| for 10.Dec.TRIBUNE: 'Inkheart' [5/10]; 'The Man From London' [4/10]; Ljubljana Film Festival |
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 BROUGHT TO BOOK ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Inkheart USA/UK/Germany 2008 Starring : Brendan Fraser, Eliza Bennett Director : Iain Softley ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Man From London France/Hungary/Germany/UK 2007 Starring : Miroslav Krobot, Tilda Swinton Directors : Tarr Bela and Hranitzky Agnes ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ WITH no new Tolkien adaptation due until 2011's The Hobbit, and the next Harry Potter instalment delayed until summer, the producers of opulent literary-themed fantasy Inkheart are clearly hoping their movie can profitably fill a seasonal vacuum. Based on a teen-oriented bestseller by novelist Cornelia Funke ("the German J.K. Rowling") the picture has been given a PG certificate for "moderate fantasy violence and scary scenes." The youngest family members might find the latter a bit too disturbing - and so should waiting for Disney's Bedtime Stories, which takes a rather more larkish approach to strikingly similar material and opens on Boxing Day. Indeed, these are just two of the more recent examples of films in which characters move between real and fictional "worlds" - see also, among others, MirrorMask, The Fall and Pan's Labyrinth, though viewers old enough to remember 1984's The Neverending Story (also based on a German novel, as it happens) will know the drill pretty well. This time the plot revolves around itinerant bookbinder/collector Mo (Fraser) and his 12-year-old daughter Meggie (Bennett), who both possess a rare gift whereby characters from any stories they read aloud become flesh-and-blood reality. Unfortunately, for every such action there's an equal, opposite re-action, and nearby individuals are sucked into a literary netherworld - the fate suffered by Mo's wife Resa (Sienna Guillory.) To regain their loved-one, Mo and Meggie must track down a copy of the long out-of-print 'Inkheart' - a quest which involves the latter's reclusive author, Fenoglio (Jim Broadbent, underused) and Mo's daffy, bookworm aunt (Helen Mirren, ditto.) While anything that gets kids to read can only be a Good Thing, Inkheart if anything rather oversells the wonderfully magical power of books. Such a message is fine in the medium of literature, but it sits a oddly when expressed via cinema - if books are such an unparalleled panacea, why waste precious reading-time going to the pictures at all? And while refreshingly Euro-centric in its locations and atmosphere, Inkheart is distractingly fuzzy in terms of its internal fantasy-logic - one suspects that much crucial background present in Funke's original has been ditched in favour of spectacular action-sequences. On a broader level, meanwhile, it's disappointing that a movie celebrating the power of the imagination should content itself with exploring such familiar thematic and visual terrain - a little Rowling here, a bit Tolkien there, and oh-so-generous helpings of Titus Groan. GEORGES Simenon's novella L'homme de Londres (1934), originally translated into English as Newhaven-Dieppe, has already been filmed three times before - twice in France (1943, 1988) and once in Britain (1947). It's a safe bet that none of these predecessors resembled this latest version, The Man From London, in anything but the basic details of the plot - the misadventures of middle-aged Maloin (Krobot), who operates the signal-box for a quayside railway-station, after he witnesses a murderous struggle between two men. During the scuffle a suitcase is thrown into the harbour - and Maloin, after fishing it out, discovers that it contains a large amount of banknotes. His impulsive reaction to this find will ultimately yield disastrous consequences for all concerned - including his malcontent wife Camelia (Swinton). Tarr (who co-wrote the script with Krasznahorkai Laszlo - Hungarians write surnames first) and Hranitzky (his wife, who edits as well as officially co-directing) relocate the "action" from Simenon's Dieppe to a nameless port - actually Bastia in Corsica - and, despite most of the character-names being English, the dialogue is (visibly) dubbed into Hungarian*: Maloin by Gati Oskar, Camelia by Kutvolgyi Erszebet. This outmoded technique might not have been such a nagging distraction if the story hadn't been presented in such numbingly slow fashion. As it is, Tarr