| from Agnes to ramZinsky : Viennale 2008 feature-film capsule-reviews, all together on one handy page |
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 The Beaches of Agnes. Playful, rather lovely cine-autobiography by Agnes Varda, director of Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962), Vagabond (1985), The Gleaners and I (2000), and Jacquot de Nantes (1991), and co-director of Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967) with her late husband Jacques Demy - Jacquot was her tribute/love-letter to Demy, completed during his final months. Now marking her own 80th birthday, Varda takes us on a tangent-happy amiable amble through her globetrotting life and work - with cameos from friends/collaborators ranging from fellow Nouvelle Vague / Rive Gauche luminaries Godard and Marker to Harrison Ford, Alexander Calder and Jim Morrison. Reflectively rambling but always clear-eyed, Varda emerges as the best kind of eccentric elderly relative - one whose idiosyncratic creativity remains inspiringly undimmed into her ninth decade. Birdsong. Many highbrow critics hailed Albert Serra's 2006 debut Honor de cavalleria - an austere Don Quixote adaptation - as a minor masterpiece, interpreting its soporific pace, underlit visuals and minimal dialogue as evidence of an artist at work. It's a similar deal with his follow-up Birdsong, which follows the Three Kings through various striking landscapes as they trek towards the new-born Jesus. Context, symbol and implication are all in this ostentatiously arduous film - one which feels like the work of a passionately religious individual struggling with the difficulties of expressing faith in this particular medium at this historical juncture. He doesn't quite pull it off - there's strong material here, but it's still an edit or two away from really coming into proper focus. The Blue Bull. Essentially a one-man show in which we observe, documentary-style, a twentysomething chap as he passes the time in and around his comfortably spartan isolated farmhouse. Our taciturn, bearded 'hero' applies himself to learning about bullfighting - obtaining theory and philosophical background from books, and enacting increasingly elaborate dry-runs, sans bull, in various corners of 'his' (?) property. What it's all supposed to add up to is anyone's guess, however: shot on cheap-looking, hand-held video, it's visually unengaging and, while intriguing in concept, is too inscrutably gnomic to justify its hour-long running-time. Further drastic trimming might result in a worthwhile short. Cisco Pike. Thuddingly blatant attempt to (A) cash in on the post-Easy Rider appetite for drug-themed, anti-establishment fare and (B) make a 'countercultural' movie star out of folk-singer Kris Kristofferson. It fails on the first front partly thanks to the wispy, contrived 'plot' (moody folk-singer-cum-drug-dealer's attempts to go straight are stymied by the machinations of a corrupt cop) and partly thanks to Kristofferson's rather glaring limitations. His lack of acting experience is cruelly exposed in his scenes alongside pros likes Gene Hackman (cop), Karen Black (our hero's hippy-dippy girlfriend), Antonio Fargas and movie-stealingly droll Warhol-protege 'Viva', all of whom are frustratingly underused. City of Fear. Companion-piece to Murder By Contract (below) is a more conventional drama, making less use of leading-man Vince Edwards (an intriguingly smarmy/macho missing link between Victor Mature and Mark Ruffalo.) This time he's a desperate San Quentin escapee who heads to Los Angeles with a canister he believes contains mega-valuable pure heroin - but which actually conceals an improbably deadly radioactive substance. Picture resembles Kiss Me Deadly in its combination of noir-thriller and atom-age paranoia, and location-sequences provide a fascinating panoramic tour of the sprawling metropolis. A succession of talky indoor scenes, however, bog down the pacing and near-fatally sap suspense-levels. Crime Wave. Gritty policier is an unusually convincing peek into Los Angeles' mid-50s underworld. Three tough-nut prison escapees (including an improbably youthful Charles 'Buchinsky' Bronson as a leather-jacketed lout) hit Los Angeles, imperilling the straight-arrow life-style of nice-guy ex-con Gene Nelson - who's got broodingly cynical cop Sterling Hayden on his case. The story is a handy pretext to explore various atmospheric night-town locales, while the dialogue is vivid hard-boil with a few dashes of quirk. Hayden, great value, lands just the right side of ham - with Jay Novello (drink-sodden animal-doctor) and Timothy Carey (scary-weirdo crim) effortlessly attention-grabbing on the sidelines. End of the Rainbow. A solid, sensitive look at how globalisation can disrupt delicate economic and social eco-systems, focussing on the arrival of industrialised gold-mining in a sparsely-populated corner of Guinea (West Africa.) While 'The Company' presents a avuncular, paternalistic but relatively forward-thinking image - perhaps partly for the benefit of the cameras - it doesn't take long for various discontents to