Festivals & Seasons, Borderlines Film Festival 2014 review by David Parkinson

Empire on Line / Festivals & Seasons Borderlines Film Festival 2014 review

by David Parkinson

Borderlines Film Festival 2014 Media Date http://www.empireonline.com/festivalsandseasons/ 1 March 2014

As dedicated as ever to bringing the best in world cinema to the towns and villages of the Marches, the Borderlines Film Festival marks a dozen editions with another splendid programme. No other screen event comes close to matching the ambition of this admirable festival and it is to be hoped that other rural communities 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 Acton Scott, Bedstone & Hopton Castle, Bodenham, Bosbury, Brilley, Burghill, Chapel Lawn, Clungunford, Dorstone, Ewyas Harold, 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, Booth's Bookshop in Hay, The Courtyard, the College of Arts, the Jailhouse and the WRVS Hall in Hereford, the Market Theatre in Ledbury, the Playhouse Cinema in Leominster, Ludlow Assembly Rooms, the Attfield Theatre in Oswestry, the Assembly Rooms in Presteigne, and The Regal in Tenbury Wells.

Borderlines is always a great place to catch up with recent releases and take in the odd sneak preview and the 2014 programme is full of temptations, including Declan Lowney's Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa, JC Chandor's All Is Lost, John Wells's August: Osage County, Jon Sanders's Back to the Garden, Jamie Adams's Benny & Jolene, Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, Brian Percival's The Book Thief, Paul Greengrass's Captain Phillips, Jean-­‐Marc Vallée's Dallas Buyers Club, Joanna Hogg's Exhibition, Daniel Auteuil's Fanny and Marius, Bill Condon's The Fifth Estate, Diego Quemada-­‐ Diez's The Golden Dream, Spike Jonze's Her, Justin Kerrigan's Human Traffic (1999), Anthony Chen's Ilo Ilo, Joel and Ethan Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis, Ralph Fiennes's The Invisible Woman, François Ozon's Jeune et Jolie, Manuel Sicilia's Justin and the Knights of Valour, Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-­‐Taylor's Leviathan, Ritesh Batra's The Lunchbox, George Clooney's The Monuments Men, Alexander Payne's Nebraska, Scott Cooper's Out of the Furnace, Joanna Kos-­‐Krauze and Krzysztof

Krauze's Papusza, Asghar Farhadi's The Past, Stephen Frears's Philomena, Carlo Carlei's Romeo & Juliet, Ron Howard's Rush, Mark Cousins's A Story of Children and Film, Dexter Fletcher's Sunshine on Leith, John Curran's Tracks, Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave, Lucía Puenzo's Wakolda and Lukas Moodysson's We Are the Best!

There are also a number of pictures that are not showing widely in other festivals, including Lily Keber's Bayou Maharajah, Jack Eve's Death of a Farmer, Sophie Huber's Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction, David `Tosh' Gitonga's Nairobi Half Life, and a couple of oldies, Rupert Julian's The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and Barrie Gavin's The Passing of the Year (1973). Also, this year, festival patron Francine Stock has selected her favourite French films. Leading off Ah, Mon Héros is a double bill of Max Linder shorts that will show alongside Louis Feullade's Fantomas (1913), which will be accompanied by pianist extraordinaire, Neil Brand.

Completing the strand is Marcel Carné's Le Jour se Lève (1939), the Jean Cocteau pairing of La Belle et la Bête (1948) and Orphée (1950), Jean-­‐Luc Godard's À Bout de Souffle (1960), Eric Rohmer's Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune (1984) and Jacques Audiard's Un Prophète (2009).

Also worth noting are: BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOUR It was quite like old times when Steven Spielberg's Cannes jury awarded the Palme d'or to Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue Is the Warmest Colour. No sooner had the verdict been delivered than there were protests. The prurient denounced the graphic nature of the lengthy scenes of lesbian love-­‐making, while the Sapphic community complained that the voyeuristic male director didn't know the first thing about female passion.

Even Julie Maroh, whose graphic novel had provided the inspiration for the screenplay lamented that the whole pornographic enterprise smacked of heterosexual fetishisation.

Then, leads Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux fanned the flames by claiming that Kechiche had been excessively demanding on set and that his perfectionism had meant that one of their bedroom sequences had taken 10 days to shoot. Outraged that his actresses had questioned his methods, Kechiche threatened to withdraw the film.

Yet, they have all been doing the PR rounds recently and managed to maintain a level of civility and professional respect, while still clearly feeling the after-­‐effects of an emotionally draining experience that has resulted in a film whose qualities lie well away from the scenes that have made all the headlines.

One is tempted to recall the accusations that Maria Schneider levelled at Bernardo Bertolucci following their fiery collaboration in the early 1970s. But this is no Last Tango in Lille, as it owes more to the humanist cinema of François Truffaut than arthouse softcore or internet porn. Moreover, the Cannes jury pointedly awarded the Palme to Kechiche, Seydoux and Exarchopoulos in recognition of their collective achievement. Yet, little criticism has been aimed at the stars for being straight and it does seem too easy to single out the 52 year-­‐old Tunisian-­‐French director for opprobrium.

That said, Kechiche does try rather too hard to cover his back at various intervals during the three-­‐hour picture. He has Seydoux take Exarchopoulos to an art gallery where the nudes on display were all painted by men. Then, during the same party

scene, he shows artist-­‐cum-­‐galley owner Stéphane Mercoyrol cursing the difficulty that men have in capturing the elusive essence of female sexuality, while actor Salim Kechiouche pointedly asks Exarchopoulos to explain the difference between sleeping with a man and a woman as academic Lucie Bibal debates the efforts of Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt to do justice to the power and mystery of the female form.

But Exarchopoulos's erotic awakening is only part of the rite of passage that Kechiche seeks to chronicle and the great strength of this film is the care it takes in showing an 18 year-­‐old's response to a range of social, cultural, intellectual and physical stimuli. In each case, her expression is often one of insecurity and hesitancy, as she comes to terms with a new discovery. Lesbianism is just one of these novelties and it could be argued that an outsider's perspective more authentically represents her unfamiliarity with the acts and sensations that are overpowering her mind and body.

But Exarchopoulos's education (sentimental or otherwise) encompasses much more than mere genital gratification.

Seventeen year-­‐old Adèle Exarchopoulos lives with parents Aurélien Recoing and Catherine Salée in a working-­‐class part of the northern French city of Lille. On missing the bus from the stop at the end of her street, she takes the train to school. She is studious and enjoys the lesson on Pierre de Marivaux's unfinished mid-­‐18th-­‐century novel, La Vie de Marianne. However, she also smokes during break with her gossiping friends and Fanny Maurin teases her about handsome Jérémie Laheurte having a crush on her.

The morning after a typical family dinner in front of the television (Exarchopoulos has a hearty appetite and loves her father's spaghetti), she is surprised to find Laheurte on her bus and gets embarrassed as they chat about music and he offers to play her some of his own stuff as a pretext for seeing her again. However, as she is walking through the city centre, Exarchopoulos is so taken by the blue-­‐haired Léa Seydoux, as she passes with her girlfriend, Aurelie Lemanceau, that she stops in her tracks and looks back to get a second glimpse.

The moment soon passes, however, and she joshes Laheurte over lunch about his efforts to read Marivaux in order to get to know her better. He admits he has little to do with books and only enjoyed Les Liaisons Dangereuse because the teacher explained its significance in class. By contrast, Exarchopoulos hates being hand-­‐held and, when Laheurte kisses her at the pictures, she begins to realise that she likes him without fancying him. That night, she wakes from a masturbatory fantasy about Seydoux and tries to put it out of her mind by sleeping with Laheurte. But she lies when he asks if she enjoyed it and there is a deadness in her eyes as she turns away from him on her pillow.

Exarchopoulos confides in gay friend Sandor Funtek that something is missing and she goes home to comfort eat chocolate as she cries on her bed after dumping Laheurte on a park bench. She is soon out and about again, however, and treats a protest march against education reform as an excuse to party. But she remains focused on her studies and is touched by a lesson on Sophocles's Antigone and the notion that a tragedy is something that is unavoidable. One lunchtime, Alma Jodorowsky sits beside Exarchopoulos as they smoke on the steps and she is surprised when her classmate suddenly pays her a compliment and kisses her. They part casually and

Loiret comments over dinner that night that her daughter has the air of someone who has had a good day. But, when Exarchopoulos kisses Jodorowsky in the toilets the next morning, she backs away and tells her that the original embrace was a spur of the moment thing that meant nothing.

Mortified, Exarchopoulos accepts an invitation to go clubbing with Funtek.

However, she quickly gets bored when he takes her to a gay bar and wanders off on her own. She ventures into a lesbian bar and takes a turn of the room before ordering a drink. Through the crowd, she spots Seydoux, who comes to her rescue when she is chatted up by an older woman. Exarchopoulos tries to explain that she is in the bar by chance and Seydoux (who is a few years older) teases her about being underage and straight. Seydoux reveals that she is studying Fine Art at college and smiles as Exarchopoulos strives to sound knowledgeable about American movies and winds up blurting out that she can be inspired to learn anything if she has the right teacher.

Once again left alone, when Lemanceau claims Seydoux to go clubbing, Exarchopoulos finishes her beer and leaves in a state of enticing confusion. She is surprised, however, when Seydoux comes to the school to find her and allows herself to be sketched as they sit on a park bench. Seydoux tells her about Jean-­‐Paul Sartre giving a whole generation a sense of freedom and Exarchopoulos confesses that she struggles to understand philosophy before suggesting that Bob Marley also wrote about emancipation. Seydoux is charmed by her naiveté and asks for her phone number and their faces draw closer (with the sun dazzling behind them) before Seydoux opts for a kiss on the cheek before going off to meet her girlfriend.

Arriving home to a call from Seydoux, Exarchopoulos feels exhilarated. But she is brought down to earth at school, when best friend Maurin and the sneering Maelys Cabezon take her to task for cutting them in favour of Seydoux. They loudly accuse her of being a lesbian and express their disgust, as Jodorowsky looks on in embarrassment. When Funtek admits taking her to a gay venue, Exarchopoulos gets into a fight and finds it impossible to concentrate in class for the rest of the day.

Far from prying eyes, Seydoux takes Exarchopoulos to an art gallery and they picnic in the park. They smoke while lying on the grass and Exarchopoulos tries to impress Seydoux while finding out everything about her, including the fact she had her first lover at 14. As their eyes meet, Seydoux closes in for a gentle kiss and an abrupt cut takes us into a bedroom for a long, intimate sequence, in which the camera alternates between naked flesh and the expressions on Exarchopoulos's face, as she succumbs to feelings she had scarcely anticipated. But the physical thrill of a teenage crush soon develops into something more serious, as she accompanies Seydoux on a gay pride march and they kiss with the sun again providing a halo behind them.

Seydoux takes Exarchopoulos to meet her mother, Anne Loiret, and stepfather, Benoît Pilot. They have cooked shellfish and Exarchopoulos blushes because this is the one thing she doesn't eat. But she is given a lesson in how to savour oysters and they listen intently as she explains how she wants to be a nursery teacher. Loiret seems to sense Exarchopoulos's immaturity, but the ensuing sex scene suggests that she has long lost her innocence and now appears to be an equal partner in passion.

This middle-­‐class soirée is contrasted with an 18th birthday party (which takes Exarchopoulos by surprise and she only gradually gets into the swing of things) in the

tiny back garden of Recoing and Salée's semi-­‐detached house and a spaghetti tea that proves something of an ordeal, as Loiret thanks Seydoux for helping Exarchopoulos study philosophy and Recoing asks what her boyfriend does. Trying not to giggle, Seydoux plays along and they are forced to keep quiet as they make love in Exarchopoulos's room. They lie entwined (ignoring the cot that has been made up for the guest) and Exarchopoulos promises she will do anything to make Seydoux love her more. The scene ends (as, indeed does the first part of the story -­‐ the French title is La Vie d’Adèle -­‐ Chapitres 1 et 2) with a shot of the lovers lying naked and unabashed on the bed -­‐ now, quite clearly a couple, even though their secret remains closely guarded.

The action shifts forward an unspecified period of time to show the now blonde Seydoux sketching a naked Exarchopoulos, as she reclines with a cigarette in her mouth. She is now a kindergarten teacher and evidently revels in reading stories to the children and having them join in dance routines. Despite remaining in the closet at work, she has also befriended colleague Benjamin Siksou, but resists his frequent invitations to go for a drink by pleading prior engagements. On this occasion, it's a party for Seydoux's friends and she has left Exarchopoulos to make all the preparations and cook her famous spaghetti. She is desperate to make a good impression and has laid out a nice spread in the garden and takes a deep breath as she hears the guests arrive.

Seydoux introduces Exarchopoulos with pride. But she is soon preoccupied with her friends and Exarchopoulos is left to linger on the periphery when not playing hostess.

She eavesdrops on clever conversations, as gallery owner Stéphane Mercoyrol muses on representations of the female form, while Lucie Bibal discusses her thesis.

Exarchopoulos meets Seydoux's pregnant friend, Mona Walravens, and feels uncomfortable at being invited to feel her prominent bump. She also senses a close bond between the pair and keeps an eye on them as actor Salim Kechiouche tries to make conversation by asking Exarchopoulos to describe what it feels like to sleep with another woman. He tells her about the action movies he has made in the States and urges her to visit New York, which he compares to a giant film set.

Everyone enthuses about Exarchopoulos's cooking and she feels like a good housewife, as she surveys the smart, chic people tucking into her simple fare. She dances in front of a screen projecting an old Louise Brooks silent and keeps a close eye on Walravens. Having washed up, she climbs into bed and admits to Seydoux that she felt foolish in such august company. But, in reassuring her, Seydoux patronisingly urges Exarchopoulos to take her writing more seriously, so she can feel properly fulfilled, and further hurts her feelings by going to sleep without making love.

Exarchopoulos is soon back in her element, however, and maybe even feels a little broody as she supervises the children having their afternoon nap. But, on returning home to find a voicemail from Seydoux apologising for working late on a project with Walravens, Exarchopoulos decides to rebel and goes to the bar where she knows Siksou is drinking with some other members of staff. Hitting the dance floor, she lets herself go for the first time in ages and responds tentatively when Siksou kisses her.

Back home, Exarchopoulos tries to keep Seydoux calm as she argues with Mercoyrol over the phone about a forthcoming show and accuses him of not taking

her work seriously because she's a lesbian. She complains to Exarchopoulos about fads in art, but she doesn't really understand and says tensions between workmates are commonplace. Ironically, she seems distracted herself in the classroom and gets home from another drink with Siksou to be confronted by a seething Seydoux.

She demands to know who dropped her off and how many times they have slept together. Exarchopoulos protests her innocence and starts to cry, but Seydoux refuses to believe her and announces that she will not live with a liar and orders her to pack up and leave. Stunned, Exarchopoulos admits to sleeping with Siksou two or three times in the hope that a confession will lead to forgiveness. But Seydoux hurls a torrent of abuse that reduces Exarchopoulos to a sobbing wreck. She insists she was lonely and never meant to hurt her, but Seydoux (who has rather conveniently forgotten the fact that she cheated on Lemanceau when first seeing Exarchopoulos) is incensed and slaps her face before stuffing things into a suitcase and telling her that she never wants to see her again. Eventually, Seydoux pushes Exarchopoulos outside and breaks a pane of glass in the front door as it slams, leaving the distraught teacher to head home in the darkness.

Holding herself together, Exarchopoulos gets through the last day of term, as her pupils present her with flowers and she joins them for a dance display in the playground. The instant she's alone, however, she bursts into tears and struggles to compose herself before home time. She spends part of her summer taking parties to the beach and leaves her charges with another teacher so that she can swim in the sea and feel the sun on her face as she floats in the warm blue water.

More time passes and Exarchopoulos (who now needs glasses for reading) is teaching first graders. She walks between the desks doing a dictation exercise and then keeps the chatty class quiet, as they go through their answers. On her way home, she dozes on the park bench where Seydoux first drew her and later cries as she looks out of her bedroom window.

She arranges to meet Seydoux at a café and they kiss on the cheek before ordering drinks. Seydoux compliments Exarchopoulos on her new hairdo, but she jokes that it hasn't really worked, as it was supposed to make her look older and more sophisticated. She tells Seydoux how pleased she is that her art has finally been recognised and puts on a brave face when Seydoux says that she is happy with Malravens and adores her three year-­‐old daughter. Aware that Exarchopoulos winced when she called them her family, Seydoux asks if she is seeing anyone. But she shrugs off the occasional fling and clings to Seydoux's hand and begs her to give her another chance.

Exarchopoulos kisses the tears off Seydoux's fingers and they lock into a furious embrace that is accompanied by some frantic fumbling under the table. But Seydoux pulls away and Exarchopoulos laments that her emotions are beyond her control.

Seydoux suggests they don't see each other again, as they will only keep hurting each other. She promises she has forgiven Exarchopoulos and will always feel infinite tenderness towards her, but leaves hurriedly, as Exarchopoulos apologises for blubbing and vows never to bother her again.

However, a few months later, Exarchopoulos gets dressed up to attend the opening of a joint exhibition for Seydoux and Mercoyrol at a local gallery. Almost as soon as

she arrives, she starts to feel out of place, even though some of the guests recognise her. She gets to chat briefly with Seydoux before she is swept away and Malravens graciously points out that a couple of the pictures Exarchopoulos posed for are in the show. Kechiouche spots her and asks if she has been to New York yet. He concedes that he has quit acting because he was always being cast as terrorists and is now making a decent living as an estate agent. He is lured away for a second and Exarchopoulos takes the opportunity to leave. She lights a cigarette and turns a corner, just as Kechiouche comes after her. But they head off in opposite directions.

It's clear from his previous features, L'Esquive (2003), Couscous (2007) and Black Venus (2010) that Abdellatif Kechiche is an empathetic rather than an exploitative film-­‐maker. His working methods in this instance may not have been ideal (the crew also protested against the gruelling hours) and the sex scenes are overlong and could easily do without some of the slapping and Kama Sutrics. But, in capturing the pace of daily life and blending Marivaux and Maroh, he and co-­‐scenarist Ghalya Lacroix (who happens to be female) have not only created a compelling portrait of a young woman discovering her true self, but they have also exposed contemporary French attitudes to class, sexuality, race, the arts, elitism, education, bullying, conversation, food, love and the status of women.

