The Raid
Director: Gareth Huw Evans

A 100-minute exercise in ostentatiously over-the-top crash-bang-wallop, Indonesian martial-arts thriller The Raid has been subject of worldwide “fanboy” hype since its international premiere at the Toronto Film Festival last autumn. Part of the fascination lies in its unorthodox pedigree, this being the third feature by Welsh writer-director Gareth Huw Evans after 2006′s little-seen Footsteps and 2009′s Merantau.

A graduate of Glamorgan University, Evans moved to his wife’s homeland to work on documentaries and soon became fascinated by the national fighting-style silat, a “sneaky” anything-goes form of hand-to-hand (or to-cheek/guts/genitals) combat. Merantau was his first attempt at a silat movie, showcasing the impressive skills of twentysomething Iko Uwais, who has been a practitioner since his early childhood.

In The Raid, Uwais is the fresh-faced, as-yet-uncorrupted SWAT-cop Rama – a quietly-spoken sort who, as we see in the opening scene, is about to become a father for the first time. The demurely pregnant wife-at-home has become a favoured non-combatant concomitant of the action genre worldwide (see also 2010 Australian variant Red Hill), and The Raid certainly doesn’t attempt to reinvent the wheel in terms of plotting or characterisation.

Rama’s unit are charged with invading a squalid inner-city tower-block which has long been a no-go area for law-enforcement officials. It’s the den of veteran criminal kingpin Tama (Ray Sahetapy), who resides in a heavily-guarded upstairs section while renting out most (but, crucially, not all) of the lower apartments to various ne’er-do-wells and miscreants. The SWAT team mount a sneak assault on the building – one which initially meets little resistance… until they reach the sixth floor, and seven shades of merry hell proceed to break noisily loose.

After a deceptively quiet build-up The Raid kicks into gear after half-an-hour or so as the cops meet wave upon wave of opposition – most of it faceless cannon-fodder in Assault On Precinct 13 fashion, but also including a handful of viciously inventive thugs who enjoy longer spells of screen-time before their messy demises. Evans and company have evidently lavished considerable imagination on several of these bloody dispatches – wince-inducing moments abound, most memorably involving one hapless chap’s neck making fatal contact with the jagged base of a wooden door.

But after a while a certain numbing repetitiveness starts to set in, the various floors of The Raid‘s squalidly grimy main setting coming to resemble the different levels of hyper-violent combat-based computer-games. As American critic Danny Peary wrote about the original 1982 Tron, “If you like to hang out at the local arcade, playing video games or just looking over someone’s shaking shoulders for a couple of hours, then you might get a kick out of this.”

Those unwilling or unable to access their inner 16-year-old boy, however, might wonder what all the fuss is about. There’s no doubting Evans’ ability to sock over a fight-scene or six – and the percussive soundtrack, by Joseph Trapanese and Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda, underlines the swaggering cool of the whole enterprise. But unless one is au fait with the workings of Indonesian society, any wider implications or metaphorical aspects remain fuzzy.

In more imaginative and socially-aware hands, for example, The Raid could conceivably have illustrated ‘Down Vietnam Street’, the chilling epilogue of Mike Davis’ indispensible 2006 dystopian mega-urban-demographics polemic Planet of Slums: “war planners… with coldblooded lucidity now assert that the failed, feral cities of the Third World – especially their slum outskirts – will be the distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first century…. [The] delusionary dialectic of securitized versus demonic urban places… dictates a sinister and unceasing duet: Night after night, hornetlike helicopter gunships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts, pouring hellfire into shanties or fleeing cars. Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions. if the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their side.”

More prosaically, for all the much-trumpeted “sneaky” nature of silat, The Raid is perhaps the most egregious example of the ‘after you, Claude’ school of movie-ruckus clichés, whereby the baddies for some reason feel duty-bound to invariably and politely wait their turn to attack the solo hero – rather than rushing him and overpowering his superior kick-ass skills through sheer weight of numbers.

In the end, then, The Raid - while undeniably diverting popcorn fare (with Sahetapy a memorably ice-cool villain) – falls some way short of two other low/low-ish budget breakthroughs by thirtysomething British blokes from the last couple of years: aliens-in-central-America parable Monsters by Gareth Edwards (Evans is presumably deploying his middle-name in hope of avoiding inevitable confusions between the pair), and Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block, which is effectively The Raid in reverse, and with added wit and zap amid all the biff-baff-pow shenanigans.

Neil Young
8th May 2012
written for Tribune magazine

5-2 : LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE  - Kiarostami
11-2 : YOU AIN’T SEEN NOTHIN’ YET - Resnais
6-1 : COSMOPOLIS - Cronenberg
7-1 : IN ANOTHER COUNTRY – Hong
10-1 : IN THE FOG - Loznitsa
10-1 : POST TENEBRAS LUX - Reygadas
10-1 : ON THE ROAD - Salles
14-1 : BEYOND THE HILLS - Mungiu
16-1 : RUST AND BONE - Audiard
16-1 : THE HUNT – Vinterberg
22-1 : KILLING THEM SOFTLY - Dominik
22-1 : PARADISE : LOVE – Seidl
22-1 : AMOUR (aka LOVE) - Haneke
25-1 : LAWLESS – Hillcoat
28-1 : HOLY MOTORS - Carax
28-1 : MOONRISE KINGDOM – Anderson
33-1 : THE TASTE OF MONEY - Im
35-1 : MUD - Nichols
50-1 : THE PAPERBOY – Daniels
50-1 : REALITY - Garrone
50-1 : THE ANGELS’ SHARE - Loach
100-1 : AFTER THE BATTLE - Nasrallah
——————————————————————–
update #29: 16th May 2012 at 2200 — live from Cannes!
—
odds archive
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FORM GUIDE (selected)

Jacques Audiard (61-y-o, French)
… twice in Competition: 1996 (A Self Made Hero - Best Screenplay, co-written with Alain Le Henry), 2009 (A Prophet - Grand Prix)

