Borderlines Film Festival review by David Parkinson as seen on empire on line

Empire on Line / Festivals & Seasons Borderlines Film Festival 2015 review

by David Parkinson

Festivals And Seasons 13th Borderlines Film Festival 27 February -­‐ 15 March 2015 A Review by David Parkinson

The 13th Borderlines Film Festival seeks to bring the best in world cinema to the towns and villages of Herefordshire, Shropshire and the Marches. No other screen event comes close to matching the ambition of this admirable festival and it's a shame than no other rural community has opted to follow its example and cater to far-­‐flung audiences in assembly rooms, community centres, churches, cinemas and village halls across their own region.

This year, the participating venues include the village, parish or town halls in Bedstone & Hopton Castle, Bodenham, Bosbury, Brilley, Burghill, Dorstone, Eye, Garway, Gorsley, Michaelchurch Escley, Moccas, Much Birch, Pudleston, Ross, Tarrington and Wem, as well as such diverse settings as the SpArC Theatre in Bishops Castle, the Conquest Theatre in Bromyard, Church Stretton School, The Courtyard in Hereford, the Market Theatre in Ledbury, the Playhouse Cinema in Leominster, Ludlow Assembly Rooms, the kinoculture cinema in Oswestry, Presteigne Screen, The Hive in Shrewsbury, The Regal in Tenbury Wells, and Booth's Bookshop, the Church of St Mary the Virgin and the Parish Hall in Hay. Among the special items this year are a Festival of British Cinema, a chance to see a selection of films personally selected by Ken Loach (Arthur Elton and Edgar Anstey's Housing Problems, 1935; Harry Watt and Basil Wright's Night Mail, 1936; and David Lean's Brief Encounter, 1945), and an illustrated talk by Ian Christie on Britain's forgotten female film-­‐makers of the 1940s and 50s that includes clips from Ruby Grierson's They Also Serve (1940), Kay Mander's Homes For the People (1945), Jill Craigie's The Way We Live (1946) and To Be a Woman (1951), Muriel Box's The Passionate Stranger (1956), and Lorenza Mazzetti's Together (1956).

In addition to an oldier roster that includes Anthony Asquith's A Cottage on Dartmoor, GW Pabst's Pandora's Box (both 1929), Max Ophüls's Madame de… (1953), John Schlesinger's Far From the Madding Crowd (1967), Ronald Neame's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) and Rolf de Heer's The Tracker (2002) and Ten Canoes (2006), the programme also includes Rowan Joffé's Before I Go To Sleep, Kevin Macdonald's Black Sea, Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi's The Boxtrolls, Olivier Assayas's The Clouds of Sils Maria, Kevin Allen's Dan y Wenallt (Under Milk Wood), James Napier Robertson's The Dark Horse, Richard Laxton's Effie Gray, Zeresenay Mehari's Difret, Afia Nathaniel's Dukhtar, Alex Garland Ex Machina, Denis Villeneuves Enemy, Carol Morley's The Falling, Bennett Miller's Foxcatcher, David Ayer's Fury, David Fincher's Gone Girl, Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice, Alan Rickman's A Little Chaos, Xavier Dolan's Mommy, Anton Corbijn's A Most Wanted Man, Mike Leigh's Mr Turner, Christian Petzold's Phoenix, Roy Andersson's A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, Matthew Warchus's Pride, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado amd Wim Wenders's The Salt of the Earth, John Madden's The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Ava DuVernay's Selma, Yann Demange's `71, Rob Brown's Sixteen, Abderrahmane Sissako's Timbuktu, Stephen Daldry's The Tribe, Suhra Arraf's Villa Touma, Damien Chazelle's Whiplash, and Morgan Matthews's X +Y. Also keep an eye out for:

AMOUR FOU

On 21 November 1811, the Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist shot Henriette Vogel before taking his own life on the banks of the Kleiner Wannsee in Berlin. He regarded this suicide pact as a supreme act of Reason, in that it eliminated the caprice of fate and gave him complete control over the moment and manner of his demise. Yet, as Jessica Hausner suggests in Amour Fou, this may not have been a grand gesture inspired by uncontrollable passion or intellectual subversion, but a tragedy rooted in drawing room farce. However, by taking so many liberties with the facts, Hausner shifts the emphasis away from the muddle motives of the doomed couple and on to the fatalistic flaws of the Germanic psyche.

While attending a salon in the Prussian capital, Henriette Vogel (Birte Schnoeink) is both shocked and enticed by a recitation given by the poet, playwright and novelist Heinrich von Kleist (Christian Friedel). He is weary of life and tries to convince his cousin Marie (Sandra Hüller) to join him in death. However, she is as uninterested in his proposition as she is in his protestations of undying love and leaves him to mingle with the other guests. Henriette is drawn to Von Kleist and the scandalous reputation of his 1808 novella, The Marquise of O. But she is taken aback when he broaches the subject of suicide, as she leads such a comfortable existence with her husband, Friedrich Louis (Stephan Crossmann), and their daughter, Pauline (Paraschiva Dragus).

Herr Vogel is a civil servant and frequently finds himself having to defend the monarchy's decision to free the serfs and impose taxes upon the aristocracy. His mother-­‐in-­‐law (Barbara Schnitzler) feels particularly betrayed and never misses an opportunity to scold Vogel and curse the French for the revolution that has allowed the lower classes to get ideas above their station. Disliking confrontation, Henriette starts fainting on a regular basis and the local doctor (Holger Handtke) concludes that she is suffering from a nervous condition. When she shows no signs of recovering, however, Vogel consults a mesmerist, who declares that she can only be helped through a lengthy course of treatment. But, when the results come back from a series of medical tests, the doctor announces that Henriette is suffering from an incurable stomach tumour.

Afraid of wasting away and dying in agony, Henriette seeks out Von Kleist and informs him that she is willing to be his partner in death. On discovering the reasons for her decision, however, he is bitterly disappointed and lectures her on the need for purity in her yearning for oblivion. Nevertheless, he accepts her offer and they travel to a country inn with the intention of leaving life while getting back to Nature. But, when they venture out of their room for supper, they are recognised by Adam Müller (Peter Jordan), who engages them in conversation under the impression that they have sought out rural sanctuary for an amorous tryst. Feeling that Müller's presence has cheapened their design, the pair agree to return to the city.

A few days later, Von Kleist bumps into Marie and pleads with her to accept his love and reconsider her decision about ending it all at his side. However, she announces that she has become engaged to a Frenchman and he shares his frustration with his friend, Ernest von Pfuel (Sebastian Hülk). But Von Kleist's situation worsens when his aunt contacts him with the news that she is cancelling the stipend she pays him, as her own finances have been compromised by the death of Queen Luise. Furthermore, his sister tells him that she is also going to stop sending him money, as she doubts his literary talent and believes the time has come for him to earn an honest living.

Several weeks pass without Henriette seeing Von Kleist and she complains to her husband that she considers his behaviour to be boorish and immature. Yet, when they meets again at a soirée, Henriette waltzes with Von Kleist, even though Vogel is clearly hurt by her enjoyment. However, even though he informs her that he would not stand in her way if she wanted to be with another man, Vogel remains devoted to his wife and seeks out a surgeon in Paris who could cure her ailment. But Henriette insists she would be too afraid to travel across Europe in such dangerous times and sends word to Von Kleist that she is

ready to fulfil his wishes.

They journey together to the Kleiner Wannsee in the depth of winter and go for a walk in the snowy woods. Unnerved by his gravitas, Henriette steels herself to tell Von Kleist that she has changed her mind. But he shoots her anyway and panics when the pistol twice misfires when placed against his temple. Eventually, he finds another weapon and kills himself (off screen). Much to Vogel's distress, the doctor informs him that Henriette's autopsy reveals no sign of an ulcer or tumour and he deduces that she must have died for love. As the film ends, Pauline is accompanied by a pianist in the song about the mystic beauty of the blue mountains that had been her mother's party piece.

Strictly staged as a series of exquisite tableaux and played with admirable restraint, this darkly droll chamber drama approaches the conventions of the heritage saga in much the same way as Jacques Rivette in his adaptation of Balzac's The Duchess of Langeais (2007). The earnest delivery of the often eccentric dialogue could mislead viewers into believing that Hausner is taking this distressing occurrence at face value. But everything from the philosophical musings about deities and destiny to the political discussions about class and taxes is subjected to mild ridicule, as Hausner contrasts the manners and mores of the Napoleonic era with her own morally bankrupt recessional times. Nothing is safe from her withering disdain, as the pampered wife content to be her husbands property has her head turned by a chauvinist dreamer and his notorious novella about a raped marquise.

Yet, there appears to be nothing romantic, let alone sexual about the arrangement into which Henriette enters with Von Kleist and this makes her actions all the more peculiar.

Friedel and Schnoeink excel. But Hausner remains so detached from her characters that it's difficult to fathom what is going on inside their heads, although she evidently finds the dynamic between the vacuous waif and the self-­‐absorbed milquetoast to be as amusing as it is perplexing. She risks alienating the audience by imposing such an air of austere artifice on proceedings, but the measured tone perfectly suits the solemnity of the subject matter and the deceptive savagery of the script's wit.

Katharina Woepermann's production design and Tanja Hausner's costumes are impeccable, but it's Martin Gschlacht's rigorous use of a static digital camera to record the action in meticulously composed deep-­‐focus medium shots and telltale close-­‐ups that most catches the eye. Some may feel that Hausner has merely Haneke-­‐ised Jane Austen and failed to build upon the good impression made with Lovely Rita (2001), Hotel (2004) and Lourdes (2009). But this is a work of satirical courage, technical assurance and narrative ingenuity that is laced with so much sardonic comedy and teasing ambiguity that its insights into self-­‐delusion, illiberality, loneliness and social ignorance will linger long after the screening.

AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS It's somewhat apt that Louis Malle's Au Revoir les Enfants (1987) should be reissued in the week that witnesses the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Based on an incident in his own childhood, Malle's first French-­‐language film in a decade explored a young boy's gradual appreciation of the harsh injustices of life as his classroom innocence is destroyed by the horrific realities of the Nazi Occupation. Acclaimed by many as the versatile director''s finest achievement, it completed a loose trilogy with Le Souffle au Coeur (1971) and Lacombe, Lucien (1974), which focussed on youths being coerced into making moral judgements in times of crisis. Yet, while its predecessors caused considerable controversy in a country still bearing wartime scars, this admirably restrained drama escaped much of the censure that continues to greet screen studies of the Vichy era and went on to earn an Oscar nomination and seven Césars, as well as win the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

Following the Christmas vacation in the winter of 1943-­‐44, 12 year-­‐old Gaspard Manesse returns to his Carmelite boarding school in Fontainbleau, to the south of Paris. His older brother, Stanislas Carré de Malberg, delights in giving some Germans false directions at the railway station. But, while he poses as a tough nut, Manesse is still tied to mother Francine Racette's apron strings and sometimes wets the bed during bouts of homesickness. His boredom with lessons is relieved. however, when headmaster Philippe Morier-­‐Genoud brings three new pupils to his classroom and Manesse becomes increasingly intrigued by Raphaël Fejtö, whose talent for maths and the piano belie the fact that he is a socially awkward loner.

He discovers the secret of Fejtö's aloofness when he is woken in the night and overhears him praying in Hebrew. Searching through his belongings, Manesse discovers that Fejtö is Jewish and is one of several boys being hidden by Morier-­‐Genoud from the Nazi patrols that rove the town. Aware that any betrayal would place the elderly priest in danger, Manesse keeps his council. But he asks Carré de Malberg why Jews are so unpopular and is informed that they killed Jesus Christ and refuse to eat pork.

Despite deciding to give Fejtöa a wide berth, Manesse forges a bond with him when they get lost during a treasure hunt in the countryside surrounding the school. As darkness falls, they huddle together in the woods when approached by a wild boar and are even more terrified when they are spotted by some German soldiers. However, they reassure the boys that they are Bavarian Catholics and mean them no harm. Indeed, they wrap them in a blanket before escorting them back to the school.

Some days later, Racette comes for parents' day and she readily agrees when Manesse asks if Fejtö can accompany them to a posh restaurant for lunch. She is embarrassed when a handsome Wehrmacht officer makes eye contact, but is relieved when he steps in to restore order after some local militiamen start harassing a distinguished Jewish gentleman and Carré de Malbarg accuses them of being quislings. As calm descends, Carré de Malbarg asks Racette if his factory-­‐owning father is still supporting Marshall Pétain and she whispers that loyalties are waning. She also urges Manesse to keep his voice down when he asks if they are Jewish. However, as she reassures the boys that she has nothing personal against Jews as a race, she wouldn't object if someone decided to hang former socialist prime minister Léon Blum.

Back at school, Manesse reflects upon Fejtö's behaviour at the restaurant and realises how frightening it must be both to be hated and to have to play a role in order to survive. He vows to be a good friend to him and is pleased when music teacher Irène Jacob is moved by his rendition of Schubert. They join in a stilt game in the playground and laugh together during a screening of Charlie Chaplin's The Immigrant (1917). In private, they giggle over smutty postcards and a copy of the Arabian Nights. But they take a more serious interest in the flags denoting the Allied progress on a map being maintained by a history teacher who had served in the trenches. Moreover, they realise that the air raid that threatens their safety is also a sign of hope and they stay out of the shelter to play an exuberant tune on the piano.

However, tensions rise when kitchen assistant François Négret is caught stealing food to sell on the black market and he accuses Manesse and Carré de Malbarg of being among his accomplices. Left with little option, Morier-­‐Genoud fires Négret, but reluctantly takes no action against the students he has identified, for fear of upsetting their wealthy parents. But Négret refuses to go quietly and his information prompts the Gestapo to raid the school one freezing January morning. Desperate to reassure his friend, Manesse shoots Fejtö a glance that is instantly spotted and the boy is led away with his two companions. As he watches them being led away, Manesse raises a hand in guilty greeting as Fejtö looks back. He also notices the envious, orphaned Négret looking on with quiet satisfaction and he tells Manesse to grow up and face the cold reality of conflict.

The officer in charge summons the students to the playground and proceeds to denounce all French people for being weak and ill-­‐disciplined. He marches Morier-­‐Genoud towards the waiting transport. But the priest turns to reassure his charges by saying: `Au revoir, les enfants! À bientôt!' As the film ends on a close-­‐up of Manesse, Malle concedes in voiceover that he has never forgotten a single second of that morning and reports solemnly that the three Jewish boys perished in Auschwitz and the priest in Mauthausen. He concludes by stating that he will remember them until the day he dies.

The actual boys taken from the Jesuit boarding school of Sainte-­‐Thérèse de l'Enfant Jesus in Avon on 3 February 1944 were Jacques Halpern, Hans-­‐Helmut Michel and Maurice Schlosser and Malle's attempt to pay tribute to them by revealing the `burning secret memory' he had harboured for four decades says much about his courage as a film-­‐maker and his decency as a human being. It also speaks volumes that he maintains a balance between his characters, so that schoolboys and collaborators alike are seen taunting Jews, while a soldier and a priest are shown defending them. Indeed, similar tensions consistently underpin the episodic storyline, which is punctuated with acts of searching and concealment, with the Gestapo's pursuit of Jews, freedom fighters and criminals contrasting with the boys' bid to find themselves in their rivalries, games and perusal of erotica.

Renato Berta's muted cinematography helps establish the sense of creeping oppression and deepening foreboding that pervades Manesse's stumbling passage towards understanding. But it's Malle's handling of the debuting Manesse and Fejto that keeps their fate from becoming melodramatic, as -­‐ like Brigitte Fossey and Georges Poujouly in René Clément's even more remarkable study of the impact of war on young minds, Jeux Interdit (1951) -­‐ they're never allowed fully to appreciate the seriousness of their situation until it's too late.

BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO Having made such an excellent impression in the wide open spaces of Transylvania in his debut feature, Katalin Varga (2009), Peter Strickland cannily confines the equally disconcerting action to a cramped recording facility in Berberian Sound Studio, a homage to 1970s Italian gialli that is less a horror movie than a study in psychological capitulation.

Apparently inspired by a pair of noisy trousers and owing debts to Michael Powell, David Lynch and Abbas Kiarostami, as well as such usual suspects as Mario Bavio, Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento, this is a masterclass in suggestion that makes magnificently manipulative use of Jennifer Kernke's production design, Nic Knowland's roving camera, Chris Dickens's editing and a sound design by Steve Haywood and Joakim Sundström that perfectly combines with the score by electro outfit Broadcast to capture not just a time and a place, but also the spirit of a genre and the fragmenting emotions of a stranger trapped in its midst.

Mild-­‐mannered Toby Jones has made his name producing sound effects for children's programmes and nature documentaries. Thus, when he arrives in Italy from Dorking some time in 1976, he suspects he has mistakenly been hired by producer Cosimo Fusco to work on a giallo by acclaimed director Antonio Mancino. Indeed, half-­‐convinced that his stay might be a short one, Jones pesters secretary Tonia Sotiropoulou to ensure he is reimbursed for his flight.

Despite a cool reception from recording engineer Guido Adorni and foley artists Josef Cseres and Pál Tóth, Jones is welcomed by actresses Fatma Mohamed and Eugenia Caruso, who are dubbing lines for The Equestrian Vortex, a harrowing tale of witchcraft in a girls' school that causes Jones to joke nervously to Fusco that this is hardly the kind of fare he is used to. But he clearly knows what he is doing and is soon supervising Cseres and Tóth in the production of gruesome noises using a range of fruits and vegetables, while

also coaxing Mohamed and Caruso into timing their lines and delivering blood-­‐curdling screams.

Somewhat relieved to retreat to the sanctuary of his room adjoining the studio, Jones reads a letter from his mother at home and plays some comfortingly familiar sounds on a tape designed to conquer his homesickness. But he is soon back at his mixing desk, where he finds Fusco's brusque professionalism as disconcerting as the breeziness of Mancino, who pops in with his playboy nephew Salvatore Li Causi to remind Jones that he is not working on a generic horror, but a signature piece by an auteur.

Still ostracised by the language barrier and increasingly frustrated by Sotiropoulou in his bid to claim his expenses, Jones is so distressed by a letter from his mother about some magpies causing trouble around a nest near his garden shed studio that he ceases to dress with his customary fastidiousness and even bawls down the phone at a clerk in accounts who proves unhelpful. Yet he manages to maintain the intricate design diagram he uses to keep on top of his task and charms his new colleagues by showing how to use a light bulb and a radiator to duplicate the sound of a UFO and copes well enough when diva Lara Parmiani comes in to record a sinister series of susurrations and Jean-­‐Michel Van Schouberg takes to the booth to produce the howls and growls needed to give voice to a malevolent goblin.

However, a third missive from Surrey and the growing tension between Fusco and Mohamed push Jones closer to the edge. His dreams seem to start merging with the movie plot and he is distraught when Mohamed is sacked and takes her revenge by trashing the studio and ruining his tapes. Consequently, Jones is less courteous towards her replacement, Ciaria D'Anna, and plays deafening noises into her headphones to bully her into producing the requisite scream for somebody being penetrated by a red-­‐hot poker. As he stands in the studio with the soundtrack completed, he stares ahead like a man traumatised and transformed by his unexpected experiences.

Following in the wake of Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974) and Brian De Palma's Blow Out (1981), this provides a fascinating reminder of the importance of sound to a motion picture. It also plays on the eccentric obsessiveness of the sound recordist and Jones more than matches Gene Hackman and John Travolta as he becomes so immersed in his assignment that he starts to lose touch with reality. However, Strickland is much more playful both in his exploitation of the audio effects and in his use of close-­‐ups of whirring analogue machinery, butchered vegetables, multi-­‐coloured flow charts and a flickering red `Silenzio' sign to convey not only the pressure that Jones is under to satisfy a lira-­‐pinching producer and an indolently arrogant director, but also the impact that the toll is taking on the sheltered milquetoast's already delicate psyche.

Twisting logic to prevent a definitive reading of action that has either addled Jones or taken place solely in his own imagination, Strickland cleverly subverts the conventions of the horror genre in which he is so determined to avoid being pigeon-­‐holed. Indeed, he almost relegates narrative to a subordinate role as he concentrates on establishing audiovisual moods whose import he can modulate with the flick of a switch or the slide of a fader. But such is picture's near-­‐fetishistic authenticity and its delight in both in-­‐jokes and obfuscation that it occasionally runs the risk of being self-­‐consciously ingenious, while the over-­‐calculating ambiguity of the conclusion feels more anti-­‐climactic than chilling.

Nevertheless, this is essential viewing for all fans of Italian cult cinema and it leaves one awaiting Strickland's next venture with baited breath.

BIRDMAN Michael Keaton landed an Oscar nomination for his flamboyant turn in Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman: or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), but it ended up walking away with Best Picture and Best Director. Critics Stateside raved about this meta-­‐satire and

pronounced it a return to form for the Mexican director after 21 Grams (2003), Babel (2006) and Biutiful (2010) took some of the lustre off his nuevo cine masterpiece, Amores Perros (2000). But, while there is no question that Keaton exhibits great physical courage, as well as actorly skill as the washed-­‐up Hollywood action hero seeking legitimacy on the Broadway stage, this despicably chauvinist insider insight into the thespian psyche falls prey to the fatal combination of being underwritten and overplayed.

As a falling star streaks across the sky, actor Michael Keaton levitates in his underwear in his dressing-­‐room at the St James Theatre on West 44th Street in New York. Back in the 1990s, he was the star of the Birdman franchise and a poster for the second sequel adorns his wall as the gravelly voice of the superhero urges Keaton to forget about seeking valediction by treading the boards in a self-­‐funded, self-­‐penned and self-­‐directed production of the Raymond Carver short story, `What We Talk About When We Talk About Love', and return to the silver screen. However, such is his commitment to the off-­‐Broadway project that he has hired daughter Emma Stone to be his assistant (as a way of trying to atone for the childhood neglect that caused her to wind up in rehab) and found a role for girlfriend Andrea Riseborough, who is desperate to start a family, even though she has a soft spot for co-­‐star Naomi Watts, another film star hoping to increase her credibility by doing a play.

As rehearsals progress, producer Zach Galifianakis worries that Keaton is behaving oddly.

So, when a light falls and hits mediocre actor Jeremy Shamos, Galifianakis insists on replacing him with Edward Norton, a Method devotee who is dating Watts and whose name could bolster the box office. Convinced that he had caused the light to fall with his telekinetic powers, Keaton agrees to the switch. But he quickly discovers Norton to be a temperamental egotist who not only demands advantageous rewrites, but who also has a penchant for deleterious practical jokes. Thus, he substitutes water for gin during a preview performance and the tipsy cast members begin bickering in front of a bemused audience.

Riseborough adds to Keaton's growing woes by announcing she is pregnant. But Norton again proves the main source of trouble, as he goes on stage sporting a bulging erection that amuses the audience much more than it does Watts, who is so mortified by his antics that she terminates the relationship. Rumours of these teething troubles reach influential New York Times critic Lindsay Duncan, who tells Keaton that she detests Hollywood has-­‐beens trying to revive their fortunes on the Great White Way and threatens to give his production a damning notice even before she has seen it.

Driven to distraction, Keaton goes to the theatre roof and wrestles with his alter ego. He rushes to the ledge and flings himself down. But, instead of plunging towards the street below, he takes flight and sails along Park Avenue before landing safely. However, Keaton is soon disabused of any thought he might have had about turning the corner when he gets locked out of the venue (when a fire door slams on his rope while he is getting some fresh air before the dramatic finale) and has to walk through Times Square in his underpants in order to gain readmission through the foyer.

Keaton is appalled that the early reviews all focus on Norton's livewire display. But, while ex-­‐wife Amy Ryan offers some timely words of support, Stone is less forgiving when Keaton catches her using drugs again and she lets him know in no uncertain terms that her problems are deeply rooted in his selfishness. Stone's suggestion that Keaton stops living in the past coincides with Riseborough admitting that she is not pregnant and he ends the romance. Thus, he is in something of a state by opening night and takes a real gun on to the stage for the finale. Duncan storms out of the theatre, as Keaton shoots himself in the face. But, as he recovers in hospital, he learns that he has only blown his nose off and that Duncan was so impressed by his `super realism' that she has given the play a rave review.

Stone offers her congratulations. But, when she pops out of the room, Keaton sees some birds fluttering outside his window and he climbs out on to the ledge to join them. On

returning, Stone is surprised to find the room empty and is horrified to see the open window. However, instead of seeing her father lying dead in the street below, she looks up and smiles quietly to herself.

Laced with visual allusions to both Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948) and Federico Fellini's 8ó (1963), this is a film that is destined to divide audiences and critics alike. Those who buy into the backslapping luvviness are likely to be wowed by the countless throwaways riffing on everything from social media, actorly snobbery and comic-­‐book blockbusters to Justin Bieber, Roland Barthes and George Clooney. But there is precious little finesse in a scenario concocted by Iñárritu in conjunction with Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Jr. and Armando Bo and, consequently, each one-­‐liner is followed by the briefest pause designed to accommodate the drum roll and cymbal crash that nodding industry lags will doubtlessly hear as clearly as Keaton heeds Birdman's interior monologue.

But if admirers are able to forgive the smugness, there is surely no way they can condone the sexist depiction of the female characters, who are either shrews, nags or prudes. It's bad enough that Riseborough has to play a character who tries to trap her man by pretending to be pregnant, but she also has to endure a purely specious kiss with Watts, who is shockingly wasted as Norton' insecure paramour. Indeed, it feels as though someone had the brilliant idea to perform a little gender reassignment on Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve (1950) and, while this may reflect the current state of Hollywood (with actors of both sexes struggling to sustain fame once they have been forced to disembark from the mega-­‐hit gravy train, if they were ever lucky enough to scramble aboard), the message is put across too coarsely for it to register as perceptive satire. The assault on sniping critics is also thuddingly gauche.

Exposing his thinning pate and thickening waistline, Keaton throws himself into the best role he has had since Batman. But Iñárritu nods and winks far too frequently and blatantly in the direction of his casting coup for its efficacy to retain its sheen, in spite of the neat gag of having Birdman sound more like Christian Bale's Caped Crusader than Keaton's own.

Edward Norton also enjoys himself in sending up Stanislavskian pretension (while getting away with the fact that he, of course, headlined Lous Leterrier's The Incredible Hulk in 2008), while Zach Galifianakis shows admirable restraint as Keaton's lawyer sidekick.

But the standout contributions come on the craft side, with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki keeping his camera in almost perpetual motion through meticulously choreographed takes that have been artfully edited by Douglas Crise and Stephen Mirrione to make them appear seamless -­‐ even though the action takes place over several days.

Antonio Sánchez's score is equally acute and propulsive, as not only do the passages of jazz drumming energise proceedings, but they also raise questions about their source and the extent to which they are connected to the disembodied voice Keaton keeps hearing and the visions (or hallucinations) he experiences. Yet, while there are bravura technical and dramatic moments to admire here, they are swamped by the self-­‐satisfaction that Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman managed more successfully to avoid in Being John Malkovich (1999).

BOYHOOD Disappointingly pipped for the Best Picture prize at the recent Academy Awards, Richard Linklater's Boyhood is a remarkable achievement. It doesn't always make for compelling viewing, but such is the ambition and integrity of a project that was filmed on just 39 days over 12 years that it is impossible not to admire the director and his accomplished and creditably committed cast. Linklater is no stranger to long-­‐hail cinema, having reunited Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy on Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013). Yet, while this is closer in spirit to Michael Apted's enduring Up series, which has dropped in on the lives of a group of 14 British children every seven years since

1964, the picture it most consistently brings to mind is François Truffaut's wondrously natural study of childhood, Small Change (1976).

We first meet Mason Evans, Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) in 2002, as a six year-­‐old living with his mother, Olivia (Patricia Arquette), and older sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater). Following an argument with her boyfriend, Ted (Steven Chester Prince), Olivia decides to up sticks and move to Houston, where she can finish her degree and get a decent job. However, the relocation tempts her estranged husband Mason (Ethan Hawke) back to the family circle after 18 months in Alaska and he strives to explain to Sam and Mason. Jr. why he has been away for so long and why the war in Iraq is so iniquitous, in spite of the atrocity of 9/11. He takes the kids bowling, but argues furiously with Olivia and Mason, Jr. is as uncomfortable watching them bicker from a window as he is witnessing his mother flirting with her college professor, Bill Welbrock (Marco Perella).

Three years pass before we catch up with the family, which has been extended by Olivia's marriage to Bill, who has two children of his own: Mindy (Jamie Howard) and Randy (Andrew Villareal). Sam and Mason, Jr. get on well enough with their step-­‐siblings and they dress up to attend the midnight release of Harry Potter and the Half-­‐Blood Prince. But they are also becoming closer to their father, who has settled in Houston and shares an apartment with his pal, Jimmy (Charlie Sexton). He takes them to an Astros baseball game and invites them for a sleepover. However, Mason has misgivings about Bill's strict parenting and feels sorry for his son when he is forced to have his hair cut short.

Within two years, Olivia has also come to realise that Bill is an abusive alcoholic and she files for divorce after he assaults her. She moves in with her friend Carol (Barbara Chisholm) and her daughter Abby (Cassidy Johnson) and completes her studies.

Meanwhile, Sam has started dating and a concerned Mason has a chat with her about boys and contraception. He also takes Mason, Jr. on a camping trip to the Pedernales Falls State Park, where they bond over The Beatles and Star Wars movies, as well as the teenager's growing interest in girls.

Olivia gets a job teaching psychology at a school in San Marcos, a small town outside Austin. But, while she cosies up to Jim (Brad Hawkins), who has served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Mason, Jr. is bullied at his new school and endures humiliation on a camping trip. However, he has developed into a strapping youth and his father is pleased to see that he is starting to attract girls. He has a new baby with second wife Annie (Jenni Tooley), whose parents (Richard Andrew Jones and Karen Jones) take a shine to Mason, Jr. and give him a vintage shotgun and a personalised bible. Mason also buys the 15 year-­‐old his first suit and makes him a mixtape of solo Beatle tracks.

In addition to dabbling with drink and drugs, Mason. Jr. also becomes interested in photography and one of his teachers, Mr Turlington (Tom McTigue), encourages him to put more thought into his work, as he has a genuine eye. However, he has been distracted by Sheena (Zoe Graham) and is taken aback when the prettiest girl in the school agrees to go out with him. But Jim disapproves of his party lifestyle and confronts him after he arrives home after curfew and Olivia is forced to accept that her third marriage is also over. Sam and Mason, Jr. discuss their situation when he visits his sister on campus at the University of Texas at Austin. She has a steady boyfriend (Will Harris) and, as they stay up to watch the sunrise, it seems that she has come through their peripatetic childhood relatively unscathed.

Now in his senior year at high school, Mason, Jr. has his heart broken when Sheena cheats on him. But he wins a prestigious photography competition and is awarded a college scholarship. His father throws him a graduation party and takes the opportunity to impart a last bit of paternal wisdom. He also comes to lunch with Olivia, where she announces that she is going to downsize the house and wants everyone to come and sort out the possessions they wish to keep. She gets tearful when Mason, Jr. packs for college

and laments that their life as a family has passed so quickly and that all she has to look forward to now is old age and death.

Arriving at Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Mason, Jr. finds he has been billeted with Dalton (Maximillian McNamara), who already has a girlfriend. Barb (Taylor Weaver) introduces him to her roommate, Nicole (Jessi Mechler), and feeds him a chocolate mushroom. Feeling at home on campus, Mason, Jr. joins his new friends on a trek through the Big Bend Ranch State Park. Sitting high on a peak with the world stretching out before him, he tells Nicole that the secret of life is not seizing the moment, but always being in it.

Working without a finished script and a total budget of around $2.4 million, Linklater has created an intelligent and largely contrivance-­‐free insight into modern youth. Aware that the teenpic has covered just about every aspect of coming of age, he opts for minor incidents rather than seismic occurrences and, thus, manages to sustain the impression of capturing lives being lived. The decision to allow Ellar Coltrane and his own daughter, Lorelei, to grow up on screen rather than cast three kids of differing ages adds to the air of authenticity, which is subtly maintained by the Oscar-­‐nominated Hawke and Arquette.

Coltrane takes a while to get into character, but Linklater turns his initial awkwardness to his advantage and is rewarded with a performance of growing capability and awareness.

