| This week's Tribune reviews: 'I Served the King of England', 'Manufactured Landscapes', 'XXY' |
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| Monday, 12 May 2008 | |
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------ I Served the King of England Czech Republic 2006 Starring : Ivan Barnev, Julia Jentsch Director : Jiri Menzel ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Manufactured Landscapes Canada 2006 Documentary, with : Edward Burtynsky Director : Jennifer Baichwal ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ XXY Argentina 2007 Starring : Ines Efron, Ricardo Darin Director : Lucia Puenzo ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ AN unlikely but welcome return to the limelight for Czech veteran Menzel (whose last feature was back in 1994) the whimsically charming I Served the King of England ('IStKoE' for short) sees the director once again filming a novel by Bohumil Hrabal - the pair's most famous collaboration being 1966's Foreign-Language Oscar winner Closely Watched Trains. Forty years on, IStKoE also focuses on World War II, tracing the progress of Dite (Barnev), a child-like figure of naive innocence who works as a waiter in a series of increasingly fancy establishments as he pursues his simple goal of wealth-acccumulation. As his country quickly succumbs to Hitler's aggressively expansionist Germany, Dite falls in love with a committed, idealistic Nazi (Jentsch) - though he himself is essentially a non-partisan, happy-go-lucky sort who's able to bob along on history's turbulent tides. IStKoE is in some ways this year's equivalent to Paul Verhoeven's Black Book: a big, expensive-looking, rather old-fashioned sort of production (in this case, complete with distracting post-synch dubbing), episodic and conventionally structured (via flashback from a post-war perspective), whose surface sheen hides all manner of moral complexities and ambiguities. Both films feature a rather surprising amount of nudity - and, as it happens, postage-stamps play a small but pivotal role in both scripts. Menzel's picture is, however, rather more troubling in terms of the viewer's relationship with the protagonist, as Dite - in contrast to Black Book's heroine - never seems to grasp the horrendous nature of the Nazi regime with which he becomes so intimately familiar. But the tone is generally rather lighter than in the Verhoeven movie: for long stretches, it's fundamentally a comedy, most of the ripest laughs being deftly mined by Martin Huba as Skrivanek, unflappable maitre d' of the jaw-droppingly opulent Hotel Pariz. Rather less successful are the extended sequences set in the 'present' (i.e. early 1950s), where Dite, recently released from a 15-year prison stretch - and played by a craggy actor (Oldrich Kaiser) who bears only a passing resemblance to the boyish Barnev - romances a flame-haired neighbour and looks back on his youthful adventures with a rather plodding kind of wistfulness. But on the whole I Served the King of England (the title referring, perhaps surprisingly, not to Dite but to the vastly experienced Skrivanek) is a rewarding affair, one likely to appeal most strongly to those who remember Menzel from his long-ago heyday. THE acclaimed Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky is the subject of Manufactured Landscapes, an ambitious documentary which tackles some weighty topical issues in a stimulating, intriguing, but ultimately rather troubling manner. While it's definitely worth a look for anyone interested in issues relating to the exploitation of workers and man's impact on his natural environment, the film raises more questions than it answers - with often-frustrating results. The most remarkable sequence is the very first: a technically-dazzling eight-minute tracking-shot through a vast interior factory-space at what we later learn is 'Sentai Electrical' (motto : 'Professionalism is our principle"), in an unidentified, heavily-industrialised corner of China. Here we see Burtynsky working on the latest in his series of panoramic photographs showing what he describes as "the largest industrial incursions": carefully-composed longshots in which the human participants are treated as interchangeable automatons or ant-like specks in the distance. Burtynsky is careful to maintain a studied neutrality about the subjects of his work - though, with his images typically changing hands for upwards of $15,000 a pop, there's clearly a major disjunct between the circumstances of this globetrotting modern artist and those who populate his images (performing what he acknowledges to be "very, very low-paid work".) It's arguably appropriate that these issues of artistic distance should become so nagging when the artworks themselves rely for their effect on distance and scale: Baichwal seems to share his carefully-studied detachment towards the political and socio-economic subtexts of his photographs, which she occasionally presents in a kind of slideshow, to the accompaniment of shimmering electronica. Manufactured Landscapes thus refracts the work of Burtynsky through Baichwal's own lenses, and as the scope of her film becomes more diffuse as it progresses (seguing from the Chinese factories to the even less well paid efforts of Bangladeshi shipbreakers), we become increasingly conscious of a certain evasiveness, a tendency to stick with a "very broad view" which makes it "hard to see the details." Is Burtynsky guilty of constructing an aesthetic of misery, degradation and exploitation? Or is the terrible beauty of his art a silently crushing indictment of the fouled-up world he records? Baichwal, clearly a major Burtynsky fan, is - ironically enough - always much too close to her material to risk even raising such questions. But one suspects that, if the drones of Sentai Electrical ever got the chance to see her film, they wouldn't be half so backward at coming forward. FINE performances - from rock-solid veteran Ricardo Darin and relative newcomer Ines Efron - elevate XXY, an offbeat but ultimately uneven portrayal of youthful angst in a coastal Uruguayan village. One of the residents is waif-like Alex (Efron), whose woes go way beyond the normal hormonal difficulties suffered by most 15-year-olds: he/she is In 1985, Argentina - via Luis Puenzo's The Official Story - won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. This remains, astonishingly, the only time a film from any South (or indeed Central) American film has been so honoured. Since then, Argentina has been one of the success stories of world cinema - regardless of its rollercoaster economy's vertiginous vagaries - to the extent that there are now several promising young directors emerging each year onto the world stage. The most talented of the bunch is arguably Lisandro Alonso, who has yet to see any of his uncompromisingly austere films (La Libertad; Los Muertos; Fantasma) obtain UK distribution beyond the film-festival circuit. The Alonso situation makes it somewhat frustrating that a rather lukewarm picture like XXY should be picked up while many more worthwhile projects languish in semi-obscurity. A low-key, slow-burning affair, it's shot in alluringly muted, greyey-bluey tones by Natasha Braier (a particularly talented cinematographer also responsible for Shane Meadows' newie, the wonderful Somers Town) and proceeds as much by significant looks and silences as dialogue. Puenzo script (based on a story by isn't without pretentious undertones: Alex's dad (Darin) is an expert in marine biology whose surname just so happens to be Kraken, and there's all manner of symbolism involving turtles and other denizens of the deep. The he/she stuff, while undeniably unusual, is really just an attention-grabbing pretext to explore the relationships between parents and children - and on those limited terms XXY does, quietly, succeed. Neil Young 28th April, 2008 written for the next issue of Tribune magazine  * Apparently the term "hermaphrodite" is no longer regarded as a suitable description for this condition. I SERVED THE KING OF ENGLAND : [7/10] : Obsluhoval jsem anglickeho krale : Czech Republic 06 : Jiri MENZEL : 118m (approx) : seen CineWorld cinema, Edinburgh, 17th August 2007 (public show - paid £6.76) : Edinburgh Film Festival : [original review] MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES : [6/10] : Canada 2006 : Jennifer BAICHWAL : 83m : seen Cinerama cinema, Rotterdam, 1st February 2008 (press show) : Rotterdam Film Festival : [original review] XXY : [6/10] : Argentina (Arg/Sp/Fr) 07 : Lucia PUENZO : 89m : seen Cameo cinema, Edinburgh, 16th August 2007 (press show) : Edinburgh Film Festival : [original review]
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