for ‘Tribune’: JANE EYRE, POST MORTEM and THE TROLL HUNTER [all 6/10]

Jane Eyre
Director: Cary Fukunaga

Post Mortem
Director: Pablo Larraín

The Troll Hunter
Director: André Øvredal

As multiplex denizens have long since learned, movie trailers are an inherently untrustworthy art-form: action-packed compendiums of a film’s most slam-bang moments, edited together to produce skilfully deceptive juxtapositions (check out 2006 slasher All the Boys Love Mandy Lane for the most enjoyably ‘cheaty’ example of same.). Even in the case of more rarefied releases, however, ‘Coming Attractions’ lures are often spiced with degrees of creative license – as with the UK trailer for Californian director Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre, his follow-up to 2009’s stylishly full-blooded tale of young love and pan-American cross-border tensions, Sin Nombre.

The trailer makes prominent use of the hauntingly eerie theme from Dario Argento’s 1977 masterpiece Suspiria, a gory witchcraft extravaganza of blood-curdling horror. The music itself, by Italian/British prog-metal outfit Goblin, is nowhere to be found in Jane Eyre itself, which relies on an suspenseful, Arvo Pärt-flavoured score by Dario Marianelli (Oscar-winner for Joe Wright’s Atonement [2007].)

Such sleight-of-hand isn’t unprecedented – Clint Mansell’s doom-laden strings from Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream have cropped up in all manner of trailers, most memorably Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers – and the nod to Suspiria is certainly all of a piece with this latest big-screen version of Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 classic, which emphasises the Gothic, nightmarish aspects of the text.

Indeed, it’s precisely the Gothic elements which are largely responsible for the movie going into production at that particular juncture, the Twilight saga’s phenomenal success – on both page and celluloid – sending studios scrambling for literary tales of pale, interesting young women and their dangerous romances with mysterious older men, preferably involving some hint or degree of the supernatural.

Bronte’s novel, in which penniless governess Jane (Mia Wasikowska) falls in love with her stern employer Rochester (Michael Fassbender), only to find – at the altar – that her fiancé is still married to his insane wife, is rather suitable for such a treatment: the seldom-glimpsed first Mrs Rochester (whose plight was the focus of Jean Rhys’s excellent novel Wild Sargasso Sea) is at one point compared by Brontë with “the foul German spectre, the Vampyre,” and she also launches a ‘blood-sucking’ attack on her own brother. It certainly wasn’t a massive stretch for Brontë’s story to become a Haiti-set chiller of zombies and voodoo in Jacques Tourneur’s 1943 I Walked With a Zombie, still perhaps the most audacious and effective adaptation of any Brontë Sisters novel.

Fukunaga and (scriptwriter) Moira Buffini’s Jane Eyre, meanwhile, is a much more faithful, dutiful and conventional affair – their take positioning the book as early precursor of the ‘misery memoirs’ which have in recent years so dominated the paperback bestseller lists (the 1847 publication presented it as a non-fiction ‘Autobiography’, edited by ‘Currer Bell’ [i.e. Brontë]. We follow Jane’s nightmarish childhood (“I see you are mortifying the girl’s flesh,” approvingly notes an onlooker during one episode of dire punishment), her troubled adolescence, and her gradual emergence as a wilful, ambitious individual chafing against the patriarchal strictures of her times (“I wish a woman could have action in her life, like a man.”)

What’s less convincing is Jane’s passion for Rochester – a somewhat crucial detail in what’s essentially a love-story – and when she announces “I would do anything for you, sir” it’s hard to square such puppyish devotion with the clear-eyed, experience-hardened Jane we’ve seen formed up to this point. That’s no failing of Wasikowska – the blonde Australian actress is arguably a little too photogenic to play a character who at one point says she’s “the same plain sort of bird as all the rest,” but she certainly nails those trickily flat Yorkshire vowels to convey the spirited nature of Bronte’s flinty heroine. Fassbender, meanwhile, maintains his current ubiquity – and steady ascent towards top-table stardom – proving as matinée-idol comfortable in 1840s trappings as he did when essaying such diverse roles as Bobby Sands (Hunger) and Erik ‘Magneto’ Lehnsherr (X-Men First Class.)