Credit has to be given to cinematographers Lee Daniel and Shane Kelly, as well as editor Sandra Adair. But the key craft contribution is Rodney Becker and Gay Studebaker's production design, as so many small details involving fashions, phones and video games appear so casually accurate and, yet, they so deftly root each unflagged scene shift in its new time frame. These changes also reinforce audience identification with the story and its milieu, as they will recognise many of the brands and will reflect on their own memories of a particular period. Indeed, this is much more a film for older viewers than adolescents, as Linklater seems to be more interested in chronicling the effect of events on Coltrane rather than viewing them from the boy's gradually maturing perspective. Given the nature of the production, this makes perfect sense, as it allows Linklater to retain narrative control without appearing to be a puppet master.

The majority of the memorable scenes involve Hawke, whether he is waxing lyrical about the Beatle bootleg Black Album, laying into George Lucas or beating the drum for Barack Obama. However, Arquette's set-­‐pieces feel more soap operatic, as she recognises that her heart has led her into another foolish union and, while it may be true to life, it feels a touch dramatically indolent to have both of her subsequent spouses be substance-­‐abusing losers with a predilection for domestic violence. It's also a shame that Lorelei Linklater is allowed to drift out of the picture, as she is a much more natural performer than Coltrane.

Indeed, given Hollywood's tendency to prioritise adolescent males, it might have made a more intriguing picture if she had been the primary focus of its 143 scenes. Nevertheless, this is a fascinating experiment that benefits greatly from being photographed on 35mm and from the deceptively rough-­‐and-­‐ready approach to structure, technique and the tantalising untied loose ends.

CHARLIE'S COUNTRY An expedition fails to go according to plan in Rolf de Heer's Charlie's Country, which earned David Gulpilil the Best Actor prize at Cannes for his tragic-­‐comic performance in a semi-­‐autobiographical saga for which he also shares a screenwriting credit. This is Gulpilil's third collaboration with the Dutch-­‐born director, after The Tracker (2002) and Ten Canoes (2006), and the trust between them is evident in a story that draws on the battles with alcohol and the law that the Aboriginal actor has endured since his breakthrough as a debuting 16 year-­‐old opposite Jenny Agutter in Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout (1971). But, while this is a lament for a passing way of life, it is not a film without wit or hope.

Having gazed with regretful pride at a photo of himself performing a tradition dance before

the Queen at the opening of the Sydney Opera House, sixtysomething David Gulpilil takes a wander through his Arnhem Land settlement in Australia's Northern Territories. He exchanges good-­‐natured racist insults with cop Luke Ford and pays off some of his debts after collecting his weekly benefits payment. While sitting by a campfire, Gulpilil decides that he would like a new house and is confused why the white council official should be allowed a proper dwelling on his ancestral land, while he has to make do with a shack.

He is equally perplexed when Ford impounds buddy Peter Djigirr's car and confiscates their guns after they go buffalo hunting. Yet, as they drink into the night with Peter Minygululu, they take comfort in the fact that the rotting carcass will soon stink out the police station. Gulpilil and his pals frequently seek oblivion in drink and drugs and he gets the idea to return to the bush while smoking weed purchased from dealer Gary Waddell, whom he betrays the next day when Ford offers him money to act as a tracker. However, when he asks Ford for the return of his rifle, he is informed that he needs a $60 licence, even though he claims to be a hunter rather than a recreational shooter.

On top of his mounting frustration with the white fella cop, Gulpilil is also informed by doctor Dan Wyllie that he needs to clean up his act. He is distressed to see old friend Richard Birrin Birrin flown off to die in a Darwin hospital and, when Ford informs him that he cannot keep the spear he had just whittled because it constitutes a lethal weapon, Gulpilil decides to quit the compound and reclaim his heritage in the Outback. He steals a police car and persuades Djigirr to accompany him. But when the vehicle runs out of fuel, Djigirr heads back home, leaving Gulpilil to fend for himself in the wilds.

Quickly acclimatising to his new terrain, Gulpilil makes himself a shelter and some new spears. He delights in painting on tree bark and catching a barramundi fish and, as he eats, he loudly proclaims that he is a free man with a vast supermarket at his disposal. However, he is soaked by a downpour in the night and goes in search of some sturdier accommodation. He finds an old hut and dreams of the illustrations on the walls. But his cough worsens, as he spends another night in the rain, shivering under his makeshift billet.

Lying under a tree, he looks at his crumpled photograph of the Opera House. However, he is unconscious when Djigirr finds him and calls the flying doctor.

When he wakes in a Darwin hospital, Gulpilil is indignant that doctor Ritchie Singer makes no effort to pronounced his `foreign' name. But, once he feels strong enough, he goes in search of Birrin Birrin and holds his hand as the old man passes away. Determined not to meet the same fate, Gulpilil slips out of the ward and makes his way to a cash till. He is watched by Jennifer Budukpuduk Gaykamangu, who whisks him to an off-­‐licence, where owner Gary Sweet watches suspiciously as they choose some hooch. Gaykamangu has been barred from purchasing alcohol, but Gulpilil's ID card is clean and he follows his new friend to the `long grass' camp where she lives with several other ageing Aborigines, who are hiding in the bushes from the police until she returns.

Having caroused into the night, Gulpilil wakes with a terrible hangover. But Gaykamangu gives him another bottle of grog and they return to the store for fresh supplies. Shortly afterwards, two elders come to the camp and admonish the long grassers for demeaning First Australian culture. However, they dismiss their protests and Gulpilil sets off to buy more booze. Sweet warns him that he could get into trouble for abetting a banned person, but he ignores his concern. That afternoon, however, the police raid the park and Ford arrests Gulpilil after he smashes in windscreen with a shovel and he curses that he ever put his faith in a black fella, because they always let you down in the end.

In court, Gulpilil tells magistrate Wayne Anthoney that he was sitting quietly in his own home when the cops burst in. However, he has no sympathy with his claim to own the land and the camera holds on Gulpilil's face, as a barber shaves off his long grey hair and beard and he sits forlorn under a single light bulb looking degraded and dejected. He gets a job in

the prison laundry, but keeps to himself in the exercise yard and the canteen, where food is shown being slopped on to plates in a series of top shots that emphasise the dehumanising mundanity of the daily routine.

Djigirr comes to visit and tells Gulpilil that he bought a licence for his gun. Parole officer Bojana Novakovic also tries to be positive, as she explains that he will have to live in a dry house and stay away from known drinkers. She laughs when he sneers that all Aussies drink -­‐ even cops -­‐ and suggests that they should stay away from him. But he is soon back around the campfire with Djigirr and Minygululu, who tells him that the man who teaches traditional dances to the children has fallen ill. He urges Gulpilil to take his place and he shows them the photo of the best day of his life before breaking into a dance. As the film ends, Gulpilil encourages his body-­‐painted students as they dance by firelight and the credits roll alongside a close-­‐up of the old man's face as he gazes beyond the flames.

Such moments of intimacy are superbly contrasted throughout with the shabbiness of the compound and the untamed wildness of the bush. But, while Ian Jones's photography is often magnificent, it's Gulpilil's shifts of mood that make this so mesmerising. Whether bantering in Yolngu with his mates or giving as good as he gets from those in authority, his effusive blend of pride and pugnacity makes his prison humiliation all the more harrowing.

De Heer never pushes the political agenda as forcibly as Warwick Thornton did in Samson and Delilah (2009), but he gets his points across without ever patronising Gulpilil, who provided many of the scenarios that De Heer shaped into a script. Graham Tardif's score similarly avoids the sentimentality and cliché that often creep into well-­‐intentioned pictures about both the historical and the current treatment of the Aboriginal population. But, ultimately, this is a survivor's story, thus, makes a fitting companion piece to Walkabout.

CYCLING WITH MOLIÉRE Having previously collaborated on L'Année Juliette (1995) and The Cost of Living (2003), writer-­‐director Philippe Le Guay travelled to the Ile de Ré to ask Fabrice Luchini to star in The Women on the Sixth Floor (2010). During the course of his stay, Le Guay hatched the idea of basing a scenario around Luchini's fondness for the classics of French literature and the result is Cycling With Molière, a droll dissertation on the relevance of canonical texts to modern audiences and the cultural chasms that exist between the page, the stage, television and cinema. Deftly using passages from The Misanthrope to comment on the action, this is an intelligent insight into the creative process that resists the temptation to brandish its wit and discernment. Moreover, it affords its leads the opportunity to demonstrate their dexterity, while guying actorly pretension.

Promising agent Anne Mercier that he will be back in Paris in time for a business dinner, TV actor Lambert Wilson takes the train to the Ile de Ré, off the west coast of France.

Renowned for playing a surgeon in a popular melodrama, Wilson is keen to establish his thesping credentials by mounting a production of Molière's The Misanthrope and he hopes to convince the reclusive Fabrice Luchini to make a comeback some three years after he supposedly suffered a breakdown while making a film.

Crossing the bridge linking the island to the mainland, Wilson makes light of his celebrity by leaving a message with a leading doctor after cabby Stéphan Wojtowicz tells him about his aged mother's hip injury. By contrast, Luchini argues the toss with plumber Jean-­‐Marc Rousseau about the need to repair the septic tank in the garden of the rundown house he inherited from an uncle who disliked his 10 sons. He is surprised but pleased to see Wilson and they reminisce about the shoot in Hungary when they last saw each other six years ago.

Luchini avoids discussing his health, but shows Wilson the pictures he now paints to pass the time. Cutting to the chase, Wilson says he remembers Luchini's passion for Molière and mentions that he is planning a production of The Misanthrope in Paris. Luchini

declares acting to be a vile profession, but Wilson insists that he is one of the good guys.

However, he doesn't want to appear too desperate and says that brain surgeon partner Camille Japy is from the Ile de Ré and that he is in the area looking for a holiday home.

Keen to change the subject, Luchini calls estate agent friend Ged Marlon and the pair are soon inspecting a property that Marlon insists would be a wise investment after major renovation.

As they look round, Luchini asks about the play and Wilson assures him that he has a producer and a theatre lined up. However, he bridles when Luchini assumes that he would take the title role of Alceste and Wilson reminds him that he once claimed that the supporting part of Philinte was more of a challenge, as scholars have always mixed up which character is the optimist and which is the cynic. Luchini is aghast that Wilson would have the audacity to offer him second billing and Wilson tries to claw things back by suggesting they could break with tradition by alternating the roles. Luchini refuses to contemplate such an arrangement, however, and it is only when Wilson is trying to find out train times that he suggests they sleep on the proposal and postpone any decision until they have had a read through the following day. Declining an offer to stay in a cluttered spare room, Wilson checks into the hotel run by Édith Le Merdy and her niece, Laurie Bordesoules. He apologises to Mercier for missing their appointment and tries to sleep, while Luchini daubs away at a canvas into the night.

The next morning, the actors toss a coin to see who reads which role and Luchini plumps for Alceste. They select a scene about spurned friendship and Wilson suggests that Luchini is attacking the text too vigorously. As they walk by the sea, Luchini admits that he confused Alceste with Che Guevara and they pop into a beachside restaurant for lunch. As they eat, Wilson confides that Luchini saved his career by giving him the confidence to stand up to a bullying director and he lays on the flattery by complimenting his interpretation of Tartuffe. They notice Maya Sansa sitting at an adjacent table and Luchini explains that she is an Italian who lives nearby.

They rehearse through the afternoon and Wilson praises Luchini for capturing Alceste's controlled anger and Luchini admits that he is impressed with Wilson's Philinte. But, while he insists that he has fallen out of love with acting, Luchin agrees to postpone a decision until the weekend and proposes that they spend the next four days workshopping the text.

As Luchini goes for a bike ride, Wilson chats to Le Merdy about his TV series and discovers that Bordesoules is a porn actress who has made decent money from a handful of films. Le Merdy asks if Wilson would give her niece some acting tips and he half-­‐heartedly agrees.

During their first session the following day, Luchini loses his temper when Wilson's phone keeps ringing and he placates him by explaining that he is arranging to borrow a house from novelist Josiane Stoléru so that he can better concentrate on the work at hand.

However, the hackles are soon raised again when Wilson complains that Luchini is delivering his lines too quickly and he responds by declaiming with plodding deliberation.

Wilson despairs of getting anywhere if Luchini cannot accept criticism and Luchini retorts that he responds favourably to notes that make sense before comparing Alceste's trial for mocking Oronte's verse with the persecution that drove him into exile.

During a cigarette break, Wilson asks Luchini about the rumours surrounding his breakdown and he explains that he decided to quit after being betrayed by a producer he considered a friend. They resume their labours, but it doesn't take long for Luchini to criticise Wilson's inflection and they argue about the sanctity of alexandrine rhythms and the need for audiences to understand an ancient form of language. Luchini cites iconic actor Louis Jouvet's maxim about cheating patrons unless the text is revered and Wilson takes exception to the insinuation that he is something of a small-­‐screen ham. He protests that actors have a duty to communicate rather than be elitist, but their dispute is

interrupted

by Marlon arriving to show Wilson two more holiday homes.

Luchini insists on tagging along and the pair continue to bicker as they look around Sansa's house. She is tetchy and warns Marlon that she will hire another estate agent unless he secures a quick sale. Wilson tries to charm her, but she says she detests actors because they are narcissistic and dismisses Luchini's efforts to explain that his friend is famous and deserving of a little more respect. Wilson curses her as they go to see a converted windmill, only for Luchini to accuse him of being a cheapskate when he questions the asking price when he is earning €1.2 million for each series of his trashy doctor show. This prompts Wilson to lose his temper and he mocks the Ile de Ré and its microclimate and derides its blonde Catholic family vibe before falling silent when Marlon insists it's the second most popular holiday destination in France.

In order to clear the air, Luchini suggests they go bicycling and they run lines as they roll through idyllic countryside. However, Wilson is nervous about his brakes and careers into a stretch of water when swerving to avoid an oncoming moped. Luchini compliments him on his physique as he changes into dry clothes and Wilson confides that he loves Japy and her 12 year-­‐old daughter, but isn't keen on moving in with her. Luchini delights in his isolation and wishes the bridge had never been opened linking the island with La Rochelle.

Yet he concedes he is enjoying playing host and acting opposite Wilson. But he refuses to make a commitment to the play and announces that he will be late on parade the next day, as he is having a vasectomy. Wilson is bemused why a loner would need such a drastic operation and Luchini explains that he never wants to repeat the mistake of having a thankless son.

As Luchini waits at the bus stop, Sansa offers him a lift and he accepts, in spite of his dislike of women drivers. She teases him about being raised by an abusive mother and apologises for being so snappish when they first met. He concurs with her contention that actors are awful people and is sorry to learn that she is splitting up with her husband. She curses him for not wanting children and then abandoning her for a woman with a son.

Furthermore, she warns Luchini about the painful after-­‐effects a friend suffered following his vasectomy. He asks what she plans to do next and she insists she wishes to turn the page, as life is too short to dwell on the past. But, even though she is keen to move on, Sansa concedes that has grown fond of the Ile. Having heard distant cries of pain in the waiting-­‐room, Luchini jumps off the operating table and flees. Meanwhile, Wilson is shown around his new lodgings by housekeeper Christine Murillo and is delighted to discover a jacuzzi in the back garden. Murillo tuts about her employer using it naked and criticises the way so many houses on the Ile have been turned into retreats that could otherwise accommodate large families. As he leaves, Wilson bumps into Wojtowicz, who asks why the renowned doctor hasn't been in touch about his mother.

Wilson shrugs that he has done his best and walks away, but it is clear that the cabby believes he is belittling him.

Sansa collects Luchini from the hospital and coaxes him into singing along with the car radio. They go for a walk along a stretch of deserted beach and she regrets having found a buyer for her property. Wilson cycles up and enthuses about fresh air and exercise before pedalling away. But he cannot resist teasing Luchini about romancing the future mother of his bambini, as Luchini picks vegetables from the garden. He is in such a good mood that he agrees to interrupt their afternoon rehearsal to talk to Bordesoules about acting and they joke about her taking more exception to the early hours involved in filming pornography than the indignities she is forced to endure.

Indeed, Luchini is in such high spirits that he allows Wilson to play Alceste. However, he quickly becomes irritated by his decision to limp as he reads his lines and Luchini rolls his eyes as Wilson explains that he has invented a backstory involving a cruel father and a

childhood fall from a horse. Luchini stresses Philinte's lines about Alceste becoming a laughing stock and lambastes Wilson for missing the character's core hatred by trying to retain his own misguided sense of civility.

They set to squabbling again, but are disturbed by Bordesoules. She tells them that she is only doing porn to pay for her wedding. However, she has a train to catch to arrange a shoot in Bucharest and Luchini seizes upon her polite disinterest in what they are doing to insist that she watches them perform a scene from the play. She confuses The Misanthrope with Tartuffe and Luchini shoots her a contemptuous glance before revelling in a sequence in which Alceste decries Oronte for being a hack. As they turn for approval after a lively exchange, Wilson and Luchini are dismayed to see Bordesoules texting her boyfriend. So, Luchini decides to humiliate her by making her read one of Celimène's speeches and they are taken aback when she performs it with feeling. Indeed, as she hurries away, they feel sad that such a sweet girl has become involved in such a sordid industry and regret being unable to do anything to spare her future ignominy.

Alone that night, Wilson invites Japy for the weekend and goes out to try the jacuzzi. It is underlit and seems very inviting. But the water begins to bubble out of control and Wilson thrashes around as he struggles to switch it off. He regales Luchini and Sansa with the story the following day and she teasingly compares his plight to James Dean's Porsche crash. As she leaves the restaurant, Luchini invites her to supper and they shop for food at the conclusion of an amicable rehearsal montage. Luchini is impressed to see Wilson on the cover of a listings magazine and insists they catch his show that evening, as he never usually bothers with television.

Trying to ignore the smell of the septic tank, Sansa compliments Luchini on his home and settles down to watch Doctor Morange. Wilson explains the plot and admits to being proud of a couple of scenes. He doubts Luchini's sincerity when he congratulates him on the delivery of a particularly melodramatic line. But he is deeply hurt when Luchini takes a phone call from Marlon and assures him that he is not interrupting anything important. As Luchini returns to the sofa, Wilson makes his excuses and Sansa ticks Luchini off for being so callous. She wounds him by saying he lacks the purity of heart to play Alceste. But he refuses to apologise and Sansa leaves lamenting that she has misjudged him.

Next morning, Wilson cycles to the market in the nearby town in order to cheer himself up and milks the murmur of curiosity and adulation. However,Wojtowicz spots Wilson and accuses him of being a fraud because his doctor friend still hasn't phoned back But, in defending himself against a charge of not caring about the little people, Wilson ends up in a fistfight and the onlookers gasp in horror as he hurls Wojtowicz into a stall.

Wilson seeks out Luchini for some medical attention and he tries to apologise for his behaviour the previous evening. Wilson insists on reading Alceste in a scene in which he ignores Philinte's efforts to calm him down and rages against base flattery before hissing out his loathing of common humanity. Luchini is genuinely surprised by his fervour. But Wilson is in no mood to be patronised and accuses Luchini of toying with him for his own amusement. Yet, as he helps Sansa pack her books, Luchini admits that he has enjoyed acting again and has warmed to Wilson, in spite of his shortcomings. As he cycles home, he spots Wilson struggling with his bike chain and agrees to do the play. Wilson accepts on the proviso that they swap cycles and Luchini proceeds to ride into the water when trying to evade the same moped that did for Wilson.

In a sequence that references François Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1961) and The 400 Blows (1959), Sansa joins them on a ride to the beach. Wilson smiles at Luchini paddling, as he calls Mercier and asks her to bring the contracts for signing. He convinces himself that he has brought Luchini back to life and looks on benevolently as he dances with Sansa after supper. As they wheel their bikes home, Wilson jokes that Luchini will need an Alitalia loyalty card and he sings to himself as he paints into the small hours.

Luchini opens the shutters next morning with a renewed sense of zeal and strides with purpose to Sansa's place. However, he discovers that she has left without saying goodbye and, when Luchini informs Wilson, he confesses to sleeping with her after returning to fetch his forgotten phone and finding her crying on the bed. Wilson insists Sansa threw herself at him and Luchini tries to laugh off the betrayal by tutting that he could hardly have fallen in love in four days. He jokes that he won't tell Japy when she arrives and reassures Wilson that they are all adults and that these things happen.

Across the island, Japy and Mercier hail a taxi and are disturbed to learn how Wojtowicz got his black eye. Stoléru has also descended and she invites some friends for a soirée.

Wilson tells her about the killer jacuzzi and she asks him to pose for some photographs to mark his stay in her home. Meanwhile, Luchini has taken receipt of a 17th-­‐century costume and takes a long, hard look at himself in the mirror as he shaves off his stubbly beard. He cycles to the party and arrives to see Wilson working the room.

Distractedly, Luchini welcomes Japy and Mercier to the Ile and discusses rehearsal and touring details with the producer. But, when he asks Luchini to recite a few lines, he scowls that he is a thespian not novelty act. He also avers that he won't do the play at all unless he plays Alceste. Wilson is furious with him for reneging on their deal. But Luchini calmly replies that Wilson demonstrated that he knows nothing of honour when he slept with Sansa. Japy is shocked and asks Wilson to explain what has been going on, but he is more intent on trying to thump Luchini and they have to be kept apart. Recovering his composure, Luchini quotes Alceste's lines about humanity being wolves and declares that the assembled liggers and philistines deserve never to see his face again.

A fade out gives way to opening night and Japy joins Mercier in the audience. All appears to be going well, with Wilson playing Alceste to Jean-­‐Charles Delaume's Philinte. But, as he reaches the point in the text where Luchini had criticised his inflection, Wilson pauses and realises he was right all along. He stands in embarrassment at the front of the stage and looks out at the audience, suddenly aware of his limitations. Back on the Ile de Ré, Luchini cycles to the beach. He looks out to sea and smiles to himself, as he takes pride in his hatred of humanity.

Played to perfection by Wilson and Luchini and smartly scripted and directed by Le Guay, this is a deceptively acerbic assault on slipping standards in the French acting profession and the declining importance of classic plays in an age of dumbed-­‐down Internet access.

Le Guay uses the gentrification of the Ile de Ré as a metaphor for the state of the performing arts and makes adroit use of Jean-­‐Claude Larrieu's seascapes, Françoise Dupertuis's production design, Elisabeth Tavernier's costumes and Milou Sanner's hairstyles to emphasise the differences between Wilson's pampered tele-­‐celeb and Luchini's self-­‐destructive artiste.

There are dry patches and the last act is allowed to drag. But the odd moment of slapstick pricks the pomposity of the duelling `friends' and refocuses the mind before another bout of slick intertextuality. Some critics have accused Le Guay of reducing the female characters to ciphers, but the chauvinism is too rooted in the scenario for it to be anything other than dramatically relevant. Besides, both Sansa and Bordesoules have their moments, as does Le Guay, who casts a shroud of ambiguity over both Luchini's precise motivation for embarking upon what may always have been a charade and the truth about Wilson's midnight tryst with Sansa. But centre stage very much belongs to Luchini and Wilson, whose byplay is a masterclass in both scene-­‐stealing and generosity that leaves one hoping against hope that a Hollywood producer hasn't hit upon the idea of reworking the picture around The Iceman Cometh as a vehicle for Robin Williams and Al Pacino.

DANCING IN JAFFA Any initiative that can help foster a greater understanding between Israelis and

Palestinians has to be applauded, especially when it involves the younger generation.

Juliano Mer Khamis and Danniel Danniel's Arma's Children (2004) has already celebrated in the achievements of the Jenin theatre group set up by Jewish human rights activist Arna Mer-­‐Khamis, while the work of the West-­‐Eastern Divan Orchestra founded by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said is commended by Paul Smaczny in Knowledge Is the Beginning (2006). So, there is nothing particularly original about either the dance school founded by Pierre Dulaine or Hilla Medalias decision to document its progress in Dancing in Jaffa, which counts Morgan Spurlock and La Toya Jackson among its executive producers. But, as in the aforementioned films, the schematic nature of the enterprise is more than compensated for by the compelling human drama that takes place when kids from either side of the divide get bitten by the bug and start learning a few home truths along with their dance steps.

Dulaine will already be familiar to moviegoers as the brains behind the inter-­‐ethnic `Dancing Classrooms' scheme that Marilyn Agrelo featured in the charming Mad Hot Ballroom (2005), while Antonio Banderas played the four-­‐time World Ballroom Dancing champion in Liz Friedlander's musical drama, Take the Lead (2006). However, what is less well known, is that Dulaine fled Jaffa for Amman as a four year-­‐old with his Palestinian-­‐Irish parents shortly before the State of Israel was proclaimed in 1948. Thus, his desire to make a difference in the city of his birth is as personal as it is courageous. Yet, while he is able to take pleasure in seeing dance work its magic on young minds, he is denied the chance to revisit his childhood home by its menacing Israeli owner, who makes it very clear what he thinks about peaceful co-­‐existence.

Five schools agree to participate in the programme, which will run for 10 weeks. Two each are exclusively Israeli or Palestinian, while the fifth is one of Jaffa's few integrated facilities.

But Dulaine initially struggles to overcome some sizeable cultural, as well as political obstacles. Muslim boys and girls are forbidden to teach each other, let alone dance, while the majority of the Israeli children have had no contact with Palestinians whatsoever and regard them with a certain trepidation. Add into the mix the natural reluctance of tweenagers to cross the gender line and Dulaine's problems become all-­‐too-­‐amusingly apparent. He dismisses those who refuse to co-­‐operate with pained impatience. But his task is made easier when he shows a video of himself in action with Yvonne Marceau and she flies in to help the kids realise that they don't have to become betrothed to their partners, while also coaxing them into seeing dance as an act of free expression and subversion that appeals to their nascently rebellious nature.

Medalia maintains a discreet distance, as Dulaine auditions his dancers and announces that there will be a competition with prizes for the winners. But her focus eventually falls on three aspirants: Noor Gabai, who resents being marginalised at the mixed school because her Jewish mother converted to Islam on marrying a since deceased Palestinian; Lois Dana, a peppy Jewish girl whose secular single mother had twins through artifical insemination; and Alaa Bubali, a sweet-­‐natured Palestinian boy who lives in a tiny fisherman's shack in the Ajam neighbourhood that is currently being gentrified by the Israelis.

Lois and Alaa are paired together and Medalia accompanies them on eye-­‐opening visits to their respective abodes, where each is accorded a friendly welcome. But, while their growing friendship is charming to behold, it's Noor's transformation that fascinates Medalia, as the spurned pariah whom nobody wanted to partner turns out to be highly talented and her personality and outlook undergo radical overhauls as she gains confidence from her accomplishments. Her success is viewed with particular pleasure by Ms Rachel, a deeply religious Jewish teacher at her school, who is committed to bringing the communities together, in spite of the fact that her brother was badly injured in a suicide bombing.

Although Medalia rather skirts the political complexities, the sight of parents mingling

without prejudice as part of the 500-­‐strong audience attending the competition (including a burqa-­‐clad mother happily snapping photographs) suggests that Dulaine has made significant strides. But it's the enthusiasm of the kids and their new-­‐found respect for each other that makes this such an inspiring watch. Where they once spat at one another, they now beam and throw themselves into routines with unselfconscious joy. Yet, as Dulaine heads home, such moments of exhilaration seem dismayingly isolated in a wider context that sees seething right-­‐wingers being protected by the Israeli Defence Force as they march through Palestinian neighbourhoods on Independence Day demanding the expulsion of the Arabs. Lois and her mother can be seen protesting against the thugs. But the incident reaffirms that it will take more than the two-­‐step to find a solution to a seemingly intractable problem.

THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY It can hardly have been a coincidence that Peter Strickland's The Duke of Burgundy arrived in cinemas a week after Sam Taylor-­‐Johnson's hideously hyped adaptation of EL James's bestseller, Fifty Shades of Grey. However, this intense, claustrophobic study in sadomasochism owes more to the 1970s sexploitation sagas of Jean Rollin and Jesús Franco than smut fiction. Indeed, just as Berberian Sound Studio (2012) paid affectionate tribute to the giallo thrillers produced around the same time in Italy by the likes of Dario Argento, so this darkly droll tale of obsession, submission and possession (which is named after a species of butterfly) is filled with grace notes that will delight Euro aficionados, while also reminding bibliophiles of Jean Genet's The Maids and John Fowles's debut novel, The Collector, which was filmed five decades ago by William Wyler, with Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar in the leads.

Proceedings are set in a rustic idyll somewhere in Central Europe in an unspecified period and open with a sublimely stylised credit sequence accompanied by the folksy music of Cat's Eyes (Faris Badwan and Rachel Zeffira) that makes knowing use of colour-­‐washed, freeze-­‐frame photomontage and eccentric credits to the providers of the lingerie (Andrea Flesch) and perfume (Je Suis Gizella) used in the picture. However, the mood quickly changes, as thirtysomething maid Chiara D'Anna returns from cycling through the woods to be scolded by older mistress Sidse Babett Knudsen for being late.

The latter is an eminent orthopterist (while D'Anna is merely an amateur entomologist) and her remote, ivy-­‐covered mansion is filled with specimens and illustrations testifying to her expertise. She also appears to demand total obedience from D'Anna and inflicts a scatalogical punishment when she is dissatisfied with the hand-­‐laundering of her underwear. But any notion that Knudsen is the controlling force in the relationship is dispelled when it is revealed that D'Anna has purchased the kinky outfits in her wardrobe.

Moreover, she scripts their encounters down to the last detail and leaves handwritten cards around the premises to instruct Knudsen in the words she should use in chastising her and how long to leave her locked in a wooden chest that seems to be her favoured place of confinement.

Inhabiting a male-­‐free world populated entirely by lesbian lepidopterists, Knudsen and D'Anna have their private moments of tenderness. But they readily reassume their respective roles of dominance and servility whenever they are in company. However, they don't live solely for sensual pleasure, as Knudsen takes her science very seriously and joins fellow specialists Eugenia Caruso, Kata Bartsch, Eszter Tompa and Zita Kraszkó in lecturing on the sounds made by various butterflies and moths to a small audience of tweed-­‐wearing ladies (whose numbers are swelled by some pale mannequins in a sly reference to Franco's 1968 insight into S&M performance, Succubus). But these encounters with the outside world afford neighbour Monica Swinn the opportunity to sew a little discord, as she informs Knudsen that D'Anna has been cleaning Kraszkó's boots in

the backyard.

Rather than being irate, however, Knudsen is somewhat grateful for the excuse to keep D'Anna at a distance, as she has hurt her back and finds it much comfier to wear a pair of baggy pyjamas in bed than some of the constricting ensembles that the maid has purchased for her (a couple of which are so complicated that they require instruction manuals). Seeking to rekindle the spark, they consult carpenter Fatma Mohamed about a new wooden bed, complete with restraining compartment, only to discover that there is such a demand for them in the vicinity that delivery cannot be guaranteed in time for D'Anna's birthday.

As a consequence of these disappointments, D'Anna's party turns out to be something of a disaster and she grows increasingly resentful at Knudsen's snoring. Things come to a head when Knudsen declares that she can no longer go along with the charade and refuses to entomb D'Anna for an entire night in her ornate trunk. She also pleads to be allowed to abandon the regnant role that D'Anna has devised for her, as she now finds that learning new dialogue and remembering when and where to hit her marks is a chore rather than a thrill. But, while they agree to compromise and accept that their dependency extends beyond the physical, any suggestion that they have resumed their romance on a new and less demanding basis is called into question by the closing shot of Knudsen dressing provocatively, as D'Anna cycles home through the trees.

For all its calculated eroticism, this is very much a love story involving a same sex couple whose familiarity with each other recalls the easy connection between John Lithgow and Alfred Molina in Ira Sachs's Love Is Strange. However, for all its cosily chaste and cannily accessible titillation (which occasionally comes teasingly close to chauvinist voyeurism), this is also a work of avant-­‐garde artistry. In an article for the BFI website, Strickland lists the five works that particularly influenced his aesthetic and, while many might have seen Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour (1967), Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant and Juraz Herz's Morgiana (both 1972), few will be familiar with Jess Franco's A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1973), Cleo Übelmann’s deliciously obscure meditation on restraint and anticipation, Mano Destra (1986), or Stan Brakhage's troublingly exquisite abstract short, Mothlight (1962), which directly influences Strickland's hallucinatory reveries and which was created by encasing moth wings and bits of foliage inside a strip of clear celluloid leader.