David Cronenberg (60-y-o, Canadian)
… three times in Competition: 1996 (Crash - Special Jury Prize), 2002 (Spider), 2005 (A History of Violence)

Michael Haneke (70-y-o, Austrian)
… five times in Competition: 1997 (Funny Games), 2000 (Code Unknown), 2001 (The Piano Teacher – Grand Prix; Best Actress, Isabelle Huppert; Best Actor, Benoît Magimel); 2005 (Hidden – Best Director), 2009 (The White Ribbon – Palme d’Or)

HONG Sang-soo (51-y-o, South Korean)
… twice in Competition: 2004 (Woman is the Future of Man), 2005 (Tale of Cinema)

Abbas Kiarostami (71-y-o, Iranian)
… four times in Competition: 1994 (Through the Olive Trees), 1997 (The Taste of Cherry - joint Palme d’Or), 2002 (Ten), 2010 (Certified Copy - Best Actress, Juliette Binoche)

Sergei Loznitsa (47-y-o, Ukrainian)
… once in Competition: 2010 (My Joy) – debut fictional feature

Cristian Mungiu (44-y-o, Romanian)
… once in Competition: 2007 (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days - Palme d’Or)

Carlos Reygadas (40-y-o, Mexican)
… twice in Competition: 2005 (Battle In Heaven), 2007 (Silent Light – joint Jury Prize)

Walter Salles (56-y-o, Brazilian)
… twice in Competition: 2004 (The Motorcycle Diaries), 2008 (Linha de Passe – Best Actress, Sandra Corveloni)

Café de Flore
Director: Jean-Marc Vallée

Faust
Director: Aleksandr Sokurov

FILE under “go figure.” The four best films which world-premiered in 2010 (by my subjective reckoning) have all yet to obtain UK cinema distribution: Marcin Wrona’s The Christening (Poland), Jean-Charles Hue’s The Lord’s Ride (France), Sergio Caballero’s Finisterrae (Spain) and Thomas Arslan’s In the Shadows (Germany) – three of which could plausibly be marketed as ‘crime dramas.’ And yet French-Canadian writer/director/editor Jean Marc Vallée’s Café de Flore, a decade-hopping metaphysical romance which disastrously descends into overwrought histrionics, pops up on our arthouse screens barely six months after its first public screenings at Toronto and Venice last autumn. Primarily a showcase for the hitherto-hidden thespian skills of 1980s pop-starlet Vanessa Paradis – now best known as Mrs Johnny Depp - Café de Flore is otherwise undistinguished fare at best. It’s a salutary example of what can go wrong when a writer-director edits his own material: there’s probably a decent enough film lurking somewhere in this overlong, overcomplicated, double-pronged, supernatural-tinged tale of amour fou, but it’s frustratingly absent from Vallée’s final cut.

The director had a runaway Canadian hit with 2005′s gay-themed 1960s/70s-set C.R.A.Z.Y., then made a reasonably promising transition to higher-profile English-language features with another “period” picture, The Young Victoria (2009). He now returns with a slick-looking, crisply shot affair, which boasts an impressive soundtrack comprising dance, indie, electro and ethereal-pop cuts – Iceland’s Sigur Ros are notably prominent in the mix. There are also several versions of the big-band-inflected title track by British electro-musician Matthew Herbert, an infectious melody which, like the Virginia Woolf novel in Stephen Daldry’s The Hours, serves to connect seemingly unrelated characters separated by several decades.

In present-day Montreal, globetrotting DJ Antoine (Kevin Parent) is two years into a passionate relationship with Rose (Evelyn Brochu), having left life-long partner Carole (Hélène Florent) and their daughters. Meanwhile in a grimy 1969 Paris, cash-strapped Jacqueline (Paradis) single-handedly raises her seven-year-old son Laurent (Marin Gerrier), who has Down’s Syndrome. She places him in a non-specialized school, where Laurent succumbs to a powerful case of puppy love. Jacqueline’s struggles to cope with this development are mirrored by Carole’s strife as she experiences hallucinations that make her wonder if some kind of reincarnation has occurred.

This is clearly difficult, sensitive subject matter, but done no favors by Vallée’s intrusively choppy, disorienting editing style, a mish-mash of crosscuts, flashbacks, dreams and fantasies building to a noisily incoherent, unsatisfying dénouement. Is Jacqueline perhaps just a figment of Carole’s anguished imagination? This would if nothing else explain how she obtains a Herbert album featuring ‘Café de Flore’ three years before the artist’s own birth. There’s considerable potential in dramatizing Jacqueline’s quest to raise Laurent in the most loving and stimulating way. Paradis is rock-solid, and many of her scenes with little Gerrier are touchingly effective. But Vallée might have more profitably concentrated on properly developing that one story, and ditching Café de Flore’s less engaging elements altogether. This kind of metaphysically-romantic, multi-layered fare can – with sensitive and imaginative handling – often work beautifully in fiction. But in film (apart from rare examples like, say, Krzysztof Kieszlowski’s Double Life of Véronique), it can easily come across as misconceived or even, as in the final reel here, near-laughably absurd.

ABSURDITY is just one among the flavours deliberately and ambitiously juggled by Russian auteur Aleksandr Sokurov in his €8m-Euro project Faust. It’s the latest an adaptation of the Goethe classic that’s also been freely reinterpreted down the centuries by Marlowe, Thomas Mann, Gounod, F W Murnau and The Fall (“cast me, blood silhouett-ah, through the ceiling sky!” - Dktr Faustus, 1986). Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival last year, this is a dauntingly dense “text” of a movie with scads of high-flown German dialogue – but also a strain of bawdy, grotesque humour that mercifully prevents proceedings from sludging into po-faced philosophical solemnity.