In his reviewing heyday in the 1930s, Graham Greene used to insist that the best films were those that portrayed life as it is lived and Blue Is the Warmest Colour consistently feels like a snapshot of an actual existence. Kechiche may have presented lesbian love-­‐making from a hetero-­‐male perspective, but he avoids objectification and it's ludicrous to claim that art can only be made by those with direct experience of the subject matter. Society would be much the poorer if writers, painters and film-­‐makers ceased trying to understand ideas, traditions and lifestyles outside their own orbit.

Their interpretation may be flawed, but surely the attempt must be applauded?

The sex scenes are undoubtedly the film's weak link, but they are essential to showing how Exarchopoulos not only grows as a woman, but also how she awakens the carnal side of the more cerebral Seydoux. Sofian El Fani's camera undeniably lingers on the naked torsos. But it also dwells on faces at other moments of intense emotionality and consistently frames the characters against the milieux that define them. Some of the contrasts -­‐ most notably between the parents -­‐ are a touch flimsy.

But the dinner table sequences are still splendidly played and would not have been out of place in an Eric Rohmer film.

As with many of Rohmer's contes, the narrative is almost daringly formulaic, as it follows the course of so many tempestuous affairs (between lovers who discover they have less in common than they thought) that burn out and eventually reach a level of affectionate acceptance after a bitter period of resentment and recrimination. But not even Rohmer or contemporary Maurice Pialat could coax performances of such naked courage and raw honesty as those achieved here by Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux. It's all the more a shame, therefore, that the film has become mired in controversy, as, in many ways, it addresses Exarchopoulos's gloriously gauche question when she learns that Seydoux is studying at L'École des Beaux-­‐Arts. `Are there arts that are ugly?', she enquires. Well, when they depict life and capture truth in such uncompromisingly close and authentically beautiful detail as this, the answer has

to be, yes.

CINEMA PARADISO Giuseppe Tornatore's Oscar winner returned to the big screen last year to mark its 25th anniversary. There were fewer five star reviews when the 173-­‐minute Special Edition appeared a decade ago and Tornatore has done little to bolster his reputation in the intervening decade with The Unknown Woman (2006), Baarìa (2009) and The Best Offer (2013) all underwhelming. But, for all its shameless sentimentality, the 123-­‐minute version remains utterly irresistible, as its cornball celebration of the art and social history of cinema, also provides a thoughtful memoir of more innocent times, when pleasures rarely came cheaply or instantly.

Italian film director Salvatore Di Vita (Jacques Perrin) returns to his apartment in Rome to a message from his mother Maria (Pupella Maggio) that Alfredo (Philippe Noiret) has died. It is 30 years since he last visited the village of Giancaldo on the island of Sicily, but the news prompts him to reminisce about his childhood, as he heads south for the funeral.

Shortly after the Second World War, the eight year-­‐old Toto (Salvatore Cascio) lives with his widowed mother (Antonella Attili) and four year-­‐old sister Lia (Roberta Lena) in a tiny cottage. He is a bright boy with a talent for mischief, who spends every spare second in the Cinema Paradiso that is the village's sole source of entertainment. Father Adelfio (Leopoldo Trieste) disapproves of the lewd images shown by Alfredo the projectionist and always insists on viewing pictures in advance to ensure he can protect his flock by censoring them. Each jump in the story is invariably greeted with a chorus of boos from the audience and Alfredo merely shrugs, as he is powerless to resist the power of the church.

When not leaping around with his pals at matinee screenings, Toto starts hanging around the projection booth. Initially, Alfredo considers him a nuisance. But he soon detects a genuine passion for cinema and teaches the boy how to operate the projector.

Maria cautions Toto to stay away from the cinema when the celluloid he keeps under his bed nearly burns down the cottage. But he defies her and saves Alfredo's life when batch of highly flammable nitrate film catches fire and he is knocked unconscious.

Nevertheless, a reel explodes in his face and blinds him. So, when local man Enzo Cannavale uses the money he wins on the football pools to build Nuevo Cinema Paradiso, Toto becomes Alfredo's assistant, as he is the only person who knows how to work the projector.

As time passes, the teenage Salvatore (Marco Leonardi) looks to Alfredo for fatherly advice and he draws on the movies to help him woo Elena (Agnese Nano), the daughter of a wealthy banker who thoroughly disapproves of their friendship. Alfredo warns him against love, but the undaunted Salvatore wins her heart, only for her family to move away and the letters he sends her while doing his national service are returned unopened. Back in Giancaldo, Alfredo urges Salvatore to leave and never look back if he is to fulfil his ambitions, as nothing can be gained from nostalgic yearning.

Three decades on, Salvatore barely recognises his old stomping ground. But he does spot a girl who looks just like Elena and he follows her home to be reunited with her mother (Brigitte Fossey). She has married one of his old friends, but has never

forgotten him. She reveals that Alfredo had persuaded her to stay away from Salvatore and laments that he never received the letter she had written before her departure.

Despite his disappointment at missing out on romantic happiness, Salvatore knows that Alfredo had had his best interests at heart in interfering and making sure he followed his dream.

Salvatore visits Alfredo's widow, Anna (Isa Danieli), and she assures him that her husband followed his career with pride. She also tells him that Alfredo left him a memento on the stool he used to climb on to operate the projector. The cinema is soon to be demolished to make way for a car park and Salvatore is as sad to leave it for the last time as he is to say goodbye to Alfredo. On returning to Rome, he opens the package and discovers it contains a reel made up from the excisions demanded by Father Adelfio and he watches in tearful joy as kisses and clenches from the golden age of cinema flicker before his eyes. In that instant, Salvatore forgives Alfredo and takes solace for a lost romance in his enduring love of cinema. Notwithstanding the gruff charm of Philippe Noiret, the scampish spirit of Salvatore Cascio and the seductive lushness of Ennio Morricone's score, the most tantalising aspect of this enduringly sweet film are the clips from the monochrome masterpieces and longforgotten programmers that crop up at regular intervals prior to the glorious final reel.

Silent icons and clowns rub shoulders with talkie stars whose lustre is only now slowly beginning to fade as the modern era's reluctance to tolerate monochrome oldies reduces access for ordinary people to the pictures that once thrilled, enthralled and amused the world.

Would that more of the films excerpted here were available on disc. But one is also left wishing that Tornatore had made his own picture with more of the artistic rigour he so clearly admires. There is nothing wrong with crowd pleasing, but every lost drop of sentiment is wrung from the more melodramatic scenes, while production designer Andrea Cristanti and cinematographer Blasco Giurato have clearly been instructed to indulge the rose-­‐tinted brand of realism that compromised the vision of the original neo-­‐realists. Perhaps Tornatore was too young at 32 to rein in his more manipulative instincts. Nevertheless, he succeeded not only in paying tribute to the heyday of Hollywood and European film-­‐making, but also in recalling a time when cinemas were not uniform boxes with equally privileged sight-­‐lines and surround sound. Borderlines audiences are lucky to have pictures brought to their doorstep.

But, even so, the day when entire communities congregated in the same small space to gaze upon worlds they scarcely knew existed have gone forever and will never return.

COMPUTER CHESS Following Funny Ha Ha (2002), Mutual Appreciation (2005) and Beeswax (2009), Andrew Bujalski takes his leave of mumblecore with Computer Chess, a technically audacious and thematically fascinating experiment in analogue nostalgia that is somewhat led down by its scattershot plotting and muddled denouement. Some have seen this as a link in a chain that also includes Vsevolod Pudovkin's Chess Fever (1925), Raymond Bérnard's The Chess Player (1927) and the late Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad (1961). But, for all the references to bogus 18th-­‐century automata and surreal hotel encounters, this is always more interesting for its aesthetic than its

content.

The scene is set some time in the early 1980s by grandmaster Gerald Peary, who is hosting a computer chess tournament that culminates in a man vs machine showdown.

Recalling `The Turk' auto-­‐player that secreted a man inside its clockwork mechanism to defeat such celebrity opponents as Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte, Peary uses an overhead projector presentation to chronicle the search for an artificial intelligence capable of defeating a human being and continues the discussion during a panel session with MIT representative Bob Sabiston (running the STASIA programme with the only woman present, Robin Schwartz), the insufferably smug and socially inept James Curry from Allied Laboratories, dogmatic maverick independent Myles Paige and CalTec's Wiley Wiggins, a psychologist who is babysitting the TSAR 3.0 software with programmer Patrick Riester because boss Gordon Kindlmann has been delayed.

Once the rules have been explained, the games begin and it soon becomes clear to Wiggins and Riester that TSAR is misbehaving. They seek a delay to run some diagnostic tests, but are forced to continue playing, as their system insists on reckless moves that keep causing them to resign. That evening, while Paige looks for somewhere to sleep (because his reservation has been overlooked) and the other boffins discuss AI while hanging out with drug dealers Jim Lewis and Freddy Martinez, Riester tries to work out why TSAR is malfunctioning.

Meanwhile, African relationship expert Tishuan Scott is hosting a couples weekend in the room being used by the tournament and, having just completed an exercise involving burrowing into a warm loaf of bread, delegate Chris Doubek is sufficiently intrigued to ask Riester what the competitors hope to achieve. More concerned with getting TSAR set up for a game against STASIA, Riester makes his excuses. But the programme again acts capriciously and Wiggins is relieved when Kindlmann breezes in to take charge. However, he is unable to come up with a solution and reassures Riester that the defeats could be turned to their advantage in the long run.

Leaving Kindlmann with wife Anne Dodge and their new baby, Riester asks Schwartz if he can pit TSAR against STASIA again and she helps him push the cumbersome machine to her room. After a while, he reaches the conclusion that the programme wants to play humans rather than machines. Elsewhere, Paige wanders the corridors looking for a place to sleep and is offered the bridal suite when he tries to bed down in the lobby. However, he finds the room has been overrun by cats and an allergic reaction prompts him kip under a table in the tournament base, where he is awoken by Scott's group and undergoes a bizarre birthing ritual. Riester puts his theory to Kindlmann over breakfast, but he rejects it entirely and the focus switches to a crunch game between Paige and Curry. Feeling frustrated by the way things have gone, Riester bumps into Doubek by the ice machine, who invites him back to his room to meet his wife, Cyndi Williams. She explains how dull life can be if one accepts the limitations of a 64-­‐square chessboard and tries to tempt Riester into a threesome, but he flees in embarrassed confusion. As Peary awards the prizes, Martinez forces Paige to drive to mother Edith Mannix's place (in the only colour sequence) to get the cash he owes him for the drugs he took.

As the programmers wind down and discuss the prospect of computers being used

for dating some time in the future, cameraman Kevin Bewersdorf shows Schwartz his state-­‐of-­‐the-­‐art Sony AVC-­‐3260 tube camera. Over at the bar, Wiggins reveals to Riester that the Pentagon is interested in TSAR and that he once borrowed some of its data for a personal experiment and was amazed when it began manifesting signs of independent thought. Processing this information back in his room, Riester is interrupted by Schwartz, who has noticed how people had been moving around the tournament room like chess pieces. But he is too analytical to realise that she might be flirting with him and bids her goodnight.

The following morning, only a handful of competitors remain for the challenge between Peary and Curry, which keeps being interrupted by Scott's group, which has double-­‐booked the room. Thus, they miss seeing Peary lose his temper (and probably the match). Among the absentees are Riester and Kindlmann because the former is busy apologising for leaving his room window open during a storm and allowing the seeping rain to make TSAR short circuit. As the film ends, Collie Ryan accompanies herself on the guitar for `It's Gonna Rain', one of four songs by the reclusive 1970s folk singer that punctuate the soundtrack.

Shooting on monochrome Portapak tape in a 4:3 aspect ratio to recreate the look of 1980s video technology, Bujalski and cinematographer Matthias Grunsky have fashioned a visually fascinating film. They are greatly aided by production designer Michael Bricker, costumier Colin Wilkes and hair stylist Charli Brath in capturing the period look and feel, which is splendidly reinforced by the antique hardware and facsimile typefaces. But, while Bujalski muses intriguingly on our relationship with technology and how the processes currently being used to make Hollywood blockbusters will look equally old-­‐fashioned in another three decades, he struggles to coax us into engaging with his characters.

Spoilt by The Big Bang Theory, audiences expect more of their geeks than glasses, bad haircuts and woeful dress sense. They expect wit and incisiveness to go with their physical gawkiness and social autism. But, no matter how affectionately they are presented and played, the programmers here are caricatures and no amount of dope smoking or acid dropping can change things.

Patrick Riester contributes a charming display of intellectual deference and interactive incompetence and his scenes with Robin Schwartz are exceedingly sweet.

But the joke quickly wears thin as the belligerent Myles Paige stomps around the hotel in search of a quiet corner, while the colour digression feels utterly extraneous.

The exchanges with the new age group also feel more mockingly contrived than fondly essential, although the sequence in which Riester fights shy of the over-­‐sexed couple old enough to be his parents is grimly humorous. However, anything seems to go in this diegetic hotchpotch, with the initial mockumentary tone being jettisoned in order to focus on the travails of Riester and Paige. Yet, little effort is made to develop the characters or make sense of their respective predicaments. Thus, while this is always audiovisually mesmerising, it's pretty patchy and often feels a tad too pleased with itself.

THE EPIC OF EVEREST Reissued to mark the 60th anniversary of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's heroics in June 1953, Captain John Noel's The Epic of Everest (1924) chronicles the

doomed third expedition up the world's highest mountain, which infamously claimed the lives of George Mallory and Merton College alumnus, Andrew Irvine. However, this newly restored print is also notable for containing some of the first footage ever taken of everyday life in Tibet and for the technical innovations that were used in its making.

Opening with a caption proclaiming that it is the birthright of humanity to conquer its surroundings, this reverential record notes in hushed awe that Mount Everest remains unconquered and that its allure will continue to attract men of mettle until its summit is reached. Having surveyed the foothills of the Eastern Himalayas and the plains that lead to a land of eternal snow, Captain Noel presents a blue-­‐tinted shot of dawn breaking over the peaks of Nepal and Tibet. An iris singles out Everest, which rises as a 10,000ft precipice of rock from the ice-­‐pinnacled Rongbuk Glacier and culminates a further 29,000 feet above sea level. The Tibetans call the mountain `Chomolungma' -­‐ the Goddess Mother of the World -­‐ and a caption boasts that this film will visit places previously unseen on camera and, as two tiny silhouettes edge forward in the cloudy distance, Noel reinforces the majesty of the landscape with a pinkish view of the glacier and its steeply sloping edifices of ice.

Lots of preparation is required for such an audacious expedition and an army of 500 men and animals sets out over the 15,000ft Jelep pass that takes travellers from India to Tibet. As cowbells ring on the soundtrack, the caravan is shown winding along narrow pathways in the snow. Eventually, it reaches Phari-­‐Dzong, the highest town in the world beneath Chomolungma's 10,000ft cliffs of rock and ice, and Noel films the simple dwellings and uses captions to explain how the people live with their cattle and dogs, never wash and have their corpses hacked to pieces on a stone slab after they die.

A few curious souls smile for the camera and a caption informs us that the better class of Tibetan women wear coral ornamented fillets to bind their madonna-­‐parted hair with braids falling over her shoulders. We are shown a silver and turquoise amulet box containing charms and a potion to ward off misfortune whose ingredients include powdered lizards, dried blood and the toenail clippings of a venerable lama. A Tibetan elder carries his badge of rank in a pendant earring of turquoise and gold, while another woman shows off a turquoise-­‐studded aureole laced into her hair. She is very bashful for someone of her advanced years and there is something endearing about the way she covers her face and turns coquettishly away from the camera. Some mothers give their babies a sun-­‐baking bath of butter to prepare their skin for the bitter winter winds and one is left to fear for a jolly beggar, who owns nothing but a drum and the rags upon his back.

Dressed in suits and pith helmets, Mallory and Irvine inspect the yaks that will carry the expedition 200 miles over the Tibetan plains. Dr Howard Somervell sketches one of the locals and his neighbours gather round to watch. Meanwhile, experienced Alpine climber John de Vere Hazard devotes himself to map-­‐making duties, while Noel Odell checks the saddle of his tiny mountain pony. Their only companions now are the nomadic Dok-­‐Pa shepherds and Noel films the womenfolk churning butter and spinning wool in tents that are closely guarded by black Tibetan mastiffs.

A caption reveals that the breathtaking beauty of the scenery helped pass the time

during the long and arduous trek and the party is grateful for the hospitality it receives at each stopping point. Nonetheless, in true old colonial fashion, a quizzical eye is raised at some of the musical instruments and the damping rods used in a communal dance. The climbers are more respectful about the hamlet of Kampa-­‐Dzong, which has stood on rock 15,000ft above sea level since before Tibetan written history began, and the Shekar-­‐Dzong monastery, which is carved into the sheer rock face on several levels and is so spectacular that it is known as `The Shining Crystal'.

The route march takes several weeks and Noel records that a donkey born in camp had to be carried over a fast-­‐flowing river after walking 22 miles on its first day and 16 the next. The party becomes aware that they are getting closer to Everest when they pass through sacred valleys pocked with the cliff cells that were once occupied by hermitic lamas. The lama of Rongbuk warns that the gods will deny them success, as he performs a ceremony in their honour, but they take no heed as they press on to a camp at 16,500ft for the yaks, who can go no higher.

In addition to Mallory, Irvine, Odell, Somervell and Hazard, Edward Norton, Bentley Beetham and Geoffrey Bruce are chosen for the big push and they pose awkwardly together outside a tent. Aiding them are 60 Sherpas, who will carry their packs and build glacier camps along the route. Transportation officer EO Shebbeare sorts out 1001 boxes and organises the stores to be sent up to the glacier depots. The first comes at 17,500ft, but there will be 15 miles of glacier to be negotiated before the party even reaches the foot of Everest's northern precipices, where temperatures plummet by 50° once the tropical sun sets.

Just before the expedition sets forth, a caption laments that just two weeks after this moment of optimism and pride, Irvine and Mallory would be dead. But spirits are high at the outset, with one female Sherpa showing at Frozen Lake Camp how she can carry packs as heavy as the best man. But the mood changes again, as a striking sequence shows the light changing on the snow as the clouds scud overhead and a caption suggests that the mountain was frowning down upon them as though it had been `angered that we should violate these pure sanctuaries of ice and snow that never before had suffered the foot of man'. Yet, as Captain Noel films wisps of cloud floating past the summit, Everest looks more beautiful than forbidding.

Shortly afterwards, however, bad weather sets in and two men succumb to frostbite.

But they cannot turn back and trudge on with the rest, as the snaking line of fatigued bodies heads towards a blue-­‐tinted Fairyland of Ice, where, according to Tibetan legend, imps, gnomes, goblins and hairy men hold high revels in the frozen night.

