| Crossing Europe (pt 1): Aaltra, Days and Hours, etc |
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| Sunday, 08 May 2005 | |
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2nd Crossing Europe Film Festival : Linz, Austria : 26th April - 1st May 2005 at Moviemento and City-Kino cinemas, and the KAPU music-venue official site : www.crossingeurope.at PART ONE ... The Plague, Aaltra, Wolff Von Amerongen and Days and Hours ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE PLAGUE : [6/10] : Greg HALL : UK 2004 : 105 mins : OFFICIAL SITE Set against a backdrop of London estate-blocks, police wagons and spray-paint graffiti, The Plague follows one weekend in the lives of four friends as they go about their routine, visiting mates, smoking, drinking, freestyling, chasing girls and getting into trouble. Made on a tiny budget [by] 23-year-old writer and director Greg Hall. (Crossing Europe film festival catalogue) The action of The Plague is punctuated (and obliquely commented upon) a series of to-camera, off-the-cuff raps by the cult underground performer known as Skinnyman, responsible for the long-player A Council Estate of Mind. Which condition is exactly what youthful Hall is trying to encapsulate with his bracingly in-your-face debut. And he pretty much succeeds - if nothing else, The Plague is so disorientingly of-the-minute that any viewer over the age of (say) 30 may suddenly feel like the most fogeyish Chelsea pensioner. Needless to say, the title has nothing to do with Albert Camus' early-sixties novel of the same name. Nor is there any horror element - at least not of the supernatural kind. And the picture would work quite well in a double-bill with Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later: in some ways, Hall's vision of early 21st-century Britain is scarcely less alarming or apocalyptic than that gore-soaked exercise in quasi-zombie paranoia. Bullet Boy is another intriguing parallel, though Hall's street-savvy world is conspicuously free of firearms (for now...) The sub-culture he chronicles is about as far away from 'Cool Britannia' as it's possible to imagine - though it seems a fair bet that in the bedsits of Bosnia and skateparks of Sebastopol, The Plague may nevertheless be passed around to nods of recognition and satisfaction. That said, the film may work better as "background noise" playing semi-heeded in the corner of a darkened room, rather than watched all the way through like something you'd rent from Blockbuster. The story is (deliberately) difficult to follow, and isn't quite substantial enough to support the 105-minute running time : editor Paco Sweetman, whose nimble cutting (in a picture which is really all about rhythms rather than conventional plot development) makes him perhaps The Plague's single most effective contributor, could profitably have been allowed to trim away another 15 or 20 minutes. Credit is also due to the cast - you really do believe that Samuel Anokye, Brett Harris, David Bonnick Jr and Nur Alam Rahman are best pals off screen as well as on - their easygoing camaraderie effortlessly transcending any theoretical ethnic or racial "boundaries." Their zip and energy - not to mention some seriously well-chosen music cuts carry the film through the occasional dead spot. The (uneven) second half features not one but two examples of that favourite scriptwriters' techniques for bringing disparate characters together - the raucous third-act party. Which in The Plague leads to a climax of unexpected bloodshed culminating in an unexpectedly sudden, audaciously brutal full stop. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- AALTRA : [8/10] : Benoit DELEPIN & Gustave K/VERN : Belgium 2004 : 90 mins Directors/writers Delepine and Kervern [sic] play Ben and Gus, a farmer and a commuter in a small Belgian village, who cannot stand each other. After an accident both turn out to be paraplegic. The ensuing strange journey to Finland, where they want to find the manufacturer of the agricultural equipment that caused their handicap, is shot in beautiful black & white Cinemascope. (Crossing Europe film festival catalogue) The "beautiful black & white Cinemascope" - shot by cinematographer Hugues Poulain - is only the most immediately obvious of Aaltra's many distinguished and delightful features. This is slow-burning, ultra-deadpan, ultra-black comedy of the most subtle and intoxicating kind - with a strain of melancholy beneath the absurdity that's surprisingly moving from time to time. Wim Wenders pioneered this kind of unorthodox 'road movie' back in the 70s with pictures like the monochrome Kings of the Road - and while Delepine and K/vern (as he's billed in the end-titles) don't take themselves anything like so seriously (note that admirably economic, unpretentious running-time) they make no bones about the fact that they're following in some