Mesmerising period drama, the perils of narcissism and a deranged comedy with “killer style”
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HITE ON WHITE Not many performers in today’s cinema can approach the mesmerising strangeness of Klaus Kinski in his prime, but Alfredo Castro is one of them. The Chilean actor made his international breakthrough as the lead in two films by Pablo Larrain – playing a disco-dancing sociopath in 2008’s Tony Manero and a morgue worker caught up in the horrors of the Pinochet years in Post Mortem (2010). More recently, his supporting role as a celebrity detective in Argentinian film Rojo proved that Castro is one of those actors who can just quietly stroll into a film midway and set your nerves tingling with a sense of irreducible danger. Castro is in muted mode, but no less galvanising, in White On White – a period drama by Chilean-Spanish director Théo Court. He plays Pedro, a photographer who visits an estate in a remote snowbound stretch of Tierra Del Fuego on the cusp of the 20th century. He has been commissioned by a powerful absent landowner named Mr Porter to photograph his pre-teen bride-to-be Sara (Esther Vega). But when Pedro’s interest in the girl breaks its agreed boundaries, he finds himself trapped in Porter’s desolate house, echoing with creaks, footsteps and the sound of drunken disorder, and forced to take part in his host’s terrible project – the systematic extermination of the local indigenous Selk’nam people. With cinematographer José Alayon mapping the surrounding terrain, from bleached-out snowscapes to parched deserts – as well as the distressed chambers of the Porter mansion, every interior a haunted theatre tableau – White On White is at once realist and eerily dreamlike. Along with Castro, there’s strong support from Lola Rubio as enigmatic housekeeper Aurora, while Lars Rudolph, best known as the wild-eyed lead of Bela Tarr’s Werckmeister
Passionate and powerful: Luca Marinelli and Denise Sardisco in Martin Eden
Harmonies, turns up in in absolute unbridled form as Porter’s mercurial righthand man – which essentially means you get two Klaus Kinskis for the price of one. The reference to Kinski isn’t gratuitous: in its eerie atmosphere and profound weirding of the colonial past, White On White is one of the few recent films to approach the troubling ghostliness of Werner Herzog’s great history films of the ’70s and ’80s (Kaspar Hauser, Aguirre et al). At once landscape study and historical horror story, this is a mesmerising essay on the secret history of early photography, and implicitly on the hidden violence of cinema. MARTIN EDEN This sumptuous costume adaptation of the 1909 novel by US writer Jack London comes from the last place you’d expect: the shores of the Italian avant-garde. Director Pietro Marcello made his name with films of an experimental nature – including Lost And Beautiful, a hybrid documentary about the fate of Italy’s rural culture and in which a commedia dell’arte clown trekked across the nation in the company of a rather forlorn buffalo. In similar vein, Martin Eden is anything but a straightforward literary
adaptation – jumping between decades in the 20th century, the narrative spiked with inserts of archive footage, as much dreamlike as strictly documentary. Jack London’s story, originally set in California, is about a young working man who dreams of literary success, inspired by the middle-class girl he falls for. Here the story is transplanted to Italy, with Martin played by the strapping Luca Marinelli, who looks like a simmering movie heartthrob from a bygone era. As Martin struggles to find his voice – and engages in debate about the socialist politics of his time – Marcello confronts the novel’s romantic pessimism with the historical realities of a century that London himself never knew. Ample play with anachronism makes Martin Eden into a compendium of Italian film history, variously channelling Visconti, Bertolucci and Pasolini. Sometimes elusive but always powerful, this is a work of passionate, polemical beauty from a director who is a genuine original. SWEAT Theoretically, Sweat is as zeitgeisty as they come – although, given how quickly things change in the strange
REVIEWED THIS MONTH WHITE ON WHITE
Directedby Théo Court Starring AlfredoCastro Streaming from June 30 Cert To be confirmed
8/10
106 • UNCUT • AUGUST 2021
MARTIN EDEN
Directedby Pietro Marcello Starring Luca Marinelli, Jessica Cressy Opens June 4 Cert 15
8/10
SWEAT
Directedby Magnus von Horn Starring Magdalena Kolesnik i Opens June 25 Cert To be confirmed
6/10
THE REASON I JUMP
Directedby Jerry Rothwell OpensJune 18 CertTo be confirmed
7/10
DEERSKIN
Directed by Quentin Dupieux Starring Jean Dujardin, Adèle Haenel Opens July 16 Cert 15
7/10
