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roundup article for Tribune magazine : HERE
SOMERS TOWN : [8/10] : Shane MEADOWS : UK 2008 : 71m (timed*) : seen at Babylon cinema, 15/3 (public screening)
Though clearly a bit of a "quickie" project made in the immediate afterglow of This Is England - and featuring that film's young star Thomas Turgoose in one of the two main roles - the DV-shot, (mainly) black-and-white, minimal-budgeted Somers Town is by no means a "minor" Meadows. Indeed, in terms of tonal consistency, concision and cumulative emotional wallop, it's in several ways a more satisfying enterprise than its bigger, BAFTA-winning "brother".
Indeed (again), there have been very few more moving films from any director since Meadows' own Dead Man's Shoes (2004) - though in this instance it's very much a case of joyful rather than sorrowful tears. This is a delightful, quietly topical, deceptively slight miniature about teenage friendship and first love - scarcely new subjects for cinema, but handled with sufficient sensitivity, humour and spirit to emphatically justify such a choice of material. Meadows and his scriptwriter Paul Fraser, meanwhile, deserve particular credit for so deftly maintaining such a delicate balance between the bouncily engaging story and its sad, even tragic subtexts.
The focus is on two lads of around 14 or 15: quietly-spoken, self-effacing Polish immigrant Marek (Piotr Jagiello) and scrappy Nottingham runaway Tomo (Turgoose), the former a resident in the London district which gives the film its title, the latter a visitor. Somers Town is wedged between two major railway termini, Euston and King's Cross/St Pancras, the latter now a major gateway to "the continent" thanks to the completion of a high-speed cross-channel rail-link. This has been a major construction project for several years, and Marek's father Mariusz (Ireneusz Czop) is one of the labourers on the site. Further Euro-flavour is provided by Marek's French "girlfriend" Maria (Elisa Lasowski), with whom Tomo rapidly becomes smitten...
Various hi-jinks duly ensue - nothing earth-shattering in its import, but all of it charming, wry, down-to-earth, true. The two leads are marvellous - Turgoose confirming that This Is England was most definitely no fluke. And it's also great to see Meadows, after a frustratingly uneven start to his career, so effortlessly now establishing himself in the front rank of younger British European directors.
{*Timed when seeing it for 2nd time, Newcastle 13th August 2008.}
also seen in Berlin...
Ballast /// Before the Fall /// Ecstasy of the Angels /// The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser /// The Exiles /// Go, Go, Second Time Virgin /// Hands Over the City /// Heart of Fire /// Katyn /// Lady Jane /// The Path /// La Rabia /// Salvatore Giuliano /// South Main
{{.....these first eight reviews are all kind of the same length.......}}
BALLAST : [7/10] : Lance HAMMER : USA 2007 : 96m : Urania, 16/3 (public)
Low-key, no-frills American "indie" is quiet to the point of occasional inaudibility, but repays the close attention it demands. It's a notably well-observed tale of family dysfunction, set in a notably bleak and flat corner of the Mississippi delta - the colour-palette a thing of greys, cobalts, dunnish, brackish browns. The travails of cash-strapped African-Americans are all too seldom tackled in any kind of US cinema at the moment, though the family in question in Ballast are, as joint owners of a small (if struggling) roadside business, hardly representative of the wider socio-economic issues which the film tries to deal with. Nevertheless, writer-director Hammer executes proceedings with a steady, serious, absorbing austerity that's entirely appropriate for the stoic doggedness displayed by his characters, eliciting believable performances from his small cast, and it's also to his credit that he carefully avoids the kind of melodramatic denouement which often mars this kind of fare.
