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

to win the 2013 Palme d’Or

updated live from Cannes, Wednesday 22nd May, 11.55pm (Fr) [list #46]

nb: films which have been shown to press in Cannes are in bold
- – - – -
9/2  Kore-eda, Hirokazu – Like Father, Like Son
5/1  Kechiche, Abdellatif -- Blue is the Warmest Colour
6/1  Farhadi, Asghar – The Past
7/1  Sorrentino, Paolo — The Great Beauty
9/1  Coen & Coen – Inside Llewyn Davis
10/1  Haroun, Mahamat-Saleh -- Grigris
10/1  Gray, James – The Immigrant
- – -
16/1  Jia, Zhangke – A Touch of Sin
16/1  des Pallières, Arnaud – Michael Kohlhaas
18/1  Soderbergh, Steven – Behind the Candelabra
20/1  Desplechin, Arnaud – Jimmy P.: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian
25/1  Payne, Alexander – Nebraska
- – -
40/1  Ozon, Francois – Young and Beautiful
50/1  Van Warmerdam, Alex – Borgman
50/1  Escalante, Amat – Heli
50/1  Winding Refn, Nicolas – Only God Forgives
50/1  Polanski, Roman — Venus In Fur
80/1  Jarmusch, Jim – Only Lovers Left Alive
100/1  Bruni-Tedeschi, Valeria – A Castle in Italy
175/1  Miike, Takashi – Shield of Straw
================================================

Best Actor
7-2 Inside Llewyn Davis: Oscar Isaac
9-2 Behind the Candelabra: Michael Douglas
….. (solo, or with Matt Damon)
6-1 The Great Beauty: Toni Servillo
13-2 Grigris: Souleymane Deme
- – -
10-1 Like Father, Like Son: Masaharu Fukuyama
10-1 Nebraska: Bruce Dern
….. (solo, or with Will Forte)
10-1 The Immigrant: Joaquin Phoenix (solo, or with Jeremy Renner)
12-1 Borgman: Jan Bijvoet
12-1 The Past: Ali Mosaffa and/or Tahar Rahim
14-1 Mathieu Amalric and/or Benicio Del Toro
16-1 Michael Kohlhaas: Mads Mikkelsen
- – -
35-1 A Touch of Sin: male ensemble
40-1 Only Lovers Left Alive: Tom Hiddleston
40-1 Only God Forgives: Ryan Gosling and/or Vithaya Pansringarm
50-1 Heli: Armando Espitia
50-1 Shield of Straw: Takao Osawa and/or Tatsuya Fujiwara
—–
* any combination of Amalric and/or Del Toro in Jimmy P. and/or Amalric in Venus In Fur

Best Actress
EVENS Blue is the Warmest Colour: Adèle Exarchopoulos
5-1 The Past: Bérénice Bejo
11-2 The Immigrant: Marion Cotillard
14-1 Venus In Fur: Emmanuelle Seigner
20-1 Only God Forgives: Kristin Scott Thomas
25-1 Young and Beautiful: Marina Vacth 
25-1 Borgman: Hadewych Minis
35-1 Only Lovers Left Alive: Tilda Swinton and/or Mia Wasikowska
40-1 A Touch of Sin: female ensemble
50-1 Heli: Andrea Vergara
66-1 A Castle in Italy:  Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi
80-1 Grigris: Anaïs Monory
80-1 Nebraska: June Squibb

updated 3rd May
================================================~ 

Palmiste
(1894 grey colt)
by Le Sancy – Perplexité (by Perplexe)

————————

ODDS ARCHIVE

.
seen Saturday 18th May
INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS
(Coen & Coen, USA) – Competition
[7/10] {19/28}
comment upcoming
.
BITE THE DUST 
(Otdat Konci; Taisa Igumentseva, Russia) – Special Screenings / Out of Competition
[5/10] {12/28}
Hollywood Reporter review
——————————————————————————————-
seen Friday 17th May
THE SELFISH GIANT
(Clio Barnard, UK) – Directors’ Fortnight
[6/10] {17/28}
Hollywood Reporter review

BRADDOCK, AMERICA
(Kessler & Portron, France) – ACID
[5/10] {14/28}
comment upcoming
——————————————————————————————-
seen Thursday 16th May
SUZANNE
(Katell Quillévéré, France) — Critics’ Week [opening film; out of competition]
[7/10] {18/28}
comment upcoming

FRUITVALE STATION
(aka Fruitvale; Ryan Coogler, USA) — Un Certain Regard
[5/10] {13/28}
comment upcoming

THE BLING RING
(Sofia Coppola, USA/Jpn) — Un Certain Regard
[4/10] {10/28}
comment upcoming

17.5.13
——————————————————————————————-
seen Wednesday 15th May

HELI
(Amat Escalante, Mexico/Neth/Fr/Ger) — Competition
[5/10] {12/28}

Escalante’s plausibly grim vision of contemporary rural Mexico as a police-state ever-trembling on the edge of sickening violence. A forbiddingly brutal prologue sets the scene and the tone, casting ominous shadows over the ensuing scenes that depict the fumblingly tender but clearly ‘unsuitable’ romance between pubescent high-schooler Estela (baby-faced Andrea Vergara) and her 17-year-old boyfriend, a thuggish special-forces police-cadet. The love-birds’ elopement plans, involving the purloinment of cop-confiscated drugs, go catastrophically awry with horrendous consequences for all.

As with his previous picture The Bastards, director Escalante serves up gruellingly nasty sequences – his piece-de-resistance here involves flambéed male genitalia – with a detachment that’s also somehow mildly gloating. But as a atmospherically dystopic indictment of how the “war” on drugs has had a devastating effect south of la frontera, Heli - named after Estela’s brother, the ordinary working Joe who becomes an unlikely angel of vengeance – is clear-eyed and persuasive.

Performances from the almost entirely non-professional cast range from serviceable to stiff, however, in a picture that’s generally a little too muted and inert to ever pack much in the way of genuine emotional impact. And while the final shot delivers some rays of optimism and hard-won transcendence, the conclusion of Heli’s particular tale – with its unambiguous implication that violent masculine action can alleviate bedroom hangups – leaves an unfortunate aftertaste.
15.5.13

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

Ratings and ranking
7/10: Suzanne
6/10: The Selfish Giant
5/10: Braddock, USA
5/10: Fruitvale Station
5/10: Heli
4/10: The Bling Ring

In Lisbon for a week to serve on IndieLisboa’s Short Film International Competition Jury, I saw over 70 short films as well as the occasional feature. In a broad program, the shorts jury watched a lot of original, conceptually-rounded and well-executed ideas representing the very ‘anti-Hollywood’ ethos that the IndieLisboa’13 banners were shouting about – if less that we connected with on a personal level.

We ended up awarding two documentaries and an animation, and just one live action fiction (further Special Mentions evened it out a little). Outstanding individual films, they will also work well together as a single program for what they say about our 21^st century condition, relationships and isolation, conformity and dissent, the materiality of our personal worlds and of the universe…

The reflections below, however, concern some themes and stylistic tendencies that emerged from the whole program rather than the process of awarding prizes. Unless stated, the following notes are my own rather than the group’s, but were developed over a week of darkness and talk and tiny coffees with my most wise and informed jury colleagues, Inês Nadais and Tess Renaudo.

Cameras making films about themselves

The short film program saw an abundance of ‘diegetic cameras’ – cameras which either appeared in the frame of the film, or were apparently used by the characters themselves to shoot the film the audience sees. Camera-phone culture has altered the way we relate to images, recording everything for posterity and embarking on interminable (unfinished) art projects. Skype objectifies and glamorises our confessions. In real life we have developed new ways of understanding this material: it is now part of the cinematic grammar – or should that be YouTube grammar, or just plain Grammr?

