Category Archives: 2011

The Woman In The Fifth

26 Monday Nov 2012

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Ethan Hawke stars as Tom, a creepy American university professor who arrives in Paris to stalk his ex-wife and young daughter. His wife calls the police and he absconds, encountering subsequent bad luck and winding up broke in a dive of a hotel run by seedy, criminal seeming people. Motivated by a desperate bid for reunification with his daughter, Tom tries to establish himself in Paris despite these somewhat dire circumstances.

Kristin Scott Thomas plays the mysterious Margit who for some strange reason is the film’s namesake. She provides nurture and romance to Tom, and having previously been the wife of a writer, encourages him to return to writing and work on his second novel but there is something wrong with what freedom and pleasure she bolsters him up.

The film is mysterious but equally irritating. Photographer Ryszard Lenczewski paints Tom’s world in fragments, his gaze obstructed by blurry visions through his own glasses, through leaves and fences and security cameras. The lens motif is a familiar tool for experiments in narrative confusion in recent filmmaking but even after attempting to decipher the puzzles of Tom’s existence, whatever grainy underlying veracities, however confusing, are uninteresting.

Director Pawel Pawlikowski gets away with considerable sexism and racism by merely filtering it through an unreliable and unlikeable narrator but does device delineate or justify these characterisations? The French-Arab owner of the hotel and the French-African tenant are completely perverse, criminal, and unhygienic. They’re the only people in the film who make Tom look good. The Polish, immaculate, Ania (Joanna Kulig) – who is somehow in bed with this dangerous hotel owner – appears to require some kind of rescue from Tom and enchants him with Polish poems and songs – which makes her so explicitly an object of perversion.

Tom often finds himself on the other side of closed doors, shut off from others, but we’re grateful for that. He is pathetic, tightly wound and worrying on screen. His affairs are strange. All his relationships with women are fruitless and our own disinterest in Tom, and general confusion about what on Earth the film is going for, makes us eagerly await the end of every scene or for a door to open, just to see if some clear idea, or an unhindered frame might redeem this enormously flat depiction of madness and writer’s block.

* a version of this post originally appeared at filmblerg.com

Hysteria

25 Sunday Nov 2012

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The costumes for Hysteria were something out of A Christmas Carol (coats and hats and warm sort of nonsense) and the plot resembled a sex-comedy of Hollywood’s golden age but despite all its charming drapery – and you will observe some flamboyant drapery! – this is a film about the implementation of the vibrator by a doctor who developed carpal tunnel from manually relieving several women daily.

It’s a tricky idea to take on because all humour on the subject of masturbation has been exhausted, and the comedy relies heavily on odious puns, which were evolved and retired with the rise of Judd Apatow films and are only now viewable on d-grade releases like Date Movie, Meet The Spartans and the latest Twilight parody, Breaking Wind: Part 1.

The only actor at home on set is Rupert Everett, whose character is instrumental but appears only to be along for the ride. Gyllenhaal and Dancy are repellent. Maggie’s talent was completely dried out in her exceptional performance in Happy Endings and has been absent from all subsequent work.

The film is exceedingly silly, and any audience risks being too mature for its unsophisticated jokes, and at the same time, too conservative for some of its content. In any context outside of comic ridicule, the “treatment” performed on most of the women in the film, is voyeurism, but these women are made ridiculous – they are all old and/or frumpy – and then pacified with a new kind of shock therapy. These particular scenes in Dr. Dalrymple’s (Jonathan Price) practice are out of place. It is really two films: a morality tale, about a physician evaluating his sense of duty and the invention of the vibrator and how it was used in experiments on women suffering diagnoses of hysteria. I do imagine it looked much better on paper, as its framework does so strongly echo the great cinema of the forties.

This demonstration of hysteria, vastly different from Cronenberg’s more accurate telling through Keira Knightley’s contorted vessel, seems to be boiled down to mere sexual frustration. Women can’t relate to this anymore, well not the type of women who will ever respond to it. All this film will accomplish is vibrator sales to old ladies. You’re advised to stay at home. Please yourself.

