| for Tribune : BRONSON // WONDERFUL TOWN // Berlinale report |
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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Bronson [7/10] UK 2009 Starring : Tom Hardy, James Lance Director : Nicolas Winding Refn ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wonderful Town [6/10] Thailand 2008 Starring : Anchalee Saisoontorn, Supphasit Kansen Director : Aditya Assarat ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ According to some accounts, Emerson visited Thoreau in jail and asked, "Henry, what are you doing in there?" Thoreau replied, "Waldo, the question is what are you doing out there?" AS noted in these pages only last week, January saw a rather ho-hum 38th renewal of the International Film Festival Rotterdam - and one of the more unexpected highlights was the unorthodox British biopic Bronson, sixth feature by Danish-born, New York-raised director Nicolas Winding Refn (previously best known for the Pusher trilogy, 1996-2005). Unexpected, because on paper Bronson looks more suitable for the readers of Nuts, Loaded and dodgy "hard men" true-crime books than the highbrow cineastes who form a sizeable part of the Rotterdam audience. It's the latest release from Vertigo Films - the opportunistic outfit previously responsible for The Football Factory, It's All Gone Pete Tong, Outlaw, and WAZ. Vertigo are also the culprits behind another Rotterdam '09 selection - the dire, salacious Geordie sex-comedy Dogging : A Love Story - written, like Bronson, by Brock Norman Brock. Michael Gordon Peterson was born to a respectable middle-class family in Aberystwyth in 1952, growing up to become notorious as a bare-knuckle boxer, criminal and long-term resident of the British prison system - changing his name in 1987 to the same moniker adopted by the Lithuanian-American tough-guy actor (1921-2003) originally known as Charles Dennis Buchinsky. Long a staple of the tabloid press, the UK's Charlie Bronson is an unusual, flamboyant kind of jailbird celebrity, a bodybuilding fanatic whose drawings and writings have earned some measure of acclaim. He's served a total of 34 years in prison - 30 of them in solitary confinement - largely because of "hostage situations", "rooftop protests" and physical attacks on staff and inmates. That Bronson is a dangerously violent, exhibitionist egomaniac is clearly beyond doubt - but, as publisher and sometime co-author Stephen Richards notes, "he is not a monster; he is a sick man. He needs to be prepared for release and he deserves better treatment than he is getting. He is not ready to come out yet. It will be years before he is, but he should be prepared for that and treated by the prison service, not just locked away on his own." Whatever one's view of the protagonist's obnoxious personality and deeds, it's hard to come away from Bronson disagreeing with Richards' sentiments. The film is, in a way, as much about the Peterson 'Bronson' as it is the Buchinsky 'Bronson' - i.e., not much at all. Instead, beneath the flashy surface bluster and stylistic excess (Ken Russell, David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, Kenneth Anger, with a dollop or two of Andrew Dominik's Chopper - to cite just the most obvious influences) , this is a powerful and serious indictment of Britain's shamefully archaic penal system. If anything, it's more chilling and urgent even than Steve McQueen's more ostentatiously high-minded Hunger from last year, because the abuses and institutional brutalities chronicled here are, we realise, most likely still going on at this very moment. In a performance that is should by rights attract its share of critical plaudits and - further down the line - awards, Tom Hardy is genuinely "barnstorming" as Bronson. Shaven-headed, extravagantly moustachioed and near-unrecognisably bulked-up, the "pretty-boy" small-timer from Guy Ritchie's tame-by-comparison Rocknrolla delivers work here that even Daniel Day-Lewis might perhaps consider 'a bit much.' But it's entirely of a piece with the excess-all-areas tone of the entire movie, an episodic compendium of sequences that range from the realistic to the vaudevillian-phantasmagorical, and which by bravado and invention transcends what looks to have been a rather limited budget. In theory, it should be impossible to steal scenes from Hardy's frenziedly full-blooded maelstrom of solipsistic, expletive-spitting fury - but that's exactly what Matt King (another Rocknrolla refugee) manages to do in his all-too-infrequent appearances as Bronson's drawling, viciously queeny 'agent' Paul, who dreams up his client's Hollywood-derived nom du ring in one of the picture's laugh-out-loud comic highlights. Refn - whose previous works have veered, sometimes disastrously, towards the show-offy - is, meanwhile. a surprisingly inspired choice for this tonally challenging material, and he successfully walks a very tricky line between satisfying those blood-thirsty audiences who simply want to revel in Bronson's full-tilt shenanigans, and those for whom his story has the lineaments of an absurdist, quasi-tragic existential opera. Those who protest that such a film can only boost Bronson's ego and self-regard further - and inspire him to further feats of extravagant anti-social behaviour - are missing the point. As someone sadly notes during the film, he's really much more "pitiful" than admirable, and