In Marcelo Caetano’s Na sua companhia a man collects video portraits of gay men undressing, with one of whom he begins an affair. Rather than construct the short from these videos, they are woven between fictionalised clips of the Sao Paulo scene, and intimate dialogue scenes. Intentionally or otherwise, this eclectic approach creates an anthropological feel (more on anthropology below) at the expense of dramatic impact.

Our jury gave the National prize to Antonio Da Silva’s Gingers which, were the cinematography not so considered and elegant, might have been the product of a project such as that in Na sua companhia (though Da Silva is unapologetically a documentary-filmmaker rather than a real-person with a humble project-hobby). Painterly representations of his redheaded subjects’ nude bodies – their beards, balls, smiles – are brought to life as the camera lingers over them talking, flirting, masturbating. Da Silva and his camera are unseen, but essential, presences.

Maria Alché’s eponymous heroine Noelia also wields a camcorder, and the product is also a collection. A fictional diary film, Noelia’s obsession with adopting unsuspecting strangers to be her mother dominates each ‘scene’. In fact, the only woman Noelia can connect with is herself, and only through her camera, with which she shares withering looks and from which she seeks assurance. It is how she relates, and also how she self-defines, the selfie as (warped) auto-assertion. (For the tension between these ideas, and the absurd humour with which it explores them, we gave the film a Special Mention.)

To digress from IndieLisboa shorts briefly, it is worth noting that Michael Wahrmann’s feature-length Avanti Popolo (in the Emerging Cinema program) favours the diegetic-projector over the diegetic-camera as mediator between characters and audience. The film is partially made up of actual Super 8 footage from the ‘60s and ‘70s which is integrated into the story as though it belongs to the main character, André. He narrates his personal reflections over it, fictionalising this pre-existing footage within the character’s reality. André himself expresses his doubts at another filmmaker-character’s ‘Dogma 2002’ technique: detourning old features by redubbing them with satirical dialogue (André’s boredom and faint praise towards his friend’s film being indicative of Avanti Popolo’s dry humour). Elsewhere, a smooth-talking radio DJ seduces his audiences with historical Brazilian rebel songs and an irrepressible taxi driver deluges André with his collection of national anthems. Wahrmann’s specific political themes aside, this approach raises an interesting thought: does the ubiquity of the diegetic-camera indicate our filmmakers are over-fixated on content rather than context? Regardless of the ideals inherent in the Web 2.0+ world, the majority of Users are curators rather than creators. (And more still, consumers). Perhaps creators make for more heroic figures.

Ellipsis

Thankfully, classical narrative drama, in which scenes of dramatic importance are played out in full, one after the other, until resolving themselves as in an argument, is out of fashion. Instead, the prevailing style is to chop together an ostensibly random collection of moments and feelings which have the cumulative effect of evoking a situation rather than a story. As with diegetic-camera films, elliptical films may tend towards database or collection cinema rather than developing narratives.

There may come, however, a sense of catharsis, transcendence, or sickening emptiness with the closing fragment. Only in retrospect does the viewer of El Ruido de las Estrellas me aturde (Eduardo Williams) realise that they’ve watched a catalogue of adolescent speculation on the materiality of the universe. An unprecedented close-up of a lone beetle crawling over a wishing-tree recalls a throwaway line comparing the physical mass and community spirit of people to cockroaches. The film’s human faces become familiar but, in underexposed long shots, the dialogue remains unattributed and, even subtitled, the scenes tend to begin and end not even mid-sentence, but mid-word. The jury gave Williams’ film a Special Mention for the originality and effectiveness of its cinematic voice, and it was the film I made the most personal connection with, although it garnered few audience votes and divided the festival’s programming team.

The incidental moments the elliptical filmmaker chooses to include might be images they consider to be quietly eloquent of the themes, the fruits of loose improvisation, or perhaps deliberate clues to a grander design. The closing shots of Gonçalo Waddington’s Imaculado leave the audience to reconsider the previous fragments of underexposed rural life. One may or may not have predicted the twist, but was there an explanation hidden in the movie’s structure?

Mahalia Belo’s visually elegant Volume toys with ellipsis by framing the story of an alienated boy and a missing girl as a series of flashbacks (subjective sound adds to the oneiric feel), but feels tethered to the old school as feelings are progressively subjugated to plot. The force of the filmmaker-as-storyteller becomes invasive. The film is from the NFTS and perhaps a commercial sensibility was at play: the film tells more than it needs to, as if to leave audiences in no doubt that Belo knows how to tell a story.

Have we grown tired of classically constructed films because they’re old news, or have media trends, audience sophistication, and a narrowing divide between consumer and creator made us suspicious of neatly plotted narratives? For some, elliptical filmmaking opens up a space for mystery and wonder; in other hands it becomes part of a realist tradition that claims to lay bare the chaos in which answers may be found.

Anthropological films

Through investigation or observation, documentary, animation or live action, a variety of films took a quasi-scientific or sociological view of their subject. In Fragmentos de uma Observação Participativa - (Filipa Reis, João Miller Guerra), the conversations of three ‘real life’ Brazilian women are disrupted and recommenced at the will of the directors, so that they repeat the same anecdotes almost word-for-word (another acknowledged camera-presence). Booms drop into frame as if to assert their own presence. The effect is of a fascinating documentary as wry and artificial as it is candid and intimate.

In contrast, documentarian Piotr Złotorowicz (Wiosna, lato, jesień) creeps invisibly around his Amish subjects, whose indifference to his mechanical eye creates an uncanny sense of timelessness. Displays of cruelty and affection go equally un-self-censored.

The anthropological tendency also ran through the fiction program. Entre paredes (Tânia S. Ferreira, Gonçalo Robalo) examines a faceless bourgeois couple’s domestic routine through the traces they leave. Sadly the film gets caught up in a stylistic agenda at the expense of insight, and the slick use of light and surface can only engage for so long. In Sept heures trios fois par année (Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, André Turpin), the temporary reconstruction of a family home is disassembled piece-by-piece at the end of a conjugal visit.

Architectural cinema

Handheld camerawork often has the unfortunate effect of privileging character/acting over setting and space, so it was reassuring to see the tripod make a comeback (if there were still a few rogue shakycams on the loose). In Jorge Jácombe’s sci-fi romance Plutão, the postcard quality of the hero’s reconstructed memories of a short-lived love affair suggest that he was deluded all along. In Mónica Lairana’s Maria, the camera is rigidly fixed on a prostitute’s bedroom and the bathroom to which she drags herself to try to feel human again. Gabriel Gauchet’s The Mass of Men precedes the telling of its violent tale by showing the whole incident from a single, fixed CCTV camera: a godlike view of a godless universe, or more specifically a box-shaped jobcentre: El Acompañante (Álvaro Delgado Aparicio) uses bold framing to draw visual analogies between the homes of its economically-trapped characters and the hand-crafted dolls they make and sell, endowing a vivid and immediate story with the epic tragedy of a folk tale.

Má Raça (André Santos, Marco Leão) confines its quarrelling mother and daughter and their irrepressible hound to their apartment for its first act. Tight, astutely framed shots trap us between reflective photo frames, slobbery windows, daughter’s packing boxes and the tactical dog-barricade of blood-red mop handles at every doorway. Unleashing the camera from its tripod only for the climactic outdoors scenes, the audience are dizzied by the aimless and impersonal concrete corridors. We awarded the film the New Talent prize for creatively expressing its themes and feelings through an unashamed use of aesthetics.

