Carnage
Director: Roman Polanski

Martha Marcy May Marlene
Director: Sean Durkin

Bombay Beach
Director: Alma Har’el

IT’S ironic that, despite Roman Polanski having been unable to set foot in the United States for several decades because of well-publicised ‘legal reasons’, the veteran Polish-French director’s last two films have been either largely or entirely set in the country of his persecutors. But whereas 2007′s enjoyable page-turning paranoid thriller The Ghost Writer blew around the gusty Atlantic seaboard (actually northern Germany) his follow-up Carnage, apart from a brief prologue, coda and handful of short hallway-scenes, unfolds within a single Brooklyn apartment (i.e. a Paris soundstage.)

This is the residence of Penelope and Michael Longstreet (Jodie Foster, John C Reilly), a comfortably-off middle-class couple whose eleven-year-old son is hit in the face during boisterous play – the ‘attacker’ being the offspring of the (wealthier) Cowans, Nancy (Kate Winslet) and Alan (Christoph Waltz.) When the Cowans visit the Longstreets in order to establish what happened and why – and what should happen next – the foursome’s chattily brittle civility soon cracks under the strains of awkwardness and embarrassment, a process accelerated by the presence of a full whisky-bottle.

Based on Yasmina (Art) Reza’s play God Of Carnage, the script – by Polanski and Reza – uses smart wordplay and double-edged dialogue to probe (and thus widen) tiny distinctions of class and gender. These four articulate individuals find themselves hamstrung and even tongue-tied by tricky conventions of social etiquette – Reilly’s bluff, jockish Michael sometimes the odd one out: “Enough with the high-falutin’ claptrap… I feel like being openly despicable,” he barks after downing yet another inch of single-malt.

Given its theatrical origins, it’s unsurprising that Carnage should be a gabfest – Reza’s one-acter reaches the screen in just 79 brisk minutes thanks to editor Hervé de Luze, who’s been working with Polanski since 1979′s Tess. But while the director has got plenty of ‘form’ when it comes to maximising the dramatic possibilities of uncomfortably restricted and restricting spaces – Knife in the Water‘s sailing-boat, the sinister apartment-buildings of The Tenant, Rosemary’s Baby and Repulsion, the dead-end Lindisfarne of Cul-de-Sac, and the huis clos country-house of Death and the Maiden (also a theatrical adaptation) - here he can only do so much to ‘open out’ such inescapably artificial, arch material. He makes imaginative use of mirrors to expand our field of view, but third-act spells of hand-held camerawork are counterproductively jarring.

Given the calibre of the cast involved, of course, Carnage is never undiverting – Waltz, in particular, nails every laugh in the script and several more besides as Blackberry-holic Alan, a savage caricature of the rapacious corporate solipsist whose diminutive stature is outweighed by his insouciantly hostile body-language and vast repertoire of withering sneers and dismissive looks. But as Winslet’s Nancy wails over an hour in, “Why are we still in this house?!”, Carnage by this time having crossed from smart, semantically-charged satire (“honor requires a social content”) to high-falutin’ talkathon. It’s nearly twenty years since Fred Schepisi so nimbly navigated rather similar terrain with his terrific version of John Guare’s stage success 6 Degrees of Separation – and for all its merits, this union of Polanski and Reza, however, becomes a snipingly vicious circle of increasingly implausible elongation and gratuitous escalation.

Carnage isn’t alone among this week’s releases to lay bare the convention-bound hypocrisies of the (American) middle-class: writer-director’s Martha Marcy May Marlene, much praised on the film-festival circuit, sees the eponymous heroine (known at various stages of her adult life as Martha, Marcy May, and Marlene, and played by Elizabeth Olsen in a notably striking big-screen debut) emerge from two years in a rural commune-cult to find herself back in ‘normality’, as represented by the well-appointed pad of her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and Lucy’s Brit-yuppie husband Ted (Hugh Dancy).

Rather than immediately seeking professional help – though outwardly calm, Martha has evidently been significantly traumatised by her experiences – Lucy and Ted allow the twentysomething woman to find her feet among tranquil and placid surroundings. But Martha’s “desocialisation” means that she takes a questioning, sometimes hostile approach to Lucy and Dan’s bourgeois lifestyles – their materialism a jarring contrast to the bosky, airy spiritualism of commune life.

This being an American film, however, said commune is quickly revealed to be a sinister affair of mind-control, unwholesome sexual shenanigans and unthinking leader-worship – with John Hawkes’ Patrick the focus of the adulation. Wiry, somehow ageless Hawkes is a fine actor (and is already strong favourite to win next year’s Oscar for The Surrogate) but here can do little with a role that’s just the latest big-screen variant of Charlie Manson – so that it’s a matter of when events will turn homicidally bloody, rather than if.

The commune episodes are presented in flashback as Martha is jolted back into her memories – Zachary Stuart-Pontier’s editing much too prosaically on-the-nose in terms of the “hooks” that are used to transition us between time-frames. The cinematography – by Jody Lee Lipes, one of the US’s most talented young DPs – favours modishly off-centre compositions, drifting towards hipster fashion-catalogue prettiness at times but more often striking suitable notes of unsettling but alluring dread – aided by the droning susurrations of Matt Snedecor and Micah Bloomberg’s sound department.

(A technical note: Martha Marcy May Marlene was shot on 35mm and should ideally be seen from celluloid rather than from digital. Unfortunately many UK cinemas will – mainly for reasons of economy and logistical convenience – be showing the film only from digital, which simply does not do justice to Jody Lee Lipes’ cinematography, especially in the many sequences involving deep shadow.)

Not much room left to discuss Alma Har’el’s ambitious documentary Bombay Beach, in which – as in Martha Marcy May Marlene - the cinematography is an inescapably picturesque element in the overall aesthetic concept. Here, however, that very picturesqueness is somewhat troubling, as Bombay Beach is one of California’s poorest towns, though with a population of just 295 (at the 2010 census, down from 929 in 1990), ‘hamlet’ would perhaps be a more accurate term.

Har’el explores the weird geographical circumstances of Bombay Beach, a settlement on the low-lying “shores” of the mostly dried-up Salton Sea – a magnet for film-makers of all kinds for a couple of decades now. Admirers of Terrence Malick’s “magic hour” evocations of Americana will respond to Har’el’s images – she’s her own cinematographer, and edits in collaboration with Joe Lindquist – as she interviews several Bombay Beach residents and explores the hardscrabble lives of those who live there.

What results is at once bygone and futuristic – with no gas station within 20 miles, many folk rely on golf-carts for transportation – pointing to some not-so-far-off ‘post-America’ with a mixture of calm wistfulness and empathetic concern for those at the bottom of the economic heap. A couple of the editorial decisions are decidedly questionable – subtitles are provided even when participants are speaking easy-to-understand English, a move which can’t help but add a certain distance between spectator and spectatee.

And the burnished surfaces of Har’el’s imagery do sometimes feel like an aestheticisation of poverty – a grittier approach to histories that sound like they’ve come straight from a Jim Thompson novel might have paid greater dividends. But as an example of how cinema can take us to places and into homes we’d never otherwise know about – or dream of visiting – Bombay Beach‘s achievements ultimately outweigh its problems, and if nothing else Har’el deserves credit for persuading no less an eminence than Bob Dylan to allow several of his recent songs to be hauntingly and judiciously deployed. ‘World Gone Wrong’, indeed.

Neil Young
24th January, 2012
written for Tribune magazine

LEAD ACTRESS
—–
1. Anna Paquin, as Lisa Cohen (the teenager in tumultuous transition), in Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret
2. Lubna Azabal, as Nawal Marwan (the mother who endures and survives a somewhat eventful life), in Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies
>>> late addition (at #3) : Zoé Héran, as Laure / Michaël, in Céline Sciamma’s Tomboy
4. Kate Fahy, as Patricia (the unbearable mother), in Joanna Hogg’s Archipelago
5. Lydia Leonard, as Cynthia (the impossible daughter), in Joanna Hogg’s Archipelago
6. Miranda July, as Sophie (the cutesy, mop-haired, cat-fancying performance-artist), in her very own The Future
———-
7. Michelle Williams, as Marilyn Monroe, in My Week With Marilyn
8. Charlotte Gainsbourg, as Claire, in Melancholia
9. Hailee Steinfeld, as Mattie Ross, in True Grit
10. Mia Wasikowska, as and in Jane Eyre
11. Joyce McKinney, as herself, in Tabloid
12. Elle Fanning, as Alice Dainard, in Super 8
———-
next best (alphabetical order):
Bérénice Bejo (The Artist), Olivia Colman (Tyrannosaur), Hebe Duarte (Las Acacias), Kirsten Dunst (Melancholia), Natalie Portman (Black Swan), Tarra Riggs (Ballast), Tilda Swinton (We Need To Talk About Kevin), Rachel Weisz (The Deep Blue Sea), Yun Jeong-hie (Poetry)

LEAD ACTOR
—–
1. Neil Maskell, as Jay (the Antichrist? or just a very, very, very naughty boy?) in Ben Wheatley’s Kill List.
2. John Boyega, as Moses (the bullying street-thug who discovers his inner heroic badass) in Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block.
3. Peyman Moaadi, as Nader (the short-tempered, exasperatedly self-defeating husband) in Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation.
4. Mark Wahlberg, as “Irish” Micky Ward (the fighter) in David O. Russell’s The Fighter.
5. Cris Lankenau, as Doug (the pipe-smoking Sherlock-admiring Portland bookworm-turned-detective) in Aaron Katz’s Cold Weather.
———-
6. Brad Pitt, as Billy Beane, in Moneyball.
7. Jean Dujardin, as George Valentin, in The Artist.
8. Johnny Depp, as – and in - Rango.
9. Tom Cullen, as Russell, in Weekend.
10. Tom Hiddleston, as Edward, in Archipelago.
11. Chris New, as Glen, in Weekend.
———-
next best (alphabetical order):
Patsha Bay (Viva Riva!), Joel Edgerton (Warrior), Alfredo Castro (Post Mortem), Bradley Cooper (Limitless), Germán de Silva (Las Acacias), Paul Giamatti (Win Win), Brendan Gleeson (The Guard), Rutger Hauer (Hobo with a Shotgun), Hunter McCracken (The Tree of Life), Peter Mullan (Tyrannosaur), JimMyron Ross (Ballast), Michael Shannon (Take Shelter), Micheal J Smith Sr (Ballast)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
——
1. Sareh Bayat, as Razieh (the ‘innocent’ outsider caught up in raging domestic storms) in Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation.
2. Jacki Weaver, as Janine ‘Smurf’ Cody (first among equals in a great year for monster-mothers) in David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom.
3. Barbara Hershey, as Erica Sayers (the mother from ballet-hell – “wow, she’s a trip…”) in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan.
4. Barbara Jefford, as Mrs Collyer (the needlingly conventional, quietly lethal mother) in Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea
5. J.Smith-Cameron, as Joan Kaplan (the distracted, overloaded, raw-nerved actress/mother) in Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret.
———-
6. Amy Lloyd, as Rose, in Archipelago.
7. Mila Kunis, as Lily, in Black Swan.
8. Juno Temple, as London, in Kaboom.
9. Charlotte Rampling, as Gaby, in Melancholia.
10. Allison Janney, as Monica Patterson, in Margaret.
11. Marlene Longange, as ‘The Commandant’, in Viva Riva!.
———-
next best (alphabetical order):
Amy Adams (The Fighter), Shannon Beer (Wuthering Heights), Jeannie Berlin (Margaret), Kathy Burke (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), Jessica Chastain (Take Shelter), Sarina Farhadi (A Separation), Louise Harris (Snowtown), Leila Hatami (A Separation), Shirley Henderson (Meek’s Cutoff), Mary Page Keller (Beginners), Malonn Lévana (Tomboy); Margo Martindale (Win Win), Chloë Grace Moretz (Hugo), Marisa Paredes (The Skin I Live In), Lucy Punch (You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger), Amy Ryan (Win Win) 