Sokurov’s protagonist, Heinrich Faust (Johannes Zeiler) is an early-19th-century middle-European anatomist who believes that the human soul can be located within the body, messily dissecting corpses to justify his theories. His intellectual arrogance is challenged by Mauricius (Anton Adasinsky), the town’s wheedling moneylender, who dismisses Faust’s preoccupations with an airy “The soul? One can do without it. Why complicate things?” (Perhaps echoing Walter Huston’s Mr Scratch in The Devil and Daniel Webster [1941]: “Soul? Soul is nothing… Can you see it? Smell it? Touch it? No…”) Mauricius, whose imperious wife (Euro art-film legend Hanna Schygulla) waltzes around in an array of operatically excessive costumes – is never named as ‘Mephistopheles’ here, but he obviously fills the role of Goethe/Marlowe’s Satanic tempter. His bargain involves granting Faust carnal access to virginal damsel Gretchen (Isolda Dychauk), a character often named ‘Marguerite’ in previous iterations. Arguably Sokurov’s trump card, saturnine Dychauk is such a luminous screen presence that one might imagine a mature, intelligent scientist like Faust trading his eternal soul for a night in her bed.

In contrast, Adasinsky’s Mauricius is a gloriously repellent creation – a deformed, goblin-like cross between John Merrick, Albert Steptoe and Mark E Smith. Mauricius is somehow simultaneously both cadaverous and obese, as we observe when he appears topless in a steam-bath sequence of knockabout ribaldry – the actor sports a fat-suit that’s no less stomach-churning for being so obviously fake, his posterior and genitals obscenely reversed. Proof, perhaps, of Mauricius’ diabolical hideousness? But Sokurov is tantalisingly ambiguous about exactly what is going on here. While we’re evidently in a Brueghel-esque netherworld of paranormal forces and supernatural critters – shot in olde-worlde tones of honey-lustrous sepia by cinematographer Benoit Delbonnel -the script is near-impenetrably opaque in terms of theology, all the way up to its disorientingly abrupt climax shot amid the geyser-spouting, rubble-strewn landscape of Iceland (perhaps hell, or maybe Faust is simply “out of it”.)

As often with this director, confrontationally odd visual distortions are frequently deployed – the image tilts queasily rhomboid every few minutes – and the sensory overload is such that the picture seems to exude a kind of envelopingly sickly toxic miasma which will certainly not be to all tastes. On the other hand, so uncompromising is Sokurov’s approach to his art that one can easily see why Sight and Sound magazine’s critic hailed it as an “instant mastepiece” after the Venice press screening – even as other august judges scuttled to the exits before the end of the first reel. Sokurov has said he wants this to be a film that “smells of chocolate” – which indeed it does, albeit an aroma mingled with rather baser bodily excretions…

Neil Young
1st May 2012
written for Tribune magazine

Two Years at Sea
Director: Ben Rivers

HOW ironic: in many British cities one’s currently more likely to see film projected “properly” (i.e. via celluloid) in multiplexes rather than arthouses. Both types of movie-house are in the midst of embracing digitisation – but whereas, say, in Newcastle the venerable Tyneside Cinema has “switched over” almost entirely, the barely-a-decade-old Empire multiplex across town still shows the occasional mainstream release via the medium of Dreyer, Welles and Ford.

Of course, in many cases it doesn’t matter how one sees a movie – so long as it’s on a big enough screen. But there are some films which only make sense when seen from 35mm (or even 16mm), and Ben Rivers’ Two Years at Sea is most emphatically one of those. As an unapologetic and exquisite art-film, however, this documentary about a hermit living in the Scottish wilds will exclusively be shown in “specialist” cinemas – and in many instances this may well be via digital projection. Readers keen to see the picture – and it’s surely destined to figure in many critics’ year-end top-ten lists – are therefore strongly advised to seek celluloid projection wherever practical and possible.

But while watching Two Years at Sea digitally certainly isn’t desirable – given the subject-matter, it’d be a bit like listening to the latest Daft Punk album via wax-cylinder – it’s certainly better than not watching it at all. The critics’ jury at last year’s Venice Film Festival – where the picture world-premiered in digital form (Rivers was still some way off finishing the celluloid) – awarded it their top prize in the ‘Orizzonti’ section devoted to cutting-edge fare, recognising the flinty austerity of Rivers’ monochrome portraiture.

His protagonist is Jake Williams, a bearded chap of indeterminate late middle-age who, after toiling for the period of time described in the title, removed himself to a rambling farmhouse somewhere in Aberdeenshire. Not that this information is included in the film itself: all we get are wordless scenes (there’s one line of audible dialogue: “chesty cough”) observing Jake going about his daily business amid countryside depicted in starkly transcendent imagery reminiscent of the great American landscape-photographer Ansel Adams.

It’s essentially a documentary – ruminative, slow-moving, attuned to the “bygone” rhythms of Williams and his unpopulated environment. But it’s not by any means simply a straight “document” of Williams’ world – unless it’s the norm in that world for caravan-trailers to float up into the branches of tall trees. Such touches show the playful side of Rivers, a horror-buff who first recorded Williams in his 2006 short This Is My Land.

Though not to all tastes, Rivers is a strikingly original British artist of the younger generation – he turns 40 this year – whose 16mm vignettes built a considerable following among cinephiles across Europe and further afield thanks to screenings on the film-festival circuit and in art-galleries. Two Years At Sea, his first feature-length foray, will hopefully boost his renown on these shores too – he isn’t exactly a “prophet without honour” here, but he’s undoubtedly better-known among art-aficionados in Barcelona and Boston than he is among those of his native Brighton.

Indeed, he appeared in the list of ’50 Filmmakers Under 50′ published just this month by Toronto’s highly esteemed Cinema Scope magazine, the only other Brit to make the cut being Kill List provocateur Ben Wheatley (who, as well as sharing Rivers’ first name, lives in the latter’s home-town) – no room for, among others, Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast), Shane Meadows (This Is England), or Gareth Edwards (Monsters). So it goes.