Genre

But for a couple of slavish expressionist horrors, there was very little. Or perhaps genre ran through the veins of some movies rather than comprising their skeletons. An absurdist comedy in which dancing is a disease, that gives a nod towards musicals with its colour-coded characters and emotional release. A coldly professional escape-the-bad-guy exercise which could’ve been about anything, and happens to be about domestic abuse. Patrick Mendes’ A Herdade dos Defuntos takes us to a junkyard that might exist in today’s suburbs or somewhere after the bomb’s dropped. The movie nods at science-fiction or horror while its grotesquery and rhythms recall the work of Paul McCarthy, and it would not be out of place as an installation. A darkly comic political allegory on Super 8, the audience’s nervous laughter was part incomprehension, part familiarity.

Does puritanical filmmaking that seeks to nullify genre necessarily exclude a sense of joy at the very fact of cinema? Or was it just that this particular program lacked humour? We saw many films that were good and clever and engaged with the medium, but few that made us want to hug it. Perhaps it is a progressive tendency, and certainly one that fits IndieLisboa’s “Hollywood is out of ideas” tagline: to see the medium refreshed again and again (albeit with the aforementioned tendencies) suggests a parallel indie cinema rather than a symbiotic one. It was this statement and the uncompromising programming that illustrated it that made the short film program so inspiring for this impurist.

Graeme Cole
4th May, 2013

(zoomcitta@yahoo.co.uk)
twitter.com/nanneman

Michael Pattison’s IndieLisboa 2013 coverage for Jigsaw Lounge

One of the two festival trailers that took turns to precede each film at this year’s IndieLisboa featured an actress, done up as some peroxide blonde in distress, screaming Não! (“No!”) in various green-screened scenarios evocative of Hollywood clichés. The first time I saw it was on my first night in Lisbon, in Culturgest’s Grande Auditório, and it deafened me to such a degree that in every subsequent showing I had to cover my ears.

Não is a rebellious word, the simplest of rejections. And Lisbon’s tenth International Independent Film Festival opened with No, the Chilean film directed by Pablo Larraín and starring Gael Garcia Bernal that, as the festival’s programme notes put it, “recreates the historic campaign that said ‘no’ to Pinochet in the 1988 plebiscite”. Its title doubled this year as a one-word mission statement for the festival itself, which was marketed in conscious opposition to mainstream values (its tagline, alongside cartoon images of, for example, five Rocky Balboas of increasing sagginess, translated to “Hollywood has run out of ideas”).

Explicitly asserting yourself against the big boys (and with Hollywood, it is indeed usually boys) is a bold move, since the question becomes what you’re offering as an alternative. Under the direction of Miguel Valverde and Nuno Sena, IndieLisboa’13 offered eight programme strands and special screenings and events that covered forty-three different production countries and films whose independent sensibilities by no means indicated technical deficiency or artistic weakness. Of course, just about every other high-profile international film festival claims to offer as wide a compass as possible, and more is not necessarily better. Now in its tenth year, though, IndieLisboa’s continuing expansion might indeed be a simple “no” in the face of rapidly diminishing arts funding – and to my eye, attendances seemed defiantly and encouragingly high.

How, then, does a festival attendee make the experience unique? One obvious answer might be to absorb as many of the home products as possible alongside people for whom such works hold especial significance. There were over fifty Portuguese productions in the IndieLisboa’13 programme; regrettably, however, I saw none of them (catch-ups via other channels are pending). Other rued misses were International Competition winners Leviathan, which I haven’t seen on a big screen, and Da Vinci, a short that I haven’t seen at all; the festival’s Patrick Jolley retrospective; and some of its shorts selections. Some national premieres were skipped, meanwhile, on the grounds that I had already seen them: while others rushed to Spring Breakers and Sightseers, I was happy to go elsewhere.

You can never see everything, of course, but in Lisbon this seems especially the case, since the daily screenings don’t begin until around five in the afternoon (and commonly extend beyond midnight), thus limiting one’s daily itinerary to two or three films. One could spend mornings at the video library to watch some of the 4,000 titles available there (including most programmed films as well as all those submitted works to which the answer was não), but the city and its weather are too lovely for a first-time visitor to invest any more time than necessary into small-screen catch-ups.

On the whole, though, I caught what I had planned to catch. To begin with, I saw (for the first time) all six films in the festival’s Ulrich Seidl retrospective, including his Paradise Trilogy. If this theme-driven triptych boasts wonderful cinematography from Wolfgang Thaler and Ed Lachman as well as the director’s trademark dynamic between symmetrical compositions and naturalistic performances, I found at least two of its entries to be oddly unmoving in comparison to the earlier films selected: Animal Love (Tierische Liebe, 1996), Models (1999) and Jesus, You Know (Jesus, Du weisst, 2003).

One of the festival’s two Mexican productions was the best I saw: Workers, an impressive deadpan comedy about two labourers in Tijuana whose pending retirements are respectively delayed by a beloved dog called Princess and an illegal immigrant status. Writer-director José Luis Valle composes his shots beautifully and his timing is impeccable, not least in the film’s best if most incongruous scene, a fixed-camera take depicting the kerbside interactions between a barbershop owner, sex shop employees and a fast food chef. The other Mexican work was Greatest Hits (Los mejores temas), Nicolás Pereda’s unusual and absorbing drama that establishes its universe before collapsing it, with two different actors playing versions of the same character: the father of Gabino (Gabino Rodríguez), a young lad who has resigned himself to a life selling compilation CDs of famous ballads to passers-by in metro stations.

I caught two of the eleven Brazilian films programmed by the festival. Avanti Popolo boasted the best opening of all those I saw: an immobile establishing shot that turns out to be the point-of-view of a parked car, which thereafter roams the streets at night. The film deals with loss – personal, familial, political – by juxtaposing a father/son relationship against the political turmoil of the 1970s. Housemaids (Doméstica), meanwhile, is a rough and ready examination of seven housekeepers in five different Brazilian cities, and the unique relationship they have with their employers. Heading further south into Argentina (with funding also from France and the Netherlands), Leones repays its formal debt to early 2000s Gus Van Sant with a lifeless march through an unnavigable, purgatorial forest inhabited by five obnoxious teens.

If Leones, one of the ten features that lost out to Leviathan in the International Competition, features aimless wandering in abundance, then Joe Rezwin’s Gazzara is a more focused stroll in the park, through the Manhattan locales that held significant meaning for John Cassavetes regular Ben Gazzara. Niall McCann’s Art Will Save the World, meanwhile, is a different kind of biographical documentary, employing a (B. S.) Johnsonian framework to look at the Britpop scene of the Nineties, as experienced by singer-songwriter Luke Haines, one of the trend’s most aggrieved naysayers. McGann’s film was the last I saw in Lisbon, and having previously met the director, I was pleased to hear its many jokes and prevalent wit were as well received by my fellow attendees as were the comical moments in The Unknown, Tod Browning’s 1927 masterpiece, which I’d seen on 35mm earlier that day in the city’s beautiful Cinemateca Portuguesa Museo do Cinema.

Though The Unknown wasn’t officially part of the festival, it screened in conjunction with Messenger From the Shadows (Notes From Film 06 A/Monologue 01), Norbert Pfaffenbichler’s archive montage that reconceptualises moments from 46 films of The Unknown star Lon Chaney’s career. I missed that film, but saw Browning’s (again) in order to fulfil a promise to Jigsaw Lounge prior to travel. Having been forewarned of the Cinemateca’s preference to subtitle only in Portuguese, however, I opted against also revisiting Godard’s Les carabiniers (1963), though having to walk out two minutes into Jacques Doillon’s French-language film You, Me and Us (Un enfant de toi) after realising only Portuguese subtitles were provided offered some karmic realignment.