SUPPORTING ACTOR
——
1. Yūsuke Iseya, as Kiga Koyata (the slingshot-wielding, stringily-indestructible mountain-man), in Miike Takashi’s 13 Assassins (Jūsannin no Shikaku).
2. Christopher Baker, as ‘Christopher’ (i.e. Christopher Baker, the softly-spoken painter/observer) in Joanna Hogg’s Archipelago.
3. Corey Stoll, as Ernest Hemingway (the rambunctious, swaggering, irresistible blowhard) in Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris.
4. Daniel Henshall, as John Bunting (the twinkly-eyed ocker psychopath) in Justin Kurzel’s Snowtown (arguably a lead performance).
5. Tsuyoshi Ihara, as Hirayama Kujūrō (the Coburn/Miyaguchi one) in Miike Takashi’s 13 Assassins.
———-
6. Alex Shaffer, as Kyle Timmons, in Win Win.
7. Timothy Olyphant, as the Spirit of the West, in Rango.
8. Sullivan Stapleton, as Craig Cody, in Animal Kingdom.
9. Nick Nolte, as Paddy Conlon, in Warrior.
10. Jonah Hill, as Peter Brand, in Moneyball.
11. Gino Anthony Pesi, as Corporal Nick Stavrou, in Battle Los Angeles.
———-
next best (alphabetical order):
Simon Russell Beale (The Deep Blue Sea), Matthew Broderick (Margaret), Matt Damon (True Grit), Brian Downey (Hobo with a Shotgun), Luke Ford (Animal Kingdom), Hoji Fortuna (Viva Riva!), Bruno Ganz (Unknown), Solomon Glave (Wuthering Heights), Bruce Greenwood (Meek’s Cutoff), Riley Griffiths (Super 8), Arliss Howard (Moneyball), Udo Kier (Melancholia), Emir Kusturica (Farewell), Frank Langella (Unknown), Guy Pearce (The King’s Speech), Geoffrey Rush (The King’s Speech), Michael Smiley (Kill List), Vuk (Le Quattro Volte), Shea Whigham (Take Shelter).

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

TOP TEN (all categories)
———-
1. Anna Paquin, Margaret
2. Neil Maskell, Kill List
3. John Boyega, Attack the Block
4. Lubna Azabal, Incendies
5. Sareh Bayat, A Separation
6. Peyman Moaadi, A Separation
7. Kate Fahy, Archipelago
8. Lydia Leonard, Archipelago
9. Yūsuke Iseya, 13 Assassins
10. Jacki Weaver, Animal Kingdom
====================================================

ENSEMBLE POINTS (includes top 11 in each category)
35 : Archipelago
20 : Margaret and A Separation
18 : 13 Assassins
14 : Animal Kingdom and Black Swan

Coriolanus [6/10]
Director: Ralph Fiennes

Haywire [4/10]
Director: Steven Soderbergh

W.E. [2/10]
Director: Madonna

WE really do go from bard to worse this week, as the new releases range from Ralph Fiennes’ solid – if slightly stolid – Shakespeare adaptation Coriolanus, to Steven Soderbergh’s somewhat spoofy, somewhat ropey action-movie Haywire and the ludicrous vanity-project that is Madonna’s opulently banal Wallis Simpson phantasmagoria, W.E.

Soderbergh, of course, has a Palme d’Or (for 1989′s Sex, Lies and Videotape) and a Best Director Oscar to his name (for 2000′s Traffic), along with several notable box-office successes (chiefly Ocean’s Eleven and its two post-modern but highly lucrative sequels). But on the evidence of Haywire and 2009′s galumphing The Informant! – I didn’t manage to catch his autumn 2010 release Contagion - he’s very much a light of former days, one who’s socking out a last few movies before he switches careers around the time of his 50th birthday in January 2013.

As his frequent collaborator Matt Damon recently commented, “He’s retiring, he’s been talking about it for years and it’s getting closer. He wants to paint and he says he’s still young enough to have another career. He’s kind of exhausted with everything that interested him in terms of form. He’s not interested in telling stories. Cinema interested him in terms of form and that’s it.”

The coincidence of Coriolanus and Haywire, then, could be seen in terms of revolving doors – Fiennes, who himself turns 50 in December, here makes a belated and reasonably promising move into directing. He’s not straying too far from what the Americans would call his ‘wheelhouse’ here, as while he’s never directed professionally on stage before he did play the indomitable Roman general Coriolanus for Jonathan Kent at the Almeida in 2000.

The screenplay is by John Logan, Oscar-nominated for Gladiator (2000) and The Aviator (2004), and who last year scored a notable double-whammy with the superlative animation Rango and Martin Scorsese’s delightful Hugo. Logan retains the bulk of Shakespeare’s dialogue, which is here recited in proper iambic pentameter – and there’s plenty of it, not all of which will be easily comprehensible to general audiences.

Clearly seeking to compensate for any such difficulty, Fiennes brings the play – set in the 5th century – up to date, with modern military-style costuming, shooting in and around Belgrade. Indeed, his decision (to a certain degree financially-dictated) to shoot in the Serbian capital proves his major trump-card, as this great city’s scruffily grandiose architecture is (a) an unfamiliar movie backdrop and (b) a good fit for a Rome coming to the end of its imperial dominance. Fiennes does his best to amp up the action-movie possibilities of the material, especially in the mano-a-mano combat scenes between Coriolanus and his main battlefield opponent, Aufidius (Gerard Butler), war-lord of the Volscians – crunchingly kinetic stand-offs which nevertheless carry a distinct homoerotic undertow.

Coriolanus is at heart a character-study of a professional soldier who, propelled to enormous popularity by his martial success, finds himself unwillingly transformed into a political figure – even perhaps a political leader – but who also realises that what makes a man (or woman) into a glorious warrior may well render them totally unfit for the compromises and intrigues that go with this very different kind of arena. Coriolanus’s problem is that he is too “good” for the world in which he lives, constitutionally unable to flatter, deceive or heed the general populace – who quickly turn against him and expel him from Rome

Coriolanus joins forces with Aufidius, plotting brutal revenge against his own kinsmen – and when all other remedies fail, it’s up to his aged mother Volumnia (Vanessa Redgrave) to avert catastrophe by diplomatic means. This provides the drama’s real climax – the final confrontation between Coriolanus and Aufidius is a bloody but slightly perfunctory coda – and provides Redgrave, so gauntly commanding throughout the movie that she looks about seven feet tall, with a superlative showcase for her undimmed thespian skills.

Best known for monosyllabic tough-guy fare, Butler acquits himself surprisingly well in a more demanding role than he usually essays – while in the supporting cast alongside Brian Cox (who plays Coriolanus’s friend Menenius with a welcome light touch) and the ubiquitous Jessica Chastain (essentially an ornamental presence as his long-suffering wife) we find Jon Snow in amusingly choric mode as a newscaster – the Channel 4 News front-man an old hand at this kind of thing, having fulfilled the same function in a 2001 TV Othello update starring Eamonn Walker and Christopher Eccleston.

For Tribune readers Coriolanus is undoubtedly the main draw this week – one hopes that a DVD has been dispatched to US General David Petraeus, said to be mulling his political options post-Iraq. And while Haywire isn’t a disaster, those seeking escapist fare should seek out Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol rather than pay decent money for what feels very much like straight-to-DVD fare tarted up with a string of big-name cameos. The plot is strictly boilerplate in the Bourne franchise mould, as an assassin trained and covertly employed by the American government goes on the run after she realises that her bosses are out to kill her.

Yes, ‘her’, the gimmick being that it’s a dame who’s doing the ass-kicking – Mallory Kane, played by MMA star Gina Carano, who is impressive in her faster paces but whose line-delivery has a speaking-clock flatness that quickly grates. As does the fuzzy-gauzy cinematography and a soundtrack score so loud and cheesy that one presumes it’s meant – like the film itself – “ironically.” A smirking gallery of big-screen notables turn up in supporting roles, clearly in on the gag, and among these the biggest impact is made by Michael Fassbender – who gets to use his own Irish accent for once (the picture refreshingly uses Dublin as backdrop for international intrigues) and shows off his tuxedo’d suaveness in what is in effect an elaborate 007 audition.

Madonna, of course, had her spell in Bondage via 2002′s Die Another Day, and now wanders behind the camera for the second time – 2008′s Filth and Wisdom never broke out of the film-festival circuit – with her hilariously dire Wallis Simpson tribute W.E.. A quick glance at that title might mislead one into thinking that the picture is an adaptation of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s classic dystopian sci-fi novel We (1921) – but no, the E stands for Edward, as in VIII.

Alek Keshishian’s script clod-hops painfully between two parallel narrative strands: the fabled romance between the prince (James D’Arcy) and the American divorcee (Andrea Riseborough) and, sixty-odd years later, the journey to self-realisation of Wally (Abby Cornish), a glum-but-glam Sotheby’s researcher, guided at every step by her Wallis fixation. This process is aided by chats with the spectre of Wallis herself (“Darling, they can’t hurt you, unless you let them”) and by Wally’s fling with a certain ‘Evgeni’ (“Russian intellectual slumming as a security-guard – dime a dozen!”), his nomenclature possibly, just possibly, a nod to the aforementioned Zamyatin.

Cornish, Riseborough and company acquit themselves as well as can be expected – one would have liked to have been on set when Madonna provided directorial assistance to old hands Geoffrey Palmer (as Stanley Baldwin) and Judy Parfitt (Queen Mary). But their efforts are continually undermined by the picture’s over-fussy editing, cinematography and direction – Madonna can’t film the simple act of buying a newspaper without freighting it with the operatic menace of a Dario Argento murder-scene. Indeed, if W.E. works at all – apart from as an unintentionally comic camp spectacle – it’s in moments of jagged-edged psychological horror, though it’s most unlikely that Madonna would be grateful for invitations to handle the next outings in the Saw or Final Destination franchises.

Neil Young
11th January 2012
written for Tribune magazine

Shame

A Useful Life
Director: Federico Veiroj

THE bigger the apple, the bigger the temptation. And to the names of Patrick Bateman, Don Draper, Axel Freed and Harry White – protagonists of, respectively, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men, James Toback and Karel Reisz’s The Gambler and Hubert Selby Jr’s The Demon - we can now add that of Brandon Sullivan, central figure in the intense psychological drama Shame. For each of these fictional males, New York in general and Manhattan in particular are a kind of super-scaled adult playground, an irresistibly erogenous urban zone where primal desires and addictions can be fed and, at least temporarily, assuaged – whether they be sexual adventure, homicidal violence, or risky financial speculation.

As written by Abi Morgan (whose The Iron Lady has only just arrived on our screens) and played by Michael Fassbender (one of six prominent roles for the German-Irish actor to obtain UK release between June 2011 and June 2012), Brandon is a successful employee of a firm whose business is carefully unspecified. All that matters is that his work is lucrative enough for Brandon to be able to afford a luxurious, glassily angular pad and enough free time to pursue his main interest: the opportunistic pursuit and seduction of women.

Wolfishly good-looking in a slightly hollow, in a certain light even slightly sallow way, whippet-lean Fassbender is ideal casting as the superficially enviable Brandon, whose Kennedy-esque carnal drives displace any possibility of real emotional attachment with other people – a nagging lack which he’s forced to confront when his more obviously fragile, needy younger sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) turns up unexpectedly in need of accommodation.