However, the exhaustive information given about the content and derivation of the field recordings heard throughout the film betray the unspoken influence of Peter Greenaway, whose fixation with taxonomy and classification Strickland evidently seems to share. He also pays lip service to Greenaway's predilection for fashioning hermetic milieu that operate according to their own idiosyncratic logic, although the hiring of Nic Knowland as cinematographer implies that he was also aiming to reproduce some of the ethereal sheen that characterises the live-­‐action features of the Brothers Quay. The digital imagery is never less than beguiling and Strickland is also fortunate in his choice of production designer Renato Cseh, costumier Andrea Flesch, editor Mátyás Fekete and sound designer Rob Entwistle, whose contribution imparts a mix of wit, menace and endless fascination to a tale of mannered repetition that mischievously invites comparison with the films of both Alain Robbe-­‐Grillet and Walerian Borowczyk.

But, as he has now demonstrated with Katalin Varga (2009) and Berberian Sound Studio, Strickland is an impish magpie who possesses the enviable ability to put a personal spin on his self-­‐reflexive borrowings. He also has a wicked sense of humour, which manifests itself here in the use of the word `pinastri' (which is a form of pine hawk-­‐moth) as the lovers' safe word, and by the crediting of Manfred and Geert as `Human Toilet Consultants' in the closing crawl for an incident that is left entirely to the imagination, as the camera lingers outside a glass bathroom door. But he is also a fine director of actors, with D'Anna and

Knudsen (doubtlessly surprising many devotees of Borgen) matching the measured intensity of Hilda Péter and Toby Jones in Strickland's earlier outings, as they prove to be the perfect co-­‐conspirators with this fiendishly tantalising master pasticheur.

ELECTRICITY Bryn Higgins adopts a self-­‐consciously stylised approach to conveying the sensation of suffering an epileptic fit in his otherwise realist adaptation of Ray Robinson's novel, Electricity. The smears, streaks and striations of light and colour have been deftly achieved by cinematographer Si Bell using a pinhole camera. However, seemingly aware of the dramatic limitations of this big city reworking of Alice in Wonderland, Higgins ends up relying too heavily on the effect to jolt the moribund narrative back into life. Model Agyness Deyn may surprise some with the courage and conviction of her performance, but even her character is so thinly sketched by screenwriter Joe Fisher that she simply becomes one more cipher in a `grim darn sarf' saga whose artistic pretensions are swamped by its soap operatic contrivances.

Twentysomething Agyness Deyn suffers from temporal lobe epilepsy. She works in an amusement arcade in the rundown Yorkshire resort of Saltburn, where boss-­‐cum-­‐landlord Tom Georgeson keeps an eye on her after she has her latest fit while out on a date. In a voiceover, Deyn explains how she was thrown down the stairs as a two year-­‐old by mother Sharon Percy because she wouldn't stop crying and how her juvenile misery was compounded when younger brother Christian Cooke was taken into care for trying to defend her from bullies. Thus, when she learns that Percy has died, Deyn slaps her face when she goes to view the body, as payback for all her troubles.

Venturing back to her childhood home, Deyn finds older sibling Paul Anderson, a poker hustler who ticks her off for not doing more to help Percy in her later years. However, a flashback to her fitting younger self (Millie Taylforth) nearly drowning in the bath as a cacklingly addled Percy looks on confirms Deyn's detestation and she eagerly accepts Anderson's suggestion that they sell the house. But she insists they split the £180,000 three ways and proposes to travel to London and find Cooke, who has drifted around since being released from prison and going in search of old flame Alice Lowe. Anderson tells her she is wasting her time and buys her a ticket to join him on a gambling trip to Las Vegas, but Deyn is determined to repay her brother for losing his liberty to protect her.

Arriving at King's Cross, Deyn checks into a swanky hotel and starts showing Cooke's photo to the strangers on the streets. She even engages private eye Peter-­‐Hugo Daly and struggles on after suffering another fit. However, homeless beggar Saffron Coomber offers to help her and they visit a hostel in their search for clues. Deyn invites Coomber to spend the night in her room, but she steals her belongings and she has to ask local doctor David Smith for a repeat prescription of her medication. He expresses surprise that she has been taking her pills for so long and suggests she undergoes tests, but Deyn dismisses his concerns, as Daly has come up with Lowe's address.

Heading into suburbia, Deyn is intrigued to know if the boy who answers the door (Callum Coates) is her nephew. However, Lowe aggressively warns her to stay away from her family and Deyn is so distressed that she has a major incident on the Underground. She wakes in her room two days later and uses a number in her bag to contact the woman who helped her get back to the hotel. Lesbian secretary Lenora Crichlow offers Deyn her spare room and promises to provide unquestioning support in her quest. Grateful, Deyn decides to confront Lowe again and she admits that she dated Cooke and hurt him by cheating on him with Anderson (who is Coates's father). She tells Deyn that Cooke was living under an assumed name in Balham and suggests she makes inquiries at the Grace Inn. Electrician Ben Batt claims to know Cooke and they get chatting. Deyn trusts him implicitly and winds up in his bed. But she suffers another fit and Crichlow is distressed that she can

do so little to help her new friend. Deyn jokes that she isn't on the market, but Crichlow keeps a watchful eye on her as she has a bath and reassures her she is happy to be a friend. She is a little peeved when she learns that Deyn has slept with Batt, however, but is pleased that he has persuaded Cooke to meet her at the pub. Skulking in a back corridor, Cooke apologises for being so elusive and Deyn regrets not having come looking for him sooner. She tells him about his inheritance and he orders her to bring the money as soon as possible so he can get on with his life without anyone trying to interfere.

Batt promises to act as go-­‐between and Deyn rewards him with a night of energetic passion. However, she has a post-­‐coital fit and is rushed to hospital, where she undergoes a series of tests before neurologist Julian Firth informs her that she has to change her medication. Despite feeling like she has snow on the brain, Deyn snaps at the doctor for patronising her and discharges herself. She returns to GP Smith and is furious when he concurs that she will be better off with the new prescription, despite her insistence that she knows who she is on the current dosage. Deyn complains to Crichlow that the new tablets make her feel like a ghost and she is still feeling vulnerable when she meets up with Anderson, who has brought Cooke's share of the money. She rejects the snake bracelet he bought her in Vegas and sheepishly apologises for lying about Lowe and claims he merely wants her to love him as much as she does Cooke.

A couple of days later, Cooke shows up at Crichlow's house and trashes the place in a burst of fury that Deyn is powerless to assuage. He lifts his shirt to show her his snake tattoo and gyrates in front of her before storming off. Crichlow tells Deyn not to worry about the damage and gives her a consoling hug. That night, Deyn has a dream in which birds fly out of her mouth and, the next morning, she flushes her medication down the toilet and declares she is washing her brain out. That night, she goes clubbing with Crichlow and has a massive fit on the dance floor and her face is badly scarred when she comes round in hospital. She proves a difficult patient and growls that she is not a dog when asked why she doesn't wear an identity tag that could help people recognise her condition. However, she perks up when Anderson delivers Cooke's cut of the house sale and she is equally delighted to see that Georgeson has come to take her home.

Slipping away after spending her last night with Crichlow, Deyn finds Cooke at the pub and he apologises for his earlier vandalism. He says he doesn't deserve the money or a second chance at happiness and makes Deyn cry by telling her that he stayed away because he always hurts those he loves the most. They hug and she says he has to come and find her next time. As she drives home, Deyn hangs out of the car window and lets the breeze blow through her hair. Saltburn may not be paradise, but it is home and she smiles at a man walking his dog on the beach, as she watches the kids play and the wind turbines whirr on the hazy horizon. She is off her meds and, for now, feels at peace.

In his second feature collaboration with Fisher after the little-­‐seen Unconditional (2012), TV veteran Higgins makes a brave stab at suggesting what it must be like to experience a full-­‐blown epileptic fit. There is an avant-­‐garde audacity to the flash-­‐cut jags and blurs concocted with Bell and editor Ben Yeates. But the sheer number of attacks (while perhaps clinically valid and accurate) feels excessive, especially when taken in conjunction with the multifarious flashbacks and dream sequences. The fact that even the snake bracelet momentarily comes to life betrays that Higgins is taking refuge in his Stan Brakhageinspired special effects in the hope of distracting the audience from the clunkiness of the storytelling and the fact that the majority of characters exist simply to ease the plot out of its latest dead end.

Sporting her cuts and bruises like a badge of actorly honour to distance herself from her modelling past, Deyn impresses as a rather resistible anti-­‐heroine who is anything but a vulnerable victim. However, some of the support playing is decidedly sub-­‐par, although the

likes of the dependable Crichlow are hardly helped by the florid, often tin-­‐eared dialogue.

Indeed, Fisher's script is strewn with clichés and caricatures (for which Robinson must share some of the blame). But it's the lack of emotional depth and subtlety that makes this such a cold and unmoving exercise.

GETT: THE TRIAL OF VIVIANE AMSALEM The law is held up to ridicule in Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz's Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, the final part of a trilogy that started with To Take a Wife (2004) and The Seven Days (2008). Given that each of the preceding instalments centres on the efforts of Viviane (Ronit Elkabetz) to end her 20-­‐year marriage to Elisha (Simon Abkarian), it seems a little odd that Studio Canal should have opted not to release all three films in a boxed set. The concluding episode certainly stands on its own as a darkly droll dramedy about the rights of married women under Israeli law. But several incidents and characters would make more sense in the wider context and, given that the decision had evidently been taken not to give the picture a theatrical release, it feels a bit abnegatory not to have issued the entire triptych.

As there is no such thing as civil divorce in Israel, legal separations are handled by the Orthodox rabbinate and Ronit Elkabetz is particularly unlucky to find herself pleading for her freedom from the smugly taciturn Simon Abkarian (to whom she was given in marriage according to an ancient custom) before a panel comprising such unyielding conservatives as Eli Gorstein, Rami Danon and Roberto Pollack. Her case is being argued by old friend Menashe Noy and, after Abkarian fails to respond to several summonses, he is represented by his older brother, Sasson Gabai, who is shown the respect usually accorded a rabbi, even though he is merely a senior official at his synagogue.

Elkabetz has been living away from the Moroccan-­‐born Abkarian for three years and Gorstein thinks he is being more than generous in offering her a chance to return to his home. Thus, he suggests that she attempts a reconciliation and is disappointed to find the couple before him again a few months later. Elkabetz complains that her husband refuses to speak to her and Noy protests that Abkarian is exploiting the law for his own purposes.

Gorstein is insulted that Noy presumes he is not in control of his courtroom and he also lectures Elkabetz that she is only to speak when she is spoken to or he will deem her in contempt.

It takes 18 months from the start of the trial for Abkarian to finally put in an appearance and Elkabetz is appalled when Gorstein declares that he finds them to be in `domestic harmony' because she has been living at home in order to fulfil the terms of a promise he had made to coerce her husband into attending. However, Abkarian pushes his luck in commending the judge on his verdict and Gorstein gives Elkabetz 15 days to find witnesses to support her claim that life under her husband's roof is intolerable.

Gabai protests that his brother is renowned as a decent and holy man, but he is forced to accept the arrival of Elkabetz's brother, Albert Iluz, who is now providing her with sanctuary. Yet, while he tries to speak up for his sibling, he ends up admitting that he sees no reason why she should want to leave a nice family and he shrugs sadly as he leaves the courtroom. Spinster sister-­‐in-­‐law Evelin Hagoel proves even less helpful, as Gabai accuses her of wanting Elkabetz divorced so that she is not the only one left on the shelf.

But Iluz's bolshy wife Rubi Porat Shoval does the most damage, as she rants so effusively about the way in which women are treated in Israeli society that Elkabetz gets the giggles as she is forcibly ejected.

Two months later, Gabai brings neighbour Ze'ev Revach and his wife Dalia Beger to court.

Each testifies to Abkarian's good character, but Gorstein objects to Revach answering questions put to Beger and listens in horror as Elkabeth urges Noy to bring up the fact that she has suffered six miscarriages because she is incapable of saying `no' to her spouse.

Fighting back tears of humiliation, Beger reveals that she has often found Elkabetz crying in the kitchen after arguments with Abkarian. But she urges her not to throw away her life and suggests she could have a tolerable time if she just showed him some respect.

Clearing the court, Gorstein has Elkabetz and Abkarian approach the bench. However, they start squabbling immediately and she vows to get a flat and shame him into setting her free. But the proceedings continue to drag on. Two weeks later, synagogue beadle Shmil Ben Ari is produced to extol Abkarian's virtues, only for Noy to point out that he has been conducting a feud with a worshipper who once sang out of tune for 15 years and Abraham Celektar is summoned a week later to give his side of the story. However, he isn't willing to stick to the script and accuses Elkabetz of meeting a man in a café and Gorstein reaches his own conclusions when she admits that Noy sometimes uses the premises for consultations. She lets down her long hair in frustration and, when Gabai questions her morality, Noy suggests he falsifies his status to boost his standing in the community.

Three years have passed by the time Abkarian finally takes the stand. He insists that he dislikes socialising because he is a private man, but soon lapses into a diatribe about Elkabetz being a gossiping shrew, who has turned the children against him. Seizing his opportunity, Noy asks Abkarian when he last showed Elkabetz any affection and he enthuses that he regularly took her to the pictures to see stars like Gregory Peck and Charles Bronson. But he is more reticent when Noy mentions connubial matters and this persuades Gabai to go on the attack when Elkabetz is sworn in. He asks why she would want to disgrace the man who had given her four children and screams at her that she is a wicked woman who has no right to choose how she lives her life.

Realising he has gone too far, Gabai resumes his seat and Noy cross-­‐examines Elkabetz.

She insists that divorce is her right and claims that she has suffered his contempt for over a decade. Seeing the tide turning against him, as Elkabetz begins to sob, Gabai jumps to his feet and questions Noy's right to represent the woman he clearly adores. Gorstein asks if there is any truth in the challenge and Noy loses his composure in denouncing the court as corrupt. Furious at having his integrity doubted, Gorstein adjourns the hearing and announces that he is no longer prepared to adjudicate in the case.

However, he is persuaded to return after Elkabetz and Noy try to outline events to a new judge in Abkarian's absence. Much to their surprise, he agrees to jail Abkarian for contempt and he shows up somewhat sheepishly two months later after a spell behind bars. In order to secure his release, Abkarian had agreed to the divorce, but he changes his mind the moment the new judge puts the question and clerk of the court Gabi Amrani has to try and restore order after Elkabetz launches into a tirade about the decline of rabbinic power in an increasingly secular state and is rewarded with a two-­‐year suspension from the court.

Two months later, Noy persuades Gorstein to overturn the ruling. But another four months elapse before Abkarian consents to a legal parting. As the lawyers meet with the judge, Elkabetz and Abkarian chat in the antechamber and he informs her that their son has started a new job. He ticks her off for smoking and is about to say something significant when they are called back into court. The following day, the five-­‐year process seems set to end, as witnesses sign the formal documents. Gorstein outlines the rubric they have to repeat. But Abkarian can't bring himself to say the words about freeing Elkabetz to lie with another man and Gorstein snaps and orders them to leave. However, as they shuffle into the corridor, Abkarian takes Elkabetz to one side and proposes to grant her the divorce if she promises to remain celibate. He declares his love for her and apologises, but he finally recognises that he is a beaten man and the pair troop back into court.

Although an element of theatricality is inevitable in any courtroom drama, the co-­‐directors frequently allow proceedings to teeter on the brink of soap opera. While few outsiders would not empathise with the plaintiff's exasperation with the patriarchal niceties that invariably favour the defendant, even when he is patently in the wrong. But the witnesses

border on caricature, while the twists and delays feel more contrived than convincing.

Jeanne Lapoirie's largely constrained camera reinforces the sense of claustrophobia established by Ehud Guterman's deceptively simple set, while Abkarian and Elkabetz (who wears austere black throughout until she makes an ill-­‐judged switch to red) both do their best work in silence. Indeed, Gabai's venomous assault on his sister-­‐in-­‐law's character is far more effective than any of the austerely dressed Elkabetz's cathartic outbursts.

However, the nagging suspicion remains that much unnoticed subtlety lies rooted in the previous two pictures and one hopes that the fully story will eventually be told.

THE GRANDMASTER Two decades have passed since Wong Kar-­‐wai tackled a martial arts subject. But, whereas the fight sequences were almost tangential to Ashes of Time (1994), they are crucial to the opening third of The Grandmaster, the latest in a lengthening sequence of films about Ip Man, the master of the Wing Chun style of martial arts that became famous worldwide, thanks to the efforts of his student, Bruce Lee. Thus far, Donnie Yen has taken the role in Wilson Yip's Ip Man (2008) and Ip Man 2 (2010), while Yu-­‐Hang To and Anthony Chau-­‐Sang Wong have respectively played the eponymous hero in the Herman Yau duo, The Legend Is Born: Ip Man (2010) Ip Man: The Final Fight (2013). In fairness, Wong announced his version in 2002, some five years after he first contemplated the subject while making another treatise on exile, Happy Together (1998). But he has clearly struggled to realise his vision, as the rough cut apparently ran for four hours and the print showing in the UK is 22 minutes shorter than the one that played to domestic audiences.

According to Wong, he wanted to ensure that international audiences could understand the political and cultural nuances in the storyline. But, while he acceded the suggestion of US distributor Harvey Weinstein and added some contextualising captions and a voiceover, Wong has disappointed those who have seen the original by tinkering with the structure and showing too little trust in the viewer's intelligence. Of course, it took Wong until 2008 to arrive at the `Redux' version of Ashes of Time and one can only hope that his intended take on The Grandmaster is released in this country on disc. For now, however, it is only possible to assess what is before us.

The action opens in a dark alley on a rainy night in the southern city of Foshan in 1936, as Ip Man (Tony Chiu Wai Leung) deals balletically with the threat posed by a dozen assailants. In his early forties and very much a man secure in his own skin, he serves as a police officer. As a young man, he was tutored in the martial arts by Chen Heshun (Yuen Woo-­‐Ping) and he now has a contented domestic life with his devoted wife, Zhang Yongcheng (Song Hye-­‐kyo). But Ip is ambitious and, when news breaks that northern Wudang Boxing master Gong Yutian (Wang Qingxiang) is going to retire as the head of the Chinese Martial Arts Association, Ip throws his hat into the ring to succeed him.

Having already appointed protégé Ma San (Zhang Jin) as his northern heir, Gong is aware that Ip will protect his legacy in the south. Surviving a severe testing by a trio of rivals, Ip demands a showdown with Gong. However, their joust is dominated by the cut and thrust of a philosophical debate and Gong is happy to pass on his mantle on declaring Ip to be the winner. But Gong's daughter, Er (Zhang Ziyi), is furious that her father's escutcheon has been besmirched and she challenges Ip to a duel. Agreeing that kung fu is about precision rather than power, Ip accepts Er's ruling that if either damages anything in the room during the bout they should disqualify themselves. No quarter is asked or given during the intense duel. It's clear that there is as much attraction as rivalry between the opponents. Thus, when Ip breaks a step, he graciously accepts defeat and jokes that he will one day demand a rematch.

Within a few months, however, the pair are forced apart by the Japanese invasion from Manchuria and Ip is compelled to abandon his plan to relocate his family to the north.

Struggling to make a living, he descends into poverty and is unable to prevent his daughters from dying of starvation. Zhang also succumbs to a lingering illness. But things are no easier for Er, as Ma San proves to be a quisling and he murders his mentor. Er demands justice from the elders, but they insist she should devote herself to finding a husband and raising a family rather than seeking vengeance.

By the time Er encounters Ip again, she has become an opium eater in Hong Kong. It is Chinese New Year's Eve in 1950 and Ip has fled the Communist Mainland in the hope of setting up a martial arts school in the British colony. He has had to see off competition from several younger masters and he urges Er to open an institution in her father's name.

However, she no longer has the appetite for the ancient art and laments that many styles have died out over the centuries and hers is just another one on the list. But a flashback reveals that she was seriously injured during a confrontation with Ma San at a railway station exactly a decade earlier and, as a result, she declines Ip's request for a rematch.

Two years later, Ip and Er meet again. She admits that she has always loved him, and, in regretting that she has failed to make the most of life, pleads with him not to make the same mistake. Ip reveals in a closing voiceover that she died shortly afterwards, having become addicted to the opium to ease the pain of the wounds incurred in dispatching Ma San. A closing montage shows Ip's school prospering, as the likes of Bruce Lee popularised his variation on Wing Chun. He died in 1972, just a year before his most famous pupil.

Anyone expecting a chop socky movie is going to be bitterly disappointed by this reverential homage. Indeed, even those hoping for a reliable screen biography will feel somewhat short-­‐changed, as Wong and co-­‐scenarists Wu Haofeng and Zou Jingzhi devote as much time to philosophy as fact. Wu has explored the theory of fighting styles in his own directorial outings, The Sword Identity (2011) and Judge Archer (2012). But, while the first third is filled with thrilling choreography by Yuen Woo-­‐Ping (whose credits include the Wachowskis' Matrix trilogy and Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2000), there is surprisingly little action in the remainder of a film that elects to focus on an unspoken affair of the heart with an entirely fictional character. Wong has ventured into similar territory before and he is clearly more at home here than he is in the more abrasive sequences.

Yet, he imposes his own artistic personality on the opening battle, as he uses slow-­‐motion for dramatic and kinetic effect to capture the power of each punch, kick and impact.

Moreover, he conspires with cinematographers Philippe Le Sourd and Song Xiaofei and editors William Chang and Hung Poon to eschew the method of flash-­‐cutting shakicam footage that deprives the viewer of spectacle in the specious name of viscerality.

Nathaniel Méchaly and Shigeru Umebayashi's score reinforces the propulsive nature of the initial action. But it becomes increasingly melodramatic as the story shifts to concentrate more on Er than Ip. Zhang Ziyi and Tony Leung (a Wong stalwart who played the blind swordsman in Ashes of Time and teamed with Zhang in Wong's 2004 study of elusive desire, 2046) make a combustible couple, with the fire in the former's eyes often compensating for Leung's more studied melancholy. But the actors are often overshadowed by William Chang and Alfred Yau's production design, with the Golden Pavilion being a particularly magnificent creation that superbly conveys the seedy grandeur of 1930s China. And, therein lies the problem with this beautifully made film that too often catches the eye without engaging the mind or spirit.

At one point, Ip declares: `Kung fu equals two words: horizontal and vertical. The one lying down is out; only the last man standing counts.' Wong deserves credit for going the distance with a project that has taken 16 years to realise. But this won't be remembered as one of his best works.

THE GREEN RAY

The fifth of the six Comedies and Proverbs in the 1980s, Eric Rohmer's The Green Ray (1986) is a freewheeling odyssey may take its title from a Jules Verne novel, but its cue comes from a couplet in Arthur Rimbaud's poem, `Chanson de la plus haute tour': `Ah! Let the time come/when hearts are enamoured.' Miraculously photographed on 16mm by debuting 22 year-­‐old cinematographer Sophie Maintigneux and improvised with effortless naturalism by a largely non-­‐professional cast, this is the perfect companion piece to such other Rohmer holiday sagas as La Collectionneuse (1967), Claire's Knee (1970) and Pauline at the Beach (1983). Moreover, having thoroughly deserved its Golden Lion victory at the Venice Film Festival, it has also stood the test of time so well that the younger generation will doubtlessly recognise their own skittishness and self-­‐preoccupation in an anti-­‐heroine who is all the more credible for being so elusively empathetic.

Having recently been dumped by her boyfriend, Parisian secretary Marie Rivière is looking forward to her summer holiday to Greece with a female friend. However, just before they are due to depart, the friend announces that her beau has changed his plans and that she would prefer to spend the time with him. Naturally disappointed, Rivière turns down an offer from her sister to join her on a camping trip to Ireland and makes alternative arrangements to spend a few days with a group of Rosette's buddies in Cherbourg.

On arriving, however, Rivière realises that she is the only single adult and she slips away to play with the children rather than having to watch the couples enjoy the intimacy of shared moments. She also takes a long walk to kill some time. But she sheds a few tears on her next stroll, as she is teased at supper after recoiling from the sight of a plateful of pork chops and scolding her fellow diners for being carnivores. Indeed, she finds herself having to justify her vegetarianism when they ask her how she can eat a friendly lettuce and she decides to return to the capital rather than endure any further ribbing.

As luck would have it, she bumps into an old flame who offers her the use of his apartment in an Alpine resort. But, having gone to all the trouble to pack and travel, Rivière feels so isolated after a single hike that she leaves that afternoon and heads north. She is lectured for her pains by Béatrice Romand, a pal she hasn't seen for some time who reminds her that she can be difficult at times and that she needs to cut people some slack if she is to sustain her friendships, let alone find a special someone to spend the rest of her life with.

Much to her delight, the hectoring ends with an offer to borrow a vacant dwelling in Biarritz and Rivière heads to the coast determined to make the most of her break. She settles herself on the beach and finds herself chatting with Carita, a topless Swedish blonde who is happy to flirt with a couple of likely lads who try to pick them up in a café. However, Rivière has realised that she is no longer prepared to play the games in order to meet other people's expectations and is so dismayed by Carita's willingness to toy with the strangers that she walks away.

Convinced that she might as well be alone in Paris as anywhere else, Rivière makes her way to the train station. She settles with a copy of Dostoevsky's The Idiot and is surprised when carpenter Vincent Gauthier introduces himself and starts discussing the book. She is charmed by his sincerity and agrees to spend a day with him at a nearby fishing village. As they watch the sunset, they see a flash of green light and Rivière remembers overhearing a conversation about the Jules Verne novel, The Green Ray, and how seeing this beam across the water allows a person to gain a greater understanding of themselves, while also reading the thoughts of others. She is pleased when Gauthier concedes that he also saw `le rayon vert' and they smile with a contentment that suggests they have found a kindred spirit -­‐ for the moment, at least.

Visiting places holding special memories for members of the cast and skeleton crew, this is a majestic melding of character, place, personality and performance. Central to every scene, Rivière excels as the spoilt, petulant and sometimes downright snooty

twentysomething whose determination to stick to her principles renders her both vulnerable and resistible. Rohmer clearly has no qualms with her being capricious and allows Rivière to indulge her genius for extemporising and for hinting at the reasons why she is alone while making the audience feel a degree of pity for her solitude.

The supporting players are admirable. But the settings are as important as the secondary characters and Maintigneux's vistas have a playful postcardness to them that not only fixes Rivière in her various locations, but also reflects her state of mind as she struggles with the fact that everyone else has made a commitment while she is still wandering aimlessly (as the clock ticks inexorably) in search of a worthy companion. That she finds him in the form of a simple craftsman casts a latterday fairytale glow over the denouement. But Rohmer has no time for happy endings, as he is more concerned with the more mundane moments that make up daily life. Hence, he treats us to numerous shots of Rivière in transit, as she battles with her own pride and prejudice, as well as the world that seems to have something against her. Her search may have ended, but, even though the heavens may have shone upon Rivière and Gauthier (a rare instance of Rohmer using both visual trickery and non-­‐diegetic music, by Jean-­‐Louis Valéro), their real romance has yet to begin.

HERE AND NOW A garrulous East London girl forges an unlikely relationship with a taciturn teen from the Wye Valley in Here and Now, which marks the feature bow of Lisle Turner, who made his name with such shorts as You Can Go Now (2006), Oxygen (2008) and Canvas (2010).

When Turner's father died, a friend suggested meditation as a means of finding solace. As a consequence, Turner became a student of Buddhism and this saga set against the changing seasons reflects upon the impermanence that is a fundamental tenet of the faith.

Moreover, the male lead is named Sidney Arthur Young in honour of the young Siddartha, although he is also supposed to resemble Devadatta, while his new friend Grace is purportedly a variation on his sister, Yasodhara.

Further reinforcing the spiritual connection is the fact that the principles come to discover themselves at eight key locations that mirror the eightfold noble path of the Buddha's discourses. However, little of this will be readily apparent to the casual viewer and one suspects more will be struck by the hollow ring of the dialogue, the awkwardness of the performances and the corny narrative contrivances than the picture's achingly sincere subtext. Yet, this remains a visually arresting debut that attempts to say something different about the state of the nation and the potential for sensitivity and understanding of Britain's much-­‐maligned youth.

Having lingered over a snog with boyfriend Dharmesh Patel, teenager Lauren Johns slides into the backseat of a waiting car and sulks all the way from the capital to Herefordshire. A thudding tune about living in a nightmare plays on the soundtrack, as the camera focuses on Johns's bleached tresses, tarty make-­‐up and trendy clothes. She doesn't say a word to African father William Nadylam or Irish mother Susan Lynch, but complains bitterly the moment they arrive about being dragged to a backwater that doesn't have a decent phone signal.

Hoping that some time away together will help the family reconnect, Nadylam has borrowed a borderlands house from a friend and is dismayed when Lynch announces that she has work to do, as someone has to pay the bills. He sidles out to chat to Johns, as she sits on a stone wall and they meet the strapping Andy Rush and his mother, Claire Coache, as they make their way home from the shops. Nadylam hints that Rush might like to show Johns around and she tuts in frustration at being forced into spending time with such an obvious geek.

Deciding to make the best of things, Johns dolls herself to the nines and is mortified when

Nadylam produces a bike so she can go cycling with Rush through the Black Mountain countryside. Pedalling furiously to keep up with him, Johns calls Rush `freak boy' and becomes irritated when he keeps slowing down to let her to catch up, only to speed away again. Subjecting him to an incessant barrage of banal questions, Johns trudges behind him as they walk through the woods. She asks about his favourite music and TV shows, but Rush remains silent until she inquires whether there are any bad lads around like her boyfriend and whether his girl gave him the scarab he wears around his neck.

As their daughter strives to break all-­‐known talking records, Nadylam and Lynch argue over his struggle to make it as a musician and her frustration at having to be both the breadwinner and the disciplinarian. But the focus quickly returns to Rush and Johns, as they explore some ruins and she complains that `history is like, dead'. She concedes that the castle might have looked nice when it was new and jokes that she would jump off the ramparts if she had to live in such a boring place. However, she gets nervous when Rush climbs a crumbling wall and is framed from below against the sun behind a cloud.

Blurry impressionist close-­‐ups of wild flowers give way to a shot of milk splashing on to muesli, as Coache teases Rush about making a new friend before he cycles off to collect Johns, who is reading a magazine as she lounges in the garden in her shades. She tells Rush that she knew he wouldn't be able to stay away from her and comes to his defence when he is taunted by bully Jack Spreckley and his mates Alex Evans and Anthony Murphy. Spitting bile as she stands toe to toe, Johns smirks as Spreckley is ordered to wash the car by his loutish father, Steve Carpenter. But she ticks Rush off for allowing them to intimidate him.

After cycling for a while, they reach a cornfield and Rush guides Johns to a rowing skiff that was deposited by flood waters. She makes a lame joke about all being in the same boat and wishes her parents would sort themselves out. He smiles as she asks if this passes for a wild time around here and then rescues her when she gets lost while trying to find a phone signal. As he leads her back to the road, they see a fox hanging from a gate and he tells her it is a reminder (but doesn't elucidate).

As Johns arrives home, she overhears Lynch berating Nadylam for being detached from reality and informs him that she doesn't want another child as she is struggling to cope with the troublesome one she already has. Hurt that Patel hasn't called, Johns ignores her father when he comes to check she is okay and lies on her bed watching phonecam footage of herself trying to goad her boyfriend into saying that he loves her.

The following morning, Nadylam goes for a walk on his own. As he sits in a graveyard overlooking the Wye, Coache invites him to a party on Saturday night. Meanwhile, Johns and Rush have ventured into the depths of the woods to explore underground. Tossing Johns a torch, Rush leads her through a narrow network of passages into a large cavern and she jokes that her parents would think they were up to all sorts in such a secluded hideaway. He plays `Amazing Grace' on the harmonica and she compliments him by saying his gesture wasn't as `greasy' as it should have been. She teases him about still being a virgin and is put out when he backs away from a clumsily attempted kiss.

As they emerge into the daylight, Johns warns Rush that he has blown his chances and that she will be sticking to normal people from now on. Back home, Lynch bursts into tears after hearing that everyone at the office is managing without her and she feels underappreciated in two places at once. Rush also returns to find his mother in tears and she explains that she still feels the pain of losing his father. Clearly bothered by the circumstances of his demise, Rush exercises vigorously as night falls. But he has no intention of sleeping for long, as he wakes Johns by tossing some pebbles against her window and coaxes her to come down, even though it's still dark.

He takes her apple picking and laughs when she rustles a branch with a forked stick and

some fruit falls on her head. They lean against a tree together during their lunch break and listen soulfully to the violin music being played by a farmer. Johns sticks a pip on Rush's cheek and declares it looks like a tear. As they work into the afternoon, the camera picks out fields full of hay bales to signify the end of summer. But things are only just starting for Rush and Johns, who is allowed to go to the pictures that night after Lynch and Nadylam are impressed with her for earning the price of her ticket.

