Little White Lies 24 ­ The Mesrine Issue

The Mesrine issue: in which Vincent Cassel talks establishment baiting and police brutality. 040 state of violence. 048 great escapes. 058 america’s most wanted. 074 Lars Von trier.

090 Robin Wright Penn.

100 alfresco cinema. 108 gus van sant. 116 incoming cannes special. 124 pages: honest, passionate, unmerciful.

Cover illustration by Paul Willoughby Vincent Cassel photographed by Sam Christmas

“Times change; men don’t.

And me least of all.”

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noTorious gangsTer JacQues mesrine would be Proud of The films ThaT bear his name.

RELEASED August 7 & August 28 DIRECTED BY Jean-François Richet STARRING Vincent Cassel, Cécile De France, Ludivine Sagnier

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“He was Public Enemy Number One, ‘The M a n o f a T h o u s a n d F a c e s ’, a s y m b o l o f the New Wave’s Oedipal energy and the rage of the Soixante-huitards.”

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Through a haze of gun smoke and whisky fumes, women and blood, JeanFrançois Richet’s four-hour saga wades into the world of a gangster who always understood the power of publicity. Lethally seductive, irresistibly energetic and dangerously charismatic – Jacques Mesrine would be proud of the films that bear his name. But is that a blessing or a curse?

After being discharged from military service in Algeria, Mesrine spent 20 years robbing, murdering and kidnapping his way across France and Canada. He was Public Enemy Number One, ‘The Man of a Thousand Faces’, a symbol of the New Wave’s Oedipal energy and the rage of the soixante-huitards.

We know this because he told us. Mesrine left behind a confessional, L’Instinct de Mort, in which he boasted about his life and crimes. That book is the basis for Richet’s two films. The first, Killer Instinct, details the origins of Mesrine’s criminal career – from Algeria to Paris, and a fateful meeting with mob boss Guido (Gérard Depardieu). After marriage, divorce and with a mistress (Cécile De France) in tow, Mesrine fled to Canada, where the brutal prison system re-moulded him into a new kind of killer. Public Enemy No. 1 sees an older Mesrine with a new lover (Ludivine Sagnier), a new partner-in-crime (Mathieu Amalric), and an ever more reckless belief in his own hype.

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For Richet, the question is how to balance that hype with reality – to find the line between the demands of cinema and the hard facts of life. Too smart to tell us that Killer Instinct and Public Enemy are based on a true story (indeed, in Public Enemy, we actually see Mesrine in prison printing his own legend. “People like pace and action,” he says. “You have to give them what they want.”), he opens each film with a title card: ‘No film can faithfully reproduce the complexity of a human life… To each his own point-of-view.’

And yet the director’s point-of-view is hard to decipher. Richet has given us pace and action aplenty, but in doing so has glibly subverted the foundation of the biopic – its claim to truth – as well as his responsibility as a writer to remain faithful to his material. So Killer Instinct and Public Enemy are… what? Based on true fictions?

Instead of analysis, we get shoot-outs, bank-jobs and prison breaks.

Mesrine was, after all, nothing if not a man of action. His escape from Canada’s Special Correction Unit in Killer Instinct is a thriller masterclass – testament to Richet’s tight control. But however entertaining the film’s frequent set pieces are, the noisy cycle of crime/prison/escape eventually proves underwhelming.

Mesrine’s criminal career coincided with the birth of the New Wave, but there’s little of that electrifying innovation here. Richet has an episodic, TV sensibility; albeit one that is distinctly French. Rather than finding inspiration in Arthur Penn or Howard Hawks, he looks to the hard-nosed aesthetic of Jean-Pierre Melville and Jacques Becker’s rugged policiers.

But fussy split screens, sudden zooms and steadicam simply serve to soften the jagged edges of those classics.

Both films are at their best when they reach for something more – when the political undercurrents of this fascinating period bubble up to the surface. Killer Instinct begins with Mesrine’s violent death at the hands of armed police in 1979 – an incident that still divides opinion in France.

But the inevitability of his death isn’t played as a simple morality tale. In

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the France that Mesrine knew – a murky swamp of radical politics, statesponsored violence and underground gangs – guilt and innocence were moving targets. The question is: who are the real criminals here?

Mesrine belonged to a generation of men haunted by the memory of Nazi occupation, and forged in the colonial killing fields of Algeria.

This combustible mix of emasculation and violence – brilliantly captured in scenes that follow Mesrine from the execution of an FLN terrorist to the bourgeois gentility of a family dinner – produced an underclass of disenfranchised men whose despair and hatred, once unleashed, was eventually turned against the state that had exploited and encouraged it.

We may hear French radio talk of a ‘new and modern Algeria’, but it

also gave birth to a new and modern criminal: well armed, well trained and able to exploit the volatility of a Fourth Republic in its final throes.

Far from accepting its complicity, however, that Republic fought back, displaying its hypocrisy by assuming extra-legal powers to stamp out the dissent it had created.

All that simmers in the background of Richet’s films – dark hints at a sinister history that might have made Mesrine’s story so much more than another gangster flick. But a number of explosive set-ups (most obviously Guido’s affiliation with a right-wing terror cell, and his subsequent murder by the police) fail to pay off. Having raised the spectre of a fresh new take on the genre, Richet suddenly backs away.

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Perhaps the problem is Mesrine himself. “If I have to train with the Palestinians,” he tells a journalist in Public Enemy, “I will.” But he won’t.

Mesrine may have moved fluidly through a world of revolutionaries, but he wasn’t one of them. He remained untouched by history. The Mesrine of Public Enemy isn’t a communist or a fascist but a narcissist – his violence a symptom of his vanity.

And yet Richet doesn’t strip him completely of sympathy. There’s always an out for Mesrine – some excuse to justify his actions, whether the murder of two state troopers in Canada (self-defence), his anti-Arab racism (cultural instinct), or a brutal assault on his wife (loyalty to his friends).

Contrast that with the withering reproach reserved for the head of the SCU, or the hypocrisy of the lawyers and judges threatened by Mesrine’s anarchic brand of self-expression.

This, of course, is exactly the kind of revisionism that Mesrine would have loved. So too the films’ charismatic lead. Though surrounded by a glittering array of talent, Vincent Cassel dominates the frame, even as the thuggish shoulders of Killer Instinct slouch slowly into the middle aged

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spread of Public Enemy. This is a physical performance, jaunty and restless, his lips curled into a mocking half-smile/half-sneer – the expression of a casual, careless disregard for the world. Even buried beneath period wigs and 40 pounds of fat, there’s no mistaking Cassel’s undimmable star power.

Though never less than entertaining, Killer Instinct and Public Enemy can’t escape the shadow of the films they might have been. Both earn their place in the gangster canon. But not even Jacques Mesrine can escape the constraints of cinema. Matt Bochenski

Anticipation. Heavily nominated at France’s Césars, scooping awards for Best Actor and Best Director.

Enjoyment. The pace doesn’t let up over four hours of action-packed cinema.

In Retrospect. Richet’s approach to the material is questionable, limiting the ambition of his films to their epic length.

Turn to page 24 for an interview with Vincent Cassel.

IF KILLER INSTINCT AND PUBLIC ENEMY HAVE INSPIRED YOU TO STAGE A CINEMATIC SMASH AND GRAB ON MORE GANGSTER FILMS, CHECK OUT THESE ALTERNATIVE CRIME CLASSICS.