illustrious cinematic footprints/tiretracks. Jim Jarmusch, Bruno Dumont's La vie de Jesus, classic Belgian serial-killer comedy Man Bites Dog spring to mind (along with 2004's parallel trouble-on-wheels efforts, Ireland's Inside I'm Dancing and Japan's Late Bloomer). But it's David Lynch's slow-progress mini-masterpiece The Straight Story which is the most naggingly insistent antecedent - not least because the audiences of both films get an unexpected "reward" at the end of the journey in the form of a culty star-cameo. The identity of Aaltra's "special guest" won't, of course, be spoiled in this review. Suffice it to say that, in retrospect, the whole film is at least in part a tribute to the type of low-key, brilliantly observational cinema for which he's deservedly famous (though he's hardly a household name in non-cineaste circles). But even as Delepine and K/vern wear their influences with pride on their sleeves, Aaltra does have an atmosphere and an energy all of its own - this is a spiky little fable which deals with reality strictly on its own terms (several aspects of our heroes' trek strain credibility), and which at its best creates a deliciously cringe-making atmosphere of social unease and embarrassment. Ben and Gus quite deliberately take maximum advantage of the latitude extended to them by the (guilty) "able-bodied" - although when their transgressions provoke callous or violent responses from their less sympathetic fellow-citizens (including Jason Flemyng in a what-the-heck's-he-doing-in-this appearance as a cocky motorcycling champ) the impact is startling. There's a lot of intelligence behind Aaltra - a picture which is near-flawlessly executed in terms of performance, script, direction, cinematography, editing and sound. Delepine and K/vern clearly know exactly what they're doing - their opening "titles", for example, are perhaps the simplest and most effective in any European release of 2004. One less fortuitous aspect of the picture's look, however, is the use of white-on-white subtitles (at least on the print caught in Linz) - this rendered a fair chunk of the dialogue indecipherable, which is a major problem when the script is as economic and acute as Delepine and K/vern's work in this terrific one-off. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ WOLFF VON AMERONGEN - DID HE COMMIT BANKRUPTCY OFFENCES? : [4/10] : Hat Wolff Von Amerongen Konkursdelikte begangen?* : Gerhard Benno FRIEDL : Germany (Ger/Aust) 2005 : 73 mins Stringently constructed in long shots, the film recounts a somewhat different economic history of Germany. Shots are seen of anonymous places of work, of everyday life and invisible capital: factories, dockyards, streets, public squares in unnamed cities. The accompanying soundtrack contains a chronique scandaleuse, an account of the economic, personal and criminal intertwinements of high finance. Picture and sound only rarely meet... (Crossing Europe film festival catalogue) On paper, Wolff Von Amerongen... (it's a great title in any language!), sounds terrific: a forensic dissection of Germany's corrupt body economic, in the detached, bemused, narration-and-images style perfected by Patrick Keiller in London and Robinson In Space. But on celluloid, at least in the English-language version I caught in Linz, W.V.A. is D.O.A. Friedl, to say the very least, is no Keiller. Wolff Von Amerongen is a severely disappointing missed opportunity - stimulating to think about, mind-numbing to actually watch. And by the end of what seems like an impossibly long 73 minutes, I couldn't even answer the question posed by the title (Otto Wolff Von Amerongen being a prominent industrialist who died in 2003 aged 85, described as "the most important financial functionary in postwar Germany.") I didn't know, and to be honest I didn't really very much care. Gerhard Benno Friedl - Did He Commit Cinematic Offences? seemed a more pressing issue, as I'd been so thoroughly and unforgivably bored by this lifeless affair. A voice blandly and baldly intones tidbits of twentieth-century German financial history, tracing the rise and fall of certain powerful individuals, detailing scandals and corruption, shady deals and hushed-up catastrophes. Friedl has clearly done his research, and the material he has uncovered could well be, in the right hands, dynamite. Trouble is, this smart-alec nature in which he presents his "findings" robs them of any impact - the result is uncomfortably reminiscent of stilted "introduction to economics" TV programmes which used to be made for British schools in the 1970s and 1980s. It sounds like somebody flicking through the German equivalent of the Financial Times are robotically reading out the "juicier" stories. As the litany of repeated personal and company names piles up, you feel that you need a large piece of paper on which to plot an intricate diagram - there's no real way of keeping up with Friedl's argument otherwise. If, indeed, he has any "argument" at all, apart from some vague "capitalism is evil" concept which Rainer Werner Fassbinder explored with much greater wit and intelligence before Friedl was even born. At one point he shows us a piece of urban graffiti which has more force, purpose and effect than his film, for all the time and effort invested in it, could ever dream of: FUCK G8! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DAYS AND HOURS : [7/10] : Pjer ZALICA : Bosnia-Herzegovina 2004 : 96 mins The second feature from the director of the award-winning Fuse (Gori Vatra, 2003), Kod amidze Idriza has attracted many fans on its tours of the world's film festivals. And one of the most vociferous and enthusiastic is Slovenia's acclaimed young director Jan Cvitkovic (Bread and Milk), who describes it as one of the best things he has seen for several years. It's the story of a handyman in his late thirties / early forties named Fuke (Basic) who visits his elderly Aunt Sabira (Sokolovic-Bertok) and Uncle Idriza (Nadarevic) at their home in a hilly suburb of Sarajevo. As well as seeing his relatives, Fuke has the job of fixing their boiler - but soon realises that this isn't the only thing "at Uncle Idriza's place" (the film's original title) which needs repairing. Sabira and Idriza clearly haven't yet gotten over the death of their son in the Balkan conflict of a decade before. And Fuke himself must confront his own mid-life crisis... Superbly observed and acted by a small ensemble cast, Kod amidze Idriza is a quiet, admirably economic family-centred gem with a particularly engaging evocation of place. Fans of Since Otar Left and/or Whisky should seek this one out. (Neil Young, Izola film festival daily paper Dnevni Otok) I stand by everything I said in my Izola piece, but to be honest Days and Hours isn't quite up to the standard of Since Otar Left or Whisky (two of the best comedies of the last few years of course) mainly because it peters out a bit with an all-singing-all-dancing, heartstring-tuggling, cockle-warming finale which Zalica himself refers to as his "Bollywood ending." Full of low-key running gags and charming (mainly middle-aged or elderly) characters, the picture is unashamedly a crowdpleaser - as was universally predicted by pretty much everybody at the event, it duly won the audience award in Izola, guaranteeing nationwide arthouse-cinema distribution in Slovenia. Let's just hope they come up with a better poster than the English-language one (design by "Kurt and Plasto" whoever or whatever they may be) used in Linz and Izola... one of the worst such promotional materials I've ever seen, because it makes a perfectly good film look severely uninviting. It's dominated by a big central image of a rotten apple driven through by a rusty nail, surrounded by a wasp and a spider (none of this to be seen in the film); ghostly faces of the main cast peer on miserably at the sides; the clunky tagline reads "Story about the man who came to repair a boiler and repaired people's hearts"; a very misleading (and mis-spelled) quote from Variety magazine promising "a kind of Bosnian Forest [sic] Gump." Then there's that dull-as-ditchwater English-language title, reportedly chosen by Zalica from a shortlist prepared by the Toronto Film Festival, who thought that the perfectly serviceable "At Uncle Idriza's Place" wouldn't bring in the crowds. Days and Hours in My Neighbourhood was their actual suggestion, trimmed down by Zalica to just Days and Hours - which to my ear sounds too much like Christopher Munch's 1991 Beatles meditation The Hours and Times. So, never mind the poster, never mind the title - At Uncle Idriza's Place (which is how I prefer to think of it) is well worth seeking out. I especially liked the evocation of this hilly suburb where everybody lives on top of each other (though in comfy detached houses) old women are constantly swapping food and returning plates, the sound of raucous Balkan music (strains of Kusturica?!) are seldom far off, and the bonds of extended family are scarcedly weakened by geographical distance. The script is by Namik Kabil, and it's a mark of his achievement that several people to whom I spoke about the film didn't actually think it was a "comedy" at all. Also worthy of note: there are a couple of characters who seem vividly alive (Samira and Zineta) even though they never actually appear on camera at all. That's good writing. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Neil Young 5th June, 2005 (The Plague seen 27th April at KAPU; other three seen 28th April at City-Kino) click here for reviews part two (The Wedding, Netto, etc) * This film was listed in the Linz catalogue under the title Did Wolff Von Amerongen Commit Bankruptcy Offences? |
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