With Sissy’s professional and romantic mishaps as a subplot (and a never-addressed hint of some possibly incestuous shenanigans lurking beneath the surface), Shame intimately follows Brandon as he plunges precipitously into what becomes a full-blown existential crisis – he eventually realises that unless he changes his ways he’s headed deeper into a personal hell. But Turner Prize-winning visual-artist Steve McQueen’s follow-up to his(near-universally praised) 2008 debut Hunger doesn’t quite manage the crucial matter of making us care about Brandon’s travails, nor make us accept that his behaviour is really so very far beyond the pale. He’s an attractive, single, well-off, unattached bloke shagging his way around town (after Hunger, now ‘Satiety’?); the only harm he’s doing is to himself – and even that’s debatable. Or is he perhaps supposedly representative of the callous “1%” whose short-termism and solipsism precipitated the current global financial crisis, more of a Gordon Gekko than a Bateman or a Draper?

As an absorbingly steely journey around a Manhattan of atomised anomie, Shame exerts considerable appeal – Sean Bobbitt’s slate-grey-blue cinematography and Harry Escott’s moodily downbeat score combine to create an air of classy clamminess. Fassbender’s uninhibited physical immersion in his role (including a couple of full-frontal nude scenes) is sufficiently persuasive, meanwhile, to the extent that a first Oscar nomination is looking highly likely.

But fundamentally this is a disappointingly conventional and even conservative work – both in its content and in its form – because whereas Hunger suggested a bold new voice arriving into filmmaking after such success in other disciplines, Shame feels like a step backward, a muting or dilution of what might have perhaps have been a distinctive talent. As with The Iron Lady, the main problem might well be Morgan’s script – the third act, involving Sissy joining Brandon in emotional extremis, veers into manipulative melodrama. And whereas Selby Jr, Toback/Reisz and company took us into a harrowing abyss, Shame - which might in other, more daring hands could have been a testosterone-pheromonal Requiem for a Dream variant – can’t quite shake its tone of finger-wagging, naughty-naughty, shame-on-you prissiness.

WHILE Fassbender has been racking up critics’ awards for Shame en route to that much-predicted Oscar nod, he’s probably best known to the multiplex-going public for his turns as Magneto in X-Men – First Class and as dashing but ill-fated film-critic Archie Hicox from Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Suave, heroic Hicox is that great rarity: a highbrow cinephile movie-character who isn’t a hopelessly nerdy-schlubby social outcast – such as Jorge, hapless protagonist of Federico Veiroj’s Uruguayan miniature A Useful Life (La vida útil, officially a co-production with Spain).

Tall, portly, bespectacled and somewhat ‘retro’ in his dress and hairstyle, Jorge resembles a cross between Alfred Molina, Stephen Fry and Simon Bates, not that external appearances are a priority for this passionate celluloid-devotee. He’s worked at Montevideo’s national cinematheque for a quarter of a century, and is evidently only at ease within its walls – a retreat from the complicated world beyond. But with discerning cinemagoers increasingly preferring to stay at home with their DVDs, Blu-Rays and downloads, the cinematheque faces an uncertain future – which snaps the lovelorn Jorge out of his usual torpidity and into a romantic pursuit through Montevideo’s streets.

If only Brandon Sullivan were on hand to offer a few lothario tips - Shame and A Useful Life are, shall we say, somewhat contrasting explorations of the male sex-drive, the latter maintaining a gentle tone of whimsical gloom. Shot by Arauco Hernandez Holz (who also co-writes and co-edits) in boxy, old-school monochrome to convey a suitably bygone air, A Useful Life is, however, just as much a showcase for its leading man as McQueen’s rather glossier enterprise. But whereas Fassbender is becoming a byword for thespian ubiquity (along with his similarly-tireless female counterpart Jessica Chastain – how come their paths haven’t crossed?), Jorge is played by real-life Uruguayan critic and programmer Jorge Jellinek, making a lugubrious and rather touching belated cinematic debut, and all the more likeable for being such an unlikely big-screen “hero”.

For all its charm, however, A Useful Life is really little more than an amblingly extended short. On the film-festival circuit – where, with its inside-baseball references to esoteric Icelandic auteurs and the like, it’s proved predictably popular since its autumn-2010 premiere – it clocked in at 65 minutes, though the UK release has been timed by the BBFC at 67 minutes. Not a lot of bang for one’s hard-earned buck, on balance – and while the picture has clearly been selected for UK distribution in the hope that it will appeal to those remaining Jorge-like cinephiles among us (perhaps with an eye to the likely success of Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist?) it’s a bit frustrating that A Useful Life should obtain arthouse exposure ahead of rather more deserving 2010 titles such as, to name a few, In the Shadows, The Christening, Finisterrae, Truce, The Invisible Eye and The Lord’s Ride. Fingers crossed that at least one or two of those make it onto our screens at some point over the next 12 months. Happy New Year!

Neil Young
3rd January, 2012
written for Tribune magazine

Asked what he was most proud of, David [Rose] said: “Narrowing the gap between films and television. When I started, there was a big gap. Television didn’t want to get involved with the unions and felt film was a dirty word. Cinema hated television because it felt it was showing films on the cheap and would think that what we were doing was ‘only a telly film’. I resented that because it’s the talent that matters. A film is a film is a film.
Birmingham Post, 23rd September 2009 {1}

When I make notes on a play the brief scribbles can generally be turned into some kind of sense, whether right or wrong. Not so with David Rudkin’s Artemis 81 (BBC1). On emerging from the preview theatre I found my scribbles were very strange, full of gnomic remarks, and as long as a novel.
Michael Church, The Times, 30th December 1981 {2}

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IN the long history of British television broadcasting, Artemis 81 is an anomaly: a three-hour conceptual/philosophical science-fiction ‘film’, made for TV, broadcast in a mammoth chunk in a high-profile evening slot, on the nation’s most-watched channel, in the middle of the Christmas holidays. For more than a quarter of a century it then existed in limbo, ‘available’ only via samizdat videotape recordings – at the time of the transmission, United Kingdom domestic VCR ownership was in its infancy. Then in June 2007 it was commercially released on DVD – as Artemis ’81 [sic], in a 175-minute version. Even this belated release was somewhat ‘botched’: the packaging promised the suitably enigmatic running-time of ‘xx minutes’ while among the cast-list we find a ‘Devilla Deloski’ (presumably Sevilla Delofski). And as the film’s writer David Rudkin noted on his website, “it’s unfortunate that the DVD’s producers have issued it under an inaccurate title: the 81 is as in the number of a distant star, not the abbreviated number of a year.” {3}

A deliberately bewildering head-scratcher in terms of its visionary content – owing as much to Shakespeare, Wagner, Brecht, Dreyer and Hitchcock as to better-known British sci-fi serials Quatermass (1953; 1955; 1958-9) or Doctor Who (1963-89; 1996; 2005-) - Artemis 81 is a puzzle to classify in formal terms. The front of the DVD sleeve announces “The Cult BBC Science Fiction Film” but the back informs us that “David Rudkin’s supernatural storywas one of the most ambitious series of its time” {emphasis added}; Church’s Times review labels it, en passant, a “play.”

The primary source of the confusion is straightforward: Rudkin did write Artemis 81 as a serial, and incorporated ‘breaks’ so that it could be shown in three sections or (his preferred format) two halves. These breaks are evident in the finished film – produced by David Rose, directed by Alastair Reid, edited by Mike Hall – and one can deduce from the Times review that a press-show interval was provided (though Church mistakenly interpreted this as some kind of lighting malfunction), enabling critics to gather their thoughts before the increasingly disorienting second half.

For the 1981 viewing public, however, decades before programme-pausing Personal Video Recorders (such as ‘Sky+’ and TiVo) there could be no such respite. Over the course of three hours, they were thrown into and around the Manichean, byzantine intricacies of a plot focussing on successful science-fiction novelist Gideon Harlax and his (girl-)friend Gwen Meredith, as the pair investigate a series of unusual suicides. It turns out that the deceased had all been passengers on the same North Sea ferry from Denmark to England, along with world-famous organist Albrecht von Drachenfels. The imperious Drachenfels is later revealed as a mere pawn of cosmic forces – his theft of a Pagan artefact from a Danish museum one element of a nefarious, potentially apocalyptic grand design.

To avert Armageddon, Harlax must somehow enter and traverse a kind of parallel reality – one which looks, sounds and feels like a dystopian vision of over-industrialised, late-1970s Eastern Europe – while shaking himself free of his ingrained, solipsistic detachment. At its core, Artemis 81 traces the halting, sometimes painfully traumatic transition of an intellectual from ivory-tower solitude (Harlax has been, literally, building himself a tower) towards fragility and feeling – towards spiritual/emotional rebirth, towards the possibility of human love…

The Danish touches in this continent-hopping tale were incorporated into Rudkin’s screenplay from the earliest stages, as Artemis 81 was for much of its gestation intended as a co-production between the BBC and Denmark’s equivalent state-broadcasting organisation (then known as Danmarksradio, a one-channel monopoly as recently as 1988) only for the co-operation to fall through at a late stage – too late, as it transpired, for rewrites and re-shoots.

The production itself was a fraught affair (“all that labour to be born…” as Gwen wistfully remarks of a tiny, delicate bloom.) Rudkin recalls: “I think the shoot was a Hellish experience – especially during the mere three days we had for the Danish location work. On the North Sea ferry there and back, there were shots that he had only one chance to get right. [Director Alastair Reid] needed all his commitment to the piece, and all his formidable technical mastery.” {4} As the writer asserts, Artemis 81 ”is a film”, but “made on a ‘telly’ budget, it must be said!” {5} What results is a determinedly and unashamedly adult-oriented, highly demanding drama of unusual geographical scope – exploring the English ‘provinces’ (principally Liverpool and Birmingham, the pair ‘fusing’ into a nightmarish vision of the ‘underworld’ city), and with extended sequences on the ferry and on dry-land in Denmark, the latter also standing in for an eerily idyllic parallel dimension: part alien planet, part ‘inner-space’.

Rudkin’s own ‘official’ synopsis provides further illumination:
Gideon, a successful novelist, insulated from reality and emotionally arid, is deeply and ruefully loved by two people: a woman musician, and a man who teaches film. But Gideon flinches from all human contact. From an alien planet, an angel of love descends, to try to unlock Gideon’s emotions and save him. But an angel of death comes not far after, seeking to imprison Gideon in his frigidity. At the climax, high within the tower of an abbey, while an organ recital proceeds below, Death’s trap is so sprung that, if Gideon succumb to him now, the whole world will be destroyed. {6}

Even by the standards of the early 1980s, such material would not be classed as obvious BBC1 evening programming for the Christmas period – at a time when communal TV-watching was seen as part of Britain’s festive experience. The arrival of the double-issue BBC listings magazine Radio Times in mid-December was, for many, a domestic publishing-highlight of the year, allowing readers/viewers the luxury of poring over a full fortnight’s worth of advance schedules. These pages were filled with high-profile movies – many of which would have been on cinema screens only a couple of years before – alongside extended versions of favourite shows, and star-packed light-entertainment one-offs.