Neil Young
24th April 2012
written for Tribune magazine

PLANET OF SNAIL: a report on the 6th AV Festival

Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars. Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature? There is a Czech proverb that describes their easy indolence by a metaphor: ‘They are gazing at God’s windows’.
– Milan Kundera, Slowness (1995)

AS one of the world’s more secular film-makers, American avant-garde maestro James Benning might not appreciate the divine element of that Czech proverb cited by Kundera. But Benning’s works, typically comprising extended takes contemplating American landscapes, do often turn the cinema-screen into a window-like conduit which allows the viewer to experience travel of both a spatial and temporal type. His 98-minute Nightfall represents perhaps the ultimate distillation of the 70-year-old Wisconsinite’s aesthetic and methods, as previously developed in One Way Boogie Woogie (1977), Grand Opera (1981), North On Evers (1992), the California trilogy (1999-2001), 13 Lakes and Ten Skies (both 2004).

It’s a one-take film, shot with a static, tripod-mounted digital camera (Benning worked exclusively in 16mm until 2007, since when the rate of his output has significantly increased) in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, not far from Benning’s Val Verde residence. The director describes it as “a study of real-time light changing from day to night,” one in which no human or animal presence is visible – though both are occasionally audible on the soundtrack, on which birdsong gradually yields to the susurrant (and ultimately overwhelming) thrum of myriad insects.

The screen is filled with dozens of trees, through whose branches and twigs the sky is visible, shading imperceptibly from mid-afternoon brightness to the pitch-black of evening – all that “happens” in the film is the falling of night, in an unambiguous example of movie which does exactly what it says on the ‘tin’. Nightfall, its baldly descriptive title presumably also a nod to Jacques Tourneur’s atmospheric 1957 noir of identical moniker, received its UK premiere at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle on March 3, starting at 4pm and finishing around 5.30 – the choice of timings designed to match the gathering of dusk in the ‘real’ world outside.

This scheduling was a typically imaginative touch from AV Festival (in the US, AV is a commonly-understood abbreviation for ‘Audio-Visual’; less so over over here) whose sixth renewal ran for the whole month of March across various venues in the north-east of England, from ‘NewcastleGateshead’ (as those two Tyne-straddling civic entities are often called in art and marketing NewSpeak) to Sunderland and Middlesbrough. AV 2012′s motto ‘As Slow As Possible’, homaging John Cage, was selected as a counterbalance to the Olympic slogan Citius altius fortius - Faster, Higher, Stronger – proposing “an alternative slower pace and relaxed rhythm to counter the accelerated speed of today.”

Cinema is just one part of AV, a biennial event which this year included – according to its catalogue – “22 exhibitions, 34 film screenings, 15 concerts, 6 walks, and … a 744-hour continuous online radio.” Indeed, many of the films selected for AV edge towards the terrain more usually associated with exhibitions and installations – though the experiencing of sitting in a dark cinema for the duration of Nightfall is of course very different from that of encountering it projected in a gallery or museum. While somewhat ill-served by the Tyneside’s digital projector and too-bright screen – Benning himself, present to introduce and discuss the film, noted the latter with regret (suggesting that the auditorium was better suited to examples of what he wryly termed “dominant” or commercial cinema) – Nightfall provided a ruminative opportunity for contemplation and reflection.

The unblinkingly steady gaze of the camera, uncompromisingly maintained for the 90-odd minutes, recalls Heinrich Von Kleist’s reaction to Caspar David Friedrich’s radically minimal 1810 painting Monk by the Sea:
“How wonderful it is to sit completely alone by the sea under an overcast sky, gazing out over the endless expanse of water. It is essential that one has come there just for this reason, and that one has to return. That one would like to go over the sea but cannot; that one misses any sign of life, and yet one senses the voice of life in the rush of the water, in the blowing of the wind, in the drifting of the clouds, in the lonely cry of the birds … Since in its monotony and boundlessness it has no foreground except the frame, when viewing it, it is as if one’s eyelids had been cut away.”

Nightfall, like much of Benning’s work, is unapologetically demanding – someone stumbling unawares into the Tyneside that March afternoon might well have been baffled and bemused by what they discovered, and it takes a certain adjustment to Benning’s approach before ‘Emperor’s New clothes’ qualms entirely subside. But that films like Nightfall feel so startlingly unorthodox is primarily a testament to the way commercial cinema’s range has narrowed over the century of its existence, with ‘MTV editing’ now the default norm for the majority of multiplex product.
Then again, there’s nothing intrinsically good or bad about “fast” movies, just as slowness itself is no indicator of quality – as anyone who has endured a day of faux-profound, treacle-paced offerings at a film-festival would wearily attest. In a list of 2012′s most accomplished first-quarter UK releases, there should be room for the frenetic likes of Hollywood’s Project X and 21 Jump Street as well as Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s AV-selected Once Upon A Time in Anatolia. God’s windows, it seems, can come in all shapes, sizes and types. And His glaziers too.

Neil Young
3rd April, 2012
written for Tribune magazine

Le Havre
Director: Aki Kaurismäki

AS defined by William S Burroughs, the “Johnson Family” – a term he discovered in one of the favourite books of his childhood, Jack Black’s 1926 hobo/burglar-memoir You Can’t Win – is not, as it may sound, a network of relatives, but rather “a code of conduct.

“To say someone is a Johnson means he keeps his word and honors his obligations. He’s a good man to do business with and a good man to have on your team. He is not a malicious, snooping, interfering, self righteous, trouble-making person… You get to know a Johnson when you see one… And sometimes you don’t see the Johnson. I remember a friend of mine asked someone to send him a hash cake from France. Well the asshole put it in a cheap envelope with no wrapping and it cut through the envelope. But some Johnson had put it back in and sealed the envelope with tape.” (The Johnson Family, from The Adding Machine – Collected Essays.)

In the light of Aki Kaurismäki’s 16th feature-film as writer-director, one is tempted to ponder whether the Johnson in question resided in perhaps came from Le Havre, the rough-edged, WW2-ravaged Normandy port-city which provides the 55-year-old Finnish veteran with his title and his setting. As shown in Le Havre, Le Havre is a veritable nest – or nid - of Johnsons: cash-strapped but dignified and decent working-class folk keen to help out whoever passes through and needs their assistance.