Had I stuck with Doillon’s film, it wouldn’t have been the first time that week that I had sat through large snippets of français sans sous titres, for there are intermittent chunks in Amsterdam Stories USA in which Dutch-born co-directors Rob Rombout and Rogier van Eck converse with one another in French with only Portuguese subtitles provided. Over the course of this six-hour travelogue through the USA’s cities, towns, streets, cemeteries and people all called Amsterdam, though, language didn’t seem to matter all that much (and most of it was English-language anyway).

Opting to see Amsterdam Stories on the third of my six days in Lisbon was the outcome of a scheduling dilemma, between guaranteed quantity (it clashed with two other appealing screenings, of Ma belle gosse and The Act of Killing) and what I had hoped to be quality (for what it’s worth, I thought its duration flew by). Though the hours passed and the numbers dwindled, the final count of people emerging from the film looked healthy indeed. More strangely, the film had the highest average audience rating of the entire festival – tallied by the out-of-five scorecards handed out before and collected after each screening. Before I saw it, Stories was already up there at 4.36; after I saw it, it shot up to 4.57, and was subsequently awarded the festival’s Prémio do Público prize. (I’d given it a three.)

Amsterdam Stories USA sets its even pace and unhurried tone as soon as its first interviewee speaks: Edgar Oliver, a poet based in Manhattan with a vague resemblance to Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter, over-enunciates and elongates his vowels. In fact, he does so to such an extent that I was reminded instantly of the first word I had heard at the festival, as piercingly shrieked by that Hollywood dame: Nãooooooooooooooo!

Michael Pattison
29th April 2013
all photos above by Michael Pattison

first dispatch -
second dispatch -
third dispatch -

PLUS: shorts competition analysed, by Graeme Cole

Reviewed below: Art Will Save the World [7/10]; Gazzara [6/10]; Pincus [5/10]; The Unknown [9/10]; Paradise Love [7/10], Paradise Faith [6/10] and Paradise Hope [6/10].

One evening last week, I was asked in the ‘Ritz Clube’ – host this year to IndieLisboa’s nightly post-screenings parties – how as a critic I go about choosing the films I see within a film festival’s dauntingly varied programme. For Lisbon, whose screenings don’t begin until four or five in the afternoon, it was a combination of two things: instinctive judgements based on brochure notes (as well as everything else that factors into any trip to the cinema in general – synopsis, subject matter, director, production context, critical buzz, chances of it being screened again and so on), and geographical practicability, as it’s no good planning to see two films back-to-back when the trip between venues is a toss-up between a forty-minute walk and a thirty-minute Metro-ride.

As the week goes on, though, you meet fellow attendees who rave about a film you had previously overlooked, or had written off, or had opted against simply because it wasn’t in the right place at the right time. And you meet directors whose films are screening the following day, say, and whose personable manner promotes the work better than any programme description ever could.

And so you begin to tweak your itinerary a little, perhaps even promising a director during a stop-and-chat that you’ll see their film (and subsequently worrying that you won’t like it, and that the next stop-and-chat won’t go as smoothly). And, as the festival draws to a close, you start to panic that you haven’t made the most of it, that in a couple of days you’ll be back in England without ever having been to at least one film in each of the festival venues. So you’ll make amendments on the sole basis that you “ought to see a film at such-and-such a cinema” for the sake of seeing a film at such-and-such a cinema.

I made time for two documentaries after unplanned encounters with their directors. Niall McCann’s Art Will Save the World (2012) is a witty look at the 1990s British pop music scene and how monetary gain was and is its sole criterion of success, through the apparently embittered eyes of singer-songwriter Luke Haines (of The Auteurs and other projects.) A playful and often very funny film, it confronts the limitations of what might be called the biography fetish (or, fittingly, auteurism) by going along with Haines’s own image-construction, which has both defined his musical output over the years and consigned him to the commercial periphery.

As one interviewee puts it here, Haines might be too clever for his own good; one senses a healthy disdain in his lyrics – too easily termed by the press as misanthropy – that chimes well with McCann’s irreverent aesthetic, which is indebted to Godard as well as to the Michael Bakewell-directed B. S. Johnson short Fat Man on a Beach (1974). I opted for the film, which screened to a highly receptive audience in São Jorge’s Sala 3, over Before Midnight and the festival’s awards ceremony – and as a theatrical run seems unlikely, I’m glad I did.

Joe Rezwin’s Gazzara (2012), meanwhile, is more direct in its aim and focus. Beginning with actor Ben Gazzara (1930-2012) playing out a one-man sketch on stage with Rezwin as his sole audience member, the film comprises a series of conversations between the two, who met when Rezwin scored his first professional film job working on John Cassavetes’ Opening Night way back in 1976.

Details touched upon include Gazzara’s childhood, life, career, achievements and, poignantly, approaching death. Perhaps not unusual for an actor whose performances were so effortlessly and intensely naturalistic, Gazzara himself comes across as shy and sensitive, and his most outrageous or more actorly moments in the film are those of an intelligent artist deeply sceptical of the mythmaking bullshit that pervades the film industry, and which is particularly at work in Hollywood’s love for biographical overviews.

At one moment, for instance, Rezwin mentions different performers with whom Gazzara collaborated, and the actor avoids comment by mimicking chat-show rhetoric and saying each one was “the best human being I ever worked with”. It’s not until the final conversation, in Central Park, that Rezwin confronts and reveals the reasons why he wanted to make the project, admitting that he might have just wanted to hang out with the actor – who he clearly admires.

If such proximity to one’s subject makes a documentarian’s work problematic and prone to sentiment (and this critic only squeezed the film into his schedule after personally meeting Rezwin), the director’s intentions are unashamedly personal and his delivery admirably unassuming, while cinematographer Trevor Tweeten imbues conceptually ordinary material with a real cinematic edge.

Pincus (2012) is another deeply personal film. Written, produced, directed and edited by David Fenster, this low-budget autobiographical work weaves real-life threads into something resembling fiction. Pincus Finster (David Nordstrom) lives with and cares for his dad Paul (Paul Fenster), a Parkinson’s sufferer, while continuing the family’s interior decoration business with aid from his pal Dietmar (Dietmar Franosch), an illegal German immigrant. Exploiting his father’s condition to get closer to yoga teacher Anna (Christi Idavoy), Pincus navigates scenarios that play out like an extended episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Nordstrom lends the role a somehow likeable moron’s charm with simple gestures, such as when he flaps his hand at a low-hanging wire while receiving a tour of a home he is about to redecorate.

Fenster likewise shows wit when the crescendo of an incongruously ominous and atmospheric drone turns out in the next scene to be a diegetic didgeridoo being blown over Paul as some kind of spiritual remedy for his illness. Dedicated to the memory of Franosch, who died in 2012 (presumably during production), Pincus unfortunately ends just as its various dramatic threads are beginning to get interesting, and its final prolonged descent into a black cave feels like the only way to end a half-cooked plot.

From a pitch-black cave representing “the unknown” to the darker-than-average auditorium of Cinemateca Portuguesa (‘Museo do Cinema’), where I saw Tod Browning’s succinct and rewarding 1927 masterpiece, The Unknown. I’d seen the film on a big screen before, but not on a razor-sharp 35mm print, and the complete absence of (what would have been) a corny “silent cinema” soundtrack heightened my awareness of the social element of cinema-going: you could hear the figurative pins drop between the material stomach rumbles and seat adjustments of fellow viewers, and the laughter that accompanied the many humorous scenes here became doubly infectious as a result.

