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all films seen in Leeds (UK) on Friday 4th November 2005, at the Leeds Film Festival
LIE STILL [6/10]
UK 2005 : Sean HOGAN : 80 mins : seen at Hyde Park Picture House (DVD projection)
A kind of M R Jamesian take on Repulsion, Lie Still is an extended variant of the moderately creepy old-dark-house chillers that used to crop up regularly on 1970s British TV. As such it's a rather refreshing throwback to earlier traditions of horror - low on budget and gore, high on intensity and mounting paranoid dread.
John (Stuart Laing) is a twentysomething drifter struggling to cope with the end of his latest relationship; seeking peace and quiet, he apparently finds both when he moves into a bed-sit flat in a creaking suburban mansion owned by the chummily ingratiating Mr Stone (Robert Blythe). This proves to be only the start of John's problems, however, as a series of horrific nightmares sends him on a downward spiral into psychosis...
The story's general outline is predictable - anyone even faintly familiar with this genre should be able to forecast the downbeat coda from early on. But Hogan knows how to create and build a mood, and does so with sufficient skill to ensure we don't dwell on the somewhat cobbled-together nature of the plot. Crucially, he deploys the tried-and-tested method of implying rather than actually showing the horrors, leaving the work to our own imaginations.
Though nothing especially out of the ordinary, Lie Still (a ropey title, never satisfactorily explained) is a promising calling-card for Hogan: he'll hopefully continue in this vein, and resist the blood-drenched teen-oriented shenanigans which have come to dominate the genre in recent years. Indeed, any producer considering a remake of Night of the Demon (based on an M R James tale) should at least give Lie Still the once-over.
ADAM'S APPLES [4/10]
Adam's aebler : Denmark 2005 : Anders Thomas JENSEN : 94 mins : seen at Vue cinema (city centre)
"Attend the tale of ATJ," wrote Mike D'Angelo in his 2003 Toronto Film Festival review of Jensen's directorial debut, The Green Butchers, "His wit was pale and his plot cliche. / He switched to camera from his pen / And never thereafter was heard of again." Jensen has been heard of again since then, of course - he churns out scripts at a startling rate, including the one for Jannik Johansen's thumpingly-good Hitchcockian thriller Murk, which is currently doing the film-festival rounds.
On the evidence of Adam's Apples, however, "ATJ" would perhaps be advised to stick to "pen" rather than "camera" in future. It's an annoyingly quirky take on religion, faith, redemption, human nature and God only knows what else, these lofty concerns awkwardly shoehorned into a cutesy, fable-like plot.
For unspecified reasons, racist skinhead Adam (Ulrich Thomsen, a bit old for the role) must spend time at a rural, middle-of-nowhere church under the care of oddball pastor Ivan (Mads Mikkelsen). Adam is determined to undermine Ivan's belief in the fundamental goodness of humanity - by violent methods, if necessary. But Ivan proves an unexpectedly tough nut to crack.
The convoluted plot revolves around an apple tree which Adam is tasked to protect after he makes a casual promise to bake an apple cake. Said tree promptly comes under attack from hungry crows, gnawing larvae, and even a stray lightning bolt - these "trials and tribulations" seemingly having something to so with the Book of Job. But who is really being tested here: Adam, Ivan or both?
The real trial, however, is the one endured by the audience: though nicely shot and boasting strong performances (from the usual gallery of Danish suspects, including the inevitable Paprika Steen), Adam's Apples is so insistently offbeat, so aggressively ambitious in its (murky) treatment of Big Issues, that it ends up grating on the nerves. Too dour to be a comedy, too daft to be anything else, this stew of ideas, jokes and twists somehow manages to be overcooked and half-baked. Now, how d'you like them apples?!
HIDDEN [7/10]
Caché : France (Fr/Austria/Ger) 2005 (copyright-dated 2004) : Michael HANEKE : 117 mins : seen at Vue cinema (city centre)
Though easily one of the year's more intriguing and absorbing releases, Hidden must nevertheless count as a disappointment - coming as it does from so gifted a film-maker (and intellectual provocateur) as Haneke, and having been so rapturously received at Cannes where it won numerous prizes including Best Director. And it is brilliantly directed, with nearly camera position and movement freighted with implication and meaning.
Hidden thus demands intense attention from the audience - but ultimately fails, in the screenplay department, to really make all this work worthwhile. We don't expect easy answers, or even easy questions, from a director like Haneke - but here he seems content to serve up arty obfuscation instead of genuine ambiguity and fruitful complexity, perhaps even veering into self-parody: Haneke-by-numbers, perhaps.
The latter seems unlikely, as Haneke is in characteristically uber-serious mode here (then again, 'happy Haneke' would seem something of an oxymoron). The set-up is, nonetheless, an overt nod to David Lynch's moebius-dopey Lost Highway, as the cosy bourgeois existence of Parisian couple Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche) - their surname 'Laurent' taken from the Lynch film - is disturbed by the arrival on their doorstep of videotapes containing surveillance-camera-type images of their own house. The tapes are accompanied by child-like drawings showing a man with blood coming out of his mouth, and one which shows a chicken being decapitated.
As the couple's marriage comes under strain - a process which also inadvertently affects their young-teenage son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky, a terrific debut) -Georges slowly realises that it all may trace back to a childhood incident involving himself and a young boy of Algerian descent whom his parents had considered adopting. His investigations in this department, however, lead to some unexpected, and some jarringly violent, consequences...
Haneke creates an unsettling atmosphere from the very first shot: an innocuous-seeming image of the Laurents' house, which we eventually realise is in fact part of the 'stalker's' footage. Time and again we have to decide, at the start of scenes, whether what we are watching is part of the film, or of the "films" within the film. Is the 'stalker' perhaps Haneke himself, in a metatextual touch (reminiscent of his masterpiece Funny Games, in which some of the characters were aware that they were fictional creations, and thus behaved with total amorality towards those who didn't share this knowledge)?
Or perhaps it's Georges himself. Or perhaps it's Pierrot, in cahoots with an individual with whom we see him in conversation during the long, static, teasing final shot. This closing image is a headscratcher, and it's audacious to end on such a seemingly 'open' note (But compare and contrast the similarly pregnant-with-meaning last sequence from Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure - and you'll see how far short of the mark Haneke has fallen here.)
Whether or not there's actually that much substance to Hidden is perhaps the real subject for discussion. On reflection, what does it all boil down to? The arrogant Georges' discovery of his own limitations? Anne (a somewhat underdeveloped character) realising that her husband isn't quite the principled intello she thought she'd married?
It's all very well picking and choosing elements and tropes from the thriller genre, then adding 'depth' by means of rather heavy-handed references to historical injustice (the French treatment of Algerian immigrants in the early 1960s) and also to more contemporary political scandals (Iraq is prominently featured in a news bulletin on the Laurents' fancy wall-mounted plasma TV). And of course many viewers will delight in joining the various dots together, poring over the film's dense visual 'text' and coming up with all manner of readings and explanations. The trouble is that sparking these post-screening discussions seems to be Haneke's primary aim with Hidden -whereas before he's always let the films speak loudly and powerfully for themselves.
Neil Young
6th/8th November, 2005
click here for a list of all films seen at Leeds Film Festival 2005 |