even if one can see him as a kind of Chris Morris of Broadmoor, deploying violence as a combination of political satire and granite-fisted performance-art, that doesn't make his actions any less absurd or reprehensible. Whether or not they warrant 30 years in solitary confinement is, of course, a matter for the Justice Secretary's conscience. And if Jack Straw sees only one film at the cinema in 2009, Bronson - released, with suspiciously handy timing, just two days after Charlie's next parole hearing - should undoubtedly be that film. WITH the breakneck alactrity that characterises its own ebullient anti-hero, Bronson bounds into our multiplexes only weeks after world-premiering at Sundance and Euro-premiering at Rotterdam. One of the latter festival's hits from 2008 - Thai romantic drama Wonderful Town - has, by contrast, taken over a year to find its way to our shores, in keeping with the demure restraint exercised by its quasi-lovebird protagonists. And while Bronson is rather more full-blooded and confrontational than Rotterdam usually serves up, writer-director Aditya Assarat's second feature (after 2005's little-seen documentary 3 Friends) is classic IFFR material - indeed, it won one of the event's main-competition Tiger Awards. And it was partly financed by the festival's own Hubert Bals Fund, an institution designed to boost film-production in countries where cinema is underdeveloped, and which near-invariably provides coin to delicate, humanistic tales that adhere to what's become the default mode of worldwide art-cinema: long scenes, slow pacing, pregnant silences, and carefully-composed cinematography. Some kind of political or social subtext or background is a plus, and in the case of Wonderful Town it's provided by Assarat setting his story in the aftermath of the 2004 Christmas tsunami. Among the towns wrecked by the tidal-wave was Takua Pa, in the south of Thailand. Here we observe Na (Saisoontorn) going about her business in one of the area's few remaining hotels. Among her guests is an architect from Bangkok, Ton (Kansen), who arrives as part of a reconstruction project. Gradually, very gradually, the city-educated, not-quite-fulfilled Na and Ton edge towards a relationship - one instinctively and vociferously opposed by her hot-headed, no-good-nik brother Wit (Dul Yaambunying.) Assarat achieves some striking effects in the early and middle sections of his film, which is most successful as a nicely-acted evocation of particular moods and atmospheres in a picturesque but claustrophobic setting ("mountains on one side, sea on the other... feel trapped sometimes.") Umpornpol Yugala's camera glides hypnotically around the slightly-dilapidated hotel, while Akritchalem Kalayanamitr's soundscapes are a wonder of tidal rumblings, distant bells, industrial thrumming, incessant insect-chitter. Zai Kuning and Koichi Shimizu contribute a strings-heavy score that's deployed to judicious effect, these various elements skilfully choreographed by Assarat in a manner which suggests he's a name to watch among the younger generation of East Asian filmmakers. It's to be hoped, however, that his future works will make more of a break from the kind of ominous-woozy aesthetic so profitably explored in recent years by his much-lauded countryman, Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Syndromes and a Century). It's no surprise, for example, to learn that the latter's editor-of-choice Lee Chatametikool fulfils cutting duties here. And Assarat is still some way from the finished article on the scriptwriting front. We're encouraged to root for Na and Ton as they establish an easy-going, unforced kind of intimacy - and to disapprove of Wit's chauvinistic suspicions, which point up the downsides of tight-knit, resilient communities such as this "wonderful", repeatedly-devastated town ("... but we always recover.") Rather frustrating, then, that the final reel explicitly endorses the brother's narrow-minded prejudices via a revelation regarding Ton's Bangkok private-life. As well as unhelpfully eroding out sympathies for Ton at a crucial stage, this "twist" sets up an incongruously violent and melodramatic climax which allows Assarat to fade out on a note of cheap, ironic pessimism. BERLINALE '09 : OF GREEN WATERS, DANCING HAWKS... AND KOREAN WIVES an exclusive report from the 59th Berlin International Film Festival  IN 1978, the superlative American suspense-novelist Patricia Highsmith - whose Ripley quintet is being dramatised on Radio 4 in weekly instalments - was invited to be jury-president at the 28th Berlin International Film Festival. As noted in Andrew Wilson's superb biography Beautiful Shadow, problems rapidly ensued: "They were terribly unhappy with her, and she was not happy with the festival." Similar discontents have been inescapably audible, with dispiriting frequency, at the 'Berlinale' (as the festival is universally known) for a long while, and I've personally heard them every year since I started attending in 2002 - which was also the debut of the current Festival Director, Dieter Kosslick.The 60-year-old from the jewellery-making southern German town of Pforzheim - whose contract was recently extended until 2013 - is a jovial figure, especially popular among film-makers. As Paul Thomas Anderson - who won the Berlinale's Golden Bear for Magnolia in 2000 and Best Director for There Will Be Blood last year - so