for this week’s TRIBUNE: ‘The American’ [6/10]; ‘Leap Year’ [4/10]; Leeds Film Festival report

Published on: November 26th, 2010

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The American
—–Director: Anton Corbijn
Leap Year
—–Director: Michael Rowe
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Speaking logically, it should be impossible for a film to be both a disappointment and a pleasant surprise – but Anton Corbijn’s anti-thriller The American comes pretty damn close. The disappointment comes from the fact that the picture is Corbijn’s less-than-brilliant follow-up to his 2007 Ian Curtis / Joy Division biopic Control - one of the truly outstanding British films of the current decade, and among the most notable directorial debuts from any country in recent years.

Given Corbijn’s unique relationship to the material, some reckoned Control might turn out to be a happy fluke: the Dutchman, who was already in his 50s when the film was made (he’s now 55), was much better known as a photographer, and had shot many iconic images of Curtis and his band during their rapid rise to fame. Initial critical responses to The American, adapted by Rowan Joffe from Martin Booth’s 1990 novel A Very Private Gentleman have ranged from mixed to hostile – serving to significantly lower expectations.

But while it has more than its share of flaws, including several plausibility-stretching plot developments at crucial stages, The American proves to be rather more watchable and satisfying than those early reviews might have led one to expect. If nothing else, it provides George Clooney with an unusual, challenging role that’s a break from anything he’s done before on screen. As Jack, a monosyllabic, ageing armourer – who provides custom-built guns for high-paying customers on a strict no-questions-asked basis – he betrays no hint of a smile over the course of the picture’s 105 minutes, making his supposedly “world-weary”, Oscar-nominated turns in Michael Clayton Realm and Conquest and Up In the Air look distinctly cheery in comparison.

And, in what’s effectively an old-fashioned “star vehicle”, Clooney is on screen for the vast bulk of that time as ‘Jack’ – an ex-Special Forces operative who, fleeing Swedish assassins, hides out in a remote Italian town. Completing one last job for an enigmatic client (Thekla Reuten), Jack – somewhat ill-advisedly, given the circumstances, falls in love with a beautiful sex-worker (Violante Placido). As even this brief synopsis indicates, The American doesn’t exactly fight shy of storytelling clichés: Jack develops a father-son relationship with an elderly priest (Paolo Bonacelli) over the course of several existential/theological conversations (despite the seclusion of his chosen locale, nearly everyone in the area seems to speak surprisingly good English.)

But so long as you don’t expect the kind of high-octane, mainstream action-picture promised by the picture’s promotional materials – which misleadingly suggest some kind of Jason Bourne shenanigans – The American yields its share of pleasures. Slow-burning, stripped down character-based and cagey to the point of evasiveness, the picture, which would make an ideal companion piece to Jim Jarmusch’s unfairly-neglected (and similarly Euro-centric) The Limits of Control, represents the latest respectful homage to Jean-Pierre Melville’s enduringly influential Le Samouraï (1967) – albeit a less effective one than Thomas Arslan’s In the Shadows, currently doing the festival circuit to near-universal acclaim but so far, like so many fine German movies, without much hope of UK distribution.

No such fears for The American, which is getting quite a hefty promotional push – including an eyecatching 1960s-style retro poster that’s received an overwhelmingly positive reception. And the visuals are also a strong point for the film itself: unsurprisingly, given Corbijn’s background – and his reteaming with Control’s cinematographer Martin Ruhe – it’s always fine to look at, albeit in a slightly glossy, fashion-shoot/car-advert manner. No surprise, indeed, to learn that there’s a coffee-table book featuring Corbijn’s photos taken during the shoot – yours for a recommended retail price of £39.95.

When it premiered at Cannes back in 2007, Corbijn’s Control received a “special mention” as runner-up (behind Israeli triptych Jellyfish) for the Camera d’Or or Golden Camera prize, which is awarded to what the jury reckons to be the outstanding directorial debut among the festival’s official sections. Since it was instituted in 1978, the most notable laureates have included Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise, 1984), Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!, 1988), Jaco Van Dormael (Toto the Hero, 1991), Jafar Panahi (White Balloon, 1995) and Bahman Ghobadi (A Time For Drunken Horses, 2000).

This year’s winner was Michael Rowe, an Australian who’s lived in Mexico for over a decade, and who wrote and directed the psychological chamber-piece Leap Year (Año bisiesto) for a reported fee of only $8,000 – the budget was so low, electricity was obtained from street-lamps outside the picture’s single set: the Mexico City apartment of struggling journalist Laura (Monica Del Carmen). Apart from a brief prologue set in a supermarket, Leap Year - not to be confused with the romantic comedy which opened here in February – unfolds entirely within this cramped space, where the thirtyish Laura writes articles for small business magazines and conducts increasingly violent romantic liaisons with her on-off boyfriend Arturo (Gustavo Sánchez Parra).