surface. The director focusses mainly on men going about their labours, punctuating these Michael-Glawogger-ish sequences with spoken and/or sung testimony from the locals - the latter adding a soulful, reflective dimension to the film that prevents it from being merely fly-on-the-wall fare. Everything Is Fine. A quartet of teen suicides is the trigger for this downbeat, solid but over-conventional drama. After a striking animated opening (which nothing in the body of the film matches in terms of boldness, invention or sheer impact) a fussy, tripartite narrative structure rather laboriously unfolds, flashing back and forwards in time around the central figure: a troubled lad who was part of the same clique as the deceased foursome. This kind of kids-aren't-alright subject-matter is depressingly topical in many 'western' countries, but needs a fresher tack than the film is ever able to find - resulting in a TV-movie-ish enterprise. Flower in the Pocket. A child's-eye view of Kuala Lumpur is presented in this likeable - but ultimately somewhat ho-hum - shoestring-budgeted, DV-shot production. We follow a pair of schoolboy brothers, who look about nine and seven, and are largely left to their own devices thanks to the lackadaisical negligence of their lone-parent dad (whose workplace travails form a subplot to the main 'action'.) Moments of casual charm abound, and the lads turn in nice, believable performances in a picture attuned to the nuances of multi-cultural, multi-ethnic modern-day Malaysia. At times, however, the director strains just a little too hard for cute, bittersweet effect. The Flower of Pain. Elliptical fragments relate the story of three characters - impoverished, disaffected, over-articulate bohemian intellectuals in an unspecified American city near the start of the Reagan era. Coffee and cigarettes are consumed; a book on Antonin Artaud is consulted (at least one or two of the protagonists are actors); the nature of relationships is talked over and over, to a destructive degree: this is, essentially, the anatomy of a very painful breakup, conducted under the shadow of inescapable mortality. Anticipating the 'Mumblecore' genre by a good 20 years, Gianvito's earnest, semi-experimental debut feels like an acutely personal act of self-expression. Occasionally guilty of groping a little too strenuously towards symbol-heavy profundity, but fruitfully challenging on a formal level and still of more than mere time-capsule interest. For a Moment, Freedom. The plight of Iranian refugees fleeing via Turkey to Europe is the focus of this slick, manipulative affair that struggles to juggle comic, dramatic and tragic elements. Focus is on an extended family who become haplessly stranded in Ankara thanks to bureaucratic officialdom - but there's also a parallel story in which a middle-aged Iranian and his live-wire Kurdish friend engage in their own quest for asylum in the west. The sentimental, over-conventional score underlines nearly every point in unhelpful, intrusive style and the writer-director's impeccably admirable intentions are frequently undone by his tendencies towards corny melodrama and soapy histrionics. Gone in 60 Seconds. One-of-a-kind action-comedy takes absolutely forever to get going - the early and middle stretches laboriously set up some kind of insanely elaborate car-theft plot via impenetrable, incomprehensible exposition, stiff performances, vile costumes/wigs, and oddly 'narrated' visuals. But then proceedings suddenly click into gear for a breathtakingly kinetic, exhilaratingly exhausting final half-hour: essentially one long, long, long, long cops-v-criminal demolition-derby car-chase. Thrills and hilarity come breathlessly thick and escalatingly fast in this poundingly entertaining triumph for writer/director/star H B Halicki (who plays 'Maindrian [sic] Pace') and his editor Warner E Leighton - who learned his trade, appropriately enough, on The Flintstones. Hollywood Boulevard. Rather like its has-been protagonist, this creaky Movieland satire hasn't aged particularly well - then again, even 1937's audiences would probably have identified deficiencies in numerous departments. Early focus on down-on-his-luck former matinee-idol (John Halliday, looking much older than his 57 years) promises a droll, more comic precursor of Sunset Blvd. - but then attention unprofitably wanders to the dullsville, hokey romance between the ex-star's daughter and a dashing young poet with screenwriting aspirations (Robert Cummings, tiresomely OTT throughout.) Even worse is a third-act shift into twisty melodrama - via a blackmail angle that's developed in off-puttingly clunky fashion. Disappointing. (How) To Be Dead. Scrappy no-budgeter about a trio of Buenos Aires twentysomethings has flashes of inspiration, but a little of its existential/intellectual larkishness goes a very long way. In a series of sketch-type scenes that give the impression of being improvised 'on the hoof', our heroes (actors playing actors?) engage in verbal, largely sophomoric 'games' - exchanging daft stories, jokes without punchlines, etc - against a series