| for this week's TRIBUNE : four new UK releases (incl. 'Body of Lies') + Vienna film-festival report |
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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Belle Toujours [6/10] Portugal/France 2006 Starring : Michel Piccoli, Bulle Ogier Director : Manoel de Oliveira ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Body of Lies [6/10] USA 2008 Starring : Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe Director : Ridley Scott ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Choke [4/10] USA 2008 Starring : Sam Rockwell, Kelly Macdonald Director : Clark Gregg ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Special People [6/10] UK 2007 Starring : Dominic Coleman, Robyn Frampton Director : Justin Edgar ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ CINEPHILE readers of The Independent may have been choked on their cornflakes this month when their newspaper's front page promised extensive coverage of 'Belle de Jour - The Sequel.' But fans of Luis Bunuel's 1967 masterpiece - in which haute-bourgeoise housewife Severine (Catherine Deneuve) turns ultra-high-class prostitute - might perhaps have been disappointed by the actual four-page feature. This was devoted to the author/blogger who uses 'Belle de Jour' as her nom de plume for bestselling books purporting to be the 'Diary of a London Call-Girl.' Not a mention was made of Bunuel, of Joseph Kessel's 1928 source-novel - nor of Belle Toujours, the 2006 follow-up to Belle de Jour. It's now being belatedly released in the UK - two years after premiering at Venice - to mark its Portuguese writer-director Manoel de Oliveira's 100 birthday on December 11th. De Oliveira - racing-driver, athlete and sometime trapeze-artist in his youth - is the last active director who worked in the silent era, and he's showing few signs of slowing down: since Belle Toujours he's completed three shorts, a feature, and is in pre-production on yet another. To be brutally honest, however, it's unlikely Belle Toujours would be getting quite so much exposure if (a) its director hadn't shown such unique creative longevity and (b) it had to be judged solely on its own merits, and not in the reflected glory of the Bunuel movie. Fatally, Deneuve is a no-show, Severine played instead (capably enough) by Ogier. But Piccoli returns as one of the screen's great connoisseurs of decadence, transgression and corruption, Monsieur Husson - an imposing, scene-stealing presence on the sidelines last time round. Piccoli (83 in December) is four decades older - and while he hasn't lost his old devilish charm, his contribution is that much more belaboured. Likewise the film: certain sequences have a pleasing lightness, and it's refreshing to see the passing of time and the ravages of age tackled with such unapologetic directness. But Toujours (featuring one ill-advised "surreal" moment that feels like something from a TV skit-show) is conspicuously padded out to reach the bare-minimum feature-length of 64 minutes, and might have worked better as a scaled-down miniature rather than the awkwardly mid-sized canvas we're left with here. Then again, anything that causes Bunuel's Belle to be revived - and most cinemas showing Toujours have sensibly booked in it in - is cause for celebration. HAVING tackled the US's disastrous 1993 Somalia expedition with so-so results in Black Hawk Down (2001), the ever-busy Sir Ridley Scott now addresses more pressing geo-political affairs with Body of Lies. The script, by William Monahan (Scott's Kingdom of Heaven; Martin Scorsese's The Departed) is based on a novel by David Ignatius which was snapped up (and retitled) by Warner Brothers in 2006, months before it reached bookshops. At that juncture, studios hadn't yet twigged that audiences don't have much appetite for topical Middle-East-themed fare - we get plenty of that from other media, thanks very much. And, with the exception of Syriana and Charlie Wilson's War - the former at least semi-arthouse in its mind-fuddling complexities, the latter taking more of a historical "deep background" approach - picture after topical picture has underperformed at the box-offices, including Rendition, Lions For Lambs, A Mighty Heart, The Kingdom and In the Valley of Elah. Body of Lies has suffered a similar fate, despite heavyweight attractions DiCaprio and Crowe in central roles. And Scott regular Crowe is quite literally a 'heavyweight' here, having pulled a Raging Bull and piled on 50lb to play CIA bigwig Ed Hoffman - his sedentary avoirdupois a result of his office-based job and cosy family life in the DC suburbs. This is all in very stark contrast to his man on the ground in the middle-east, ultra-energetic Jordan-based Agency highflyer Roger Ferris (DiCaprio), who spends most of his waking hours dodging bullets and/or explosions as he imvestigates a shadowy terrorist network responsible for devastating attacks on European targets. Just as Ferris is an unusually 'forward-thinking', progressive representative of the American government - Arabic-speaking, he's attuned to the specifics of local cultures, engages in an appropriately chaste courtship with a