The screenplay’s flashback-based, time-hopping structure is, however, unneccesarily complicated and confusing in its (inevitable) condensation of Bronte’s original text, resulting in a film which is much more effective and memorable in terms of its elemental, often spooky atmospherics than it is in terms of characterisation and story-development. And for all its hand-held immediacy, Jane Eyre can’t quite elevate itself above the general, seemingly endless run of British period dramas – we may perhaps have to wait for Andrea Arnold’s upcoming, reportedly uncompromisingly stark Wuthering Heights for a truly 21st century re-imagining of a seminal Brontë Sisters text.

Pablo Larraín’s Post Mortem, follow-up to his 2007 arthouse success Tony Manero (which followed the murder spree of a sadsack fortysomething obsessed with Saturday Night Fever) and another immersion in the police-state dystopia that was mid-70s Chile. This one is another example of Larraín’s mordant gallows humour, as we follow Mario (Tony Manero star Alfredo Castro) a morgue-employee who learns that he’s to officiate at an autopsy on a particularly illustrious corpse – this in the immediate aftermath of the infamous 11th September 1973 coup d’état which resulted in the death of President Salvador Allende and the ascent of General Pinochet.

“Nothing can escape the wheel of history,” Mario is told, and Larraín shows us the mental strain suffered by ‘cogs’ in that wheel – including those who consider themselves peripheral and apolitical, but who may nevertheless find themselves experiencing guilty qualms. The identity of the cadaver on Mario’s slab is coyly withheld for much of the movie, though anyone with a passing knowledge of recent Chilean history will soon be able to work it out.

Larraín forensically dissects Fascism’s bureaucracy of death, presenting a chilly and oblique view of a key historical moment with immersive versimilitude. It’s at heart an arch character-study of a grim, ghostly individual (one who engages in a notably downbeat and ill-fated ‘love affair’ with a burlesque-performer): dialogue is deliberately stilted and robotic, compositions carefully just-so, and the suffocatingly symbolic final shot is held and extended to a punishing degree. Post Mortem is thus a film that’s rather easier to appreciate and intellectually admire than it is to fully engage with, let alone ‘enjoy’ – Tony Manero without the disco, and much more than a continent away from Quincy.

André Øvredal’s The Troll Hunter, meanwhile, gleefully stakes out its terrain at the more crowdpleasing end of the subtitled-picture spectrum – indeed, it’s no surprise to learn that American studios are already planning a remake of this larkish, rock-the-house Norwegian twist on the Blair Witch ‘fear-spurred cameraman’ sub-genre.

Supposedly (and unconvincingly) assembled from camcorder footage found after the disappearance of a student camera-crew, the film gradually uncovers the existence of trolls – some of them barely man-sized, some much, much (much!) larger – in the untenanted, achingly picturesque wastes of far north-west Scandinavia. The not-so-mythical marauders’ exploits have apparently been hushed up (Jaws-style) by the tourism-conscious national government, but are now brought to light thanks to testimony from a disgruntled, whistleblowing professional ‘troll hunter’ (bluff, imposing, nicely deadpan Otto Jespersen.)

Consistently emphasising the comic ahead of the horrific, Troll Hunter delivers daft, reasonably entertaining fare for younger audiences willing to indulge its somewhat over-frequent spells of talky ‘downtime’ in between the budget-munching, FX-heavy troll-action. Cod-scientific, straight-faced explanations of the monsters’ complex ecology are drolly amusing, though the most intriguingly topical and promising angle in Ovredal’s screenplay – the idea that the beasties are only attracted by the blood of Christian men (and women) is timorously underdeveloped. Fee fi fo fum, indeed…

Neil Young
for Tribune magazine