of downtown city-centre locales. Monochrome and largely nocturnal, the picture is nicely shot, and hangdog lead Ignacio Rogers has charismatic appeal - but it's all much too pretentious, opaque and ostentatiously elusive to make it worthwhile. The Inheritors. Though less impressive than his devastating 2004 debut Tropic of Cancer, Eugenio Polgovsky's follow-up confirms him as a high-calibre documentarian. Once again, he delivers an unadorned, uninflected look at poverty-striken lives in today's Mexico - the emphasis now on various forms of child labour. There is no voice-over, no on-screen titles to provide information about the subject, forcing the viewer to come to their own disturbing deductions. We're initially surprised that the children seem so happy - smiling for the camera like youngsters do. But the implications of those smiles are, we realise, more troubling and haunting than pages of statistics. The King of Roses. Gloriously berserk example of the unapologetic, floridly symbolic, too-much-is-not-enough Art Film which rarely gets funded any more - one whose opulent grandeur quickly transcends what initially looks like unbearable pretentiousness. What plot there is involves one 'Anna Rahma' (Magdalena Montezuma) a tormented, mentally-unstable, imperious grande dame - spiritual cousin of Norma Desmond and Veronika Voss, perhaps - who moves to a rambling mansion on the Portuguese coast to grow roses with her adult son. But this is mere pretext for a series of intense, operatic reveries - most of them ostentatiously sensual, many of them dangerously skirting the mistreatment of animals without, thankfully, ever crossing the line into actual cruelty. Not for everyone, by any means, but yields multiple, unexpected rewards for the patiently indulgent. Liverpool. Saluted as the "poet and master" of Argentine cinema following La libertad and Los muertos, Lisandro Alonso spent years on his next feature, Liverpool - dashing off an hour-long "squib", Fantasma, along the way. Predictably, the supposedly "throwaway" Fantasma turns out to be the best thing he's ever done - a truly dazzling miniature - and Liverpool, though by no means without interest, shows signs of having been worked on and worked over for rather too long. A glum tale of a sailor visiting his aged mother in a remote corner of Patagonia, it's forbiddingly minimalist, snail-paced stuff - rewarding for those with the patience to go along with the journey, but frustrating in that we now know Alonso is capable of so much more. March. When three young friends kill themselves on the eve of their 30th birthdays, their surviving families, friends and neighbours - in a small Tyrolean town - experience a mixture of grief, guilt and bafflement. Making his feature debut, polymath writer-director Klaus is clearly much more interested in and performance than story or visuals, and he's far from the first film-maker to explore the anomie and discontents beneath the affluent surfaces of 21st-century Austria. He does so with sufficient skill and sensitivity to justify such a choice of material, although this kind of Dardennes-ish unadorned, observational social-realism is rapidly becoming over-familiar. Medicine For Melancholy. Talk-fest two-hander is a touch too aware of its own classy smartness, but is executed with an beguilingly fresh combination of intelligence and sweetness. Shot in cool, sepia-hinted monochrome, it's a post-modern quasi-romance in the Linklater/Sunrise/Sunset vein - set in some quietly well-heeled, nicely unfamiliar corners of San Francisco. The fact that this is a city where African-Americans comprise a surprisingly small minority is just one of countless subjects discussed by our (black) quasi-lovebirds. They make for pleasant, stimulating company - though, oddly, they're peripheral to the most surprising and effective sequence, an informative, all-too-brief documentary-style discussion of SF housing-issues. Murder By Contract. Pleasingly offbeat, economic post-noir in which we follow the career of a taciturn, self-absorbed, hyper-professional hitman (Vince Edwards - see companion-piece City of Fear above) through his first Manhattan jobs and then cross-country to Los Angeles - where this insouciantly strutting bantam faces his toughest assignment. Reminiscent of Collateral, The Third Man and Point Blank at various junctures, but has its own divertingly distinctive flavour thanks to a judicious combination of thriller and deadpan-comic elements (the jauntily twangling/ambling guitar-score tips the balance towards the latter end of the spectrum.) Edwards, meanwhile, is a consistent delight as the icily self-contained killer. Must Read After My Death. Chronicle of an unorthodox, dysfunctional American family will be compared with Andrew Jarecki's Capturing the Friedmans - both depend on the subjects' own enormous, self-recorded archives. But while Morgan Dews, a junior member of the clan himself, doesn't come up with anything quite so shatteringly disorienting as Jarecki, there's still much of psychological and social interest here. It's essentially a clear-eyed tribute to