Though its plotting is on-the-nose and its poetic justice is generously portioned, Lon Chaney gives one of the great performances as travelling circus employee Alonzo the Armless (not harmless!), conveying emotional shifts by widening his eyes, dropping his cheeks or laughing maniacally to hide inner torment. In the scene in which his object of desire (Joan Crawford) reveals her marital engagement to a rival performer, and a pattern of reaction shots builds anticipation of Chaney’s deepening emotional response, my hysterics were by far the cinema’s most audible.

There’s laughter of a different sort to be had across the Paradise Trilogy, the centrepiece of IndieLisboa’s Ulrich Seidl retrospective. Depicting a triangle of related women enduring the increasingly testing travails of everyday life, it’s an aesthetically consistent triptych that drags along the typical burdens and dramatic limitations of theme-driven concept art – where, as with films such as Dekalog (1988), the self-stated theme becomes an interpretable provocation in itself.

Indeed, these films play out like theses written in response to a given question, and each appears to have easy targets in its sights and an obvious method of execution. Never mind lost, this is paradise unattainable.

In Paradise: Love (Paradies: Liebe, 2012), the strongest of the bunch, single Viennese mother Teresa (Margarethe Tiesel) arrives at a Kenyan holiday resort with romantic hopes and racial ignorance. A succession of starry-eyed encounters with impoverished locals gradually turns acidic, as Seidl employs a painful character study to reveal the unpleasant realities of the service and tourism industries and the irreconcilability between post-colonial harmony and an economic framework fundamentally dependent upon low wages and making profit.

As an Englishman abroad watching an Austrian abroad, I suspect I was one of the few who cottoned on early during Paradise: Love that the laughs were there to make the eventual ugliness all the more saddening, and by the end of the film my fellow audience members, who had earlier been in fits of laughter at Tiesel’s “committed” (read “brave”) performance, seemed to have sobered up.

In the straighter Paradise: Faith (Paradies: Glaube, 2012), Teresa’s sister Anna Maria (Maria Hofstätter) devotes her entire being to the rehabilitation of Catholicism into Austrian society, knocking on the doors of indifferent sinners and scrubbing herself clean after happening upon an al fresco orgy when walking home one night. Into this arrives Anna Maria’s husband Nabil (Nabil Saleh), a paraplegic Muslim hopeful of a loving marriage.

Religious intolerance, and more specifically the exclusivity of any theistic belief, provides an increasingly caustic feel that is neither original nor compelling – though cinematographers Wolfgang Thaler and Ed Lachman are currently working wonders under Seidl’s direction. Paradise: Hope (Paradies: Hoffnung, 2013), which premiered at Berlin earlier this year, concludes this narratively unpredictable but dramatically dull trilogy at a weight-loss holiday camp for teens run by disciplinarians.

Watching Hope in the festival’s video library (it screened at the cinema only after my departure), I belatedly realised Seidl’s approach across his trilogy is to implicate wider social problems through almost hysterical archetypes. He deals in extremities to evoke the essential: when Teresa leaves her resort in Love, the local taxi drivers hound her in such a choreographed way that it’s impossible to take the scene literally, though its meaning is relatable to any holidaymaker who has visited an economically backward country; in Faith, meanwhile, there is a fundamental silliness in pitching a Christian and Muslim against one another in such an unavoidably claustrophobic setting, but its real target might not even be religion per se, but the patriarchal and religious foundations of another institution: marriage.

The smart move in Hope is to provoke us with ongoing suggestions of sexual abuse, but the actual problem is the innately sexual implications of an image-obsessed society in general, as exemplified by an absurdly punitive “fat camp”, and as hinted at by intermittent appearances by Vivian Bartsch, the lead in Seidl’s similarly-themed Models (1999), covered in my first Lisbon dispatch.

Michael Pattison
29th April, 2013

first dispatch –
second dispatch –
roundup –

Reviewed below: Animal Love [6/10]; Avanti Popolo [6/10]; Greatest Hits [7/10]; Amsterdam Stories USA [6+/10].

Never judge a film by its audience or, indeed, a city by its cinephiles. Otherwise, you might be left feeling isolated, depressed. Still, if we care for cinephilia enough to cheer the increasingly rare projection of film, we ought to also care enough to lament and resist the running commentaries that can often ruin a cinema experience. In such cases, I find myself unable to become fully immersed in the film, and instead begin to wonder whatever on earth two people could find worth discussing for 90-plus minutes in the dark.

Pro: I’ve now seen Ulrich Seidl’s Animal Love (Tierische Liebe, 1996) on 35mm. Con: I have also seen it with unwanted accompaniment from whisperers and mumblers in the same row. Though I have in the past referred to these types as “those who go [to the cinema] for the pretty images”, however, in this instance I’m inclined to extend some benefit of doubt and assume it was to see the dogs, by which the whole of Screen 3 in Alvalade’s Cinema City Classic was constantly enthralled.

Animal Love is a sketch-piece comprising semi-fictional vignettes detailing various Austrians’ relationships with their beloved pets – mostly dogs, but also bunnies, ferrets, rats, guinea pigs. More specifically, it comes to view these creatures in compensatory terms: their ubiquitous presence in every frame here might be representative of some kind of absence – social, emotional, even sexual – in contemporary Vienna as a whole. Certainly, the film has Seidl’s keen but non-judgemental eye for the bizarre, which he has a knack of finding in the most mundane circumstances: a pair of homeless men who beg for money to feed their pets are paralleled with an older, presumably gay couple who spout anarchism while bringing their canine up to be a menace to other dogs as well as to its owners; an estranged couple who argue in their decrepit flat while their pet dog lies indifferently in the frame between them is juxtaposed against another couple who are into swinging (and who end the film copulating “doggy-style”); a middle-aged singleton who dances with her pet; a man with a fondness for deadpan phone sex, and so on. Never judge a dog by its owner. Or should that be the other way around?

Following Workers (covered in my previous report), Animal Love is the second film I’ve seen in Lisbon whose narrative revolved around dogs. And there was to be a third: though the dog (named Whale) in Avanti Popolo (2012) is in comparison less central to the film’s plot, its curious disappearance and even more curious reappearance troubles its owner, Mr. Gatti (Carlos Reichenbach), to a such a degree that the latter seems comparatively unmoved by an unexpected visit from his son André (André Gatti).

Avanti Popolo is one of those films that is thin on incident but heavy on (for want of a better word) texture. Uruguayan-born writer-director Michael Wahrmann’s first feature frames Brazil’s turbulent political history through its father-son relationship to subtle effect. Due to the elusive style in which it reveals its information, only keen watchers will figure early on that André is one of two brothers, the other having died a victim of the country’s military dictatorship.

The domestic/social dichotomy is ambitious turf to chart for Wahrmann, and I can’t pretend to know the full details of the historical events to which his film refers – mostly by use of Super 8 films that André projects onto the interior space of his father’s home. There’s a puzzling encounter towards the end of the film between André and a man he pays to fix his film projector, who turns out to be the sole member of the “Dogma 2000” movement, whose filmmaking manifesto stipulates firstly that you can’t shoot anything – everything must be re-dubbed from older material (such as Patton). Its length and inclusion in the film imply some kind of mission statement on its director’s behalf; we sense Wahrmann agrees with André when the latter pays backhanded compliments to Dogma 2000 by referring to it as another example of “underdeveloped” and “solitary” cinema.