BEFORE THE FALL : [4/10] : 3 dias : F. Javier GUTIERREZ : Spain 2007 : 93m : Cinestar, 14/3 (press) :
Ludicrously overwrought thriller with unlikely science-fictional overtones. As if the imminent end of the world (due to meteor-strike) wasn't enough to deal with, our (refreshingly taciturn) "hero" is also faced with the prospect of a Chigurh-esque serial-killer, recently escaped from jail, turning up at his rural retreat. The recipe is Deep Impact meets Night of the Hunter (plus Cape Fear and Straw Dogs): a promising proposition in the right hands. But despite the occasional impressive sequence, Gutierrez mainly treats the picture like a calling-card audition for The Hills Have Eyes 3. A little if his songs-for-the-deaf stylistic overload goes a very long way indeed - the visuals are dementedly flashy and even the grating score sounds like it's been borrowed from some cheapo slasher-pic. The tension-light script, meanwhile, wallows in increasingly gratuitous unpleasantness, executed with sledgehammer subtlety. Net result: Shallow Impact.
ECSTASY OF THE ANGELS : [4/10] : Tenshi no kokotsu : WAKAMATSU Koji : Japan 1972 : 88m : Delphi, 15/3 (public) :
'Radical' Japanese treatment of hot-button terrorism/politics issues has dated pretty badly. Elements of a revolutionary organisation ('The Year,' quaintly subdivided into seasons, months, weeks and days) fight, debate and copulate, their internal disunity serving to (unsurprisingly) stymie their collective effectiveness. Alternating between colour and black-and-white, the picture tries hard to shock, with copious nudity, violence and offbeat (even farcical) comedy, but comes off as sophomoric in its desperation to impress. Easy to tire of the protracted, verbose ("we must discuss our vectoricity as group!") dialogue spouted by individuals who are more mouthpieces than proper characters - a definite case of "jaw jaw" rather than "war war". Plot-exposition is lazily handled via onscreen newspaper headlines, and sloganeering statements such as "only self-legitimation gives one the right to be political" count, in this context, as sexy bedroom talk.
THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER : [7+/10] : Jeder fur sich und Gott gegen alle aka Every Man For Himself and God Against All : Werner HERZOG : West Germany 1974 : 109m : Filmkunst 66, 14/3 (public screening, unsubtitled) :
Enticingly offbeat take on a notorious historical footnote from 1828, in which an adult man turned up in the middle of a German village after supposedly having been kept in prison-like isolation and solitude since childhood. Herzog's trump-card is the astonishing performance from 'Bruno S' as the eponymous man-child: relatively normal in looks, but in manner part Frankenstein's monster, part Elephant Man as he haltingly navigates a series of environments both natural and man-made. The film's the evocation of early 18th-century Germany is notably convincing - moods, (slow) rhythms, (mist-hazed) landscapes, and the various social strata which Hauser encounters. To visualise his protagonist's inner life, meanwhile, Herzog interpolates 8mm footage shot in locations, from Angkor Wat to what looks like Armenia's hummocky hinterland - a risky, potentially jarring strategem, but one which pays significant dividends.
THE EXILES : [7/10] : Kent MACKENZIE : USA 1961 : 72m : Arsenal, 14/3 (public) :
Lauded as a half-lost masterpiece in Thom Andersen's essay-film Los Angeles Plays Itself, The Exiles - covering one hectic evening and the ensuing (very long) night in the lives of Native Americans in downtown Los Angeles - now looks rather rudimentary in narrative terms, the kind of thing that might have functioned better as 'straight' documentary. It does, however, remain poignantly effective as a work of socially-conscious humanism, and consistently impressive for the way it time-capsules the neon-lit ambience and specific details of its now-long-lost urban milieu: the vicinity of the much-lamented 'Angels Flight' funicular, familiar from the writings of Bukowski, Fante and co. There are some technical rough edges, including distractingly noticeable post-dubbing on most of the dialogue (interior monologues have much more impact), but elsewhere Mackenzie achieves a hard-bitten poetry as we follow his characters on their intersecting journeys through the enticingly inky dark.