* a version of this post originally appeared at filmblerg.com

Goodbye First Love

24 Saturday Nov 2012

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A young man cycles the busy streets of Paris – his face masked by a black scarf ala Mick Travis in if…. (1968) – stops to buy condoms from a vending machine, and continues to his girlfriend’s house. Goodbye First Love, as its title suggests, is about the end of a relationship, so it’s a little exhausting being taken back to their “first time”, observing the beginning of the end.

14 year-old Camille (Lola Créton) says farewell to Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky) who has decided to drop out of school and travel around South America. At first he writes often and she marks his destinations on a map with coloured pins, overseeing his expedition from home base in Paris. Then the letters dry up, and Camille becomes severely depressed. Sullivan is away for most of the film, and we don’t mind. He didn’t seem all that keen on her in the first place.

After a very long period of grief (so so long), her move into architecture is hopeful – a challenging, masculine profession – but her talent is informed only by her much older professor Lorenz (Magne-Håvard Brekke) . Camille is mute. She knows herself by Sullivan’s sexual desire of her, from his old love letters (which are often about other women he is seeing) and then from Lorenz’ interest in her – which is just creepy. The old man looks like Riff-Raff from Rocky Horror.

The same actors play Camille and Sullivan from aged 14 to 24(?) which presents an immense challenge. She looks 14 the whole time. First pining over the boy she lost her virginity to and then accepting a father figure for a lover doesn’t appear to faze her, and makes he rest of the film baffling and annoying. Sullivan seeks challenges and new experiences and Camille just waits for someone else to love her. Her entire being is reactionary. Her nudity is unnecessary. Her body hair has more to say about her than she herself does. It’s sexist. Despite an occasionally breathtaking aesthetic (the French countryside is captured beautifully), the film is un-motivated and backward in its ideas of women, which is despicable because it was written and directed by one. Teenagers who like masochism and subtitles will enjoy.

* a version of this post originally appeared at filmblerg.com

A Dangerous Method

24 Saturday Nov 2012

Posted by in 2011, David Cronenberg, Film

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Filmed in Vienna, Zurich and Berlin, A Dangerous Method  chronicles the infamous dispute between its founders, Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, and the rise of Sabina Spielrein from hysteria patient, to psychoanalytic theorist. Though it appears thoroughly subdued by comparison to his previous, explicit work, it has the same psychology of all of its creator’s early genre/sci-fi films and maintains the structure of his two recent collaborations with actor Viggo Mortensen .

In the strictly patriarchal beginnings of the 20th century, extremes of female suppression caused the very corporeal condition of hysteria, and the “talking cure” experiment was being pioneered as a possible treatment. Here, Kiera Knightly convincingly and contortingly portrays an hysteric teenager whose memories of humiliation arouse and disgust her to breaking point. Michael Fassbender’s performance is that of a deeply repressed and troubled Jung, whose devotion to a talking cure is interrupted by his desire for a sexual one, and no one could appear to be wound tighter.

A Dangerous Method does not appear to have a central plot. Our gaze is shifted between several character conflicts without resolution, and only appears to touch on Jung’s anti-Semitism or mysticism or romanticism or class, pushed to the surface briefly,  and left for audiences to reconcile. It is a film that would certainly require repeat viewing for an enriched experience, and knowledge of Freud and Jung is helpful, as there’s so much more to gain from this than what is merely being said.

Some Cronenberg fans will repudiate it for the lack of graphic violence. There are no close-ups of inside-out orang-utans, no one gets shot in face, or has their scars made love to. The film is however a quintessential Cronenberg work.

Freud has influenced Cronenberg’s films magnificently, but we are shown here, how the concepts of this influence were conceived and how they likewise reflect the cinematic experiments of art and mortality through sex and violence – the director’s life’s work. Cronenberg’s protagonists are often doomed to become the objects of their own experiments, committing horrible acts in order to combat death, giving in to basic animal desires while attempting to achieve the scientifically remarkable, and in that expression, this is no different. Just as in many of his earlier, violent films we observe a demonstration of an experimental idea – but, again, no heads explode.