When I met Warhmann the following evening, I asked him to clarify a few of the songs that feature in the film, to which someone joked that he should compile a soundtrack and sell CDs to boost profits. Indeed, Avanti Popolo begins and later reworks a gag featuring a car’s CD player, and recalled for me a film that I had caught earlier that same evening, Greatest Hits (Los mejores temas, 2012), which opens with Gabino (Gabino Rodriguez) showering, dressing and waiting for his mother to serve him a sandwich while reciting what appear to be the lyrics of the most clichéd of love songs. As it turns out, however, Gabino is trying to remember the tracklist of a CD compilation of ballads, copies of which he is planning to sell illegally; such retention of information, he believes, will allow for a more convincing sales pitch.

If this Mexican-Canadian-Dutch co-production from Mexican writer-director Nicolás Pereda begins and continues in amusingly experimental fashion, it also, quite remarkably, accumulates and captivates with deeper emotional thrusts through sheer force of will. Just as we think the film and its protagonist may be drowning in numbers, Pereda introduces Gabino’s father, who hilariously enters the domestic space and stops in his tracks to look at or beyond the camera for as long as he can keep a straight face. Soon, however, scenes begin to repeat themselves with added details and small variations, as if the actors are rehearsing. Realities collide, realities collapse: just as Gabino is getting to grips with his father’s reappearance after a ten-year absence, another actor enters the frame to play him, and the first half of the film repeats itself to different (and eventually poignant) effect.

But what’s in a story anyway? In a word – the word being Amsterdam – about as much or as little as you want. Rob Rombout and Rogier Van Eck’s Amsterdam Stories USA (2012) employs an arbitrary framework in which to investigate the impulses of everyday American life. Said framework is the US cities, towns, roads, streets, cemeteries and residents named Amsterdam; the film is an unhurried, even-paced, six-hour, four-part travelogue from New York (once New Amsterdam) to a ranch in Amsterdam, California by way of Amsterdams in upstate New York, Ohio, Georgia, Mississippi, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Montana and Idaho, as well as a host of places in between, where the filmmakers visit and encounter such people as a stand-up comedian whose stage name is Sven Amsterdam (and so on). Even counting the five-minute breaks between each chapter – East, South, Midwest, West – I didn’t leave my seat.

Rombout and Van Eck appear as eccentrics. Dutch-born but choosing to converse with one another in French (which was only subtitled in Portuguese!), they’ve employed a fascinating premise here and have assembled a wealth of interviews, from which emerge the prolonged social effects firstly of America’s immigrant origins and secondly the deeper formative events that have marked the country since World War II, such as JFK’s assassination, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War and 9/11 (which actually figures comparatively little).

As author Russell Banks puts it here, the images sent abroad from America and even consumed by Americans themselves are different to what most people are actually living. And as it shifts again and again between light-hearted and more contemplative registers, Amsterdam Stories gathers a view of the United States from those whose histories and anecdotes aren’t ordinarily the stuff of cinematic quality. To quote the slogan of New York-based black news outlet Amsterdam News, “We choose to plead our own cause, because for too long others have done it for us.”

I’ll say more on Amsterdam Stories and the context of viewing it at a festival in my Festival Round-up. Before then, though, there’ll be a report on Days 5 and 6, including Seidl’s Paradise Trilogy, the first entry in which I caught immediately after Amsterdam Stories following a mad dash to Lisbon’s fortress-like Culturgest. Until the next dispatch, até logo…

Michael Pattison
26th April 2013

THE FIRST DISPATCH —
THE THIRD DISPATCH –
roundup

Reviewed below: Leones [5/10]; Housemaids [6/10]; Workers [8/10]; Models [7/10]; Jesus, You Know [7/10].

As a critic attending IndieLisboa for the first time (in what’s now its ten-year existence), I’d invested all research prior to my arrival in navigating the city’s comparatively small but famously varied terrain (here a hill, there a stretch). It hadn’t occurred to me that the Lisbon Independent Film Festival would be appealing enough for the public to pack its venues – especially on an otherwise anonymous Monday evening.

As it happens, this was very much the case. Arriving at the mini-multiplex Cinema City in Alvalade equipped with a critic’s pass and a beginner’s naivety, I was turned away from both films penned into my itinerary: Museum Hours and Housemaids, both of which were apparently sold out. Directors Jem Cohen and Gabriel Mascaro are hardly names you would expect to fill a cinema to capacity outside of specially curated retrospectives (and even then…). My surprise was, nevertheless, double-edged: disappointment on the one hand, but on the other such high attendance figures was welcome news. Good for them, bad for me.

Onward, then, to a film I had opted against due to its programme notes. And though any synopsis fails to do its textures justice, Leones is an ambitious debut feature that markedly derives from (without bettering) the work of others. Twenty-eight year old Jazmin López writes and directs this Argentinian-French-Dutch co-production, which follows a quintet of teenagers through a seemingly unnavigable forest. As they trudge through dense greens quoting Hemingway, playing with firearms, listening to a cassette recording of themselves and miming a game of volleyball, López hints at deeper mysteries. To begin with, one of the clan has a recent scar on her nape, while the audio recording becomes increasingly loaded with a sense of doom.

The whole thing is shot on film, by Matías Mesa, in gorgeous roaming Steadicam, and comprises eighteen or so takes. As our wanderers drift out of frame with purpose, the camera probes the environs, accompanied by sound designer Julia Huberman’s intensified ambience and ominous, low-frequency drones before the quintet reappears, doubling back on themselves but none the wearier for it. Shades of Lisandro Alonso here, while as a succession of non-sequiturs Leones also resembles Alan Clarke’s Elephant (1989), as well as that film’s chief imitator, Gus Van Sant’s Gerry (2001).

If the latter film’s increasing sense of dread was sustained through an emotional engagement with its two protagonists, however, López’s film makes it clear from the outset that its borderline-obnoxious teens are Godardian ciphers about whom we care little – even if their meandering pilgrimage is beautifully captured.

Perhaps influenced by such images, I embarked upon my own journey, the following morning, to IndieLisboa’s vast Culturgest venue on foot. I visited the festival’s video library in order to catch Housemaids (Doméstica, 2012) after all, determined not to be defeated by the previous evening’s sell-out. Gabriel Mascaro’s directorial credit – to say nothing of his “script” – is somewhat problematic, given that the film’s concept involved seven children being given a camera each to document a week in the life of their families’ live-in maids, the raw material of which Mascaro then assembled into this 76-minute whole.

Interweaving diaristic dispatches, Housemaids takes the form of fly-on-the-wall documentation (“carry on talking, pretend the camera isn’t there”) as well as ad-hoc interviews between child and maid. It’s a potentially compelling methodology given the domestic intimacy at hand, but there’s a fundamental limitation to this cosy perspective: namely, the way in which the socio-economic foundations upon which a servant-employer relationship is based. As is made evident, however, each housekeeper has been conditioned by a tragic past. One maid tells in horrifying detail of how she miscarried triplets as a result of domestic abuse; another is seen sleeping propped against a settee, face-down, as if she literally worked herself to slumber.

Given that one of the housekeepers surveyed here is a man, the gender-specific title is of interest: said housekeeper relates how he entered his trade after his wife left him as a result of his inability to provide for her; subsequently, he’s been stripped of any masculine status. There are gender as well as racial implications here, both of which are de facto class problems. The most telling moment in the film might be when one housemaid admits that she has no complaints because her employer is actually a housemaid too — it goes some way to evoke the absurd image of a system built on service.