his free-spirited grandmother, whose 'open' marriage to a continent-hopping womaniser gradually shades from happiness into nightmare. The archive of audio and visual footage is very smartly edited, but Paul Damian Hogan's score is somewhat over-conventional and distracting. The Order of Myths. This study of American race-relations is certainly timely, but Margaret Brown's unobtrusively anthropological profile of the Mardi Gras celebrations in Mobile, Alabama (the oldest such festivities in the country, and long since "segregated" into a pair of parallel, wildly elaborate events, one organised by the black community, one by the whites) would be worthy of attention at any juncture. Deft and even-handed, it's surprisingly illuminating about the past (countless eye-opening details emerge), a colourfully vibrant record of the present, and also a cautiously optimistic peek into possible futures. Though hardly groundbreaking in form, the film's rich content provides bountiful compensations. Our Beloved Month of August. Ambitious in structure but wayward in execution, this genially sprawling 2-1/2-hour affair shows evidence of ample talent - but director/co-writer/co-editor Gomes is prone to self-indulgence. First half largely comprises ethnographic / anthropological documentary sequences about a rural Portuguese backwater during mid-summer, when cheesy pop bands tour from village to village performing sentimental romantic numbers. The emphasis then shifts to a soap-opera-style fictional story involving one of the groups, involving a puppy-love triangle and an awkwardly-handled incest theme. Larkish meta-fictional inserts featuring the actual film-makers punctuate the narrative, lending an off-puttingly smart-alec air to an enigmatic, boisterous but ultimately unsatisfactory enterprise. Pit Stop. "This machinery owns us!" exclaims mechanic Ellen McLeod (E.Burstyn, billed as Ellen McRae) - and one gets the impression that no-one in this car-obsessed rough gem would have it otherwise. Certainly not cocky street-racer Rick (slowburning 'Dick' Davalos), whom scheming track-owner Willard (line-slurring Brian Donlevy) reckons might be just the chap to take over from maniacal, cackling Hawk (Sid Haig, an alarmingly uninhibited physical performance) as star of his smash-em-up figure-8 circuit. Like most of the autos on view, this is a modified kind of vehicle - atmospheric authenticity plus eccentricity-studded artifice - but the ride proves more than worthwhile. Rise and Fall of a Little Film Company, from a novel by James Hadley Chase. Godard's contribution to TV crime-show Serie Noire is a characteristically subversive/nihilistic mashup that deconstructs everything it touches: television and cinema (which are presented as mutually exclusive and antithetical), acting, casting, storytelling and, most specifically, the folly of "adapting" a work from one medium to another. Elusive shards of quasi-plot involve a two-bit movie-company's doomed attempts to film James Hadley Chase's potboiler The Soft Center - in French, Chantons en choeur, which translates as "Let's sing in the choir." Godard, however,is most emphatically a lone voice - and his 'song' may not always exactly be musical, but his wilfully discordant form of take-no-prisoners, scattershot intellectual slapstick is often surprisingly hilarious - and occasionally penetrating... when it actually comes close to hitting its myriad targets, that is. Salamandra. There's apparently an unwritten rule in current and recent cinema which states that any anarchic/hippy commune must invariably be either chaotic, filthy, unwholesome or ill-conceived - or, preferably, all of the above. That's certainly the case in this intense, downbeat little study of a dysfunctional, chain-smoking mother - recently released from jail - who takes her six-year-old son to a remote Patagonian collective. Shot in the stripped-down, unadorned, hand-held, Dardennes-ish style that's become the default style for artistically-inclined moviemakers worldwide, the picture has a distractingly hazy chronological setting - and, more damaging, is almost entirely populated by annoying, unsympathetic characters. The Savage Eye. Weird little psychological travelogue - a bit like Carnival of Souls without the ghosts - would work infinitely better a silent movie. This would enable us to pay full attention to the wonderful array of Los Angeles locales, mostly decidedly off-the-beaten-track, visited by our confused heroine - divorcee 'Judith X' (Barbara Baxley), fumbling towards self-realisation - without being constantly distracted by the poetic/philosophical drivel on the soundtrack. This consists of a sophomoric interior-monologue between Judith and a male presence whom the credits identify as 'The Poet' (Gary Merrill) but who'd be more accurately described as 'Verbose Spouter Of Pretentious Doggerel.' Symptom X. Audiences who found Kobayashi Masahiro's grindingly repetitive The Rebirth a little too action-packed should seek out this even more static example of current Japanese art-cinema. A thirtish man shares a small city-centre flat with his ageing