QUAI DES ORFÈVRES (1947)

DIRECTED BY Henri-Georges Clouzot

Henri-Georges Clouzot was the only director whom Alfred Hitchcock considered a rival for his title of ‘Master of Suspense’. Not to be confused with Olivier Marchal’s 2004 36 Quai des Orfèvres (which is itself a worthy modern policier), Clouzot’s dark classic is the story of a jealous husband who becomes the chief suspect in the murder of a businessman who had got too close to the man’s wife, a music hall star on the make. Clouzot would revisit the jealous husband archetype with disastrous consequences in 1964’s L’Enfer, but here he was at the top of his game, offering hard bitten thrills that offered little relief to the post-war audience.

BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1956) DIRECTED BY Jean-Pierre Melville

Directly referenced in Public Enemy’s Deauville casino heist gone wrong, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob Le Flambeur is a nail biting thriller, underscored by a keen sense of psychological nuance. Starring Roger Duchesne as the ill-fated gambler down on his luck, the film prefigured the New Wave’s sneering antagonism with its own brand of nihilistic cool. Set somewhere ‘between night and day… between heaven and hell’, this is a movie from Jacques Mesrine’s age of Algeria brimming with uncertainty, fear and mistrust.

ROMANZO CRIMINALE (2005) DIRECTED BY Michele Placido

With its pounding period soundtrack and pin-sharp fashions, Romanzo Criminale may succumb to the temptations of cliché, but Michele Placido’s film has epic ambitions. This is a gangster’s eye view of Italian history in the 1970s, where the shifting allegiances between the criminal underworld and the ruling classes were expressed in bodies and blood on the streets. Our eyes and ears may belong to Kim Rossi Stuart’s violent hoodlum Il Freddo, but our conscience is Stefano Accorsi’s Commissario Scialoja, who wages a Stoic struggle against the powerful forces arrayed against him by both criminals and the government.

It’s an explosive experience.

LA MALA ORDINA (1972) DIRECTED BY Fernando Di Leo

Influenced by the films of Don Siegel, William Friedkin and Sidney Lumet, the Italian ‘poliziotteschi’ enjoyed a brief period of popularity between the decline of the spaghetti western and the rise of home-grown horror. Fernando Di Leo was one of its most celebrated voices, and La Mala Ordina (aka Hired to Kill) was perhaps his defining work. The story of a Milanese pimp framed for the theft of mob heroin, and forced on the run from various hitmen, it may betray its sensationalist roots (while the undertone of fascistic violence is another sign of the times), but it’s an enjoyably bleak and blood-spattered gangster joint.

LONDON TO BRIGHTON (2006) DIRECTED BY Paul Andrew Williams

It may not be a gangster film in the traditional sense, but Paul Andrew Williams’ blistering debut, in which two prostitutes flee from London to Brighton pursued by the psychotic son of a murdered crime boss, single handedly reinvigorated the British crime drama.

Intense performances, guerrilla camerawork and Williams’ masterful handling of mise-enscène combine to create a near perfect unity of image and action, and one of the most heart-in-mouth cinematic experiences of the decade.

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It’s the well-behaved children that make the most formidable revolutionaries. They don’t say a word, they don’t hide under the table, they eat only one piece of chocolate at a time. But later on, they make society pay dearly.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mains Sales

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Publisher Danny Miller danny@thechurchoflondon.com

Associate Editor Jonathan Crocker jonathan@thechurchoflondon.com

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Contributing Editors James Bramble, Mike Brett, Ellen E Jones, Neon Kelly, Andrea Kurland, Kevin Maher, Jonathan Williams

Editorial Interns Ruth Carruthers Paul Fairclough

Words, pictures, thanks...

William Alderwick, Nikki Baughan, Anton Bitel, Jon Boam, Laurence Boyce, Amy Brown, Ailsa Caine, Adam Lee Davies, Priscilla Eyles, Nell Frizzell, Abi Gliddon, Lee Griffiths, L贸rien Haynes, Sophie Ivan, Prudence Ivey, Alan Mack, James Mansfield, Kayt Manson, Kingsley Marshall, Andy Miller, Sorrel Neuss, Emma Paterson, Lawrence Pearce, Andy Potts, Monisha Rajesh, JW Smith, Sparrow Vs Swallow, Matt Taylor, Emma Tildsley, Ian Viggars, Josh Winning, Jason Wood

Advertising Director Steph Pomphrey steph@thechurchoflondon.com

Published by The Church Of London Top floor 8-9 Rivington Place London EC2A 3BA +44 (0) 207 7293675

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Made with the support of the UK Film Council through the Publications fund.

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LWLies is published six times a year ISSN 1745-9168 漏 TCOLondon 2009

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WITH MANY MORE ACTS BE ANNOUNCED OVER 13 STAGES

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the camera’s eye is a window into an unknown soul. from gangsters and rubber men to prison blues and red-hot stars, get lost in the desert of the real.

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V i n c e n t C a s s e l ta l k s J a c q u e s M e s r i n e , t h e Pa r i s u n d e r g

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r o u n d a n d w h y h e ’ l l n e v e r b e pa r t o f t h e E s ta b l i s h m e n t.

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WORDS

BY MATT BOCHENSKI PHOTOGRAPHY

BY SAM CHRISTMAS

ife could be pretty easy for Vincent Cassel.

Six-foot three inches of alpha male masculinity, he grew up in an artistic family of opera singers, dancers, rappers and actors in 1970s Paris.

But he took his time making a mark. Cassel was already in his mid-twenties when he landed several small roles in French television; 28 before he got a name part in Merchant Ivory’s Jefferson In Paris; and 29 before La Haine put him irrevocably on the map.

That breakthrough role, as Vinz – a snarling, cop-killing symbol of France’s brewing social breakdown – tells you everything you need to know about Cassel. Sure, he may make it look easy – with the history, the connections, the piercing eyes and soulful charm – but Cassel has built a career on eclectic taste and hard choices. He may have appeared in costume dramas like Elizabeth, but he did so as the outrageously camp Duc d’Anjou. He may have added his voice to Shrek, but he followed it up with Gaspar Noé’s rape-revenge shocker Irréversible; just as the hollow gloss of Ocean’s Twelve gave way to the gleeful gore of Satan.

In between these high profile gigs came the

smaller projects that allowed Cassel to explore the limits of his anti-hero persona – Gilles Mimouni’s L’Appartement (where he met future wife Monica Bellucci), Dobermann with Jan Kounen, and the genre-bending Brotherhood of the Wolf. These are not the choices of an actor comfortable with the idea of coasting through his career.

Case in point: Cassel is currently rocking a skinhead for a new role in Romain Gavras’ directorial debut Lords. Gavras, the son of Palme d’Or-winner Costa-Gavras, has, like Cassel, avoided the respectability of mainstream French filmmaking. Instead, he’s embraced the emerging punk aesthetic flooding out of the Parisian banlieues. Gavras and Cassel are both working with the heirs of La Haine, the Kourtrajmé Collective, a group of mixed race kids from the sink estates making powerfully creative statements through violent rap lyrics and music videos, several of which were shot by Gavras.

Check out the Justice track ‘Stress’ on YouTube – a disturbingly realistic day-in-the-life account of a gang of street thugs that paints the Parisian suburbs as a scene from Mad Max. Likewise,

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“it is not easy when you want to make something n e g at i v e to wa r d s the system or t h e g o v e r n m e n t. ” the music video that Cassel commissioned for Satan, ‘Batards De Barbares’ from Kourtrajmé members La Caution, features graphic scenes of murder culminating in a suicide bombing.

Given his background, Cassel may be an unlikely champion of this guerrilla street scene, but there’s no doubt that he means it. “I’m not calculating anything,” he says when asked why the biggest star in French cinema continues to hang out with a bunch of ghetto filmmakers.

“From the first images [I saw] – even though they had no obvious sense – I thought they were totally relevant to my idea of France, and my vision of France and Paris and the mix of culture,” he explains. “There was no complex anymore – it was free, it was fun, it was creative.

