in school and ending years later in her adulthood, we see Adèle grow. Following a doomed relationship with Thomas (Jérémie Laheurte), a boy from school, Adèle begins to question her sexual identity. After briefly seeing Emma (Seydoux), an older and blue-haired Fine Arts student, on the street, Adèle comes to suspect that she may be a lesbian. Her feelings are confirmed when she begins a deeply passionate relationship with Emma, though their lives are fraught with complications.

Some of the criticisms of Blue is the Warmest Colour mention the fact that the film is loosely based on a graphic novel by Julie Maroh, a woman and a lesbian, and, hence, constitutes the removal of a lesbian voice and it’s replacement by yet another white middle-aged straight male one (see the conclusion to Sophie Mayer’s review in this month’s “Sight and Sound” magazine). In keeping with this, Blue is the Warmest Colour is a film that is not particularly about lesbianism, having more to do generally with young love. Though the film does not remove the lesbianism that is more central to the graphic novel, it does gloss over the homophobia, preferring to tell a love story in which the lesbianism is often merely incidental. In terms of story arc, Adèle and Emma’s relationship could easily be a straight one. This, coupled with some long drawn out sex scenes that many claim have a particularly male, if not leering, perspective, has led to a lot of criticism that the film is a self-gratifyingly masculine vision of female liberation. Kechiche even seems to have expected this, making pointed references to Pierre de Marivaux’s “The Life of Marianne”, a 600-page book which displays proof that a male author can convincingly present the psychology of a female character. Personally, this argument seems unhelpful, suggesting as it does that gender is a bridge that cannot be crossed – that males can’t make films about women nor women films about men, a ridiculous idea. However, that femininity is presented more often by male voices than by female voices is a worthwhile point and, here, Kechiche does not help himself by pointing towards Marivaux or, for that matter, as he does constantly in one scene for no apparent reason, G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box.

It is only worth addressing these debates, which ultimately do not offer any clear solutions, because the sex scenes in Blue is the Warmest Colour are so long, so detailed and so prominent. Kechiche has claimed that the sex scenes are true to life in that they are clearly shown as only a part of Adèle and Emma’s relationship, that there are a lot more scenes set around the dinner table (for instance) so the sex scenes are not overemphasised and that sex should be presented truthfully. However, what he seems to have missed is that relationships can be truthfully represented on film but the sexual act cannot be, since it is such an off-putting thing to be a third-party, or witness, to. An audience can vicariously enjoy the aspirations of young love without feeling like a lecherous intruder and Kechiche’s attempt to represent sex just as anything else cannot help but make the audience feel as if they are intruding on something very private. This may display a sexual immaturity in cinema and in a cinema audience, something given further credence by the fact that the similarly explicit sex scenes in a film like Y Tu Mamá También are not so off-putting because the sex is not about love. If this is true that cinema cannot make sex look loving, then, it seems, like the arguments above that do not have a solution, that is just the way it is. In short, the sex scenes in Blue is the Warmest Colour are a misstep.

Forgetting the controversy, however, Blue is the Warmest Colour is a well-made drama filled with great performances, particularly Adèle Exarchopoulos, who seems to live and breathe her character. Léa Seydoux is good too, but she has a lot less to do, since she is in the role of the girlfriend in traditional cinema, one that is always underwritten and usually only one further manifestation of the film’s thematics or the protagonist’s inner landscape (see, for instance, Barbara Sugarman in Don Jon or the mothers in Like Father, Like Son). The film moves at a good pace, barely feeling its three-hour length with much momentum. As a story about a young woman maturing and gaining a form of sexual and emotional independence, it is hard to think of another film that addresses this subject with such loving attention to detail and a lack of sentimentality. If the relationship between Adèle and Emma does not say much in terms of lesbianism, it is more eloquent about a romance across class lines. Emma’s friends and relatives humour Adèle, who seems to have been exhibited for their interest and amusement. This is used to show how Adèle is fearless in carving out her own path, unperturbed by the patronising looks she gets when she says that she wants to be a schoolteacher, allowing for an ending in which she defiantly strides away from the camera into a future, one that is uncertain but absolutely her own. As a side note, the fact that the end features a potential male suitor (Salim Kechiouche) ineffectually trying to chase after her may give a lie to the criticism that Blue is the Warmest Colour is merely a male story with only the protagonist’s genders altered.