Noel's framing of the mountainscape is often inspired, as he uses snow and ice to frame the daunting rocks in the distance. Moreover, as he frequently takes top shots of the party walking towards the camera, he clearly puts himself at considerable risk to attain such memorable images.

The seven-­‐strong party strike out for Snowfield Camp below Everest's precipice, at 21,000ft above the sea. The men and tents look minuscule against the windswept North-­‐East Ridge, which has been chosen as the optimum route to the summit. But, reliant on their climbing skills and some sturdy rope, they cut 2000 ice steps, place 400ft of hand ropes and even fix a rope ladder to scale the `Ice Chimney' that will allow their porters to make the next leg of the journey. A masked oval shows three

men tackling a ledge and two more going up a steeper incline. A long shot shows six figures climbing in pairs through the snow. But, while the images are dramatic, it's impossible to know who is who and why the numbers on the climb keep fluctuating.

At Ice Cliff Camp, three members of the party sit on the rocks and gaze out from a height of 23,000ft at the humbling terrain. But it is decided that Noel's camera is too heavy to go any further and he can only watch from a distance as groups return from building new camps at 25 and 27,000ft. He is forced down to Snowfield amidst deteriorating weather conditions and it is from here that Noel uses a pioneering telescopic lens to film from one and a half miles away as Norton, Somervell and Mallory risk their lives to rescue the four men stranded on the topmost ledge of an almost vertical incline some 2000ft above.

On reaching Snowfield, the survivors told of hearing the phantom guard dogs of Chomolungma. But Noel is determined to remain with the spearhead party to capture the great moment for posterity and he heads to Eagle's Nest Point, where he has a clear view of Everest from ice cliff to the summit. A caption explains how the clear air made it possible to photograph silhouettes against the snow some three miles away and Noel makes use of a telescope mask to focus the gaze on the correct part of the screen. He demonstrates how the North-­‐East Ridge looks to the naked eye and then shows how the lens can pick out Norton and Somervell at a height of 25,000ft from a distance of one and three-­‐quarter miles away.

At 28,000ft, the climbers began to find the air too thin and they return to base camp with Norton snowblind and Somervell in a state of near physical collapse. They are laid in tents to recover, while Mallory and Irvine volunteer to take a tilt at the top using breathing apparatus. The camera catches a glimpse of them at 26,000ft from the Eagle's Nest and a caption claims that this is the longest distance that a motion picture camera has ever taken and image, as the pair were two miles away and 4000ft above the filming point. Odell claimed to have seen Mallory and Irvine a mere 600ft from the summit -­‐ closer to God than man had ever been before -­‐ but they suddenly vanished and the whistling wind effect on the soundtrack falls silent as a cut shows Everest (at some remove) in a telescope mask.

As the Sherpas sent out a search party, a caption speculates that the pair fell down a 10,000ft precipice, while another suggests they might have attained their goal and had simply been too tired to descend and had frozen to death in the open air. Shots of the mountain covered by cloud reinforce the notion of their fate being shrouded in mystery, as, after two days without word, Odell ventures up to 27,000ft to lay out six blankets in the form of a cross on the snow. A signal reading `Abandon hope and come down' was then sent and the tragic end to a glorious expedition hits home hard.

Another caption states that they must leave the mountain and its secret, as nothing more can be done. As the letters dissolve, the implication is that we try to defy Mother Nature, but it she is too powerful and we are simply too small to challenge her might.

The party is seen returning across the snow and there is something chastening about the sight of such small specks of humanity against such a colossal backdrop. A caption ponders whether one could wish for a better grave than pure white snow and, as a pall of cloud draws across the land, another claims there can be no more fitting memorial than a simple cairn of stones. As photos appear of Irvine and Mallory, a

caption reads: `With what uncanny and awful power did this mountain fight, and how cruel and heartless a human sacrifice did she claim!'

While the expedition saw Everest as merely a rock, the Tibetans continue to regard it as a goddess and, as rousing Simon Fisher Turner music plays on the soundtrack, another caption queries whether something ethereal had opposed human strength and Western science, just as the Rongbuk lama had predicted: `The Gods of the Lamas shall deny you White Men the object of your search.' As a last caption asks whether there is a guardian spirit beyond our comprehension that watches over the living mountain, a browny red tint is used to invest a long shot of sunset over Everest with additional mystery and the scene fades to black as clouds darken the view and the word `Chomolungma' lingers over the ill-­‐starred enterprise.

Vital both as a record of an heroic bid to do what no man had done before and as a work of ethnography, this restoration has been undertaken in collaboration with Sandra Noel, whose father first became obsessed with Everest when he visited the region in disguise while on leave from his Indian regiment in 1913. Six years later, he proposed that the mountain should be climbed during a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society and this August body combined with the Alpine Club of Great Britain to form the Mount Everest Committee in 1920.

The first reconnaissance trip took place the following year, with Noel shooting the earliest footage of both Everest and Tibet while accompanying the 1922 expedition.

But the Maharaja of Sikkim and the 13th Dalai Lama took exception to the depiction of Tibetan life in The Epic of Everest, with the former being particularly offended by the locals being shown eating insects and the latter considering the monastic scenes an affront to Buddhism.

Captain Noel's courage during the 1924 trek can never be doubted and his artistry is often as apparent as his ingenuity. But this never feels quite as engaging as either South (1919), Frank Hurley's account of Ernest Shackleton 1914-­‐16 bid to cross Antarctica, or The Great White Silence (1924), Herbert G. Ponting's record of Robert Falcon Scott's doomed 1910-­‐13 Terra Nova expedition. This may be because so little effort is made to introduce the members of the summit party as individuals.

Consequently, 90 years on, they merely remain names rather than stand out as identifiable heroes and it takes background reading to appreciate the enormity of their loss. Nevertheless, this stands as a worthy tribute to those who risked all for the glory of their country and their comrades.

FOR THOSE IN PERIL Having won a BAFTA for his 2011 short, Until the River Runs Red, 31 year-­‐old Paul Wright makes an ambitious feature debut with For Those in Peril. Evoking both John Grierson's Drifters (1929) and Béla Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), it trades heavily on maritime mythology and the cliché of a dour Scottish community closing ranks behind rage and superstition against an ostracised unfortunate. But, for all Wright's poetic aspiration and technical assurance, his storytelling is often ponderous.

Indeed, the sombre social realism excludes any hint of humour and, thus, the action becomes increasingly prone to sentimentality and melodrama.

Nobody understands how George MacKay managed to survive a fishing expedition that claimed the lives of his crewmates. Mother Kate Dickie does her best to help him

cope with the fallout, despite mourning the loss of her oldest son, Jordan Young. But the other residents of a small port on the Aberdeenshire coast are deeply suspicious of MacKay's inability to remember anything of his ordeal and his conviction that the others are not dead, but have been claimed by a sea devil in punishment for the wickedness of those left behind. Resisting the psychiatrist Brian McCardie's suggestion that he needs specialist care, MacKay tells Young's girlfriend, Nichola Burley, about his belief that the crew can be rescued from the demon he first heard about in a childhood tale told by his mother. But, while Burley has a certain sympathy with his plight, her beligerent father, Michael Smiley, orders MacKay out of his house and grieving trawlerman Lewis Howden similarly threatens violence when MacKay comes to the pub to explain his theory.

Despite their hostility towards her son, the locals remain on friendly terms with Dickie and she is encouraged to sing `The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face' during a karaoke night. But even the village kids led by Conor McCarron take to taunting MacKay, as they probe him about why he can't remember anything of the disaster.

One night, the baiting gets out of control and MacKay strips to the waist to fight with some of the boys and even Burley (who had been for a nocturnal swim with MacKay) decides she has to sever all ties with him. McCardie returns to urge Dickie to have her son institutionalised and MacKay seems to agree it would be for the best. But he has already hatched a plan and collects materials discarded around the village to put out to sea on a rickety raft with a tray of stolen fish and a homemade harpoon in the hope of luring the monster to the surface.

He has to be rescued by Howden and he teaches him a lesson by leaving him dangling in a net for the voyage back to shore. But MacKay remains convinced of the rectitude of his mission and, having had Dickie tell him the story of the monster on the night before he is due to leave, he slips away at dawn and rows out in a stolen boat. Taking a knife, he carves gills in his neck and plunges into the water. Back on the mainland, Dickie waits for news of her missing child. However, when her neighbours call her down to the beach, she doesn't find his corpse, but the carcass of a large creature (probably a whale) that has been washed up on the tide. Yet, if MacKay has succeeded in rousing the devil from its lair, there is no sign of the lost fishermen.

Viewed as a mood piece, this has much to recommend it. Benjamin Kracun's cinematography captures the squally coastal light and his restrained use of colour makes the recovered yellow oilskin and the blood on the water all the more effective.

Michael Aaglund's editing is also seductively measured and reinforces the ethereality of MacKay's reverie, as it crosscuts between grainy TV news clips, Super 8 recollections of childhood, night vision interludes, underwater imagery and jerky and often blurry phone-­‐cam footage. But, while MacKay admirably maintains a trancelike intensity as he literally finds himself caught between the devil and the deep blue sea and Dickie produces another persuasive display of tough love, the supporting performances are often far less convincing. Part of the problem lies in the fact that the inhabitants seem to belong to a 19th-­‐century Puritan settlement rather than one in modern-­‐day Scotland, while Wright's dialogue is often gloweringly grim. This allows the likes of Smiley to overplay their fury and even Burley, who is initially sweetly forgiving turns on MacKay like a character in a soap opera rather than a work of

cinematic art. Sadly, Wright must shoulder the responsibility for setting this tone and for opting to keep the audience at such a distance by providing little social or mythological context for the narrative, by refusing to broach the facts of the catastrophe (and, thus, divulge whether MacKay is traumatised or murderously malevolent) and by couching so much of the later action in obfuscatory magic realist symbolism.

Other aspects fail to convince, such as the fact that someone would bother to record (let alone keep) camera-­‐phone snippets of Young bad-­‐mouthing his brother.

Moreover, there is no diegetic logic for its inclusion, as no one appears to be showing it to MacKay or watching it to make fun of his delusions. Instead, it simply creates the suspicion that, for all his outward displays of affection for his sibling, Young was a difficult character himself and that Smiley's rage towards MacKay may owe more to his disapproval of Burley's choice of boyfriend than the teenager's temerity to survive a wrecking that claimed five other lives. Thus, while this cannot be faulted for its earnestness or aesthetic austerity, it is too self-­‐consciously uncompromising and too hazily allegorical to keep onlookers entirely engrossed.

GLORIA. Although they burned brightly in the first half of the last decade, the new waves in Mexico, Brazil and Argentina have all but petered out and the brightest cinematic light in Latin America currently emanates from Chile. The achievements of the new generation of film-­‐makers may not be as audacious or courageous as those of such Nuevo Cine Chileno auteurs as Raúl Ruiz, Miguel Littín and Patricio Gúzman, who came to international prominence in the late 1960s and were only silenced by the censorship imposed by the Pinochet regime. Yet, while it was no friend to free expression, the toppled dictatorship did establish Fondart in 1992 and its largesse has largely enabled the likes of Andrés Wood, Pablo Larrain, Jorge Olguín and Sebastián Silva to make their mark.

Sebastián Lelio must now be added to their number, as Gloria builds on the impressive start made with La Sagrada Familia (2005), Navidad (2009) and El Año del Tigre (2011). Moreover, it contains the finest screen performance of 2013 by Paulina García, who deservedly won the Best Actress prize at the Berlin Film Festival. Dominating almost every frame, García recalls Carmen Maura at the peak of her powers for Pedro Almodóvar and she is splendidly supported by a fine ensemble and an excellent soundtrack, which acts as a kind of Greek chorus as the 58 year-­‐old divorcée searches for love and validation in a world she is determined not to let pass her by.

Returning home after another disappointing night at her favourite singles disco, Paulina García bundles the neighbours' hairless cat into the corridor and takes off her make-­‐up. She seems resigned to being alone and yet still feels pity for the unmarried male living above her, who is having another of his ranting fits. The next morning, however, she sings cheerfully with the car radio on her way to work and is delighted to spend some time with son Diego Fontecilla and her young grandson. Over a decade has elapsed since she separated from Alejandro Goic and, while he has moved on and started a new life with the much younger Liliana García, his hard-­‐drinking ex has been left to take her chances in nightclubs and bars and leave long messages in the

hope that Fontecilla and his headstrong yoga teacher sister, Fabiola Zamora, will call her.

One night, however, García strikes lucky with Sergio Hernández, a recently divorced father of two grown-­‐up daughters, who is feeling fragile after losing 117 kilos and undergoing gastric bypass surgery. Such is García's delight at getting a man back to her place (even one seven years her senior) that she turns a blind eye to the girdle holding in Hernández's stomach and they spend the night making passionate, if rather inexpert love. As an ex-­‐naval man, Hernández is keen to show off his mettle and following their first lunch together, he takes her to Vertigo Park, his bungee-­‐jumping and paintballing complex, and coaxes the game García into trying out the facilities.

He notes sombrely how men like to play war, but Hernández is not one to take leaping into the void lightly.

Keen to keep hold of the first chap to show any interest in her in years, García excuses his the dubious views he espouses while socialising with her academic friend Hugo Moraga, his wife Coca Guazzini and their daughter Antonia Santa María. As he reads her poetry, she even tolerates the fact that he is forever on the phone to his daughters and keeps her a secret from them, as he has not forgiven them for failing to visit him after his operation. However, her patience snaps at Fontecilla's birthday party, when she introduces Hernández to her family for the first time. They are far from impressed by his accomplishments in uniform and tease him over the fact that neither of his girls (who are now 27 and 31) graduated from high school and now cannot find jobs and are entirely dependent upon him for their upkeep. Yet, the moment he ceases to be the centre of attention, Hernández becomes restless and, when the others start reminiscing over old photos, he humiliates García by slipping away without saying goodbye.

Over the next few days, García refuses to take his calls as she comes to terms with the fact that she has been diagnosed with glaucoma and that Zamora is pregnant and is planning to move to Sweden with her boyfriend. She also starts smoking dope after a package for her upstairs neighbour is delivered to her in error. However, having seen Zamora off at the airport and briefly been confronted with her mortality as she watches a skeleton marionette dancing in a shopping mall, García decides to give Hernández a second chance and they head to the coast for a romantic weekend.

No sooner have they arrived than he receives a call that his ex-­‐wife has been involved in an accident. Sighing deeply, García picks up her bag and walks to the door. But Hernández calls her back and proclaims that she is the only woman who matters to him and she strolls over to him, peels open her shirt and rips off his girdle before pouncing on him. They spend the afternoon swimming in the swanky hotel pool and he reaffirms over supper that he is wholly committed to the relationship and is even prepared to go dancing with her in Cuba. However, when García drops his phone into his soup in an effort to stop him fretting, Hernández suddenly becomes very serious and excuses himself from the table.

Realising he is not coming back, García searches the hotel from top to bottom, including the toilets. But, rather than hide away in her room, she returns to the bar and wanders into the casino, where she hooks up with the podgy Marcial Tagle, who paws away at her as they go for a carriage ride, bop at a disco and ride a playground merrygo-­‐

round before García wakes alone on the beach the following morning. Having lost her shoes, she tosses her jacket over the sea wall and, feeling cheap and foolish, crashes in the hotel lobby until housemaid Luz Jiménez arrives to take her home by bus.

Once home, García throws herself into spring cleaning and finds Hernández's paintball gun. Putting on a black dress and red sequinned jacket, she returns the weapon after peppering Hernández and the front of his house with pellets and derives considerable satisfaction from the fact that his daughters witness his vanquishing. Still eager to find love, but no longer willing to make compromises, García arrives at Santa María's wedding reception and turns down an invitation to dance. She wanders outside and, hearing a peacock screeching, gazes at its fanned feathers and returns indoors with renewed vigour to strut her stuff to Umberto Tozzi's 1982 hit, `Gloria'.

Throughout the film, the music is often key to setting the scene and commenting on the action, whether it's Donna Summer's `I Feel Love' accompanying García's latest attempt to snare a man at the disco or the use in the hairdresser's of the `Adagietto' from Mahler's Fifth Symphony, which mischievously recalls the humiliation of Dirk Bogarde in Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice (1971). However, García's bespectacled lonelyheart is never as pathetic as Von Aschenbach and her willingness to throw herself into everything she does makes her a charmingly sympathetic character.

She may not want much, but she knows how difficult it is to fulfil dreams in a country that is still struggling to acclimatise to democracy at a time of global recession. Yet, this is not an overtly political picture. Lelio sets up Hernández as the epitome of militaristic paternalism and there is a sly dig at the Chilean audience in the fact that his daughters are so helpless in his absence. But Lelio is less interested in the state of the nation than the mood of its people and his quiet admiration is summed up by the incredulity in Hernández's voice when he asks García if she is always so interminably happy. Indeed, this dogged determination to make the most of things prevents the story from lapsing into sentimentality and one hopes any US version will respect this emphasis on positivity in the face of adversity.

Presumably, Hollywood stars of a certain age will already have contacted their agents about remake rights, as this is a magnificent role and it is played to perfection

by Paulina García, who dabbles with dope and strips for her sex scene with the same confidence that she fires off the stinging one-­‐liners that stud Lelio and Gonzalo Maza's first-­‐rate script, which also contains a quirky anecdote from Jiménez about how cats came to be created on board Noah's Ark. However, Sergio Hernández should not be overlooked, as his entrapment between lust and terror has symbolic as well as dramatic significance, while Benjamín Echazarreta's intimate, but rarely intrusive cinematography, Marcela Urivi's production design and Eduardo Castro's costumes are all spot on. Indeed, this rivals anything produced by Andrés Wood and Pablo Larrain (who is among the producers), with the sequences in which García encounters the dancing skeleton and the displaying peacock capturing her shifting mindset with a visual subtlety that far too few modern film-­‐makers possess.

GONE WITH THE WIND Adapted from Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer Prize-­‐winning novel, Gone With the Wind

(1939) captured the public imagination long before the cameras started rolling, as producer David O. Selznick embarked upon a search for the actress to play his feisty heroine, Scarlett O'Hara. Apparently, 1400 hopefuls were interviewed before the part went to a cavalry officer's daughter who had been born in Darjeeling and had earned a reputation for being difficult while making half a dozen films in Britain. Indeed, in thesping circles, Vivien Leigh was better known for her adulterous liaison with Laurence Olivier than for her acting. But she threw herself into the role with a vigour that made her more than a match for co-­‐star, Clark Gable, who had been the nation's unanimous choice to play Rhett Butler. Yet, while Leigh went home with an Academy Award, Gable (who was then known as The King of Hollywood) lost out to her compatriot Robert Donat for his performance in Sam Wood's school saga, Goodbye, Mr Chips.