For me it’s important because there’s so much energy coming out of them, and I totally agree with what they do. Even if some people don’t understand it, I really think that out of this collective group of artists, some really strong directors are going to emerge.”

Cassel, you feel, is constantly on the hunt for filmmakers whose energy matches his own.

Though softly spoken in person, there’s no

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disguising the star power or the restless tension of a man who needs to keep moving, to keep testing, to keep proving himself. And there’s no bigger test than the life of Jacques Mesrine.

Shot over a record-breaking nine months (“A pregnancy!”) with Cassel in almost every frame, this is his Raging Bull. He even went through the same arduous process of weight gain as De Niro. Then again, this is the story of a man who lived an extravagant lifestyle, immersed himself in other characters, and slept with beautiful women. Okay, he’s never robbed a bank, but isn’t Cassel basically just playing himself? “Erm… No. Honestly, Jacques Mesrine’s life has nothing to do with mine,” he laughs.

And yet it’s a life that he knows well. Cassel was first approached to make the films seven years ago, but the timing wasn’t right. Although he agreed to do it, Cassel admits that in retrospect he wasn’t ready as an actor.

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“Everybody has a story about Jacques Mesrine, whether it’s t r u e o r n o t. ”

Moreover, they needed to find somebody prepared to spend a lot of money on two films about an anti-hero who took on the establishment, and as Cassel says, “that is not easy when you want to make something negative towards the system or the government.”

So the project went on the backburner for the best part of a decade, but Cassel didn’t pass the time idly. “Over seven years, I could really study and read more or less everything that has been written by or about Jacques Mesrine,” he says. “I met his kids, I met one of his girlfriends, I met people who worked with him robbing banks, I met some cops and some journalists who interviewed him. I really had time to study for once because usually you’re hired for a movie and you have to study in a rush. By the time I got on set I knew more than I really needed.”

Every French person of a certain generation knows Jacques Mesrine. He’s their Ronnie Biggs – not just a gangster, but a cultural touchstone, almost a national treasure. Cassel still remembers watching television as a 13-year-old in ’79, seeing Mesrine’s bloody body laid out in the streets. Even then, he says, “there was a pop

culture about the guy – a lot of my friends were walking around wearing T-shirts with his face on, or quoting things that he said. I would see his name popping up on walls, or in rap lyrics.” Even so, the interest that the film provoked surprised him: “The day they announced the movie, I started to receive e-mails and people would come up to me in the street and say, ‘You know, I met the guy.

I was in school with him…’ Everybody has a story about Jacques Mesrine, whether it’s true or not.”

A story and an opinion. Cassel’s opinion is pretty unequivocal. He compares Mesrine (dubiously) to Che Guevara, and defends him from the charge that he was nothing but a killer. “He’s been accused of six murders – he accused himself in the book that he wrote of 43 murders – but the truth is that today, still, none of those murders has been proven against him,” he argues.

“Let’s face it: this guy has been killed in the middle of the street by cops – executed – when there

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“It’s when y o u s ta r t d o i n g t h i n g s t h at you don’t want to d o t h at y o u r u i n y o u r s e l f. ” was no proof that he ever killed anybody.

How come? Why was he such a threat to the government? My take on that,” he continues, “is that he was a clown that became too loud. He was becoming a dangerous jester. In ’79, when he dies, he’s the favourite celebrity of the French people. So when suddenly that guy escapes all the police that are running after him, and does a cover story for Paris Match threatening the government, making fun of it… They just couldn’t afford it. Then they said, ‘Okay, we’ve got to get rid of this guy.’ And they got rid of him.”

For all their anti-establishment credentials, Killer Instinct and Public Enemy were jointly nominated for Best Film at the 2008 Césars, while Cassel himself was officially welcomed into the bosom of the French film industry after being named Best Actor. Well deserved as it was, what does it mean now that the former bad boy is the favourite son? “I don’t know, honestly.

I think it’s too soon to tell,” he says. He lapses into silence for a moment. “I’m 43 this year and it’s just that you become something else,” he muses. “If you grow up properly you understand more and more things, and you master your craft

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a little bit more every time, and so you’re getting… ripe. Being part of the César and all that, I can see the difference. But I don’t think it’s going to be like that [that he’ll be seen as part of the Establishment]. I’m still the same person, I still have the same taste, and I still have some strange movies to shoot.”

Cassel is an actor who built his reputation on the ferocity of those early performances, when his bristling anger captured the authentic attitude of the street. Is that Cassel gone forever? How can you maintain that intensity when you’ve got money in the bank, a superstar wife, a big house in the big city? “I really, really enjoy what I do,” he answers. “I’ve been spoiled since the beginning and I’ve never said ‘yes’ to a movie for money. So it’s still really fresh and pure – I’ve never really had the feeling of going to work. As long as your desire is ‘clean’, let’s say, you still have the same energy. It’s when you start doing the things that you don’t really want to do, when you find excuses for yourself, that you start to ruin yourself.”

A filmed interview with Vincent Cassel will be available on LWLies TV in the week of the film’s release.

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Hellboy II: The Golden Army

J a c q u e s M e s r i n e m a y h a v e b e e n c a l l e d ‘ T h e M a n o f a t h o u s a n d F a c e s ’, b u t h i s s k i l l s pa l e i n c o m pa r i s o n w i t h t h e w o r k o f H o l ly w o o d ’ s g r e a s e pa i n t g u y s . F r o m Tom Sullivan to Ray Harryhausen, we ask the masters of make-up effects about the future of their art form in a digital world. Words by Paul Fairclough

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atex, sculpture and prosthetics have been central to the art of filmmaking since Georges Méliès first voyaged to the moon in 1902. Make-up artists on early silent films spent their time caking actors in camera-friendly yellow grease paint, but it was the movies’ fantastical possibilities that made an art of the process, giving us everything from an aged Charles Foster Kane to a chestexploding alien; from an enhanced Dirk Diggler to a reverse-ageing Benjamin Button.

That film’s recent awards for visual effects have met with controversy, however, bringing a simmering argument into sharp focus. Because unlike competitor and fanboy favourite Hellboy II: The Golden Army, the incredible make-up effects on Brad Pitt’s character had a little digital help. While message boards have debated the justice of comparing traditional SFX methods with CGI-enhanced wizardry, some in the business are beginning to wonder if the seemingly limitless possibilities of the digital age will bring an end to the reign of the rubber men.

And it is, overwhelmingly, a boys’ game. Men like Dick Smith (Little Big Man, The Godfather) and Rick Baker (An American Werewolf In London) were part of a generation of talented individuals who could write their own rules in a fledgling industry in which technological advances unshackled their imaginations. Special effects make-up is one of the few parts of ‘the biz’ that remains the preserve of the risk taker and the maverick enthusiast.

A glance at the CVs of those responsible for the most groundbreaking work in the field yields little in the way of formal training. Instead, it shows practitioners in the art carving their niche in the film business through sheer determination. For prosthetics king Jake Garber, the road to The Nutty Professor and Hellboy grew out of studying theatre at the University of Minnesota. He never graduated. In fact, today Garber cheerfully admits that he never really had any training in the business he’s made his own.

Like many of his peers in the skin trade, Garber was simply a fan, mostly of horror movies – just one of those kids who was always drawing or making models with whatever was to hand. Dick Smith similarly began his career as a grease paint guy for the Yale amateur dramatics group. Within a few years of graduating, he was head of the make-up department at new-fangled television company NBC. As one of Smith’s key protégés, it was Rick Baker who led the last great revolution in pre-digital SFX make-up. With An American Werewolf In London, he brought the art into the mainstream, garnering not just huge press attention but also critical acclaim. The moment of lycanthropic transformation, set to Creedence’s ‘Bad Moon Rising’, is a bigger YouTube hit than Jenny Agutter’s gratuitous shower scene. In response to the urgings of director John Landis, Baker devised a technique that he called ‘change-o-face’ (he was an artist, not a brand manager); a blend of latex, animatronics and puppetry that allowed Landis to film David Naughton’s agonising aerobics session in full, without recourse to conveniently positioned furniture.