The BBC1 offerings the night before Artemis 81‘s transmission were more typical festive fare: 1976 war-movie The Battle of Midway, followed by the News; at 9.10 the ‘easy-listening’ delights of Val Sings Bing (Irish crooner Doonican saluting his trans-Atlantic counterpart Crosby); at 9.55 popular Cockney comedy Only Fools and Horses; at 10.40 the BBC’s resident movie-critic Barry Norman’s Films of the Year. Perhaps sensing that the outré content of Artemis 81 might be a tough ‘sell’, Radio Times previewer Robert Ottaway emphasised “the cast – which must be the most intriguing assembly of actors from different backgrounds ever attempted. There’s Hywel Bennett (from [ITV's successful comedy] Shelley), and Dinah Stabb (from the National Theatre), and Dan O’Herlihy (who was nominated for an Oscar for his part in [Luis Buñuel's] Robinson Crusoe). Above all, there’s ‘Sting’, lead singer of [chart-topping pop-punk-reggae outfit] The Police … in his first major dramatic role [Sting had previously appeared more fleetingly in 1979 releases Quadrophenia and Radio On]. He is the Angel of Life, and was deliberately chosen as a present-day ‘god’.” {7}

Ottaway omits two notable performers who were, however, to be listed on the 2007 DVD’s packaging, both appearing in a humorous sequence set in an Oxford University library: Ingrid Pitt – vivacious stalwart of Hammer horrors and briefly seen in a previous British Pagan-themed cult classic, The Wicker Man (1973) - who cameos as a character identified in the credits only as ‘Hitchcock Blonde’;  and a then-unknown Daniel Day-Lewis, two years before his first significant big-screen role in Gandhi (1983).

More surprisingly, Ottaway makes no reference to the pedigree of the film’s behind-the-scenes talent. One might have expected acknowledgement of Rudkin’s highly acclaimed TV-play Penda’s Fen (1974) – directed by the revered Alan Clarke, and in many ways the main precursor to what was being attempted with Artemis 81. As Clarke’s sometime colleague Barry Hanson (producer of both gangster-classic The Long Good Friday [1980] and seminal TV-movie The Naked Civil Servant [1975]) recalls in Richard Kelly’s oral biography of the director, Penda’s Fen ”is a play of mystical Olde English, a boy beset by angels and devils, and a pagan king emerging through an earth that held various appalling nuclear secrets. It also had ["clean up TV" campaigner] Mary Whitehouse thinly disguised in it, and all sorts of obsessions and fears that were abroad in that early part of the 1970s. You name it, they all cropped up…” {8}

Elsewhere in the same volume, prominent British dramatist/director David Hare evokes the creative context which gave rise to Penda’s Fen and Artemis 81: “We were all working together on the same corridor at BBC Birmingham when Alan was making Penda’s Fen - Stephen Frears and Mike Leigh, Alan Bleasdale and Willy Russell. And there was [producer] David Rose just being a wonderful impresario. When I saw Penda’s Fen, I just couldn’t believe it. And that is the whole BBC Birmingham culture right there, which was David Rose letting people do what they wanted and nobody in London knowing what was going on. You know: ‘The earth splits open?’ ‘Oh yeah?’ There’s just no way a London producer and script editor would have been having that. But my God, that film went out at nine-thirty at night on a majority channel, it’s incredible — an hour and a half long. And how bold to do it!” {9}

Hare’s exclamation at the ‘boldness’ of Penda’s Fen‘s themes and scheduling gives a sense of how radical Artemis 81 must have seemed seven years on: twice as long (with no break), and broadcast not on an obscure Thursday night in March but during Christmas. With no repeat scheduled, and for the vast majority no opportunity for another view via videotape, Artemis 81 proved too much to digest for many. Michael Church’s Times review ends with a paragraph of disjointed dialogue quotations – transcribed, it seems, straight from his notebook – capped with an exasperated summary: “Total poetry, total theatre, total bewilderment.” {10}

Church’s inability to ‘tune into’ Rudkin’s wavelengths is encapsulated by his assertion that Gideon’s film-lecturer friend “Jed had uttered the immortal line ‘only a three-sixty shot from vertigo can bring the living water to my eyes.’ So.”{11}  This line does, as transcribed, sound like the epitome of pretentious verbiage – but given the running stream of Hitchcock references in Rudkin’s screenplay, it should obviously read “only a 360° shot from Vertigo can bring the living water to my eyes” – and thus the dialogue is crucially leavened by a streak of mordantly self-deprecating humour.

But if that august broadsheet The Times struggled with the breadth and idiosyncrasy of Rudkin’s folie de grandeur, he was to receive a surprisingly warmer reception from a rather more ‘downmarket’ newspaper, the tabloid Daily Mirror. In a preview published on the morning of the broadcast and headlined ‘Don’t Worry – Just Enjoy It’, the left-leaning mass-market newspaper’s reviewer Kenneth Hughes admitted “It could be the most baffling show of the holiday, but Artemis 81 … is also one of the best of the year.

“This three-hour thriller, giving pop singer Sting his first big television role, is a knockout. But even some of the people most closely involved are not too sure exactly what it’s about. Director Alastair Reid calls it a television Rubik Cube. And actor Hywel Bennett, who is at the heart of the action says he doesn’t understand it. Artemis 81 IS very complex. It has to do with a threat to the future of mankind, a series of mysterious deaths, a strange affair involving the Angel of Love [sic] and a great organist who, if he hits the right (or wrong) note, could blow up the world. My advice: Don’t worry about understanding it, just relax and enjoy it.” {12}

This ‘relaxed’ approach mirrors the modus operandi of David Rose, the producer identified by Hare as personifying “BBC Birmingham culture” and – after Rudkin – the second-most important individual in terms of Artemis 81‘s gargantuan ambition. Appointed by world-famous broadcaster/administrator David Attenborough during the latter’s energetic 1969-73 tenure as BBC Director of Programmes, Rose was sent to the Corporation’s Pebble Mill studio in Birmingham shortly after it opened in 1971, with the title ‘Head of Drama (English Regions).’ According to Barry Hanson’s blunt recollection, “In a way, Pebble Mill was a white elephant, so they’d given David Rose this brief to just do something – whatever…” {13}

Enjoying considerable autonomy, Rose quickly established himself as what UK broadcasting mandarin Jeremy Isaacs called a ‘benign magus,’ in a 2004 Independent article marking Rose’s 80th birthday. Isaacs wryly contrasts commissioning practices of the 1970s with those of the new century, by which time the BBC had been ‘reformed’ by successive Conservative governments (most notably those of Margaret Thatcher, 1979-1990) which tended to see the state broadcaster as an instinctively left-wing ‘enemy within.’

“It now commissions drama either from outside proposals or from internal groups who are treated as independent businesses in (friendly) competition with each other,” according to British cultural commentator Graham Nelson, who describes the Corporation as “semi-privatised.” ”Now that producers are on the outside, they have less ability to pull strings; at least some of them feel that there is less of a culture in which they are seen as artists. On the other hand, it’s certainly true that the environment of the BBC’s best work was at times shambolic, always plagued by union disputes and bureaucratic obstructions caused by too few resources shared too widely.” {14}

Rose’s Pebble Mill tenure can thus be seen as an example of the BBC’s unique, pre-Thatcher culture(s) yielding demonstrably flavoursome and enduringly influential fruit. “It is not just what David did that is instructive,” wrote Isaacs, “but how he did it: no committees of consultants; no focus groups or market-testing. Just an eye for a situation, a nose for a script, and a mind of his own to make the critical judgement.” {15}

As has generally been the case in British television – especially BBC TV – the main auteur of a programme, be it a stand-alone show or a series, was identified by Rose as the writer. Authorial collaborations are rare – in contrast to the American model, where group-work is the general scriptwriting rule. The giants of British TV tend to be identified as its writers: Dennis Potter (1935-1994); Jack Rosenthal (1931-2004) and Nigel Kneale (1922-2006); men who seldom sat in a director’s chair.

Rose’s Pebble Mill ‘stable’ included such luminaries as Rosenthal, Russell, Bleasdale, Hare, David Mercer and Malcolm Bradbury – many owing Rose a crucial debt for their careers’ inception and/or development. Rather less well known (then as now), David Rudkin – who in the sixties and seventies was at least as celebrated for his stage work – occupied a more marginal position on the ‘visionary’ eccentric/experimental wing.

Several key figures in this ‘golden age’ of BBC drama did work in film, of course – and today Pebble Mill alumni Mike Leigh and Stephen Frears are best known (certainly outside the UK) for their cinema-careers. But with the British film industry in the doldrums during the 1970s, television was seen as the best option for writers (not to mention directors, actors and crew-members) who wanted to make a living from their craft: the BBC’s Play For Today perhaps the most notable outlet.

And audiences often responded enthusiastically, partly because of the limited alternatives available at a pre-personal-computer, pre-internet, pre-multiplex, pre-DVD era when video-recorders were the preserve of the relatively wealthy and/or the technologically inclined. The most extreme example of this came one famous evening in 1979, when Britain only had three domestic channels – BBC1, BBC2 and ITV – and foul weather kept most of the population indoors. ITV was off-air because of an industrial dispute, and Leigh’s corrosively acid, convulsively hilarious comedy Abigail’s Party attracted around 16 million viewers (for British audiences it remains the single work for which Leigh is best known.)

Artemis 81 was never going to achieve anything kind of mass viewership, of course, even at Christmas – a time of the year when science-fiction offerings on the BBC were usually in the mould of family-friendly Dr Who spin-off K-9 and Company, a 50-minute one-off (in fact a pilot for a series that was ultimately never commissioned) broadcast in an early evening slot the very day after Artemis 81‘s transmission.

The ostensibly berserk and foolhardy creative ‘gamble’ presented by Rudkin’s epic does, however, make perfect sense when viewed in the wider terms of David Rose’s general, time-tested approach. It would be his ‘last hurrah’ at (and perhaps also a ‘parting shot’ directed towards) the BBC, as by the time of its broadcast he had been installed (by the aforementioned Jeremy Isaacs) as Head of Drama at Channel 4, a new commercial channel with an explicit remit to showcase and sharpen the creative cutting-edge, and which started broadcasting in November 1982.

In some ways, Artemis 81 would have been a better fit for Channel 4 than BBC1 – the new channel was responsible for a very eclectic range of films, many premiering on the small screen before successful releases, and became quickly associated with unapolgetically challenging offerings like Ken McMullen’s Ghost Dance (1983) – inspired by the writings of Jacques Derrida and featuring the man himself among its cast – and David G Hopkins’ four-part Percy Shelley adaptation Zastrozzi (1986).

Rose – who in his nine years at Channel 4 was to fund (or help support) key films by Peter Greenaway, Jerzy Skolimowski, Terence Davies, ‘Merchant-Ivory’, Andrei Tarkovsky and Wim Wenders – hired a safe pair of hands to direct Artemis 81, a project which it seems was never likely to be handled by Rudkin himself (Rudkin, who as a young man had worked with François Truffaut on the dialogue for Fahrenheit 451 [1966], is only an occasional director.)

Then 40, Scotsman Alastair Reid had cut his teeth on pioneering medical soap Emergency-Ward 10 from 1960-65, going on to amass a solid array of BBC credits including the long-running Play For Today and ground-breakingly gritty crime-series Gangsters (1976-78). Reid has directed the occasional theatrical release over the years, but he’s essentially a TV director: extremely popular cop-drama Inspector Morse (Reid was responsible for the first episode), Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (1993), and Traffik (1989), Channel 4′s miniseries remade by Hollywood as Traffic (2000 – landing Steven Soderbergh the Academy Award for Best Director.)

But while Reid performed an evidently crucial role in bringing Artemis 81 into the nation’s living-rooms, he’s very seldom been mentioned in discussions of the programme, either then or now. The Radio Times, contemporary reviews, and the programme itself firmly identify the work either as “David Rudkin’s Artemis 81” or “Artemis 81 by David Rudkin”, and even if the piece is freighted with references to films and film-makers – including numerous specific shots, intended to evoke certain cinematic forebears (principally Hitchcock, secondarily Dreyer) – it’s clear from Rudkin’s written recollections, and from Rudkin and Reid’s jocular statements on the DVD commentary-track, that these are as specified in Rudkin’s screenplay.