The action opens in April 1861 on the Tara cotton plantation in Georgia, where Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) lives with her parents, Gerald (Thomas Mitchell) and Ellen (Barbara O'Neil), and her sisters, Suellen (Evelyn Keyes) and Carreen (Ann Rutherford). She has a crush on Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard), but has learned that is to announce his engagement to his cousin, Melanie Hamilton (Olivia De Havilland), at a barbecue at his Twelve Oaks estate the following day.

As she flirts with the young bucks in attendance, Scarlett catches the eye of Rhett Butler (Clark Gable), who has been disowned by his family. He annoys the patriotic southerners by opining that the Confederacy would be foolish to declare war on the Unionist north, as it lacks the manpower and industrial might to achieve victory.

Moreover, he also overhears Scarlett proclaiming her love for Ashley, who lets her down gently by claiming to be more compatible with Melanie. Butler promises to keep her secret, but their conversation is interrupted by news that hostilities have broken out and Scarlett accepts the proposal of Melanie's younger brother, Charles (Rand Brooks), as he volunteers to fight for the flag.

Scarlett is soon widowed and goes the Hamilton home in Atlanta. However, her opinionated maid, Mammy (Hattie McDaniel), accuses her of going there solely to wait for Ashley and she is further upbraided by the city's womenfolk when she attends a charity bazaar while still in mourning. But Butler (who is aiding the Confederate cause as a block runner) silences the scolding gossips by placing a sizeable bid to dance with Scarlett and she mocks him when he insists that he will marry her.

Following the Battle of Gettysburg, the war turns decisively against the South and Ashley kisses Scarlett on Christmas Day before returning to his unit. By the summer, however, Atlanta is under siege and Scarlett and her house servant Prissy (Butterfly McQueen) have to deliver Melanie's baby without medical assistance. She summons Butler and he escorts her through the burning city and kisses her before going off to fight. After a perilous journey, Scarlett discovers that Twelve Oaks has been sacked.

But Tara has survived and she is grateful to find sanctuary with her sisters and her widowed father, whose mind is beginning to fail. When Union troops attack the plantation, Scarlett vows over its untended fields never to go hungry again.

Having fought off a rapist scavenging on the estate, Scarlett succeeds in harvesting a cotton crop. But she fails in her bid to prise Ashley away from Melanie and finds herself facing an enormous tax bill when her father is thrown from his horse trying to

chase away an interloper. Desperate to keep Tara in the family, Scarlett visits Rhett in Atlanta, only to discover he is in jail and that his assets have been frozen by the Reconstructionists. She goes to see Suellen's fiancé, Frank Kennedy (Carroll Nye), who is now a prosperous shopkeeper, and cons him into thinking her sister has married another man so that she can wed him and use his wealth to save Tara. She also persuades Ashley to accept a job as manager of Kennedy's lumber mill.

However, she is soon a widow again, as Kennedy is killed during a reprise attack on a shanty town where Scarlett had narrowly avoided a gang rape. But she isn't single for long, as Butler proposes to her and they soon have a daughter, Bonnie Blue (Cammie King). Scarlett resents the loss of her figure, however, and refuses to sleep with Butler, who rightly suspects that she still holds a torch for Ashley. They are caught canoodling by his sister India (Alicia Rhett), who spreads a rumour that Scarlett has corrupted her brother. Butler is furious and forces Scarlett to attend Ashley's birthday party, where she finds an unlikely ally in Melanie, who warns her guests against believing tittle-­‐tattle.

On arriving home, Butler gets drunk and rapes Scarlett. He apologises the next morning and offers her a divorce, but she refuses for fear of causing more scandal.

Butler takes Bonnie to London, but is forced to return early, as his daughter keeps suffering from nightmares. Scarlett is pleased to see them, but he rebuffs her attempts at reconciliation and she suffers a miscarriage after falling down the stairs in the middle of a blazing row. Soon afterwards, Bonnie dies in a fall from her pony, while Melanie collapses during the pregnancy the doctor warned could kill her. She urges Scarlett to look after Ashley, but never forget that Butler loves her. As she consoles Ashley, Scarlett realises that his heart had always belonged to Melanie and she rushes after Butler to plead with him not to leave Tara. He says any chance they had of a future disappeared with Bonnie and he tells Scarlett he doesn't give a damn when she insists she will be lost without him. But, as Butler walks away into the mist, Scarlett pledges to find a way of winning him back.

Despite the busyness of the plot, the making of Gone With the Wind is every bit as eventful. Although Sidney Howard would go on to become the first posthumous winner of an Academy Award for his screenplay, Edwin Justin Mayer, John Van Druten, Ben Hecht, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jo Swerling were among the many to contribute to the finished article, while the homosexual George Cukor was removed from the director's chair at the insistence of Gable, who had him replaced with his macho pal Victor Fleming, only for him to pass the baton to Sam Wood, while he recovered from a breakdown.

The traumas proved worth it, however, as the film became the biggest hit in boxoffice history (and remains so on adjusting for inflation). Moreover, it converted eight of its 13 Oscar nominations and received two more honorary bestowals. In addition to Best Picture, Director and Actress, GWTW also made history, as Hattie McDaniel became the first African-­‐American to win an Academy Award. However, her victory was tainted by accusations that she had played an Uncle Tom-­‐type character and the picture was compared by some Civil Rights activisits with DW Griffith's discredited silent, The Birth of a Nation (1915), on account of its nostalgic depiction of slavery.

Yet, while this might be an historical travesty, it could scarcely be improved

aesthetically. Ernest Haller's Technicolor photography, William Cameron Menzies's production design, Walter Plunkett's costumes and Max Steiner's score are exemplary and the much-­‐maligned Selznick deserves enormous credit for imposing a single creative vision upon the project. The acting is also first rate, although occasionally implausible traits and actions ensure that Howard and De Havilland are overshadowed

by Gable and Leigh, whose clashing stellar screen and classical stage styles add another dimension to Rhett and Scarlett's feuding.

Ultimately, this is a thunderingly contrived melodrama that romanticises a grim time.

Its heroine is largely anachronistic and its hero is a cad. Yet, audiences in a world already at war thrilled to see women doing their bit for the cause and men risking all in the name of glory. Some 75 years on, such attributes remain admirable, but don't stir the soul in quite the same way. Thus, Gone With the Wind now not only depicts a bygone era, but also feels like the product of a distant yesteryear and, while it remains rousing entertainment, its artistic shortcomings are more evident than ever.

THE GREAT BEAUTY. Having slightly missed his step with his English-­‐language debut, This Must Be the Place (2011), Paolo Sorrentino returns to terra firma with The Great Beauty, a companion piece to his masterly denunciation of former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti in Il Divo (2008), which invokes Federico Fellini's La Dolce vita (1960) and 8ó (1963) to suggest that little has changed for the denizens of Rome's social and intellectual élite over the last half century. Exquisitely photographed by Luca Bigazzi to show the capital in all its glory and venality, this is a long, intricate and occasionally self-­‐satisfied treatise. But it cuttingly captures both the spirit of its time and the sense of moral abnegation that was epitomised by the notorious Bunga Bunga parties that made the Italian establishment a global laughing stock.

The action opens with a quote from Louis-­‐Ferdinand Céline's 1930s novel, Journey to the End of the Night: `Our journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength.' But the scene soon shifts to the midday gun sounding on the Janiculum Hill, as a gaggle of Japanese tourists scurries around clicking their cameras and snapping up mementoes.

Suddenly, one of the group collapses and dies from a heart attack and the myth of the Eternal City is called into question just as Toni Servillo hosts his 65th birthday party in a magnificent apartment overlooking the Colosseum on one side and a convent on the other. He has been in Rome for three decades, but has drifted since the publication of his acclaimed novel, The Human Apparatus, and has channelled his creative energies into journalism. Currently covering the arts and society happenings for a glossy magazine, Servillo flits between parties with a sense of entitlement and belonging that is tainted by a creeping boredom and the knowledge that he has wasted his talents and needs to act quickly if he is to do anything worthwhile before it is too late.

Among the guests toasting Servillo health are his dwarf editor Giovanna Vignola, failed playwright Carlo Verdone, toy salesman Carlo Buccirosso, left-­‐leaning radical writer Galatea Ranzi, malcontented couple Iaia Forte and Pamela Villoresi, and impoverished aristocrats Franco Graziosi and Sonia Gessner, who have been hired to give the evening a touch of class. They exchange acerbic asides and calculated witticisms as they watch younger freeloaders gyrating on the dance floor. A giant

neon Martini sign leaves one wondering whether this really is the right place and the right time and Servillo himself is jolted out of his complacency by a couple of chance encounters.

The first brings Vernon Dobtcheff to his doorstep, who reveals that his wife has just died. As Servillo sympathises, the stranger explains that he discovered in her diaries after 35 years of marriage that she never stopped adoring Servillo, who had been her first love. Deeply touched by this reminiscence of his innocent past, Servillo succumbs to the charms of fortysomething stripper Sabrina Ferilli, who still works for the drug-­‐addicted, club-­‐owning father who was once part of Servillo's coterie. He is still quite capable of luring beauties like Isabella Ferrari into his bed, but he starts taking Ferilli to functions and delight in subjecting his friends to her forthright opinions and contentment in her own skin. Yet he remains plagued by nagging thoughts that he needs to escape in order to rediscover his artistic soul.

However, the need to pay the bills forces him to assess the likes of performance artist Anita Kravos, whose latest piece consists of her running around naked (apart from a makeshift hijab and the Soviet hammer and cycle shaved into her red-­‐dyed pubic hair) and banging her head as hard as she can against an ancient aqueduct. He exposes her as a charlatan within the first few seconds of their interview and her bitter tears contrast with the blankness on the face of the society beauty who seems more interested in her Facebook images than living a life and the sobbing of the 12 year-­‐old action painter, whose exploitative parents look on as she daubs inexpertly for the watching media.

Such experiences should at least raise an eyebrow, but they seem no more tediously bizarre to Servillo than the magician who makes giraffes disappear, the underground sepulchre transformed into a botox clinic, the mammoth sea monster that has made the headlines or the photographer who has spent his entire career taking self-­‐portraits.

Not even the sight of a priest and his nun companion ordering expensive champagne in an exclusive restaurant seems extraordinary when cardinal Roberto Herlitzka (who is widely tipped by many to be a future pope) would rather share his tips on how to cook duck than explore the crises facing the Vatican. But religion does play a part in Servillo's salvation, as he hosts a dinner party for 104 year-­‐old nun, Giusi Merli, whose wise asides on the world's woes convinces Servillo that he is finally ready to abandon his superficial milieu and start his second book.

Co-­‐scripting with Umberto Contarello, Sorrentino laces the dialogue with waspish quips that complement his stylistic nods not just towards Fellini, but also to Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte (1961) and Ettore Scola's The Terrace (1980). In some ways, this leaves him paraphrasing classic works, with Fanny Ardant's cameo as herself recalling Anna Magnani's appearance in Fellini's Roma (1972). But the fact that such clear parallels exist between the early 1960s and the present validates the approach and the comparison. However, there is nothing of Marcello Mastroianni's world-­‐weary charm in Toni Servillo's performance, which is suffused with a melancholy that betrays both his fear of ageing, his regret at not fulfilling his potential and his acceptance that Italy probably won't have changed much in another 50 years.

This sense of paralysis is exacerbated by the shallowness of the amusements society seizes upon to escape the mundanity of existence. Sorrentino clearly has little time for

avant-­‐garde frivolity or celebrity novelty. But he is equally frustrated by the posturing of the haute bourgeoisie that has ensnared Servillo and he allows him fleeting flashbacks to teenage idealism to sustain him as he moves through circles Dante would have trouble describing. Moreover, Sorrentino uses the views of antiquarian landmarks, Renaissance basilicas and Risorgimento monuments to ask whether Italy has really sunk so low after centuries of accomplishment and one is left wondering what future generations will remember of this sorry, deluded era of spiritual, moral, cultural and financial bankruptcy.

HANNAH ARENDT Having already profiled Hildegard of Bingen and Rosa Luxembourg, Margarethe von Trotta turns her attention to a third notable German woman in Hannah Arendt, an ardent and considered recollection of the furore that arose when the exiled Jewish philosopher covered the trial of Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker in the early 1960s. Thought is notoriously difficult to depict on screen and, even when the resulting ideas prove to be as combustible as Arendt's, the cogitative process is necessarily reduced to passages of space gazing, floor pacing, paper shuffling, cigarette smoking and typewriter tapping. Thus, while this admirably conveys the intellectual and emotional impact that the Eichmann affair had on survivors of the Holocaust around the world, it struggles to capture the personal anguish that Arendt endured as she was disowned by lifelong friends enraged by her concept of `the banality of evil'.

As Hannah Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) teases novelist friend Mary McCarthy (Janet McTeer) about her complex love life, news reaches New York that Nazi fugitive Adolf Eichmann has been captured by Mossad agents during a nocturnal raid in Argentina.

Arendt and poet husband Heinrich Blücher (Axel Milberg) host a drinks party to celebrate the fact that she has persuaded New Yorker editor William Shawn (Nicholas Woodeson) to let her cover the trial and New School colleagues Hans Jonas (Ulrich Noethen) and Thomas Miller (Harvey Friedman) are proud that the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism will be a witness to the prosecution of a key figure in the Final Solution. Blücher cannot resist taunting Jonas about his wartime service in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army and McCarthy has to ask Arendt's secretary Lotte Köhler (Julia Jensch) to translate their argument. But he also fears that the proceedings in Jerusalem will bring back unhappy memories of Arendt's undergraduate affair with pro-­‐Nazi tutor Martin Heidegger (Klaus Pohl) and the trauma of being detained in Camp Gurs in France prior to her flight to the United States in 1941.

Having travelled across Israel by bus, Arendt is welcomed by Zionist friend Karl Blumenfeld (Michael Degen). But, from the opening speech by prosecutor Gideon Hausner, Arendt has misgivings that the trial has been stage-­‐managed by David Ben Gurion's government in a bid to win over younger Jews who resent the failure of the older generations to defend themselves against the Third Reich and suspect that many debased themselves in order to survive the Shoah. Indeed, as she sits in the pressroom and watches Eichmann struggling with a cold in his glass cage and protesting that he is being grilled like a steak, she decides that he was not a monster but a mere functionary and that the evidence being presented is designed less to secure a

conviction than to demonstrate what went on in the death camps and how the survivors merit respect rather than calumny.

Using monochrome footage of the actual trial, Von Trotta cuts between distressed witnesses giving their testimony to close-­‐ups of Eichmann's impassive face and colour shots of Arendt listening intently and forming her opinions. She calls Blücher to lament that a single man is being blamed for the crimes of a regime and reaches the conclusion that Eichmann was not particularly anti-­‐Semitic, but was such a dedicated logistician that he managed to replace curiosity and conscience with duty and job satisfaction and that, rather than being a wicked genius, he was a mediocrity who denied himself the luxury of thought in order to carry out his orders. Unpersuaded by Eichmann's contention that any resistance on his part would have done nothing to prevent the Holocaust, Blumenfeld warns Arendt that her perspective will make a lot of people angry. But she is unmoved and heads home with boxes of transcriptions to begin the arduous process of making sense of what she had seen and heard in the courtroom.

As she toils, Arendt recalls Heidegger telling her younger self (Friederike Becht) that thinking was a lonely and unrewarding business and she feels pressure from Shawn and associates Francis Wells (Megan Gay) and Jonathan Schell (Tom Leick) to deliver her articles as quickly as possible in order to cash-­‐in on public interest in the trial.

However, Arendt also has classes to teach and, during a discussion on the nature of radical evil, she tells her students how she managed to escape Europe with forged papers. But her focus is deflected when Blücher suffers a brain aneurysm and she devotes herself to his care. During his convalescence, Eichmann is sentenced to hang and Arendt and Blücher argue with Jonas over the condemned man's claim to have been following the law as it existed within the Reich and whether this excuses him from his greater moral abnegation. Jonas insists that Eichmann remained at his post even after Heinrich Himmler had abandoned the policy and, after he leaves, Blücher jokes that Jonas is still angry with Arendt for becoming Heidegger's lover when he also had a crush on her.

Eventually, Arendt delivers her articles to Shawn. But he is greatly disquieted by her contention that Eichmann merely epitomised `the banality of evil' and that the leaders of European Jewry co-­‐operated with their persecutors in the hope of reducing the calamity. However, Arendt refuses to change a word and develops the pieces into a book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she insists that the behaviour of the elders was the darkest element of a pitch black chronicle. Unsurprisingly, the New Yorker switchboard is jammed by complaints and Jonas and Miller join the chorus of disapproval. As her daughter Charlotte Beradt (Victoria Trauttmansdorff) denounces her arrogance, Arendt retreats to the country, where McCarthy comes to report on the raging media storm and Arendt thinks back to 1933, when she had begged Heidegger to explain why he had joined the National Socialist Party in the hope that his legacy would not be tainted.

McCarthy complains that the majority of those attacking Arendt have jumped on a bandwagon without bothering to read her articles and she mounts a waspishly eloquent defence of her friend at a meeting of literary luminaries in New York. But Arendt discovers the full extent of the pain she has caused when she learns that

Blumenfeld is dying while being threatened by a Mossad agent (Germain Wagner) and he turns his back on her when she visits him on his deathbed. Jonas's wife Lore (Sascha Ley) wishes things could be sorted out, but the hate mail continues to arrive, with Lotte reading one letter accusing Arendt of having cold eyes in wishing that she will be haunted forever by the ghosts of six million martyrs.

She insists on justifying herself to each correspondent and castigates Miller for starting a witch-­‐hunt when he urges her to resign for bringing ingnominy upon their proud institution. But Arendt refuses to be bowed and uses a lecture to explain that the system was tried rather than Eichmann. She concedes that evil perpetrated without convictions is hideous, but stands by her assertion that Eichmann had been obeying orders rather than pursuing a personal vendetta. Miller stands to castigate her for blaming the Jews for their own destruction, but she insists that even victims lose their moral compass in extremis and posits that the leadership might have found an alternative path between resistance and collaboration. As Miller falls silent, Arendt states that she wanted to understand Eichmann rather than judge him and, in studying him and his utterances, she became convinced that his most grievous crime had been to surrender the ability to reach rational decisions, as this refusal to think had made industrial slaughter a possibility.