Baker’s techniques were as mind-blowing to ’80s audiences as today’s digital crowd-pleasers, which may be why he’s unfazed by new developments. “What happens so often,” he’s noted, “is that they pit the rubber guys against the pixels, and we need to work together.” For Baker, the enjoyment he gets out of the down and dirty business of creating effects props is nothing compared to achieving a spectacular visual result. “I got into puppets and animatronics because we could do things we couldn’t do with make-up,” he’s explained. “It’s the same thing with the CG stuff; I do all my design work on the computer now – it’s my favourite tool.”

To Tom Sullivan, whose SFX make-up on Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead redefined the thoroughly modern zombie, and opened up new frontiers for gore-hounds, CGI effects are part of a creative palette that includes latex, rubber and grease paint. It’s with excitement rather than dismay that he greets the news that Benjamin Button’s effects were digitally enhanced. “I was astounded,” he enthuses. “It fooled me.”

He admits, though, that at the many conventions he attends, the fans’ favourites are resolutely old school. “They would rather see make-up appliances, puppetry, animatronics and stop-motion animation over digital almost across the board,” he laughs. But then we’re talking about the brainhungry disciples of The Dead, and there seems to be something about the visceral effects Sullivan achieves that resonates with horror fans.

That love might partly be about the reaction that live, on-set mayhem engenders in the performers.

Sullivan certainly thinks so. “If there’s actual blood ‘n’ guts erupting as opposed to a guy in a suit, it really makes a difference,” he says, citing the chest-burst scene in Alien – “where the actors knew

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Model of Pegasus and Perseus in flight, Clash of the Titans (1981) Š Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation

something was going to happen, but not what; so when John Hurt’s chest explodes, they’re getting an actual shock.” It is, he explains, part of a venerable directorial tradition: “There are other devices, like the director will have a hidden air horn and when they need everyone to jump, they’ll let it go and just remove the sound later. That kind of nasty stuff you can’t do with CGI.” Dick Smith agrees, perhaps because, like Sullivan, his vast experience on set has shown him that actors love having something to react to. “I’ve known directors to take 30 takes on one scene,” he says, “just to get that moment, or several repeats of a moment, where the actor is in touch with his character. And how does he do that when the actor is clothed in underwear and has little dots stuck to various parts of his anatomy?”

Ironically, Smith has little interest in the gorier side of an art form that’s vital to the sci-fi and horror genres, even though it was his ingenuity that made Linda Blair’s head spin in The Exorcist.

His area of expertise has always been the realistic physical transformation of performers, and his allies in the acting profession were those like Olivier and Eli Wallach who revelled in the theatrical possibilities of latex and paint. As the chief innovator in ageing make-up, he created an almost unrecognisable 121-year-old Dustin Hoffman for Little Big Man in 1970, gave Brando his hangdog looks for The Godfather, and sculpted the elderly Salieri’s misery in 1984’s Amadeus. His view of the growth in digital effects is far more equivocal than either Tom Sullivan’s or Rick Baker’s. He’s pragmatic, acknowledging that big scenes and genre pieces can benefit from digital enhancement.

But his affections lie with the aspects of the art he helped develop: “I’m so glad that I was active and had a good run during the hey-day of physical and practical make-up, and played a role,” he says.

If you want to sum up the issues facing SFX make-up, look no further than the career of Kazuhiro Tsuji, the exceptional Kyoto make-up artist mentored by both Rick Baker and Dick Smith, currently recognised as one of the new tyros in the business. Tsuji’s work as special effects make-up artist on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is seminal, but no one would claim that it’s reliant on digital imaging.

In fact, Tsuji’s effects sculptures achieve a quality beyond prop making, and have more in common with the hyperreal creations of Australian contemporary artist Ron Mueck than with the workaday artefacts that rely on CGI for their impact. His make-up design was the only thrilling element of Burton’s leaden Planet of the Apes, and his contributions to Hellboy and the Gore Verbinski remake of The Ring attracted admiration. Tsuji is by no means unique in blending CGI and practical make-up, but the extent of his innovation is pushing boundaries as he uses the cutting edge of technology to meet the merciless demands of all-seeing, pin-sharp innovations like Panavision’s HD video.

To Tom Sullivan, the debate between fans of Benjamin Button and Hellboy about who deserves what is meaningless. “My view is that all awards are unfair,” he exclaims. “I like what Spielberg said: ‘Give five people the same budget, the same script, get them to go away and make a movie, then we’ll compare’.” Though naturally, his personal taste leans towards Big Red: “Of course, I’d give [the award] to Hellboy and Guillermo’s amazing team,” he says. “The scale of what he does – he pulls a lot out of his dollar and it all goes up on the screen.”

Sullivan believes that concerns about the future of SFX make-up fail to take into account the sheer amount of practical work that lies behind CGI effects. “Even for the digital stuff to work, people with skills like Rick Baker and [Fight Club’s] Rob Bottin or Stan Winston are required for creating and sculpting, which has to be even more astoundingly detailed for digital,” he says. “That stuff has to be created, and the most cost-efficient way is still to create models. There’s a really high range of work being done out there, like nothing the world’s ever seen.”

It’s these models that remain close to the hearts of most make-up effects jockeys. All of them name-check the creator of stop-motion animation and godfather of filmmaking illusion, Ray Harryhausen. When asked about his views on the future of SFX make-up, the great man is charmingly nonplussed as to what he could possibly offer the debate, although his faint praise that CGI “allows everyone to remake everything” gives an indication of where his affections lie.

The clearest indication of his view lies in the introduction to his autobiography, An Animated Life, that elucidates a point which otherwise lingers in the background in almost all that’s said.

Harryhausen acknowledges that CGI has “reached a high few would have anticipated”, but finds the realism of CGI a counter to the dreamlike element that makes the impossible believable. “Stopmotion,” he writes, “supplies the perfect breath of life for fantastical creatures, offering a look of pure fantasy because their movements are beyond anything we know.” Anyone who’s watched Harryhausen’s bronze Talos come to life in Jason and the Argonauts and felt the hairs rise on the back of their neck will know exactly what he means

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Jacques Mesrine was a product of the tangled alliances between state institutions and organised g a n g s i n 1 9 5 0 s F r a n c e . B u t t h i s i s n ’ t t h e o n ly t i m e , o r t h e o n ly p l a c e , t h at a s tat e h a s t i e d i t s e l f to t h e very criminals it is sworn to police. McMafia author M i s h a G l e n n y g u i d e s LWL i e s t h r o u g h a t a n g l e d w e b o f power, profit and politics. Words by Sorrel Neuss

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nitiated into violence as a French paratrooper in the battle for Algerian independence, then employed as a stooge by the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète, Jacques Mesrine’s criminal career was intertwined with the very state that spent the best part of 20 years trying to catch him.

From clandestine political struggles in post-war France and Italy, to the complete criminal takeover of the Balkans in the ’90s, thugs with long arms have forged an ever-tighter relationship with politicians, the army and police.

A very French brand of terrorist armed with torture tools and plastic explosives was plotting to overthrow President Charles de Gaulle when Mesrine came of age. An ultra nationalist group of military men posted to North Africa during the 1954-1962 France-Algeria war formed a ‘Secret Army’, whose aim was to block Algerian independence. No cheese-eating surrender monkeys, this lot: the terror they inflicted on Algeria’s Muslim Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), not to mention their ‘unpatriotic’ kinsmen, made the waterboarding and electrical shocks exacted on locals by the regular army during the war look tame.