memorably put it, Kosslick runs "a film festival as if he's having a party in his living-room." Kosslick's own philosophy, set forth back in 2002 and rigorously followed ever since, is that he wants the festival "to have glamour, business and young people" - presumably in that specific order, and with outstanding cinema implicitly some way further down the pecking-order. As befits an event originally part-funded by Hollywood to provide drab post-war West Berlin with some diversionary cultural escapism, Berlinale 2009 certainly didn't lack glitz: red-carpet attendees included Messrs (Steve) Martin, Pfeiffer, (Demi) Moore, (Keanu) Reeves, Zellweger, Winslet and (Tommy Lee) Jones - plus Clive Owen and Naomi Watts from the festival's opening film, Tom Tykwer's not-that-bad-actually banking thriller The International (reviewed on these pages a fortnight ago.) The Berlinale's perennial concentration on 'paparazzi fodder' is just one source of what one might label the 'Highsmithian' grumblings to be heard with such monotonous regularity all over Potsdamer Platz - the very central, very modern, somewhat soulless concrete-and-glass urban intersection which plays host to the majority of the festival's screenings and events. The hideously byzantine ticketing structure is another. An even more pressing perpetual gripe - especially among members of the press - is the paucity of noteworthy pictures on view, especially in the competition section. Then again, it was a near-identical situation last year, when the Golden Bear candidates included - in addition to There Will Be Blood - such subsequent arthouse notables as Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, Philippe Claudel's I've Loved You So Long and  Erick Zonca's initially much-derided Julia, starring 2009 Berlinale jury-president Tilda Swinton. Not to mention Lance Hammer's fine American indie Ballast (which remains, one year on, inexplicably without UK distribution) and the ultra-controversial Bear-winner from Brazil, Jose Padilha's Elite Squad.Joining Swinton on this year's jury was the man who some view as the closest thing Europe has currently got to a Patricia Highsmith figure, Sweden's supposedly "reclusive" Henning Mankell - bestselling creator of the taciturn detective Kurt Wallander (fleshily incarnated by Kenneth Branagh for the BBC last year.) And when I saw this formidable figure - who passingly resembles a more business-like cousin of Willie Whitelaw - storm out of a press-and-industry screening of Peruvian competition-movie The Milk of Sorrow with what I took to be a thunderous countenance, the words "desperately unhappy" did spring to mind. Having attended the same early-morning screening, I partly sympathised with his apparent displeasure. The film is the second feature from Lima-born, Barcelona-resident Claudia Llosa, who made such a promising debut with Madeinusa two years ago. It tells the story of a meek young woman born as a result of rape during Peru's terror-filled 1980s. Desperate to avoid such a fate - despite the relative calm that now prevails in the nation - she has taken the drastic measure of inserting a potato into her vagina. In one of the film's numerous magical-realist touches, said tuber has taken root and started to "grow." While impeccably well-intentioned and sensitively acted, The Milk of Sorrow - taking its title from a mammary infection which, according to local superstition, is passed to daughters born of violation - ultimately founders on the weight of its poetic/political conceits and symbolic metaphors. Based partly on my own lukewarm reaction, partly on Mankell's stormy visage, I was happy to lay an American distributor/critic's €2 (at 28/1) on The Milk of Sorrow winning the Golden Bear. The "buzz", such as it was, being conspicuously stronger for Katalin Varga, a Hungarian/Romanian drama of rural revenge by little-known British director Peter Strickland, and Germany's Everybody Else, a Sardinia-set relationship-analysis from Maren Ade (solid, but a letdown after Ade's outstanding debut The Forest for the Trees from 2003, which eventually obtained limited UK distribution in late 2005). Needless to say, 32-year-old Llosa - niece of the (presently) more-famous novelist and (arch neo-liberal/conservative) politician Mario Vargas Llosa - was duly named the "surprise" winner of the Golden Bear. The result was viewed as testament to the fact that, Ade's movie apart - and only one German film (Fatih Akin's Turkish co-production Head-On in 2004) has won the Bear in the last two decades - few competition titles seemed to attract much critical or audience enthusiasm. The only other contender I saw was, as it happened, also inflected (some would say 'infected') with magical-realism: Francois Ozon's Ricky in which a baby born to a working-class mother in northern France turns out to be very special indeed. To say any more would be to spoil the fun of a film - freely adapted from a short story by British author Rose Tremain - that relies for much of its impact on a single big 'reveal,' and which, while not without its charms and diversions, ends up running out of inspiration some way before the finish-line. Regular attendees at the Berlinale soon learn that the Competition is to be - at best - only very lightly sampled, and that much more attention should be devoted to the lower-profile non-competitive sections. This year proved no exception