Arendt urges future generations to avoid repeating this mistake and Miller storms out as she is warmly applauded by her students. She sees Jonas sitting along and is taken aback when he snaps that her hubris and ignorance know no bounds. He asks why she cannot see that Eichmann was responsible for the train that took her to Gurs and that she was spared by a chance denied countless others. She tries to calm him down, but he says he wants nothing more to do with Heidegger's favourite student.

Arendt is also ostracised in the canteen and she tells Blücher in their apartment overlooking the Hudson that she cannot apologise for telling the truth.

A closing caption reveals that Arendt continued to muse upon the nature of evil for the rest of her life. But Von Trotta and co-­‐scenarist Pam Katz refrain from exploring how much damage Arendt's stance did to her career. Indeed, apart from a brief mention of the presidential race between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, the action is given little contemporary context. Even the situation in Israel and the tensions within Judaism are dealt with superficially, with the result that the full import of Arendt's opinions cannot be satisfactorily assessed, as she is presented as a woman who set greater store by friends than groups and who was deserted by all except some loyal females and a husband who often seemed to be supporting her to goad a detested rival.

Nevertheless, Von Trotta is to be commended for broaching such a difficult subject and having the conviction to concentrate more on Arendt's writings than her private life. There is something Capraesque about her fall from grace. But, given the kneejerk nature of the ourcry against her, none can deny the power of her closing remarks in the lecture theatre about the only thing separating ordinary folks from the likes of Eichmann is their ability to think for themselves. This conclusion has a powerful resonance in our own era of angry mobs and vitriolic campaigns on social networking sites. But, even at a remove of half a century, Von Trotta appears cautious in her comments on the wartime Jewish hierarchy and its furious response to Arendt's

theories. She also sidesteps several crucial times in Arendt's life, most notably between 1933-­‐40 and the immediate postwar period when she returned to Germany to work with the Zionist welfare organisation. Youth Aliyah. Consequently, with its awkwardly incorporated flashbacks, this is nowhere near as trenchant as it might have been. It is also, on occasions, a little stiff, as films often are when they have to slip between several languages.

Yet, this is still a compelling portrait, with Barbara Sukowa (who took the leads in both Rosa Luxembourg, 1986 and Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen, 2009) capturing the loneliness of academic endeavour and the steely certitude with which Arendt presented her views. She is ably supported by a fine ensemble, with McTeer bringing some much-­‐needed vivacity as Mary McCarthy, while Caroline Champetier's photography and Bettina Böhler's editing are as acute as Volker Schäfer's production design and Frauke Firl's costumes. But the deepest impression is left by the clips of the unrepentant Eichmann, as he argues his case with the jobsworthy fussiness that made Arendt's appraisal of him so chillingly apt.

KISS THE WATER This is Eric Steel's unexpectedly charming follow-­‐up to his hideous study of suicide in San Francisco, The Bridge (2006). In many ways, Kiss the Water, is another film about unfathomable motives and death, as its subject is hunting with hooks and the brightly coloured flies that ensnare salmon in the rivers that wind through the idyllic landscape of the Scottish Highlands. At the centre of the story is Megan Boyd, a dedicated practitioner of the art of fly tying, whose obituary in the New York Times in 2001 so intrigued Steel that he felt compelled to find out why a woman who spent her entire life in a cottage outside the tiny Sutherland village of Kintradwell could have earned the British Empire Medal from the Queen. Ultimately, Boyd proved elusive and the resulting profile is so fleeting that she only appears for a few frames in the closing seconds. But, thanks to her neighbours, the glorious vistas and some inspired impressionist animation, Steel manages to fashion a tribute that is every bit as enticing as one of Boyd's lures.

Rosina Megan Boyd was supposedly born in England on 29 January 1915. She moved north when her father got a job as a river keeper in Brora and became obsessed with fishing flies when game warden Bob Trussler gave her a book on the craft and made her disassemble and reconstruct samples until she perfected her technique.

Leaving school at 14, she eventually moved to a remote hillside cottage that had no running water or electricity where she could work without distraction. Sitting at a kidney-­‐shaped table by the window in her corrugated iron shed with a rusting red roof, Boyd toiled for 14-­‐16 hours a day, six days a week. She always took Sundays off and usually disappeared on expeditions that aroused only mild curiosity among locals who recognised her genius and respected her privacy.

Invariably dressed in a man's shirt and tie, sweater, wool skirt, tweed jacket and sturdy boots, Boyd reinforced her sense of androgyny by cutting her own hair short.

She rode a motorcycle around the country roads and, when she bought a car, became renowned for the speed and waywardness of her driving. However, she was always happy to offer lifts and became a more active figure on the Brora and Helmsdale scene when she developed a passion for Scottish dancing. Inevitably, she took the

man's part and once refused a commission from Prince Charles because it clashed with a dance. Indeed, when she was awarded her honour in 1971, she declined the invitation to accept it in London as she would not be able to find anyone to look after her dog and Her Majesty replied that she quite understood and allowed her son to present the medal in person on his next visit.

Although the arrangement was supposed to be a secret, Boyd liked her neighbours to know when `Charlie' had come to call. But, while she tied for the rich and famous, she kept her prices low and always prioritised her regulars, who knew to leave their orders on a notepad beside the door if she was out. This devotion to her adopted locale prompted Boyd to serve as an auxiliary coastguard during the Second World War and she only retired at the age of 70 because her eyesight was starting to fade.

She lived another 15 years after her retirement, but passed away in the nursing home at Golspie where she had spent her final days. Ironically, she disliked the idea that her flies were used to capture salmon for sport and never fished herself. But she was happy to teach her trade to willing students and put them through the same exacting training she had received. However, she never found anyone she considered to be a worthy heir and the admirers assembled by Steel opine that Boyd's flies were so special because she put life into them.

Sublimely photographed by Ole Bratt Birkeland and deftly edited by Sabine Krayenbuhl to the lulling Paul Cantelon score, this is an affectionate account of a quiet life and a paean to the salmon who swim out into the freezing seas in order to feed and to return to their own tributaries to spawn. Steel subtitles the picture `A Love Story', but leaves it vague whether he is referring to the romance of a noble creature's odyssey or Megan Boyd's devotion to her trade. No one knows why salmon are attracted to flies intricately fashioned from feathers, twine and slivers of shiny metal and Steel makes no attempt to solve the mystery. He is equally indifferent to the stark details of Boyd's existence. Instead, he seeks to recreate the essence of a life he first encountered in newsprint and makes of Em Cooper's thick-­‐painted animations that serve as the visual equivalents of flies to attract and entice the viewer so that they can be hooked and reeled into Boyd's vanishing world.

In the process, Steel allows himself to ruminate upon seclusion, tradition, sexual identity, community, the psychological significance of environment and artistic zeal.

He relies heavily on the anecdotes of those who knew Boyd, but omits to identify them on screen. For the record, therefore, his interviewees are Hettie Cunningham, Harry Davidson, Stewart Graham, Sheila Grant, Angela and George MacBeath, Edward MacKay, Bill Main, David Profumo, Lilla Rowcliffe, Valerie Sanders, and Aileen, Alex and Colin Simpson. They speak with evident fondness and admiration, but they also protect Boyd's privacy and legacy, which is celebrated in a series of delicate close-­‐ups of the tying process. Few will emerge from the experience any wiser about Boyd, fishing, salmon, Scotland or the artificial fly. But surely all will be seduced by the elegiac idyll that is dangled so tantalisingly before them.

LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON As can be seen from After Life (1998) and Nobody Knows (2004), which are both showing at Borderlines 12, Hirokazu Kore-­‐eda is a director of great sophistication and restraint. But he succumbs to melodramatics in Like Father, Like Son, a baby

swapping saga that arrived in cinemas hard on the heels of Mira Nair's adaptation of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. This has long been a common plot device in everything from classic novels to cornball telenovelas and it is rather surprising to see such an astute commentator on the modern family resorting to such a hackneyed gambit. Yet, even though this is Kore-­‐eda's weakest domestic drama, he is still such an assured storyteller and so gifted a director of children that this is not without interest, even though his previous picture, I Wish (2011), was another study of antithetical households, albeit one seen from the perspective of brothers trying to reunite their estranged parents.

Workaholic architect Masaharu Fukuyama and his dutiful wife Machiko Ono are trying to get six year-­‐old son Keita Ninomiya into an exclusive elementary school.

Fukuyama has taught the boy to fib about how he taught him to fly a kite on a happy camping trip and their application seems set to be accepted when an anomaly arises over a blood test. A hurried DNA check reveals that Fukuyama is not Ninomiya's father and the hospital confirms that his biological son, Hwang Sho-­‐gen, has been raised, along with their other two children, by suburban appliance salesman Lily Franky and his wife Yoko Maki.

Fukuyama persuades Franky into suing the hospital and they agree on some weekend visits to get to know their natural sons. Much to Fukuyama's frustration, however, Ninomiya rather enjoys the free-­‐and-­‐easy atmosphere of Franky's cramped home, while Hwang finds it difficult to cope with Fukuyama's fussy restrictions.

Feeling he could offer both boys a better start in life, Fukuyama consults with his lawyer about adopting Ninomiya and even contemplates accusing Franky and Maki of being bad parents, even though this might entail them losing custody of their other kids.

However, when Fukuyama broaches the subject of making it worth the parsimonious Franky's while to sign over Ninomiya, he is so insulted that the pair are barely on speaking terms when the court date comes around and a nurse admits that she switched the infants in a fit of pique because she was having such a tough time with her own stepchildren. Naturally, the judge finds in favour of the plaintiffs. But the problem still remains of what to do with the boys.

Fukuyama consults his own frosty father, Isao Natsuyagi, who insists that bloodline is everything and Franky agrees to go along with the exchange. However, Hwang is so unhappy living with Fukuyama and Ono that he runs away and, even when he returns and starts to bond with his new father, he admits that he would much rather be with Franky. Trying to do the right thing, Fukuyama returns some photographs to Ninomiya and they have such an unsettling effect on the child that he also runs away.

But all ends well, with both families promising to stay in touch and celebrating with a party in Franky's shop.

Steering well clear of the savage class satire that made Étienne Chatiliez's similarly themed Life Is a Long Quiet River (1988) so raucously enjoyable, this may be more convoluted than earlier Kore-­‐eda family outings like Nobody Knows (2004) and Still Walking (2008). But he dots the action with moments of tranquil, Ozu-­‐like contemplation and conspires cunningly with production designer Keiko Mitsumatsu and set decorator Akiko Matsuba to use the forbiddingly chic and chaotically cosy

abodes to highlight the contrasts between the competing fathers. Disappointingly, he relegates the mothers to the margins and also rather dubiously aligns good parenting with larking around and discipline with suffocating nurture.

Yet, while Fukuyama is rather obviously set up as the fall guy with childhood hangups of his own, he gives such a plausible performance that it is possible to feel more sympathy for him in his bourgeois moral confusion than it is for Franky in his cheerful, working-­‐class acceptance of fate. But while the focus is often on the grownups, Kore-­‐eda also slyly shows how readily Ninomiya and Hwang acclimatise to their new surroundings and it is these small details that often prove more poignant than the more stage-­‐managed confrontations.

THE MISSING PICTURE Although he has been acclaimed for such fictional works as Rice People (1994) and The Sea Wall (2008), Panh is best known for unflinching documentaries about the Cambodian genocide. But, while S-­‐21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) and Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell (2011) made powerful use of personal testimony, this deeply personal adaptation of his own book, The Elimination, combines archive material with claymation to recreate lost scenes from Panh's past and reclaim his own history from the propagandist depictions fabricated by Pol Pot and his Khmer henchmen. Aesthetically, this is a bold approach that occasionally runs the risk of trivialising a age of atrocity. However, the blend of naiveté and nostalgia is entirely intentional, as Panh seeks both to expose the fallacies contained in footage designed to seduce the Kampuchean Revolution's Communist allies and to warn against the ease with which flawed humanity can succumb to its worst instincts.

Panh was 13 when Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge on 17 April 1975. As he recalls in a commentary co-­‐scripted by Christophe Bataille and read by Randal Douc, the regime quickly exploited the tensions between the bourgeoisie and the lower classes to impose a programme of re-­‐education that saw thousands of city dwellers dispatched to agricultural labour camps, where stubborn resistance was systematically weakened and eradicated by increasingly pitiless corporal and capital punishment.

The killing fields were secretive places, however, and no cameras were allowed to record the barbarism they witnessed. Consequently, Panh stages their crimes in a series of dioramas populated by clay figurines that restore the missing pictures and memorialise the family members, friends and strangers who perished at the hands of `brothers' and `sisters' who acted as much out of envy as fear before falling victim themselves to the suspicion and paranoia that became the norm under Brother No.1, as he sought to impose an ideology comprising concepts borrowed from Jean-­‐ Jacquess Rousseau and Mao Zedong.

In the opening sequence, Panh shows a stack of film canisters and reveals that the monochrome imagery they preserve was faked to show the glorious triumph of the people over misrule. But, while he makes poignant use of this footage, he rather overdoes the metaphor of the crashing sea unleashing a tidal wave of memories that the Khmer Rouge were unable to hold back. Similarly, Marc Marder's score is frustratingly insistent in its eagerness to convey the simple decency of the models sculpted with laudable attention to detail by Sarith Mang and photographed with subtle sensitivity by Prum Mesa to enhance their personality as they immobily endure

back-­‐breaking labour, cramped living conditions, state-­‐orchestrated malnutrition and brutal executions.

Brightly coloured and presented in tableau that manage simultaneously to suggest authenticity and artifice, the figures convey the terror and helplessness of the population, while also distancing the viewer from the full horror of the traumas that accounted for over two million souls in four years. Panh is too shrewd not to recognise that it might be a mercy that such barbarism was never filmed and he and editor Marie-­‐Christine Rougerie frequently juxtapose intimations of happier times with evocations of cruelty to force the audience into realising the full hideousness of the new normality, in which dying of starvation (as Panh's father did) becomes an act of heroic resistance. But, while it contains many moments of excruciating poignancy and chilling depravity, it's the totality of the enterprise that is most significant, as it stands as a testament to Panh's own survival and his eloquent ability to commemorate and condemn long after his tormentors have been confounded.

Despite the comparisons with Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985), The Missing Picture has more in common with Camp 14: Total Control Zone, Marc Wiese's harrowing account of the suffering that Shin Dong-­‐Huyk witnessed over 23 years after being born in a North Korean labour camp in 1983. And there is no escaping the similarity between Matthew Cooke's How to Make Money Selling Drugs and Eugene Jarecki's The House I Live In. The former actually premiered first, but it arrives on British screens a full year after the latter and its self-­‐consciously subversive analysis of the War on Drugs in the United States often leaves it sounding glibly smug rather than trenchantly significant.

MOON MAN A much-­‐loved book provides the inspiration for Stephan Schesch's Moon Man. However, while Irish animators Fabian Erlinghauser, Sean McCarron and Marie Thorhauge wisely stick closely to the graphic style conceived back in 1966 by Tomi Ungerer, Schesch and co-­‐scenarist Ralph Martin overload the story in expanding upon the original text without lacing it with the satirical wit that might have appealed to older children and grown-­‐ups.

Fed up with being alone in space, the Moon Man (Katharina Thalbach) hitches a lift on the tail of a shooting star and lands on Earth. He was hoping to make some new friends, but the President (Míchael McElhatton) is convinced he is the advance party of an alien invasion force and orders sidekick Conquista (Helen Mooney) to send his soldiers to capture him. In fact, the President is a cruel, arrogant dictator and has plans to attack the Moon and has inventor Bunsen van der Dunkel (Pat Laffan) working on a rocketship. But he doesn't care that the children can no longer sleep at night without the Moon Man's reassuring presence in the sky.

One young girl (Taylor Mooney) and her father (Paul McLoone) are concerned, however, and they cruise around in a flash car searching for the Moon Man so he can return home before the troops find him. But he is having far too nice a time to make any hasty decisions. He loves the colours and sounds of his new surroundings and even gets on well with the smaller Earthlings, after he mingles with the guests at a Halloween party. But, when he also wanders into the seafront castle of Van der Dunkel (who has been asleep for a century because he had nothing better to do), he

strikes up a friendship that is far more valuable to `the Inventor of Everything' than the riches the President can offer him.

With Ungerer acting as narrator, Schesch (who also produced Hayo Freitag's 2007 adaptation of the same author's The Three Robbers) ably contrasts the worldviews of the Moon Man and the President. Having only just vanquished the last opposition to his regime, the latter detects threats everywhere, while the former sees only beauty in the flora and fauna. The sequence in which he is enchanted by a lake to the strains of Louis Armstrong's version of `Moon River' is utterly beguiling and who could resist the double act of a moose and an owl who shines a torch while perched on his antlers?

Indeed, purely on the visual front, this is one of the best advertisements for traditional 2-­‐D graphics in a while (keep an eye out for the endless sight gags, the best of which is the presidential flag). Moreover, Schesch resists the breakneck pace and contrived set-­‐pieces that are now as much a part of European animation as they are Pixar and Disney's high-­‐concept romps. But the sense of peril isn't always palpable, while the underlying messages about trust, co-­‐existence and friendship might have been stated a little more trenchantly.

MUSCLE SHOALS The career of record producer Rick Hall very much reflected his upbringing in the Alabama backwoods, as the songs he heard the cotton pickers singing as they toiled in the fields inspired the music that he would record at his fabled FAME Studios in the 1960s and 70s. However, as the debuting Greg `Freddy' Camalier points out in Muscle Shoals, this region around the Tennessee River was synonymous with musical greatness.

According to Tom Hendrix, the Yuchi Indians believed that a woman sang in the waters of the river to ward off evil spirits and, thus, there is something in Bono's contention that the songs recorded in this burgh of 8000 souls `came out of the mud'.

The U2 frontman becomes something of an irksome presence as he waxes lyrical about the energy of a place that spawned WC Handy (the father of the Blues), Helen Keller and Sam Phillips, who would sign the likes of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash to his Sun Records label in Memphis. But, while he packs the early stages of this enjoyable documentary with Terrence Malick-­‐like magic hour shots of the Colbert County countryside, Camalier never quite nails why Muscle Shoals generated so much exceptional music.