One of the organisation’s leaders, Jacques Soustelle, was Governor General of Algeria. Shrewd, confident and mean, he was known at the time as the ‘Molotov of Gaullism’, ‘Jacques the Wrecker’, ‘the most dangerous man in France’.

In 1959, Time magazine reported: “When he leaves his office on Paris’ Rue Oudinot, his movements are signalled ahead by a succession of handclaps; at the ministry entrance and on surrounding street corners, men armed with submachine guns spring to the alert.”

“Just like a Chicago gangster, eh?” Soustelle quipped.

Soustelle operated like a kind of one-man cabinet in oil-laden Algeria.

Metropolitan France consumed more than 20 million tons of the stuff at that time, and he was damned if he was going to lose control over North Africa’s bounty. When de Gaulle pushed for Algerian independence in an effort to end the war, Soustelle’s cohorts plotted to bury him. Machine gun fire sprayed de Gaulle’s car in August 1962, but he and his wife escaped. The OAS quickly fell out of favour in mainland France, and most members either fled to Argentina or were jailed.

Some of those associated with the OAS, however, still hold political sway. Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far right National Front leader who won an astonishing number of votes in France’s 2002 presidential elections, served in 1965 as campaign manager for Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignacour, former chief attorney for the OAS leaders.

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The French are still sore about it. Mesrine director Jean-François Richet and screenwriter Adel Raouf Dafri were “overly wary” of talking about politics in ’60s France, and refused to be interviewed.

France wasn’t the only country where the lines between state business and organised crime were becoming blurred. Across a few borders in Italy, the relationship was even murkier.

In 1969, a bank in Milan’s Piazza Fontana was blown to smithereens.

The authorities jumped on the chance to point the finger at left-wingers, but the people who lit the fuse were never found. Many suspect that it was the work of neo-fascists.

As communism gained popularity, to stop people from voting Red the authorities blamed left-wing terrorists for the blast in a deliberate strategy to foment tension – giving birth to one of the most notorious terrorist organisations in Italy’s history, the Brigate Rosse.

According to Andrew Gumbel at the Independent newspaper, “The Red Brigades and other violent leftist groups emerged as a reaction to right-wing terrorists, and to the state’s cack-handed attempts to blame the early bombings on left-wing anarchists.” Between 1969 and 1981, the Red Brigades got to work robbing banks, blowing up railway stations and offing dozens of policemen, magistrates and journalists. As the pool of blood deepened, other political groups began to manipulate BR violence for their own ends.

In 1978, the BR kidnapped and murdered Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro, who was trying to extend the government’s parliamentary majority through a compromise with the Italian Communist Party. Disguised A-Team style in Alitalia airline uniforms, a team of Brigade recruits ambushed Moro in Rome, killed five of his bodyguards and took him hostage. Unhappy with the whole communist alliance idea in the first place, the Christian Democrats did not exactly fall over themselves to negotiate Moro’s release, and after 54 days he was shot and dumped in the boot of a Renault parked next to a Roman amphitheatre.

But the plot was a hell of a lot soupier than that. Both Moscow and Washington opposed Moro’s policies, and according to Mino Pecorelli, a journalist who was shot a year later, Moro’s kidnapping had been carried out by a “lucid superpower”. Giovanni Fasanella, who co-wrote a book on the Moro case, told The Guardian, “Moro was killed because he had revealed state secrets [whilst held captive] and could have revealed others… West and East were in agreement, because his policy was disturbing to both sides”.

“The Russian s tat e w a s unable to deal with the mechanisms of a market e c o n o m y. It s i m p ly c o u l d n ’ t d o i t.”

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Fasanella thinks that Gladio, the secret US/UK-sponsored post-war army tasked with thwarting the communists in Italy, pulled the trigger. Whoever was responsible, it’s clear that the relationship between the Red Brigades and the Italian state was not your typical cops and robbers affair.

Cold War Italy was a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream, but the rapid deterioration across the water in the Balkans into state-sanctioned organised crime after 1989 does not need embellishment.

As the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed, so too did the Balkans. Assets previously controlled by the state went up for grabs, while war ravaged the region for a decade, giving rise to a new, far greedier brand of European organised criminal.

Unlike the terrorist groups in post-World War II France and Italy, nasty pieces of work in the Balkans had no ideological drive save a yawning hunger for cash. As Misha Glenny, former BBC correspondent in the region and author of McMafia, explains: “As a consequence of war, [economic] sanctions [imposed by the West] and corruption in the Balkans during the first half of the 1990s, the states of the former Yugoslavia turned to and nurtured mafias to run the logistics of their military effort, and it was not long before criminals were in control of the economy, the government and the war. Anyone with any serious political ambition had no choice but to get mobbed up.”

Egged on by the ’80s get-rich-quick culture and expanding globalisation, a new capitalist class in the Balkans and former Soviet Union set about establishing a hierarchy among themselves. This was not played out over tea and HobNobs.

There was an initial, bloody struggle to grab hold of major assets in the Balkans, says Glenny. Once that initial bloodletting was over, a few big winners went on to safeguard their position by making the state responsible for their security. They spent a huge amount of their loot on private protection from the police and other rackets, and used the rest of it to make even more money.

Very quickly the Balkans became a vast transit zone for all things dodgy from the Bulgarian, Romanian or Macedonian borders over into Austria, Italy and beyond. Paramilitary groups and the big asset-grabbing winners, or oligarchs, linked up with criminal bosses from all over the world to bring nose powder, skag, prostitutes and cheap cigarettes into Europe.

And even though the different ethnic factions in the region were fighting a horrendous war on the front lines, they worked well together smuggling illicit goods that ended up in countries like the UK. “They were paid handsomely for their betrayal of the national cause,” says Glenny. In between slaughtering scores of Kosovo Albanians, Zeljko Raznatovic, better known as Arkan, had a sideline in smuggling heroin with the help of some of the very people that he was supposed to murder.

Anyone with any power was up to their neck in it, especially the countries’ leaders. During the ’90s, Macedonia’s economy was propped up by the illegal cigarette trade, controlled by the secret services and its president, Milo Djukanovic. By charging a transit tax for cigarettes bought wholesale from factories in America and routed via Macedonia to Italy, Djukanovic claims to have made £20 million a year.

But the cigarette mafia did not get off lightly just because they had the president’s endorsement. Stiff competition lead to gang warfare across the Balkans in 2000, and those involved started dropping like flies “Hits in the Balkans tend to be very carefully targeted,” says Glenny. “Assassinations of key opponents are usually associated with a struggle around a particular commodity, which we saw with the cigarette trade. It really became very bloody, but you didn’t get ordinary people knocked off in the street in the cross-fire.”

Back in the former USSR, the scope for making obscene amounts of cash was just as mind-blowing. Under what seemed like a perpetually drunk Boris Yeltsin, the price of many commodities in Russia was deregulated, but oil and gas were not. A few shrewd men made a killing selling subsidised energy on the European market at global prices. Other assets formally under state control were also scooped up and turned into gold overnight.

“The state, particularly the judiciary, was unable to deal with the mechanisms of a market economy,” says Glenny. “It simply couldn’t do it. t was completely overloaded and gridlocked, so policing had to be privatised.”

As the oligarchs got richer, they demanded more protection, and private rackets became bigger and ballsier. The number of hits was dizzying and Moscow turned into a bling-soaked Wild East. “Oligarchs’ aspirations are incredibly crass,” remarks Glenny. In their gaudy parties, scantily clad women are more decorative than the furniture. “Although I have never been to a party where everyone started taking their clothes off and fucking,” he says, “I really felt that people were about to take off their clothes and start fucking at any moment.”