Money issues blight the following day's excursion, however, as Lynch refuses to pay the admission price to a stately home and Nadylam is in such a foul mood when they return to the cottage that he nearly crashes into the cycling Rush. Unperturbed, he takes Johns to the river and strips off to his underwear to dive into the muddy water. She follows suit and watches him float on his back as she sits on the bank in a towel he has thoughtfully brought. Johns clams he is like a boy scout because he is always prepared and, as they throw bread to some swans, she recalls the happy times she used to have when her parents took her swimming.

Arriving home, Johns finds Lynch cooking because Nadylam is brooding. Strumming his guitar, he refuses to come to the table and Johns wonders why they keep bickering. Never one to back away from a confrontation, she pours water on Spreckley and his mates next morning, as they take cover on a rusting bridge across the river. Rush points out the remains of a nearby aqueduct and jokes that it must have looked good when it was new.

However, Johns isn't listening, as she is checking her phone for messages. It slips from her grasp and falls into the river and only Rush's quick intervention prevents her from similarly plunging down.

Rush arrives home to find Coache sorting through the last of her husband's clothes. She asks about Johns and tells him to make the most of her while she is here. By contrast, Nadylam takes his daughter's muddy knees to mean she has been up to no good and both Johns and Lynch lie alone that night wishing they could get things back the way they were.

In a last bid to ensure they do something as a family, therefore, Johns begs her parents to come to the party and they wander in to find the courtyard of Coache's converted barn heaving with locals and their offspring. They are taken with the easy sense of community and Lynch looks on fondly as Nadylam and Johns mingle with confidence. Coache tells Lynch she is lucky to have such a fine man and breaks down as she reveals that hers died three years ago to the day.

As dusk falls, everyone gathers around a roaring fire and Nadylam is encouraged to follow Jay Nicholson in singing a song. Lynch smiles reassuringly, as his lyrics reflect upon the state of their marriage and they canoodle in the background as Johns and Coache exchange compliments by firelight. Rush takes Johns to see a tree decorated with lanterns and they climb into its branches to cuddle under a blanket. She puts her head on his shoulder and tells him that she likes the fact he only speaks when he has something to say.

However, their moment is shattered when her parents call her home.

Lynch and Nadylam are playfully chirpy at breakfast the following morning and Johns leaves them to it, as Rush has promised to take her somewhere special on their last day together. As she waits, however, he is ambushed by Spreckley and his pals, who steal his bag and subject him to a kicking when he tries to retrieve it. Rush struggles to his feet and roars in Spreckley's face when he brands him `Killer' and taunts him for not having a father to defend him. But Rush needs to be alone and cycles into the Black Mountains without collecting Johns.

She seems to know where he has gone, however, and finds his bike at the side of the road.

As the weather closes in and the music on the soundtrack becomes more drivingly dramatic, Rush makes his way to a high ledge and gazes out across the landscape. But Johns comes up behind him and calmly touches his arm. They sit down and he explains how his father fell to his death from this precise spot and how he had waited with his body

for several hours before they were found. It had been a terrible accident, but rumours started at school that Rush had killed his dad. He confides that he could stand the accusations, but has never quite come to terms with how little was left after his father was cremated and his ashes were scattered on the wind. Johns looks into his eyes and they kiss, as the sun comes out and they can see clearly again.

The magic hour light gives way to shots of browning leaves, as Johns and Rush embrace for the last time. He tells her to be happy and she looks back through the rear window as they drive away. As a song of mournful optimism plays in the background, she inspects the scarab now around her neck and the viewer is left to wonder whether this is goodbye or merely farewell.

Despite numbering Andrew Eaton among its producers, this has clearly been produced on a smallish budget and Turner isn't always able to paper over the cracks. Will Humphris's photography and Neil Hillman's sound design are clear plus points, as is the glorious setting. But Jonny Pilcher's electronica score is irksomely intrusive and some of the support playing from the grown-­‐ups errs on the stiff side. Johns also struggles with some tin-­‐eared slang in the early stages, but she settles into the role and sparks pleasingly, if not always persuasively with the strapping Rush, who always looks much more imposing than his persecutors.

The major problems, however, are the formulaic nature of the storyline and the slenderness of the characterisation. Turner also fails to give the audience a proper sense of the environment, as the tough estate where Spreckley lives seems detached from the homely community that rallies round Coache in her hour of need. Similarly, there is no sense of how far apart the ruins, woods, caves, bridges, mansions, picturehouses and hills actually are. Moreover, the relationship between Coache and Rush is very thinly sketched and it is never made clear just how old he and Johns are supposed to be. Yet, for all its shortcomings, this lulls viewers into rooting for the young lovers and may even prompt a few to read up on Devadatta and Yasodhara.

THE HUNDRED YEAR-­‐OLD MAN WHO CLIMBED OUT OF A WINDOW AND DISAPPEARED Fans of Jonas Jonasson's bestseller are going to have decidedly mixed feelings about Felix Herngren's adaptation, as it lurches between the madcap adventures of a runaway centenarian and the flashbacks to his chequered past. Played by Swedish comic Robert Gustafsson, Allan Karlsson proves a unique character from the moment he uses some explosive sausages to exact his revenge upon the fox that killed his beloved cat, Molotov.

But life in a retirement home doesn't suit Allan and he absconds with a case full of cash and proceeds to head across country with new buddy Julius (Iwar Wiklander), student chauffeur Benny (David Wiberg) and fugitive biker moll Gunilla (Mia Skaringer), while keeping one step ahead of the murderous Bulten (Simon Seppanen) and some bungling cops. More amusing, however, are his historical encounters with General Franco during the Spanish Civil War and Robert Oppenheimer during the building of the atom bomb, which presage meetings with Josef Stalin, Harry S. Truman, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as Albert Einstein's eccentric gulag-­‐bound brother, Herbert (David Shackleton). The frantic pace is irresistible and the slapstick endlessly droll. But the bawdiness is less successful, as is the circus finale revolving around Sonja the elephant.

Moreover, while Gustafsson ages perusasively, he oversells several gags and, as a consequence, this is never quite as funny or engaging as it should be.

IDA The sinister methods of totalitarianism are explored by Pawel Pawlikowski in the Oscarwinning

Ida, which sees the UK-­‐based director return to his Polish homeland in the company of playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz for a story set in the 1960s. Representing a marked improvement on The Woman in the Fifth (2011), this is a sombre examination of the relationship between the Communist Party and the Catholic Church and the role that each played in playing down the role that Poles played in the Holocaust and the lingering legacy of anti-­‐Semitism that inspired it. Many other films have considered the related themes of guilt, shame, conspiracy and silence. But Pawlikowski succeeds in capturing the look, as well as the mood of a country that seemed content to wallow in the self-­‐pitying delusion of totalitarian victimhood.

Having been raised in a convent, 18 year-­‐old Agata Trzebuchowska is eager to take her vows and become a nun. However, mother superior Halina Skoczynska insists that she has a final meeting with her last known relative, her aunt Agata Kulesza, who turns out to be a high-­‐powered judge, who plays jazz in her spacious apartment as she calmly informs Trzebuchowska that she is a Jewish orphan who was rescued during the war. She shows her a photograph of her mother holding a baby and abruptly terminates the visit, as she has to preside over the prosecution of some supposed enemies of the state.

Feeling guilty at leaving Trzebuchowska to process such momentous news, Kulesza collects her from Lodz bus station and shows her more family snaps. She also offers to drive the demure teenager to her home town of Piaski, but warns her there will be few traces of her past and no grave to mourn beside. Although fearful that the revelation will shake her faith in God, Trzebuchowska agrees to the journey and suppresses a smile when her aunt asks if she ever has impure thoughts and teases her that she wouldn't be making much of a sacrifice if she did not.

Trzebuchowska kneels at a memorial on the edge of the village before they call at the farm the family owned before they were dispossessed. A peasant woman asks the novice to bless her baby and informs them that the menfolk will be home later in the day. As Trzebuchowska prays in the local church, Kulesza seeks out Mariusz Jakus's bar and asks if he remembers her family. He shakes his head hurriedly, but old patron Marek Kasprzyk laments that the thriving Jewish community was wiped out during the war.

On returning to the farm, tenant Adam Szyszkowski claim to know nothing about the previous owners. But the outraged Kulesza barges past them into the house and threatens to destroy him unless he reveals what happened back in the 1940s. Out in the barn, Trzebuchowska strokes a cow and notices the pieces of stained glass that have been used to repair holes in the wall. Szyszkowski threatens to call the police, but Kulesza refuses to be intimidated and makes sure that officer Artur Janusiak knows how important she is when she swerves off the road and has to have her car towed by horses.

With Kulesza in the cells for a night, Trzebuchowska finds sanctuary with priest Jan Wociech Poradowski. He also denies knowing the family and she spends an uncomfortable night on a camp bed listening to the chimes of the church clock. The following morning, she meets up with her aunt for breakfast and Kulesza confides that she had once been a high-­‐powered prosecutor who had condemned people to death during the purges of the early 1950s. She claims she is no longer scared of anyone and will force Trela into confessing what happened to Trzebuchowska's mother and where she has been buried.

As they drive to Szytlow, Kulesza picks up hitch-­‐hiker Dawid Ogrodnik, who is a saxophone player with the jazz player booked to play in the hotel where they are staying. The women watch the musicians rehearse and Kulesza ribs Trzebuchowska about getting a crush on the handsome stranger. She asks at the bar for directions to the house occupied by Szyszkowski's father, Jerzy Trela, but discover he is in hospital. So, she suggests they enjoy themselves and dance the night away to Ogrodnik's band. However, Trzebuchowska thinks it is disrespectful to party when they are searching for her mother and she stays in her room and reads, while Kulesza thrills to Joanna Kulig's singing and cuts a rug with an

amorous middle-­‐aged man in a sharp suit.

She curses her luck that she missed out on some loving because she is sharing a room with her niece and urges Trzebuchowska not to throw her life away on a vocation that may be rooted more in a need for security rather than genuine religious conviction. When she tuts, Kulesza acknowledges that she may be a slut, but she reminds Trzebuchowska that Jesus liked spirited women like Mary Magdalene and makes a grab for her bible in taunting her for being a saint.

Trzebuchowska flees the room and follows the sound of music coming from the ballroom.

She listens as Ogrodnik plays John Coltrane's `Naima' and applauds his talent. As they chat, she tells him that she was raised in an orphanage and has just discovered her true heritage. He reassures her that he has a Gypsy spirit and she returns to the room to pray, without putting on her veil.

The next morning, they go to the hospital to find Trela. He tells Kulesza that he had liked her sister and had hidden her in the woods, along with her husband, their baby and another young boy when the Nazis tried to round-­‐up the Jews. Kulesza asks if the boy was scared when he died and Trela looks away in shame. She breaks down and reveals that he was her son and that she had entrusted him to her sister while she went and fought with the partisans. Her heroism had helped her become an important person in the new regime, but she had never been able to forget the child she barely knew.

Back at the hotel, Trzebuchowska tucks Kulesza into bed. They are disturbed in the night by a knock at the door and Szyszkowski enters to ask if they would be willing to sign over the deeds to the farm in return for knowing where their relatives are buried. Trzebuchowska agrees and wanders downstairs to listen to the band playing. Ogrodnik spots her and comes to sit beside her. She tells him that she has decided to take her vows and he reveals that he plans to avoid his national service. As she smiles sadly, he asks if she has any idea of the effect her beauty has on him and she returns to her room to let down her long red hair as she stands before the mirror.

Having said her goodbyes to Ogrodnik in the foyer, Trzebuchowska accompanies Kulesza to the farm. Szyszkowski leads them into the forest and starts digging as they sit and watch. Eventually, he produces a skull, which Kulesza wraps in her scarf and wanders away to be alone. Trzebuchowska asks Szyszkowski why she was spared and he admits that he didn't have the heart to harm her because she was so tiny. He gave her to the local priest so that no one would know she was Jewish and he hopes that she can forgive him.

Gathering up the remainder of the bones, Trzebuchowska leaves Szyszkowski with his guilt and returns to the car. They place the remains in the boot and Kulesza promises to bury them in the family grave in Lublin. When Trzebuchowska suggests that they find a priest, Kulesza reminds her what they really need is a rabbi and she promises to sober up on the long drive to the cemetery. When they arrive, the plot is overgrown and it takes a while to find the family stone. They bury the remains using broken tools and Trzebuchowska makes the sign of the Cross, as she prays.

As they arrive back at the convent, Kulesza tells Trzebuchowska that she won't come to witness her vows. But she knows her parents would be proud of her and she promises to drink to her health on the big day. However, on the day before the ceremony, Trzebuchowska agonises about her identity, her faith and the feelings she still has for Ogrodnik. She apologises to a picture of the Sacred Heart and looks on as the others become nuns without her.

In Lodz, Kulesza leafs through a photograph album and goes to a bar to get drunk. She asks a Artur Majewski to drive her home and curses that Trzebuchowska hides her beautiful hair away. Waking to find herself alone in bed, Kulesza has breakfast and a bath.

She puts Mozart's `Jupiter Symphony' on the record player, throws open a window and buttons up her coat before jumping to her death.

Standing alone in the apartment, Trzebuchowska plays the same piece of music and falls asleep on her aunt's bed. She wakes in the night and puts on one of Kulesza's dresses and teeters in a pair of her heels. She even smokes a cigarette in the mirror and knocks back a glass of vodka before dancing to the music. As she spins, she becomes tangled in the net curtains and falls over.

At the funeral, Trzebuchowska hears Kulesza being hailed a heroine of the state who will live forever in the collective memory. She is not wearing her habit and notices Ogrodnik leaning against a tree. That night, she comes to the bar where he is playing and her hair cascades over one of Kulesza's dresses. After everyone else has left, Ogrodnik puts on a record and they dance across the check-­‐tiled floor. Trzebuchowska stands on tiptoe to kiss him. As she lies beside him in the darkness of his apartment, he asks if she would like to come to Gdansk with the band. He suggests they should get married and have children and a dog. But she isn't sure she shares his definition of a normal life. So, when she wakes the next morning, she puts on her habit and veil and leaves him to sleep. However, as she walks back along the long road to the convent, it remains uncertain whether she now has a sacrifice to make her vows worthwhile or whether she is returning to tell the mother superior of her decision to leave.

Sombrely photographed by Lukasz Zal and Ryszard Lenczewski in a austere monochrome entirely suited to its time and setting, this is a provocative treatise on Polish anti-­‐Semitism and the stance taken by the Catholic Church during and after the Second World War. The boxy Academy ratio frame, the hard edges of the lighting (which takes on a more Vermeeresque glow during some of the later close-­‐ups of Trzebuchowska) and Marcel Slawinski and Katarzyna Sobanska-­‐Strzalkowska bleakly authentic production design combine to suggest a state in the grip of regret, recrimination and repression. And this sense of being bereft of life and hope seeps into Kulesza's excellent performance, as the self-­‐loathing apparatchik worn down by the Party's brutal methods of enforcing an ideology in which she no longer believes.

But, while she is never less than angelically inscrutable, Trzebuchowska (a student with little acting experience) proves less convincing as the innocent whose spiritual certainty is more readily undermined by a handsome stranger than the shocking discovery of her heritage. Nevertheless, she blossoms under Kulesza's tutelage. Similarly, in making a smooth transition from the stage to the screen, the debuting Lenkiewicz joins with Pawlikowski in deftly exploiting the conventions of the road movie and the detective story to explore how calamitous events over the previous quarter century had impacted upon the role of women in Polish society. They don't quite succeed in keeping melodrama at bay during the latter stages, but this is still a thoughtful, cinematic and wholly relevant picture that consistently echoes the work of Andrzejs Wajda and Munk.

KUMIKO, THE TREASURE HUNTER David and Nathan Zellner prove highly playful in Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, as they ruminate on the lonely death of Takako Konishi, a young Japanese woman who was found in a snowy field in Minnesota in 2001 while supposedly searching for the loot buried by Steve Buscemi's character in Joel and Ethan Coen's deadpan police procedural, Fargo (1996). Paul Berczeller went some way to debunking this myth in his excellent Channel 4 documentary, This Is a True Story (2003). But director David and his co-­‐scripting sibling treat the story with a wry earnestness that is worthy of the Coens themselves and, as a consequence, this highly distinctive road movie acquires a quirky charm as it exposes the perils of believing everything you see on screen.

Bullied by her boss and snubbed by her well-­‐heeled colleagues, Tokyo office lady Rinko Kikuchi hates her dead-­‐end job and deeply resents being reminded by mother Yumiko Hioki that she is 29 years old and still hasn't got a boyfriend, let alone any children. Her

only friend in the world is her pet rabbit, Bunzo, but she also spends hours poring over a VHS copy of Fargo, which she found in a cave after being guided to a beach by a mysterious treasure map. As she watches the film, she makes meticulous notes and, because it purports to be a `true story', she becomes more convinced with each viewing that the suitcase full of cash buried near a fence by Carl Showalter (Buscemi) still has to be there, as he was killed before he could reclaim it.

After a while, Kikuchi hatches a plan to fly to the United States and find the field. She goes to the local library and is caught trying to steal a detailed map of Minnesota by security guard Ichi Kyokaku. However, she manages to tear out the page she needs and revisits the film to plot her next move. Unfortunately, her video recorder chews up the tape and she is distraught. But she learns that Fargo is also available on DVD and she buys a player that gives her a much clearer view of the snow-­‐covered terrain she will have to negotiate. Now sure that she can locate the spot, Kikuchi bids a tearful farewell to Bunzo at an underground station, steals her boss's credit card and takes a flight to Minneapolis.

Suddenly feeling a long way from home, as she hardly speaks a word of English, Kikuchi hops on a bus and heads north. She is treated to some Midwestern hospitality by Shirley Venard, an elderly widow who gives her a room for the night and offers her a copy of James Clavell's doorstop novel, Shogun, as it might remind her of home. Somewhat reluctantly, Venard points Kikuchi in the vague direction of North Dakota, but she soon gets herself lost again and is rescued by sheriff David Zellner, who (much to his embarrassment) drops her off at a Chinese restaurant in need of a translator. He also helps her find a better map and convinces her to accept a gift of some climate-­‐appropriate clothing. Yet, against all the odds, Kikuchi not only manages to discover the spot, but also digs up her quarry before beaming and -­‐ in a moment that will leave some to surmise that she has only succeeded in mission in her death throes -­‐ calling to the nearby Bunzo that it's time to head home.

The Zellners are no strangers to eccentricity. In their debut collaboration, Plastic Utopia (1997), their hero was a mime bent on exposing the ugliness of society, while much of David Zellner's sci-­‐fi opus, Frontier (2001), was spoken in the imaginary language of Bulbovian. Subsequently, Goliath (2008) followed a man intent on avenging the murder of his cat, while Kid-­‐Thing (2012) centred on a 10 year-­‐old tomboy trying to decide what to do about the woman's voice coming from a deep hole in the woods. So, accompanying a dotty Japanese woman on a fool's errand to the other side of the world seems almost normal by comparison.

The presence of Alexander Payne among the executive producers has prompted many to detect similarities between this odyssey and his Oscar-­‐nominated saga, Nebraska (2013).

However, the Zellners have been trying to realise this project for several years and their artless indie spirit meanders through it with an irresistibly shambolic charm. Resisting the temptation to mock either Kikuchi or the people she encounters en route, the action has a fairytale feel that more than justifies the decision to plump for a happy ending, which is somehow entirely respectful to Takako Konishi's less propitious fate. Indeed, there is something deeply moving about Kikuchi's melancholic solemnity, whether she is eating noodles alone and gazing through rain-­‐streaked windows, spitting in her boss's tea, standing in the middle of nowhere wondering what to do next or dragging her makeshift quilt cloak through the snow in a last desperate effort to complete her quest.

Yet, while the picture relies heavily on its dolefully credulous heroine and her oddball charm, the supporting performances are as nicely judged as the Octopus Project score, which amusingly weaves in motifs from Carter Burwell's original soundtrack.

Cinematographer Sean Porter similarly makes astute use of the crowded confines of the big city and the vast expanses of the weather-­‐beaten plains to make Kikuchi look lost and alone in each locale. Such iconography could strike some as derivative, while the depiction

of the secondary characters could be considered condescending. But, if taken as a whimsical dissertation on the lesson Akira Kurosawa taught in Rashomon (1950) about the camera sometimes being an unreliable witness, this has heart, humour and a sprinkling of magically tragic ambiguity.

LEAVE TO REMAIN Experienced TV documentarist Bruce Goodison focuses on immigration in his fictional bow, Leave to Remain. However, the tone is considerably more sombre in this well-­‐meaning drama that deplores the fact that only one in ten of the thousands of teenagers who risk their lives to flee to Britain each year are granted asylum by the Home Office. Stated so baldly, this sounds like a shocking statistic. But Goodison and co-­‐scenarist Charlotte Colbert are at pains to point out that while many deserving cases are shamefully turned away, some of those claiming to be escaping from war zones, political/religious persecution or institutionalised misogyny are not necessarily telling the whole truth to the lawyers, activists and lay people committed to helping them secure a second chance.

Among the latter is Toby Jones, who teaches classes at an educational facility for migrant children in East London. In a bid to bring the plight of his charges to wider attention, he has travelled to Oxford so that Afghan refugee Noof Ousellam can address a public meeting. In excellent English, Ousellam describes how he tried to protect his sister the night that his older brother was taken away and slaughtered like an animal by the Taliban. The largely well-­‐heeled audience members furrow their brows and shake their heads in dismay, as he describes how he was shot at on the Turkish border and how only 19 of his party of 31 made it to Italy on a leaky boat. He concludes by hoping that the place that monitors the English language will believe his testimony (although he admits in voiceover that he has related it so many times that it is starting to lose its meaning).

The action cuts to Jones's classroom at the start of a new term. Ousellam is one of the cockier members of a class that includes Gloire Mbote, Farshid Rokey and Ntonga Tango Mwanza, who enjoy teasing the taciturn Tressy Nzau and 15 year-­‐old Yasmin Mwanza, who has recently arrived from Guinea. Also new to the ranks is Zarrien Masieh, another Afghan who is very nervous and readily accepts a seat next to the kindly Mwanza.

Ousellam jokes that he is a simple farm boy, but he shoots Masieh a sharp glance when he looks back at his desk.

Mwanza accompanies Masieh on his first visit to the Home Office building in Croydon, where he has his fingerprints and photograph taken by unseen officials whose tone is brusque to say the least. The woman who interviews Mwanza is no more friendly, as she sternly demands more details when she breaks down while describing how she was raped by her husband and his friends when she was 12 years old. Masieh is interrogated though an interpreter, who offers the opinion that she thinks he is older than 15 and hails from Pakistan rather than Nuristan, as he claims. The bearded civil servant concludes that Masieh has to be lying because he refuses to make eye contact and tuts about typical behaviour when the frightened youth makes a bolt for the door.

Masieh makes his way back to his lodgings to find Ousellam and his mates dressed to the nines (two in police uniforms) and trying to persuade Ebrahim Ismail Qorbat to join them for a night on the tiles. As he is over 18, he worries that he could be arrested for not having the requisite papers, but Ousellam convinces him to come along, as Mwanza's Cockney roommate Melanie Wilder has promised to bring some of her friends. As they travel to watch the Diwali fireworks, the lads make crude wisecracks that the English girls can't understand and Masieh feels uneasy to be out after dark. He is frightened by the noisy display and becomes even more terrified when Qorbat is picked up at the tube station and Ousellam informs the boy that he will almost certainly be deported for being in London illegally.

Everyone is shaken by the incident and Ousellam frets that he has changed his story so often that he can't remember what he said in his original statement. Rokey urges him not to worry and suggests they trawl the internet to find a hot spot to bolster his case. They hit upon the Goresh Valley and, feeling more confident, Ousellam checks in on Masieh and tells him not to sleep on the floor. He is still feeling buoyant the following day when he meets with his solicitor, who decides that his claim to have fled a murderous land dispute is not strong enough and she recommends that they plead that he has a right to remain under Article 8 of the Human Rights Act because he has established a life in Britain.

Jones senses that Ousellam is playing the system, but he agrees to go along with the lie that traffickers had ordered Ousellam to say he was from a relatively peaceful area in order to make it easier to smuggle him out of the country. Back at the house, Ousellam and his crew quiz each other about British life and the Royal family to pass their citizenship tests and they parody jihadist videos as they chant their answers, sing the Edwin Starr song `War' and try to film up Wilder's short skirt.

The next day, Jones and fellow tutor Dystin Johnson bundle the kids on to a coach for a field trip in Wales. Masieh sees a traffic warden lecturing the driver and runs away and Ousellam offers to fetch him. He warns Masieh that he will kill him if he betrays the secret they share and reassures Jones that all Afghans have a phobia of uniforms As the others sing to traditional music and play cards, Masieh confides in Mwanza that he misses his mother and wishes England felt safe. However, she cannot understand him and seeks to cheer him up by lending him her headphones and reassuring him that anything is possible in this new country.

On arriving at the residential centre, Wilder reads Nzau and Mwanza's palms and she upsets the latter by telling her she is going to have lots of babies. But Mwanza solemnly reveals that she has already had three and can no longer have any more. Meanwhile, Masieh (who suddenly seems to be able to speak passable English) tries to have a word in private with Jones, but Ousellam insists on offering to translate and repeats his threat that he will kill Masieh if he betrays him.

Next morning, the party is decked out in red kagools and waterproof leggings for a walk in the hills. Masieh seems to enjoy the open spaces, but the girls get cold and ask if they can go back. Johnson agrees to escort them, as a mist is descending. Ousellam loses his temper when Jones orders them down and snaps that he is no longer a child. But, just as Jones is about to admonish him, someone notices that Masieh has disappeared and the pair go looking for him. In fact, Masieh is having a lovely time chasing sheep (or is this a flashback to happier times?) until he senses Ousellam coming up behind him. He asks if he misses Nuristan and Ousellam insists that he had no option in acting the way he did and pleads with Masieh to stay silent. The younger boy makes to throw himself off a ledge, but Ousellam pulls him back and they sob on each other's shoulders as he suggests they have a better chance of survival if they behave like brothers rather than enemies.

Jones is relieved that the wanderers have returned, but he senses a tension between the two Afghans and keeps an eye on them during a bonfire party. As the others dance, however, Masieh becomes increasingly twitchy and he bumps into Mwanza with such force that Johnson has to take her to the local doctor. She is appalled by the cigarette burns on her back and decides to refer her to a hospital to examine what appear to be abdominal injuries. On the bus ride home, Masieh curses himself for hurting Mwanza, while Ousellam keeps a close eye on him in case he tries to speak to Jones. But they return home without further incident and Ousellam begins to prepare for his day in court.

Wearing a suit, Ousellam is subjected to a stringent search by the security guards and his treatment is mirrored by the terse questions that Masieh faces from an immigration officer about his body hair. As Masieh has his mouth inspected to see if he has any wisdom teeth, Ousellam is chastised by the judge for nodding instead of answering clearly, while the

prosecuting counsel mocks the flimsiness of his ever-­‐shifting evidence. He also doubts whether Wilder is really Ousellam's girlfriend. But his dismissive tone riles Jones and he testifies that Ousellam has been part of his family for a year and describes in detail a game they play with loose change. Fixing the judge's gaze, he avers that Ousellam has become as integrated into British society as he is and he resumes his seat with a look of quiet determination masking the fact that he has just perjured himself for a stranger.

Outside the courtroom, Ousellam thanks Wilder for speaking up for him and he accompanies Jones to collect his belongings so he can move into the spare room. He nips upstairs to issue a final threat to Masieh, who swears that he will tell Jones the truth if Ousellam lacks the courage. Feeling very alone and frightened, Masieh burns a letter from the Home Office as he sits in the street, while Wilder lends Mwanza a red dress to go clubbing and coaxes her into playing the Never Ever Ever drinking game. As Wilder knocks back the shots, Mwanza admits to never having had a boyfriend. She totters to the tube station on high heels and is pleased with the appreciative glances she gets from the lads, as she teaches them some African dance moves.

Across the city, Ousellam sits alone in his new room, having been roundly ignored by Jones's son (Jake Davies), who can barely raise his eyes from his computer game. He wonders whether he can trust Masieh, who is shown in equally piteous isolation. But the boy is starting to crack under the strain and, when a doctor declares he is feigning post-­‐traumatic stress after he describes how his uncle was beheaded by the Taliban in his village bakery, Masieh runs away and collapses in the street on seeing a woman in a hijab.

Mwanza sees him fall and rushes over to the delirious Masieh, who asks if she is his mother.

Ironically, she is playing the Virgin Mary to his Baby Jesus in the Nativity play that Jones is producing at the centre. He cowers in swaddling clothes in a trapdoor compartment beneath the stage, as Ousellam tries to call the shots and criticises Jones when the cardboard Hand of God he is operatingn gets stuck on its pulley. They are interrupted by Johnson, who has come to inform Mwanza that her application has been rejected because the Home Secretary has deemed physical abuse to be a less compelling reason to remain than political prejudice. Mwanza runs away in distress and hides in the toilets. Masieh follows her inside and they sit back to back against the cubicle door, as he wishes he could help her and she shudders at the prospect of having to go home.

Masieh rushes into the street and tries to buy a lamb. When a butcher in the market tells him he doesn't have enough money, he steals one from a delivery truck and takes it home.

He becomes increasingly frustrated as he struggles to cut it up for the oven and the action slips into slow motion as Jones and Ousellam find him slumped on the kitchen floor next to the trampled carcass with the oven door broken. Amidst the confusion, Ousellam gets a phone call and learns that he has been granted leave to remain. But, as everyone congratulates him, Masieh accuses him of being a Taliban collaborator and stabs himself in the neck with a tin opener.

Driving back from the hospital, Jones nearly hits a pedestrian, as he seethes with fury at being deceived. He demands to know the truth and Ousellam admits that he used to lay mines for the Taliban and recalls the pain he felt on being accused of killing babies by a mother whose son had just been blown to pieces as he played in the fields. Jones asks why he should believe this story when he has aleady swallowed so many lies and asks Ousellam if he realises the trouble he could now be in for trying to help him. Ousellam goes to the bathroom to wash the blood off his hands and slips away before Jones, sporting a Santa hat, can bring him a drink to celebrate Christmas. He finds a present on the bed and unwraps a copy of the Quran.

Ousellam waits at Masieh's bedside and insists that he was only a child when he was led astray and pleads for forgiveness. They arrive home as snow starts to fall and Mwanza

dances in the street with excitement. The other residents come out and start throwing snowballs and Ousellam and Masieh join in. Mwanza gives Masieh a hug and promises him everything will be fine, but Ousellam watches him with a certain sadness, as he knows how much he still has to go through before he can start to live anything approaching a normal life.

Based on actual experiences, this heartfelt, if occasionally soapboxy picture was workshopped over three years, during which time Goodison taught his cast to use mini-­‐cameras in order to film their own footage to bring added intimacy and authenticity to the proceedings. However, in deciding to fictionalise the testimony, Goodison and Colbert run the risk of melodramatising it and there are moments when this feels clumsily calculating in its bid to expose the callousness of the British authorities and to highlight the plight of youngsters whose stories are not believed because those who have gone before them have reduced their chances by striving to work the system to their advantage.

The decision to make a covert villain the poster boy of Jones's campaign to raise awareness is a canny one. But the do-­‐gooding liberal is thinly written and Jones often struggles to tone down his performance so that it doesn't seem quite so actorly alongside the admirable efforts of non-­‐professionals like Masieh and Mwanza. Ousellam has similar problems, but he is more able to get away with over-­‐playing as it chimes in with his character's cocky conviction that he has the sincerity and charm to pull the wool over people's eyes. Yet the suspicion lingers that the material has been over-­‐reheased, as its spontaneity often feels forced. There are also gaps in the plotting that undermine its credibility.

Nevertheless, Goodison has worthwhile things to say about the discrimination many young refugees encounter as their claims are being evaluated. His insights into the ease with which they pick up the argot and fixations of British teenagers are also pertinent and amusing, while his use of shallow focus and close-­‐ups to emphasise the isolation of Ousellam, Masieh and Mwanza is highly shrewd. However, the score by Mercury Prize winner Alt-­‐J often errs on the manipulative side and blunts the edge seen in such similarly themed features as Thomas McCarthy's The Visitor (2007), Laurent Cantet's The Class (2008) and Philippe Loiret's Welcome (2009). Consequently, one wonders whether Goodison might not have been better off making a straight documentary, in which the facts could have been presented in a more trenchant and less emotive manner.