Housemaids caught in absurd daily rituals also feature in Workers (2013), Mexican filmmaker José Luis Valle’s very impressive first fiction feature, following his 2009 documentary El milagro del Papa. In it, two labourers in Tijuana are hoping to retire: Lidia (Susan Salazar) is one of two housemaids employed by a rich Livia Soprano-type nearing the end of her embittered life, while Rafael (Jesús Padilla) is himself ‘nearing the end’ – in his case, of thirty loyal years working as a cleaner at a Phillips factory. Respective obstacles to retirement are a beloved greyhound and an illegal immigrant status, but both Lidia and Rafael are determined to attain their goal – though one is seemingly more pro-active than the other, the film concludes with the funniest ten-years-later epilogue that I’ve seen.

This deadpan comedy provides clear evidence that Valle is a master image-maker, composing his frames with equal attention to back- and foreground. His sense of timing, furthermore, is right on the money. Take the film’s best scene, a single take in which all kinds of trades compete for space within the fixed frame: an ice cream van pulls up to sex workers standing outside their parlour, which is situated between a barber shop and a fast food stall; not long after, a knife-sharpener sets up a kerbside business to attract the fast food chef and local youths alike, while the sky grows darker thanks to seamless trickery and/or César Gutiérrez Miranda’s wonderful cinematography.

If Workers’ immaculate editing lends a sense of performativity to the labour depicted therein, Ulrich Seidl’s Models (1999) allows its eponymous group of hopefuls to directly address the camera as if it were a mirror. Vivian (Viviane Bartsch), Tanja (Tanja Petrovsky), Lisa (Lisa Grossman) and Elvyra (Elvyra Geyer) are bottom-rung models looking to etch careers for themselves while retaining their self-respect and negotiating ongoing domestic and relationship issues. Opening with peroxide blondes Vivian and Elvyra talking to one another in the back of a cab, Seidl’s film – which screened on 35mm as part of IndieLisboa’s retrospective of the Austrian heavyweight – daringly presents itself as a typically and hypocritically misogynist “exposé” that likes to look at its females while paying lip service to their plight.

Only it isn’t. Boosted by strong performances – Bartsch being the outright highlight – and a refreshing willingness to spare its performers exclusive nudity (instead, the most explicit full frontal nudity here involves male genitalia), Models is sensitive and often captivating stuff. Heaven knows why this quartet are so dogged in their quest to be objectified – liposuction, sunbeds, gym sessions, waxing and dieting are the words of every day – but one suspects Seidl has a deep admiration for these women that, unlike most of his male characters in this film, goes beyond sexual gratification.

M is for model, M is for monologue: confessions abound in Seidl’s Jesus, You Know (Jesus, Du weisst, 2003), which also appeared on 35mm. Here too you might think the filmmaker’s got it in for his characters (in this instance, theists), but he does well to elicit our sympathy for this perpetually sad cast of mourners, all of whom are appealing to Jesus for some levity in their everyday grind. Still, there is deadpan hilarity at work: during the monologues, Seidl, working with regular editor Christof Schertenleib (and Andrea Wagner), cuts to images of tellingly inanimate icons of Jesus, whose unchanging indifference is like some rebuff of the Kuleshov Effect.

Four more Seidl films screen during the festival: Animal Love (1996) and all three films in his Paradise Trilogy (2012-13). Notes on each are forthcoming…

Michael Pattison
24th April, 2013

SECOND DISPATCH –
THIRD DISPATCH –
roundup

* All Divided Selves (Luke Fowler, UK)
* An Anthropological Television Myth (Un mito antropologico televisivo; Bertino, Castelli & Gagliardo, Italy)
Argo (Ben Affleck, USA)
Augustine (Alice Winocour, France)
The Avengers - a.k.a. Marvel’s The Avengers a.k.a. Avengers Assemble (Joss Whedon, USA)
* Babylon (Chebbi, Ismael & Slim, Tunisia)

Barbara (Christian Petzold, Germany)
The Bay (Barry Levinson, USA)
Bellas Mariposas (Salvatore Mereu, Italy)
Blancanieves (Pablo Berger, Spain)
The Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard, USA)
Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg, Canada/France)
* Cursed Be the Phosphate (Yel’an Bu Al-Phosphate; Sami Tlili, Tunisia)

The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, USA)
* A Dream’s Merchant (Un gând, un vis, Doyle… şi-un pix; Bogdan Ilie-Micu, Romania)
* Futures Past (Jordan Melamed, USA)
* Gone Wild (Dan Curean, Romania)
A Hijacking (Kapringen; Tobias Lindholm, Denmark)
Here I Am, Here I’m Not (Elisa Eliash, Chile)
Hold Back a.k.a. Refrain (Rengaine; Rachid Djaïdani, France)

* I Am Breathing (Davie & McKinnon, UK)
* Leviathan (Castaing-Taylor & Paravel, USA)
Life of Pi (Ang Lee, USA)
Lincoln (Steven Spielberg, USA)
* Little World (Món Petit; Marcel Barrena, Spain)
Looper (Rian Johnson, USA)
The Love Songs of Tiedan (Mei jie; Hao Jie, China)
Magic Mike (Steven Soderbergh, USA)

Me Too (Ja Tozhe Hochu; Alexei Balabanov, Russia)
Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson, USA)
Nor’easter (Andrew Brotzman, USA)
Once Upon a Time Was I, Veronica (Era uma vez eu, Verônica; Marcelo Gomes, Brazil)
* One Way Boogie Woogie (James Benning, USA)
* Parabeton: Pier Luigi Nervi and Roman Concrete (Heinz Emigholz, Germany)

Pincus (David Fenster, USA)
La Playa DC (a.k.a. La Playa; Juan Andrés Arango, Colombia)
Premium Rush (David Koepp, USA)
Project X (Nima Nourizadeh, USA)
Prometheus (Ridley Scott, USA)
Ruta de la Luna (Juan Sebastián Jácome, Pan/Ecu)
Sightseers (Ben Wheatley, UK)

Sinister (Scott Derrickson, USA)
Somebody Up There Likes Me (Bob Byington, USA)
Tabu (Miguel Gomes, Portugal/Germany)
Ted (Seth MacFarlane, USA)
* Tomorrow (Zavtra; Andrei Gryazev, Russia)
Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (John Hyams, USA)
* A World Not Ours (A’lamun Laysa Lana; Mehdi Fleifel, Palestine/UK)
Wrong (Quentin Dupieux, USA/France)
Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, USA)

* = documentary

Olympus Has Fallen
Director: Antoine Fuqua

… and Leonidas has risen! Leaving aside the fortuitous topicality of a movie that posits an invasion of the United States by North Koreans (renegade radicals rather than Kim Jong-Un’s government) the chief interest in director Fuqua’s eighth outing concerns the belated ascent of Paisley’s Gerard Butler to the status of Hollywood action star. The 43-year-old former trainee lawyer has been plying his thespian trade in Los Angeles since the end of the last century, and even at the time of his big-screen breakthrough in the title role of Patrick Lussier’s quickly forgotten Dracula 2000 (aka Dracula 2001)  was being seriously bruited as a future James Bond.

With Daniel Craig, post-Skyfall, secure as 007 for at least one more movie, that particular boat may have sailed – Paddy Power rank Butler a 20/1 shot to be the next incarnation of Ian Fleming’s super-spy, with ten candidates ahead of him in the betting. But this is a juncture when big-screen tough-guys of convincing swagger and solid box-office appeal are in short supply: this winter’s comebacks from Messrs Schwarzenegger (The Last Stand) and Stallone (Bullet to the Head) tanked spectacularly; reliable draws Bruce Willis and Liam Neeson are 58 and 60 respectively; Jason Statham seems content to treading water at a level only one notch above the dreaded straight-to-video (last month Parker, next month Hummingbird…)

Over the last dozen years, Butler’s stop-start career has included several peaks of real achievement and promise: 2007′s 300, in which he bellowed valiantly (“this – is – Sparta!!!”) as Sparta’s King Leonidas; the terrific voice-over in the Watchmen-supplement animated short Tales of the Black Freighter [2009] – probably his finest performance to date in what’s arguably the most accomplished project he’s worked on; flexing Shakespearean muscles in Ralph Fiennes’ extremely muscular Coriolanus [2011]); plus some admirably leftfield choices such as Neveldine/Taylor’s giddily post-modern Gamer (2009) and the mud-spattered, Icelandic Beowulf and Grendel (2005).