Security at these Moscow shindigs is as thuggish as you’d imagine.

“There are all these goons standing around whose faces you can’t see because they’re so tall, and you can’t see round them because they’re so wide. If you piss them off they’ll squeeze you like that,” he says, squishing an imaginary head between his hands, “but if you don’t piss them off, they’re fine. They’re not there to draw attention to themselves.”

And that’s why the rest of us continue to buy half price rolling tobacco, coke cut with icing sugar, or dodgy DVDs without feeling guilty. The economic and social fallout isn’t visible from our living rooms or on our street corners. It’s not in the interest of these global Mafiosi to start whacking each other in their own shop window.

The chain of supply and demand in illicit goods is simple enough, as is the reason why some states collude with it. As Glenny concludes: “There are still so many organised crime operations in places like Italy because these states have never been mature and developed enough to calm the distress and discontent that gives rise to organised crime.

It really isn’t rocket science.”

McMafia: Seriously Organised Crime is published by Vintage, and is available now.

You should read it – it’s really good.

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IN CINEMAS FROM FRIDAY AUGUST 14

The great Karl Marx, of course.

How dare you? Money is a blight on this world.

A totem of the capitalist system we must overthrow to create a new socialist utopia!

Marx? Interesting.

You’ve read The Communist Manifesto?

That’s quite a mission. Sounds like you need some intellectual guidance. Who do you turn to?

So, comrade, we should start with money. Cash, dollars, dough, greenbacks, queen’s heads, pesos, lire, francs, marks…

You want it, right?

It’s my all-time favourite. I have two copies; one for making notes, one for display purposes.

Bob Dylan, man. He was so right on about everything.

Money? Right now, I’m more concerned about the liberation of my people.

Your people?

Sounds heavy.

What’s up?

We are being oppressed by our occupiers. They show no shame or pity!

We must fight them on the streets.

THE WORLD IS A TERRIBLE PLACE AND IT MAKES YOU ANGRY, RIGHT? REAL ANGRY. BUT YOU CAN FIGHT THE MAN. NOT THROUGH VOTING (IF THAT CHANGED ANYTHING, THEY’D ABOLISH IT) BUT REVOLUTION! THERE’S PLENTY OF PEOPLE W H O C A N H E L P Y O U I N Y O U R F I G H T. LU C K I LY, W E ’ R E H E R E TO HELP FIND THE RIGHT ONES FOR YOU. WORDS BY ED ANDREWS

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Reading? There’s no time for that. The revolution needs bombs, bitches and Marlboro Lights. And guns, lots of guns!

We need to kill a few politicians and do a spot of kidnapping; this revolution needs some ransom cash, capeesh?

What’s Aldo Moro’s address?

Okay. So what are you going to do now?

Das ist richtig! Sounds like you’d fit in nicely with Germany’s Red Army Faction.

THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX (2008) The film captures the rise and fall of the most prominent terrorist group in post-war Germany in all its ‘glamour’.

GOOD MORNING, NIGHT (2003) This Italian film is based on the Red Brigade’s 1978 kidnapping and murder of politician Aldo Moro.

Davvero? The Red Brigades are the ones for you.

W A T C H

Hola compadre! You need to check in with The 26th of July Movement, esse!

W A T C H

CHE: PART ONE, CHE: PART TWO (2008) Soderbergh’s epic two-part biopic of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara charts his success in the Cuban revolution and his ill-fated failure in Bolivia.

W A T C H

THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND (2002) Sam Green’s film tells the story of America’s violent left wing radicals, the Weathermen, who wanted to bring the Vietnam War home through the bombing of government buildings.

The Palestine Liberation Organisation are going to be right up your street.

W A T C H

/ONE DAY IN SEPTEMBER (1999) Kevin Macdonald retells the hostage siege at the 1972 Munich Olympics, where Palestinian terrorists, Black September, took 11 Israeli athletes hostage.

The French! Algeria is overrun with pâtisseries and Charles Trénet records. I hate Charles Trénet! They must leave.

You need to get involved with the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale.

W A T C H

Ze Engleesh speakerz, eh!

We don’t want to be a part of Canada. Fuck hockey, fuck Tim Hortons!

As a committed supporter of Quebec sovereignty, the Front de Libération du Québec sound like your type of revolutionaries.

Viva La Revolución! I will form a guerrilla army and fight those pigs in their backyard. Next stop, Cuba!

Far out! Times are a changin’ for sure.

You might like some dudes called The Weathermen.

The bastards!

Who are these imperialists?

W A T C H

It’s the state of Israel.

We had a fight a few years ago and they will not give us our land back!

W A T C H

THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (1966) Gillo Pontecorvo’s masterpiece explores the eight-year Algerian war of independence with France.

/MESRINE: KILLER INSTINCT (2009) The rip-roaring first half of this biopic of French criminal Jacques Mesrine charts his involvement with French-Canadian terrorist group the FLQ.

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i n s p i r e d b y j a c q u e s m e s r i n e ’ s p r i s o n - b r e a k i n g e s c a pa d e s , LW L i e s c o m m i s s i o n e d five artists to reimagine some of cinema’s classic escapologists.

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B ut c h Cassidy and the S undan c e K id S P A R R O W V S S W A L L O W 051

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I n 1 9 8 0 , t h e F r e n c h h a r d r o c k b a n d T r u s t r e l e a s e d a n a l b u m w h o s e ly r i c s helped transform Jacques Mesrine from public enemy to national icon. Lead singer Bernie Bonvoisin recalls how it happened. Words by Matt Bochenski

Even before his death, the process of assimilating Jacques Mesrine into French popular culture had begun. As unlikely an icon as he may have seemed, he embodied a kind of Resistancechic which, allied with his propensity for kidnapping wealthy industrialists, elevated him to hero status among France’s disenfranchised masses. When the government paraded his bullet-riddled body on national television, they only served to quicken Mesrine’s transformation from menace to Messiah.

Barely 12 months after his murder in 1979, the impact of Mesrine’s life and death was manifest in the lyrics of French hard rock band Trust. Founded in 1977 by Bernie Bonvoisin, Nono Krief, Ray Manna and Jeannot Hanela, Trust were an overtly politicised outfit -whose provocative 1980 album, Repression, attacked the French state for harbouring Ayatollah Khomeini, and accused the Soviet Union of imprisoning political dissidents in psychiatric hospitals.

But two songs in particular, ‘Instinct de

Mort’ and ‘Le Mitard’, caused a sensation by directly referencing the recently deceased Mesrine. ‘Instinct de Mort’ is a savage, scattershot denunciation of the policemen who killed Mesrine at Porte de Clignancourt on the outskirts of Paris, and the politicised penal system – ‘kingdom of beatings’ – used to suppress a free-thinking generation. ‘Le Mitard’ (‘The Cooler’) is a more focussed but no less bitter re-construction of Mesrine’s life in the infamous Fleury-Mérogis prison – “Inhuman, shrunk, without any tomorrow.”

Speaking from Paris, Bernie Bonvoisin believes that Trust simply reflected the energy of the times: “I’ve never been involved in a political party, but I’ve always watched the world around me and tried to understand it. I’m from a workingclass family and my parents gave their lives for this society – that was a lesson of life.”

Back then, he knew Mesrine as an invigorating symbol of opposition – the live fast, die young dream of rock ‘n’ roll taken to its ultimate conclusion. “He was alive,” says Bonvoisin.

“The man was particular, his story was particular.

That’s what motivated me to write about him.”

