| Edinburgh Film Festival : pt.I (Wed 17 Aug) 'P', 'Mars', 'Screaming Masterpiece' |
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| Wednesday, 17 August 2005 | |
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Paul Spurrier's P [6/10] Anna Melikian's MARS [5/10] Ari Alexander's SCREAMING MASTERPIECE [5/10] ------------------------------------------------------------- Written and directed by British former child-star Spurrier, the mildly gory, mildly arty, pretentiously-titled P is the atmospheric but somewhat overlong tale of a country teenager named Aaw (Suangporn Jaturaphut) and her travails when she moves to the big bad city. The innocent child, who can't be much more than 16, ends up pole-dancing in the seedy 'P-Bar' (apparently 'P' = 'phi' = 'ghost' in Thai, though we aren't told this in the film itself). But Aaw - now rechristened Dau for the benefit of the bar's beer-swilling foreign clientele - isn't as defenceless as she looks. Her grandmother has schooled her well in the magical arts of their Khmer ancestry - skills which come in handy when she encounters abusive and/or insulting behaviour from her customers and colleagues. This is why, after a deceptively idyllic rural opening in Aaw's tiny village, what P becomes is, in effect, a Carrie for the seedy Bangkok sex-scene. A spicy premise - and it's rewarding to see the demure Aaw wreak her bloody revenge on those who have wronged her. But there's a price to pay: all this spell-casting means she becomes a conduit for evil forces. These take physical form as a vampiric double of Aaw, which goes on a kill-crazy rampage while the girl sleeps. Spurrier loses his grip on the material in the second half, when Aaw's painful struggles to contain her demons is presented in terms suggesting Spurrier is aiming for some kind of drug-addiction allegory (she tries a 'cold turkey' option by handcuffing herself to a pipe inside her filthy latrine). These latter sections also see the film lose much of its fresh, poetic flavour - nightmarish images of a long-haired demonic female on the loose see Spurrier venturing into the well-trodden territory of Hideo Nakata's Ring and its many imitators. The climax, in which one of Aaw's victims returns to wreak some messy vengeance of her own, is a bit of a mess - head-scratchingly "enigmatic" in the manner of a scriptwriter who can't quite tie together all the loose ends of his plot - leaving this P only Q.G. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mars is an intermittently charming, often laborious slice of Russian whimsy that entertains and annoys in roughly equal measure. A big, bald, brooding bruiser of a boxer (Gosha Kutsenko) impulsively gets off his train in the small town of Marx, located in a scenic spot between the sea and the mountains. Here me meets all manner of weird and tragic characters in an episodic plot which starts off OK but rapidly bogs down into a series of cutesy, verbose exchanges of a philosophical/allegorical sort. As when the boxer discovers that the main employer in the town is a factory making stuffed animal toys, the workers being paid in the "soft currency" of the toys themselves. The pace bogs down a bit around the middle, writer-director Melikian seemingly treading water in search of the next bit of quasi-fairytale cuteness or old-movie references. Things rallying right at the end for a suitably bittersweet finale, though this tearjerking climax is somewhat too-little-too-later. The cinematography and production design ensure that Mars is always striking on the eye - it's only when the characters open their mouths that things start to go awry. The best thing about it by far is Kutsenko's performance as Boris. Laconic, perpetually knackered and fundamentally decent despite his daunting appearance, watching him ambling around the town is like seeing Tarkovsky's Stalker adrift in a gaudily-coloured Tim Burton/Amelie universe of ostentatious, slightly desperate bizarrerie. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Screaming Masterpiece - another pretentious title, never explained or even mentioned in the film itself - is a so-so self-congratulatory celebration of the Icelandic music scene, one made for and best seen on the small screen. Internationally-famous names like Bjork and the band Sigur Ros appear via concert footage, as do well over a dozen other outfits whose renown hasn't yet travelled far beyond their proud island's rocky, black-beached shores. Some are fine - many are distinctly ordinary, no better than you'd find in any large town or small city. Various talking heads - including academics, journalists, historians, visitors (including, very briefly, Damon Albarn) and the artists themselves - pop up to talk about Iceland and/or analyse why the nation's music is so special. The nation's "head pagan" is on hand to tracing the knotty cultural heritage back to its ancient Viking roots. An title-card smugly informs us that Iceland's vibrant music scene has come about despite a relatively tiny population of 300,000, and it's speculated that as in Manchester and Detroit, foul weather has encouraged local youngsters to pick up guitars because there's little else to do. The difference is, of course, that both those cities were working-class conurbations with notable records of economic misfortune. Iceland is, by contrast, an affluent (and famously expensive) country with a Scandinavian attitude to social matters - and generous funding of artistic endeavours. At times you suspect that Screaming Masterpiece has been the recipient of such state largesse - it plays like an extended tourist-board advert, with soaring shots of the countryside mixed with rocking footage of bands in action to remind us just how damn hip the place is (cheapish flights now available!). The combination of snowy splendour and sweaty gig action also inadvertently means that the film ends up a bit like 9 Songs without the sex. In the documentary field, the closest comparison is with one of the hits of Edinburgh '04, surfing hagiography Riding Giants : in both cases the many positive notes are drowned out by the increasingly loud sound of backs being roundly slapped. In documentaries these days it seems 'blow your own trumpet', shall be the whole of the law, and never has anyone been in such dire need of (in the words of Iceland-visit-pioneers The Fall) being "humbled in Iceland." People keep talking about the "rock n roll spirit" of Icelandic music - though there's no mention of Megas Jonsson, the "father of Icelandic rock". And isn't rock about shaking things up and causing trouble? A little of that spirit here might have produced a more textured and rewarding film, but director Alexander is content to remain a silently approving off-screen presence. This means that the derivative nature of many of the acts - some of them singing in American accents, just after having spoken about their pride towards their Icelandic roots - goes unquestioned. At the very least, Alexander (who's so proud of his roots that he doesn't use his real Icelandic surname on the film's credits) might surely have pointed out the absurdity of a guitarist ('Mugison') who rehearses in a remote, isolated church where there are no neighbours to take offence at his racket, only to then "unleash" an acoustic number that Coldplay might dismiss as too milksoppy. ------------------------------------------------------------- Neil Young 17th August / 1st September, 2005 * P : [6/10] : UK (UK/Thai) 2005 (copyright-dated 2004) : Paul SPURRIER : 105 mins |
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