We learn that Laura’s hang-ups trace back to her childhood in faraway Oaxaca, and likely have much to do with her father – who passed away on the February 29th of a leap year. The film takes place over the course of another ‘leap February’ – at the end of which Laura plans to die, preferably during the kind of risky S+M sex which she favours. A claustrophobic cross between Looking For Mr Goodbar, Repulsion and Last Tango in Paris, with a touch of Rear Window (Laura compulsively spies on her neighbours), Leap Year at its best evokes Laura’s life of “quiet desperation”, an urban anomie of isolation and withdrawal into morbid fantasies.

But the film ends up conforming to the all-too-prevalent template for arthouse films with a sexual content, losing the narrative thread as the emphasis is increasingly placed on mechanical, soulless intercourse at the expense of character-development. The single-location technique feels more and more like a cost-cutting gimmick, and Laura isn’t really a sufficiently engaging or intriguing figure to sustain our interest over the course of a whole feature – especially one with such an underwhelming finale.


LEEDS FILM FESTIVAL 2010

Cinema has no single ‘inventor’ per se, but France’s Louis Le Prince (1842-c1890) is generally reckoned to be responsible for the very first moving images shot on film using a single-lens camera: short fragments known as Roundhay Garden Scene and Leeds Bridge, both taken during 1888 in the West Yorkshire metropolis – and both now available to view on YouTube.

122 years on, Leeds is now host to what is billed as the “largest film-festival in England outside London” – and which is surely one of the longest such events anywhere, this year’s renewal (the 24th) running from 4th to 21st November. Over the course of these 18 days, the festival showed over 100 features and several dozen shorts, kicking off with Oscar-touted The King’s Speech in the Town Hall – the Victoria Hall, to be precise, a fabulously ornate example of 19th-century municipal architecture which is normally used for classical concerts.

This was the first time that the festival had deployed the Hall as a screening-venue but it surely won’t be the last: tickets for The King’s Speech sold out in record time, and a second screening was hastily arranged for the city’s rather more cosily atmospheric Hyde Park Picture House – which has been in operation since 1914.

This was where I caught George Clooney’s latest enterprise, The American - which is released this week, and is reviewed elsewhere in this week’s magazine, along with another ‘LIFF’ (Leeds International Film Festival) title, Michael Rowe’s intense S&M drama Leap Year. A rather more satisfying example of current Latin American cinema was to be found contending for the ‘Golden Owl’ prize – restricted to films having their UK premiere at LIFF – in the form of Huacho, written and directed by Alejandro Fernández Almendras.

A four-part study of a Chilean family over the course of a single day, Huacho (apparently a slang term for what used to be referred to as an ‘illegitimate’ child, and which can also be interpreted as something closer to “abandoned”) is shot documentary-style by gifted cinematographer Inti Briones – responsible last year for Cristián Jiménez’s visually arresting drama from the same part of the world, Optical Illusions.

Here working with grainy 16mm film, Briones unobtrusively evokes the quotidian atmosphere of folk  living precariously around the poverty-line: the mother’s failure to pay the electricity-bill results in a power “outage” that is used as the screenplay’s pivotal event. Using non-professional actors, Fernández Almendras keeps his focus tight on his performers – but simultaneously manages to make some wider points about life in the rural, neglected south of the country.

Though perhaps ultimately a little too low-key and uneventful for its own good – each of the four stories is content to amble along towards something vaguely resembling a conclusion – Huacho nevertheless shows a commendably close attention to everyday social realities, and thus represents a quietly encouraging first effort for Fernández Almendras. Along with the likes of Jiménez, Alicia Scherson (Tourists) and Sebastián Silva (The Maid), he’s one of several noteworthy new cinematic talents from a country that has certainly been at the forefront of the world’s attention during 2010 – perhaps inevitably, several pictures based on the San José mining rescue are reportedly in pre-production – enough to make a possible sidebar for LIFF 2011 or 2012, perhaps?

Neil Young
16th November, 2010
(written for the 25th November edition of Tribune magazine)

THE AMERICAN : [6/10] : USA 2010 : Anton CORBIJN : 105m
seen 11th November at Hyde Park Picture House, Leeds (complimentary ticket) — Leeds International Film Festival {15/28}

LEAP YEAR : [4/10] : Año bisiesto : Mexico 2010 : Michael ROWE : 92m
seen 11th November at Vue cinema, The Light, Leeds (complimentary ticket) — Leeds International Film Festival {15/28}