LEVIATHAN Although he now stands alongside Alexander Sokurov as the best-­‐known Russian director in the West, Andrei Zvyagintsev is very much a marginalised figure at home. Despite being partially funded by the Ministry of Culture and backed by media mogul Alexander Rodnyansky (who acts as co-­‐producer here), Zvyagintsev only commands a small arthouse following at home. Thus, while The Return (2003), The Banishment (2007) and Elena (2011) were scooping international prizes, they were greeted with little domestic fanfare and the Kremlin has similarly managed this accessible and darkly satirical exposé of the corruption of Church and State by limiting its release and allowing its barbed criticisms to echo in a cavernous hollow. But its message will resound with those who have witnessed Vladimir Putin's contemptuous muscle-­‐flexing over the last few months and read about the steady erosion of civil liberties that now even extends to the use of profanities in the arts.

For generations, mechanic Alexei Serebriakov's family has owned a two-­‐storey, blue wooden house on an outcrop of the Kola Peninsula in north-­‐western Russia. However, crooked mayor Roman Madianov covets the spectacular views of the Berents Sea and issues a requisition order that will force Serebriakov to move out, along with wife Elena Liadova and the teenage son from his first marriage, Sergei Pokhodaev. Determined to

fight his corner, Serebriakov contacts Vladimir Vdovitchenkov, his former army commander who is now a successful lawyer in Moscow.

As the facts of the case are read out with breathless efficiency by the clerk of the court, it quickly becomes apparent that the judge is in cahoots with Madianov and Vdovitchenkov advises his friend that, in the long run, he is probably better off conceding defeat. But Serebriakov refuses to buckle and takes up Vdovitchenkov's offer to have a dossier of incriminating evidence against Madianov compiled by some of his influential friends in the capital. Despite knowing that Madianov is a man used to getting his own way and may well exact cruel revenge, Serebriakov ignores the warning that the tactic might backfire and orders Vdovitchenkov to present his findings.

However, Serebriakov makes a discovery of his own, as Vdovitchenkov and Liadova have been sleeping together and the old friends have a furious row (off screen) before, much to Pokhodaev's chagrin, he decides to pardon Liadova and get on with their lives. Despite easing off because he doesn't want to jeopardise his chances in an upcoming election, Madianov proves less forgiving and has Vdovitchenkov beaten up for blackmailing him.

Moreover, he feels emboldened because the local Russian Orthodox priest has informed him that all power comes from God. Thus, he makes a second bid to drive Serebriakov from his property.

Aware that the feud isn't over, Serebriakov goes to collect Liadova from the canning factory where she works. However, the boss hasn't seen her all day and Serebriakovt becomes increasingly concerned because she doesn't answer her phone. He searches the town and finds Liadova's dead body on the beach. As he protests to the priest that things consistently go against him, the cleric reminds him of God's warning to Job: `Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook or press down his tongue with a cord?'

Seemingly resigned to his fate, Serebriakov allows himself to be arrested by the cops and makes arrangements for Pokhodaev to stay with friends, as he begins a 15-­‐year jail sentence for murder. Unconcerned by the misery he has caused, Madianov gives orders for the house to be demolished and its shattered frame is left to resemble the skeleton of the beached whale where Pokhodaev used to play. However, after attending a church service, he reminds his son to watch what he does in life, as God is always watching.

Although they are very different film-­‐makers, it is always tempting to compare Zvyagintsev with Andrei Tarkovsky. The inclusion of a spiritual dimension makes the superficial connection seem even stronger. But Zvyagintsev is nowhere near as poetic or metaphysical in his approach. Indeed, this comes closer to Hungarian maestro Béla Tarr's brand of acerbic, long-­‐take realism than Tarkovsky's cerebral, stylised allegorising.

Moreover, Zvyagintsev is a cautious critic, whose speciality lies in drawing intense performances out of his actors and making telling contrasts between landscapes and interiors. Thus, even though the entire narrative revolves around the venality that has been allowed to fester since the collapse of Communism, Zvyagintsev takes his pops at Putin in oblique ways, such as having Madianov run the town like a private fiefdom from beneath a presidential portrait and then have the drunken huntsmen use pictures of previous leaders for target practice, while leaving Vladimir Vladimirovich on the wall to allow time to pass its judgement on his deeds.

In discussing the film, Zvyagintsev has alluded to the influence of Fedor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. But the more significant literary source is Thomas Hobbes's 1651 tome, Leviathan, in which the Magdalen Hall-­‐educated philosopher famous stated that only a commonwealth offering all its citizens a stake in its running can prevent their lives from being `solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short'. This may be an oblique denunciation of the current regime, but it packs a punch without letting the socio-­‐political subtext distract from the very human storyline with its universal themes of greed, betrayal, injustice and the futility of resistance when both fate and faith are in conspiratorial conjunction.

The performances are excellent, with Madianov deftly underplaying his villainy, while Vdovitchenkov's self-­‐serving geniality chillingly reveals that those associated with the Muscovite establishment are just as willing to play dirty as coarse provincial thugs. The only suspect part of Zvyagintsev and Oleg Negin's screenplay is its depiction of Serebriakov's family life, which feels a little too formulaic for a work of this artistic stature.

The use of extracts from Philip Glass's 1983 opera Akhnaten (the 18th Dynasty pharaoh who is credited with introducing as monotheism) also feels a touch arch. But Andrey Ponkratov's production design is as impeccable as cinematographer Mikhail Krichman's beguiling use of natural light and colour, while Zvyagintsev's subtle shifts of tone and imposingly melancholic Russian sensibility ensure that this leaves as much of an impression as the biblical sea monster.

LIFT TO THE SCAFFOLD Louis Malle had a somewhat unusual apprenticeship after graduating from the IDHEC film school in Paris. Having assisted the marine explorer and conservationist Jacques-­‐Yves Cousteau on the Palme d'or and Oscar-­‐winning documentary, The Silent World, he served as Robert Bresson's assistant on the compelling prison thriller, A Man Escaped (both 1956).

Then, while still only 24, he embarked upon his directorial debut, Lift to the Scaffold (1957), an adaptation of a pulp novel by Noël Calef that borrowed heavily from film noir and the pictures of Alfred Hitchcock and Jean-­‐Pierre Melville while also anticipating some of the techniques and tropes that would become familiar in the work of such nouvelle vague contemporaries as Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut and Jean-­‐Luc Godard.

The action opens in the middle of a passionate whispered phone call, with Jeanne Moreau in a call box and Maurice Ronet in his office. She tells him how much she loves him as they plan to rendezvous at a café once a dark deed has been completed. A former legionnaire and paratrooper who fought with distinction in Indochina and Algeria, Ronet now works for Moreau's tycoon husband, Jean Wall. But, having told secretary Micheline Bona to hold his calls just before Saturday closing, Ronet scales the outside of the glass building using a rope and crampon and slips silently into Wall's office. Ronet hands him a dossier on an oil company that Wall peruses with avaricious pleasure before his junior pulls a gun and shoots him. Arranging the desk to resemble a suicide scene, Ronet hurries downstairs to take a call from Bona to let him know that security guard Gérard Darrieu is ready to lock up.

Descending in the lift, the trio say their farewells at the street door and Ronet goes to his car, which is parked outside Alice Reichen's flower shop, where he has become a familiar face since he started seeing Moreau. Assistant florist Yori Bertin calls to him as he opens the roof of his convertible and her delinquent boyfriend, Georges Poujouly, is suitably impressed.

Just as he is about to pull away, Ronet spots the rope left hanging from the balcony outside Wall's office and hastens across the road to remove it. However, as he takes the lift upstairs, Darrieu cuts the power and locks the entrance grille before heading home for the weekend.

Realising he is trapped, Ronet examines his surroundings with his cigarette lighter and ponders an escape. Outside, however, Poujouly cannot resist the fact that Ronet has left his motor running and drives off in the car, with the reluctant Bertin in the passenger seat. They lower the roof as they cruise through the streets and, thus, Moreau only sees Bertin at the window as the vehicle passes her café table and she convinces herself that her lover has betrayed her with a shopgirl.

A model of lovesick dejection, Moreau goes to Wall's office and rattles the locked grille, just as Ronet tries to open the elevator door. She asks garage clerk Jacques Hilling if he has seen her husband, but he thinks he left hours ago and isn't surprised that he left his car behind, as Wall has a reputation for acting on impulse when a deal is in the offing. Shrugging sadly, Moreau wanders the darkening streets, while Ronet chain smokes and settles down for a long wait. Meanwhile, Bertin is growing bored with Poujouly joy-­‐riding up and down the

autoroute and is dismayed when he gets into a race with a speeding Mercedes. He follows the sports car to a motel outside the city and is invited in for a drink by its German driver, Iván Petrovich, and his wife, Elga Andersen.

Having recently stolen a scooter, Poujouly doesn't want to be seen at the reception desk and stays in the car as Bertin registers then under Ronet's name. They spend the rest of the night drinking champagne with Petrovich, who is amused by Poujouly's blustering lies about his military service and love of fast cars. Andersen insists on taking photographs with the miniature camera that Bertin had found in Ronet's car and she posts the film for developing in a box on the motel concourse.

Eventually, Poujouly and Bertin crash in their room, while Ronet discovers a panel beneath the lift carpet and Moreau wanders into a bar and gets chatting to Ronet's louche pal, Félix Marten, and his companion, Sylviane Aisenstein. As Ronet uses his knife to unscrew the panel, Poujouly decides to leave the motel in the dead of night. He wakes Bertin and they are in the process of stealing Petrovich's car when he confronts them. Poujouly mistakes the cigar case the German is pointing for a gun and shoots him with the revolver that Bertin had found in the glove compartment of Ronet's car and which Poujouly had purloined, along with his raincoat and driving gloves.

The frightened couple zoom off in the Mercedes and abandon it on a bridge in the middle of the city, along with Ronet's belongings. Reasoning that they are bound to get caught and being unable to bear the thought of being separated before Poujouly is guillotined for murder, Bertin suggests they take an overdose of pills and lie on the bed to await the end.

Meanwhile, Moreau has been arrested on suspicion of being a prostitute, after she is found wandering the streets with Marten without her identity papers. She is recognised by the desk sergeant, however, and she exploits his embarrassment by turning on the hauteur and demanding that he contacts her chauffeur.

As she waits, Moreau is approached by commissioner Lino Ventura, who asks what she knows about Ronet. Still feeling cheated, she says she saw him driving around with a young girl earlier in the evening and this convinces Ventura that Ronet murdered Petrovich and Andersen. While one of his colleagues takes great delight in letting the press into the motel room while spinning them a lurid yarn about the case, a couple more cops rouse Darrieu and make him open the office block. Ronet, who has removed the panel and is shinning down a rope in the shaft, is horrified by the sudden restoration of power and is relieved that the hurtling conveyance stops before he is crushed. Clambering back inside, he replace the panel and carpet, gathers the cigarette butts he has left on the floor and walks calmly out of the building before anyone can notice him. However, while ordering breakfast at a nearby café, he is recognised from his photo on the front page of the paper and is arrested.

By now, Wall's body has been found and Ventura and deputy Charles Denner are ready to accept that he shot himself. However, they are unimpressed with Ronet's contention that he could not have been at the motel because he had been trapped in an elevator. But Moreau is determined that her lover should not be convicted of a crime he did not commit and goes to the florist to find out where Bertin lives. She discovers the young couple coming round after their failed suicide pact and assures them she will make them pay for what they have done. As they plan their next move, Poujouly remembers the camera and speeds off to the motel to collect the prints before anyone else can see them. Moreau follows and enters the dark room in time to see Ventura arrest Poujouly, as the incriminating images materialise in the developing bath. However, Ronet had also used the camera to take pictures of himself with Moreau and her fingers lovingly stroke the pictures in the shallow fluid before she turns to the camera and reaffirms her love for her doomed beau.

In adapting Calef's convoluted scenario, Malle and co-­‐writer Roger Nimier leave one or two loose ends. The rope is seemingly left hanging from the balcony, so Ventura would have been exceedingly foolish if he had bought the story that Wall had topped himself, while it is

never explained who took the photographs of Ronet and Moreau together, as it is unlikely that such a tiny camera would have had a timing device back in 1957 and they would hardly have asked a stranger to snap such moments of stolen intimacy. However, such quibbles aside, this is a thoroughly satisfying thriller, whose predictability leaves the audience dreading the inevitable outcome. This Hitchcockian approach to suspense is given visceral immediacy by Henri Decaë's vivid monochrome views of night-­‐time Paris and Malle's telling use of close-­‐ups.

The almost haphazard sequence of climactic events may strike some as unduly melodramatic. But Malle is keen to show how the best laid plans can unravel as spectacularly as those made in the heat of the moment. Moreover, by having both Ronet and Poujouly come to grief, Malle and Nimier seek to suggest a generational gulf in the Fourth Republic, as colonial war heroes and quiffed tearaways despise those who cosily confronted each other during the Occupation and have since profited from the peace.

But, while Ronet may have had a dual motive for the actions that leave him trapped in flagrante, he is less fascinating character than Moreau, who clearly enjoys the trappings of being married to a rich and powerful man and, yet, who is willing to give it all up for a lover whom she believes -­‐ on the flimsiest of evidence -­‐ could jilt her on a whim. Even in the depths of her despair, however, Moreau continues to hope that Ronet will find her and sweep her away to a new life, even though her prolonged and very public absence from home makes her behaviour seem highly suspicious on the very night her husband decides to end it all. Consequently, she invites as much pity as scorn as she addresses the audience in a closing speech that is delivered in a daze and is lit in such a way by Decaë to capture the porcelain beauty that would have persuaded a calculating and pragmatic man of the world to risk everything to possess it.

LOVE IS STRANGE Ira Sachs warms to THE theme of same-­‐sex marriage in Love Is Strange, which marks something of a departure from previous outings like Forty Shades of Blue (2005) and Keep the Lights On (2012) in that it doesn't draw directly on the director's own experiences, but on those of his acquaintances. The premise is so contrived that the ensuing dramedy could easily have lapsed into sitcomedic or soap operatic mode. But Sachs and co-­‐scenarist Mauricio Zacharias elect, instead, to take Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) and Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953) as their role models and the resulting picture, while a touch twee in places, benefits greatly from the decision.

After living together perfectly happily for 39 years, artist John Lithgow and music teacher Alfred Molina surprise themselves, as well as their family and friends, by announcing their intention to get married. As the picture opens, the pair get ready for the big day in their comfortable Greenwich Village apartment and bicker through the nerves as they struggle to hail a taxi. They exchange vows with affection but little fuss and return home to celebrate with downstairs NYPD neighbours Cheyenne Jackson and Manny Perez and Lithgow's workaholic nephew Darren Burrows, his novelist wife Marisa Tomei, and their teenage son, Charlie Tahan.

While they are on honeymoon, however, John Cullum, the archdeacon in charge of the Roman Catholic school where Molina teaches, learns about the nuptials. While he could turn a blind eye to Molina co-­‐habiting with Lithgow, the public affirmation of their relationship puts him in an awkward position and he feels he has no option but to dismiss him. As Lithgow earns little from his painting, the couple realise that they can no longer afford the mortgage and decide to sell the apartment. However, as neither drives, an offered double room in Poughkeepsie is out of the question and they throw themselves on the mercy of their wedding guests until they can find something more affordable.

Molina finds sanctuary on the sofa with cops Jackson and Perez, while Lithgow ships out to

Brooklyn to use the lower bunk in Tahan's bedroom. But Molina quickly discovers that his much younger hosts have little time for Chopin and an improving book and divide their off-­‐ duty time between partying, playing Dungeons & Dragons and watching Game of Thrones.

When Molina meets up with Lithgow, therefore, he flops into him because he can no longer stand the pace and just wants their old quiet life back.

Lithgow is also struggling to settle in, as he keeps breaking Tomei's concentration when she tries to write and can't resist asking Tahan questions that no self-­‐respecting kid would wish to answer. Moreover, it gradually becomes clear that Burrows isn't always working at the office when he calls to say he'll be late home and Tomei's worries are further compounded by the suspicion that the skateboarding Tahan is more than just close pals with Russian classmate Eric Tabach. Lithgow scarcely helps the situation when he asks Tabach to pose for a portrait on the roof and the newlyweds concur that they need to make alternative arrangements as swiftly as possible. However, an untimely fall exposes the extent of Lithgow's cardiovascular disease and a distraught Molina is forced to look for new accommodation alone.

Keenly observed and expertly played by Lithgow and Molina, this is one of the most intelligent tearjerkers to reach British cinemas in a long while. Obviously, disbelief has to be suspended on occasion. But, once the set-­‐up has been established, Sachs concentrates on how the situation impacts upon the characters. The anguished phone calls and clinging reunions are beautifully handled, especially when Molina and Lithgow pretend to be Stonewall veterans in order to get free drinks at a bar. But Tomei and Tahan also have their moments, as Lithgow intrudes upon her carefully regimented routine and his grumpily adolescent need for privacy. However, such is the canniness of the storytelling that neither of the quandaries thrown up by Lithgow's sojourn are ever entirely resolved.

Sachs and Zacharias also have a fine ear for the argot and rhythms of everyday speech.

However, Sachs isn't solely interested in exposing the homophobic bigotry that continues to linger in supposedly polite society. He is also eager to explore the durability of soulmate romance (hence the throwaway reference to The Philadelphia Story) and capture a part of Manhattan that is rapidly disappearing. He is ably abetted by Greek cinematographer Christos Voudouris, whose views across the rooftops, streets and parks are every bit as elegantly nostalgic as anything that Gordon Willis achieved for Woody Allen. But this isn't simply stylistic archness, as the imagery reinforces the leisurely tonal shift from cosy contentment to melancholic sanguinity.

LA MAISON DE LA RADIO Only Frederick Wiseman and Raymond Depardon can compete with Nicolas Philibert when it comes to Direct Cinema. But, while either could have produced a study of Radio France to match La Maison de la Radio, neither could have invested it with such wistful wit and delicate discretion. Filmed over several months in 2011, the action has been shaped to suggest a day in the life of stations like France Inter, France Info and France Bleu, which share the thousand or so offices nestling in Henry Bernard's vast circular edifice on the banks of the Seine in the 16th arrondissement of western Paris. But rather than dwelling the bustle behind the scenes, Philibert concentrates on the cool professionalism that informs each and every broadcast.

Following an evocative montage of voices in studios across the complex building to an info-­‐ cacophony, Philibert leaves Patrick Cohen presenting the breakfast show to descend on the newsroom, where presenter Marie Christine Le Dû is giving rookie newsreader Faouzi Tritah some unvarnished tips on how to approve the composition and delivery of his new flash items. Clearly not wishing to intrude upon what is tantamount to a dressing down, Philibert slips into the drama studio, where producer Marguerite Gateau is taking someone through a story to explain how she wants it read. But Philibert doesn't linger long and flits from Tata

Milouda conducting an interview about slam poetry to soprano Ruth Rosique preparing to record a jaunty ditty with her accompanist.

Back in the newsroom, Emmanuel Leclère tries to book an interview with the president, while managing editor Marie-­‐Claude Rabot-­‐Panson calls a reporter to arrange a live link-­‐up.

Assistant Florence Paracuellos scours the Internet for filler items and comes up with something about dying anchovies in Los Angeles. Outside, people scurry along corridors, while the garage and post room are hives of activity. An outside broadcast unit sets off on a motorbike to follow the Tour de France into Châteauroux, while blind journalist Laetitia Bernard types in Braille and Japanese writer Akira Mizubayashi is interviewed about the effects of the 11 March tsunami.

Down in the music studio, Rosique is backed by strings and an accordion, while Gateau listens intently as the cast completes a final read through before she starts recording her drama. Elsewhere, the audience enters in the spirit of a quiz show whose time clock ticks down to the sound of a xylophone. As a rapper launches into a number in English, Philobert cuts drolly to classical music specialist Frédéric Lodéon, who peers out from behind a stack of CDs on his desk to reveal how to spot when a programme has been pre-­‐recorded. Luckily for journalist Philippe Vandel, he isn't going out live, as he muffs his lines in delivering a report on Belgium. But it's the sound of drilling coming through the supposedly soundproofed walls that frustrates Gateau, as she has to stop recording until peace is restored.

By contrast, things are becoming heated in an editorial meeting in the newsroom and Philobert cuts away to the soothing sound of a marimba band in full flow. Jesus Cabrera also provides a welcome distraction with his drinks trolley, while Rabot-­‐Panson tries to lighten the mood by joking about the discovery of four bodies in Lille. As Gateau works on some sound effects for her production, a storm chaser named Michel discusses the French weather and sportingly agrees to do a plug for the interviewer's show. It's not an ideal day to be on the trail of the Tour, but spirits are high among the spectators, who come over and chat with the reporter and offer him a bottle of wine before he speeds off after the peloton.

Philobert cuts from a point-­‐of-­‐view shot through winding streets to a conductor leading his choristers through a song being recorded with a piano accompaniment. Writer-­‐cum-­‐actor Jean-­‐Bernard Pouy is asked to extemporise a pensée to close an under-­‐running programme and he waxes lyrical about potatoes while peeling some. Elsewhere, writer Annie Ernaux explores the place of anger in solitude, while sound recordist Marc Namblard ventures into some woods to set up a miscrophone under camouflage to record some ambient sounds.

Views of the Eiffel Tower bring Katell Djian and Laurent Chevallier's cameras back inside the Maison de la Radio to shuttle from Rabot-­‐Panson following up a story about a cyclist racing a horse to Antonio Placer recording `Republicalma' with pianist Jean-­‐Marie Machado. The close-­‐ups used to capture this intense rendition are repeated to capture the changing expressions as Bénédicte Heim is interviewed by Alain Veinstein about her dual life as a writer and teacher. The contrast between his composure and her unease is fascinating and Philobert adroitly follows it with a clip of Umberto Eco ruminating on perspectives in novels before plastic surgeon Laurent Lantieri discusses how patients react when they first see their new faces.

Continuing the round of the magazine and chat shows, Philobert listens in as singer Arno Hintjens avows that he wouldn't want to be famous, as he like being able to remain the underdog and he shares the pleasure that actor Michel Piccoli still takes in travelling by bus.

Comic actor Jos Houben clearly wishes that his fans could distinguish between his characters and his private self, as he reveals how people used to seeing him being knocked around on screen expect to be able to push him around in real life. This lament on the breaking down of barriers is juxtaposed with a clip of screenwriter Jean-­‐Claude Carrière contemplating how differently everyday noises would have sounded throughout history. But Philobert returns to

Houben in time to hear him explain the need for rules in comedy and have to be reminded by his hosts that the sight gag he wishes to perform wont work very well on the radio.

Checking in on Gateau and Rabot-­‐Panson once more, Philobert eavesdrops on conductor Matthias Brauer giving the Radio France choir a stern lecture on the need for precision in Germanic pronunciation. He also dallies to listen to Maïa Vidal singing `The Alphabet of My Phobias' in English to an accordion before cutting away to the world of critters and creepy-­‐ crawlies, as Namblard continues to record the sounds of Nature. As if to prove that preparation is everything, Philobert next cuts from current affairs presenter Alain Bedouet sorting papers in his office to him conducting a lively discussion on the role of Facebook in the Tunisian Spring. However, unpredictability is part of the magic and the shot of Caroline Ostermann grimacing after reading the shipping forecast splendidly conveys the tension that even the most experienced broadcaster feels when going out live.

A montage conveys the range of programmes on offer during the evening, with a football commentary providing the audio backdrop to shots of people typing, reading and recording.

As a song about Virgil and Ulysses dies away, medical academic Jean-­‐Claude Ameisen readies himself to speak. Nearby, Evelyne Adam hosts a popular request show on France Bleu and researcher Elisabeth Rodier fielding calls that may well come from the occupants of the cars visible from her window. But not everything is designed to provide the soundtrack to quotidian tasks, as Pierre Bastien demonstrates by using rubber bands, Meccano and a trumpet in a glass of water to make music on a France Culture show. Realising nothing can top this astonishing sequence, Philobert takes a final tour of the darkened offices and studios. Lights still burn through the night, however, as someone has to write Patrick Cohen's script for the next day's breakfast show.

Although this superb documentary depends heavily on Philobert's eye for detail and editorial acuity, its bid to convey the immediacy and intimacy of radio is entirely reliant on Olivier Do Huu's inspired sound mix. Whether capturing the mellifluous sonorousness of the spoken word or the rich variety of song, Do Huu judges each to perfection and sends the viewer back to the private spaces where they do their own radio listening with a fresh appreciation of the artistry and craftsmanship involved in communicating solely with words, music and sounds.

The majority of the faces on view (none of which are identified on screen) will be unfamiliar to British audiences, but the very denial of easy celebrity recognition forces non-­‐ Francophiles to concentrate on what is being said and how it is being presented. Gateau and Rabot-­‐Panson are probably the star turns, but Lodéon strikes a chord (even though Philobert bends the observational rules by resorting to an interview situation) and Bastien's Heath Robinson turn is a joy to behold (although its probably not quite as compelling on a purely audio level). The real star, however, is Bernard's modernist masterpiece, which made headlines last autumn when it had to be evacuated during a fire scare. One wonders how a similar snapshot of the BBC might turn out, bearing in mind that the division of stations between London and Salford would preclude a commensurate sense of homogeneity. But, while Britain can currently boast a number of admirable documentary makers, there is no one who can hold a candle to Nicolas Philibert.

MANAKAMANA The technical challenges that Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez set themselves mean that there is little opportunity for fabrication in Manakamana, an observational documentary that is made up of 11 vignettes, each of which lasts approximately 11 minutes, which is the time it takes for a 400ft magazine of 16mm film to pass through a fixed camera and for the cable car from the base station at Cheres in Nepal to reach the temple to the Hindu goddess Bhagwati, which sits atop a mountain, some 3425 feet above. Produced by Lucien Castaing-­‐ Taylor and Verena Paravel for Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Laboratory, this is as much a

work of avant-­‐garde formalism as it is an anthropological or sociological study. Indeed, like Castaing-­‐Taylor and Paravel's Leviathan, the content is largely left to chance. But, given the rigidity of both the structure and the methodology, it seems rather surprising that this supposedly unmediated record of reality is the product of an 18-­‐month post-­‐production process. Can fades to black at the end of each run really be that complicated to achieve?

As there are no captions or voiceovers, the viewer is left to glean snippets of information from the conversations that take place during the shuttles. In all, six upward trips and five down are presented in full. The service was launched in 1998 and it is possible to see through the windows the path up the hillside that pilgrims had used since the 17th century.

Each car is capable of carrying six people and affords breathtaking views of the Trisuli and Marsyangdi valleys and the Annapurna and Manaslu-­‐Himachali mountain ranges. But Spray and Velez deny the audience the chance to see the temple or the devotions that take place there. However, judging by the fate of a rooster and four goats (albeit presumed in the latter case), it is safe to say that sacrifices of some sort are not unusual.

The first pair to ride the car are Chabbi Lal and Anish Gandharba, an old man in a dhaki topi hat and a small boy sporting a peaked cap, who sit politely and look nervously around them as they go. They are followed by Bindu Gayek, a middle-­‐aged woman carrying a basket of flowers that are clearly intended as an offering to the goddess. She is succeeded by Narayan and Gopika Gayek, a couple of around the same age who are carrying the aforementioned rooster. Next to make the ascent are Khim Kumari Gayek, Chet Kumari Gayek and Hom Kumari Gayek, a trio of elderly women in traditional Nepalese dress who seem to share the same husband. But the most animated trip sees three heavy metal musicians Simen Pariyar, Anil Paija and Saroj Gandharba being joined a tabby kitten, which one of the youths jokes might be for the chop when they reach journey's end. Sadly, this almost certainly seems to be the fate awaiting the five goats that follow them in a pen gondola.

Making the first descent is a single middle-­‐aged woman known only as Bakhraharu. After her come two younger women, Mithu Gayek and Isan Brant, who chatter away in American accents. But the possible mother-­‐daughter pairing of Mily Lila Gayek and Bishnu Maya Gayek provide the most amusement, as they try to eat rapidly melting ice creams without getting sticky fingers. They are followed by traditional musicians `Kaale' Dharma Raj Gayek and `Kaale' Ram Bahadur Gayek, who use the ride to tune their stringed instruments and play the odd snatch of melody before the film ends with Narayan and Gopika Gayek returning to the village, with their foreheads anointed and a very dead bird that seems destined to make the journey from altar to dinner table.

It has to be said that some 11 minutes seem to last a lot longer than others, even though the sight of pods passing in the opposite direction to the ascending one look amusingly like something from a science-­‐fiction film. As Velez and Spray are credited as camera operator and sound recordist respectively, it has to be presumed that they were present at all times and one is left to wonder how differently some of the passengers might have behaved if they had operated their equipment from a distance. The persons riding alone are unsurprisingly the most reticent and the viewer is left to speculate about the thoughts going through their heads as the sometimes creaky cable cars go back and forth. While the metalheads lark about, take selfies on their phones and complain about the lack of air-­‐ conditioning, the sarangi players provide a potted history of the mechanical marvel they are riding. Elsewhere, Narayan and Gopika discuss their ears popping and the fact that more local roofs are using tiles instead of thatch, while Khim, Chet and Hom natter about their obviously delicate domestic arrangements and their trust in the goddess to protect them as they pass over the hills, fields and houses below. But it says much that the highlights are provided by a couple of melting ice-­‐cream cones.

The inclusion of the cornets feels suspiciously like a Flaherty-­‐like suggestion by the film-­‐ makers rather than a fortuitous happenstance. Indeed, this is most likely the case, given that

Velez and Spray (an ethnographer who has lived in Nepal since the 1990s) spent a lengthy period getting to know the locals and cast those they felt would be least intimidated by the presence of the crew. However, setting such quibbles aside, this is a fascinatingly immersive voyeuristic experiment that comments obliquely on such issues as tradition and progress, the spiritual and the secular, observation and communication, and the individual and the landscape. One fears an enterprising producer somewhere selling Channel 4 a lookalike reality series filmed at such locations as the London Eye, Ben Nevis, Blackpool Tower and Big Pit. But would anyone want to watch an airborne variation on Gogglebox?

NATIONAL GALLERY At 84, Frederick Wiseman is half a decade younger than Lanzmann. But the master of Direct Cinema has been much more prolific in a career that has seen him produce 43 films in 48 years. Although none can match Shoah's 566 minutes, many have come in around four hours, including At Berkeley (2013), which went on general release towards the end of last year.

Coming in at three hours, National Gallery might be considered a miniature. But this profile of a revered landmark that has stood on Trafalgar Square since 1838 is every bit as compelling as La Danse (2009) and Crazy Horse (2011), which respectively ventured behind the scenes of the Paris Opera ballet corps and French capital's leading burlesque venue.

Documentaries about galleries and museums have become increasingly common since Nicolas Philibert made La Ville Louvre in 1990. Indeed, 2014 alone saw the release of tours of the Hermitage, the Vatican Museums and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, as well as the latest entries in producer Phil Grabsky's ongoing Exhibition on Screen series (more of which anon). But, for once, Wiseman is less interested in the mechanics of a great institution than in the art on display and how the curatorial and docent staff strive to make it relevant to visitors of all ages and backgrounds.

Opening with a montage of masterpieces, Wiseman fixes on a cleaner burnishing a floor with an electric polisher and captures the reflection in the shiny surface. In so doing, Wiseman announces that he is going to concentrate on ways of seeing and how the eye can be guided and the mind can be taught to look at and think about painting in new ways. To this end, he has a female guide ask a tour party to forget that they are viewing Jacopo di Cione's altarpiece in an art gallery and imagine they are 14th-­‐century Tuscan peasants gazing at it by candlelight and feeling their faith being reinforced by the flecks of gold that would have been picked up by the flickering flames. It's a bold approach to making art come alive and the impression it leaves lingers during footage of a meeting at which National Galley Director Nicholas Penny resists the efforts of Head of Communications Jill Preston to consider an outreach initiative designed to enhance visitor appeal.

Penny's concerns about lowering standards are understandable. But one only has to witness the pleasure being experienced by a class of blind art lovers discussing Camille Pissarro's `The Boulevard Montmartre at Night' to realise that there should be no boundaries when it comes to connecting the public with the treasures entrusted to Penny's care. The case is reinforced as an enthusiastic male guide introduces a group of small children to Orazio Gentileschi's `The Finding of Moses' by reassuring them that paintings are simply trying to tell stories in the same manner as their picture books.