GO, GO, SECOND-TIME VIRGIN : [5/10] : Yuke yuke nidome no shojo : WAKAMATSU Koji : Japan 1969 : 65m : Delphi, 13/3 (public) :
Spirit of '68, Japanese-style, as students on a city rooftop engage in psychological and political discussion and 'games' that lead to unexpectedly dire consequences for all. Talky affair has an engaging rawness, a proto-punk deliberate tasteleness that brews together rape and suicide ("I'm just too hopelessly unhappy to live") with the increasingly gory exploits of a knife-wielding psycho. Clearly intended as a dark anthem for alienated, disaffected, anomie-afflicted youth, but retreats into a modishly flip, tiresome nihilism. While the jazzy score diverts, and inventive use is made of the sole location, high above the city's rumbling traffic, but any effectiveness is undercut by dialogue that's often a half-baked mishmash of sloganeering ("I want to die because I want to kill") and pseudo-poetic, quasi-surrealistic ramblings: "like thin soup rising, the incest kitchenette" ... "A naked lunch, a drug-filled lunch, slit my wrists from impotence and drugs," and on and on and on.
HANDS OVER THE CITY : [6/10] : Le mani sulla citta : Francesco ROSI : Italy (/Fr) 1963 : 105m : Zeughauskino, 13/3 (public)
... to whom? The collapse of a city-centre building exposes a web of corruption in this commendably ambitious tale of urban dysfunction, graft thrillerish elements onto the rather dry subject of local government machinations. After a crackerjack opening and absorbing first half - during which we see the hapless citizenry's elected representatives at work (often in literally smoke-filled rooms), rest and play - the picture gets stuck in the city's (noisily chaotic) council chamber for much its latter stages, with diminishing returns. One gets the impression that, for all the newsreel-like immediacy of the most effective sequences, this is if anything rather a sanitised version of the sharp practices so damagingly prevalent in Italy (and elsewhere) during the late fifties and early sixties: bizarre to see a film which attempts to diagnose the ills of the body politic of post-war Naples, for example, that never names or even hints at the presence of the region's notorious mafia manifestion, the Camorra.
HEART OF FIRE : [5/10] : Feuerherz : Luigi FALORNI : Germany (/Aut) 2008 : 92m : Berlinale Palast, 14/3 (press)
A corny story is used to explore strong material in Heart of Fire, an exotic, cinematic equivalent of "misery memoirs" - stories of nightmarishly tough childhoods that have proved such publishing moneyspinners. Here we witness the cruelly accelerated growing-up process endured by a bright 10-year-old girl as she's dragged into the Eritrean battle for independence in 1981/2. Sporting an increasingly tattered cerise dress (its deterioration one of few subtle touches on view), our heroine finds herself caught in what's effectively a civil war within a civil war, quickly graduating from wooden "guns" to the real thing: The Littlest Freedom Fighter, if you like. Impeccably well-intentioned but baldly manipulative and uninspired as a drama, the picture boasts some lively performances but relies too heavily on its square, near-incessant score for mood and atmosphere, and is undermined by the conspicuous dubbing jarringly applied to several key supporting characters' dialogue.
{{........the remaining reviews are longer, and of differing lengths..............}}
KATYN : [5/10] : Andrzej WAJDA : Poland 2008 : 118m : Berlinale Palast, 15/3 (press)
..... this review is somewhat long, so has been allocated its own page
LADY JANE : [6/10] : Robert GUEDIGUIAN : France 2007 : 104m : Cinemaxx, 13/3 (press)
A most remarkable cinematic collaboration continues with downbeat crime-drama Lady Jane, the fourteenth (!) time writer-director Guediguian has worked with actress Ariane Ascaride - a partnership stretching all the way back to 1981's The Last Summer. And the uneven, overlong film emphatically works best as a showcase for the talents of the tiny, deceptively birdlike star, who's never less than compelling in the central role of Muriel, owner of the Marseille fashion-boutique which gives the movie its name (borrowed from a 1966 Rolling Stones track).
