| for Tribune : 'Colossal Youth' [7/10]; 'Gone Baby Gone' [7/10]; Edinburgh Film Festival preview |
|
|
| Wednesday, 04 June 2008 | |
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Colossal Youth Portugal 2006 Starring : 'Ventura' (Mario Ventura Medina), 'Vanda' (Vanda Duarte) Director : Pedro Costa ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Gone Baby Gone USA 2007 Starring : Casey Affleck, Ed Harris Director : Ben Affleck ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ THERE are certain critics who reckon that Pedro Costa - relatively little-known in Britain, 49, Portuguese - is the finest and most important film-maker in the world today, and that Colossal Youth (which reportedly came within an ace of winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes two years ago, and which belatedly obtains UK "distribution" via a month-long, weekends-only run at the ever-adventurous ICA) is his masterpiece. Audiences may well agree to differ: this is film-as-art at its most refined and challenging. The 155-minute film consists of repetitive, elliptical, gnomic episodes in the life of Ventura, a real-life sixtyish (?) man living in an unspecified corner of an unspecified city (i.e. Lisbon). His wife Clotilde leaves him, destroying their furniture as she goes. Ventura, dejected, spends his time visiting his "children" (who call him 'Papa'). Monologues ensue: they talk, he listens; he talks, they listen. "Conversations" occasionally take place. Repetition and simplicity are crucial. Costa has gone on record that he intends certain sections of the audience to walk out at certain junctures: the film must therefore be seen in public, where the walkouts themselves become part of the experience. The film is a contemplation of light on faces, buildings, furniture, walls, doors. The source and nature of the light is ambiguous: the street lights in this area seem unusually bright, lighting up the outsides of blocks of flats so that midnight seems noon-bright. The camera almost invariably stays fixed, at a certain distance above ground, looking up at the "characters" - all of whom are people in effect playing themselves. Duration is a significant element, but considerations of time become increasingly elastic - perhaps even irrelevant. A particular love-letter, written by Ventura for an illiterate friend (son?), is repeated throughout the film: the beginning is always the same (becomes in effect the picture's complex mantra) but the ending always changes - and the final reading is capped by a droll "punchline". The austerity of Costa's approach makes it seem unlikely, but wry comedy of this kind can often be extracted from the picture's tough, seemingly unyielding meat. Colossal Youth - named after the 1980 song and LP by Welsh lo-fi rockers Young Marble Giants - clearly won't be to all tastes, but anyone interested in current world cinema really needs to at least give it a try. HOW ironic that a film which culminates in a particularly thorny moral dilemma should have caused rather similar problems for its UK distributor. Gone Baby Gone was slated for release last Christmas, but was "indefinitely" postponed over concerns that the subject-matter - the abduction of a briefly-unsupervised little blonde girl - bore unfortunate similarities to the Madeleine McCann case (ironically enough, the picture now looks more like an eerie prefiguring of the Shannon Matthews affair.) At one stage it appeared that the picture might even go straight to DVD: a harsh fate indeed for what is, flaws notwithstanding, one of the year's more satisfying mainstream thrillers. It's a notably promising directorial debut from Ben Affleck - who's also made a decent job (with Aaron Stockard) of adapting Denis Lehane's hardboiled 1998 novel for the screen: the results are ultimately more satisfying, indeed, than the last Hollywood Lehane adaptation, Clint Eastwood's intense but portentous and overpraised Mystic River (2003). In both movies the story unfolds in some of the scruffier, seamier corners of Boston (with which local-lad Affleck evidently has greater natural affinity than Californian Eastwood), using crime-genre tropes to explore issues of morality, community and justice. Risking nepotism charges, Affleck casts kid-brother Casey as private-eye protagonist Kenzie - but, fortunately for all, the actor (consolidating his recent breakthrough in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) proves ideal as a man who's much tougher than his slight frame, youthful face and whiny voice suggest. Kenzie is an east-coast cousin of Elliott Gould's Philip Marlowe in Robert Altman's masterpiece The Long Goodbye (1973): an easy-going, laid-back sort whose rock-solid moral sense is made to seem freakishly anachronistic and incongruous in the context of his decadent times and seedy milieu. This resilient core gradually emerges after Kenzie and his professional/romantic partner Gennaro (Monaghan) are hired to investigate the disappearance of moppet Amanda (Madeline O'Brien) - and discover that her loudmouth, hard-drinking mother Helene (vivid work from Oscar-nominated Amy Ryan) has numerous messy connections to Boston's underworld. The resultant convolutions may strain plausibility as twists, flashbacks and revelations pile up - but audiences willing to go along with the journey will be rewarded arriving at a final-act destination that's genuinely thought-provoking and