Jordanian nurse (Golshifteh Farahani) - Body of Lies feels rather more like an early Obama-era affair than an artefact of the Dubya days. Its attempt to combine brainy analysis with high-octane action-sequences doesn't quite come off - but one can always at least detect evidence of intelligence and ambition amid the twisty shenanigans. Adding a crucial element of class: deft support from the currently-ubiquitous Mark Strong (a career-best turn as silkily sinister Jordanian security chief), Jamil Khoury (taciturnly imposing as his chief henchman) and Théâtre de Complicité founder Simon McBurney, an offhand delight as one of those eccentric computer boffins which no self-respecting blockbuster can apparently do without. NINE years ago, David Fincher's Fight Club was one of those rare films which felt like a cult movie even before it was released - it certainly put Chuck Palahniuk, upon whose (relatively inferior) novel its script was based, on the literary map. Indeed, it's rather surprising that nearly a decade should have passed before another of his books made it to the big screen. Sad to report, then, that Choke - adapted from Palahniuk's 2001 novel of the same name by Clark Gregg, who also directs and appears in a prominent supporting role - is decidedly underwhelming. Gregg is one of those "you know, whatsisname" actors who's carved out a successful career on Hollywood's sidelines - you may have seen him in The Usual Suspects, Iron Man, one of his three David Mamet collaborations, or as West Wing FBI-man Mike Casper. On the evidence of Choke - plus Robert Zemeckis's daft sub-Hitchcock thriller What Lies Beneath (2000), his sole other writing credit - Gregg should really concentrate on his 'day-job.' He's certainly more effective in his thespian duties here - as the hapless protagonist's smarmy boss, he gives himself, and duly nails, most of the funniest lines - than behind the camera. Then again, it's debatable whether a more experienced director would be able to do much with the rather unvolving exploits of our sad-sack protagonist Victor (Rockwell). A self-pitying sex-addict in his late thirties, Victor's many neuroses stem from his wildly unorthodox childhood (glimpsed in numerous flashback episodes) with his colourfully adventure-prone, mentally-unstable mother (Anjelica Huston, affecting) plus the fact that he's never known his father's identity. Victor's numerous "issues" complicate every aspect of his life, including his tentative courtship with Paige (Kelly MacDonald), demure nurse at the hospital where momma is a fast-fading resident. There's potential here for a smart, cynical dissection of contemporary ennui and anomie - but Gregg, presumably in thrall to Palahniuk's text, steers down some decidedly unproductive blind alleys. If only the picture was half as clever and controversial as it clearly reckons itself to be: there's a tiresomely 'blasphemous' subplot about Victor's conception possibly being the result of quasi-Divine intervention, for example. The first and second rules of Fight Club were, famously, that you couldn't talk about Fight Club - a pity that discussing Choke, while it's by no means the worst movie around at the moment, is barely worth the bother. IT'S a little surprising - in a nice way - to see such an ultra-low-budget British movie as Special People trying its luck in commercial distribution. This unassumingly genial satire, which combines TV's The Office, Damien O'Donnell's Inside I'm Dancing (2004) and Christopher Guest's The Big Picture (1989) to uneven but ultimately winning effect, debuted at last year's Edinburgh Film Festival - where it attracted notices that were politely encouraging and lukewarm rather than wildly enthusiastic. Though nominally an ensemble, first among equals is Jasper (Coleman) is a pompous but talenteless thirtysomething "director" whose career highlight came when one of his shorts (a sub-sub-Loachian effort all-too-plausibly entitled Koncrete Dreamz) won an award at the 1998 'Film Festival of Walsall.' Proving the wisdom of the old 'those who can't do, teach' dictum, the tetchily impatient Jasper ends up imparting the rudiments of film-making to a group of wheelchair-using youngsters - with predictably chaotic results. Expanded from a short, Special People - shot on what looks like low-end digital video - feels occasionally as thought it's been padded out in order to reach minimal feature-film length. Writer-director Edgar devotes precious time to a somewhat half-baked on-off romantic subplot between two of the teenagers (handled convincingly, it must be said, by the appealing performers), when he could more profitably have explored the comic potential in the relationship between Jasper and his semi-reluctant tutees. Edgar's strengths are in the observational sharpness of his comedy - many of the movie-making insider gags are, it's safe to guess, the fruit of his own experience within the industry. And Special People, despite its evidently limited resources (regardless of its box-office fate, its cosiest home will likely prove to be the small screen) hits the laugh-target with sufficient frequency to ensure it's at least a cut above most of