and Hranitzky's fondness for punishingly extended takes makes it hard for the audience to engage with and/or keep track of the plot, a tortuous business of cross and double-cross. At certain times, vision (cinematographer Fred Kelemen's carefully composed, chiaroscuro images) and sound (Vig Mihaly's hauntingly repetitive score) do combine to striking effect, and at junctures the film succeeds in transcending narrative concerns to become a kind of inescapably static, nightmarish reverie. But this is nowhere near enough to justify the kind of investment Tarr and Hranitzky demand over the course of 139 protracted minutes. On close examination and subsequent reflection, there's really very little substance here, little that really lingers in the mind after the lights go up and the credits begin to roll. The Man From London, which was a notoriously troubled, multi-national production from start to finish (the main producer committed suicide mid-shoot), is perhaps a kind of anti-cinema - an example of the medium being deployed to intimidate audiences into cowed, awed submission, to encourage them towards a kind of hushed, humbled reverence by the supposed presence of capital-A Art. NB : * The version shown in UK cinemas is reportedly dubbed into French, and not the Hungarian dubbing which accompanied earlier film-festival screenings.  LJUBLJANA FILM FESTIVAL REPORT THIS is the twelfth and final Tribune film-festival report of 2008 - after Gothenburg, Rotterdam, Berlin, Nottingham (for the British Silent Film Festival), Amsterdam, Linz (Austria), Lisbon, Split, Edinburgh, Bergen and Vienna. Unlike my despatches from those events, however, my Ljubljana analysis won't be focussing what I regard as the most outstanding films among the program. That's partly because I've already enthused about several of them (Shane Meadows' Somers Town; Terence Davies' Of Time and the City; Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World - just confirmed for an April 2009 release here) in these pages already over the last few months. And it's partly because I'm on the programming board for the Ljubljana International Film Festival - somewhat awkwardly acronymmed as 'LIFFe' - and so recommended many of them to the event's director, Simon Popek. Instead I humbly present my verdicts on the five most notable new films which I discovered during my week-long stay in Ljubljana - capital of Slovenia, a compact, amiably picturesque university city of 260,000 residents, where LIFFe attracts enthusiastic and youthful audiences in impressive numbers (the financial-crisis is still some way off in his part of the world) for a dozen days in mid-November. LIFFe's large programme allowed me to finally catch up with a couple of films that have been attracting some spectacular praise on the festival-circuit all year: Wakamatsu Koji's United Red Army and Antonio Campos's Afterschool. Now 72, Wakamatsu has long been revered as an influential enfant terrible of political Japanese cinema. I found much to like about his last picture, 2004's Cycling Chronicle, but at Berlin in February wasn't so impressed with a pair of his supposed early 'classics' - to the extent that I cancelled my plans to see the 190-minute United Red Army. The film is a hugely ambitious look back through a particularly complex historical episode - namely, the exploits of the Japan's radical left from the late sixties to the mid-seventies. The first hour of the film is largely expositional, with narrated newsreel/TV footage providing an engrossing, stimulating guide to a turbulent political landscape. Less successful are the somewhat rudimentary dramatisations which purport to show how the URA came into being during 1971 - and it's thus not good news when the emphasis shifts over to such dramatisations for most of the remaining two hours. Indeed, what we end up with is roughly equal parts The Baader Meinhof Complex and The Beach, as the URA guerillas retreat to a mountain training-camp where petty personal rivalries result in brutal "self-critique" sessions and quickly-mounting death-toll. The film becomes yet another example of how cinema invariably presents communal living as a recipe for cataclysmic disaster, and it's odd that such a supposedly maverick artist as Wakamatsu should come up with something that feels like it could have been made as anti-revolutionary propaganda by his country's more conservative elements. My Wakamatsu strike-rate is thus one out of four - and I feel that