| ragbag roundup : THE CHILDREN [5/10]; THE MARCORELLE AFFAIR [3+/10] |
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 THE CHILDREN : [5/10] : UK 2008 : Tom SHANKLAND : 84m (BBFC) : seen on DVD in Sunderland (with thanks to Roel Haanen), 15th March 2009So-so, sci-fi inflected horror in which a bunch of tots turn on their parents during a Christmas holiday in a rural cottage. From an idea by Paul Andrew Williams - who showed flair with genre material on both London To Brighton and The Cottage - and ideally Williams should have directed it himself. Instead such duties are handled by Tom Shankland, displaying the stylistic excess, and the lack of subtlety and flair, that helped make his debut WAZ a similar kind of missed opportunity. Like The Children, however, WAZ did have a nicely nasty streak of uncompromising grimness, and there are moments here where the picture finds its own tone - escaping the inevitable shadows of such creepy-kiddy fare as Village of the Damned, Who Would Kill a Child? and David Cronenberg's chill-fest The Brood. One, much more recent, precursor which Shankland and company might not have seen is Larry Fessenden's Wendigo (2001), a similarly winterbound affair full of sinisterly frost-seized trees, featuring a similarly classy cast (here the beleaguered adults include Ae Fond Kiss's Eva Birthistle and Stephen Campbell Moore from The History Boys) edited with a similarly jarring jaggedness, but with a slightly surer handling of mood and tone. On the plus side, Shankland's script is, for all its essential preposterousness, profitably ambiguous about why the little darlings have suddenly turned so homicidal - though the alert viewer will pick up plenty of hints along the way - "new viruses... kids are especially susceptible." And there's a certain punishment-of-luxury schadenfreude to be had in watching such smug bourgeois being epâtée by their own mollycoddled sprogs. 15.3.09 THE MARCORELLE AFFAIR : [3+/10] : L'affaire Marcorelle : Fr 2000 : Serge LE PERON : 94m (AFM) : seen at the Austrian Filmmuseum, Vienna, 18th April (paid €9) Marcorelle is a respectable sixtyish judge (or 'A.D.A.', as the irksomely American-English subtitles on the print reviewed here would have it) in Chambery, a picturesque but somewhat sleepy town not far from the Swiss border. A cinephile and, back in the day, political activist, his comfortable bourgeois existence is jeopardised when he becomes entangled with a Polish waitress/prostitute/femme-fatale (Irene Jacob). Or does he? Debut feature by former Cahiers du Cinema critic Le Peron so confusingly dots between reality and dream/fantasy sequences it quickly becomes hard to know what's going on or why. And rather harder to care: while individual sequences have a certain droll, discombobulating charm, the overall air of stilted, forced whimsy is decidedly wearing. The performers - including Dominique Raymond as Leaud's still-engagee wife and Mathieu Amalric as his ambitious younger colleague - throw themselves into the proceedings with game enthusiasm, but are stuck with a contrived, self-reflexive, self-satisfied screenplay that's primarily an excuse for Le Peron to indulge his own cineastic fantasies. And, like many films which rely too heavily on dream-sequences, the cumulative result is decidedly lid-heavying for the viewer also. 20.3.09 |
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