the supposedly 'comic' fare currently infesting multiplex screens worldwide. BELLE TOUJOURS : [6/10] : France (Fr/Por) 2006 : Manoel DE OLIVEIRA : 69m (BBFC) : seen 28th April 207, Moviemento cinema, Linz, Austria (Crossing Europe film festival) public show (complimentary ticket) [original review] BODY OF LIES : [6/10] : USA 2008 : Ridley SCOTT : 128m (BBFC) : seen 3rd October 2008, Vue Leicester (press show - CinemaDays event) CHOKE : [4/10] : USA 2008 : Clark GREGG : 92m (BBFC) : seen 3rd October 2008, Vue Leicester (press show - CinemaDays event) SPECIAL PEOPLE : [6/10] : UK 2007 : Justin EDGAR : 82m (BBFC) : seen 23rd August 2007, Cineworld Edinburgh (Edinburgh Int'l Film Festival) press show [original review]  ROURKE'S DRIFT... TO OSCAR GLORY?an exclusive report from 2008 Vienna International Film Festival - by Neil Young TO paraphrase Tommy Lee Jones from No Country For Old Men, the Viennale - which showcased the Coen brothers Oscar-magnet twelve months ago - may not be the best film festival in the world... but if it ain't, it'll certainly do till the best one comes along. The event officially known - but hardly ever referred to - as the 'Vienna International Film Festival' has taken place each October since 1960 in Austria's impossibly culture-saturated capital, bringing a couple of hundred movies (plus myriad shorts) to an unusually cine-literate, adventurous, youthful audience: 90,000 admissions every year, give or take. The Viennale has never - thankfully - been a "red carpet" festival attracting the kind of Hollywood stars and world premieres one associates with Europe's long-running, paparazzi-haunted "A-List" events at Cannes, Berlin and Venice. Instead, under the idiosyncratic stewardship of maverick, ever-uncompromising cineaste Hans Hurch, it presents - mainly in characterfully-opulent movie-palaces - a careful selection of the most talked-about, critically-esteemed features from each of those glitzy jamborees, plus other select venues on the global festival-circuit (Rotterdam, Buenos Aires, Turin, Pusan, Sundance, etc.) This year, the haul included the top prize-winners from both Cannes (Laurent Cantet's The Class) and Venice - Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, more of which anon. But what lifts this particular festival above all others - at least among those I've personally experienced - is the intelligent attention it pays to cinema's past, as well as the present and possible futures. There is always an irresistibly generous offering of sidebars dipping judiciously into the first century of movie history - the only problems being that not all of the selections are shown with English subtitles, and also the small matter of fitting everything into a single crowded visit. This year's subsidiary strands were dedicated to: John Gianvito (a leading-light of the US avant-garde, whose Profit motive and the whispering wind [2006] is an instant classic of quiet but ferociously engaged, agit-prop art), Miguel Gomes (only 36, but already regarded as the next big thing from Portugal), Nora Gregor (a long-neglected Teutonic starlet, best known for Renoir's Rules of the Game), Werner Schroeter (key figure of post-war German cinema, whose many ardent fans included a certain R W Fassbinder); and, in the Viennale's nod to the relative "mainstream", Bob Dylan, via an eclectic sampling of movies tangentially or directly connected with Minnesota's favourite son. The latter affording a exceedingly rare chance to catch Jean-Luc Godard's 1986 subversive anti-TV-movie Rise and Fall of a Small Film Company, Based on a Novel By James Hadley Chase on the big screen. All this plus a pleasingly random grab-bag of two-dozen arthouse favourites from the past seven decades - Sturges' The Lasy Eve to Welles' Touch of Evil to Gus Van Sant's Mala Noche and Christian Petzold's The State In Am in - assembled as an affectionate tribute to long-serving Vienna cinema-manager Franz Schwarz. Not to mention an evening of slapstick shorts compiled by sometime Godard collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin in honour of recently-deceased film-criticism doyen Manny Farber. This laughathon included 1919's The Cook, bringing together Roscoe ("Fatty") Arbuckle and a disarmingly young Buster Keaton, the former (who also directed) harvesting just as many laughs as the latter. Dwarfing all of these sections, meanwhile, both in terms of size and scope, was the programme shown at the Austrian Filmmusem under the heading Los Angeles - A City On Film. Every year the Filmmuseum - a magnificent cinematheque run in a discreet corner of a former Habsburg palace by Alexander Horwath - hosts a month-long parallel programme which covers the whole of October, organised by a special guest curator. This year the honour fell to American director/teacher Thom Andersen, whose Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) is one of the most stimulatingly brilliant cine-essays of the decade: a portrait of California's sprawling mega-metropolis over the past century as seen through the countless movies shot within its environs. From acknowledged classics such as Chinatown down to video-destined obscurities like Dead Homiez, each is revealed as offering invaluable psychogeographic glimpses of the ever-changing Angeleno landscape. Asking Andersen to assemble a season of Los Angeles films was, therefore, an inspired move. The results allowed Viennale-attendees the privilege of experiencing an array of rareties in glorious 35mm, courtesy of the Filmmuseum's impeccable projection facilities: Jack Hill's smash-em-up B-movie Pit Stop (1969); Irving Lerner's hitman opus Murder By Contract (1958); Andre De Toth's hard-bitten noir Crime Wave (1954), plus Andersen's own pungently atmospheric time-capsule short Olivia's Place (1966).  