* a version of this post originally appeared at filmblerg.com

I Wish

24 Saturday Nov 2012

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Two brothers are separated when their parents divorce. Koichi lives with his mother and grandparents in Kagoshima where its active volcano rains ash every day. Younger sibling Ryunosuke lives with dad in Fukuoka in a house his father shares with other struggling musicians. Koichi dreams of having his parents reunite. He is older than Ryu and is possessed of a feeling of loss headed into his adolescence. He becomes obsessed with the idea of the volcano erupting, causing them to move back to their old home in Osaka to live as a family again. Ryu is younger and much more carefree, living a kind of independence where he happily grows beans and vegetables and dances and plays music with his father’s band each night. 

The bullet train is being expanded to Kagoshima and the city, including the boys grandfather, are preparing for it. Koichi soon learns that there is a place where two bullet trains pass at the same time, both flying at 260km per hour, causing a miraculous release of energy that can grant any wish. He and his brother plan to meet at this location and make wishes to reunite their family.

The boys’ mother has had to take up working in a supermarket, but still provides Koichi with an orderly and safe family environment of clean clothes, chores and daily family meals. Ryu wakes his bohemian father most mornings, packs his own lunch and runs like wild everywhere he goes, buying greasy dinner from local merchants on his way home. Koichi attends school in uniform, and takes part in rigorous swimming lessons. Ryu wears no uniform and thrashes wildly in the water with his friends. The age gap also divides their interests largely. Koichi is considering girls and family, perplexed by longing and doubt about the future, where Ryu seeks joy from his immediate environment and he only looks to the future of his vegetables.

I Wish is a stunning coming-of-age film that draws diverse portraits of changing Japanese provinces, its cinematography opening up to the awe of huge natural and industrial wonders, combined with the camera’s handheld and playful approach to its interiors. It captures the struggles of a family living apart, through two willful and engaging young boys who use their belief in miracles to try and decide their own destinies.

* a version of this post originally appeared at filmblerg.com

The Rum Diary

24 Saturday Nov 2012

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A seaplane glides leisurely through the clouds and over the sparkling waters of San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Dean Martin’s “Volare” carries us gently into the dank, chaos of Paul Kemp’s (Johnny Depp) hotel room after a massive bender.

Depp, at first glance, sadly closer resembles Edward Scissorhands and not Raoul Duke – after all, are we not viewing this for another cinematic incarnation of Thompson? His drunken stumbling is not a bow-legged gait, his teeth are not balancing a cigarette holder – oh, this won’t be like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? This is the first of many misdirections in Bruce Robinson’s The Rum Diary.

Kemp arrives in Puerto Rico at a newspaper on its last legs. The high-strung editor in chief, Lotterman (Richard Jenkins), is hopelessly dependent on several deadbeat journalists to keep the press running and foolishly sees promise in the newest drunkard on his staff.

Puerto Rico in the 1950s is a growing tourist destination and its un-touched islands are being bought up to build resorts, casinos, and “so many bowling alleys, it is horrible to ponder the meaning of it”. Kemp is happily along for ride, paid well for minimal work, until floating with the tide one night (nice metaphor) he meets Chenault (Amber Heard), the only white woman in Puerto Rico.

Aaron Eckhart plays a composite of two of the novel’s characters. Though called Sanderson, the slick PR suit eager to capitalise on paradise, he has also absorbed Yeamon, a heavy drinking, short-tempered writer with an irresistible thrill-seeking squeeze. Perhaps to give the film and its characters a little more purpose, Robinson favoured Sanderson as a kind of corporate villain, but Kemp’s relative political conscience (barely existent in the novel) is so weakly adapted to the screen that the conflict between the two, even with their mutual interest in Chenault, is dull and vacuous.

An excellent performance by Giovanni Ribisi as Moberg, a man so affected by substance abuse that he is sub-human and Michael Rispoli is a good sidekick to Depp, and perhaps their slapstick scenes together are the most memorable.

