| Edinburgh Film Festival pt.IV (Sat 20 Aug) incl. Christian Petzold's 'Ghosts' [7/10] |
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| Friday, 19 August 2005 | |
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Christian Petzold's GHOSTS [7/10] James Toback's WHEN WILL I BE LOVED [6/10] Reza Bagher's POPULAR MUSIC [5?/10] Rachel Boynton's OUR BRAND IS CRISIS [6/10] Steve Mahone's RADIANT [6/10] --------------------------------------------------------- A return to form for writer-director Petzold after the disappointing Wolfsburg, Ghosts is a characteristically intricate and gently suspenseful tale whose slow pace ultimately rewards patient attention. The central character is a mousy German teenager Nina (Julia Hummer) who has been in trouble with the Authorities; we follow the development of her friendship with wild-child Toni (cast standout Sabine Timoteo); and also her dealings with an emotionally-fragile Frenchwoman (Marianne Basler) who claims that Nina is her own child, having been abducted as a two-year-old. Aurelien Recoing plays the Frenchwoman's husband, making this the second Edinburgh 05 title (after the rural One Long Winter Without Fire) in which he plays a man grieving the 'loss' of a small daughter. Ghosts has a little more of the guessing-game about it: like Petzold's two best films (The State I Am In and Something to Remind Me) it's a carefully-modulated puzzle building up to a revelation of one of the characters' true identity, a denouement which casts a different light on all that's gone before. A work of calm surfaces and strong emotions, Ghosts is a subtle, compelling, mature work that will probably repay a second viewing. So how sad that the general moviegoing British public seem unlikely to get the chance even of a first encounter: it's nothing short of a scandal that, while all manner of undistinguished French product obtains distribution (see yesterday's Les yeux clairs), no company has yet taken a chance on any Petzold feature. Ghosts may not be quite up to his finest work, and as a director he's clearly never going to be anything other than unobtrusively functional - but he remains one of European cinema's most remarkable scriptwriters, one of the very few film-makers whose work gets better the more you think about it afterwards. --------------------------------------------------------- I lasted a reel of Korean film The President's Last Bang before walking out, baffled that a critic as reliable as Glenn Kenny of Premiere magazine could reckon it "dynamite". The first 20 minutes utterly failed to grab me, and instead I escaped along the corridor to another screen of the CineWorld multiplex for the 'Reel Life' interview with George A Romero. Romero is a good talker (once he gets going) and provided some amusing/informative insights during a 80-minute chronological survey of his up-and-down career. The near-sellout audience (90% male) in the multiplex's biggest screen lapped it up. --------------------------------------------------------- No fear of a walkout during the brisk When Will I Be Loved, a neatly-etched Manhattan miniature in which twentysomething Vera (Neve Campbell) skilfully copes with the machinations of her sleazy boyfriend (Frederick Weller) and the amorous advances of billionaire Italian count (Dominic Chianese). A slightly sour-flavoured, self-consciously high-falutin' morality-play with much sidewalk chatter (Neil Labute meets Woody Allen with a dash of Edward Burns?), the picture's firsy half is a bitty affair spiced up with as-themselves star cameos (Mike Tyson, Damon Dash, Lori Singer) before things settle down into longer, two-hander scenes featuring a series of just-desserts payoffs. The travails of well-heeled Upper West Side loft-dwellers won't be of great concern to all audiences of course, and Toback does occasionally give vent to his inner dirty-old-man by including gratuitous shots of Campbell naked in the shower. Then again, this closing bathroom scene does allow him to close on a freeze-frame of Campbell looking in the mirror which defly quotes the very similar fade-out shot from Karel Reisz's The Gambler from 1974 - Toback's first credit as a writer, and still the best picture he's ever been involved with. --------------------------------------------------------- I managed an hour of Popular Music before heading for the exit. Not a bad film as such - it seemed to be going down well with the audience - but I just never got into this tale of growing up in a remote village on the Swedish side of the Swedish-Finnish border. After a clunky prologue in the Himalayas we flash back: first section sees the two lead characters as six-year-olds in the mid-sixties; after forty minutes or so the narrative leaps forward a decade to the mid-seventies, when they're awkward teenagers. The usual bittersweet nostalgic stuff, presented in the gently sepia-hazy visuals traditionally associated with such retrospective fare - and certainly nowhere near as good as last year's music-themed kid-oriented Scandi comedy, Finland's Pearls and Pigs. A major minus: gratingly ham-fisted, overemphatic direction from Bagher - an odd choice to adapt what's apparently a much-loved bestseller in Scandinavia, considering he spent the first 17 years of his life in Iran. Or are we supposed to conclude that childhood is childhood wherever you are - oppressive parents, the joy of friendship, the tedium of school, etc.? Despite considerable effort I just couldn't engage with the characters, and a lengthy sequence at a boozy wedding stirred unfavourable comparisons with Polish feature Wesele (The Wedding), also showing at Edinburgh '05. As I departed, Engelbert Humperdinck's 'Please Release Me' was booming on the soundtrack... --------------------------------------------------------- Firmly in the tradition of Pennebaker/Hegedus's The War Room - which introduced the moviegoing public to crack political consultant James Carville, Our Brand is Crisis follows Carville's company GCS on one of their trickiest assignments: the re-election of unpopular, ageing, American-raised Bolivian president Gonzalez Sanchez de Lozado, known as ‘Goni'. Concentrating squarely on the behind-the-scenes processes of GCS, this is emphatically not a survey of present or past Bolivian politics, though it does climax in the nail-bitingly close election results. Instead, by concentrating on the way GCS scheme to ‘sell' Goni to the sceptical electorate, Boynton's absorbing debut is a wry companion-piece to Klusak/Ramunda's Czech Dream: both lay bare the often-cynical manipulations of modern-day advertising, though with Our Brand is Crisis the stakes are considerably higher: the first images we see are of riots on the streets of La Paz as the people vent their anger at the failings of the ruling class. Boynton's choice of emphasis means that the ordinary Bolivians aren't much heard here - their contributions are largely restricted to footage of focus-groups, in which slick GCS representatives listen to their comments though glass and via a translator. But, as (the impressively bright and engagingly self-confident) Boynton herself pointed out after the screening, this isn't really a film about Bolivia at all: it's about America exporting certain ideas of democracy around the world. Topical stuff, and given a fresh slant by the fact that GCS are in effect the ‘good guys', aiding politicians who share their centre-left, progressive views. And Tony Blair. --------------------------------------------------------- Arty no-budget sci-fier Radiant was heralded in the EIFF catalogue as ‘this year's Primer' - but Texan writer-director Mahone's debut proved a mercifully less-frustrating head-scratcher than Shane Carruth's mind-blowingly convoluted mini-epic. Although packed with enigmatic moments, the biggest mystery about Radiant is off-screen: how Matthew Tompkins, who plays a traumatised ex-soldier, has stayed off Hollywood's radar up till now. His beefy movie-star good looks recall Patrick Swayze and David Keith, and he seems a pretty good actor to boot - making the most of a role that may remind some of Nick Nolte's zen-master bruiser from Karel Reisz's Who'll Stop the Rain? Can it be coincidence that both are named Ray? This Ray is one of four survivors pursued by government forces after a super-virus accidentally infects the residents of a remote desert lab. Three are 'colonised' by the new strain, one is not: Ed (James Cable) is an agoraphobic loner with distorted sensory perceptions, whose voiceover is heard throughout the film. |
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