Not that the finished article conforms precisely to the writer’s wishes and expectations. As Rudkin notes with pained disdain:
The producer David Rose left BBC to take up a senior post at the then new Channel Four, and although he kept a watch on things, in effect we lacked his controlling presence. I nurse a particular grievance about the editing. The up-and-coming young editor I thought right for Artemis, and who wanted to do it, was not even considered: this was a ‘big’ project, and so was allocated to the Senior Editor – with whom I was never granted so much as a discussion. On Penda, I had been given reasonable access to the edit and the dub, and my responses had been sought and sometimes acted on. On Artemis I was allowed to see no rushes, no rough assembly, no rough-cut; my first invitation to a sighting was together with members of the publicity department. I protested, and was granted a viewing before that; but it was a formality. As I feared, much had been done to Artemis in the cutting-room and dubbing-suite that I could never have endorsed. {16}

This troubled gestation and ‘birth’ is another example of the way Artemis 81 blurs distinctions between television and cinematic ‘film’, as it is almost invariably the latter which provides example of auteurvisions being mangled or destroyed by interfering studios. Notorious examples are Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982)and the aforementioned Wicker Man. Nevertheless, as Rudkin himself admits, even the ‘impure’ edit of Artemis 81 remains the fruit of what “had been an extraordinary enterprise…” {17}

Indeed so – in terms of British science-fiction, few germane parallels can be drawn with contemporary big-screen offerings. Around the period in question these chiefly consisted of US-funded entertainments intended for worldwide consumption, and heavily indebted to Stateside predecessors: remakes (Flash Gordon [1980], Alien [1979], Outland [1981]); rip-offs (Inseminoid [1981]), and movies blatantly hoping to cash in on the colossal box-office success of 1977′s Star Wars and 1979′s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (the latter was, ironically enough, to have its first UK television showing on ITV the very night before Artemis 81 aired.)

As an essentially British affair – despite the Danish elements - Artemis 81 has much more in common with ITV’s ill-fated autumn 1979 Quatermass revival, one in which (according to publicity materials) “Earth’s dark ancestral forces awaken to a summons from beyond the stars.” This big-budget four-parter, developed at the BBC until 1974 but abandoned amid financial concerns and only years later picked up by its commercial rival, was shot cinema-style on 35mm. It was optimistically intended to repeat the seminal success of Nigel Kneale’s three 1950s BBC Quatermass serials – which subsequently formed the basis of three fine Hammer movies.

Kneale’s downbeat, apocalyptic script was filmed by British director Piers Haggard, with results that were quickly – and universally unfavourably – contrasted with Quatermass‘s 1950s outings. The 1979 Quatermass (also shown in certain territories as an edited-down TV-movie) has never enjoyed a fraction of the ‘cult’ status long associated with BBC ‘contemporaries’ such as Terry Nation’s brutally cynical Blake’s 7 (1978-81), a series acknowledged by Joss Whedon – a great admirer of UK sci-fi in general – as principal forerunner of his ill-fated 2002 TV “space western” series Firefly and its big-screen sequel Serenity (2005).

But while Blake’s 7 has remained prominent in Britain’s general cultural consciousness after its abrupt cancellation, thanks to semi-regular repeats and VHS/DVD releases; and while Doctor Who (always principally aimed at younger audiences), has never really gone away, the ‘lost’ standalone Artemis 81 was always a rarer, much more elusive, even esoteric kind of beast. This tended to endow Rudkin’s (inner-)space oddity with an unusual, exalted standing that was confirmed and significantly boosted by its 2007 ‘re-entry’ into the cultural atmosphere.

As Sight and Sound magazine’s DVD-reviewer Sergio Angelini noted, “David Rudkin’s densely layered three-hour fantasy epic has remained largely unseen since its original transmission in 1981 but is still as baffling and compulsively entertaining as it was 26 years ago. A surreal cornucopia of science fiction, organ music, movies and Greek mythology, this sprawling, rich tapestry finds its ur-texts in Milton’s Paradise Lost and Hitchcock’s Vertigo… The section set in a city of death is powerfully rendered by director Alastair Reid, but there are several longueurs along the route – especially an elaborate but meandering sequence in an underground bunker – before a kinetic finale replete with references to Rebecca and Rear Window … Unfortunately, due to rights problems, some cuts have been made to sequences showing stills from Hitchcock movies.” {18}

Though many who purchased the DVD (and there has still never been a network repeat, not even on one of the BBC’s new, theoretically more risk-embracing digital channels) may have experienced echoes of contemporary reviewers’ ‘bewilderment’, and/or disappointment at the programme’s stagier, more dated aspects, it’s no hyperbole to say that the re-emergence of Artemis 81 has attracted new legions of admirers in the UK and abroad. Among the latter is Slovenian film-maker/programmer/critic Jurij Meden, who described it as a “piece of cinematic novum” {19} and treated it as having as much right to filmic status as, say, David Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE (2007) – much preferring Rudkin’s journey into the interior unknown.

But for its televisual origins, it would surely have figured in Sight and Sound‘s August 2010 salute to what it called ‘Weird British Cinema’, aiming to “unearth the ancient rituals and traditions that seep through soil into British films… From The Wicker Man’s pagan Summerisle and the haunting of Suffolk lands in Witchfinder General to the old Albion of A Canterbury Tale.” {20} The revival of interest in Artemis 81 led to several commentators seizing upon this uncompromisingly eccentric and erudite artefact (“if you’re talking about writers who are instinctive, in a way there isn’t anyone quite like Rudkin” – Barry Hanson) as proof of how television in general – and British TV in particular – has degraded into a blander, more risk-averse business. In the foreword to his 1983 collection Glued To the Box, Clive James – the Australian academic/journalist who through the 1970s pioneered (and arguably perfected) the art/craft of TV criticism, could write that “American television is undoubtedly worse than British television” {21} without fear of contradiction, citing only Hill Street Blues and Lou Grant as US offerings worthy of respect. Things, clearly, have changed since then – in 2011, the majority of educated, cultured, cosmopolitan Britons are at least familiar with, say, Lost, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Wire and Boardwalk Empire.

Mark Fisher is among the most illuminating examples of what might be termed the ‘Artemis generation’, old enough to have experienced both its 1981 and post-2007 incarnations. He has written a comparison of Artemis 81 and its closest West German ‘equivalent’ – Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s World on a Wire (Welt am Draht, 1973) for Film Quarterly (“Visionary Television,” Vol. 64, No. 2, Winter 2010), while in his analysis of Rudkin’s film for the website k-punk, Fisher combines personal recollection with wider cultural analysis:

I first saw Artemis 81 when it was broadcast for the first and only time in December 1981. Even though it struck me then as incoherent and incomprehensible, I willingly sat through all three hours of it. Judging by the internet responses to Artemis 81, my experience was a common one amongst kids who, like me, were allowed to stay up late and watch it because it was broadcast during the school holidays. … What makes Artemis 81 still alienating to watch are all the things that it lacks – all those strategies for producing audience identification to which we are now so accustomed. The acting style is as Brechtian as anything you would see in a Straub-Huillet film; the dialogue is anti-naturalistic, highly mannered (it reminds me more of an opera than television writing – and Wagner is one of many intertexts). I hardly need say that it is impossible to imagine something like Artemis 81 being commissioned, still less broadcast by the BBC today. … Like much seventies culture – and Artemis 81 really belongs to the ‘long seventies’ that ended circa 1982 – it deploys pretentiousness as a visionary force. To use a musical analogy, Artemis 81 combines the overblown ambition of Prog with the cool Ballardianism of postpunk. It is quintessentially pulp modernist – there are references to The Devil Rides Out as well as to The Seventh Seal and Carl Dreyer. It is the BBC that made and broadcast Artemis 81 which should be recovered and defended, not the institution as it currently functions today. {22}

It should not be forgotten that in televisual terms, the ‘institution’ is one which relied heavily on serious – and seriously scary – science-fiction to boost its renown and acceptance in its earliest days. During the early fifties (many UK households obtained their first sets – usually rented – to watch Queen Elizabeth II’s 1953 coronation) the most watched and avidly discussed programmes were headed by an adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 (starring a pre-Hammer Peter Cushing) and Kneale’s The Quatermass Experiment (1953), the latter leading to further serials Quatermass II (1955) and Quatermass and the Pit (1958).

The most famous and long-running of all BBC programmes – regardless of genre – followed in 1963: Doctor Who‘s crypto-eponymous hero combined aspects of Sherlock Holmes and Kneale’s Professor Quatermass, travelling through space-time in a blue ‘police-box’ known as the Tardis. The Doctor is a humanoid alien from distant planet Gallifrey who has nevertheless remained recognisably somehow very British through all his many incarnations during the show’s runs: from 1963 to 1989, via a one-off TV movie in 1996, and the current ‘reboot’ which has aired to conspicuous success since 2005.

But with the only very occasional exception, Doctor Who and its more adult-oriented, more explicitly Kneale-influenced spin-off Torchwood (2006-) stand almost alone in terms of the BBC’s ongoing commitment to science-fiction. The corporation now expends more energy on ‘prestige’ period dramas, literary adaptations, cop thrillers and topical parables of urban anxiety. Artemis 81, now thirty years old, has been cited as an influence by writers of various stripes, but the prospect of even a small-scale remake seems distinctly remote – and such an enterprise would surely be shunted off to a ‘minority’ channel, kept well away from BBC1 and/or the Christmas period when audience-ratings have become a matter of paramount concern.

Long gone are the days when the viewer had the limited ‘choice’ of Artemis 81 on BBC1, Billy Wilder’s Oscar-winning The Apartment (1960) on BBC2, or a three-hour broadcast of Trevor Nunn’s The Three Sisters (a Royal Shakespeare Company version of the Chekhov play) on ITV. The latter ran from 9.02 to midnight, thus scheduled in direct competition with Rudkin’s written-for-TV experiment (The Times‘ Church was unimpressed by the Chekhov televisation, branding it “ultra-tasteful, ultra-sensitive, and for one viewer at least, ultra-boring.” {23})

Artemis 81 - with its novelist ‘hero’ and indelibly, intricately inscrutable dialogue – is nothing if not a writer’s piece, and so the last word should belong to its creator, its auteur, David Rudkin: “An existential morality, told in terms of Gothic fable… I can see why some disparage it now as a ‘pretensh-fest’ by a ‘hi-aim author’ (okay folks, let’s all be happy little epsilons and aim low…); but where people positively respond to it, it’s to its prodigality with images, and its mythic charge that flows into parts of us that meaner contemporary TV drama (and cinema for that matter) do not even know are there.” {24}

Neil Young
October 2011

This essay was originally published, in Slovene, as  ”Ves tisti trud, da bi se (ponovno) rodila: Artemis 81 Davida Rudkina” in Proti koncu: sodobna TV serija in serialnost, edited by Jela Krecic and Ivana Novak. (Ljubljana: Slovenian Cinematheque, 2011). English-to-Slovene translation by Maja Lovrenov.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books
James, Clive. Glued to the Box. London: Pan, 1983.
Kelly, Richard. Alan Clarke. London: Faber, 1998.