Such as Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), an angelic, studious west African lad in (illegal) transit to London whose journey is inadvertently truncated in Southampton’s twin-city. His fellow-travellers are seized by security forces and whisked off to refugee camps around France – we see TV footage of riots at Sangatte – as a prelude to deportation. Idrissa is considerably more fortunate, ending up in the care of ageing shoeshiner Marcel (André Wilms) who lives a simple but blissful existence in a down-at-heel but cosy corner of town with his wife Arletty (Kati Outinen). Idrissa’s arrival coincides with a domestic crisis: Arletty is diagnosed with cancer, which although it initially seems “extremely benign”, quickly develops into a life-threatening condition…

Le Havre, by contrast, is “extremely benign” pretty much throughout, a cautiously optimistic vision of a multi-cultural, strangely timeless France that some may dismiss as a naive, rose-tinted fable, but which Kaurismäki delivers with disarming simplicity, conviction and wry humour. And while Le Havre might still on this evidence deserve its full original name – ‘The Harbour of Grace’ – it’s sadly exceptional: “a nasty wind blows outside,” as someone remarks. Even this city’s own population isn’t entirely ‘Johnsonian’: Nouvelle vague legend Jean-Pierre Léaud skulks in the shadows as a snitch just itching to alert the authorities to Idrissa’s presence – though the chief representative of the law, Jean-Pierre Darroussin’s trilby-sporting, deadpan Inspector Monet, proves surprisingly amenable to Marcel’s persuasive bonhomie (“my heart has its tender spots,” he confides.)

In the light of recent Toulouse atrocities, Le Havre - which premiered at Cannes last May, and somehow went entirely unrewarded by Robert De Niro’s main-competition jury – can’t help but feel accidentally topical, even urgently so. Kaurismäki’s is a persuasive, world-weary sort of hard-knock humanism, built on twin, interlocking foundations of romantic love and practical-minded community spirit (liberté, égalité, fraternité indeed.)

The director’s long-established, distinctive brand of just-so, retro aesthetics is here realised with the help of collaborators long-standing (cinematographer Timo Salminen, part of the team since 1981) and new (production-designer Wouter Zoon). On the other side of the camera, silky veteran Darroussin and engaging debutant Blondin organically slot in with familiar faces from the established Kaurismäki rep-company (including four-legged pal Laika, who gets her own name-check in the credits).

The results are, as always with the admirably un-modish, unchanging Kaurismäki, visually striking in their mildly-stylised look (lighting is always sideways-on, never overhead) creating an alluringly shadowy netherworld of melancholic but subtly hopeful resilience and resourcefulness. As Le Havre’s very own Raoul Dufy once remarked, “Blue is the only colour which maintains its own character in all its tones… It was always stay blue.”

Neil Young
27th March 2012
written for Tribune magazine

films shown in the Uncharted States of America strand of the Bradford International Film Festival

alphabetical by title

:: A.EFFECT {short} – Mike Ott (17m) – 2010*
:: AN AMERICAN JOURNEY – Philippe Séclier [France] (58m^) – 2011*
:: ANALOG DAYS – Mike Ott (80m) – 2007*
:: APART FROM THAT – Shainin & Walker (120m) – 2007*
:: AUGUST EVENING – Chris Eska (127m) – 2008*
:: BEETLE QUEEN CONQUERS TOKYO – Jessica Oreck (90m^) – 2010
:: BLUE BUS – Phil Scarpaci (95m) – 2010
:: BONECRUSHER – Matthew F Fountain (72m^) – 2010*
:: BRAVE NEW WEST – Carr & Hawes-Davis (80m^) – 2009*
:: BROKE SKY – Thomas L Callaway (97m) – 2008*
:: BUMMER SUMMER – Zach Weintraub (81m) – 2012*
:: CALIFORNIA COMPANY TOWN – Lee Anne Schmitt (77m^) – 2009*
:: CALL OF THE WILD – Ron Lamothe (108m^) – 2008*
:: CASTING A GLANCE – James Benning (80m^) – 2008
:: CHINA TOWN – Lucy Raven (52m^) – 2010*
:: COLD WEATHER – Aaron Katz (96m)  – 2011
:: THE COLOR WHEEL – Alex Ross Perry (83m) – 2012
:: DANCE PARTY, USA – Aaron Katz (65m) – 2007*
:: DANGEROUS MEN – John S Rad (80m) – 2007*
:: A DARKNESS SWALLOWED – Betzy Bromberg (78m^) – 2007*
:: DISFARMER: A PORTRAIT OF AMERICA – Martin Lavut [Canada] (52m^) – 2011*
::: (short version shown 2009)
:: DISTINGUISHED FLYING CROSS – Travis Wilkerson (61m^) – 2012*
:: EGGSHELLS (1969) – Tobe Hooper (90m) – 2010* {restoration}
:: EXIT – Sharon Lockhart (41m^) – 2009*
:: FISH KILL FLEA – Cassidy, Hillis & Loeber (50m^) – 2008*
:: FOREIGN PARTS – Paravel & Sniadecki (81m^) – 2011*
:: 45365 – Ross & Ross (90m^) – 2011
:: FREEZER FRIGHT – Nancy Silver (57m^) – 2010*
:: HAMILTON – Matthew Porterfield (65m) – 2007*
:: HOHOKAM – Frank V Ross (72m) – 2008*
:: HOOPESTON – Thomas Bender (78m^) – 2009*
:: IMMOKALEE, USA – Georg Koszulinski (77m^) – 2009*
:: INTRO – Brandon Cahoon (79m^) – 2012*
:: IT WAS GREAT, BUT I WAS READY TO COME HOME – Kris Swanberg (61m) – 2010*
:: THE LAST BUFFALO HUNT – Lynch & Schmitt (76m^) – 2012*
:: LAY DOWN TRACKS – Lombardi & McCaffrey (59m^) – 2007*
:: LITTLEROCK – Mike Ott (84m) – 2011*
:: LOREN CASS – Chris Fuller (83m) – 2007*
:: LOWLANDS – Peter Thompson (51m^) – 2010*
:: LUNCH BREAK – Sharon Lockhart (83m^) – 2009*
:: O’ER THE LAND – Deborah Stratman (52m^) – 2009*
:: OMG/HAHAHA – Morgan Jon Fox (74m) – 2009*
:: ONE SMART INDIAN {short} – Craig Butta (9m) – 2012*
:: ONE WAY BOOGIE WOOGIE / 27 YEARS LATER – James Benning (116m^) – 2007
:: PARADE – Brandon Cahoon (83m) – 2009*
:: POLICE BEAT – Robinson Devor (81m) – 2007
:: PROFIT MOTIVE AND THE WHISPERING WIND – John Gianvito (58m^) – 2008
:: PUTTY HILL – Matthew Porterfield (85m) – 2011
:: QUIET CITY – Aaron Katz (81m) – 2008*
:: REDLAND – Asiel Norton (105m) – 2010
:: R R – James Benning (112m^) – 2008*
:: SAWDUST CITY – David Nordstrom (97m) – 2012*
:: SMALL ROADS – James Benning (103m^) – 2012*
:: TEAM PICTURE – Kentucker Audley (62m) – 2009*
:: THREE STORIES {short} – Lee Anne Schmitt (14m^) – 2012*
:: TURKEY BOWL – Kyle Smith (64m) – 2012*
:: VOLUPTOUS SLEEP – Betzy Bromberg (95m^) – 2012*
:: WHEN IS TOMORROW – Kevin Ford (80m) – 2008*
:: WHO IS BOZO TEXINO? – Bill Daniel (56m^) – 2007*
:: WHO KILLED COCK ROBIN? – Travis Wilkerson (73m edit, aka WKCR Redux) – 2007*
:: THE WHOLE SHOOTIN’ MATCH (1979; restoration) – Eagle Pennell (109m) – 2008
:: WITHOUT – Mark Jackson (87m)  – 2012
:: YEAST – Mary Bronstein (77m) – 2009