The guide explaining the history of Hans Holbein's portrait of Christina of Denmark takes a more sophisticated approach, but still captures the personality of a sitter who clearly didn't relish the prospect of marrying Henry VIII. A lecturer urges teachers to decode paintings and make them more relevant to their students by considering what might have been in an artist's mind when they created a particular masterwork. But this campaign of enlightenment is not solely restricted to visitors and guests, as a pair of curators debate the impact that restoration can have on understanding the meaning of a picture and how it was

produced.

Heading into the galleries, Wiseman and cameraman John Davey watch aspiring amateurs sketching earnestly. But they are just as intrigued by the visitors gazing at paintings and listening to headset commentaries, as well as those dozing or kissing on the benches provided in the centre of the rooms. However, they have to eavesdrop to the Di Cione guide, as she treats her party to her interpretation of Peter Paul Rubens's `Samson and Delilah' and coaxes them into imagining what it must have felt like to betray a loved one out of patriotism. She also asks them to reflect upon the fact that the painting once hung in a burgomaster's house and that the flesh on display must have shocked some of his more prudish neighbours.

Another female docent suggests that while a painting captures a specific moment in time, it is always possible to reinterpret its precise meaning. She finds this sense of ambiguity beguiling, but those using the bank of computer screens provided for visitors seem less inspired. Amusingly, Nicholas Penny seems equally nonplussed as a committee strives to convince him to have the finishing line for a marathon outside the National Gallery in order to raise its profile. He worries that such a sporting association would cheapen the institution's reputation and frets that its charitable status might be compromised if it was seen openly supporting the sponsor of the race. Once again, Jill Preston leads the chorus trying to change his mind, but Penny feels such cheap publicity would make the gallery seem desperate.

Meanwhile, the Di Cione guide is talking a group through the symbolism in Holbein's `The Ambassadors', which some claim holds clues to a murder conspiracy. She points out the ingenuity of the anamorphic skull in the foreground and also notes the crucifix at the rear, which she suggests might be the artist's way of reminding the handsome young duo posing for him that the end can come at any time. A colleague continues on a sombre note as she informs a school party containing several black kids that a distressing number of the pictures bequeathed to the gallery were initially purchased by slave traders seeking to show off their wealth. She reminds them that paintings that seem old and musty can often have surprising connections with modern life.

Elsewhere, an audience listens to a lecture on George Stubbs's methodology and Wiseman follows this with another spot of people watching that includes a neat match shot between the hats being worn by the subject of a painting and the woman (supposedly) looking at it.

The Gentileschi guide returns to tell a school group that it is more rewarding to study art than maths because it offers more ways of being right. He uses Giovanni Bellini's `The Assassination of Saint Peter Martyr' to explain how authors and film-­‐makers have a lot more time to tell their stories than painters and praises them for being able to convey the most dramatic moment of a narrative in a single image. Engaging his audience, he gets them to speculate about the reasons for the inclusion of some woodcutters looking away from the crime and uses this to urge them into always taking a second look, as you never know what you might find.

Slipping away from the public space, Wiseman sits in on a nude life class as the teacher offers suggestions about composition and the different ways in which the female flesh and the vertical pole on which she is leaning can be depicted. He then ventures into the square to film the fountains at night and contrast the bustle of nocturnal London with the quiet of an early morning as people queue in the cold to get into the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition.

Once again, Wiseman and Davey capture faces in close-­‐up and juxtapose them with the works on display inside the gallery. This time, the pictures are as celebrated as `The Virgin on the Rocks', `St Jerome in the Wilderness', `Lady With an Ermine' and `Salvator Mundi', but Wiseman notes the reverence of the onlookers and the same sense of humility in the presence of genius affects a curator discussing Leonardo's technique and humanity with a TV crew.

This use of lectures and interviews allows Wiseman to bend the rules of observational cinema while retaining his usual distance. But he comes in for a closer look as a frame restorer cleans a section prior to making new shapes in the wood. Elsewhere in the bowels of the gallery, a man toils on a canvas, while a female curator invites a male colleague to take a minute sample for analysis from a picture she has been working on. The intricacy of this task is contrasted with a man cleaning a much larger canvas and a woman mixing chemicals to apply to the surface of another smaller item.

Outside, patrons queue in the rain to see Leonardo's `The Virgin and Child With St Anne and St John the Baptist' and `The Last Supper'. But the NG management team is fully aware that such bumper paydays will be fewer and further between over the next couple of years and a meeting focuses on the need to make budget cuts to tide the gallery over this leaner spell.

Clearly Wiseman timed his visit well (he spent 12 weeks in London in 2012), as the gallery was also hosting an exhibition about the debt that JMW Turner owed to Claude Lorrain and he attends a lecture on how `Dido Building Carthage' not only reflects Turner's fascination with Antiquity, but also implies his views on the recent collapse of the Bonapartist empire in France.

Repairing to a quieter corner, Wiseman catches Larry Keith explaining how the removal of yellow glaze from Rembrandt van Rijn's `Portrait of Frederick Rihel on Horseback' has revealed new information about the colour tone and depth of the image. However, he also produces an x-­‐ray image to reveal the image of a man standing in a field that Rembrandt clearly abandoned in order to paint this equestrian work. He points out areas where well-­‐ meaning restorers from earlier ages had damaged the canvas, but concedes that no painting is immune from the ravages of time and that difficult decisions have to be taken about preserving the integrity of Old Masters, as well as their sheen.

Following brief cutaways to show the Leonardo `cartoon' being photographed and a woman painstakingly applying gold leaf to a frame, Wiseman snatches another snippet of an interview being conducted by a rival crew. The speaker declares how the show has enabled scholars to gain a better understanding of how Leonardo prepared his palette and applied his paint. But a colleague also interjects that the process of hanging the pictures has also alerted them to themes and details they had not noticed before.

After dropping in on another life class, in which the tutor remarks how good it is to remind ourselves that we are all the same when unclothed, Wiseman joins the small crowd watching some eco protesters draping a banner about saving the Arctic across the famous portico entrance in an attempt to draw attention to the NG's connection with Shell.

However, work goes on uninterrupted inside, as a critic does a piece to camera about Turner's use of black in `The Fighting Temeraire' and a curator supervises a crew lighting the Master of Delft's giant Crucifixion triptych. An Australian expert continues this theme by showing a couple of students how Rubens's use of light in `Samson and Delilah' was possibly influenced by the fact that he knew the picture would be hung over a chimney with a window to the viewer's left. He also explains how light reflects off flooring and Wiseman again shoots into the polished tiles to achieve a striking effect.

A couple of young curators take this factor into account as they discuss the new layout for a gallery undergoing renovation. But Wiseman leaves them to pay brief calls on lectures about Titian's love of Ovid, Michaelangelo's `The Entombment' and Nicolas Poussin's `The Adoration of the Golden Calf', which had recently been returned to show after being vandalised by a man with an aerosol can. Another guide marvels at how a still life artist has preserved a lobster and a lemon for posterity, while a rather dull quartet debate the accuracy of the musical notation contained within Jean-­‐Antoine Watteau's `The Scale of Love'.

Indeed, Wiseman seems to lose momentum at this juncture, as he watches a female guide discussing the emotional content of Counter Reformation art and flits between close-­‐ups of

Caravaggio's `Salomé Receives the Head of John the Baptist' and `The Supper at Emmaus' during a Beethoven recital by pianist Kausikan Rajeshkumar. Footage of a reception for the Turner show also feels a tad dry, but Larry Keith returns with a colleague and a couple of students to enliven proceedings with a discussion of Diego Velásquez's `Christ in the House of Martha and Mary'. A seemingly less extrovert expert explains the craft involved in achieving the texture of the frame surrounding Rembrandt's `Self-­‐Portrait at the Age of 63'.

Yet Wiseman seems more taken with his hesitant approach than Penny's confident assessment of Poussin's imitation of sculptural effects in `The Triumph of Pan'.

As Betsy Wieseman waxes lyrical about Johannes Vermeer's `A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal', Wiseman shifts between the canvas and her hearers. It is readily apparent that the majority are white, educated and somewhere in affluent middle age and, as Wieseman restates the idea that no two people see the same painting (and that few see the same painting on a second viewing), it seems as though NG diversification strategies still have a way to go. Larry Keith similarly pitches his discussion of Caravaggio's use of ground to build up the paint in `Boy Bitten by Lizard' towards a specialist audience and it is somewhat ironic that Penny provides a more accessible insight into the ownership history of a pair of Titian pictures of the goddess Diana.

Wiseman might have been advised to end his tour in the rooms devoted to the Impressionists, as the paintings are so iconic and the visitors are clearly excited to see them.

However, he cannot resist the temptation to include two more items that feel rather tacked on. The first centres on Jo Shapcott recording a reading of her poem, `Callisto's Song', which was inspired by Titian's `Diana and Callisto', while the second features Leanne Benjamin and Edward Watson in a balletic piece entitled `Machina for Metamorphosis' by choreographer Wayne McGregor. Staged between two paintings from the Titian show, this feels staged for the camera rather than happened upon, as there is no audience applause at the end.

Moreover, the sight of the dancers disappearing through a doorway into darkness feels like an unsatisfactory ending to a film about an art gallery.

Notwithstanding this minor cavils, this is a typically astute and alert piece of Direct film-­‐ making, in which no people or paintings are identified by captions on the screen. Acting as his own sound recordist (with the assistance of Emmanuel Croset), Wiseman excels at picking up the ambience of the galleries, while his precise editing reinforces the aura of hushed bustle. He particularly impresses here with the cross-­‐cuts between painted and rapt faces, some of which are as witty as they are deft. But this differs significantly from his other snapshots of institutions in action, as the operational side plays second fiddle to the artefacts and the ways in which they are cherished and showcased by the knowledgeable and dedicated staff. In some ways, therefore, this could be branded an infomercial. But Wiseman allows himself the odd sly aside that suggests the National Gallery may need to make some compromises if it is to respond to the social, cultural and financial challenges that lie ahead.

OMAR Adam Bakri finds himself caught between clashing cultures in Hany Abu-­‐Assad's Omar, a tense mix of political thriller and romantic drama that represents a vast improvement on the Nazarene's American debut, The Courier (2012). It also marks a return to the Palestinian question for the first time since Abu-­‐Assad followed his excellent feature bow, Rana's Wedding (2002), and the trenchant documentary Ford Transit (2003), with the exceptional study of a suicide bomber's psyche, Paradise Now (2005). But what makes this so riveting is the moral ambiguity the characters feel towards their cause and comrades when faced with conflicting personal desires or the dictates of the Israeli Defence Force.

Scaling the Qalandia Wall and burning his hand on the rope as he slides down the other side after being shot at, West Bank baker Adam Bakri goes to see his pals Iyad Hoorani

and Samer Bisharat for tea and chat. He also swaps covert notes with Hoorani's teenage sister, Leem Lubany, who loves his writing and promises him that they will run away together to a new life the first chance they get. However, social visits come at a price and, when Bakri is returning from an early morning assignation with Lubany, he is caught by an IDF patrol and has his nose broken with a rifle butt when he gets mouthy after being ordered to stand on a rock with his hands on his head.

Such provocation convinces Bakri of the rectitude of Hoorani's plan to kill a soldier in the barracks and the pals target shoot in the wilderness to prepare themselves for the mission.

As they discuss the future, it becomes clear that they are still naive and Bakri is stung by Hoorani's reluctance to let anyone date his sister. Despite their callowness, however, Bisharat succeeds in picking off a trooper in the compound and Bakri drives the getaway car before blowing it up to destroy any evidence.

Shortly after snatching a kiss off Lubany the next day, however, Bakri is chased through the streets and felled by a shot to the leg. He is manacled and beaten by a torturer and has his genitals scorched when he tells his abuser to wipe his nose. Left in solitary, he dreams of Lubany. But he is eventually moved to a bigger dormitory cell, where he is approached by members of Hamas and the Al Aqsa Brigade. Uncertain who to trust, he lets down his guard when a kindly prisoner warns him against collaboration and avers that he has nothing to confess. His words are played back to him by agent Waleed Zuaiter, who assures him that this slip is serious enough to put him away for 90 years and Bakri's lawyer confirms his plight. However, Zuaiter offers Bakri a way out, as he will let him return to Lubany if he betrays Hoorani.

Returning home with the story that he was released through lack of evidence, Bakri rushes to show Lubany that he is safe. He also leaves a message with Bisharat's seven spinster sisters for him to get in touch and is give instructions where to meet. Unwilling to compromise his friends, Bakri tells Hoorani that he has been freed to trap him and he promises he will think about him dating Lubany if he arranges the ambush of some off-­‐duty soldiers to prove his loyalty. Readily assenting, Bakri rendezvous with Lubany at the humble home he has found for them and they kiss for the first time after she gives him a beany she has knitted for him. This comes in useful when he is pursued by IDS agents who come snooping around his home and he ditches his jacket and covers his head to give them the slip.

When he goes to meet Lubany from school, however, Bakri sees her talking through the fence to Bisharat and he becomes more suspicious when she asks for details of the ambush he is setting up. She warns him that some of her classmates think he is a traitor because he was released so quickly and urges him not to be jealous of Bisharat, as she only loves him. Confused, Bakri goes about his task and Rohl Ayadi confesses that he has been offered a visa to New Zealand to snitch for the IDS. Hoorani is delighted that the quisling has been caught and not only gives Bakri a photograph of Lubany to copy, but he also promises to arrange their nuptials as soon as he can.

The following day, however, as the three pals shoot the breeze in a café, they are ambushed and Bakri is suspicious that Bisharat disappeared moments before two men pulled guns from a dumpster on the pavement outside and began shooting. Hoorani escapes, but Bakri finds himself in custody again and Zuaiter is furious with him for trying to make him look foolish. He cautions Bakri that he knows what he is doing at any hour of the day and shows him a photo of him chatting to Lubany in an alleyway. Moreover, he warns him that he is now on his own and Bakri is savagely beaten in the corridor for being a traitor. He asks to see Zuaiter again and, on hearing him getting an ear-­‐chewing from his wife on the phone, he jokes that no man is free. They laugh and Zuaiter offers Bakri a mint and a last chance at salvation.

Returning home with an electronic tag on his calf, Bakri tries to see Lubany, but she

accuses him of having let the side down and says she wants nothing more to do with him.

Distraught, Bakri tries to remove the tag with a buzz saw and watches helplessly as Bisharat and Lubany converse through the school fence. He asks Bisharat to meet him and they go into the wilderness above the village. Bakri puts a knife to his throat and charges him with passing secrets to the enemy. Bisharat insists that he had no option, as Lubany was pregnant and the IDS offered to help if he worked for them.

Deceived and confused, Bakri promises Bisharat that he won't let anything happen to him and even asks Hoorani to accept Bisharat as a brother-­‐in-­‐law when they meet the next day.

Suddenly a shot rings out and Hoorani is killed. Zuaiter comes to inspect the corpse and gives Bakri his word that he will keep hold of it for two months so that nobody can blame him and Bisharat for being the last people to see him alive. Bakri then meets with Lubany's male relations and arranges the betrothal, which Lubany reluctantly accepts after Bakri refuses to pick up the note she proffered on a saucer while serving tea. Handing Bisharat a wad of cash, Bakri returns to his bakery and tosses Lubany's picture into the oven. A few weeks later, he catches her eye as he walks in Hoorani's funeral procession and informs Bisharat that he wants nothing more to do with him.

Two years later, senior Palestinian leader Ramzi Maqdisi tracks Bakri down and asks what he remembers about Hoorani's death. Bakri feigns ignorance when he asks where Bisharat got the money to marry Lubany and shows no emotion when Maqdisi says the autopsy proved that Hoorani had been dead several weeks before he was found. Bakri tries to scale the wall to find out what is happening, but has to rely on an old man to give him a boost up the rope. He calls on Lubany and sees her nursing two children. She has given up her studies to become a mother. But Bakri is stunned when she tells him her son is only a year old, as this means that Bisharat was lying when he told him Lubany was pregnant.

She bitterly regrets that things didn't work out between them and says sorry for every doubting his probity.

Having apologised for letting her down, Bakri calls Zuaiter and asks him for a gun in return for delivering the real culprit for the barrack killing. He sends Lubany a letter and she looks towards the camera as she finishes reading it. But it is too late to stop Bakri, who asks Zuaiter to show him how to load the pistol and asks if he can have a try. Once he has the weapon in his hand, he turns to Zuaiter and, recalling an anecdote Bisharat had once told him, he asks the Israeli if he knows how they catch monkeys in Africa before shooting him in the head.

What makes this picture so sad is the futility of the assassination that ruins so many lives.

Ground down by the petty humiliations of occupation, Bakri and his buddies convince themselves that a strategically worthless act of rebellion is entirely justified and their failure to recognise that their token gesture will have such hideous repercussions highlights both the desperation of the Palestinian people to recover some control over their lives and the pitiful ignorance of those unaware that every action is bound to have a more terrifying reaction. But Abu-­‐Hassad refuses to blame the freedom fighters for their recklessness, as oppression appears to have left them with little option to do otherwise. Yet, it's love for a faithless girl rather than patriotism that drives Bakri to make so many self-­‐destructive mistakes and it's noticeable that Abu-­‐Hassad and production designer Nael Kanj fill Bakri's dauntingly enclosed world with so many advertisements making false promises about better times ahead. Despite its surfeit of increasingly self-­‐conscious twists, Abu-­‐Hassad's screenplay is studded with similar ironies, as well as several darkly comic quips, which are delivered with confidence by an inexperienced cast. Outside the prison sequences (which are chillingly designed by Yoel Herzberg and photographed by Ehab Assal), Bakri perhaps falls short of the requisite mix of grit and vulnerability, while his apparent lack of understanding of the political complexities of his cause and the true nature of violence threatens to make him more of a cipher than a genuinely tragic anti-­‐hero. But his

helplessness when flirting with Lubany is deeply touching and, thus, his final sacrifice is stripped of any glamour, as this is the act of a man who is already dead inside.

OPEN BETHLEHEM Good intentions rarher go astray in Leila Sansour's Open Bethlehem. Edited down from 700 hours of footage shot over seven years, this is the latest version of a documentary charting Sansour's involvement with a campaign to prevent the city where Jesus Christ was born from being suffocated by the Israeli authorities responsible for extending the exclusion wall that snakes around and across the Palestinian territories. As this is such a personal project, it is hardly surprising that Sansour features so prominently. But the surfeit of cutaways to her listening or looking concerned at meetings where she is not the focus of attention run the risk of turning this courageous and eminently worthwhile enterprise into something of a vanity project.

Leila Sansour was born in Moscow in 1966 and first became interested in films when her exiled mathematician father, Anton, bought a camera to record the family's return home in 1973. As a prominent Palestinian Catholic, he had been invited to establish the University of Bethlehem and Leila now bitterly regrets rebelling against his authority in seeking to study abroad. As a result, she came to view Bethlehem as a place to escape from rather than cherish. But, as she explains using archive footage. Israel soon started planting settlements on the hills outside the city it had captured during the 1967 Six-­‐Day War and, by the mid-­‐1970s, it had breached the Green Line it had vowed to respect. Indeed, it continued building in spite of its promises under the 1995 Oslo Accords until it had lodged 170,000 citizens in 40 settlements that were connected by roads that no Palestinian was allowed to use -­‐ even if it cut across the now isolated pockets of the old town, Flying back to Bethlehem in 2005 with her British novelist husband, Nicholas Blincoe. Leila visits her cousin Carol, who is one of the few family members who refused to go into exile.

She is appalled to see the collection of bullets and shrapnel she has amassed during encounters in the neighbouring streets and goes on a tour around the city to see how the Israeli wall has deprived the Palestinian population of 87 percent of its land. Standing 8m (twice the height of its erstwhile counterpart in Berlin), it has provoked anger among Palestinians, whose protests have provide the Israelis with what they consider to be ample justification for its erection.

Leila recalls how it snowed on the day Anton returned to his hometown and he took this as an omen. But a visit to her friend Claire, whose flat is now in the shadow of the wall, convinces her that she must assume her father's mantle and do something to raise global awareness of Bethlehem's plight before it is reduced to a ghost town. Opening an office on the university campus, Leila and Carol enlist the support of the local mayor and the governor in seeking to re-­‐brand and regenerate Bethlehem and, in the process, attract foreign aid and tourists. Much to their delight, the Swiss government offers them $160,000 on the proviso that their campaign is socio-­‐economic rather than political, while Fr Yacoub Isaak at the Syriac Church agrees to have mass said in Aramaic for pilgrims keen to hear the service in the language that Christ spoke.

But, while 65 percent of Bethlehem's economy is dependent upon religious tourism -­‐ with the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Armenian Apostolic churches having their Christmas celebrations at different times of the year -­‐ Israel controls access to the shrines and Leila attends meetings at which small business owners complain that the Palestinian Authority is doing too little to save their livelihoods. Keen to arrest the trend, Leila welcomes travel writer Jeremy Head from The Times and accompanies him on a tour of the Church of the Nativity and a desert monastery that she informs him will soon be off limits if the wall continues to encroach upon Palestinian land.

While out in the wilderness, Leila has the idea to introduce a passport that would entitle

holders to symbolic citizenship of Bethlehem in return for becoming ambassadors for its message of peace and goodwill to all. She pushes the notion to John Harris of The Guardian while visiting architect Bassem Khoury, who shows them the bullet holes in his walls. But it is the prospect of shopkeeper Khalil Musallam losing the premises he has run for 40 years because of Israeli plans to place Rachel's Tomb behind the security wall that convinces Leila that time is of the essence. So, shortly after Checkpoint 300 is opened to restrict the passage of Palestinian people into Israel, Leila and Carol persuade Mayor Victor Batarseh to join them on the expedition to London and Washington to launch the Open Bethlehem campaign.

After the first one is mailed to Pope Benedict, the passport is presented to the media at Chatham House on 9 November 2005 and Leila is accorded a warm welcome at the Houses of Parliament. But, while politicians and religious leaders are enthusiastic in the British capital, their American counterparts are more cautious and Leila realises that she will have to make her message more palatable to get the White House onboard.

While watching the Christmas festivities, Leila feels the weight of history bearing down on her, as her ancestors had risked so much to preserve the site of the Nativity during centuries of occupation and treachery. But, in spite of the visit of archbishops Rowan Williams and Cormac Murphy O'Connor in 2007, the campaign starts to lose momentum and slip off the wider agenda. Leila still hosts fact-­‐finding missions from various dignitaries, journalists and students (including a party of American Jews, whose views on shared values might have been given more space in a film that rarely explores the Israeli perspective). But, as she spends her third Christmas in Bethlehem, she can feel the cracks starting to widen within the operation, especially after the Swiss withdraw their funding.

Already frustrated by being separated from her husband, Leila begins to lose heart after her trusty car breaks down and several of her co-­‐workers start making plans to move abroad. Further sapping her morale, Khalil dies shortly after Rachel's Tomb is sealed off and Fr Yacoub falls ill before he can implement the schedule of Aramaic masses. As she looks at old photos, Leila wonders if she hasn't jumped aboard a fast-­‐sinking ship and despairs at anyone being able to save Bethlehem. Her mood darkens further when Carol and her sister Vivien move away and she views footage of her father's funeral with a heavy heart, as the battle for freedom is no place for romantics and dreamers.

Her mother calls from Moscow to wish her a happy new year and suggest that she prioritises her own future over that of a lost cause. But it snows during the holidays and Leila takes this as a sign that she has to keep following the Star of Bethlehem, wherever it leads. Following a rather trite cartoon showing Leila's restored car flying over the skyline like a magic carpet, a closing montage includes footage of Bishop Desmond Tutu among those proudly proclaiming their citizenship. But surely a caption could have been inserted explaining what has happened in the years since Sansour first presented the Road to Bethlehem version of this actuality in 2010, as it is clear from the vox pops in this closing segment that an alarming number of people have never heard of the `little town' and have no idea of its historical, let alone its current significance.

Although some may accuse her of sentimentality, Sansour can hardly be blamed for building this chronicle of Bethlehem's inexorable decline around the Christmas celebrations. But, for all its intensity and sincerity, this is a rather ragged record of both the Israeli attempts to crush the town's spirit and the noble attempt to rally international support behind the passport initiative. At no point to Sansour reveal what impact her campaign has had on the Israeli establishment and this lack of debate leaves this looking more like an advertorial video diary than a detached assessment. Naturally, it is difficult for Sansour to separate her status as figurehead and film-­‐maker, but she might have given Carol or some of her other collaborators a bit more of a say.

It might also have been useful to have included a contribution from a geopolitical specialist

to explore the extent to which Sansour was being ingenious or naive in opting to stress the Christian rather than the Palestinian aspect of the situation. But what cannot be doubted is her commitment and her willingness to make sizeable personal sacrifices to honour the memory and legacy of her father and the people he felt he had a duty to help. For this alone, Open Bethlehem deserves the widest possible audience.

PELO MALO The passing references to the declining health of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez root Mariana Rondón's Pelo Malo (aka Bad Hair) in some form of historical context. Following on from At Midnight and a Half (1999), which she co-­‐directed with Marité Ugas, and Postcards From Leningrad (2007), Rondón directs with a sure sense of place and coaxes excellent performances from a cast that was encouraged to improvise around a script it never got to see. But, for all its wistful charm, there is real potency in a domestic drama that lays bare the social and economic problems facing the citizens of Caracas, whose poverty only reinforces the racial and gender prejudices that confirm the failure of Bolivarian Marxism to overhaul the legacy of colonialism and underdevelopment.

Having embarrassed mother Samantha Castillo by taking a bath in the house she is cleaning, nine year-­‐old Samuel Lange Zambrano joins best friend María Emilia Sulbarán to watch their neighbours through the windows of their flats in a sprawling tenement estate.

He scarcely notices his toddler brother and is oblivious to the fact that his mother has been facing an uphill struggle since his father died and she lost her job as a security guard for an unnamed infraction. He is aware, however, that she dislikes the amount of time he spends looking in the mirror at the frizzy hair he wishes so desperately was straight. But he cannot help winding her up, as he pleads for a new look in time for his new school ID card photo.

Paternal grandmother Nelly Ramos (who has never quite forgiven her black son for marrying a Latina) delights in stirring the pot and encourages Zambrano to explore his fey side, as she teaches him the words to kitschy pop songs by 60s icon Henry Stephen and makes him an outfit for his photo session. Feigning concern, she asks Castillo to let her grandson live with her for a while to ease the burden. But she has no intention of letting Ramos turn Zambrano against her and drags him off to the doctor to have him examined for traces of homosexual tendencies. Peeved at being lectured for wasting the doctor's time, Castillo dresses in a party frock, gets tipsy and wakes Zambrano in the night to dance with her. However, he finds her tedious and she is forced to take out her frustration on a youth who comes to fix a bicycle.

Meanwhile, Zamabrano has developed a crush on the twentysomething who runs a small kiosk near the basketball court. Although she would quite like him as her boyfriend, Sulbarán accepts his choice and is disappointed when her prostitute mother refuses to babysit Zambrano any longer until Castillo pays her back wages. Thus, she has no option but to let her son spend more time with Ramos, while she hangs around headquarters and tries to secure a meeting with boss Beto Benites. He invites her to a barbecue at his house and he makes a fuss of Zambrano when he swims in the pool. But he is more interested in preying on Castillo and dangles the prospect of being rehired in return for some sexual favours.

As the news becoming dominated by reports on the progress of Chávez's chemotherapy and supporters shave their heads in solidarity, Zambrano falls out with Sulbarán, who says she will only like him if he poses as a soldier in his ID picture. She also gets cross when he uses cooking oil to straighten the hair of one of her dolls. Benites comes to dinner and brings Zambrano a goldfish, but he retreats to his room and is unimpressed when his mother leaves the door open so his curiosity can be piqued as she makes love with her guest. Benites tells her to report for work next day, but Zambrano has no intention of making life easy for her. He demands fried plantains for breakfast and, when Castillo

refuses to get out of bed, he starts making them himself and slicks down his hair with the spare oil. He dons a hoodie belonging to the kiosk guy and, when he ignores her request to remove it, Castillo throws his goldfish out of the window.

Zambrano sulks on being left with Sulbarán and her mother, but he accompanies her to the photographer, where she dresses as a beauty queen for her ID shot. Castillo returns home with a razor so Zambrano can fix his hair, but he refuses to thank her and insists he doesn't love her, as he sets about changing his appearance. As the film ends, Zambrano stands in moody silence as his classmates sing the national anthem. But he bops around against a variety of photographic backdrops to Stephen's hit `Lemon Tree' as the closing credits roll.

Settling down after a fussy start, Micaela Cajahuaringa's visuals ably convey a confining and confusing world from a nine year-­‐old's perspective. But, in focusing so rigorously on the battle of wills between Castillo, Ramos and Zambrano, Rondón archly suggests that the average citizen was too preoccupied with their own hills of beans to pay much attention to the plight of their ailing president. Such sly asides are echoed in the commentary on class, colour, machismo and sexuality. But Rondón avoids over-­‐playing her hand in emphasising the human drama over the subtext. Consequently, even though it occasionally misses its step (particularly during Castillo's visits to the doctor and her clumsy hetero show and tell session), this is never anything less than playful, perceptive and poignant.

It was only a matter of time before someone took the Slumdog Millionaire formula and applied it to another city with a teeming population of haves and have-­‐nots and sufficient poverty, injustice, corruption and violence to fuel the melodrama. Set in a lakeside favela in Rio de Janeiro, Stephen Daldry's Trash ticks all the boxes. But it's never clear who this Hollywoodised adaptation Andy Milligan's teen interest novel is aimed at. Richard Curtis's script is awash with a sentimentality that is reinforced by Tulé Peake's prettified production design and Adriano Goldman's lustrous photography, while Antônio Pinto's score ladles on the manipulative mawkishness with an intrusive disregard for subtlety or taste. Clearly, the intention is to alert the global mainstream to the problems blighting Brazil's major cities by producing a sanitised variation on Hector Babenco’s Pixote (1981) and Fernando Meirelles's City of God (2002). But all Daldry and Curtis have succeeded in doing is trivialise their subject and patronise their audience.

Flashing back from a moment of crisis, the action opens with Wagner Moura fleeing the police through the streets of Rio. He works as an aide to Stepan Nercessian, who is campaigning to become the city's new mayor. Before he is captured, tortured and killed, Moura tosses his wallet into a refuse truck and it is found by 14 year-­‐old Rickson Tevis, as he gleans for things to recycle and sell with his friend, Eduardo Luis. They live in a favela overlooking Rio and are delighted with the windfall. However, when cop Sefton Mello comes to the rubbish tip offering a reward for the return of the wallet, he realises that the absent Tevis must have come into some easy money and orders his officers to hunt him down.

Intrigued by the key they find inside the wallet, Tevis and Luis consult their friend Gabriel Weinstein, who lives in the sewers but immediately recognises that the key comes from the lockers at the central railway station. On opening the locker, the boys find a piece of paper containing a series of numbers and a letter addressed to Nelson Xavier. Heading back to the favela, they sneak into the office of parish priest Martin Sheen and discover online that Xavier is a lawyer who has been jailed for a variety of misdemeanours. But before they can investigate further, Mello has Tevis arrested and he only just manages to escape before he can be liquidated.

Meanwhile, Luis and Weinstein have asked Sheen's assistant, Rooney Mara (a computer whizz who also teaches the street kids English) to arrange for Luis to visit Xavier in his maximum security prison. He reveals that he is Moura's uncle and that the numbers are a code that can by decrypted using passages from the Bible. Moreover, a handy flashback

explains how Moura became disillusioned by Nercessian's venality and decided to steal $4 million in bribes, along a ledger containing full details of the illegal transactions.

The trio decide to stakeout Nercessian's beachside compound. But he reacts badly to being spied upon and orders Mello to round up the urchins and torch their homes.

However, they remain at large and manage to crack the code, which leads them to the cemetery where Moura's daughter, Maria Eduarda, is buried in a crypt. On further investigation, they discover that Eduarda is not dead after all. But Mello arrives and coerces the kids into breaking into the crypt, so he can recover Nercessian's stash.

Miraculously, Tevis manages to overpower Mello and disarm him. However, he opts to spare his life and takes the loot back to the favela, where he shares it with the other residents by scattering the banknotes from the top of the rubbish dump. As the film ends, Rooney helps the threesome produce a video account of their exploits, which goes viral, just as the evidence from the ledger helps put Nercessian behind bars.