My personal highlight of Andersen's programme was H B Halicki's sui generis demolition derby from 1974, Gone In 60 Seconds - a berserk low-budget underground classic whose sluggishly exposition-heavy first half suddenly yields to a forty-minute climax that constitutes one long, long, long, long, long car-chase. Screened in a suitably scuzzy, grindhouse-vintage, Swedish-subtitled print, the picture - emphatically not to be confused with Hollywood's big-budget "remake" Gone In Sixty Seconds (2000) - provided a thunderously entertaining night-out-at-the-pictures experience for a sell-out crowd. Rather more rarefied delights were on offer via the Werner Schroeter retrospective - which the gravely-ill maestro himself graced with a personal appearance, during a tribute evening that featured a suitably uninhibited concert by Fassbinder-muse (and sometime wife) Ingrid Caven. Far too few of the Schroeter films incorporated English subtitling, but those that did included the movie regarded as his chef d'oeuvre, Der Rosenkonig ("The King of Roses") from 1986. It's a ripe example of the unapologetic, floridly symbolic, too-much-is-not-enough Art Film which used to crop up regularly late at night in the very early days of Channel 4, but which so rarely gets funded any more - and whose opulent grandeur, in this specific case, quickly transcends what initially looks like unbearable pretentiousness. What plot there is involves one 'Anna Rahma' (Schroeter's favourite diva Magdalena Montezuma), a tormented, mentally-unstable, imperious grande dame - spiritual cousin of Billy Wilder's Norma Desmond and Fassbinder's Veronika Voss, perhaps - who moves to a rambling mansion on the Portuguese coast to grow roses. But this is the merest of pretexts for a series of intense, operatically sensual reveries. Not for everyone, by any means, but yielding unexpected rewards for the patiently indulgent. The problem with experiencing a picture like Der Rosenkonig - especially in the ornate splendour of the Metro cinema ("a great place to assassinate a president," as Iranian-American director Rahman Bahrani quipped before a Q+A) - is that everything afterwards can seem decidedly semi-skimmed. And it's an inadvertent problem of the Viennale that the archive material is always so reliably strong that it can cast a daunting shadow over the brand-new stuff. Nevertheless, any film festival worth its salt would be proud to include such fare as New Wave grande dame Agnes Varda's delightfully playful, shamelessly namedropping cine-autobiography The Beaches of Agnes; Margaret Brown's piercingly topical study of race-relations in Mobile, Alabama in The Order of Myths; Eugenio Pologvsky's harrowing, audaciously unadorned chronicle of Mexican child-labour in The Inheritors; and Celina Murga's deft tale of class conflict among Argentinian youth in the video-shot drama A Week Alone. Impressive though all of these fiercely independent works were, all were unambiguously dwarfed by a relatively "mainstream" entry that was the sole ten-out-of-ten masterpiece of the 2008 Viennale: Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, accorded the unusual accolade of three screenings at the cavernously atmospheric Gartenbaukino. I saw a total of 34 feature-films, old and new, during the course of a week-long stay, and this unassuming saga of a washed-up WWF-style warrior eking out a living in down-at-heel New Jersey was, by some way, the most accomplished of the entire bunch. It's not hard to see why the movie won the Golden Lion at Venice in September, nor why Mickey Rourke is already reckoned to have the Best Actor Oscar pretty much in the bag (potent rival claims of Sean Penn [Milk], Richard Jenkins [The Visitor], Benicio Del Toro [Che] and Frank Langella [Frost/Nixon] notwithstanding.) What is surprising is that the contributions from pretty much everyone else involved in the film - director Aronofsky (previously known for visually tricky, smart-alecky enterprises Pi, Requiem For A Dream and The Fountain) first-time scriptwriter Robert D Siegel, and their entire technical team - should match or, in many cases, exceed Rourke's superlative work. Gritty, hilarious, moving, thumpingly entertaining and unobtrusively multi-layered, The Wrestler - which also played during last month's London Film Festival - is released here on January 16th. Don't miss it. Neil Young 11th November, 2008 the above articles written for this week's edition of Tribune magazine more Jigsaw Lounge Viennale 2008 coverage  |
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