mother. They barely speak, and their daily routines only occasionally intersect. As the resentful son shows signs of losing patience with his glum, increasingly incontinent and confused parent, there's tension: will he cross the line into abuse? The climax, when it eventually arrives, is rather a deft surprise - but even at sixty-odd minutes, this arch, austere film is too much of a slog. Tony Manero. An unusual angle on Chile's Pinochet dictatorship - the repressive police-state is shown as a social atomisation which makes it paradoxically straightforward for a murderous psychopath to go about his criminal business. The film, however, takes things a step further into offbeat territory by having the killer - a withdrawn, taciturn, fiftyish misanthrope - obsessed with the film Saturday Night Fever and its main character Tony Manero, to the extent of entering a TV contest showcasing Manero impersonators. The result is an unlikely but unsettling combination of moods and tones, which narrowly overcomes the gimmicky implausibility of its central conceits. To See If I'm Smiling. Tamar Yarom has tracked down six women, all formerly members of the Israeli army, willing to talk openly about their experiences in the Occupied Territories. She then draws out testimony which is not only an incisive indictment of the army's policies in Palestine, but paints the conduct of these individuals in an often-unflattering light. Though it's perhaps chiefly a confessional catharsis for guilt-ridden oppressors - who, unlike so many of their Palestinian targets, are still alive to tell their tales - the picture does convince that its eloquent participants are also, to some degree, victims of a deeply misconceived policy. Touch of Evil. Larkish/sombre adaptation of Whit Masterson's novel Badge of Evil sees writer/director Welles' revisit The Third Man territory. In a film that's all about crossing 'frontiers' of all kinds, the US/Mexican frontier replaces quadripartite Vienna, with Welles again the Machiavellian, amoral Mr Big who miasmically dominates proceedings whether or not he's on screen. This time he's an obese, corrupt old-school cop, "investigating" a murder attempt on a crusading Mexican politican (an off-puttingly "browned-up" Charlton Heston) shortly after the latter's marriage to a feisty, ever-so-blonde American (Janet Leigh). Inventive Carol-Reed-ish camera-angles and lighting-effects abound in a monochrome, eccentric fever-dream of a movie which isn't anywhere near as disturbing or provocative as it initially appears, but showcases Marlene Dietrich (two-scene cameo as a seen-it-all madam-cum-fortune-teller) to sensational effect. A Week Alone. Quietly absorbing, unobtrusively acute study of childhood and class in modern-day Argentina. The setting is an affluent, gated community patrolled by private security-guards; the principal characters a group of kids (of various ages) whose parents have gone away on holiday, leaving them under the nominal care of a housekeeper. Complications eventually ensue - the arrival of the housekeeper's brother, who is evidently of a different social stratum from the rest of the kids, exacerbates various simmering tensions - though proceedings generally unfold at a pretty low-ish boil. Even when mayhem erupts towards the end, melodramatics and histrionics are carefully eschewed. Wendy and Lucy. After all-male two-hander road-movie Old Joy, Reichardt delivers another lo-fi, humanistically sensitive glimpse into marginal American lives - this is American "indie" cinema, but with just enough of a ragged "independent" edge to keep things interesting. Based on Jon Raymond's story 'Train Choir' (odd title), it's the measured, downbeat story of drifter Wendy (Michelle Williams) heading to a new life in Alaska with her dog. Our heroine is resourceful and proudly self-reliant - but also isn't averse to a spot of shoplifting, a lapse which results in disproportionately difficult consequences. A victim of tough economic circumstances, Wendy is, however, essentially the author of her own misfortunes - and Williams' mournful-gamine performance is just a tad too calculated to elicit our sympathies. Worth a look, nevertheless. The Wrestler. Mickey Rourke delivers an Oscar-worthy performance - one that, barring accidents, surely will be recognised by the Academy - as a washed-up WWF-type ring-warrior, eking out a living on the New Jersey circuit some 20 years after his prime. But what's genuinely startling is that the film is much more than just a showcase for its star - indeed, the work by director Aronofsky (vaulting far beyond anything he's previously achieved) and feature-debutant scriptwriter Robert D Siegel, plus their various technical collaborators, matches Rourke at every step. The stunning result is a thunderously entertaining, surprisingly moving, deftly thought-provoking example of current American cinema at its very best: by some measure the finest movie of the year, and one of the decade's top half-dozen so far. Neil Young 3rd-11th November 2008 VIENNALE 2008 index-page 
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