Daldry dots the story with snippets from this video, which enables Tevis, Luis and Weinstein to address the camera directly and keep the focus fixed on their courage and tenacity rather than the clunkier elements of Curtis's screenplay (which was translated into Portuguese by Felipe Braga). Andy Milligan based his book on his own experiences as a teacher in the favelas, but Daldry too often misses the stark realism required to convince an arthouse audience of the narrative's authenticity. He owes debts to acting coach Christian Duurvoort, who helped him coax such splendidly natural performances from his young leads, and editor Elliot Graham, whose chase sequences are pacy, intricate and compelling. But he is badly let down by the purpose-­‐built favela, which looks far too clean and picturesque to convey the desperation that drives juvenile pickers to spend back-­‐breaking hours combing through garbage in the hope of finding something they can sell for a few reals.

Moreover, Curtis and Daldry fail to solve the problem of why the kids would be so eager to solve the central mystery and bring Nercessian down. They also badly fumble the magic realist revelation that Moura had faked his daughter's death in a bid to protect her, while they also struggle to find anything worthwhile for Sheen and Rooney to do, as the grizzled American cleric devoted to serving the poor and the plucky liberal seeking a cause to salve her conscience. Clearly, these roles have been cast to secure funding by widening the US appeal, but they add little to the storyline and only reinforce the pandering nature of the project as a whole.

Goldman's camerawork is often nimble and well matched with hip-­‐hop tracks by MC Cidinho, the percussive choral interludes provided by Barbatuques and the slick Os Mutantes cover. But, despite the winning charm of the teenage protagonists. Daldry and Curtis remain outsiders looking into a world they neither know nor understand and, consequently, this quickly collapses under the weight of its precarious good intentions.

THE POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS Creativity in the face of adversity is the theme of Edward Lovelace and James Hall's The Possibilities Are Endless, a record of Scottish musician Edwyn Collins's refusal to surrender to the paralysing effects of a 2005 cerebral haemorrhage that left the former Orange Juice frontman with restricted movement on his right side and severe problems with his memory and speech. Although it has its own personality, this documentary frequently feels like a cross between Jesse Vile's Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet (2012) and Emma Davie and Morag McKinnon's I Am Breathing (2013), which respectively profiled a rock guitarist and a young father suffering from the motor neurone condition known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. But this is a much more boldly stylised insight into how Collins and wife Grace Maxwell have coped with a decade of incapacity that strives to allow the audience to experience his perspective rather than simply observe it.

Having enjoyed chart success with Orange Juice with `Rip It Up' in 1983, Edwyn Collins rather disappeared from the pop scene before resurfacing with `A Girl Like You' in 1994.

He continued to record and perform and commanded a loyal following. But, during an interview on BBC 6 Music in February 2005, the 45 year-­‐old complained of feeling unwell.

He put the nausea down to food poisoning. But, two days later, he suffered the first of two brain haemorrhage that prompted an emergency operation on 25 February. As a result of his ordeal, Collins was left with such debilitating aphasia that the only four phrases he was able to say were `yes', `no', `Grace Maxwell' and `the possibilities are endless'.

However, Collins began to make steady progress during a prolonged bout of neurological rehabilitation, as Maxwell helped him relearn how to speak, read and draw. Even more amazingly, in 2007, he was able to complete post-­‐production on his sixth solo album, Home Again, which he had been working on before being placed in a six-­‐month medically induced coma. Moreover, Collins managed to play a gig at Arts Theatre in London. But there was no return to the rock`n'roll lifestyle, as Collins relies on Maxwell (who is also his manager) to strum his guitar strings while he forms the chords with his functioning left hand and sings with a voice that has lost little of its power and emotion. There is no strutting egotism on display here. Instead, Lovelace and Hall capture the love and trust that exists between soulmates who long for little more than being able to retreat to Helmsdale, the village on the Scottish east coast where Collins enjoyed idyllic childhood holidays and the couple has a second home.

Fleeting glimpses are seen throughout the film of a young man whose formative inspirations resemble Collins's own and it is delightful to discover that he is the singer's teenage son, William (whose adventures include some hesitant flirting with a local girl played by Yasmin Paige). But this is just one of many gambits that the co-­‐directors employ to plunge the viewer into Collins's world and reflect his painstaking return to lucidity. The first involves a sudden cut to darkness from footage of an appearance on Conor O'Brien's American chat show that starkly conveys the sudden awfulness of the first haemorrhage.

But the incremental speckling of the pitch blackness with images of the cosmos and cinematographer Richard Stewart's evocative views of the Scottish countryside, which symbolise the slow reclamation of the sense of self that has since enabled Collins to resume his career and make his marriage all the more intimate and precious.

STATIONS OF THE CROSS Numerous European directors have denounced colonialism over the last half century, but nowhere near as many as those who have taken a tilt at Catholicism. Dietrich Brüggemann and his co-­‐scenarist sister Anna become the latest to join the scathing cadre with Stations of the Cross, a droll satire on blind faith that rather confounds its own scepticism with a miraculous denouement. Divided into 14 parts linked to Christ's progress to Calvary, this is often as stylistically austere as its subject matter, as all but three of the scenes have been photographed from a static camera. But, for all the aptness of the mise-­‐en-­‐scène, this is never as sharp as the central segment of Ulrich Seidl's `Paradise' trilogy.

Somewhere in Germany, Fr Florian Stetter addresses a class for the final time before their confirmation by the bishop. He urges them to become warriors in the army of the Lord by following the teachings of the Catholic Church to the letter and by seeking the devils within their own psyches and driving them away, along with the temptations that entice them into sin. The students listen with a mixture of reverence and indifference. But 14 year-­‐old Lea van Acken is intrigued by both her faith and its interpretation by the Society of St Paul, to which Stetter belongs.

As her classmates file out, Van Acken lingers to ask the priest why a loving God would allow small children to fall sick and she seems only partially satisfied by his answer that an ailment can be a sign that the Almighty has chosen the child for special grace. However,

she is impressed by his suggestion that self-­‐sacrifice can bolster prayer and she vows to stop eating and go without warm clothing in the hope that her offering will be pleasing unto the Lord.

The reason for Van Acken's inquiry becomes apparent when she gets home, as her four year-­‐old brother, Linus Fluhr, has yet to speak his first word and his silence only exacerbates the tensions between their parents, Klaus Michael Kamp and Franziska Weisz. The latter is very much the head of the household and blames the emasculated Kamp for their son's condition. But her disdain also keeps Van Acken at a distance and she seeks solace in the unfussy affection of French au pair, Lucie Aron.

She also knows better than to let Weisz know that she has become friendly with Moritz Knapp, a boy from another class who approached her in the library on the pretext of requesting help with his maths homework. He invites her to attend the choir practice at his liberal-­‐minded church, Don Bosco, where they play gospel and soul as well as Bach and hymns. Knowing such satanic sounds would never to tolerated at St Athanasius, Van Acken tells her mother that a girlfriend is keen for her to join the choir. But Weisz refuses to consent to her daughter participating in musical orgies and she so convinces Van Acken that dabbling in such ditties can only inflame the passions that the teenager confesses her failing to Fr Stetter, who is dismayed to learn that she had entertained sexual yearnings for Knapp.

Dismayed at having sinned so wantonly, Van Acken refuses to dance to the pop music played in Birge Schade's gym class and orders Knapp to leave her alone when he tries to take her side. She also brushes aside Aron's concern about her appetite and, for once, is glad that her parents pay so little attention to her, as they fail to detect that she is looking pale and drawn. Indeed, she is so weak that she faints during the confirmation ceremony.

Weisz is more embarrassed than concerned. But, when Van Acken begins having breathing difficulties, she asks Stetter to give her daughter communion and is as stunned as everyone else when she chokes on the wafer and dies and Fluhr utters his first word -­‐ his sister's name. Convinced that Van Acken should be beatified for performing a miracle, Weisz splashes out on an ornate coffin. But only Knapp shows any real emotion at the funeral, as he tosses a single rose into the open grave.

Although splendidly played by Van Acken and a fine ensemble, this always feels as it is taking the easiest pot shots rather than discussing thornier topics like faith, fanaticism, devotion and gullibility in a little more depth. Thus, such is the monotonous stridency of Stetter and Weisz's austerity that they feel more like cartoon characters than antagonists in a on Christian morality by such masters of the form as Carl Theodor Dreyer, Robert Bresson and Ingmar Bergman. Van Acken's naiveté also seems a little far fetched for a 21st-­‐century adolescent, even for one so firmly under the maternal thumb. But she holds the picture together with an endearing earnestness and a pathetic vulnerability that makes her demise more worthy of a tear than a snort of derision.

Clearly, zeal should be open for lampoon when taken to such monolithically ludicrous extremes. But, even with a primary target like the Society of Pius X (which was founded by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in 1970 and rejected the reforms of the Second Vatican Council), the screenplay hammers home the admonitions with such vehemence that the Brüggemanns themselves run the risk of appearing preachily sanctimonious. The references to the youthful saints of yore, for example, could be handled with more comic finesse, as they are already sufficiently disturbing. However, the ascetic restraint that Brüggemann demonstrates in restricting the movement of Alexander Sass's camera around Klaus-­‐Peter Platten's atmospheric sets (which evoke stern Christian art with amusing subtlety) is altogether more laudable, as is the stark insertion of the captions defining each stage on this mournful Via Crucis.

STILL LIFE Rather aptly, Stefano Falivene's camera also remains pretty much static in Uberto Pasolini's Still Life. The producer of The Full Monty (1997) made his directorial debut with the charmingly quirky Sri Lankan handball comedy, Machan (2008). But, while this sophomore outing is sustained by a splendid display of taciturn saturninity by Eddie Marsan, it collapses under the weight of its aching sincerity in a closing coda that is almost too embarrassingly sentimental to endure.

For exactly half his life, 44 year-­‐old Eddie Marsan has been handling the funeral arrangements of those who have died alone in his part of South London. Rummaging through the deceased's belongings, he searches for clues to the identity and whereabouts of any loved ones and, as is often the case, when no one comes forward, he chooses music for the ceremony and composes eulogies that are only ever heard by himself and the officiating cleric.

Convinced that even the most wretched soul deserves dignity in death and a decent send off, Marsan takes his job very seriously. But, when the local council is forced into making cutbacks, he is made redundant and suddenly becomes aware of the emptiness of his own existence. This revolves around following up obscure leads, dining nightly on toast and tuna, and sticking photographs of his clients in a souvenir scrapbook.

Occasionally, he visits the cemetery to lie on the plot he picked out for himself many years before. But Marsan is not a morbid character and his compassion prompts him to ask dourly insensitive boss Andrew Buchan if he can complete his last case at his own expense, as the man in question lived opposite him. At first glance, there seems nothing remarkable about the elderly alcoholic who so kept to himself that Marsan scarcely recognises him. But, as he makes enquiries, he discovers that not only did he serve in the Falklands War, but that he also has friends in the Midlands and an estranged daughter.

Somewhat unexpectedly, Marsan and Joanne Froggatt hit it off as they plan the service and he becomes a new man overnight, as he changes his attire and his favourite beverage. Moreover, following a meeting at the railway café, Marsan realises he is no longer content -­‐ he is genuinely happy. He asks Froggatt for a date and if he can accompany her to the funeral. But, as he crosses a busy road, he is killed by a passing bus and is buried in the same cemetery on the same day as Froggatt's father. However, she thinks he has let her down, while he is laid to rest with no one to mourn him. As the dust settles, however, the ghosts of those Marsan had helped down the years gather at the graveside to pay their respects.

One suspects that this ending might have melted the hearts of millions during the golden age of Hollywood. But modern audiences are less susceptible to such monochrome kitsch and the good intentions turn to mush as the spectres mumble their encomia. Marsan's performance certainly deserves something better than this cornball mawkishness, which is made all the more unbearable by Rachel Portman's glutinous score. Surely one of Pasolini's fellow producers should have stepped in and demanded a rethink? But this false step is entirely in keeping with the faux mood of social realism that should have been supplanted by an air of Ealing whimsy.

Froggatt briefly provides some peppy support in a story that contains echoes of Carol Morley's Dreams of a Life (2011) and Vincent Lannoo's Paper Souls (2013). But this is very much Marsan's show and it says much about his doleful presence that he is utterly captivating for the first two-­‐thirds of the action, as he goes about his daily routine with a touching sense of dedication. Lisa Hall's interiors are also worthy of note, but Pasolini's writing and direction are consistently heavy handed, whether he is seeking to pass comment on Marsan's melancholic duties or the state of Coalition Britain.

STILL THE ENEMY WITHIN

Owen Gower's Still the Enemy Within is an inside account of the 1984-­‐85 Miners's Strike that marked with more trenchancy and less sentiment than Matthew Warchus's Pride the 30th anniversary of what many consider to be the last civil war fought on British soil. More cinematic and less emotive than Ken Loach's The Spirit of `45, this documentary proves that few of those who took on the Thatcher government have forgiven or forgotten the process of industrial rationalisation that cost them their jobs and undermined the stability of their communities. But the fact that Gower and his fellow film-­‐makers were all toddlers or unborn at the time of the strike demonstrates what an indelible impression its defeat has left on this country's social, economic and political landscapes.

Although the primary focus falls on the contributions to camera of those who stood shoulder to shoulder on the picket lines, Gower also makes intelligent use of archive material, such as the promotional film made for the National Coal Board in the early 1970s showing miners skiing, surfing and enjoying exotic holidays with dolly birds in bikinis. He also shows pages from the Ridley Plan, which was drawn up while the Tories were in opposition and detailed the strategies required to provoke a dispute by the National Union of Mineworkers and utilise it to crush the union power that had brought down Edward Heath's administration in 1974. Yet, in castigating the Machiavellian duplicity of Margaret Thatcher and her free market advisers, the talking heads say little about the extent to which the hubris caused by bringing about a three-­‐day week led NUM leader Arthur Scargill and his executive to walk blithely into the trap.

All the speakers agree that the opening skirmishes of the strike were the most satisfying. In addition to uniting mining communities nationwide, the stand-­‐off also drew in the support of other unions, as well as students, gay rights activists, anti-­‐racism campaigners and foreign workers prepared to show their solidarity with brethren in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Durham, Scotland, Kent and South Wales. But it soon became apparent that Thatcher also had her adherents, who were prepared to dig in to loosen the union stranglehold and restore prosperity through privatisation. Moreover, the strikers discovered that Thatcher had planned for the long haul and had stockpiled coal supplies to prevent the NUM from holding the nation to ransom.

She also had the support of the media, with newspapers and broadcast stations alike being reluctant to reflect the frontline experience in case they were accused of spreading Scargillian propaganda. The most infamous case involved the coverage of the showdown in June 1984 between some 6000 flying pickets outside a British Steel coking plant in South Yorkshire and police reinforcements numbering between four and eight thousand.

The BBC changed the order of events in its nightly bulletin to suggest that violence had broken out because miners had bombarded the police with missiles. But there is as much pride as anger in the voices of those recalling this savage outbreak of class war and few have any doubt that many of the officers on duty that day (who were drawn from forces across the UK) took sadistic pleasure in wielding batons and conducting mounted charges.

The Battle of Orgreave proved crucial, as the tide of public opinion slowly started to turn.

The manslaughter in November of cabby David Wilkie (when two Welsh miners dropped a concrete block on his cab as he drove a blackleg to work) shocked many, as did the deaths of three children scavenging for coal on spoil pits. But the Nottinghamshire membership had refused to sanction a strike without a national ballot and other unions had also opted not to support the campaign. As the Labour Party leadership dithered, it became increasingly clear that `King Arthur' was no longer ruling supreme. The bitterness felt by many at what they consider to be the treachery of their fellow workers has not abated, especially among those who struggled to provide for their children and saw their marriages collapse, as their homes and livelihoods were taken away from them. .

Paul Symonds, Norman Strike, Steve Hammill, Mike Jackson, Joe Henry, Jim Tierney and

Joyce Sheppard are among the most eloquent and thoughtful in their reflections on what they experienced. The aptly named Strike recalls how he became a minor celebrity after a mishap on television, while Sheppard describes how ordinary housewives became innovative activists who were prepared to endure police brutality in order to stand by their menfolk. But the shot of Symonds standing in a `country park' that has been planted over the remnants of his old colliery speaks volumes for what was lost when the strike officially ended on 3 March 1985.

Settlements long associated with coal lost their raison d'être overnight and it is all too easy to trace a line from the subsequent auction of nationalised assets to the onset of the credit crunch and its ongoing recession. Few will be able, therefore, to watch unmoved, as ordinary men and women ponder how events that took place on their own streets led to the humbling of the trade union movement and the triumph of the corporatocracy Although Gower's sympathies quite clearly lie with his interviewees, he strives to remain as editorially neutral as possible. But the selection of certain expressions, gestures and postures from the news footage proves every bit as combustible as direct quotations like Thatcher calling the strikers and their supporters `the enemy within'. Moreover, the words of the contributors are as often loaded with lingering venom as calm reason. This in no way devalues the film, either as a social document or a lesson from history. But a little more contemplation on the conduct of the campaign by Scargill and his acolytes might have proved even more instructive.

TESTAMENT OF YOUTH In 1979, the BBC produced a magnificent adaptation of Vera Brittain's Great War memoir, Testament of Youth. Scripted by Elaine Morgan and directed by Moira Armstrong, this five-­‐part serial managed to capture the faux glamour and harsh reality of the conflict without resorting to heritage pictorialism. It's very much to tele-­‐veteran James Kent and producer David Heyman's credit, therefore, that this BBC-­‐backed feature version is almost as restrained. Wisely rejecting the cosy accessibility popularised by Downton Abbey, Juliette Towhidi's screenplay may take the odd liberty with its 600-­‐page source. But, even though Swede Alicia Vikander is marginally less persuasive than Cheryl Campbell in conveying Brittain's tragic trajectory, this well-­‐meaning film laudably eschews the glossy sentimentality that so undermined Joe Wright's take on Ian McEwan's Atonement (2007) and Steven Spielberg's vision of Michael Morpurgo's War Horse (2011).

On Armistice Day in November 1918, Vera Brittain (Alicia Vikander) wanders through the rejoicing crowds in London lost in her memories. She thinks back to the summer of 1914, when she went swimming at her Derbyshire home of Melrose with her 18 year-­‐old brother Edward (Taron Egerton) and his inseparable Uppingham School pals, Roland Leighton (Kit Harington) and Victor Richardson (Colin Morgan). Having just turned 20, Vera is keen to become a writer and has pleaded with her parents, Thomas (Dominic West) and Edith (Emily Watson), to allow her to continue her education at Oxford. However, Thomas is an old-­‐fashioned, nouveau riche conservative (who made his money with a pair of paper mills) and he sees no reason why a girl of marriageable age would ever need to study.

As Edward has successfully applied to New College and Roland is due to go up to Merton, they rally to Vera's cause and her father allows her to sit the entrance exam. Much to her delight, she is offered a place at Somerville, where she comes under the watchful eye of Classics tutor, Hilda Lorimer (Miranda Richardson). However, the crisis foretold by an array of ominous newspaper headlines finally breaks and war is declared on Germany on 4 August. Roland and Edward immediately defer their college places to volunteer for action, although Victor is turned down on the grounds of ill health. Edward enlists with the 10th Sherwood Foresters, where he befriends Geoffrey Thurlow (Jonathan Bailey), while Roland arranges a transfer to the 7th Worcester Regiment so he can get to the Western Front as

soon as possible. Before he leaves, Roland (whose mother is fleetingly played by Anna Chancellor) manages to evade the beady eyes of chaperone Aunt Bella (Joanna Scanlon) long enough to make his feelings known to Vera and they become engaged. However, when Vera sees the effects of shell shock on Geoffrey and hears dreadful stories of the mounting casualties, she decides to take leave from Oxford in the summer of 1915 to train as a nurse. Initially, she is stationed at a hospital close to her Buxton home, but she applies for the Voluntary Aid Detachment and is sent to the First London General Hospital at Camberwell. But, even though Vera witnesses suffering on a daily basis, it is only when Roland comes home on leave and they spend a few days together by the Suffolk coast that she recognises the psychological damage that trench warfare is inflicting upon the troops.

She tries to rationalise Roland's emotional distance and looks forward to their Christmas wedding. But, on the day before he is due to come home, Roland is killed by a sniper as he repairs the barbed wire by a full moon and the heartbroken Vera struggles to continue with her duties. The scenario departs somewhat from the book here by condensing her time in Malta, during which Victor (who had been accepted by a top brass in desperate need of fighting men) was blinded at Arras on 9 April 1917 and Geoffrey was killed at Monchyle-­‐ Preux on St George's Day. Vera returns to London in time to minister to Victor before he dies. But Towhidi further tinkers with the timeline by dispatching Vera to nurse Edward at a field hospital at Étaples under the supervision of Matron Hope (Hayley Atwell)., when he was actually wounded in the thigh at the Somme and she cared for him at Camberwell.

Such changes might make dramatic sense, but they will frustrate those familiar with Brittain's own account. The script even has Vera meet future husband George Catlin (Henry Garrett) well in advance of their first encounter following a lengthy correspondence.

However, Vera would abandon her vocation after Edward recovered and was sent to the Italian front, where he lost his life at San Sisto Ridge during the Battle of Asiago in June 1918. Having become so disillusioned with the conflict that she readily agreed to nurse German wounded, Brittain became a lifelong pacifist and later returned to Somerville, where she would complete her degree and become friends with fellow writer Winifred Holtby (Alexandra Roach).

But the final third of the book has been discarded to retain the focus on the war years and the shattering effect on Brittain of losing her brother, her fiancé and her two closest male friends in such a short space of time. By opting not to depict soldiers going over the top, Kent wisely coerces the audience into sharing Vera's imagined impressions of the horrors of the trenches and keeps the emphasis on the broken bodies and tormented minds of the lost generation. Rob Hardy's camera is allowed to rove briefly over the frontline, while another crane shot at Étaples reveals a landscape filled with stretchers in an image that is bound to draw comparison with the Atlanta station sequence in Victor Fleming's Gone With the Wind (1939).

A soft-­‐focus wild flower montage over a reading of Leighton's 1915 poem `Violets' represents another borderline miscalculation. But Kent (a first-­‐time feature maker, in spite of having an impressive TV CV) largely resists such stylistic flourishes and concentrates on reinforcing the classical sense of time and place impressively generated by Jon Henson's production design and Consolata Boyle's costumes. He might have toned down Max Richter's saccharine score, but he works well with his actors, with Vikander pretty much note perfect whether she is reading from Brittain's letters or capturing her bluestocking assertiveness and virginal vulnerability. She inherited the role from Saoirse Ronan, who had earned an Oscar nomination for Atonement, and it should be noted that the BAFTA electorate has overlooked Testament of Youth entirely. Obviously, accolades are no guarantee of quality, but their absence can only be regarded as a misfortune in the case of a picture that is being so fulsomely marketed as a prestige product.

TRASH It was only a matter of time before someone took the Slumdog Millionaire formula and applied it to another city with a teeming population of haves and have-­‐nots and sufficient poverty, injustice, corruption and violence to fuel the melodrama. Set in a lakeside favela in Rio de Janeiro, Stephen Daldry's Trash ticks all the boxes. But it's never clear who this Hollywoodised adaptation Andy Milligan's teen interest novel is aimed at. Richard Curtis's script is awash with a sentimentality that is reinforced by Tulé Peake's prettified production design and Adriano Goldman's lustrous photography, while Antônio Pinto's score ladles on the manipulative mawkishness with an intrusive disregard for subtlety or taste. Clearly, the intention is to alert the global mainstream to the problems blighting Brazil's major cities by producing a sanitised variation on Hector Babenco’s Pixote (1981) and Fernando Meirelles's City of God (2002). But all Daldry and Curtis have succeeded in doing is trivialise their subject and patronise their audience.

Flashing back from a moment of crisis, the action opens with Wagner Moura fleeing the police through the streets of Rio. He works as an aide to Stepan Nercessian, who is campaigning to become the city's new mayor. Before he is captured, tortured and killed, Moura tosses his wallet into a refuse truck and it is found by 14 year-­‐old Rickson Tevis, as he gleans for things to recycle and sell with his friend, Eduardo Luis. They live in a favela overlooking Rio and are delighted with the windfall. However, when cop Sefton Mello comes to the rubbish tip offering a reward for the return of the wallet, he realises that the absent Tevis must have come into some easy money and orders his officers to hunt him down.

Intrigued by the key they find inside the wallet, Tevis and Luis consult their friend Gabriel Weinstein, who lives in the sewers but immediately recognises that the key comes from the lockers at the central railway station. On opening the locker, the boys find a piece of paper containing a series of numbers and a letter addressed to Nelson Xavier. Heading back to the favela, they sneak into the office of parish priest Martin Sheen and discover online that Xavier is a lawyer who has been jailed for a variety of misdemeanours. But before they can investigate further, Mello has Tevis arrested and he only just manages to escape before he can be liquidated.

Meanwhile, Luis and Weinstein have asked Sheen's assistant, Rooney Mara (a computer whizz who also teaches the street kids English) to arrange for Luis to visit Xavier in his maximum security prison. He reveals that he is Moura's uncle and that the numbers are a code that can by decrypted using passages from the Bible. Moreover, a handy flashback explains how Moura became disillusioned by Nercessian's venality and decided to steal $4 million in bribes, along a ledger containing full details of the illegal transactions.

The trio decide to stakeout Nercessian's beachside compound. But he reacts badly to being spied upon and orders Mello to round up the urchins and torch their homes.

However, they remain at large and manage to crack the code, which leads them to the cemetery where Moura's daughter, Maria Eduarda, is buried in a crypt. On further investigation, they discover that Eduarda is not dead after all. But Mello arrives and coerces the kids into breaking into the crypt, so he can recover Nercessian's stash.

Miraculously, Tevis manages to overpower Mello and disarm him. However, he opts to spare his life and takes the loot back to the favela, where he shares it with the other residents by scattering the banknotes from the top of the rubbish dump. As the film ends, Rooney helps the threesome produce a video account of their exploits, which goes viral, just as the evidence from the ledger helps put Nercessian behind bars.

Daldry dots the story with snippets from this video, which enables Tevis, Luis and Weinstein to address the camera directly and keep the focus fixed on their courage and tenacity rather than the clunkier elements of Curtis's screenplay (which was translated into Portuguese by Felipe Braga). Andy Milligan based his book on his own experiences as a

teacher in the favelas, but Daldry too often misses the stark realism required to convince an arthouse audience of the narrative's authenticity. He owes debts to acting coach Christian Duurvoort, who helped him coax such splendidly natural performances from his young leads, and editor Elliot Graham, whose chase sequences are pacy, intricate and compelling. But he is badly let down by the purpose-­‐built favela, which looks far too clean and picturesque to convey the desperation that drives juvenile pickers to spend back-­‐breaking hours combing through garbage in the hope of finding something they can sell for a few reals.

Moreover, Curtis and Daldry fail to solve the problem of why the kids would be so eager to solve the central mystery and bring Nercessian down. They also badly fumble the magic realist revelation that Moura had faked his daughter's death in a bid to protect her, while they also struggle to find anything worthwhile for Sheen and Rooney to do, as the grizzled American cleric devoted to serving the poor and the plucky liberal seeking a cause to salve her conscience. Clearly, these roles have been cast to secure funding by widening the US appeal, but they add little to the storyline and only reinforce the pandering nature of the project as a whole.

Goldman's camerawork is often nimble and well matched with hip-­‐hop tracks by MC Cidinho, the percussive choral interludes provided by Barbatuques and the slick Os Mutantes cover. But, despite the winning charm of the teenage protagonists. Daldry and Curtis remain outsiders looking into a world they neither know nor understand and, consequently, this quickly collapses under the weight of its precarious good intentions.

THE TURNING Producer Robert Connolly rather misses an opportunity to do something audacious with his adaptation of the 17 short stores in Tim Winton's celebrated 2005 collection, The Turning.

Instead of following Robert Altman's example in his landmark take on Raymond Carver's Short Cuts (1993) and interweaving vignettes that largely share a core of common characters, Connolly has allowed the 16 directors he has hired to take each narrative as a discreet entity that can be scripted and cast according to their own wishes. Thus, even though Vic Lang is the nominal hero of the text and occurs in eight of the tales, he is played by a different actor in each and any hope of continuity (or of vague comprehension for the uninitiated) is lost in the scrimash.

As in all portmanteau pictures, there are highlights. But there are far too few across a three-­‐hour running time and, while one admires Connolly's integrity in striving to bring the entire tome to the screen, a little judicious editing might not have gone amiss. As it stands, however, the picture opens with Marieka Walsh's animated interpretation of TS Eliot's poem, `Ash Wednesday', which appears at the start of Winton's book. Spoken here by Colin Friels, it melds into Warwick Thornton's `Big World', which employs a near-­‐verbatim voiceover (delivered by James Fraser and Winton himself) to explain why college flunkers Lenny (Fraser) and Biggie (Henri Phillips) quit their dead-­‐end jobs at a meat factory to hit the road. However, their adventure looks like going off the rails when they pick up a hitchhiker and, one joint later, they both reckon they have a good shot at scoring with Meg (Nikita Lee-­‐Pritchard).

Jub Clerc's `Abbreviation' introduces Vic Lang (Joseph Pedley), as he receives his first kiss from Melanie (Cheyanne Pearce), who is missing her ring finger, while Robert Connolly's `Aquifer' follows teacher David Wilson (Callan Mulvey), as a TV news story about bones being discovered in a lake prompts him to return to his hometown to face up to a dark secret from his childhood. A half-­‐suspected truth also emerges in Anthony Lewis's `Damaged Goods', as Gail Lang (Libby Tanner) wonders about the lingering crush that husband Vic (Dougie Baldwin) has on Strawberry Alison (Taylor Ferguson) and comes to suspect that he might have married her for the same soft-­‐hearted reasons that he pitied

Strawberry because of the birthmark on her face, A past relationship also informs Rhys Graham's `Small Mercies', as Peter Dyson (Oscar Redding) returns to his hometown of Angelus following the suicide of his wife (Jasmine Knox) and struggles to make a fresh start with son Ricky (Finn Woodlock) until he meets up with ex-­‐girlfriend Fay Keenan (Mirrah Foulkes), a recovering addict whose hopes of rekindling old flames merely reminds him of abortion that drove them apart as teenagers (Harry Borland and Madeline Ferme). Vic (Harrison Gilbertson) gets a fresh perspective in Ashlee Page's `On Her Knees', as he pays a visit to his mother Carol (Susie Porter) and is dismayed to learn that she has been wrongly fired from her job as a cleaner for stealing.

But, while recognising the sacrifices she made to raise him, he cannot understand either why she refuses to clear her name or why she insists on finishing her work without payment.

A sudden realisation also strikes Brakey (Toby Wallace) in Tony Ayres's `Cockleshell', as a shocking blaze makes it clear why neighbour Agnes Larwood (Brenna Harding) is so withdrawn when she leaves her parents (Paul Ireland and Peta Brady) to go on her nightly spear-­‐fishing trips to the beach. Wondering also plays its part in Claire McCarthy's `The Turning', as mother of two Raelene (Rose Byrne) convinces herself that religion might hold the answers to her problems with short-­‐fused husband Max (Matt Noble) after she notes the contentment of born-­‐again Sherry (Miranda Otto) and her recovering alcoholic husband Dan (Myles Pollard) when they move into the White Point caravan park. However, Max mistakes her sudden prolonged absences as a sign of her infidelity.

An unprovoked attack also occurs in Stephen Page's `Sand', as a father (Waangenga Blanco) tries to cheer himself up after being abandoned by his wife by taking sons Frank (Jakory Blanco) and Max (Jarli-­‐Russell Blanco) fishing to on the beach. However, the boys wander off alone and Max tries to bury Frank alive by luring him into a pit. The sibling rivalry continues to simmer years later in Shaun Gladwell's `Family', as fallen Aussie Rules hero Frank (Meyne Wyatt) comes home to White Point to see Max (Wayne Blair) for the first time in years and he recalls the burial incident as they surf together.