An outwardly respectable fiftysomething ("you wouldn't notice me"), it emerges that Muriel has a decidedly racy, shady past. Decades before, she was part of a criminal gang motivated partly by avarice, partly by a soixante-huitish spirit of anti-authoritarian rebellion. The past refuses to stay buried, however, and when her teenage son is taken hostage by an unseen kidnapper, the hardbitten-but-vulnerable Muriel must regroup the "old "gang" and face up to her younger self's misdeeds.
What unfolds is essentially a pulpy pageturner of a yarn in the Lynda LaPlante vein, its tangents and convolutions perhaps ideally suited to a small-screen miniseries. As the twists and coincidences pile up, plausibility takes a back seat and we fall back on the strengths of the lived-in characterisations and committed performances. "I've run out of compassion for the world and thsoe who live in it - including myself" sighs Muriel as she contemplates the web of violence and revenge in which she's become entangled: sympathy for lady (Jane) vengeance, indeed.
There are some striking sequences scattered through the 100-odd minutes - in particular, a tense rendez-vous with the kidnappers on a railway-station platform - and the muted ending is satisfying, but on balance this feels like a jazzy, relatively minor indulgence from Guediguian, primarily intended a proudly unsentimental billet-doux to his perpetual muse.
THE PATH : [6/10] : El camino : Ishtar YASIN Gutierrez : Costa Rica (/Fr) 2007 : 91m : Colosseum, 15/3(public) :
A bland-sounding title hides multiple meanings in The Path, the lively story of two kids who cross the hazardous border from Nicararagua to Costa Rica in search of their mother. The pair aren't just moving towards a goal, they're also moving away from danger: the 12-year-old girl eventually tires of her grandfather's incestuous attentions, although it turns out that the road of escape is by no means a safe one. What unfolds is a picaresque adventure through light and dark - at times realistic, at other times magical-realistic, occasionally taking on the air of a sinister fairytale. Unlikely coincidences and developments abound: the duo keep encountering a rather untrustworthy-seeming puppeteer (a droll turn from veteran French actor Jean Francois Stevenin), though there's also comic relief in the absurdist, repeated sight of a pair of blokes lugging around an antique table.
These are fictional children in what often feels like a documentary setting - the camera captures serendipitous appearances of local flora and fauna (some charming, some hostile) along the way, while when the kids go on a boat-ride their fellow-passengers regale them with accounts of their own (evidently true) misadventures through what's long been a particularly febrile part of the world. Paying particular attention to the soundscapes experienced by her youthful protagonists, writer/director Yasin mostly keeps to her path - although, perhaps betraying her inexperience on her feature debut, she occasionally trespasses into excessive symbolism, fabulism and/or pretentiousness. The ambiguous, nebulous climax is one such divagation - but, by then, the journey has provided sufficient highlights to be reckoned worthwhile.
LA RABIA : [6/10] : aka Anger : Albertina CARRI : Argentina 2008 : 83m : Cinestar, 13/3 (press)
A case of 'Hard Life in Country', Argentinian-style, as we observe the turbulent passions which unfold in a tiny, remote rural community. The families inhabit of two neighbouring farmsteads feud, feed and fuck - the infidelity-theme in this particular setting recalling Carlos Reygadas's Mexican variant, Silent Light. But whereas Reygadas used his age-old story as an excuse for prettified obfuscations, writer-director Carri emphasises the grinding everyday unpleasantnesses of the farmer's life. An opening title ominously informs us that the animals depicted "lived and died as they normally would", and while the demise of certain fauna (such as the drowning of a bag of weasels in a very early scene) would seem to be simulated, there are several scenes of documentary-style slaughter which will make La Rabia - which is either the name of one of the farms, or of the hamlet as a whole (this isn't entirely clear) - tough going for some.