Magazines / newspapers
The Birmingham Post
Daily Mirror
The Independent (online edition)
Radio Times
Sight and Sound
The Times

Websites
David Rudkin. www.davidrudkin.com
Home Page of Graham Nelson. www.gnelson.demon.co.uk
Jigsaw Lounge. www.jigsawlounge.co.uk
k-punk. k-punk.abstractdynamics.org

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FOOTNOTES

{1} Graham Young, “David Rose talks of his time with BBC Birmingham at Pebble Mill,” Birmingham Post, September 23, 2009, accessed June 15, 2011, http://www.birminghampost.net/news/west-midlands-news/2009/09/23/david-rose-talks-of-his-time-with-bbc-birmingham-at-pebble-mill-65233-24757523/.

The Iron Lady
Director: Phyllida Lloyd

There can’t be many biopics guaranteed to offend its subject from frame one, but pre-credits information that The Iron Lady was financed by “Funds from the National Lottery,” is one sure way to provoke Baroness Thatcher’s wrath. The National Lottery, introduced by John Major, was strenuously resisted by his predecessor – her opposition to gambling a legacy of her strict Methodist upbringing

“Sundays meant going to church three times and not being allowed to go to the cinema,” according to Richard Dowden in Catholic Herald (1978), though young Margaret Roberts was reportedly a keen moviegoer on non-Sabbath days. While her Methodism remained a major influence, her cinephilia seems to have quickly waned in adult life as she began the career that would eventually yield a decade in Downing Street – with consequences that continue to affect (many would say blight) millions of lives.

It’s a remarkable story (and still unfinished), one that’s already been selectively chronicled by television productions. The Iron Lady is, however, the first attempt to bring the whole saga to the big screen – and on this evidence, the daunting task is some way beyond the abilities of director Phyllida Lloyd (sole previous movie: frothily lucrative nonsense Mamma Mia!) and writer Abi Morgan (Brick Lane, and the upcoming Shame.)

Early scenes are auspiciously oblique and left-field, with a doddering Baroness (Meryl Streep) – a distrait-dowager protagonist familiar from her walk-on appearances in Gordon Burn’s experimental behind-the-headlines novel Born Yesterday (2008) – escaping her carers to buy a pint of milk from a corner shop. Dairy-products are to recur prominently throughout, a nod to Thatcher’s grocer inheritance (and her 1970s “milk-snatcher” notoriety) – indeed, the very first shot of the movie proper is a wrongfootingly bald image of pints in the fridge.

In this short prologue, Morgan and Lloyd unobtrusively capture some grim aspects of the Thatcher legacy: atomised urban relations, taken-for-granted rudeness, rubbish in the streets. As Thatcher shuffles home, The Iron Lady maintains an air of stately calm as we observe, at close quarters, the lioness in winter – still capable of a chilling growl, but increasingly fogged in confusion. Over the course of one day, the becalmed Baroness reflects on episodes from her life – in more or less chronological order – as she comes to terms with the absence of her recently-deceased husband (Jim Broadbent, distractingly miscast.)

Though invisible to everyone else – include Thatcher’s jovially fussy daughter Carol (Olivia Colman) – Denis is, it’s clear, still very much a part of Margaret’s consciousness. In a nod to It’s a Wonderful Life, by way of A Beautiful Mind, he guides/goads her through what becomes an illustrated digest of one of this most tumultuous, controversial of political careers – much of it played, perhaps surprisingly, for wry, mostly effective laughs.

The period of Thatcher’s dominance (1979-1990) and its aftermath did not, of course, result in “wonderful lives” for large swathes of the UK population, and The Iron Lady won’t threaten box-office records in Scotland, north-east England or Merseyside. But, as if nervous of prodding still-raw wounds, Morgan and Lloyd generally downplay the political stuff – concentrating instead on Thatcher’s ‘outsider’ status as in the Tory party as an ambitious woman, as a provincially-born, lower-middle-class wife/mother who also happened to be a brainbox Cambridge graduate and barrister (“I know I will never truly be one of them,” she sighs).

What results is a frustratingly disjointed and evasive affair, emphasising the importance of Airey Neave (Nicholas Farrell) in the development of Thatcher’s public image – all King’s Speech echoes evidently intentional – but savagely truncating or entirely omitting figures of similar or greater importance, many of whom lurk unacknowledged in shadowy backgrounds. Thatcher’s predecessor/foe Edward Heath (John Sessions) is fleetingly glimpsed, but there’s no sign or mention of key policy-mentor Keith Joseph, while N.Tebbit, C.Parkinson, J.Archer, W.Whitelaw are conspicuously absent, along with – closer to home - Thatcher’s son Mark (“boy’s always going awol!” as Denis snaps). HM Queen, meanwhile, with whom Thatcher had such a fascinatingly tricky relationship, is also ‘airbrushed out’ of the story – perhaps, if Iron Lady clicks at the box-office, a Streep/Mirren ‘deathmatch’ sequel could be suggested…

As it is, we zip from the triumphant, triumphalist glow post-Falklands to the late 80s in a matter of seconds – Thatcher a steely leaderene one minute, a slightly-bonkers, whisky-addled liability the next. As with Lloyd’s only previous big-screen outing, Mamma Mia!, Streep’s contributions prove absolutely crucial in retaining our interest – here travelling far beyond (eerie) impersonation, to the extent that even her staunchest critics to feel an unexpected twinge of sympathy for the devil (sans Prada, in this case.)

But while it works fine if taken strictly as a vehicle for Streep’s talents, The Iron Lady – both film and character – show rapid signs of corrosion after about an hour or so, petering out with a coda that’s more a matter of bathos than pathos. Bizarrely, the actual end is signalled by Streep’s name appearing on screen mid-scene – an acknowledgement that that this is less a film and more a delivery-mechanism for a virtuouso, awards-magnet performance.

Because whereas that awkward stage-screen transfer Mamma Mia! was whipped into something resembling shape by veteran editor Lesley Walker, here the multi-decade, flashback-studded, fictionalised material largely defeats cutter Justine Wright, whose background is principally in documentaries. As it’s pretty much ‘all in the mind’, anything goes and everything, in theory, is defensible – hence the solipsism, the occasional anachronisms, the sloppy period-detail touches (Tinker Tailor it ain’t, much less Il Divo), those bizarre lacunae and absences.

But with increased freedom comes, as Thatcher herself might put it, increased responsibility. And if Morgan and Lloyd intended to properly explore and dramatise recent political history, to do so via ‘nightmares in a damaged brain’ – lurid title of a shocker from the Tories’ original 1983 Video Nasty list – ultimately yields headaches for all.

Neil Young
27th December, 2011
written for Tribune magazine

The Artist
Director: Michel Hazanavicius

IF the bookies are to believed, the Oscar for 2011′s Best Picture is destined for a French, black-and-white production which, if not exactly ‘silent’, is almost entirely dialogue-free. Its protagonist speaks a grand total of two words – but is nevertheless a strong fancy (alongside Shame‘s Michael Fassbender) for Best Actor, against stiff competition from G.Clooney and B.Pitt.

The film in question is The Artist (UK release December 30th), directed by Michel Hazanavicius – whose previous movies, a pair James Bond spoofs starring comedian Jean Dujardin, were notable commercial successes at home but made minimal splash beyond France’s borders. His latest collaboration with Dujardin, however, has propelled both men firmly into the international limelight – Dujardin won Best Actor at Cannes for his irresistibly charming and charismatic turn as George Valentin, a slick-haired 1920s screen-idol who combines the smouldering Latin-lover magnetism of Rudolph Valentino with the lithe-limbed athleticism and easygoing swagger of the peerless Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.

And just as Fairbanks struggled to adapt to the coming of sound (Valentino had already gone to the great boudoir in the sky by the time of The Jazz Singer), Valentin suffers the indignity of a riches-to-(almost) rags decline, as the fickle ticket-buying public turns to fresher faces – and voices. His precipitous fall mirrors the rapid rise from obscurity of Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), a beanpole, bouncy re-imagining of Joan Crawford’s ‘flapper’ persona – their diverging fortunes complicated by an on-off romantic relationship between the pair.

Arriving in our multiplexes while Martin Scorsese’s Hugo is still drawing (limited) audiences, The Artist is another rousingly heartfelt tribute to a bygone, unfairly neglected cinematic era. But whereas Scorsese deploys the latest CGI and candy-coloured 3-D effects to bring the world of early-silents pioneer Georges Méliès to life, Hazanavicius and his cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman (et al) craft an affectionate, relatively lo-fi pastiche of 1920s movie-making styles.

With its near-incessant jazz-age soundtrack and judiciously sparing use of sound-effects, however, The Artist is no “silent” movie. And it certainly takes what experts might dub a casual approach to actual Hollywood chronology. But Hazanavicius does manage to capture the look and feel of films from the 1920s and 1930s – his eye for background detail is unobtrusively delightful – in a manner that should satisfy the strictest cinephile.

Everyone else, meanwhile, will revel in the old-school star-quality of appealing leads Dujardin and Bejo, who enjoy a nonchalant kind of chemistry and hold their own against stiff competition more recognisable supporting players including John Goodman and James Cromwell. Even Malcolm McDowell pops up for a cameo, though it’s disappointing that the British veteran should be restricted to just a single brief scene.

Enjoying rather more screen-time is Valentin’s (mostly) milk-white terrier ‘Uggy’ (played by ‘Uggie’), a delightful canine thespian evidently intended to stir memories of the Thin Man series’ Asta. His presence is perhaps also a sly nod, topically enough, to Tintin’s faithful pooch Snowy – Hazanavicius now joining Belgium’s Hergé as a Francophone creator of a thoroughly European ‘product’ that exerts unexpectedly global nostalgic appeal.

Neil Young
13th December 2011
written for the Christmas double-issue of Tribune magazine

THE GUARD : [6/10] : Ireland (/UK) 2011 : John Michael McDONAGH : 96m (BBFC) : {15/28}
….. seen 19th August at the Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle (£6.95) digital
["Slightly rickety, fairly funny showcase for terrific Brendan Gleeson turn as oddball Irish copper."]

RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES : [4/10] : USA 2011 : Rupert WYATT : 105m (BBFC) : {11/28}
….. seen 27th August at Empire cinema, Sunderland (£6.50) 35mm
["Ironic that picture which pivots on IQ-boosting serum is so dunderheadedly idiotic"]

FRIGHT NIGHT : [6/10] : USA 2011 : Craig GILLESPIE : 106m (BBFC) : {16/28}
….. seen 14th September at Empire cinema, Newcastle (£7.45) digital – 3D projection
["screwed up timings, missed Kill List (frustrating). Saw Fright Night (6/10) via (superfluous) 3D. I love C.Farrell, but Tennant nicked this."]

KILLER ELITE : [4/10] : USA(/Australia) 2011 : Gary McKENDRY :  116m (BBFC) : {11/28}
….. seen 25th September at Empire cinema, Sunderland (£6.50) 35mm
["Thick-ear actioner pits mercenaries against SAS-retirees in "1980" (anachronisms pile up faster than bodies)"]
["... lacking in suspense, surprises - apart from the startling fact that Mark Strong somehow isn't in it. What gives?!]

KILL LIST : [7/10] : UK 2011 : Ben WHEATLEY : 96m (BBFC) : {19/28}
….. seen 28th September at the Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle (£8) digital
["Nicely nasty old-school Brit-horror works best as bloody buddy-pic. Too many loose-ends a-danglin', tho."]
["classiest touch: cameo from Damien 'Twins of Evil' Thomas. (Who I thought was Edward 'Kiss of the Vampire' de Souza...)]

SUBMARINE : [6/10] : UK 2010 : Richard Ayoade : 97m (BBFC) : {16/28}
….. seen 3rd October at Lantaren Venster, Rotterdam (€9) 35mm
["daftest aspect: Craig Roberts (lead, narrator, star) is third-billed behind Noah Taylor and Paddy Considine. Why?]