and, saw an unusually strong sampling of retrospective material from the archives, including a rare chance to experience 70m SovScope classics from the USSR archives (including Igor Talankin's poetic, elusive, allusive siege-of-Leningrad reverie, Stars of the Day [1968]) on huge screens such as the DDR-era International on Karl Marx Allee, one of the world's great temples of cinema. It was also great to see two films by the Canadian-born - but "Viennese by choice" - fashion-photographer-turned-Euro-auteur John Cook (1935-2001), namely Slow Summer (1976) and Clinch (1978), both via prints immaculately restored a couple of years back by the ever-estimable Austrian Film Museum. Superb encapsulations of life among Vienna's bohemian and proletarian strata in the mid-to-late seventies, they identify Cook as an unusually warm, instinctive kind of film-maker, one who emphatically deserves a much higher profile than he currently 'enjoys' in the UK.  My biggest delight - and discovery - of the entire Berlinale was lurking in the sidebar entitled After Winter Comes Spring, comprising a selection of seldom-screened features made in the old Eastern Bloc during the two decades leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Poland's Grzegorz Krolikiewicz (b.1939) isn't a household name even among hardcore cineastes, but on the evidence of his 1977 mindbender The Dancing Hawk, he's greatly overdue a return to the spotlight. A deliriously fragmented, anything-goes journey into the memories, subconscious and fantasies of a schlubby Communist Party apparatchik as he rises through the ranks to an eventual position of wholly unearned power and responsibility, this wickedly subversive exercise in deadpan agitprop disproves the misconception that cinematic masterpieces should be slow, sensible affairs. A berserk compendium of visual and aural inventiveness, it's what a Terry Gilliam remake of Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror might look like if produced under the influence of weapons-grade amphetamines. A refreshingly bold approach to pacing and storytelling was also to be found in Mariano De Rosa's Green Waters, the most impressive of the two-dozen-plus new features I caught at this year's Berlinale and a typically adventurous choice by the programmers of the festival's reliably consistent and provocative parallel section, the Forum. While necessarily more measured and steady than Krolikiewicz's take-no-prisoners berserker, Green Waters (Aguas Verdes) nevertheless distinguishes itself by so audaciously combining genre techniques - some of them not entirely "reputable" in current art-cinema circles - with deceptively sharp psychological study. Indeed, owing as much to lurid European horror and suspense pictures of the 1970s as the respected antecedents dutifully cited in the press-notes (Pasolini's Theorem; Fellini's La Dolce Vita), this deft study of a middle-aged dad's paranoid crackup during a disastrous beach holiday is only a tweak or two away from being a pretty broad mainstream comedy. It's those crucial tweaks, however, that mark De Rosa out as perhaps the most promising young Argentine director to emerge onto the scene since Lisandro Alonso (La Libertad, Fantasma, etc). There's a daunting stream of talented film-makers from that particular country, but far too many of them adhere to the "softly softly" template which has somehow become the approved mode of "serious" film-making worldwide. The other outstanding title among the newer selections at the Berlinale - which, including the Forum, now boasts a daunting 200 features across a bewildering range of sidebars and strands - was tucked away in the Panorama, the most unwieldy and hazardous segment of the jamboree (chief offender this year: Julian Hernandez's excruciatingly pretentious, 191-minute Mexican fable of desire and rebirth Enraged Sun, Enraged Sky, an early but seemingly unbeatable candidate for the title of 2009's Worst Movie.) This was Sung-Hyung Cho's German documentary Home From Home - an off-puttingly bland English-language title for Endstation der Sehnsuchte ("Final destination of longing"?): an utterly beguiling, disarming heartwarmer. Following the fortunes of three elderly couples - the husbands German, the wives Korean - as they retire after decades in the Fatherland to a "German Village" on South Korea's southernmost tip, this is a textbook example of observational, humanist non-fiction film-making, moving and hilarious by turns, and is of such universal appeal that it deserves a shot at theatrical exposure in the UK and elsewhere. Cho's crowdpleaser would appear to boast rather more plausible distribution possibilities and commercial prospects than the rather more ballyhooed Milk of Sorrow. Not that I'm betting on it. Neil Young 3rd March, 2009 written for the 12th March edition of Tribune magazine (in which the reviews and report appear in slightly shorter form)  Jigsaw Lounge 2009 Berlinale index-page BRONSON : [7/10] : UK 2009 : Nicolas Winding REFN : 92m (BBFC) : seen 28th January 2009, Cinerama cinema, Rotterdam (International Film Festival Rotterdam - public show - paid €9) : original review WONDERFUL TOWN : [6/10] : Thailand 2008 : Aditya ASSARAT : 92m (IFFR) : seen 30th April 2008, Sao Jorge cinema, Lisbon (IndieLisboa film festival - public show - complimentary ticket) : original review |
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