Today, Bonvoisin is close friends with Mesrine’s daughter, and still believes that the gangster was “a victim of his image and of the media, and nothing else.” His view of the government that ordered his death is scathing: “Like many countries in Europe, we don’t have anything to be proud of in our past. France was a colonialist country. Our memories are dirtied by shame and blood. Today, we’re gonna pay for that.”

As for Mesrine’s legacy, and Trust’s, Bonvoisin is more equivocal. He thinks the political energy that propelled them when they were young is now more diffuse. “For the kids today, Mesrine is just some character in a movie,” he says. “They are angry but in a different way; they are angry alone, not collectively. They think more for themselves than for others, and this is a big problem. I think it’s essential today to be involved in what’s going on,” he continues, “in Europe, in France, in the world. It’s important to have a position, a place, an idea… The most important thing is what you are, not what you have.”

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Yes, Madame!

He turns, he turns, in thousands of steps Which lead nowhere.

In a concrete world with trees of bars, Flowers of despair.

Inhuman, shrunk, without any tomorrow, His sustenance is slid under a grille in the ground And the water to quench his thirst in a bowl.

He is alone… without sun And no longer even has his own shadow.

Unfaithful companion, she’s gone away, Refusing to be a slave to this living dead-born.

He turns… he turns, and he’ll always turn, Until the day when, like a wounded animal, After giving a single moan, He will fall to the ground and let himself die.

Fleury-Mérogis…

One day in September 1976 Where I would exist so little That I wouldn’t even be ‘nobody’.

Mesrine.

Fleury-Mérogis…

One day in September 1976 Where I would exist so little.

Mesrine.

I see you shed a tear, Why are you so sad?

Poor dog! You say to me There is an error.

He’s a man, Madame, He is imprisoned.

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It’s he who your peers have condemned so well, In rending justice, in the name of freedom, Fleury-Mérogis…

One day in September 1976 Where I would exist so little That I wouldn’t even be ‘nobody’.

Mesrine.

Fleury-Mérogis…

One day in September 1976 Where I would exist so little.

Mesrine.

I see you shed a tear, Why are you so sad?

Poor dog! You say to me There is an error.

He’s a man, Madame, He is imprisoned.

It’s he who your peers have condemned so well, In rending justice, in the name of freedom, Mesrine.

He turns… he turns, and he’ll always turn.

Mesrine.

Until the day when, like a wounded animal, Mesrine.

He will fall to the ground and let himself die.

Mesrine.

Translation by Prudence Ivey

“CRACKLING WITH WIT AND WISDOM, IT’S THE REAL DEVIL WEARS PRADA”

IN CINEMAS SEPTEMBER 11 ON DVD SEPTEMBER 14

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The FBI’s list of Public Enemies is more than just a s e m i n a l l a w e n f o r c e m e n t t o o l – it ’ s a w i n d o w i n t o a c o n s ta n t ly e v o lv i n g s o c i e t y. W o r d s b y A d a m L e e D a v i e s

Crime and criminals have always fascinated the American public, from the gunslingers of the Wild West to the drug tsars of the ’80s; from the glamour of the Mafia to the mental squalor of serial killers like Ted Bundy. Whether or not you subscribe to the shop-worn adage that a society gets the criminals that it deserves, self-reliance, rebelliousness and the thrill of the chase are central to the entrepreneurial spirit of America, while the extraordinary developments and dizzying pace of the American twentieth century created crimes and criminals that were undoubtedly shaped by their place and time.

Since 1908 it has been the task of the FBI to investigate and apprehend these men and women.

Originally born out of the need to regulate inter-state commerce, the Bureau soon became America’s national police force, with the jurisdiction to cross city, county and state lines while pursuing its remit to investigate violations of Federal law (later, under the direction of J Edgar Hoover, expanded to include chasing down all manner of bank-robbers, bootleggers and jail breakers). Though hardly without its critics over the years, the FBI has had remarkable success in capturing the felons and fugitives that have attained the status of ‘Public Enemy’ or, later, made their ‘Ten Most Wanted’ list: men and women who mirror their times to an often eerie degree.

“About the time we can make the ends m e e t, s o m e b o d y m o v e s t h e e n d s .”

H e r b e r t H o o v e r , US P r e s i d e n t , 1 9 2 9 - 3 3 The twentieth century brought with it a new kind of criminal. The gangs of the Wild West were succeeded back East by gangs of a far more organised nature, while the advent of the motorcar meant that even the old school criminals that remained were far more mobile. Michael Willrich, Associate Professor of History at Brandeis University, explains the public appeal of this new element: “In 1930, the Chicago Crime Commission published a list of the city’s ‘Public Enemies’. Journalists, already fascinated with Chicago’s gang problem, quickly adopted the term as their own, crowning Capone ‘Public Enemy Number One’. The second archetype, which really took off in the Depression-era, was the itinerant rural bank robber; Charles ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd – memorialised in song as a sort of populist bandit; John Dillinger; and Bonnie and Clyde.”

The Great Depression of the ’30s saw banks foreclosing on mortgages left and right, so when destitute farmers and homesteaders read reports of flamboyant robbers sticking up the very same banks and taunting the law with daring prison escapes – such as the surely apocryphal tale of John Dillinger busting out of the joint armed with a fake gun fashioned from a bar of soap – they rooted for them as if they were latter-day Robin Hoods.

Al Capone was patently no Robin Hood, but Dr Laura Cook Kenna, Professor of American Studies at George Washington University, argues he was an aspirational figure within his own community.

“Coverage of Capone tended to comment on his over-the-top style of dress. You could read this detail as mere trivia. You could also read such descriptions as reminders of Capone’s low-class, immigrant background; or you could read about those silk suits and think, ‘Now this guy… This guy knows how to live! I hope someday I make it big myself and can show it off to the world just like he does.’”

Dillinger eventually went down in a hail of bullets, while Capone was nabbed for tax evasion and passed away in Alcatraz. Prohibition was repealed, the Great Depression was over and the days of the guns-blazing gangster had passed. The world went to war.

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“It was a nervous, downhill feeling, a mean k i n d o f A n g s t t h at a lw a y s c o m e s o u t o f w a r s … ” H u n t e r S T h o m p s o n , H e l l’ s A n g e l s Long-time FBI director and shameless publicity seeker J Edgar Hoover conceived of the Ten Most Wanted list in 1950. The first men to make the list were as much a product of their times as the gangsters of the ’30s had been.

Many soldiers who returned from World War II bought into the new prosperity touted by Madison Avenue and enjoyed the easy living of suburban life. Others, however, didn’t re-assimilate quite so well, and despite such colourful characters as disguise-wearing thief Wille ‘The Actor’ Sutton and Frank Sprenz – who made his getaways in a helicopter – the reports on the first Top Ten tell of twilight lives lived in cheap rooming houses, and of brutal, drunken arguments in seamy neon rat-traps straight out of a James Ellroy novel. In his book Hoover’s FBI: The Men and the Myth, former FBI agent William Turner accused the Bureau of creating public enemies from an ‘array of cheap thugs, barroom knifers, psychopathic rapists, wife-beaters and alcoholic stick-up men’ to deflect attention away from what Turner saw as the true menace to society – organised crime.

Whatever the reasons behind Hoover’s refusal to acknowledge organised crime – and the idea that the Mob were blackmailing him over his sexuality cannot be entirely discounted – the fact remains that there were no Mafia figures on the Most Wanted list until the late ’70s. Dary Matera, ex-crime reporter and author of books on Dillinger and the FBI, offers a more prosaic possibility: “The FBI’s Top Ten list is designed to track down wanted felons on the lam. Organised crime figures are highly provincial and rarely run because they have no power, connections, or income outside the small but lucrative territories they rule.”

“ W e ’ v e g ot t h e b e g i n n i n g s h e r e o f a n o u t r i g h t r e v o lu ti o n .”