WARRIOR : [4/10] : USA 2011 : Gavin O’CONNOR : 140m (BBFC) : {11/28}
….. seen 9th October at Empire cinema, Sunderland (£6.50) 35mm
["Interminable, crassly manipulative fight-pic is meat-and-potatoes stuff with massive helpings of over-corned beef."]
….. full review HERE

GREED : [6+/10] : USA 1924 : Erich VON STROHEIM : 135m approx : {15+/28}
….. seen 16th October at Star & Shadow cinema, Newcastle (£5.00) 35mm, with live organ accompaniment
["Not so much about "greed" as pathologically perverse parsimony. Death Valley finale still packs a punch, tho."]
….. full review HERE

GUN CRAZY : [9/10] : aka Deadly Is the Female : USA 1950 : Joseph H. LEWIS : 87m (BBFC) : {24/28}
….. seen 6th November at Star & Shadow cinema, Newcastle (£5.00) 35mm
["Startlingly steamy über-noir - studded with wild, imaginative camerawork - was years/decades ahead of its time."]

TOWER HEIST : [3/10] : USA 2011 : Brett RATNER : 104m (BBFC) : {8/28}
….. seen 9th November at Empire cinema, Newcastle (£5.95) 35mm
["Pretty poor excuse for a comedy-crime caper -- chief larceny is the one perpetrated against ticket-buying public."]

RAGING BULL : [7/10] : USA 1980 : Martin SCORSESE : 129m (BBFC) : {20/28}
….. seen 23rd November at Rialto cinema, Amsterdam (€9.00) 35mm
["Standouts after revisiting Raging Bull for 1st time in 20 years: master DoP Michael Chapman (obvious), Frank Vincent as Salvy (not so much. Beautiful treatment of repellently ugly protagonist.")

MY WEEK WITH MARILYN : [6/10] : UK(/USA) 2011 : Simon CURTIS : 99m (BBFC) : {16/28}
….. seen 28th November at Empire cinema, Sunderland (£5.50) 35mm
["Surprisingly un-awful, though strictly telly-with-tea-and-biscuits stuff. Comic aspects work best."]

MONEYBALL : [7/10] : USA 2011 : Bennett MILLER : 133m (BBFC) : {20/28}
….. seen 28th November at Empire cinema, Sunderland (£6.75) 35mm
["Pitt/Hill scenes zing (BP's best lead-perf); but them muzak'd-up young-Billy flashbacks keep dragging it down."]

THE DEEP BLUE SEA : [5+/10] : UK 2011 : Terence DAVIES : 98m (BBFC) : {14+/28}
….. seen 29th November at The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle (£4.00) digital
["A gauzy, murky plod. On basis of this, Mirth and City, Davies should concentrate on microbudget docs"]

WEEKEND : [7/10] : UK 2011 : Andrew HAIGH : 97m (BBFC) : {19/28}
….. seen 1st December at Apollo Regent St, London (£10.50) digital
MISS BALA : [4/10] : Mexico 2011 : Gerardo NARANJO : 113m (BBFC) : {10/28}
….. seen 1st December at Odeon Panton St, London (£11.45) digital
TABLOID : [6/10] : USA 2011 : Errol MORRIS : 88m (BBFC) : {14+/28}
….. seen 1st December at Odeon Panton St, London (£11.45) digital
MARGARET : [8/10] : USA 2008/11 : Kenneth LONERGAN : 150m (BBFC) : {23/28}
….. seen 2nd December at Odeon Panton St, London (£11.45) digital

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN : [3/10] : USA/UK 2011 : Lynne RAMSAY : 112m (BBFC) : {6/28}
….. seen 4th December at The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle (£8.00) digital
["No, we really don't. So ultra-classily overwrought that it tips over into crass absurdity."]

HUGO : [7/10] : USA/UK 2011 : Martin SCORSESE : 126m (BBFC) : {19/28}
….. seen 5th December at Empire cinema, Newcastle  (£7.75) digital 3D
["Pleasant surprise: over-elaborate but irresistibly heartfelt billet-doux to old-time cinema and its abandoned gods"]

IMMORTALS : [5/10] : USA 2011 : Tarsem Singh Dhandwar : 111m (BBFC) : {13/28}
….. seen 5th December at Empire cinema, Sunderland (£8.25) digital 3D
["Thor / 300 mashup in honey-sepia shock-corridor 3D, with mucho strenuous cod(piece)-classical bombast."]

LETTERS TO SANTA : [5/10] : Listy do M. : Poland 2011 : Mitja OKORN : 116m (approx) : {12/28}
….. seen 8th December at Multikino cinema, Ursynów, Warsaw, Poland (public show – complimentary ticket) digital
….. with thanks to Mitja Okorn

GUNNAR GOES GOD : [6/10] : Norway 2010 : Gunnar HALL JENSEN : 85m (approx) : {15/28}
….. seen 11th December at Kinoteka cinema, Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw, Poland (zł15 = £2.78 approx) digital (Blu-Ray)
["Spiritual-search sequel-of-sorts to barely-known masterpiece Gunnar Goes Comfortable (2003). Patchy."]
….. with thanks to Olga Szymanska

WE HAVE A POPE : [4/10] : Habemus Papam : Italy(/Fr) 2011 : Nanni MORETTI : 105m (BBFC) : {11/28}
….. seen 15th December at The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle (£6.95) digital
["Sed, no habemus scriptum! Strong opening and jarring finale, mishy-mushy drift in between"]

SHERLOCK HOLMES – A GAME OF SHADOWS : [4/10] : USA/UK 2011 : Guy RITCHIE : 129m (BBFC) : {10/28}
….. seen 18th December at Empire cinema, Sunderland (£6.75) 35mm
["Cynically content to go through the noisy motions, clank through the clunky gears."]

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL : [6/10] : USA 2011 : Brad BIRD : 133m (BBFC) {17/28}
….. seen 22nd December at Odeon cinema, MetroCentre, Gateshead (£11.45) digital IMAX
["Giddy-fun romp, vertiginously so during Dubai mid-bit; but all downhill from up there. Best (and weirdest) moment: Simon Pegg's giant gormless face briefly filling the Kremlin "corridor". Main problem: the villain. Not much of a character, no real menace, dwarfed by shadow of P.S.Hoffman from the last one."]

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO : [6/10] : USA 2011 : David FINCHER : 158m (BBFC) {17/28}
….. seen 26th December at Vue, Worcester (£8.55) digital
["Lis♀♂Mik ♥ as appropriate as pink ribbon on a black porcupine. As useful as an ashtray on a motorbike."]

AMERICAN DREAMS (lost and found) : [7+/10] USA 1984 : James BENNING : 53m (AF) {20+/28}
….. seen 28th/29th December on DVD in Sunderland
["Texts/images/sounds (foci: ⇧H.Aaron, ↓A.Bremer) - US 50s/70s - the gentlest bombardment"]

LANDSCAPE SUICIDE : [5/10] USA 1986 : James BENNING : 92m (AF) {14/28}
….. seen 29th/30th December on DVD in Sunderland
["Doc/fic hybrid isn't among JB's most rewarding experiments, but evidently helped him refine his focus. And of all the pictures "inspired" by Ed Gein - Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Silence of the Lambs, etc - J.Benning's is, uh, the toughest."]

IT’S a term bandied around with dismaying frequency by some critics, but masterpieces of cinema are as rare as ever. By my subjective reckoning there have been only six in the last decade, and not since 2009 have I allotted any UK new-release a maximum five-star rating: Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler and also Neill Blomkamp’s District 9.

But even if nothing reached that level (Aleksandr Mindadze’s February-premiered Innocent Saturday still awaits British distribution) there was nevertheless a decent enough helping of outstanding fare. Half a dozen, for me, were particularly praiseworthy. In alphabetical order:

* Unheralded Aussie writer-director David Michôd’s crime-family saga Animal Kingdom, the year’s most promising debut.
* Joanna Hogg’s excruciatingly accurate study of a posh, dysfunctional family holidaying in the Scilly Isles, Archipelago (UK).
* Writer-director-star Miranda July’s drolly disturbing and daringly kooky The Future (USA/Germany).
* Gregg Araki’s daffily apocalyptic, sweetly raunchy campus-comedy Kaboom (USA).
* Kenneth Lonergan’s multi-layered Manhattan drama Margaret (USA).
* Gore Verbinski’s sui generis animated comedy-western Rango (USA).

The Tribune Top Ten is completed by Jason Eisener’s Hobo with a Shotgun, Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, and Thomas McCarthy’s Win Win - edging out Ballast, Moneyball, Source Code and Wuthering Heights.

If forced to pick just two films from the ten, I’d take Rango and Margaret – two films which have enjoyed (or endured) drastically different levels of exposure. Rango is an irresistibly audacious mashup of Chinatown and Shame, with a hallucinatory Gonzo touch of Hunter S Thompson. Written by John Logan (Gladiator, Hugo, etc) and directed by Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean) it ‘stars’ Pirates’ Johnny Depp – who, providing the voice of the eponymous and nerdishly neurotic lizard, turns in arguably the finest performance of his career.

Unsurprisingly for a Verbinski-Depp reunion from a major Hollywood studio, Rango was the recipient of ubiquitous ad-campaigns – and, boosted by stellar reviews, it enjoyed extended runs in every multiplex in Europe, North America and far beyond, taking $123m in the USA alone. That’s around 2,600 times the meagre $47,000 amassed by Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret during its derisory American ‘release’ in November.

Given this paltry return on a reported $14m budget, and despite a cast including Oscar-winners Anna Paquin and Matt Damon, plus Mark Ruffalo, Jean Reno and Matthew Broderick, UK distributor Fox Searchlight opted for a token one-screen London engagement (at a small west-end Odeon) from December 2.

The fact that the picture has been the focus of more than one messy lawsuit (revolving around issues of length and ‘final cut’) evidently contributed to its exceedingly low profile. The sorry saga, including the crucial behind-the-scenes role played by Martin Scorsese, is more fully explained via several online articles (check out those by Mike D’Angelo, Tony Paley and Guy Lodge.)

But after receiving some ecstatic paeans of praise from British broadsheet reviewers, plus an international Twitter-campaign that saw film-geeks rallying behind the hash-tag #TeamMargaret, Fox have expanded the film into selected arthouses around the country.

And despite a daunting 150-minute running-time, Margaret does emphatically deserves to be seen. The film isn’t perfect, showing signs of its tortured post-production history. But even in its current, arguably ‘compromised’ form, it at least matches the humanistic complexity of Lonergan’s cracking 2000 debut You Can Count On Me – which starred Laura Linney and a then-unknown Ruffalo as long-separated siblings.

Margaret is a film whose sprawling plot-lines and multiple characters and exploration of social strata fully deserve the term ‘novelistic’. But whereas book-readers are engaged in an essentially solitary engagement with their texts, Margaret depends for its full effect on being seen with as large an audience as possible. Because, among other things, it’s an incisive and astute study of how people interact and generally rub along with each other in the 21st century, most especially in the large cities where – since 2007 – more than half of humanity resides.

And they don’t come much bigger than New York, the focus of a movie written in the aftermath of 9/11, and shot at a time – 2005 – when the shock-waves of that catastrophe were still very much a factor of daily life. Lonergan doesn’t address 9/11 head-on, and it’s only very occasionally mentioned in the dialogue, but Margaret (the title, a reference to a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, is pronounced with stress on the final syllable, like ‘martinet‘) is very much concerned with how flawed individuals deal with shatteringly tragic events, both alone and together.