To this point, the action has included cameos by Jesus and a shark. But nothing untoward happens with the rifle in Mia Wasikowska's `Long, Clear View', which harks back with narrator Julie Rigg to follow the young Vic (Matthew Shanley), as he struggles to fit into his new town. A series of violent incidents distract his Angelus classmates as he arrives and he desperately wants Strawberry Alison (Marika Teledzinska) to notice him. But he suddenly starts to fit in and his new sense of confidence enables him to take care of his mother Carol (Di Adams) and his baby sister when his policeman father's new posting keeps him away for long periods. A lurch in time sees the older Vic (Richard Roxburgh) and Gail (Cate Blanchett) join Carol (Robyn Nevin) for Christmas in Simon Stone's `Reunion'. However, Carol has written down the wrong address of the aunt and uncle who had invited them for lunch and the trio find themselves lounging around the pool in an empty house wondering where everyone is.

The focus remains on Vic (Josh McConville) in David Wenham's `Commission', as he heads into the Western Australian gold fields to find his estranged father, Bob (Hugo Weaving), to break the news that Carol is dying of cancer. Much to his surprise, Vic finds himself warming to the man he hasn't seen in 27 years and accepts his explanation why he suddenly disappeared from their lives. Indeed, the pair set off together next morning to give Carol their support. But it is only in Jonathan auf de Heide's `Fog' that the full truth emerges, as Bob (Dean Daley-­‐Jones) hates being part of the corrupt Angelus police force and takes to drinking to cope. One night, he is sent into the outback to find a missing hiker (Sam Turton) and he hopes to unburden himself on Marie (Eva Lazzaro), the young reporter accompanying him on the mission. But the rescue proves trickier than he had anticipated.

Justin Kurzel heads off on the beaten track in `Boner McPharlin's Moll', as narrator Louise Harris reflects on the legend that grew up about herself and the school rebel on whom she had a crush when they were teenagers. An adolescent obsession also dominates Yaron Lifschitz's `Immunity', as a girl (Kimberley Rossi) recognises Vic (Casey Douglas) on the train and plucks up the courage to talk to him -­‐ and all through the medium of modern dance. And a confession rounds things off in Ian Meadows's `Defender', as Gail (Kate Mulvany) and Vic (Dan Wyllie) spend a weekend with friends Fenn (Gibson Nolte) and Daisy (Renee Newman-­‐Storen). Feeling that Vic is drifting away from her, Gail admits to an affair with the motel manager in Angelus and is disturbed by Vic's composed reaction.

However, he deals with his emotions when Fenn suggests they go clay pigeon shooting and Vic once again feels the security of having a rifle butt against his cheek.

Clearly, UK audiences are going to be most intrigued by the episodes featuring Hugo Weaving, Rose Byrne and Cate Blanchett (whose husband, Andrew Upton, wrote her script). But the strongest contribution is actress Mia Wasikowska's first excursion behind the camera, which suggests that she is both a confident storyteller and has a way with actors. By contrast, Robert Connolly and Claire McCarthy's offerings are among the weakest, although renowned names like Warwick Thornton and Justin Kurzel adopt a rather prosaic approach to their material.

The constant shifts in style reinforce the fragmentary nature of the exercise, particularly during Yaron Lifschitz's wholly unexpected dance interlude. But the jarring tonal disparity is much more damaging, as the audience is asked to recalibrate every 10 minutes, while trying to come to terms with the fact that someone different is playing a character who has just cropped up in the previous instalment. The visual imagery and music also leave a lot to be desired, but admirers of Winton's tome will probably be reasonably satisfied with this bold, if frustratingly inconsistent transfer.

TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT Despite the near universal acclaim lavished upon it by the critics, Two Days, One Night has to be classed as one of Luc and Jean-­‐Pierre Dardenne's least impressive achievements.

Those who felt that The Kid on the Bike (2011) was a bit too soft around the edges in relocating Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948) to recessional Wallonia will be even more disappointed by the feelgood socialism being peddled in this working-­‐class saga, which has little of the suspense identified by adherents who seem to have been so dazzled by the fact that an Oscar-­‐winning actress can play a plausible human being that they have blithely accepted the storyline contrivances because they are rooted in fact.

Make no mistake, this is an involving and provocative piece of work. But it feels more like Ken Loach's cosily sentimental Looking for Eric (2009) than harder-­‐hitting Dardenne outings like Rosetta (1999), Le Fils (2002) and L'Enfant (2005). At times, it feels as though the brothers are striving for their own take on Jean Renoir's Popular Front classic, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1935). But, in spite of spending several weeks familiarising themselves and their cast with the workings of a small business to ensure the authenticity of the action, this seems like a credit crunch hybridisation of Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men (1957) and Martin Ritt's Norma Rae (1979) and one can easily imagine it being remade as a vehicle for someone like Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Mother of two Marion Cotillard is set to return to work after being treated for depression.

However, on the Friday before she is due back at the small solar panel factory in the port town of Seraing, she receives a phone call from boss Batiste Sornin informing her that her contract has been cancelled. She is told that foreman Olivier Gourmet gathered the 16-­‐strong workforce and asked them to vote between keeping Cotillard or hanging on to their annual €1000 bonus and picking up a little extra overtime in the company's bid to see off the increasingly stiff competition from Asia.

Unsurprisingly, all but two colleagues opted to protect their own interests and Cotillard is dismayed that what she took to be firm friendships counted for nothing when the chips were down. However, best mate Catherine Salée asks Sornin to give Cotillard the weekend to speak to her workmates and try to persuade them to vote differently in a secret ballot on Monday morning. Having just escaped the trap of welfare and public housing, husband Fabrizio Rongione is ready to back Cotillard all the way, as he knows his wage from a diner kitchen will be insufficient to support young children Pili Groyne and Simon Caudry. But Salée remains ready to rally to the cause, even though she warns Cotillard that feelings ran pretty high during the discussions and that she should expect some harsh words, as well as some reluctant support.

Instead of seeking pity, as she visits her comrades in their homes, Cotillard merely asks them to put themselves in her shoes. But, while some shrug and agree to support her, others refuse to even listen to her arguments, as they have husbands out of work. One man reveals that he needs the bonus to help pay for his daughter's tuition, while others protest that everyone has a right to protect their own interests when times are tough.

Another woman avers that she has already put the money towards a new patio, while Yohan Zimmer throws a punch at Cotillard for daring to try and make him feel guilty about putting his family before her. Philippe Jeusette adopts an equally chauvinist approach.

But, even though she is surprised to discover that several colleagues have weekend cash in hand jobs to help pay their bills, Cotillard is determined to press on into Sunday.

However, she the combined effects of a nightmare in which Caudry drowns and three consecutive rejections prompts her to swallow a handful of Xantax and Rongione only just gets her to the hospital in time to have her stomach pumped. Yet, within an hour, Cotillard is back on the trail and she gets a welcome boost when Christelle Cornil declares that she is going to support her friend because her plight caused a row that finally convinced her to leave her abusive husband.

Feeling more optimistic, Cotillard, Rongione and Cornil sing along with the 1964 Them track `Gloria' on the tinny car stereo and she gets to two more houses before she decides to call it a day. Yet, in spite of her efforts, the vote is tied on Monday morning. Sornin comes up with a compromise that would allow Cotillard to return to work after another period of recuperation. However, short-­‐termer Serge Koto would have to lose his job to balance the books. Cotillard turns him down and leaves the premises with her head held high, as she has done the right thing, while also being justified in her protest.

So much attention has been paid to Cotillard's performance that it seems the only place to start our analysis. Screeds have been written about how courageously deglamorised she is with her scrunchied hair and cheap, coloured tank top, as though it was a feat of Method-­‐like transformation for a beautiful woman to play a member of the proletariat.

Judging the calibre of acting on mere physical plausibility is reductive in the extreme, especially when the reason for the Dardennes going for a star name rather than a lesser light or a non-­‐professional is that they required an actress of Cotillard's ingenuity and integrity to make this difficult role credible. But there is nothing new in this. Roberto Rossellini cast Anna Magnani in Rome, Open City (1945) because he also needed proficient authenticity rather than typage.

Yet, while Cotillard ably holds the picture together, she cannot distract entirely from the melodramatic devices to which the Dardennes resort to keep their tale on track. The cosmopolitan nature of the workforce smacks of box-­‐ticking, as an Arabic family and a black migrant are tossed in alongside old-­‐fashioned neighbourly types and hostile bigots.

But even more specious is the notion that a boss bent on downsizing and imposing flexible contracts would accede so readily to a single employer's request for a divisive and time-­‐consuming re-­‐ballot. Moreover, the script also cynically avoids any union involvement that could complicate matters, while the corny reliance on some High Noon-­‐like suspense

means that only a superficial attempt is made to explore the impact that modern working practices are having on traditional class unity.

As stated above, Cotillard is magnificent, as she lurches between domestic contentment, self-­‐loathing, doubt, despair and determination. But some of the support playing is decidedly stiff and as unconvincing as the odd line of loaded dialogue, as the Dardennes strive to uphold both Renoir's maxim about everyone having their reasons and their own unshakeable belief in the fundamental goodness of ordinary people. Alain Marcoen's bustling handheld camerawork adds some much-­‐needed gritty naturalism, as do Marie-­‐ Hélène Dozo's muscular editing, Igor Gabriel's acutely observed interiors and Maïra Ramedhan Levi's workaday costumes. But, otherwise, this comes across a touch too self-­‐consciously as a topical morality tale rather than a slice of life being lived. If only there had been more moments like Cotillard's touching encounter with Koto in the launderette or with young father Timur Magomedgadzhiev, as he tries to coach a junior football team while acknowledge the help that Cotillard gave him while he was struggling to integrate.

WHITE GOD Budapest provides the setting for Kornél Mundruczó's White God, which surprised many by taking first prize in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival. With its title alluding to Samuel Fuller's controversial race-­‐relations allegory, White Dog (1982), this may be no more subtle than Mundruczós previous reworkings of the Joan of Arc (Johanna, 2000) and Frankenstein (Tender Son, 2010) stories. However, as in his seething study of rural tensions, Delta (2008), Mundruczó proves that he is capable of moments of provocative poetry, while also springing narrative surprises that goad the viewer into shedding their preconceptions.

Thirteen year-­‐old Zsófia Psotta is far from pleased when her mother announces that she is leaving Budapest to take up a job in Sydney. But she is even more dismayed when she learns that she is going to have to stay in a cramped apartment with her father, Sándor Zsótér, a former academic who now works in an abattoir and has no time for Psottas beloved Golden Labrador-­‐cross, Hagen. Indeed, he dislikes the dog so much that he refuses to pay a fine imposed under a recently passed act outlawing mixed breeds.

The tension between father and daughter increases when interfering neighbour Erika Bodnár claims that Hagen bit her and the police warn Psotta that her pet will be impounded unless the fine is paid. Unwilling to leave Hagen at home, she takes him to the concert hall, where she is due to rehearse with the youth orchestra in which she plays the trumpet. She confides her concerns to pianist Károly Ascher, who has a crush on her. But music teacher László Gálffi refuses to allow Hagen into the hall and summons Zsótér to take his daughter home.

He is so angry with Psotta for causing such inconvenience that he stops the car and leaves Hagen at the side of a busy road. Accepting his fate with stoicism, Hagen befriends a stray Jack Russell and they join forces to steal some meat from dyspeptic butcher Ervín Nagy.

Fleeing the scene, the new friends find acceptance with a pack of feral hounds, only to be pursued by dog catchers Gergely Bánki and Tamás Polgár. As Hagen bounds away, he is captured by beggar János Derzsi, who drugs and beats him to force him into becoming aggressive. Once he is suitably snarling, Derzsi sell him to restaurant owner Bence Csepeli, who also trains fight dogs as a sideline and cruelly mistreats Hagen to prepare him for his first bout against a bruising Rottweiler.

As Psotta cycles around the city searching for her faithful companion, Hagen manages to escape and roams the streets before he is finally taken to the pound. A kennel worker is ordered to put him down, but he has learned to defend himself and he mauls the luckless stranger to death before freeing dozens of caged dogs and reuniting with his pack. They go on the rampage, with Hagen leading them to the concert hall in the hope of finding Psotta.

She is playing inside and follows on her bike when the dogs are driven away.

Such is their desire to avenge the brutality meted out to Hagen that the dogs hunt down everyone who has wronged him, from Bodnár and Nagy to Derzsi and Csepeli, and savage them. With Hagen at their head, they gather outside the slaughterhouse where Zsótér works and he lights a flame thrower in case they should attack him. However, Psotta cycles up and takes out her trumpet. As she plays, Hagen lies down and his canine companions follow suit (and one can only presume from the pre-­‐credit sequence that she continues to keep them under her spell).

Some may find the denouement's mischievous misquoting of the opening line of William Congreve's The Mourning Bride (1697) a touch twee. But, if music does have charms to soothe the savage beast, it clearly has little effect on those subjecting Hagen to a dog's life.

Mundruczó evidently equates them with the compatriots who have been voting for Hungary's notorious neo-­‐Nazi Jobbik party and shows them little mercy when the underdog bites back. Such a message is disappointingly heavy-­‐handed, but the director and co-­‐scribes Viktória Petrányi and Kata Wéber have little time for nuance, as the action starts out with Incredible Journey charm and acquires some seething Amores Perros menace before coming to rest with an unsettling calm that resembles The Birds.

Although her budding romance proves something of a distraction, Psotta makes a perky heroine, while the supporting cast play their cookie-­‐cutter roles with a pantomimic menace that is reinforced by Asher Goldschmidt's bombastic score. Yet, for all the moody clarity of Marcell Rév's scurring dog's-­‐eye-­‐view camerawork, the undoubted stars of the show are animal co-­‐ordinator Teresa Ann Miller and trainer Arpád Halász, who excel in turning the benign family pet (superbly played by a pair of Labrador, shepherd and Shar-­‐Pei crossbreeds called Bodie and Luke) into a fang-­‐bearing monster without losing the audience's sympathy. Rarely can the Palm Dog at Cannes have gone to a more deserving or more astutely non-­‐anthropomorphised winner.

WILD Such is the versatility of Québecois director Jean-­‐Marc Vallée that dramatic changes of scenery have become the norm. Since debuting with the award-­‐laden serial killer saga Black List (1995), he has made a Western (Los Locos, 1996), a revenge thriller (Loser Love, 1999), a period study of homophobia (C.R.A.Z.Y., 2005), an historical biopic (Young Victoria, 2009), a cross-­‐decades love story (Café Flore, 2011) and an Oscar-­‐winning, fact-­‐based AIDS drama (Dallas Buyers Club, 2013). So, in choosing to hook up with novelist Nick Hornby to adapt Cheryl Strayed's bestselling account of the trek that changed her life, Vallée is simply following his impressive instincts. But, while Wild may look magnificent and may well snag Reese Witherspoon an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, this 1000-­‐mile rite of passage is hamstrung by the tonal lurching and sketchy characterisation that seem to be an unavoidable by-­‐products of its structural convolution.

It's the summer of 1995 and Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) is only partway through her three-­‐month odyssey from along the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert in Southern California to the Oregon-­‐Washington border. She is already beginning to regret bringing such a heavy backpack (which she has dubbed `the Monster') and now wishes she had taken more time choosing her footwear, as her hiking boots are a size too small and they have just removed a toenail. As she inspects the damage, one of the boots falls down a chasm and Cheryl tosses the other after it in frustration.

Forced to make do with a pair of sandals customised with some duct tape, she struggles on and the action flashes back to the phone call she made to her ex-­‐husband, Paul (Thomas Sadoski), to ask him to support her by dispatching supply packages to pick-­‐up points every 100 miles or so along the route. He agrees to help, in spite of not being able to fathom the reason for the enterprise, and we see Cheryl struggling in a pseudo-­‐slapstick

montage to pack her haversack and then carry it on her back.

Heading out to the gas station from her motel room, Cheryl hitches a lift with a friendly couple and a song on the radio prompts her to recall her younger self (Bobbi Strayed Lindstrom) dancing with her mother, Bobbi Nyland (Laura Dern). However, the reverie proves all-­‐too-­‐brief, as Cheryl is dropped at her destination and ventures into the wilderness. As she camps for the night, she writes an entry in her journal and thinks back to how Bobbi had always been there for her and how she had once ticked off her younger brother, Leif (Keene McRae) for expecting their mother to wait on him hand and foot.

Fortified by porridge, Cheryl makes steady progress and has covered 30 miles by the end of Day Five. However, her food supplies have so dwindled by the eighth day that she asks a farmer named Frank (W. Earl Brown) if there is anywhere she can buy some food. He is working with his tractor and tells Cheryl to wait in his truck until he has finished for the day.

Having little option, she agrees, only to spook herself out when she finds a gun in the vehicle. She feels even more insecure when the stranger suggests she comes back to his place for a shower and a hot meal and she sips with some trepidation from his hip flask.

However, even though she warns him that her husband is waiting for her further along the trail, Cheryl still accepts some liquorice and is mighty relieved to find that Frank is married to the no-­‐nonsense Annette (Jan Hoag), who not only welcomes her inside, but also jokes that she might just join her the following day to get away from her trying spouse.

Amused by her hosts' banter, Cheryl thinks back on the end of her marriage to Paul and remembers the surprise on the face of the tattoo artist when he learned that they were getting inked to forge a permanent bond that would outlast their divorce. They had managed to stay together for seven years, but Cheryl doesn't blame Paul for calling it a day, as she had not made life easy and had cheated on him endlessly. She feels more remorse the next morning when Frank drops her back on the trail and lets her know that he doesn't blame her for being a bit scared of him the night before.

He wishes her luck in her endeavours. But even though she succeeds in lighting a fire, Cheryl begins to wonder why she has set herself such an onerous challenge, especially when she has to make a detour to avoid a snake. An incident with an insect also terrifies her and Cheryl thinks back to her friend Aimee (Gaby Hoffmann) telling her that she has nothing to prove and that she should quit at any time the going gets too tough. This causes her to think about a blazing row with Paul and how she gave up too soon with him and has now lost him to another woman.

However, just as her spirits plunge around the 80-­‐mile mark, Cheryl spots a fit young man named Greg (Kevin Rankin) skinny-­‐dipping in the river. She is embarrassed, therefore, when he calls over to her and reveals that he has been averaging 20 miles a day since he set off. He suggests that she checks into a campsite and rethinks her plan of campaign and this jolts her back to the first time she heard about the Pacific Crest, when she found a guidebook in a shop while waiting with Aimee for the results of a pregnancy test. She had been angry and vowed not to keep the baby, as it would interfere with the lifestyle she had envisaged for herself.

Now back on the path, Cheryl feels pleased with herself for negotiating a difficult climb.

She is also happy to bump into Greg at Kennedy Meadows, where his friend Ed (Cliff De Young) shows her how to pack `the Monster' more efficiently. His kindly guidance reminds her of a debate she had with Bobbi when they found themselves on the same Minneapolis campus about the merits of James A. Michener's writing, in which the 22 year-­‐old Cheryl insinuates that her mother lacks her intellectual sophistication. Shortly afterwards, however, they are informed that the 45 year-­‐old Bobbi has a tumour on her spine that she is not expected to survive.

Arriving at Reno, Cheryl calls Paul to let him know she is faring well. However, she decides to hitch a ride and is put out when Jimmy Carter (Mo McRae) accuses her of being a

vagabond. He writes for The Hobo Times and speculates that Cheryl has been inspired to wander because she couldn't face up to a trauma. She is stung by his remarks and his casual chauvinism. But she still accepts a care package and feels decidedly uncomfortable when he accepts a lift from a woman and two men, one of whom keeps ogling her as they drive along.

Her eye is drawn to the photograph of a young boy who was killed by a speeding truck and she harks back to the anguished times she spent urging Bobbi not to give up her fight. This fortitude helps Cheryl through the snow that falls heavily on Day 30 and she dismisses the skiers who tease her that she has lost her way and wandered back into California. As she notices a fox watching her, Cheryl recalls remonstrating with the doctor who had given Bobbi a year to live and now cannot explain why her condition has deteriorated so rapidly.

The pain of loss continues to haunt Cheryl for the next week and she wonders why Leif resisted visiting his mother in the hospital when he knew how much he meant to her.

Eventually, she persuades him to come. But, while they say their goodbyes, they hardly make peace and Cheryl goes seriously off the rails and not only begins cuckolding Paul, but also starts using heroin and not even Aimee can bring her out of the slough. That is, until she decides to separate from her husband and she finds the trail guide by serendipity.

There is more to endure on the path before Cheryl reaches journey's end. She has encounters with a snarky park ranger (Brian Van Holt), fears being stalked by a pair of bow hunters in the woods (Charles Baker and JD Evermore) and shares her experiences with another solo female trekker (Cathryn de Prume). But, much to her surprise, she also meets Jonathan (Michiel Huisman), who invites her to a gig after they sleep together and she writes Paul's name in the sand for the last time to signify she is no longer dependent upon him and can stand on the two feet that have carried her to the brink of a fresh start.

A clutch of films have focused on intrepidity in the great outdoors since Sean Penn directed himself as Christopher McCandless in Into the Wild (2007). Standing just 5' 1", Reese Witherspoon certainly deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as James Franco and Mia Wasikowska for their respective efforts in essaying Aron Ralston in Danny Boyle's 127 Hours (2010) and Robyn Davidson in John Curran's Tracks (2013). She may be a decade too old for the role (and, indeed, is only nine years Dern's junior), but she conveys a wider gamut of emotions here (while under extreme physical duress) than she exhibited in her Oscar-­‐winning turn as June Carter Cash in James Mangold's Walk the Line (2005).

Moreover, Witherspoon also co-­‐produced the picture, which seems destined to become a feminist classic, even though it was written and directed by males. In truth, Hornby strains a little too hard to find audio and visual cues to trigger the flashbacks, but Vallée (masquerading as John Mac McMurphy) and co-­‐editor Martin Pensa amusingly avoid seamless transitions, as if self-­‐guyingly to draw attention to occasional gaucheries like the match cut between a panting Witherspoon emerging from a hedge and her wilder self gasping during a vigorous bout of coitus. However, some of the promiscuity and smacktaking montages feel mannered, as does the inclusion of snippets of poetry by Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost. Moreover, too many of the soundtrack prompts appear to have been selected to manipulate audience response during moments of sinister suspense that turn out to contain red herrings rather than rapacious predators.

Yet, this is a slickly assembled picture, with Yves Bélanger's widescreen imagery often taking the breath away, as it emphasises Witherspoon's insignificance in the grander scheme of things. On screen throughout, she excels whether persevering in the face of physical and psychological upheaval or having the awareness to recognise the landmarks on her way to xelf-­‐discovery. Dern provides admirable support, but there is something Sirkian about the positioning of her demise within the narrative and this tendency towards melodrama in the flashbacks has an undeniably enervating effect. But Vallée's sincerity can never be doubted, while Witherspoon proves (as she has done previously with Alexander

Payne's Election, 1999 and Robert Luketic's Legally Blonde, 2001) that, when she finds the right role, she is one of the finest screen actors of her generation.

WILD TALES Nominated for an Oscar, Damián Szifrón's Wild Tales is a compendium of six vignettes linked by the theme of vengeance. Numbering Pedro and Augustín Almodóvar among its producers, this subversive black comedy broaches the odd serious issue in riffing on Peter Finch's famous line in Sidney Lumet's Network (1976) about being mad as hell. But such are the deft shifts in tone within and between episodes that this makes telling points about both Argentinian society and human nature with an assurance that is reflected in Maria Clara Notari's production design, Javier Julia's cinematography and the amusing Morricone references in Gustavo Santaolalla's score.

Launching proceedings is `Pasternak', which takes place on an aircraft and centres on model Maria Marull and music critic Dario Grandinetti, as they realise that they have a mutual friend in common. However, as she reveals that she dumped him and he explains how he wrote a review that shattered his confidence, it becomes clear that all of their fellow passengers once offended their disconcertingly absent host. If this feels like the opening to a whodunit, `The Rats' smacks of hard-­‐boiled pulp, as waitress Julieta Zylberberg recognises customer César Bordón as the loan shark who drove her father to suicide and left her mother destitute. However, cook Rita Cortese (who is no angel herself after spending time behind bars) has just the right ingredient to spice up the shyster's egg and chips.

The mood darkens in `Road to Hell', which feels what one of Laurel and Hardy's famous tit-­‐for-­‐tat exchanges might have looked like if directed by Sergio Leone and Quentin Tarantino. The set-­‐up is pretty standard, as Audi-­‐driving businessman Leonardo Sbaraglia flips nobody Walter Donado the finger after finally managing to pass his humble Peugeot on a narrow mountain road. However, Sbaraglia gets a puncture in the middle of the desert and he has mixed feelings about the sight of Donado rolling up to offer his assistance.

Such is the potency of the blend of absurdity and brutality that colours the resulting contretemps, the otherwise admirable `Bombita' makes less impression than it should and Szifrón and co-­‐editor Pablo Barbieri Carrera might have rethought its place in the running order. Particularly, as it stars Ricardo Darín as a demolition engineer who is so angry at having to pay a large fine to retrieve his towed car that he decides to stand up for the little guy.

Darín's mood is hardly improved by the fact that wife Nancy Dupláa gives him grief for missing his daughter's birthday party and another father is put to the test in `The Bill', as the rich and influential Oscar Martinez conspires with lawyer Osmar Núñez to let gardener Germán de Silva take the rap when son and heir Alan Daicz kills a pregnant woman in a hit-­‐and-­‐run accident. But, while De Silva is prepared to help the family for a fee, he is not alone in wanting a pay-­‐off. Exposing the fissures in the class system, this is easily the weightiest tale. But its bleak satire nicely sets up the frantic farce of `Till Death Do Us Part', which looks on with gleeful satisfaction as bride Erica Rivas wreaks havoc at her wedding reception when she learns that groom Diego Gentile has been cheating on her with one of the guests.

Rivas revels in the spirited slapstick, which provides a fitting climax to a picture that forever seems to be on the cusp of eruption. Indeed, the performances are splendid throughout, as is Szifrón's writing and direction, as he strives to give each segment its own flavour without resorting too blatanly to `tales of the unexpected' contrivance. As with any anthology, maintaining consistency levels proves challenging. But the quirky wit and ready sympathy for the put upon keep the audience onside.

A very different Argentina comes under scrutiny in Natalia Meta's feature bow, Death in

Buenos Aires. Set in 1989, this crime thriller captures the mood of a country coming to terms with the freedoms lost during la última junta militar and Meta owes much to production designer Mariela Rípodas and costumiers Valentina Bari and Daniel Melero for recreating the look and feel of the capital in this time of transition. Many will brands the storyline a cross between Cruising and Brokeback Mountain, but this would miss the point of the socio-­‐historical context that makes the action so compelling.

When millionaire Martin Wullich is found dead in his luxury apartment, sister Luisa Kuliok uses her influence with judge Emilio Disi to ensure that Commissioner Hugo Arana adopts a softly softly approach to prevent details of her gay brother's secret lifestyle from leaking out. Wullich was known as a horse breeder and connoisseur of fine arts, but he also frequented the nightclub managed by Humberto Tortonese, where onetime lover Carlos Casella performs the cabaret.

Inspector Demian Bichir is assigned the case and is surprised to find rookie Chino Darín already at the scene of the crime when he arrives with partner Mónica Antonópulos. He resents being ordered to let Darín assist with the inquiry and has qualms when he insists on going undercover to learn more about Wullich's activities on the gay scene. But, as Darín starts taking greater risks while tailing suspects, Bichir becomes increasingly drawn to him, even though he has plenty to worry about at home with wife Jorgelina Aruzzi and son Nehuen Penzotti.

Strongly supported by a solid ensemble, Bichir and Darín impress as the corrupt cop whose moral compass has long been mislaid and the impulsive newcomer prepared to put his body on the line in the course of duty. Antonópulos also shows well, as the partner who understands Bichir better than he knows himself, while Casella handles the musical numbers with flamboyant aplomb. But, while the sexual sparks fly, it is difficult not to compare the leads with Eduardo Noriega and Leonardo Sbaraglia in Marcelo Piñeyro's (2000).

WINTER SLEEP Nuri Bilge Ceylan won the Palme d'or at Cannes for Winter Sleep, which he co-­‐wrote with his wife and regular collaborator, Ebru. Yet, while this is an intense study of conscience, pride, duty and the tensions between the genders, generations, classes and belief systems in modern Turkey, it always feels as though it could exist just as happily on the stage as the screen. Some of the dialogue during the lengthy and often heated exchanges has a novelistic ring and it is perhaps unsurprising that Ceylan acknowledges his debts to Shakespeare and Chekhov, alongside Voltaire and Dostoevsky, in the closing credits. But it is difficult to watch this three-­‐hour chamber drama without being reminded of Ingmar Bergman and his own epic study of domestic dysfunction, Scenes From a Marriage (1973).

This is clearly the work of another master film-­‐maker. But it never feels quite as cinematic or substantial as Distant (2002), Climates (2006), Three Monkeys (2008) and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), which all won awards at Cannes, while missing out on the top prize.

Haluk Bilginer runs the mountaintop Othello hotel on the Cappadochian estate he inherited from his late father. Bolstered by his modest achievements as an actor, Bilginer's patrician sense of superiority manifests itself in his column for the weekly Voice of the Steppe newspaper, in which he lords it over the residents of the town and espouses his superficial views on everything from manners and responsibility to religion and politics. Yet, while he enjoys his status as the local grandee, Bilginer has few friends, with even younger wife Melisa Sözen and divorced sister Demet Akbag despising him for his pettiness and pomposity.

As the guests depart and the snow settles, Bilginer prepares to hunker down for the winter.

However, as he drives down to the town with assistant Ayberk Pekcan, he is severely

shocked when a stone shatters his windscreen. He recognises his assailant as Emirhan Doruktutan, the young son of troublesome tenant Nejat Isler, who has fallen so far behind with his rent that Bilginer has confiscated his refrigerator and television to make up the arrears. Yet, when he confronts Isler, Bilginer takes a step back when a fight breaks out with Pekcan and Ceylan uses the incident to suggest that Bilginer is not only indifferent to the struggles of his tenants, but that he is also a coward.

This impression is reinforced by Bilginer's inability to sit down and write the history of Turkish theatre he is always claiming will be his legacy. But he is quick to find fault with others. So, when Sözen seeks him out to discuss her plans to raise funds for the local school, he mocks her ideas and picks holes in her book-­‐keeping. Moreover, when Isler's obsequious brother, Serhat Kiliç, brings his nephew to the hotel to apologise for throwing the stone (and the stressed Doruktutan faints), Bilginer treats him with indifference and derides Kiliç's efforts as the town imam to strike a balance between the sensibilities of his secular and spiritual neighbours.

Refusing to tolerate her sibling's arrogance, Akbag takes him to task for the article and pokes fun at his literary style, while also accusing him of courting cheap popularity by holding opinions in which he doesn't believe. But Bilginer lambastes his sister for cowering behind self-­‐deception and takes himself off to Istanbul after a drunken night with a farmer friend. In his absence, Sözen takes the money she raised for the school and offers it to Kiliç, in the hope it can alleviate his brother's suffering. However, Isler refuses to accept charity and contemptuously tosses the banknotes on the fire. Thus, he remains in debt to Bilginer, who returns home with renewed determination to start work on his magnum opus.

In many ways, this is Ceylan's most densely written picture, as the some of the conversations last up to half an hour. Yet, while the cast respond superbly to the challenge of sustaining such lengthy and often fiery exchanges, Ceylan does much more than eavesdrop behind Gökhan Tiryaki's camera. Indeed, at one point, he and co-­‐editor Bora Göksingöl pay homage to the famous Kuleshov Effect by cutting away from the irate Sözen to shots of Bilinger's seemingly unchanging half-­‐smile, which appear to convey a different emotional response with each crosscut. But there is no escaping the theatricality of the tête-­‐à-­‐têtes, even though the décor and lighting of Gamze Kus's sets is irrsistibly atmospheric and Ceylan uses the darkened interiors to contrast with the widescreen vistas of the Anatolian landscape to imply that not only is Bilginer hibernating, but that he is also entering the last act before a sleep that will last a lot longer than one winter.

What most frustrates about the decision to stage so much action indoors, however, is the fact that Ceylan is so adept at using the environment to comment on the psychological state of the characters. Moreover, he also has a rare knack for shooting at night, with the sequence in which the wild horse (which had earlier been captured by a motorcyclist at Bilginer's behest) is allowed to roam free again meriting comparison with similar equine scenes in the films of Miklós Jancsó and Béla Tarr. But one keeps coming back to the slanging matches between Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann in Scenes From a Marriage (which was adapted for the stage in 2008 and it is easy to see how this could make a similar transition), as the trouble behind the façade of their outwardly idyllic relationship reflected the fissures in contemporary Swedish society, just as Ceylan here explores the wider moral implications of Bilginer's relationships with his wife and sister.