But there’s also been the sense of a jobbing actor with his eyes on the main chance, grabbing at some ill-advised vehicles along the way including Joel Schumacher’s execrable Phantom of the Opera (2004) and a slew of undistinguished romantic comedies trading on a bed-hopping persona much beloved by Hollywood’s more salacious gossip columns.

While essentially no more than a diverting slice of pyrotechnic escapism – albeit with an incongrously classy cast that includes Oscar-winners Morgan Freeman and Melissa Leo alongside 1990s nominees Angela Bassett and Robert Forster – Olympus Has Fallen, which lists Butler as one of three main producers, has been doing well enough at Stateside box offices to now indicate a decade or so of leading-man heroics for the beefy, blue-eyed swaggerer.

He hits just the right notes of straight-faced self-awareness as former special forces operative Mike Banning, the only hope for the USA after the White House (secret service code-name: Olympus) is invaded and occupied by nefarious visitors from north of the DMZ. Though virile and relatively youthful, the President (Aaron Eckhart) is held helpless hostage of the evildoers in a fortified bunker beneath the Oval Office, along with his plucky Secretary of Defense (Leo). The odds and the numbers are stacked massively against Banning, needless to say. But he has the experience and tactics to prevail, plus a blithe attitude to torture – when he takes two Koreans captive – that’s more troubling (because played for macho laughs) than anything in Zero Dark Thirty.

This morally dubious section apart, Olympus Has Fallen overall represents another competent if ultimately unremarkable genre outing for C-level director Antoine Fuqua – best known for Training Day, even if his most effective outing is perhaps King Arthur (2004), starring another James Bond manqué, Clive Owen. He handles the set-pieces with anonymous aplomb, barrelling us from set-piece to set-piece as the stakes are raised to science-fictional levels of apocalyptic threat that wouldn’t be out of place in the much more fantastical GI Joe: Retaliation - which Olympus now stealthily replaces on our multiplex screens.

Neil Young
9th April 2013
written for Tribune magazine

Spring Breakers
Director: Harmony Korine

The coastal town of St Petersburg, Florida (pop. 244,997) is where dreams of freedom go to die: Jack Kerouac breathed his last there in 1969, the once-handsome 47-year-old’s body bloated and bloodied by a lifetime of excess. Despite all his ‘rootless’ wanderings, the On the Road author never quite managed to move out from under his mother’s roof.

Getting away from a stultifying domestic environment is also the primary motivation of the four Kentucky college students in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, a controversy-stirrer since premiering in competition at Venice last September. Bad-girls Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson), Cotty (Rachel Korine) and the relatively goody-goody Christian lass – bluntly named Faith (Selena Gomez) look on while their classmates escape to warmer climes during the late-March vacation which provides the film with its title.

Short of funds, the quartet impulsively decide to rob a local diner – the first of many credibility-straining episodes in writer-director Harmony Korine’s ostentatiously underdeveloped screenplay. Delighted with their ill-gotten gains – the girls take olfactory and tactile pleasure in grubby banknotes – they head to St Petersburg, or to be precise nearby St Pete’s Beach, for a fortnight of unbridled hedonism.

Their party-hearty antics eventually land them in police custody – from which they are bailed by the area’s star DJ and ambitious drug-dealer, gold-toothed Al , aka ‘Alien’ (James Franco). Alien is engaged in a slow-boiling turf war with his former best pal Archie (rapper Gucci Mane), and after Faith heads home in tears (“this wasn’t supposed to happen,” she moans) the remaining trio give increasing free rein to their capacity for gun-toting violence and general anti-social behaviour.

As noted by local police-chief Rob Vincent, who allowed Korine to film for four days on his premises, Spring Breakers “doesn’t depict reality, obviously. I think most people will get that whether they’re from here or St. Louis or wherever. Spring break, generally speaking, is college students, and I don’t think they’re going to want to go on vacation so they can join organized crime.”)

On paper, Korine’s follow-up to the little-seen, experimental Trash Humpers (2009) sounds like a cross between John McNaughton’s delirious, Florida-set Wild Things (1998) and Nima Nourizadeh’s apocalyptic teen-party Bacchanal from last year, Project X. But whereas McNaughton, Nourizadeh and their various collaborators kept tight control on their material, Korine – still best known for his 1990s breakthroughs Kids and Gummo - takes a wayward approach of scattershot repetitiveness (nearly all transitions between scenes, for example, are marked with the loud clack-CLACK of a gun being cocked).

Shifting uneasily from the dreaminess of Sofia Coppola’s Virgin Suicides through the larkish Florida decadence of Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike to the neon-noir crimeworld of Michael Mann’s Miami Vice, Korine comes across as a flashy opportunist masking his film’s lack of substance (critic-baiting nods to racial and feminist issues notwithstanding) behind all manner of surface sheen courtesy of ace cinematographer Benoit Debie, a longtime collaborator of France’s reigning enfant terrible, Gaspar Noé, who conjures a series of enveloping moods using various shades of natural, artificial and hallucinatorily excessive illumination.

In comparison with Noe’s coruscatingly savage visions of nihilism, however, Korine’s swaggeringly prankish self-awareness is hipsterish and flimsy, simultaneously revelling in and skewering the glossy, celebrity-aping banality of what passes for mainstream American youth culture (and whose wholescale importation into the UK is most toxically encapsulated by Geordie Shore). Korine takes aim at this staggeringly easy, soft target and very nearly manages to miss, so giddy is he on what he evidently believes is a rarefied gas of cultural subversion.

But unless the viewer is aware of who Benson, Gomez and Hudgens are – all three are well known for their wholesome small-screen work in the States – much of the point of Spring Breakers falls flat, becomes a monotonous one-joke comedy milked dust-dry. We’re left instead to feast on scraps, including most eyecatchingly a performance of hammy ludicrousness from the ubiquitous James Franco (whose pan-disciplinary experimentation has basically turned his whole career into one vast, unending Debordian dérive, the journey powered by an endless supply of nudges and winks). But even this caricature of gangsta excess quickly outstays its welcome – Franco (“look at all my sheeeeeit” he brags, showing off his bling) is horribly indulged by his director in a manner not seen since Paul Thomas Anderson allowed Joaquin Phoenix to capsize The Master.

Franco, Korine and company do pull off one genuine coup de cinema, however, a homage to Britney Spears just after the halfway mark in which Alien delivers a soulful rendition of “Everytime” at his al fresco piano while the three remaining Breakers, decked out in pink Pussy Riot balaclavas, swoon around with AK-47s. We’re then treated to a hilarious slo-mo montage of their crime-spree escapades, including one hilarious non sequitur, not-exactly-crime-of-the-century bit involving a hapless boob being pushed into a wedding-cake.

For these few minutes, Spring Breakers achieves the kind of demented focus and brilliance which that true film maudit, Project X - a much more sly and insidious invader of our multiplexes twelve months ago – sustained for over an hour. Pick it up for a fiver on DVD.

Neil Young
26th March, 2013
written for Tribune magazine