The principal focus is on Lisa Cohen (Paquin), an articulate teenager who lives on the well-heeled Upper East Side with her mother Joan (J. Smith-Cameron), a successful but insecure stage-actress. Lisa inadvertently contributes to a road-accident in which a woman (a remarkable one-scene cameo from Allison Janney) is killed – though the chief cause is the negligence of a bus-driver (Ruffalo).
As the impact of this single incident ripples outwards, Lonergan examines its effects on Lisa – whose guilt gradually turns to outrage as she discovers that the driver has a history of recklessness behind the wheel – and those around her.

The film is punctuated by breathtaking scenes of raw, sometimes gruelling emotion as traumatic relationships explode into heated verbal exchanges. Rising to the stiff challenge of Lonergan’s screenplay, Paquin, with terrific support from Smith-Cameron, Janney, and Jeannie Berlin (an early-70s Oscar nominee making a belated return to prominence as the dead woman’s best friend), compellingly incarnates a character making a painful transition from spoiled solipsism to something resembling responsible adulthood.

Lisa throws herself into, and increasingly defines herself by, what becomes a personal moral quest for justice – or as much justice as circumstances and political/legal realities can permit. As she discovers, the reassuring thing about society is that one is never truly alone – but the price is that all of our actions have consequences, both for those around us, and for ourselves, which can far exceed anything we may be able to imagine or expect.

Neil Young
13th December, 2011
written for Tribune magazine

MARGARET : [8/10] : USA 2008/2011 : Kenneth LONERGAN : 150m (BBFC) : {23/28}
….. seen 2nd December at Odeon Panton St, London (£11.45) digital
RANGO : [8/10] : USA 2011 : Gore VERBINSKI : 107m (BBFC) : {23/28}
….. seen 9th March at Sunderland Empire cinema.

Another Earth
Director: Mike Cahill

THE Tribune Top Ten list for 2011 will be published – deo volente - later this month, but as a taster let’s have a peek into the bottom of the barrel. In terms of films that have obtained at least reasonably wide UK distribution, a subjective run-down of the rancid would include multiplex moneymakers The Hangover Part II and Tower Heist, arthouse misfires Our Day Will Come and This Our Still Life, and, somewhere in between, the colossally disappointing Brit cop-flop Blitz.

But December, aptly enough, sees the very lamest of the year’s cinematic turkeys flapping pathetically onto our screens – one which will, if there’s any justice, by Christmas have already made the transmigration to the DVD bargain-bucket. Mike Cahill’s Another Earth is the kind of ludicrous, overwrought codswallop which gives metaphysically speculative science-fiction a bad name – one senses the literary master of the genre, Stanislaw Lem, revolving in his grave while resignedly muttering “Nie ma tego złego, co by na dobre nie wyszlo” (“Bad things often turn out to be good for you.”)

And even if it has somehow attracted critical supporters and a smattering of awards nominations Stateside since premiering at Sundance back in January, the fact that this jawdropping dreck has obtained distribution while dozens of incalculably more-deserving new films from the first half of 2011 languish silently in limbo (top of the heap: Russian stunners Innocent Saturday and Elena) is enough to make any self-respecting cinephile’s blood boil.

The poster for debutant director/co-writer Cahill’s Another Earth makes it look like some opportunistic, straight-to-video knockoff of Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia: a young blonde stands by a body of water, out of which a whole other planet incongruously looms. But whereas Von Trier’s movie presented its destructive heavenly newcomer as a straightforward but effective metaphor for his protagonist’s depressed mental state, Another Earth holds as little water as allegory as it does in terms of scientific plausibility – even given the medium’s necessary ‘suspension of disbelief.’

Because ‘Earth 2′ (as it’s dubbed) turns out to be an exact replica of our own world – right down to the people who inhabit it – hurtling towards us through space, until close enough for spaceships to make a handy-hop transit. As this is a relatively low-budget production (reportedly just $200,000), these interstellar shenanigans are essentially a backdrop for what’s supposed to be an intimate human story: a steadily-budding romance between school-cleaner Rhoda (Brit Marling, who also co-wrote the script) and classical composer/musician John (William Mapother – Tom Cruise’s younger cousin, best known for his appearances in TV’s Lost).

True love never did run smooth of course, and Rhoda and John’s amour is complicated by her guilt over having been the drunk-driver who caused the deaths of John’s child and pregnant wife in a car-smash a few years before. As Rhoda was a ‘minor’ at the time of the incident, John – we’re asked to believe – never learned her identity. So when she pays an impromptu visit to his house in order to apologise (as one does), he doesn’t recognise her. Even so, she chickens out of her confessional plans, instead posing as a cleaner sent to spruce up his neglected property.

This development is a credulity-stretcher by any measure – but it’s only one difficult-to-swallow element in what turns out to be a multi-course meal of contrivances, coincidences, plot-holes and absurdities, the whole thing presented with a kind of sanctimonious, po-faced mawkishness that ends up transforming painfully sensitive subject-matter into an exercise in crudely manipulative crassness.

One ends up feeling considerable sympathy with Rhoda’s elderly Asian co-worker Purdeep (Wes Anderson regular Kumar Pallana -, who, despairing at the ugliness of the world, or somesuch – reacts by pours “bleach in his ears… in his eyes…” Maybe he saw the rushes.

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

IDFA (Amsterdam) Film Festival report

CRITICS of the British penal system who reckon our prison-inmates are cushily treated should pay a visit to San Pedro jail in the Bolivian capital La Paz. Many of the male prisoners share their accommodations with their wives and even their children, who reside within the walls of the institution voluntarily – an arrangement tolerated by the near-invisible ‘authorities’. A veritable town inside the city, San Pedro boasts makeshift shops, restaurants, sports facilities and many other facilities, as glimpsed in Diego Mondaca’s eye-opening 48-minute film Citadel (Ciudadella) – a highlight of last month’s 24th International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, or IDFA for short.

When Ally Derks (“the high priestess of documentaries” as she’s been dubbed) set up IDFA back in the late 80s, the idea of a film-festival exclusively devoted to non-fiction work was radical and pioneering. That’s certainly not the case these days, and while there are many successful rival events of similar stripe including Toronto’s Hotdocs, Copenhagen’s CPH:PIX and Sheffield’s Doc:Fest, IDFA remains the big daddy on the block. It has grown steadily and organically in size, all the while with Derks at the helm – an unusual degree of continuity and stability that has enabled IDFA to expand and reach out to local audiences (many screenings sell out) while retaining an intimate, quite cosy feel: gezellig, as they say in Holland.

If IDFA has a significant fault, apart from its sheer size and the occasional difficulty of getting into popular screenings, it’s that it tends to concentrate so squarely (in both senses of the word) on mainstream, conventional forms of documentary – a development which Derks seems to welcome: “they’re less dogmatic, really entertaining… We call them ‘Pop Docs,’ and ‘Docutainment,’ docs that have larger appeal and craftsmanship.”

More experimental or edgy fare almost never makes it into the numerous competitive sections – and instead is confined to the ‘Paradocs’ section (“in which the ‘periphery’ of the documentary genre takes center stage… what is going on beyond the frame of traditional documentary film-making” according to the IDFA catalogue.)

This year’s ‘Paradocs’ comprised 17 titles, but only three were longer than 30 minutes in length – and those seeking a more generous helping of challenging material would find greater satisfaction at Marseille’s equivalent docu-fest, FIDMarseille (as covered in these pages during the summer) where unorthodox stuff like Citadel is the norm rather than exception. Mondaca’s commendably bold directorial debut was shot by Andrés Boera Madrid, his digital cameras nimbly negotiating the twisty Hogarthian labyrinth that makes up San Pedro, and the resulting footage ruthlessly edited by Aldo Alvarez in a way that barrels us through the 48 minutes with an almost perverse briskness.

Though bracing in its rough-edged alacrity – the title’s similarity to Fernando Meirelles and Katja Lund’s City of God (2002) is surely no coincidence – Citadel is a slightly frustrating experience for the viewer, as it sparks dozens, perhaps hundreds of questions about how and why San Pedro operates as it does, without providing much in the way of answers (explanatory voiceover and captions are eschewed, though some of the residents chat about their daily lives both on and off camera). Google and Wikipedia are available, likewise Rusty Young’s non-fiction book Marching Powder, but Mondaca and company perhaps took the view that to do full justice to San Pedro’s complexities in a traditional documentary would probably involve epic length – instead presenting these jagged, impressionistic fragments.

Not that there’s anything wrong with a well-made ‘traditional’ documentary, of course, and IDFA showcased numerous examples this year – the best of which eminently deserve big-screen exposure via arthouse distribution, though many of them will no doubt pop up on the likes of BBC4 before long. Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker’s Fightville is perhaps the soundest commercial prospect, given the burgeoning popularity in the UK of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), an activity often dubbed ‘cage-fighting’ and given considerable tabloid prominence in recent years thanks to Katie Price’s sometime spouse Alex Reid.

Following two young MMA prospects as they make their way through the ranks, the propulsively-edited, Louisiana-set Fightville gets under the skin of this controversial sport much more successfully than Hollywood’s recent fictional attempt, Warrior, balancing the bone-crunching violence with hard-knock humour in a way that ensures appeal far beyond the sport’s own young-male demographic. It helps that both of the MMA starlets are articulate, presentable lads, and that considerable prominence is also given to charismatic, choufleur-eared MMA trainer ‘Crazy’ Tim Credeur (who on this evidence deserves a documentary all to himself) and smooth-talkingly hard-working promoter Tim Guillory.

A rather easier ‘sell’ is presented by Carlos Botes’ The Last Dogs of Winter, which follows the attempts by a lone-wolf Canadian to revive the extinction-threatened Qimmiq, a species used by local Inuits for centuries as hunting-hounds but now abandoned in favour of motorised skidoos. The snowy wilds of remote northern Manitoba make for a stirringly picturesque backdrop for footage of the rugged but irresistibly cute Qimmiq and the polar bears who occasionally pass by – including numerous interactions that are generally playful than confrontational.

Doing their best to make an impact among such skilled four-legged scenestealers are the breeder himself, a crustily ornery hippie named Brian Ladoon, and his unflappably laid-back younger Kiwi assistant Caleb Ross (a contrasting pair, both making for great company). And while the tone is perhaps somewhat over-celebratory, with nearly every beat underlined by Tom McLeod’s overused score (excessive music the bane of far too many documentaries these days), by the end even cynophobes might find a droplet or two welling in their tear-ducts.

No less moving for its careful avoidance of sentimentality, Seung-Jun Yi’s Planet of Snail won – to nobody’s great surprise – IDFA’s headline prize, for best Feature-Length documentary. A critical and audience hit which looks set for a long tour of the world’s festivals, and not just those concentrating on non-fiction, it’s the portrait of a deaf-and-blind young poet/sculptor artist and his bubbly girlfriend, and succeeds in quietly transporting us straight into its subject’s theoretically closed-off world.

Neil Young
27th November, 2011
written for Tribune magazine
IDFA 2011 screening-diary

Citadel. [****/5]. Ciudadela : Bolivia/Germany 2011 : Diego MONDACA : 48m : {11/13}. Seen Pathé De Munt, 24th November (press/industry)
FIGHTVILLE. [7/10]. USA 2011 : Petra EPPERLEIN & Michael TUCKER : 85m : {20}. Seen Pathé De Munt, 23rd November (public – complimentary ticket)
THE LAST DOGS OF WINTER. [7/10]. New Zealand 2011 : Costa BOTES : 97m : {19}. Seen Pathé De Munt, 26th November (public – complimentary ticket)
PLANET OF SNAIL. [7/10]. S.Korea 2011 : YI Seung-Jun : 87m : {18}. Seen Pathé Tuschinski, 23rd November (public – complimentary ticket)