At Home with Michael Hootman

I’VE BEEN TRYING TO TELL YOU (BFI Blu-Ray).

Fashion photographer Alasdair McLellan’s film is set to Saint Etienne’s latest album. It’s a kind of road movie which bears a passing resemblance to Chris Petit’s

Radio On. It contrasts a Britain of industrial landscapes and motorways with its countryside; but whereas Petit’s film was strictly dour monochrome, McLellan’s is mostly beautifully saturated technicolour. A series of impossibly handsome and beautiful models skim stones on the Southampton docks, kiss in cars or ride on motorcycles. A shirtless young man strides purposefully through a suburban landscape. The models drift in and out of the film and they’re given very occasional snatches of dialogue: ‘did you see the KLF last night?’, or ‘only love can mend a broken heart’. Like the music it’s dreamy, ethereal and comforting but with something mournful being hinted at in the background. The film is set in the late ‘90s - though if it wasn’t for a thick copy of the Yellow Pages and use of a landline phone I’m not sure I’d have even noticed. McLellan and a band member’s talk - included as an extra - explain that the project is about memory and what it is to misremember. This completely escaped me at first viewing - I’ve Been Trying To Tell You seems to be more of an example of nostalgia rather than a critique of it - but it’s still enjoyable without seeing it through any particular authorial lens. A shot of young men and women swimming near a waterfall can make you feel woozy with a sense of England and being young and the sheer beauty of it all. Is the finished product actually a film? Maybe, though as a moving-image coffee-table book with a great soundtrack it’s a successful example of what is practically a new form of media.

THE LOVE OF JEANNE NEY (Eureka Blu-ray).

If you’re not as familiar with the events of post-revolutionary Russia as contemporary audiences were - this silent film dates from 1927 - you may initially feel a slight confusion about what’s going on. It doesn’t really matter as this isn’t a work of historical fiction but more of a melodrama typical of the period. Jeanne is living in Russia when her diplomat father is killed by her lover, a fighter for the Communist cause: G W Pabst’s film was made during the Weimar Republic, a time when you could just about get away with having the Communists as the good guys. Jeanne flees to Paris where she has to contend with a sexually predatory uncle, a Russian lowlife (Fritz Rasp) who’s followed her to France for nefarious reasons, a saintly blind girl (Brigitte Helm, who played both the heroine and robot in

Metropolis) and a fiendish diamond-swallowing parrot. Pabst’s direction looks like a calling card for Hollywood - he does fluid camera, impressive crowd scenes and gets some big silent-movie style emotions from his actors. The result is not exactly great, but it’s fun and has one of the best villains in movie history. Rasp is brilliantly loathsome; at times his face, contorted into an evil sneer, looks barely human in that he resembles some kind of human-lizard hybrid. He dominates every scene he’s in to the point that when he’s off screen the viewer’s interest wanes. It’s pacy, slightly ridiculous but recommended for Rasp’s barnstorming psychopathy.

LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES (BFI Blu-ray).

This is basically ‘Transgression: Fifties Style’ in which a couple of adolescent siblings construct a fantasy life for themselves with its own arcane rules and occasional forays into pushing at the boundaries of decency. Based on a Jean Cocteau novel, what was probably quite arresting 70 years ago, today looks tame verging on the insipid. Paul and Elisabeth do some light shoplifting, they stick their tongues out at a little girl, he calls her a bitch. Later they share a bath and, in a scene of slightly embarrassing symbolism, Paul throws some

milk over his sister’s face. Are there incestuous desires being hinted at? You bet there are! When Paul is badly injured by a snowball thrown by the school reprobate Dargelos (Renée Cosima) he becomes an invalid who has to be cared for by his pretty uncaring sister. Later they both end up sharing a huge mansion with a young model (Cosima again) and a mutual friend, Gérard, whose sole purpose in life seems to be witnessing a lot of bickering. Despite the pedigrees of the author and director, JeanPierre Melville, I found this absurd, obscure and just plain boring. One insurmountable problem is the leads are supposed to be 16 but are played by actors a good decade older which ends up making the leads’ behaviour slightly ridiculous rather than emotionally troubled. Nicole Stéphane has a malevolent intensity as Elisabeth, and far outclasses the pretty but wooden Édouard Dermit who plays Paul, but a great performance is easily lost in a sea of dull plotting and tiresome dialogue. Fans of slightly pretentious French cinema will probably warm to this film more than I did.