* = UK Premiere
^ = non-fiction
total 63 films (31 non-fiction, =49%)

============================================

alphabetical by director

– Kentucker AUDLEY : 2009 Team Picture
– Thomas BENDER : 2009 Hoopeston
– James BENNING [4] : 2007 One Way Boogie Woogie / 27 Years Later. 2008 Casting a Glance. 2008 R R. 2012 Small Roads
– Betzy BROMBERG [2] : 2007 A Darkness Swallowed. 2012 Voluptuous Sleep
– Mary BRONSTEIN : 2009 Yeast
– Craig BUTTA : 2012 One Smart Indian (short)
– Brandon CAHOON [2] : 2009 Parade. 2012 Intro
– Thomas L. CALLAWAY : 2008 Broke Sky
– Drury Gunn CARR : 2009 Brave New West (co-director)
– Aaron CASSIDY : 2008 Fish Kill Flea (co-director)
– Bill DANIEL : 2007 Who Is Bozo Texino?
– Robinson DEVOR : 2007 Police Beat
– Chris ESKA : 2008 August Evening
– Kevin FORD : 2008 When Is Tomorrow
– Matthew F. FOUNTAIN : 2010 Bonecrusher
– Morgan Jon FOX : 2009 OMG/HAHAHA
– Chris FULLER : 2007 Loren Cass
– John GIANVITO : 2008 Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind
– Doug HAWES-DAVIS : 2009 Brave New West (co-director)
– Aaron HILLIS : 2008 Fish Kill Flea (co-director)
– Tobe HOOPER : 2010 Eggshells (1969)
– Mark JACKSON : 2012 Without
– Aaron KATZ [3] : 2007 Dance Party, USA. 2008 Quiet City. 2011 Cold Weather
– Georg KOSZULINSKI : 2009 Immokalee, USA
– Ron LAMOTHE : 2008 Call of the Wild
– Martin LAVUT (Can) : 2009 & 2011 Disfarmer: A Portrait of America
– Sharon LOCKHART [2] : 2009 Lunch Break. 2009 Exit.
– Jennifer LOEBER : 2008 Fish Kill Flea (co-director)
– Danielle LOMBARDI : 2007 Lay Down Tracks (co-director)
– Lee LYNCH : 2012 The Last Buffalo Hunt (co-director)
– Brigid MCCAFFREY : 2007 Lay Down Tracks (co-director)
– David NORDSTROM : 2012 Sawdust City
– Asiel NORTON : 2010 Redland
– Jessica ORECK : 2010 Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
– Mike OTT [3] : 2007 Analog Days. 2010 A.Effect (short). 2011 Littlerock
– Vanessa PARAVEL : 2011 Foreign Parts (co-director)
– Eagle PENNELL : 2008 The Whole Shootin’ Match (1979)
– Alex Ross PERRY : 2012 The Color Wheel
– Matthew PORTERFIELD [2] : 2007 Hamilton. 2011 Putty Hill
– John S. RAD : 2007 Dangerous Men
– Lucy RAVEN : 2010 China Town
– Bill ROSS IV : 2011 45365 (co-director)
– Frank V. ROSS : 2008 Hohokam
– Turner ROSS : 2011 45365 (co-director)
– Phil SCARPACI : 2010 Blue Bus
– Lee Anne SCHMITT [3] : 2009 California Company Town. 2012 The Last Buffalo Hunt (co-director). 2012 Three Stories (short)
– Philippe SECLIER (Fr) : 2011 An American Journey
– Jennifer SHAININ : 2007 Apart From That (co-director)
– Nancy SILVER : 2010 Freezer Fright
– Kyle SMITH : 2012 Turkey Bowl
– J. P. SNIADECKI : 2011 Foreign Parts (co-director)
– Deborah STRATMAN : 2009 O’er the Land
– Kris SWANBERG : 2010 It Was Great, But I Was Ready To Come Home
– Peter THOMPSON : 2010 Lowlands
– Randy WALKER : 2007 Apart From That (co-director)
– Zach WEINTRAUB : 2012 Bummer Summer
– Travis WILKERSON [2] : 2007 Who Killed Cock Robin? 2012 Distinguished Flying Cross

total 57 directors (14 female = 25%)