He is more successful in identifying what drove Hall to rise from an isolated shack with no amenities to mixing with musical royalty. Forced to live with his father after his mother drifted into prostitution following the scalding death of his toddler brother, Hall saw both his father and his first wife killed in vehicular accidents (he under the tractor his son had bought him to celebrate his success and she in the car that Hall himself was driving). However, he was also determined to prove wrong those who had crowed that he wouldn't amount to much and to exact a measure of revenge on Billy Sherrill and Tom Stafford, who had fired him from his first studios in the nearby town of Florence for taking music-­‐making too seriously.

But, from the moment he recorded Jimmy Hughes's `Steal Away', Hall knew he had found his calling and he scored his first solo hit with `You Better Move On', which was written and recorded by local hotel busboy Arthur Alexander and became a major

UK hit for The Rolling Stones in 1964. However, the first house band Hall assembled -­‐ comprising Norbert Putnam, Peanut Montgomery, David Briggs and Jerry Carrigan -­‐ didn't stay with him for long, as they were whisked away to open for The Beatles at their first American concert in Washington, DC. Undaunted, Hall put together another crew and David Hood (bass), Jimmy Johnson (guitar), Roger Hawkins (drums) and Barry Beckett (keyboards) became known as The Swampers, whose `greasy' sound convinced those not in the know that these four young white boys were seasoned black veterans.

They were often joined in the studio by songwriting session players Spooner Oldham, Donnie Fritts and Dan Penn and they attracted the attention of Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records after hospital orderly Percy Sledge topped the charts with `When a Man Loves a Woman' in 1966. Suddenly, Hall was playing in a different league and he forged an unlikely bond with the notoriously temperamental Wilson Pickett, who brought the best out of The Swampers on tracks like `Land of 1000 Dances' and `Mustang Sally'. Recorded at a time that Governor George Wallace was still advocating segregation, these hits should have become theme tunes for the campaign for equality. But not even Aretha Franklin knew that she would be working with white folks when Wexler signed her from Columbia and redirected her flagging career with `I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)'.

This session ended with Franklin's husband, Ted White, getting into a fight with one of the brass section and Wexler and Hall fell out when the latter went to the singer's hotel to have it out with the controlling spouse. Yet, while he lost his contract with the label, The Swampers were invited to New York to finish such legendary cuts as `Respect', `(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman', `Chain of Fools' and `Do Right Woman, Do Right Man'. Undaunted, Hall contacted Leonard Chess in Chicago, who entrusted him with Etta James's next album and he talked her into recording `Tell Mama', which became a huge hit. She admits being a difficult customer, but was soon seduced by the Swamper mix of blues, hillbilly and rock, in which the heavy bass and drum grounding allowed for a little more surface finesse.

Shortly afterwards, Duane Allman arrived in Muscle Shoals after quitting his band, The Hour Glass. As brother Gregg recalls here, he had recently damaged an elbow in a horseback fall and had been inspired to play slide guitar with a bottle of Coricidin pills after hearing the debut album by guitarist Taj Mahal. Welcomed with open arms

by Hall and The Swampers, the long-­‐haired Allman was viewed with deep suspicion by the locals and it was a reluctance to face the lunch counter crowd that led Allman and Wilson Pickett to concoct a version of `Hey Jude' that was to prove crucial to the evolution of Southern Rock. However, for once in his life, Hall's ear failed him and he let The Allman Brothers Band slip through his fingers.

Camalier doesn't quite explain the extent to which this misjudgement persuaded Hood, Hawkins, Johnson and Beckett to decamp and join Wexler just as Hall secured a big deal with Capitol Records. Instead, he lets Percy Sledge reminisce about the time Jimi Hendrix played in his backing band and his conclusion that time changes everything is left to justify the decision to open the Muscle Shoals Studios at 3614 Jackson Highway. Cher was among the first clients. But, as Hall guided Clarence Carter to the top of the charts with `Patches' (which he wrote in memory of his

recently deceased father), the new facility got off to a slow start and the Swampers were growing concerned that they had made a dreadful mistake when The Rolling Stones checked in.

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards recall their brief stint at the studio with evident relish. Indeed, Richards reckons that the recording of Fred McDowell's `You Gotta Move' and their own compositions `Wild Horses' and `Brown Sugar' was perhaps the funkiest highlight of the band's 50-­‐year career. But, while his erstwhile colleagues were spinning rock gold, Hall was melding session stalwarts like Clayton Ivey, Jesse Boyce and Harvey Thompson into The FAME Gang, who played on albums by a bewildering variety of artists over the next decade. Indeed, such was the growing reputation of the two studios that they got to host acts of the calibre of Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, Candi Staton, Bobbie Gentry, Lou Rawls, Joe Tex, Joe Simon, Bobby Womack, Tom Jones, The Osmonds, Carlos Santana, JJ Cale, Boz Scaggs, Bob Seger, Linda Ronstadt, Joan Baez, Leon Russell, The Staples Singers, Otis Redding, Kris Kristofferson and Mark Knopfler.

The list is as astonishing as it is impressive. But what is most notable is the diversity of the artists and the fact that the two house bands always seemed to catch the vibe of whoever they were backing, whether it was Jamaican Jimmy Cliff on `Sitting in Limbo' (which did so much to popularise reggae) or Steve Winwood and Traffic, whose `headless horseman' style was slicked into shape by The Swampers on tracks like `(Sometimes I Feel So) Uninspired'. As Donna Jean Godchaux (who sang backing vocals for Percy Sledge before joining The Grateful Dead) avers, they were just a bunch of freakishly talented musicians who just all happened to be in the right place at the same time.

This is, in effect, the key to the Muscle Shoals story and Camalier rather misses in allowing Bono to ramble on with pretentious earnestness and cinematographer Anthony Arendt to shoot so many evocative images of riverbanks and main streets.

But this is less a forensic study than a fond shuffle down memory lane, with the anecdotes mattering as much as the archival footage ably edited by Richard Lowe and even, perhaps, the music itself. Thus, the picture winds up with what is essentially a digression about Lynyrd Skynard's passing association with The Swampers that earned them a mention in the lyrics of `Sweet Home Alabama'. But, as Jimmy Johnson divulges, the combo played a key part in helping the Van Zant siblings find their sound and it was his refusal to cut the nine-­‐minute `Freebird' down to under four minutes for radio play that led the label to snatch them away from his studio.

Although his rift with Wexler has never healed, Hall bears no grudges against Hood, Johnson, Hawkins and Beckett (whose 2009 death goes curiously unmentioned) and Camalier opts to end his overview with the old gang reuniting to accompany Alicia Keys on `Pressing On' rather than chart the fortunes of the complementary rivals over the last 30 years. Such decisions may be frustrating, but they don't detract from the excellence of what Camalier has chosen to include. Some may cavil at his leisurely approach, but many more will be scrambling to acquire some of the countless gems contained in an affectionate actuality that leaves one longing to see Dave Grohl's paean to Muscle Shoals, Sound City.

MUSEUM HOURS.

Jem Cohen urges audiences to see beyond surface artifice in Museum Hours, a slowburning study of lonely hearts finding a connection following a chance meeting brought about by the most inauspicious circumstances. However, while this is very much a film about seeing the bigger picture, it also seeks to persuade viewers to notice the small details in both works of art and everyday occurrences, as they provide the secret to understanding both the intentions of the creator and the bigger truths about life, love and death.

Arriving in Vienna to see an estranged cousin who has lapsed into a coma, Canadian Mary Margaret O'Hara wonders whether she has done the right thing in acting on impulse. She speaks no German and has little money and doesn't even know where the hospital is. In some confusion, she wanders into the Kunsthistorisches Museum and is meandering around the galleries when sixtysomething attendant Bobby Sommer senses her distress. He gives her directions and wishes her well for her stay.

But, with long hours on her hands outside visiting times, O'Hara soon returns to get out of the winter snow and finds Sommer just as welcoming as he was before.

Having been a woodwork teacher and a rock band manager in a former life, Sommer works at the museum for the company as much as the cash. With his brother now living in Düsseldorf (a city he despises), Sommer spends his evenings playing online poker or sitting alone in bars. Yet, while he seeks a little quiet after his noisy past, he still dotes on school parties and (in voiceover) muses on how different young people are in galleries and concert venues.

Delighted at having made a new friend, Sommer shows O'Hara some of the museum's more famous paintings and arranges for her to have a monthly pass that will gain her free admission whenever she requires. Although he enjoys pointing out masterpieces and priceless artefacts for her to enjoy, Sommer is aware of his limitations and suggests that O'Hara tags along with one of art historian Ela Piplits's tours. But she is intimidated by the grandiloquent discussion of `The Conversion of St Paul' and `Country Wedding' in the room devoted to the 16th-­‐century Dutch master, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and opts to pass her visits with Sommer. He offers to translate for her with the doctors and they go for a beer. As the weather improves, he also shows her some of the city's landmarks and slowly starts to rediscover a place he has long called home, but all too rarely embraced. As they chat, they begin to learn about each other's histories and hopes for the future. Being gay, Sommer is not interested in romantic love. But he feels a growing bond with O'Hara and they amuse themselves by imagining patrons strolling naked around the museum after O'Hara remarks upon the blissful lack of shame in Lucas Cranach's `Adam and Eve'. But, during one of their walks, O'Hara gets a call from the hospital and she not only fears losing a relative, but also that her platonic friendship is about to come to an end.

In collaboration with cinematographer Peter Roehsler and editor Marc Vives, Cohen has succeeded in creating a combination of essay, travelogue and intimate human drama that thrills the senses, the intellect and the heart in equal measure. The almost corny tactic of shooting exteriors in 16mm and interiors in high-­‐definition digital works triumphantly. The performances of the non-­‐professional Sommer and country singer O'Hara are also touching and authentic, while their story (such as it is) avoids contrivance in slipping between minor moments that often fail to hold Cohen's

attention as something in the background catches his eye. Indeed, the visuals are the key to this beguiling film, whether contrasts are being made with a self-­‐portrait by the aged and impoverished Rembrandt and a once-­‐loved toy discarded in a junk shop. The people rooting for bargains in the flea market are also brilliantly juxtaposed with the peasants in one of Bruegel's famously democratic canvases, although Cohen adds to the impact by shooting through a glass window to the accompaniment of a guided tour tape.

This clash of the banal and the beautiful is further illustrated by the view of St Stephen's Cathedral that is partially blocked by a vulgar Coca-­‐Cola sign. But the most affecting moment comes as Sommer describes an image of Christ in the museum to O'Hara's comatose cousin and the evocative efficacy of his simple language is deftly counterpointed by the camera drifting away to gaze through the window as a train travelling silently alongside a frozen river. Rarely has cinema captured the link between life and art, the ethereal and the earthbound with such delicacy or honesty.

There are lapses, most notably the nude reverie, while the members of Piplits's tour party are quite awful actors. But these are minor flaws in an appreciation of the world around us and the masterworks it has inspired and, if this occasionally feels like a reworking of Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise (1995) for senior citizens, it should remind film-­‐makers everywhere that cinema is not the exclusive preserve of the young and photogenic.

THE PATIENCE STONE Casablanca stands in for the unnamed city in Atiq Rahimi's second feature, The Patience Stone, which he has adapted from his own 2008 Prix Goncourt-­‐winning novel with the veteran French screenwriter Jean-­‐Claude Carrière. Based in Paris since his family fled Afghanistan following the Soviet invasion, Rahimi made his directorial debut with Earth and Ashes in 2004, which centred on an old man summoning the courage to tell his miner son that their village has been destroyed and that only his small grandson has survived. In many ways, this harrowing drama provides the other side of the coin, as it focuses on a woman who decides to pour out the frustrations and resentments that have been building up inside her during 10 years of marriage to a comatose husband who has always been more concerned about fighting causes than protecting his family.

Considering the battle being fought in the streets outside, it's ironic that wounded warrior Hamid Djavdan should have been shot in the neck by a comrade in arms who had insulted his mother rather than by a mortal foe. Wife Golshifteh Farahani is particularly vexed by the origins of the quarrel, as Djavdan has rarely show such loyalty to her over the past decade. Yet, she continues to sit by his bedside and change the drip that has been keeping him alive since he lost consciousness 16 days earlier.

Mullah Mohamed Al Maghraoui had confidently predicted that her spouse would recover. But he has proved as unreliable as Djavdan's brothers and Jihadist comrades, who fled when the fighting got too close and left Farahani to care for the invalid and their two small daughters, Hiba Lharrak and Aya Abida.

Aunt Hassina Burgan empathises with Farahani's situation and suggests that she treats Djavdan's incapacity as a variation on the `syngue sabour', a magic stone in Persian mythology that shielded the owner from the misfortunes of life. Suitably

emboldened, Farahani starts to tell her husband the secrets she has never been able to tell him before. She harks back to her childhood and confides the hopes that she had when her father arranged their marriage, in spite of the age difference. But she soon starts listing the flaws and failings that made him such a difficult and abusive man to live with, when he was actually home and not off with his pals defending their rights as macho Muslim males. Moreover, she also vents her spleen over her dissatisfaction with their culture, faith and social hierarchy. But, not content with uttering blasphemies, Farahani has one last confession to make about her relationship with dashing, but stuttering soldier Massi Mrowat.

Ever since she was criticised for not wearing a headscarf at the New York premiere of Ridley Scott's thriller Body of Lies (2008), Golshifteh Farahani has been a persona non grata in her native Iran. Indeed, she has been resident in Paris since momentarily bearing her breast in a César promo after she had been nominated for her role in Hiner Saleem's comedy Si tu meurs, je te tue/If You Die, I'll Kill You. But she is unlikely to repair any bridges with her electrifying performance in this unflinching diatribe against prejudice, hypocrisy, brutality and oppression endured by so many Muslim women.

Lushly and lithely photographed by Thierry Arbogast against Erwin Prib's atmospheric sets, this avoids feeling overtly theatrical thanks to Hervé de Luze's deft editing. But such is the combustible content of the monologues fashioned by Rahimi and Carrière that the gaze remains firmly on Farahani, as she gets a lifetime's grievances off her chest and unexpectedly discovers the sensation of making love with a man who wants to please rather than possess her. More might have been made of Burgan's flintily sagacious prostitute aunt, while some may bridle at the climactic contrivance. But this is a bold and perceptive picture that deserves the widest possible audience.

THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO IDEOLOGY Over the last decade, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has become the screen's leading iconoclast. Having introduced himself in Ben Wright's Manufacturing Reality: Slavoj Zizek and the Reality of the Virtual (2004), he reinforced his reputation for quirky observation in Astra Taylor's Zizek! (2005) and Examined Life (2008).

However, he seems to have found his cinematic soulmate in Sophie Fiennes, as the pair retain the deceptively playful style devised for The Pervert's Guide to Cinema (2006) in The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, which enables Žižek to present his loquacious dissertation on recreated sets from the very films he is using to illustrate his thesis. It's a tour de force performance that confirms Žižek's status as academe's stand-­‐up superstar. Yet, for all its acuity, this is also a curiously unfocused diatribe that often feels like a highbrow version of the Kevin Bacon Game. Žižek launches forth while standing beside a dumpster in the Los Angeles alleyway used by John Carpenter in They Live (1988), the story of a man who discovers some sunglasses that cut through the cant of modern living. Rather mischievously dubbing the picture `one of the forgotten masterpieces of the Hollywood left', Žižek opines that we spend out lives eating out of the trash can of ideology. Yet, we no longer have to suffer to uphold our ideological causes because society has downplayed them in insisting that our principle duty is to enjoy ourselves. There is a difference between

enjoyment and simple pleasure, however, as the former also includes the possibility of pain and Žižek explains that desire is based upon a lack of an ideal placed just out of our reach. He suggests that religion operates around this lack and uses the `Climb Every Mountain' scene from Robert Wise's The Sound of Music (1965) to show how Catholicism is different from other religions in that it invites followers to have it all.

The song dubbed by Marni Nixon for Peggy Wood was cut from the version that Žižek saw as a youth in Yugoslavia, as the state censor recognised its aspirational lyrics hardly chimed in with the Communist message. But advertisers have continued to embrace its ethos and have long applied it to slogans for Coca-­‐Cola. One memorable line proclaimed that `Coke is it!', but Žižek reveals that the combination of a chocolate egg and a mystery gift inside a Kinder Surprise actually materialises the `it' in a neatly harmonious manner. However, he warns that we should always be wary when things appear to be so perfect and employs the example of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to prove his point. The famous `Ode to Joy' is taken to reflect the dream of a peaceful world. But Beethoven was not `a cheap celebrator of the brotherhood of all people'. Instead, he sought to show how social antagonism continually disturbs the easy emotional impulse and we should not be surprised to learn that `Ode to Joy' has been pressed into service as an anthem for the united German team competing at the Olympics between 1956 and 1968, the European Union and the white supremacist state of Rhodesia.

Of course, `a bit of the old Ludwig van' played a key role in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1973) and Žižek contrasts the vicious delinquency in this adaptation of Anthony Burgess's novel with the cosier kind on view in Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins's West Side Story (1961). Indeed, he uses the lyrics to the song `Gee Officer Krupke' to beat the liberal commentators who tried to excuse the kids who exploited the 2011 London Riots to go on a looting rampage. Moreover, he compares this desperate lashing out against an uncaring system with Travis Bickle's violent outburst in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) and Anders Breivik's killing spree in Oslo in the same summer of 2011. Žižek avers that, in such cases, ideology is a lie masking our inability to understand the world and our place within it.

Having used Ethan Edwards's rescue of his niece from the Comanche in John Ford's The Searchers (1956) to demonstrate how a frightened society reacts to alien interlopers, Žižek utilises Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) to explain the success of the most extreme ideology of the last century, National Socialism. He also compares Adolf Hitler's anti-­‐Semitic policies with John Major's back to basics assault on unemployed teenage mothers as an example of how to governments scapegoat minorities to enlist public support. However, Žižek wisely points out over clips from Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935) and Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1972) how surprisingly close certain aspects of Nazi and Communist ideology actually were and he seems to delight in the way the heavy metal combo Rammstein has reclaimed debased notions from the Third Reich and, in the process, proved how pernicious they were in the hands of master propagandists. . Žižek next confesses to a liking for Starbucks cappuccino, but explains how cleverly the company plays on consumer guilt to excuse its high prices by boosting the good causes it promotes through its profits. He insists that capitalism could not function

unless it consistently condoned our self-­‐indulgence. Yet, one only has to look at the discarded aeroplanes in the Mojave Desert to realise that our heedless consumption is having a deleterious effect upon the environment. According to Žižek, such waste forces us to experience ourselves as historical beings and he points to apocalyptic pictures like Francis Lawrence's I Am Legend (2007) as the embodiment of the `inertia of the real', which requires us to accept that failure and dissipation are elements of an evolution we should embrace rather than resist because capitalism thrives on crisis.