I've devoted quite enough of my time (ars longa, vita brevis!) to a director whose exalted status is, from my perspective, decidedly baffling. I'm more likely to give another chance to Antonio Campos, the half-Brazilian, half-Italian 24-year-old New Yorker whose Afterschool - which he wrote, directed and edited - is ranked by savvy American critic Mike d'Angelo as the best film (of any kind, from anywhere) of the last six years. I normally respect d'Angelo's verdicts, but on this occasion I can't endorse his encomium: Afterschool, in which a troubled teenager at a fancy prep school happens to catch the drug-related death of two pupils while working on a video-project, is a classic example of debutant overreach. Campos deserves credit for tackling major issues of contemporary American society - most notably the way technology is producing a de-sensitised generation which experiences life at one or two removes - but he's let down by some basic lapses in storytelling logic and plausibility. Afterschool does, however, herald the arrival of one major talent: cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes, whose limpid widescreen images balance on a tricky edge between hyper-realism and hallucinatory intensity. If United Red Army and Afterschool both count as noble, intriguing failures, I was ultimately more impressed by a trio of pictures which aimed a little lower, but came much closer to hitting their targets. One of LIFFe's major strands this year (which I had no involvement in, by the way) was an impressive survey of the career of Adoor Gopalakrishnan, the 67-year-old from Kerala who is generally ranked behind only Satyajit Ray among post-WWII directors from the sub-continent. I must admit that I'd never actually seen one of his films until catching his latest, Four Women, in Ljubljana - and while I can't claim to have been blown away by it, Gopalakrishnan clearly deserving of a higher profile in the UK. Four Women is directed in a restrained, quiet, classical style, presenting four sensitive and informative glimpses into the lives of Indian females during various time-frames in the past sixty years. If any of the tales in Gopalakrishnan's tetralogy had been expanded to feature length, the results might have ended up a bit like Snow, the third film by 32-year-old Bosnian director/co-writer Aida Begic. A realistic tale with fable-like elements here and there, it's set in 1997, in a village where all the men have been killed in the recently-concluded Balkan war. Women of various ages make the best of their situation, and we see how adversity can strengthen individuals into a fragile but resilient community. A testimony to imagination and endurance, Snow is a small, perhaps even slight piece  of work, but there's enough here to suggest Begic's name is one to bear in mind over the next few years.Forced to choose the best film I saw in Ljubljana this year, however, I'd probably have to go for Bruce LaBruce's Otto; or, Up With Dead People, the latest provocation from the Canadian veteran closely associated with the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s. Now 44, LaBruce has perhaps mellowed a bit as he approaches middle-age - Otto, softcore sex scenes and grisly horror moments notwithstanding, is a surprisingly sweet affair about a teenage gay zombie wandering morosely around Berlin, until he's "discovered" by a wildly pretentious film-maker and semi-shanghaied into her latest no-budget shocker. Part Shadow of the Vampire, part Shaun of the Dead, Otto is much more comic than horrific, and manages to say more about disaffected modern youth than Afterschool, with all its austere ruminations, ever does. Some adventurous UK distributor may pick it up soon - it's ideal midnight-movie fare. further reviews from LIFFe 2008 can be found at the bottom of this page Neil Young 2nd December, 2008 written for 10.Dec. edition of Tribune magazine INKHEART : [5/10] : UK (UK/USA/Ger) 2008 : Iain SOFTLEY : 106m (BBFC) : seen 3rd October 2008, Vue Leicester (press show - CinemaDays event) THE MAN FROM LONDON : [4/10] : France (Fr/Ger/Hun/UK) 2007 : TARR Bela & HRANITZKY Agnes : 139m (BBFC) : seen 18th August 2007, Cameo Edinburgh (public show - Edinburgh International Film Festival - paid £6.40) - original review  also seen in Ljubljana: The Best of Times Overwrought romantic drama, written by Ivan Vyrypaev - whose own Euphoria tackled similar themes of regret and amour fou with much greater concision and impact (this time