=================================================================

further reading

reproduction of 2007 BIFF catalogue entry introducing and explaining the strand

2010 National Media Museum blog entry on Uncharted States IV

Minicine’s salute to the strand

Zach Weintraub writes on Bummer Summer‘s selection for Uncharted States VI

a personal selection: five of the best

The Call of the Wild (Lamothe)
casting a glance (Benning)
Profit motive and the whispering wind (Gianvito)
Who Is Bozo Texino? (Daniel)
Who Killed Cock Robin? (Wilkerson)

Into the Abyss
Director: Werner Herzog

This Is Not a Film
Director(s): none credited

TWO decidedly personal documentaries about incarceration this week, one made from the outside of the “bars” looking in, the other vice versa. The former is Werner Herzog’s Into the Abyss, part of a larger project in which the veteran German director closely examines the cases of American Death Row convicts. The latter, This Is Not a Film, is a rather more unorthodox and complex enterprise focusing on multiple award-winning Iranian film-maker Jafar Panahi, whose plight (in December 2010 he was sentenced to six years in jail, banned from making films or leaving Iran for 20 years) has attracted considerable international attention.

Into the Abyssis very evidently a ‘Werner Herzog film’: as is the case with most of the director’s non-fiction output, Herzog himself is an inescapable offscreen audio presence, eagerly probing his interviewees offbeat fashion. “Tell me about your encounter with the squirrel!” he interjects at one early point here, ever on the alert for leftfield anecdotes. But despite such moments of levity, the subject-matter is unavoidably grave: the two main protagonists, Michael Perry and Jason Burkett, both received death sentences for their teenaged participation in a senseless 2001 triple-homicide.

This Is Not A Film has rather more of a leavening of humour (much of it associated with a scenestealing pet iguana), but the stakes are once again very high. While Panahi isn’t facing execution, the state’s penalty for “making a film against the [Ahmedinajad] regime” would effectively mean the suspension of his creative life and the prolonged silencing of a major creative voice in world culture – Panahi’s The Circle won Venice’s Golden Lion in 2000, while his 2007 football-themed drama Offside was perhaps the most widely admired and awarded Iranian film of recent years before Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation came along.

Since falling foul of the authorities, Panahi has been largely under a somewhat liberal form of house-arrest: as we see in This is Not a Film, he’s not under direct police “supervision” and is able to leave his comfortable city-centre Tehran apartment (according to a Variety magazine story, Panahi can even go shopping in his neighbourhood.) Some understanding of Panahi’s case and circumstances are fairly crucial to appreciating the ironies and implications of This is Not a Film, which relies for much of its impact on a careful navigation through issues of authorship and creative control.

Panahi is banned from film-making but can’t be stopped from being a filmmaker, 24/7 – he therefore asks his documentarian friend Mojtaba Mirtahmasb to visit him in his apartment, where he’s shown puttering about, discussing his situation with phone-callers, and describing his next project. He reads out sections of the screenplay (shades of Marguerite Duras’s The Truck [1977]) and even marks an outline of its “set” using tape on his Persian rug (requiring us to play along with his flight-of-fancy, Dogville-style).

As the non-film “film” goes on, Panahi abandons the script-reading takes a more hands-on role, interviewing his block’s pro-tem caretaker using the high-end video equipment Mirtahmasb has left behind after heading home for the evening. Does any or all of this activity constitute a breach of his sentence? Despite the title, This Is Not a Film obviously is a film (video, technically speaking), but neither Panahi nor Mirtahmasb are credited as its “directors” – the end-credits indicate that it is an “effort” by both men, with Panahi as editor shaping the material into its final 75-minute form.

As a playful exercise in nose-tweaking, it’s an admirably audacious if somewhat necessarily navel-gazing project whose exposure outside Iran will doubtless vex the regime even further – with potentially serious consequences for Panahi and company. Of course, the more Panahi is persecuted the more his stock will rise among the worldwide cultural community – a fact of which the “director” himself, nothing if not aware of the multiple compound ironies which his circumstances compel him to negotiate, will be inescapably conscious.

But even if this claustrophobic miniature is chiefly of interest as a samizdat curio, Panahi and Mirtahmasb’s “effort” quietly illuminates an ever-evolving situation of foment and resistance in the Iranian capital: it’s clearly no accident that it was filmed on a Wednesday, the day on which fireworks are set off in noisy protest against the regime, providing a steady gunfire-like backdrop for Panahi’s domestic peregrinations.

Into the Abyss (portentously subtitled A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life) takes a quieter, more detached approach to its incendiary, controversial material. Indeed, Herzog, while making no attempt to hide his personal distaste for the death penalty, does not tackle capital punishment directly – even though Texas is the setting, there’s no mention of the state’s execution-happy former governor, George W Bush. Instead, he chronicles the Perry/Burkett case with forensic scrutiny, interviewing family-members on both sides and building up a harrowing litany of miseries, deprivations, natural and unnatural demises, terrible accidents and interlocking tragedies.

This is Herzog in unusually sober, reflective mood, professionally assembling testimonies that take us into the grim mechanics of state-operated termination. Indeed, so engaging and articulate is Fred Allen – a former executioner of striking professionalism who has, since retirement, come to question the wisdom of the practice (a la Britain’s Albert Pierrepoint) – that he could easily have warranted a whole documentary to himself.

But overall there’s the slight sense of an opportunity missed – at 100-odd minutes, Into the Abyss is a companion-piece to Herzog’s three-hour Death Row film, also available in a TV version cut into 47-minute episodes. It’s competently-handled, well-intentioned, thought-provoking fare, but would function just as well on the small screen as the large (in other words, hang on for the BBC4 transmission). Whereas the rough-and-ready, no-budget This is Not a Film, in terms of its conceptual provocations and implications, does somehow become more of a film, more of a sharp-edged political provocation, if seen in a cinema – taking its place alongside auteur movies whose ‘authorship’ is an element to be emphasised and advertised, rather than deliberately, wittily and challengingly obfuscated. 