Cutting away from the plane graveyard, Žižek takes us to the bed of the Atlantic Ocean to find the wreck of the liner at the centre of James Cameron's inspired piece of Hollywood Marxism, Titanic (1997). Superficially, this is an egalitarian tale of crossclass romance. But, in Žižek's eyes, it demonstrates how the exhausted élite feeds off the energy of the lower classes to reinvigorate itself and keep them in their place. He opines that even iconic events need to be reassessed and, over an extract from Jan Nemec's Oratorio for Prague (1968), he suggests that the Prague Spring of 1967 needed to end in Soviet oppression for its core dream to remain alive, as if the people had toppled the Communist regime, the sheen of their idealism might well have been tarnished by the consequences of their actions when they became responsible for governing themselves.

Returning to Titanic, Žižek declares it a highly conservative film, as its purpose is `the production of the couple'. However, this is not exclusively a Hollywood trait, as one of the great works of Soviet Socalist Realism, Mikhail Chiaureli's The Fall of Berlin (1949), also binds its action together with a love story. Indeed, this colour flagwaver even boasted dialogue written by Josef Stalin himself. But the ideological message would have been lost without the romance between Natasha (Marina Kovaleva) and Alesha (Boris Andreev), as what would have been the point of surviving the Great Patriotic War unless there was someone back home making the defence of the revolution seem so worthwhile.

From here, Žižek leaps to the unwritten rules that underpin the British public school system and the American military and uses clips from Lindsay Anderson's If... (1968), Robert Atlman's M*A*S*H (1970) and Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987) to highlight the obscene enjoyment many derive from belonging to such institutions. Yet, as the pictures of the humiliated prisoners at Abu Grahib prove, it is all-­‐too-­‐easy to overstep boundaries and Žižek wonders how this affects the maintenance of the social order. However, it is not just ordinary citizens or agents of the establishment who abuse power and Žižek contrasts the ruse used to restore faith in Batman in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight (2008) with the 45 second lie used by George W. Bush and Tony Blair to justify the invasion of Iraq. Indeed, he goes further in denouncing elected governments that pay lip service to democracy while doing whatever if deems fit to retain power.

The fundamentalists behind 9/11 claim to have been doing the will of Allah and Žižek turns around a quotation by Jean-­‐Paul Sartre that is often mistakenly attributed to Fedor Dostoevsky to claim that everything is possible because God exists. If atrocities can, therefore, be laid at the door of a higher order, there is no wonder humanity sets such store by what psychoanalysts call `the big Other', as this can be

applied to an extreme belief in any doctrine. Both Lenin and Stalin insisted that acts perpetrated in the name of Soviet Communism were necessary to advance historical progress and Žižek applauds Miloš Forman for having the intelligence to turn his satirical gaze away from the leadership in The Loves of a Blonde (1965) and The Fireman's Ball (1967) and focus it on the masses, as they gave legitimacy to the regime and, if they could be shown to be so deeply flawed, then ridicule reflected back upon the Czechoslovak authorities.

The big Other doesn't simply give out lives meaning, however. It is also a virtual entity that serves as the ultimate witness to our actions. Yet, Žižek isn't sure such an entity exists and uses Celia Johnson's inability to confide in her gossipy friend Everley Gregg in David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945) as proof. He also suggests that we take solace in bureaucracy, like the one depicted in Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985), to atone for the fact that there is no divine being. Warming to his theme, Žižek says that being liberated from ideology is the ideal state and audaciously employs the Crucifixion sequence from Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) to support his notion that there is no god and that Christianity is unique in incorporating doubts about its veracity in its own teachings, ranging from the Book of Job to the gospels.

Jesus Christ rose from the dead and Žižek ponders whether it is possible to be `reborn' in a state devoid of ideology. He finds his answer, however, in John Frankenheimer's chilling allegory, Seconds (1966), as the ageing man who is given a new identity and the chance to forge a second life pines for what he left behind in his previous existence and pays a cruel price for his nostalgic weakness. Such attachments to the old order have prevented humanity from dreaming beyond its existing state and Žižek alludes to the desert orgy in Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970) to show how quickly the hippie ideal of the mid-­‐1960s began to fail and explain why epoch-­‐shattering revolution is so rare.

Cinema is the art of dreams and, as such, allows us to assess the ideologies governing our world. `We are not simply submitted to our dreams,' Žižek concludes, `they just come from some unfathomable depths and we can't do anything about them.

Our dreams stage our desires and our desires are not objective facts. We created them, we sustained them, we are responsible for them.' Given the state of the planet, perhaps the time has come to become realists instead of dreamers and demand changes in the social, economic and political orders, as `the depressing lesson of the last decades is that capitalism has been the true revolutionising force'. But, even if our utopian vision turns out to be impossible, we should not despair and should remain vigilant because although `the ghosts, the living dead, of the past failed revolutions are roaming around unsatisfied, they will find their home in the new freedom!'

Let's get one thing straight. This is not a definitive account of The Pervert's Guide to Ideology. It is merely the attempt of a reasonably bright bloke to keep up with the torrent of ideas and asides espoused by Slavoj Žižek during this demanding, but endlessly enjoyable film. Some of the links are extremely tenuous and this doesn't come close to a coherent thesis. Instead, it feels like a lecture by a scatty don whose notes are in the wrong order. Yet, with his skittish gestures and distinctive articulation, Žižek proves an irresistible companion and there is much more of a twinkle of

knowing humour in his eyes here than in previous outings.

Sophie Fiennes seems to recognise this and the settings designed by Lucy van Lonkhuyzen are often as hilarious as they are apposite. The standouts see Žižek lying on Travis Bickle's bed with his shoes off (Taxi Driver), sitting in Hitler's plane seat (Triumph of the Will), standing on the steps of Stalin's aircraft (The Fall of Berlin), perching on a barrack-­‐room toilet (Full Metal Jacket) and reclining on a gurney being rushed towards oblivion in Seconds. The moments afloat from Jaws and Titanic are less effective, but Fiennes, Žižek and editor Ethel Shepherd seem willing throughout to go with what tickles them and accept that not every gag will be equally appreciated. Indeed, this hit-­‐and-­‐miss attitude pervades the entire picture, with some of Žižek's assertions feeling less persuasive than others. Thus, as a `critique of ideology', this is clearly more populist than scholarly. But, while he frequently covers his back with vague pronouncements like `ideology is an empty container open to all possible meanings', Žižek remains a beguiling performer and this undeniably difficult film more than repays the concentration it demands.

RENOIR For some reason, directors find it difficult to make good pictures about their filmmaking idols. There are a handful of exceptions. Ably aided by Johnny Depp as Edward D. Wood, Jr., Tim Burton captured the man behind the madness in Ed Wood (1994), while Ian McKellen helped Bill Condon reveal the personal and professional travails of James Whale in Gods and Monsters (1998). But, despite varying degrees of veracity, considerable disservice has been done to Charlie Chaplin (Robert Downey, Jr.) in Richard Attenborough's Chaplin (1992), Jean Vigo (James Frain) in Julien Temple's Vigo: A Passion for Life (1998), F.W. Murnau (John Malkovich) in E. Elias Merhige's Shadow of the Vampire (2000), Melvin Van Peebles (Mario Van Peebles) in Van Peebles Jr.'s Baadasssss (2003), Luis Buñuel (Matthew McNulty) in Paul Morrison's Little Ashes (2008), Orson Welles (Christian McKay) in Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles (2009), Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) in Simon Curtis's My Week With Marilyn (2011) and Alfred Hitchcock (Toby Jones and Anthony Hopkins respectively) in Julian Jarrold's The Girl and Sacha Gervasi's Hitchcock (both 2012). Sadly, Gilles Bourdos has done little in Renoir to add to our knowledge or increase our understanding of one of French cinema's greatest talents.

As much a portrait of the auteur's painter father Pierre-­‐Auguste as a focused insight into the events that prompted Jean to become a film-­‐maker, this adaptation of Jacques Renoir's memoir of his grandfather and uncle could not be more visually sumptuous.

Owing much to Impressionist canvases and the 1936 featurette Une Partie de Campagne, the compositions of Taiwanese maestro Mark Lee Ping-­‐Bing are sublime, while Benoît Barouh's production design enables Bourdos to capture the atmosphere in the idyllic retreat of Les Collettes in the village of Cagnes-­‐sur-­‐Mer on the Côte d'Azur. But, for all the meticulous attention to detail and evident sincerity of the project, this is too short of dramatic incident or psychological insight to be anything more than a ravishing work of heritage homage.

As 15 year-­‐old Andrée Heuschling (Christa Theret) cycles along a sun-­‐dappled country road in the summer of 1915, the only hint that there is a war raging in the trenches far to the north is an effigy of Kaiser Wilhelm hanging from a tree. As she

approaches Les Collettes, she encounters the 13 year-­‐old Claude `Coco' Renoir (Thomas Doret) strutting through the grounds in search of a distraction from the serenity of his father's enclave. He takes Dédée to the house, where she asks La Grand'Louise (Sylviane Goudal) if Pierre-­‐Auguste Renoir (Michel Bouquet) requires a new model. She is taken to a studio in the garden, where she sees the 74 year-­‐old artist in a wheelchair and so afflicted by rheumatoid arthritis in his hands that he has to have his brushes tied into his grip so he can work.

Despite still mourning the recent death of his wife, Aline (Michèle Gleizer), Pierre-­‐ Auguste is enchanted by Dédée and asks her to pose for him. She accepts and is offered her own room in the house so that she can be available whenever `le patron' needs her. Such is her self-­‐assurance that she readily poses nude and attracts both the curiosity of Coco and the lowering resentment of La Grand'Louise and her assistant Madeleine (Solène Rigot), who have each posed for their master in the past. However, she makes the deepest impression on the middle Renoir son, Jean (Vincent Rottiers), who, like his brother Pierre (Laurent Poitrenaux) has been fighting in the Great War. Wearing the uniform of the 6th Battalion of the Alpine Hunters, Jean returns on crutches, as he has narrowly escaped losing his leg to gangrene after being wounded.

He resents the fact that his beloved nanny, Gabrielle Renard (Rohmane Bohringer), had been sent away by his mother before her death and wonders whether Dédée (who had been recommended by Henri Matisse) was intended as a parting gift of atonement for her husband. However, he soon comes to appreciate the beauty of her porcelain skin and flame-­‐red hair and is grateful that she has sparked the ailing Pierre-­‐Auguste's renewed creativity.

As he talks to his father, while watching him work in his studio and in the open air, it becomes clear that Jean has no notion what to do with his future. He tries to be helpful and makes the odd gesture towards keeping the bored Coco amused. But he is painfully aware of his limitations and has to be helped through a shallow stream by La Grand'Louise and Madeleine, who have carried Pierre-­‐Auguste in his wheelchair so he can paint in a new location. Wandering away from the party, Coco sees a dead animal on the bank and gets another taste of the cruelty of death. But, while his father is frail, he has no intention of giving up the ghost just yet and manages a few steps on to the terrace at the coaxing of Dr Pratt (Carlo Brandt).

Dédée is obsessed with the cinema and adores the daredevil serial adventures of the American actress Pearl White. Jean admits that he enjoyed seeing Musidora in Les Vampires, but hasn't given the medium much thoughts. But he is becoming increasingly enamoured with Dédée and they make love after going fishing for eels by torchlight with some Italian boatmen. She urges him to make a career for himself in the cinema so that she can become his leading lady and a star of the silver screen and, despite his initial reluctance, he eventually agrees. Shortly afterwards, however, Jean gets angry with a peddler (Thierry Hancisse) who fails to respect his uniform and, such is his rekindled sense of patriotic zeal that his experience in an biplane prompt him to sign up to the fledgling air corps and Dédée is so furious with him for risking his life and reneging on his promise that she disappears.

Realising that his father is missing her, Jean tracks Dédée down to a seedy bar-­‐cumbrothel in the nearby town and causes a scene when he tries to drag her home. Having

already smashed some valuable plates in the kitchen when La Grand'Louise refused to let her boss around the maids (Cecile Rittweger and Joséphine Chillari), Dédée confirms her temperamental streak by resisting Jean's attempts to coerce her. But she returns to Les Collettes in time for a family picnic and smiles as the three siblings pose with their father and Gabrielle, who has been specially invited to see Jean before he leaves for his new reconnaisance squadron.

Closing captions inform us that Pierre-­‐Auguste died in 1919 and that Jean survived the war to keep his promise to the newly renamed Catherine Hesseling, who starred in several of his early silent films. Yet, although they married and had a son, they separated in 1931 and, while he went on to make such masterpieces as La Grande illusion (1937) and La Règle du jeu (1939), she slipped out of the limelight and died in poverty in a Parisian suburb seven months after Jean had passed away in Hollywood in February 1979.

A few lines of background information might not have gone amiss at the start of the film, either, as only those au fait with Pierre-­‐Auguste Renoir's life and times will be up to speed with events as Dédée first enters his orbit. However, even though more might have been said about Aline, Pierre, Coco and Gabrielle, Bourdos and fellow scribes Michel Spinosa and Jérôme Tonnerre capably convey the tensions between Renoir père et fils and the effect that Dédée has upon their sensibilities. They also suggest her capricious side, although they may not have got the historical chronology exactly right, as most commentators state that Dédée only became Pierre-­‐Auguste's model in 1917 (two years after Aline had died). This would also be more seemly, as Dédée would only have been 15 in the summer of 1915 and, even a century ago, a sexual relationship with the 21 year-­‐old Jean would have been highly inappropriate. It might also have been more accurate to note that Jean had first developed a serious interest in cinema while watching Charlie Chapin comedies while immobilised following his injury (when his visiting mother had convinced surgeons not to amputate his left leg).

Such quibbles aside, this is an admirably played period piece that has been tastefully scored by Alexandre Desplat. But, having acquired a reputation for unconventional adaptations of novels by Jean-­‐François Vilar (Disparu, 1998), Ruth Rendell (A Sight for Sore Eyes, 2003) and Guillaume Musso (Afterwards, 2008), Bourdos seems to have adopted a disappointingly traditional approach that is closer in spirit to Bruno Nuytten's Camille Claudel (1988) than Martin Provost's Séraphine (2008). Too many set-­‐pieces seem to have been concocted for their visual effect than their dramatic or thematic significance, among them the close-­‐ups of paint swirling beneath the surface of the water jar and the long shots of the torches illuminating the fishing smacks in the dead of night, the paddling procession through the crystal clear stream and the bicycling Dédée's encounter with some bedraggled soldiers on the road. Thus, while such tableaux are never anything less than striking, they merely prettify the action and deprive it of the depth and trenchancy necessary for convincing, compassionate and compelling family biography or artistic appreciation.

STORIES WE TELL .

The fine art of spinning a yarn is explored in Sarah Polley's teasingly self-­‐reflexive Stories We Tell, which confirms the impression made with two earlier studies of

marriage under pressure, Away From Her (2006) and Take This Waltz (2011), that this acclaimed Canadian actress is also one the country's finest directors. Revelling in the spate of ironic coincidences attendant upon her tale, Polley uses her own family history to explore how narratives shift focus according to the perspective of the teller.

This may not be the most original topic and Polley borrows heavily from Michelle Citron's Daughter Rite (1978) to help examine it. But her confidence in both her subject matter and her technique ensures that this remains compulsive viewing, even during the more intimate revelations that often leave the viewer feeling uncomfortably like an intruder.

The focus of the film is Polley's mother, Diane, who is first seen in monochrome in the mid-­‐1960s delivering a rendition of "Ain't Misbehavin'" as part of a television audition. Super 8 home movies follow to explain how she was the life and soul of the party and husband Michael and children John, Suzy, Mark and Joanna all testify to her being a wonderful mother and an irrepressible spirit. However, we learn that she had earned a certain notoriety when she scandalised polite Toronto society by abandoning her affluent husband and losing custody of her first two children in order to romance Michael, an English actor with whom she had become besotted during a production of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker. Michael and Diane had married soon afterwards and had even appeared in a couple of plays together, including Eduardo De Filippo's Filumena, which provided the basis of Vittorio De Sica's Marriage, Italian Style (1964), in which Sophia Loren cons Marcello Mastroianni to the altar by refusing to tell him which of her three sons is his.

Unfortunately, Diane had fallen for the characters that Michael played on stage and was more than a little disappointed when he quit acting to get a regular job so that they could afford a large house and a comfortable lifestyle. She, however, continued to run a casting agency and appeared in such TV series as Street Legal, and remained the extrovert party girl even after having two more children. In 1978, she was offered a part in the Montreal production of David Fennario's Toronto at the Centaur Theatre.

Reading from the letter he had written Sarah when her life had changed forever in 2007, Michael admits that he rather relished the prospect of a few months of respite and readily gave his blessing for her to go. However, on paying her a weekend visit, he was pleased to find their old passion re-­‐igniting and was delighted when Diane returned from the engagement to announce she was pregnant.

Following a change of heart en route to the abortion clinic, Diane gave birth to Sarah on 8 January 1979. As her siblings left home, she found herself the centre of attention.

But, when Sarah was 11, Diane was diagnosed with cancer and died soon afterward.

Bereft, Michael and Sarah became closer than ever, although a family joke began to circulate around this time that she bore no resemblance to her father whatsoever. What is not mentioned here, but is crucial to know, is that Diane had launched Sarah as a child star and she had earned the nickname `Canada's Sweetheart' through appearances in films like Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) and the Disney Channel's Road to Avonlea. Moreover, even after she fell out with the latter in 1991 for wearing an anti-­‐war badge at an awards ceremony, she continued to act and won acclaim for her work in such pictures as Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter (1997) and Isabel Coixet's My Life Without Me (2003).

In 2007, however, while preparing to shoot Jaco Van Dormael's Mr. Nobody, in which a 118 year-­‐old man tries to piece together his forgotten life under hypnosis, Polley decided to find out whether Michael was her biological father or whether, as family rumour suggested, it was really actor Geoffrey Bowes. John recalls overhearing an anxious phone call in which his mother had confided that she was pregnant in a way that made him suspect the hearer was the father of the child. But he had said nothing for 28 years and Diane's friends Ann Tait and Deirdre Bowen had similarly held their counsel. However, a few days after Sarah confronted Bowes and was assured that he was not her father, she received a message from film producer Harry Gulkin, who had scored a major hit with Czech exile Ján Kadár's Lies My Father Told Me in 1975. Happy to meet another of her mother's circle, Sarah was aghast to discover that the 79 year-­‐old was her real father and he explained how they had been drawn to each other during the run of the play and how he had tried, on learning of the pregnancy, to persuade Diane to leave Michael and live with him in Montreal.