It's worth sticking with, however, for the way Carri shows us a child's-eye view of adult passions - most of the action is observed by the farms' youngest residents, one of them the latest in cinema's long line of mute, spooky little girls (it's a strong performance, nevertheless). She punctuates the drama with particularly effective Rorschach-inkblot-style animations (by Manuel Barenboim) that give proceedings - which seem to take place in a land that's near-permanently stuck at dusk - a slightly dream-like/nightmarish air. Musical cues are also offbeat - rock guitar would seem an incongruous accompaniment for such a bucolic enterprise - but represent another minor gamble which pays ultimate dividends. Just a shame, then, that the denouement should prove so predictably violent and melodramatic, making La Rabia, despite all its original touches and skilful execution. ultimately just another tale of extreme dysfunction among volatile-tempered countryfolk. Cold comfort granja, if you like.
SALVATORE GIULIANO : [7/10] : Francesco ROSI : Italy 1962 : 123m : Cinemaxx, 16/3 (public)
Rosi's ambitious, boldly original take on the life of mountain-bandit-turned-political-terrorist Giuliano proceeds from an audaciously unusual starting-point: the man himself is only very briefly glimpsed, usually in the form of a corpse after his violent, controversial death. The film which bears his name is very much a matter of two halves - the first much more effective and successful than the second.
For an hour, Rosi crafts an atmospheric, documentary-style vision of Sicilian peasant life in the island's mountainous hinterland - reminiscent of Vittorio de Seta's Bandits In Orgosolo, but with the added spice of relating, in accessible and intriguing style, a half-forgotten period of Italian political history when Sicilian independence was very much under discussion.
Rosi presents us with panoramic landscapes of country and town, the latter featuring a truly remarkable kind of communal "performance" by hundreds of local woman - evidently "playing" themselves as the re-enact the circumstances of Giuliano's exploits, pursuit and demise. And the scene in which the deceased Giuliano's cadaver is visited by his elderly mother has a stark, disarming poetry that makes a fine contrast with the noisier, more newsreelish stuff that's often gone before.
At around halfway, however, the focus shifts from external scenes to internal sequences, bogging down in talky courtroom exchanges as Giuliano's former right-hand man takes centre stage. The film becomes not so much Salvatore Giuliano as Gaspare Pisciotta- and it certainly doesn't help that the actor playing the latter role is somewhat hammy, and has nearly all of his dialogue post-synched by another performer. Longueurs start to set in, as we realise that we're never really going to find out exactly what happened to Giuliano and why. But despite this regrettable dip, the picture overall represents an engagingly different, intelligent approach to near-current historical-political-news events.
SOUTH MAIN : [6/10] : Kelly PARKER : USA 2008 : 77m : Cinestar, 16/3 (public)
Sober, conscientious, quietly effective documentary telling the stories of three women - Latisha, Tajuana and Tena - who live on or near South Main Street in the area formerly known as South Central Los Angeles. Actually, the three women, who each face severe housing problems as a result of local government action (and inaction), are allowed to tell their own stories, sometimes during long, unbroken-take to-camera monologues/interviews.
While the women are shown only at home, a composite portrait of an entire socio-economic situation is compiled as we watch. Director Parker clearly enjoyed privileged access to these people's lives, having evidently built up a considerable relationship of trust with each of them.
The result is an organic proximity to her material, though the film's overall structure seems to lack much in the way of shape: it's effectively two separate movies, the first focussing on on Latisha's troubled, tragic experience as a victim of gun-crime (her fiance was killed on the eve of their projected move out of the area), the second concentrating on Tena and Tajuana, before a coda involving the birth of Latisha's baby.
At each stage, the women's resilience comes through loud and clear - likewise the unhelpfulness of the unseen government agencies which should in theory be there to aid them. Intimate in scale and probably ideally suited for small-screen exposure, South Main is a liberal-humanist documentary of the old school, seeking to raise awareness of specific problems and extend the audience's sympathy towards members of society which they might otherwise disregard.
reviews written from February 15th to May 17th.
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