Neil Young
20th March 2012
written for Tribune magazine

Wild Bill
Director: Dexter Fletcher

Another week, another British geezer-gangster thriller? Yes and no – Wild Bill is a cut above the general run of crime-themed London dramas, and hails from a somewhat unexpected source. As an actor, Dexter Fletcher has been a familiar face on British TV since the 1980s (Press Gang, 1989-1993) and is now perhaps best known for his turn as head-concierge Tony Casemore in Hotel Babylon (2006-2009).

On the big screen his pedigree is even longer and more illustrious: after debuting as ‘Baby Face’ in Alan Parker’s Bugsy Malone (1976), he went on to work with such eminences as David Lynch (The Elephant Man), Derek Jarman (Caravaggio), Ken Russell (Gothic), Mike Leigh (Topsy-Turvy) and Michael Winterbottom (Jude). But it’s his collaborations with Guy Ritchie (Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) and Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake) which feed most directly into Wild Bill, where he steps into the director’s chair for the first time – 45 at the time of filming, he turned 46 in January.

Co-written with Danny King and producer Tim Cole (who also co-produces), Wild Bill stars Fletcher’s former Press Gang co-star Charlie Creed-Miles as the eponymous sometime villain, who as the film begins has just got out of nick after serving an eight-year stretch. Decked out in “old school” shellsuit and Burberry scarf, he heads back to his native London to find the city in the convulsive throes of pre-Olympic building-work – a tide that evidently raises all boats: “boom times for everyone in the borough!” grins one of Bill’s numerous former partners-in-crime.

Despite Bill’s attempts to stick to the straight and narrow, economic pressures (and the dictates of screenwriting convention) mean it’s only so long before the absence of decently-paid legal work will send him veering back to his old ways – though he’s now somewhat hangdog and downtrodden, ‘Mild’ Bill still has the spark of ‘Wild’ Bill lying dormant. Likewise, although his initial meetings with the sons he barely knows (and who have been fending for themselves in the nine months since their mother ran off with a new lover) – 16-year-old Dean (Will Poulter) and 11-year-old Jimmy (Sammy Williams) – are frosty-to-hostile, we don’t have to wait long for father-son relationships to begin thawing out…

Fletcher and company aren’t exactly seek to reinvent the wheel – this is terrain previously, and more skilfully, explored by Shane Meadows – whose London-set Somers Town (2008) likewise unfolded against a backdrop of a construction-industry largely peopled by eastern and central Europeans. But the familiar proceedings are executed with a fair measure of heart and humour, plus a range of strong performances – no surprise that Fletcher should turn out to be very much an “actors’ director” – with Creed-Miles and Poulter excelling, especially in their emotionally-charged scenes together.

Wild Bill, dedicated to Fletcher’s own recently-deceased father Steve, is a blokey affair that will speak most directly to men who’ve struggled to adapt to the demands and responsibilities of fatherhood. But it’s a likeably heartfelt little picture with sharp, nuanced dialogue and solidly-crafted characterisations and while its director probably won’t be giving up the ‘day job’ he’s been toiling at for the last 36 years, he joins recent BAFTA-winner Paddy Considine (Tyrannosaur) as a British name to watch on both sides of the camera.

Neil Young
13th Match 2012
written for Tribune magazine

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan

WE’RE only at the Ides of March, but unless 2012 turns out to be an unprecedented annus mirabilis for cinema it seems safe to predict that Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, the sixth feature by Turkish writer-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, will rank among the finest UK new-releases of the year in many critics’ December wrap-ups. Eight years after his international breakthrough Distant (2003) won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival – Anatolia likewise took the same prize, effectively the ‘runner-up’ award. Ceylan’s picture screened right at the end of the festival, allowing the jury a truncated period to ponder its mysteries and savour its moods – otherwise it might well have edged out Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and taken the Palme d’Or itself.

Of course, with Malick there was a degree of “lifetime achievement” in the Palme win – the kind of sentiment that will doubtless see Ceylan, who took Best Director at the 2008 festival for Three Monkeys and the international critics’ prize for Distant in 2006, similarly rewarded sooner rather than later. He’s now firmly established as a major figure of European cinema – Turkey geographically and culturally straddling both Europe and Asia, although it’s perhaps telling that the title of Ceylan’s picture locates it firmly within the Asian part of his nation.

We’re in a remote, underpopulated corner of the country, as several cars full of policemen and other officials scour the land in search of a buried murder-victim – with taciturn guidance from the suspected murderer, Kenan (Firat Tanis). It’s night-time, and the only illumination comes from the cars’ headlights – otherwise the countryside is a zone of impenetrably deep shadows, treacherous ravines, hidden waterways, ancient silences. In this stripped-down form of cinema, the dialogue (screenplay by the director in collaboration with Ebru Ceylan and Ercan Kesal) becomes crucial, delineating the relationships between the central figures – Cemal, a doctor (Muhammet Uzuner), Naci, the police commissioner (Yilmaz Erdogan), Nusret the prosecutor (Taner Birsel) and Ali, the driver (Ahmet Mumtaz Taylan). As the hours wear on, fatigue kicks in – and their impatience with Kenan’s vague directions becomes sharper.

The first “half” of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is a multi-layered masterclass in minimalist cinema, with pitch-perfect performances, precisely-calibrated dialogue and, most astonishing of all, spellbinding cinematography from Gökhan Tiryaki, who must make each shot appear as if it’s lit only by car headlights (and perhaps it was). How Tiryaki was left off the nominations in the cinematography section of the European Film Awards is an enigma worthy of the film itself.

This is a long film, running more than two and a half hours in total, but such is the hypnotic power of Ceylan’s nocturnal chronicle that considerations of time recede – indeed, it’s a slight disappoinment when day finally comes, and the action shifts to the town where the doctor performs the much-delayed autopsy. But Anatolia, while uneven in its impact, is a poetic and mature work which demands to be appreciated in toto - punctuated with breathtaking moments (an apple bouncing down a hill and into a river is a particular show-stopper), but crafted with a truly novelistic sweep that rewards every ounce of attention it demands.

Neil Young
6th March 2012
written for Tribune magazine