While still processing the news, Sarah was contacted by a journalist who wanted her permission to run the story and she recalls weeping on a park bench wearing Neanderthal make-­‐up from Mr Nobody as she pleaded with the reporter to hold fire until she had had time to tell Michael. Naturally, he had been devastated by the disclosure and had tried to arrange his feelings in the long missive that forms the linking narration to the film (and which we see him recording under Sarah's impassive and exacting direction). He was even more distressed when the results of a DNA test confirmed Gulkin as the father, although Sarah was amused to notice that she shared a gummy smile with his other daughter, Cathy. The situation also impacted upon the lives of her other siblings, as all three sisters got divorced shortly after the truth emerged and it became headline news across Canada.

In an effort to come to terms with her mother's secret existence, Sarah decided to make this documentary and relations became strained for a time with Gulkin when he insisted that his was the only side of the story that mattered, as he alone had gone through the same emotions as Diane and had been forced to keep silent about his paternity after attending her funeral. Eventually, however, he was persuaded by Sarah's insistence on studying the way in which stories can become distorted and falsehoods can become accepted truths and agreed to be one of the many talking heads seen in the film. But it only gradually becomes clear that Sarah had also played sly visual games throughout the picture and that the photos and home movies had been leavened with grainily shot reconstructions in which Rebecca Jenkins had played Diane, Peter Evans had been Michael Polley and Alex Hatz had been Harry Gulkin.

With this realisation, comes relief that Sarah had not filmed herself breaking the news to Michael from several angles as he sat in anguish at the kitchen table and that the septuagenarian occupies the privileged position of being narrator, actor and interviewee and, thus, is allowed to blur the line between reality, memory and reconstruction in a unique manner. Michelle Citron had also staged vérité moments in Daughter Rite, which had also been accompanied by a poetic voiceover. But Polley potently shows herself talking through scenes with Rebecca Jenkins, as though she is discussing her own life with her mother, and promptly debunks this deeply moving

incident by concluding with a shot of the sheepish Geoffrey Bowes admitting that he had slept with Diane after all.

Slickly edited by Michael Munn, ingeniously designed and photographed by Lea Carlson and Iris Ng, and cleverly costumed and coiffeured by Sarah Armstrong and Josie Stewart to complete the Super 8 illusion, this is probably no different from a thousand and one other domestic sagas in which families have managed to survive secrets and lies and renegotiated a new way of getting along. The fascinating aspect is that, while Diane is not there to defend her actions, nobody actually seems to blame her for her infidelity (as it is generally accepted that Michael wasn't the most demonstrative husband) and only John takes her to task for recklessly neglecting birth control arrangements while in the throes of passion. This could be taken as a comment on the status of women in the 1970s, but it also suggests that a family with a dramatic background is fully aware of the allure and power of the flawed heroine. Most of all, however, it confirms Polley's contention that the recollections of everyone in the film (including herself) are prone to reinterpretation by virtue of the circumstances in which they were recorded and their positioning in the final cut. Consequently, even the absolute truth (if it ever exists) can be brought into question by manipulation on the screen Operating with great sensitivity, particularly towards Michael (whom she clearly still adores), Polley refuses to soft soap and, while she allows John the odd breach of the fourth wall, she keeps a firm grip on proceedings to prevent the account becoming too sensationalist or sentimental. But hard facts remain at a premium and it is evident by the close that a fair amount of damage has been done by Diane's elaborate charade, with even some of her offspring betraying their disappointment at her conduct. What's more, it isn't ultimately clear why Polley wanted to make the film (and subject her loved ones to such public introspection) or quite what she got out of it. This vagueness is reflected in the odd digression and self-­‐indulgence, as well as the decision to keep Diane as an elusive enigma. Moreover, Polley stubbornly avoids expressing many opinions of her own, either on camera or in her voiceovered emails.

But whether it proved cathartic or not, this is an ambitious, lucid and accomplished piece of film-­‐making whose conclusions on the ownership of an episode and the authentic and unreliable memories it accrues will cause many to cast a backward glance at their own past.

THIS AIN'T CALIFORNIA Just as Bruce Brown confirmed himself as the King of Ultimate Summer with a string of surfing movies, Stacey Peralta became the doyen of the skateboard documentary with Dogtown and Z-­‐Boys (2001) and Bones Brigade (2011). However, as Tristan Patterson revealed in Dragonslayer, there was a darker side to the supposedly idyllic skater lifestyle and Marten Periel echoes this theme with This Ain't California, which harks back to the 1980s to show how riding was not simply an expression of personality in the German Democratic Republic, but also an act of subversion.

Teenager Denis Panicek first became aware of skateboards when he saw one on a programme beamed in from neighbouring Czechoslovakia. His pals Dirk and Nico were equally blown away by the sight of kids their own age having such fun and commanding such respect from doing tricks and adopting their own distinctive dress

sense. Fashioning their own boards from some rollerskates and an old plywood chair, the trio began perfecting their skills and soon became so adept that Denis's dad began filming them on his 8mm camera.

The triumvirate was broken up when Nico was forced to move to Berlin with his pop singer mother. But Denis quit school and followed hot on his heels and they quickly infiltrated the local boarding scene, where Denis acquired the nickname `Panik'.

Initially, the East German authorities were unsure what to do with a craze that smacked of Western decadence and rebellion. But they also soon recognised that the riders were do dedicated to improving their technique that they were too busy to cause any trouble.

Moreover, the exercise involved helped keep the kids fit and when competitions like Euroskate started to be held behind the Iron Curtain, the Party decided it would help boost patriotism among the younger generation if riders from the GDR began winning cups and medals and brought home a little prestige. Denis and Nico were among the first wave of skateboarders to be allowed to travel. But events in places like Prague opened their eyes to the restrictions and deprivations that existed beyond Checkpoint Charlie.

With Kai Hildebrand playing Panik in the reconstructed sequences and leading modern boarders like Valeri Rosomako, Kai Hillebrand, Lennie Burmeister and Juppie Diens strutting their stuff to increase the authenticity, this is a fascinating insight into youth culture behind the Berlin Wall in the decade before it was demolished. Throughout, Persiel avoids overt ostalgia and makes evocative use of both archive material, dramatisation and interviews with buddies and adversaries alike. The fact that Denis was killed in Afghanistan in 2011 while serving with the German army makes the picture all the more poignant, as the world seems to have learned little in the quarter century since it had supposedly changed for the better forever. ¡VIVAN LAS ANTIPODAS! Ever since his debut feature, The Belovs (1994), Russian documentarist Victor Kossakovsky has opted for a lyrical observational style. He is best known for Hush!

(2003), which he filmed from the window of his St Petersburg apartment. But he surpasses that eavesdropped snapshot with ¡Vivan las Antipodas!, a compelling travelogue that reveals the anticipated differences and unexpected similarities between places that are literally situated at the opposite end of the Earth to each other.

Apparently, any tunnel through the planet's core would be 7926 miles long.

However, as two-­‐thirds of the surface is covered in water, the majority would come out in the middle of an ocean or sea. But Kossakovsky has identified four pairs and makes stunning use of location photography and post-­‐production trickery to compare and contrast them.

Most people will be familiar with Shanghai, the poster city of the Chinese economic boom with its population of 18 million and the world's biggest bridge spanning the vast expanse of the Yangtze River. By contrast, the bridge over the trickling stream at Entre Ríos in Argentina is considerably less spectacular. But there is no smog or traffic congestion here. Instead, fiftysomething brothers Abel and Orlando Perez have plenty of time to shoot the breeze as they man a toll that is lucky to get a couple of

customers a day. No wonder they joke that a dog jumping into a passing vehicle will probably see more of the world than they will However, these porch philosophers know their patch and can tell from the increased croaking of the frogs and scurrying of the ants that a deluge is imminent. The rain does indeed come and the shot of the ramshackle three-­‐house settlement (which has no electricity) suddenly being surrounded by a flood tide is not only visually striking, but also very much the `crazy metaphor' that Abel proclaims it to be.

Further south in Chilean Patagonia, René Vargas lives a solitary life with his sheep and cats. He has acquired the nickname `The Condor Man' on account of his fascination with the gracefully gliding birds who share his remote habitat. But on the flipside of his idyll, Tatiana Frolova finds life lonely on the banks of Lake Baikal in Russia when daughter Alina Gajdukova is away at boarding school. The chatter happily while going about their daily chores and feast on fresh cranberries as Alina asks her mother what to do when you're in love with somebody who doesn't know about your feelings.

Kossakovsky uses the placid waters to reflect the craggy Baikal scenery that has its mirror image in Vargas's eyrie-­‐pocked outcrop. But there are few geographical similarities between Big Island in Hawaii and the village of Kabu in Botswana. A longtime resident of the former, Jack Thompson watches in relief as the red-­‐hot lava flow emanating from the volcano Kilauea passes a safe distance from his house.

Leaving his dog Alias behind, he sets off on his motorbike to check on his neighbours and is distraught to find Alias missing on his return. A magnificent match cut shifts the scene from the mottled grey lava to the hide of an elephant seen in close-­‐up near to Lilian's kiosk. Bathing hippos and basking lions can also be spotted in the bush.

But business is obviously slow and Lilian wishes those congregating outside did a bit more shopping and a bit less gossiping. Back in Hawaii, however, Jack calls on caravan dwellers Joe, Ginger, Luke and Noah Esposito in the hope that they have seen Alias. But his search seems destined to end in disappointment, as Kossakovsky makes another majestic cross-­‐cut from the glowing lava to the magic hour sky over Entre Ríos.

The final pairing takes us from Miraflores in Spain to Castle Point in New Zealand.

At the former, Kossakovsky alights on a rock that has occupied the same spot for millennia and shows it paying temporary host to a variety of ants, geckos and caterpillars. However, a fledgling butterfly seems reluctant to stray too far from the familiar landmark and its reassuring solidity contrasts tragically with the expiring carcass of a whale that has become beached on the Wairarapa coast. Measuring over 20 metres, the mammal is too big for the locals to move, let alone coax back into deeper waters and they simply have to stand around and watch it die.

Diggers hover as volunteers fire up a chainsaw and start preparing the beast for burial. It's a sad end to a journey that has enthralled and inspired. But the message is not lost that no living creatures are immune from either the caprices of nature or the passage of time and Kossakovsky uses this interconnected fragility to remind viewers of the responsibility they have to each other and to future generations to ensure that the legacy we pass on is as pristine and sustainable as possible.

LE WEEK-­‐END

Seven years after exploring the impact of ageing upon the friendship between actors Peter O'Toole and Leslie Phillips in Venus, director Roger Michell and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi reunite to approach similar territory from a different direction in Le Week-­‐end. This time the imperilled pair are sixtysomethings Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan, who have been married for 30 years and have become so used to each other that his good qualities are beginning to irritate her and he has started taking her for granted.

In a bid to put a bit of romance back into their lives, they arrange a weekend in Paris.

But, even as they board the EuroStar at St Pancras, it is clear that she is seething at his lack of spontaneity and he is retreating into himself as he wonders how to break the news that he has been dismissed from his university post for insulting a black female student. He also wants to broach the subject of their adult son, who wishes to come back home with his wife and child just months after moving out. But a more pressing concern is the state of the hotel in which they spent their honeymoon and Duncan's insistence that that take a taxi ride around the city until she can spot something more suitably palatial in which to celebrate their wedding anniversary.

Having opted for a suite with a view of the Eiffel Tower, Duncan resists Broadbent's clumsy attempt to seduce her and it takes a good lunch to put her in a better mood.

They spend the rest of the day mooching around museums, churches and bookshops and even take a detour out to Montparnasse to see Samuel Beckett's grave before absconding from a bistro without paying the bill. Yet all is not well and Duncan infers that she would like to quit her teaching job and do something worthwhile with her retirement and Broadbent is forced to come clean about his enforced lay-­‐off.

They bump into Broadbent's Cambridge contemporary, Jeff Goldblum, who reveals that he has relocated to the City of Light and is expecting a baby with young wife, Judith Davis. In inviting them to a soirée, he also lets slip that his literary career has taken off (whereas Broadbent's has stalled after showing some early promise) and that he is extremely wealthy. Thus, it is with some trepidation that Broadbent and Duncan arrive at Goldblum's apartment and they soon feel horribly out of place, despite empathising with both Davis and Goldblum's slacker son from his first marriage, Olly Alexander. But, while they begin to feel better about themselves (as they are not part of this ghastly coterie and are nowhere near as desperate to be the centre of attention as their host), it takes Duncan's flirtation with academic Brice Beaugier and Broadbent's heart-­‐to-­‐heart with Alexander and his soul-­‐baring dinner table revelation to make them realise what they stand to lose if they separate.

They arrive back at the hotel basking in an odd sense of superiority. However, they are informed that Broadbent's credit card has been declined and are forced to call Goldblum and ask him to meet them at a café. He finds the silver lining in the situation and they put a record on the jukebox and begin to dance, in homage to the Madison sequence involving Anna Karina, Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur in Jean-­‐ Luc Godard's Bande à part (1964) Hanif Kureishi is a curious writer. His dialogue has a tendency to be florid and his scenarios invariably take a melodramatic twist. Yet he also has an intuitive gift for character and the milieux he creates always feel authentic. Thus, this is a bittersweet curate's egg of a picture that veers between moments of deft inspiration and utter

contrivance. Fortunately, in his fourth collaboration with Kureishi, Roger Michell knows how to tone down his excesses. He is also a fine director of actors and allows Broadbent and Duncan to limn an eminently resistible duo, whose vulnerability allows the audience to forgive their peevish tics and traits and hope that they find a way of becoming the people they once were and would like to be again.

As he so often does, Jeff Goldblum also excels as the cocky American whose façade barely conceals his insecurities. But it's the tension between Duncan and Broadbent that holds the film together, as he rides her wounding barbs about the nature of his love for her and she tolerates his willingness to settle for second best. The simmering row over a past infidelity that they carry over into the dinner party is particularly well realised and the ensuing conversations that bring things to a head reveal their willingness to share their misery with others and fulminate upon it rather than sit down and discuss it together and assess how it might impact upon the future of their marriage. Yet, excellent though the leading trio are, cinematographer Nathalie Durand comes close to ensuring that Paris steals the show, while the use of tracks by Bob Dylan and Nick Drake alongside Jeremy Sams's pastichy score is worth a dozen of Kureishi's self-­‐consciously chiselled bon mots.

WINTER NOMADS Manuel von Stürler's documentary accompanies shepherds Pascal Eguisier and Carole Noblanc, as they negotiate tricky terrain on the Franco-­‐Swiss border with three donkeys, four dogs and 800 sheep. The ancient practice of transhumance is rapidly dying out and the debuting Von Sturler is as keen to capture the personality of people willing to undertake it as he is on recording the trek itself. He avoids defining the relationship between the fiftysomething Eguisier and the younger Noblanc, but it seems to run deeper than mere master and apprentice, as they search for patches of common pasture in an unforgiving landscape that is pocked with evidence of encroaching modernity and increasingly covered with snow as Christmas approaches.

Boss Jean-­‐Paul Peguiron sees them off, along with Irmate (their black bellwether sheep), dogs Titus, Milien, Tutsi and Kiwi and donkeys Figaro, Turca and Paquerette.

Also along for the ride is a puppy named Léon, who spends much of his time riding on Noblanc's back, until it is decided that the time has come to follow in father Titus's paw-­‐steps.

Although they share the hardships of the journey, Eguisier is quite definitely in charge and, when the sheep wander into a rapeseed field during their first stopover, he gives Noblanc a ferocious lecture, which she seems to take in her stride. Yet, while she trudges along dutifully for much of the time, Noblanc does have an independent streak and is not averse to expressing her own opinion when required. For the most part, though, she is content to help Equisier set up camp under green canvas, cook over an open fire and put up with the incessant snow and its attendant thaws and freezes.

As they press on, the free-­‐spirited Figaro has to be replaced by Polo when he develops a hoof problem. But the pair get to enjoy the hospitality of Eguisier's friend Mike and his mother and there is a real sense of well-­‐being after they wake at first light following a good feed to see the sheep still sleeping in the field. Equally striking are Camille Cottagnoud's painterly images of the flock grazing in the pale winter

sunshine and standing in the light of a full moon, which are splendidly counterpointed

by Marc Stürler's ambient sound.

But things don't always run smoothly during the course of the 600km trip. A grumpy farmer refuses to let them cross his land and they discover that houses have been built on what used to a significant pasture. There is also the harsh reality of Peguiron arriving with a trailer to collect 52 sheep who will be slaughtered for the festive market. Yet, while the shepherds know they cannot afford to allow sentiment to interfere with their task, Noblanc decides they need cheering up and pops into the supermarket of the nearest town to purchase oysters, foie gras and a Yule log for their Christmas supper.

As the snow starts to melt, the pair find a field and chat to a kindly family that offers them coffee. They also have a moonlit fondue with some friends and Noblanc reveals that she hails from Brest and had the chance to travel to Bulgaria but opted to stay with Eguisier, who picked up his shepherding skills while staying in the Italian town of Bergamo. She concedes he can be a chauvinist bully, but insists that discipline is paramount is a difficult job is to be done well and, besides, she can always shout back if she feels his criticism is unfair.

At destination's end, Peguiron complements them on their expertise and they relish a day basking in the warming sun before the last of the flock is transported away for the spring and summer. They concur that Maryline has the potential to succeed Irmate as the bellwether and she is rewarded with a bell collar of her own. But Noblanc has to fight back the tears as the trailer disappears and one is left to wonder how the couple will occupy their time before their next expedition.

Very much a fond record of a disappearing lifestyle, this is film of dramatic contrasts and deceptive incongruities. Von Sturler resists romanticising Eguisier and Noblanc's part-­‐time nomadic existence and wisely avoids anthropomorphising the animals, with the result that the arduousness of the endeavour is readily apparent, in spite of the occasional folksiness of Olivia Pedroli's score. However, the fact that Von Sturler and Claude Muret share a screenwriting credit suggests that some of the situations might have been staged for the camera. This has been a criticism aimed at ethnographic cinema since the pioneering days of Robert Flaherty. But, as was the case with Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte (2010), the blend of authentic and augmented action feels entirely plausible and it is impossible not to be amused, moved and inspired by this age-­‐old practice and the quirky characters keeping it alive.