unexpectedly poignant. Go, Affleck(s), go! EDINBURGH 2008 preview So, where will you be between 5.30 and 6.45pm on Thursday, the 19th of June? At Sankt Jakob Park in Basel, gearing up for the European Championship quarter-final between Turkey and Germany, perhaps? Sampling the eyepopping delights of Expo 2008 in Zarazoga? Maybe you'll be at Royal Ascot, counting your winnings after Coastal Path's Gold Cup win? Enjoyable exploits all - but the place to be during those particular 75 minutes is surely a front-row seat in screen 2 of the CineWorld multiplex at Fountain Park, Edinburgh. You'll thus be able to experience the UK premiere of the new film by Terence Davies, Of Time and the City, which looks a safe bet to be the highlight of the 62nd Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF). Davies may not be a "household" name like, say, Mike Leigh or Ken Loach, but the 62-year-old Liverpudlian - responsible for Distant Voices Still Lives (1988), The Long Day Closes (1992) and The House of Mirth (2000) - is revered in many parts of the world as the great, living British director. He's always been a textbook example of the prophet lacking "honour" in his own backyard - and, more crucially, lacking the funds to get his movies made. This new work - a 75-minute impressionistic documentary-collage about Davies's home city - is the result of 'Digital Departures', a project set up as part of Liverpool's year as European Capital of Culture, allotting three video-shot films £250,000 each. And while there's general delight among the cineastic community that Davies is back in 'business', there's also dismay that such a respected auteur should have to seek such "unusual" sources of funding. And early reports indicate that the money has been extremely well-spent: Time Out's Geoff Andrew reckoned it the first "truly great movie" he saw at this year's Cannes Film Festival. "It's about Davies," he gushed, "it's about Liverpool, it's about Britain and how it's changed in the last century, and it is about what it means to be a sentient, intelligent - and, mercifully, in Davies's case, witty - human being. O tempora, o mores... Oh, what a magnificently beautiful movie!" While it's terrific to see Davies included in the EIFF programme, it's slightly disappointing that only one public screening has been scheduled - especially as the majority of the 141 other features on display are being shown twice. Edinburgh's slate is always dauntingly vast: even hardened critics seldom manage to see more than 30 pictures, even if they attend for the full duration (this year 18-29 June, a belated move from the traditional August slot when EIFF had to compete for space with a dozen other, noisier festivals). It's likely that most Tribune readers will only be able to attend for a few days, of course, and if you do make it up for the Davies premiere (try the Highfield Guest House on Mayfield Road for top-value accommodations; chow down at Hanam's Lebanese restaurant on Brougham Street) make sure you're also around two days later for the first UK showing of another 75-minute epic-in-miniature from a British director who's often more appreciated overseas than at home. Regular readers of this magazine may recall my waxing enthusiastic about Shane Meadows' delightful tale of teenage friendship Somers Town when I caught it at the Berlin Film Festival in February. I'm pleased to report that UK distribution is on the cards for later in the year, but why wait till then? And if you attend the screening on Saturday 21st June at 1430 (CineWorld 3), you should also try to get a ticket for the on-stage interview with Meadows - who's always excellent in such situations - scheduled for 1645 on the same afternoon (in CineWorld 2). Among the other new/new-ish titles in the lineup, try to catch Xiaolu Guo's We Went To Wonderland, Eran Rikli's Lemon Tree, Klaus Kinski "concert-movie" Jesus Christ Saviour, Brazilian drama Elite Squad (wildly controversial winner of Berlin's Golden Bear), and loopy fantasy The Fall, while there's also a very strong word for offbeat documentary Three Miles North of Molkom. This year's two retrospectives, meanwhile, look decidedly promising: the oft-overlooked ouevre of seminal 1960s documentarian Shirley Clarke (The Cool World; Portrait of Jason; Ornette - Made in America) gets a rare airing, while an 18-film Jeanne Moreau tribute features her collaborations with Welles (The Trial and The Immortal Story), Truffaut (Jules et Jim and The Bride Wore Black), Bunuel (Diary of a Chambermaid), Fassbinder (Querelle), Marguerite Duras (Nathalie Granger), Demy (The Bay of Angels) and a Louis Malle quartet: Le feu follet, The Lovers, Viva Maria! and, arguably the pick of the bunch, the wondrous Lift to the Scaffold from 1958, complete with improvised Miles Davis score. full details, and ticket-booking : www.edfilmfest.org.uk Neil Young 20th/21st May, 2008 written for the current issue of Tribune magazine  COLOSSAL YOUTH : [7/10] : Juventude em marcha aka En avant, jeunesse! : Portugal (Por/Fr/Swi) 2006 : Pedro COSTA : 157m (timed) : seen National Film Theatre, London, 27th October 2006 (public show - paid £8.50) : London Film Festival : [original review] GONE BABY GONE : [7/10] : USA 2007 : Ben AFFLECK : 114m (BBFC timing) : seen Biopalatset cinema, Gothenburg, Sweden, 26th January 2008 (public show - paid SEK 85 = £7.19 approx) |
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