The sex scenes were a mistake, and a rather damaging one, but nonetheless Blue is the Warmest Colour is a moving portrait of the young woman maturing. It is hard to imagine a female director making a film with more insight into Adèle simply because she is a woman. It is a story well told with a great central performance and a film that was vastly over-rated at Cannes but also one that is ridiculously over-scrutinised now. Great, flawed filmmaking.

Other Palme D'Or winners:
Amour
The Tree of Life
La Dolce Vita

REVIEW: Beyond The Hills (2013)

                       

After co-writing and directing the excellent 2007 Palme D’Or winning film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Cristian Mungui became probably the most famous Romanian filmmaker. Now, he is back with Beyond The Hills, another powerful drama that equally refuses to judge its characters.

Inspired by real events, Beyond The Hills focuses on the troubled friendship of two possibly ex-lovers, Voichita and Alina (played by Cosmina Stratan and Cristina Flutur respectively, who both shared the Best Actress award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival). They have been apart for some time, Voichita having joined a strict Orthodox convent and Alina having been aboard in Germany. Alina returns to their hometown, seeking help from Voichita. The priest in charge of the order, known only as Papa (Valeriu Andriuta), allows Alina to stay in the convent and she tries to fit in with the rest of the devout nuns. However, things take a turn for the worst when Alina starts to rebel against the order.

The film is based on an actual criminal case which shocked Romania in 2005 and it is very difficult to give the film an accurate review without (a) spoiling the plot, which unravels slowly and inexorably and which is best left unknown; and (b) merely reiterating what the film itself so successfully expresses. With 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Mungui’s key achievement was that he made a film about a backstreet abortion that was eloquent of the physical and emotional toll on those involved and of the terrifying protocol behind the otherwise unofficial procedure, rather than a polemical film that fell on either side of the debate about abortion in general. With that film and here, Mungui manages to humanise a debate that can often become wholly religious or academic. In the case of Beyond The Hills, Mungui succeeds in making a powerfully ambiguous film that is sympathetic of all sides. Every character has good and bad features, even Papa who, in any other film, would be a fascistic sex pest. In fact, Mungui is only openly critical of one thing in the film – bureaucracy, whether it be the inappropriately personal questions of a passport office or the protocol of keeping certain patients out of hospital either because they are no-hopers or because they are there for the long haul. Bureaucracy is dehumanising and Mungui is in the business of humanising every person on screen.

The film’s ambiguities even go so far as its generic iconography. The fixed-camera long take aesthetics are pure art house, its early plot points the stuff of drama and yet its later sequences, in mood and in aesthetics, touch on horror and, once, slapstick comedy. The ambiguity peaks in a key moment in which Voichita watches a restrained Alina struggling against her bonds. Alina’s struggles may either be the result of demonic possession or mental illness – or simply the natural reaction of someone who wakes up to find himself or herself tied to a table. Towards the end, there is a lot of screaming and running around, but the film manages to be almost equally suggest the supernatural and the secular. Again, it seems unnecessary to write about this in detail so clearly and skilfully does the film express what may or may not be hysterics in an Orthodox convent.

Having recently written so harshly of the cowardice of Zero Dark Thirty for merely standing aside and watching while evil is committed, it does seem hard to justify a film as apparently neutral as Beyond The Hills. However, while Bigelow’s wish to merely document is necessarily dehumanising, her impassive camera photographing torture and boardroom scenes as two humdrum but unavoidable activities that CIA operatives just have to do, Mungui is not afraid to allow humanity to exist within his carefully framed images. Mungui contributes to the debate and does not shirk responsibility with some false claim of reportage. Each sequence shot (in which each scene is played out in only one take) is less about creating a semblance of realism and more about revealing the people that the performers are playing. It is a film that is just as meaningful when nothing is happening – a pause or a downward glance may have multiple interpretations. Though he seems to have an interest in people in harrowing situation, he remains nonetheless a humanist.

Beyond The Hills is a well paced, beautifully shot film with great performances from the majority of the cast. It is an intelligent and moving film that is open to life’s complications and man’s imperfections. It also has a fantastic final shot. A film that thoroughly speaks for itself and is worth seeing on the big screen if you can find it.

REVIEW: The Artist (2011)

 
  The Artist is a French-Belgian co-production from director Michel Hazanavicius, best known for the OSS 117 spy spoof films. With The Artist, Hazanavicius delivers what looks like a potential international, crowd-pleasing hit in the form of a black and white silent comedy drama.