around, it's much more amour and also much more fou.) Told over several time-frames (when the principal characters are roughly 20, 40 and 60) it's a thorny love-triangle involving two women - sometimes best friends, sometimes bitterly feuding - and the enigmatic man with whom both are smitten. The chronological fluidity (we float back and forward between eras) overcomplicates a slender narrative - already made unneccessarily complicated by the man and one of the women sharing the same nickname, Valya - and lessen the emotional impact, while all of the reverie-prone characters are, almost from the off, too eccentric, unsympathetic and/or annoying for us to care much about their various torrid travails. Still, the performances are suitably full-blooded, the cinematography alluring, and the atmosphere of the lakeside settings is quite pungently evoked. It's clearly intentional that so little of the turbulent political or social situation in the country as a whole (USSR, then Russia) impacts on the protagonists' intense solipsism, but this does give proceedings a contrived, fable-like air: and the only notable reference to external events is an excessively poetic/surreal mention of Gorbachev, said eminence 'appearing' in a dream as a man made entirely of gold. Beyond the Mirror Final film from influential Catalan director Joaquin Jorda is a documentary about several folk - including himself - suffering from the mental disorders agnosia and alexia, both of which are caused by brain lesions and result in distorted perceptions of reality. While evidently productive as a therapeutic exercise for Jorda himself, the film is rather less satisfying for the viewer: individual episodes are informative and sometimes quite moving, with the engaging personalities of the subjects emerging via Jorda's sympathetic lens. But it's all somewhat ploddingly monotonous in its minute analysis of symptoms, syndromes and medications, and also much too long, not least because Jorda includes so many symbolic "artistic" interludes - which have, at best, a very oblique connection to the rest of the movie - in which giant chess pieces with human faces are animated around a sunny-seaside chessboard. Warsaw Bridge Elaborate but clod-hopping and off-puttingly arbitrary surrealistic whimsy from a former producer and associate of Luis Bunuel. A "story" of sorts (involving an acclaimed author and his latest novel, dealing with sinister events in a pre-unification Berlin) can be pieced together from these wayward fragments, but it's not really worth the bother: inspiration is largely lacking in paceless sequences of garish, curdled opulence that - after belated, breathtaking opening titles that arrive about 20 minutes in - quickly wear out their welcome. It adds up to a kind of exquisite, freewheeling pretentiousness, located at a tricky intersection of dreams, nightmares and the wiggier reaches of modern dance. There's insufficient structure in place to allow these knowingly artificial, self-deconstructing (or rather self-undercutting) episodes to build into anything worthwhile, so what we are left with is high-faluting flights of fancy - complete with ostentatious, highbrow displays of nudity and similarly meretricious erudition - which only occasionally deliver the transcendent epiphanies the director is evidently aiming for. Warsaw Bridge is an example of that "art cinema" which is so in thrall to other art-forms - literature, painting, sculpture, opera - that the possibilities of the cinematic medium itself are frustratingly minimised and neglected. Neil Young 17/27.Dec.08 AFTERSCHOOL : [5/10] : USA 2008 : Antonio CAMPOS : 107m (BBFC timing; LIFFe catalogue and website lists run-time as 120m) THE BEST OF TIMES : [5/10] : Luchshee vremya goda aka The Best Time of the Year : Russia 2008 : Svetlana PROSKURINA : 93m BEYOND THE MIRROR : [5/10] : Mas alla del espejo : Spain 2006 : Joaquin JORDA : 112m FOUR WOMEN : [6/10] : Naalu Pennungal : India 2007 : Adoor GOPALAKRISHNAN : 105m OTTO; OR, UP WITH DEAD PEOPLE : [6/10] : Canada/Germany 2008 : Bruce LaBRUCE : 94m SNOW : [6/10] : Snijeg : Bosnia & Herzegovina (Bos/Fr/Ger/Iran) 2008 : Aida BEGIC : 100m UNITED RED ARMY : [5/10] : Jitsuroku rengo sekigun - Asama sanso e no michi : Japan 2007 : WAKAMATSU Koji : 190m WARSAW BRIDGE : [4/10] : Pont de Varsovia : Spain 1990 : Pere PORTABELLA : 85m all timings are approximate; all screenings public (complimentary tickets) |
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