Puerto Rico’s history of U.S. repression was never grasped fully by Thompson, and how could it be? They were both victims of capitalism’s machinations; he, through a lifetime of drug addiction and alcoholism, and Puerto Rico through Operation Bootstrap. The film fails as a legacy to Hunter S. Thompson because the novel wasn’t one of his best, and the script is polluted with bizarre trivial pursuits for its characters in order to shape some kind of plot or get a few laughs. Wouldn’t be surprised if Robinson directed it drunk as well.

* a version of this post originally appeared at filmblerg.com

The Source

24 Saturday Nov 2012

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The Source is dolled-up as a bright, musical fable of female independence, but is essentially a story of the hopeless situation for the female under Islamic repression.

The women of an un-named North-African village (filmed on location in Morocco) routinely collect pails of water from a remote spring high on a dry, desolate rock. When this dangerous trek causes another pregnant local to miscarriage, Leila (Leila Bekhti), newly welcomed to the fold of women, rebels.

The miscarriage is not the first by far, a whopping 15-20 such incidents are counted out in one scene, and the women, led by Leila, take part in a “love strike”, refusing to sleep with their husbands till the matter is resolved and the women put out of danger.

Her friends spend their time (outside of servitude) watching Mexican soap operas and discussing the men in the village. The initial outrage over miscarriage quickly becomes overshadowed by the starved sensuality of these women but the biggest insult is the staging of the revolution in the women’s’ communal bath house, where half of them argue their rights topless.

Leila’s husband Sami (Saleh Bakri) has taught her to read, but unfortunately the only verse she cites in support of her case are the Qur’an and some decadent Arabian Nights erotica – two texts that, despite the film’s insistence that they’ll deliver her, are undoubtedly instrumental in her oppression.
Writer/director Radu Mihaileanu uses various sub-plots to describe female disenfranchisement  in Islamic culture but the question is merely skirted; one cut-paste image follows the other : sex out of wedlock + veils + dowry + unsatisfying love + loveless marriage + repudiation etc. The result is a colourful yet ultimately thin collage-portrait of Islamic misogyny. Running an offensive 135 minutes, your time will be better spent on 21 Jump Street later in the month.

Tyrannosaur

24 Saturday Nov 2012

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Actor Paddy Considine’s debut feature Tyrannosaur is an extension of his short film Dog Altogether (2007) with Peter Mullan and Olivia Colman reprising their roles in this extended version.

Joseph (Mullan) is a man possessed of inexorable rage.  Staggering between violent intimidations, child-like antagonism, and drunken despair he is terrifying. When he meets Hannah (Colman) – an op-shop assistant with an abusive husband (Eddie Marsan), he is brought under her consoling influence.  As the bond strengthens, both Colman and Mullan’s accomplished tragic dimensions move you, uninterrupted, through Hannah and Joseph’s transforming circumstances.

The camera is rarely permitted to defer from Hannah and Joseph. It is their presence, their fears and pleasures that dynamically inform the narrative. It is more like a stage production but only a camera can properly capture the sensational tremors of Mullen’s brow or Colman’s brave and devastating smiles.

Considine seems apprehensive of the Christian significance of redemption. Hannah’s prayers are naive and her faith in Jesus is obviously her way of reckoning her devotion to a monstrous husband. Faith in God is essentially a faith in humanity, and the role of saviour is frequently substituted between she and Joseph as aspects of her home-life are revealed. In Hannah, Considine has succeeded with an equal female counterpart to Joseph, and not simply some reactionary love interest for a leading man – this is very refreshing but delivers some unsettling surprises.

 

Ned Dennehy is an excellent support as Tommy, Joseph’s drunkard crony. Filled with a similarly racist and infantile nature to his friend, he orchestrates a hate crime and muses dreams of opening a zoo within the same breath. Tommy’s crude charm belongs to a similar class of Brits portrayed in such films these days, and Considine rightfully keeps Tommy at a distance. This is not just another kitchen-sink drama from the bowels of England’s working-class. This film, like its characters, attempts to move out of its archetypal rut.

Shot in a very dreary Leeds, Tyrannosaur is an intimate look at the conflict of animalistic and moralistic reactions to the grievous circumstances that befall men and women – and very unfortunately, dogs. Handkerchiefs encouraged.

* a version of this post originally appeared at filmblerg.com