  George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) is a silent movie star in 1927. Not unlike Douglas Fairbanks, he is suave and acrobatic but also vain. We first meet him at the premiere of his new film “A Russian Affair”, a spy thriller, which already looks like the latest in a string of hits. Outside, he bumps into Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), a wannabe actress, who finds herself at the wrong end of the velvet rope. The photographers snap several photos of Valentin and Peppy together, prompting the next day’s Variety to proclaim “Who’s That Girl?” 

  On the strength of her new publicity and with Valentin’s support, Peppy gets a bit part on Valentin’s new film “A German Affair”, where a passionate though short-lived romance blossoms. Later, as Peppy’s star rises, Valentin’s career hits a number of problems, not least of which is the coming of sound to Hollywood, which will marks the death of silent cinema.

  The Artist is, in many ways, a pleasant surprise, not least that, in the modern climate of digital photography, widescreen and unrewarding 3D, a black and white silent filmed in the Academy ratio can still find an appreciative audience. The hopes that the success in the film will spark a new interest in the silent cinema are, however, too optimistic.

  The Artist has many problems and many, it is sad to say, comes from its format. Though it can be intermittently funny, inventive and moving, the story of a rising female star and her romance with a self-obsessed, older star whose career is in decline makes the film essentially just another version of A Star Is Born. Though there is nothing particularly wrong about this, it does result in the film having a troubling narrative. A lot of the running time is spent with a wallowing Valentin, desperate to get back to into the limelight. Far from the great Janet Gaynor and Judy Garland versions of A Star Is Born, the film comes to resemble Charlie Chaplin’s almost insufferable, self-pitying Limelight. While these versions of A Star Is Born relied on great performances and a great script to get through its more unsympathetic parts, The Artist has little to sustain itself.

  Admittedly, the film does have some great moments, though these moments are almost all found within the first and last ten minutes. Here, the film manages to be funny and moving, but also surprisingly inventive, which so many silent films were. It is entirely evident that writer-director Michel Hazanavicius has a genuine love for the silent cinema. The problem is that he possesses only the wish, or capability, to quote and celebrate. He seems to have no real wish to make a proper silent film. There is none of the stunts, filmmaking ingenuity and drama of a great Buster Keaton, none of the social value and melancholy of Chaplin and none of the pacing and excitement of Fritz Lang. In the end, The Artist comes to feel like a mere gimmick – something that’s fun in small doses or, even, something that is funnier as an idea rather than as a feature length film. As a result, The Artist mirrors the old techniques of the silent cinema and makes a few jokes at the expense of their histrionics, but it does not manage to replicate the charm of the silents. Though it has its moments, there is nothing of the ingenuity and genius of, say, the moment when an upset Keaton sits on the coupling rod of a moving train.

  What’s left is an extended pastiche, not just of silent cinema but also of classical Hollywood cinema in general. As a result, we are treated to excerpts from Bernard Hermann’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the recreation of some famous scenes from Citizen Kane as well as references to Sunset Boulevard, Fairbanks, Murnau, Asta the dog and the films of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The film ends up becomes one of Quentin Tarantino’s tired genre rehashes, full of name checking but largely devoid of the wit or charm that the originals possessed. To watch The Artist can, at times, merely make you wish you were watching Sunrise, The Cameraman or The Circus.

  However, it may be a mark of the film’s better moments that it feels somewhat rule to criticize the film so completely. The film is not without its little joys, such as when Valentin’s dog tries to alert an embarrassed and disbelieving policeman in a moment of crisis. Similarly, Hazanavicius reveals the ability to direct an Astaire-Rogers dance number, something that all the current dancing-based reality TV series prove completely unable to do. The supporting characters are all fine with James Cromwell and John Goodman very good playing it up in the old acting styles.

  The main problem with The Artist is the fact that the main aim of the project seems to have been to make a silent film, rather than to tell a story or come up with some inventive formal stylistics that may be best served in a silent film. Ultimately, the film itself is not well served by being a silent film. In fact, it does not even look like a silent. Aside from that, it is also overlong. At one hundred minutes, it is an over-stretched gimmick that would have been better served in a half an hour. The story itself is clichéd and rather difficult to get swept up in and the frequent references to other films can get rather irritating. Not without its joys and not entirely a failure, The Artist remains a missed opportunity. Though a rise in interest in silent cinema could only be a good thing, it is hard to believe that The Artist will be the film that sparks it.