Wa r r e n P K n o w l e s , G o v e r n o r o f W i s c o n s i n , 1 9 6 5 - 7 1 If the ’50s was a period of readjustment in America then the ’60s demanded wholesale change. The Most Wanted list still found room for throwbacks like John William Clouser – the ‘Florida Fox’ who was described as a ‘braggart, Mama’s boy and sadist’, and wanted for the seemingly bizarre crime of kidnapping two Florida theatre managers. Then there was murderous transvestite Leslie Douglas Ashley, who was picked up while working the carnival circuit as Bobo the Clown. But in such a politically charged period it was inevitable that activists and revolutionaries were the main targets. “The FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list has, unfortunately, been highly politicised over the years,” bemoans Matera. “It too often reflects the political ideologies of the administration in power. This was especially true in the ’60s when the list was stocked with anti-war demonstrators, Black Power rebels and anti-government student groups like The Weather Underground.”

These were different kinds of fugitives, with a good deal more moral stamina than the crooks the FBI were used to. This led to some heavier tactics on the Bureau’s part – which often backfired. “The FBI was viewed as a bunch of square, terribly un-hip government jackboots, narcs and snitches who were out of tune with the youth of the day,” continues Matera. “Some of those listed, like Black Panther Angela Davis, became heroes to a large percentage of the population. Being on ‘The Man’s’ hit-list was a badge of honour.”

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Professor of American History at Edinburgh University, and author of The FBI: A History, disputes Matera only on timing. As he reckons it, “The American public had a favourable image of the FBI right up until Watergate in the ’70s. In the ’60s the Bureau targeted protesters in spite of their lawabiding behaviour – Martin Luther King, for example, and protesters against the Vietnam War. The public did not learn about the FBI’s questionable aims until the ’70s. At that point, all hell broke loose…”

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“ I n a r e a l d a r k n i g h t o f t h e s o u l , it i s a lw a y s t h r e e o ’ c lo c k i n t h e m o r n i n g , d ay a f t e r d ay.”

F S c o t t F i t z g e r a l d , T h e C r a c k Up With Hoover’s death in 1972 coinciding with the release of pop-culture leviathan The Godfather, one might imagine that the Mob would at last be on the agenda, but although the FBI now acknowledged the existence of organised crime, without the strength of Hoover’s personality behind them, it would be years before they began to make inroads into the Mafia.

The Bureau’s most notable cases during the ’70s and early ’80s could, perhaps, be said to centre on serial killers. Christopher Wilder, for example, was a high-living professional racing driver who went on a kill-crazy rampage over eight states before being shot dead by a New Hampshire state trooper who had recognised him from a Most Wanted poster. Ted Bundy murdered at least 30 women and twice escaped from prison between 1974 and 1978, and was eventually executed in 1989 after being apprehended while on the list. In an interview given the night before his death, Bundy said, “There are loose in the towns and their communities people like me today, whose dangerous impulses are being fuelled day in, day out, by violence in the media… particularly sexual violence.”

Dr Cook Kenna – who specialises in crime and the media – has long pondered whether the media could in any way be to blame for such terrible crimes. “Maybe the question is not so much whether media violence shaped a particular generation of killers but, rather, how mass media shape our perceptions of violence,” she says. “In the US, this almost paranoid vision of criminals lurking everywhere resonated particularly well with the growing sensibility that threatening forces were at work in myriad areas of life.”

But Bundy was all too real… “It’s not that serial killers weren’t actually out there doing heinous things,” she agrees, “but I’m suggesting that the particular ways that ’70s Americans understood serial killers and their crimes were shaped by their understanding of what kind of world they lived in, one where threats were increasingly insidious and abundant.”

“They are after our way of life, a n d w e h a v e to d e a l w it h t h e m .”

C o n d o l e e z z a R i c e , US S e c r e t a r y o f S t a t e , 2 0 0 5 - 0 9 While the ‘War on Drugs’ that reached its peak in the ’80s and ’90s was a huge – if only intermittently successful – operation, it rather fell into the purview of the Drug Enforcement Administration. This period instead saw the FBI very much involved in combating other enemies, both domestic and foreign. “The liberal democratic Bill Clinton era saw a rash of conservative rebels hit the list,” notes Dary Matera. “Antiabortionists, separatists, white supremacists and their ilk were now Most Wanted.”

Terrorism was also very high on the agenda, with Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi making the list in 1995 for the bombing of an American airplane over Lockerbie; while Ramzi Yousef – nephew of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – was listed for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Both were subsequently caught and sentenced.

The FBI has not always met with such success when it comes to terrorist activity. As Professor Jeffreys-Jones explains, “Federal investigations into 9/11 were critical of the FBI’s performance against terrorism. They charged that the Bureau had not kept abreast of terrorist escalation. Since then, federal enquiries, reforms and legislation have demanded that the FBI step up its intelligence performance, and the Bureau has diverted resources to that area.”

This is the legacy of the controversial Patriot Act, passed in October 2001, which many claim violates the Fourth Amendment to the Bill of Rights. It gives the FBI much greater authority to gather intelligence in pretty much any manner that it sees fit. With such resources, why bother with, say, a Most Wanted picture of Osama Bin Laden – on the list since 1999 for the bombing of US Embassies in Tanzania and the Yemen – in every Post Office in America? “Over the years, the public have responded to the Ten Most Wanted list, submitting information that led to arrests,” says Jeffreys-Jones. “Conceivably, this could happen in the case of Bin Laden.”

“The criminals that populated the Most Wanted list have always mirrored society,” says Matera.

“From the bank robbers of the ’30s to the anti-war radicals of the ’60s; from the drug kingpins of the ’80s and ’90s to the terrorists of today, nearly 500 of those criminals have been sought since the list’s inception in 1950. Of those, more than 460 have been located.” And for all the mistakes and misdeeds that have attended it, Matera has no doubt as to the list’s overall efficacy. “For more than a half century,” he says, “the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list has served as one of the strongest law enforcement tools ever invented.”

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Laurence Boyce, LITTLE WHITE LIES

Cannes

PG

Contains infrequent mild language

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Following the release of JFK in 1991, Norman Mailer noted that film had t h e p o w e r to m a k e ‘ n e w h i s to r y ’. W i t h m u lt i p l e x e s o v e r r u n t h i s s u m m e r b y stories borrowing from the real lives of Jacques Mesrine and Coco Chanel, P h i l l i p K D i c k , I g g y P o p, B e n a z i r B h u t t o and John Dillinger, we ask one simple question; what counts for truth in cinema? Words By Kingsley Marshall

Following the recent success of Milk and Frost/Nixon, the popularity of the filmed biopic with both producers and audiences shows no sign of abating, with over 30 movies in production based on the lives of real people.

This is far from a recent development, however, with representations of real life having long fed the insatiable fires of Hollywood. In the course of his research for a book on history and celebrity, the critic George Custon observed a commonality across over a hundred film biographies that had been shot between 1927 and 1960. In every single example, the lives being portrayed on the screen featured narratives that charted triumph over adversity. Whether this adversity was contrived from childhood trauma, personal relationships, substance abuse, economic difficulties or a conquest of bigotry, each of the films he looked at – whose subjects included everyone from Joan of Arc to Al Jolson – hinged the development, achievement and decline of their protagonist to one event; a singularity of history.

In his study of historical film, Mark Carnes noted that “Hollywood history sparkles because it is so historically ambiguous, so devoid of tedious complexity.” That’s an observation as true to Defiance, Daniel Craig’s recent portrayal of Jewish resistance in the eastern provinces of Poland during World War II, as it is to Stephen Soderbergh’s epic double header Che. As Marnie Hughes-Warrington observed: “Mainstream film is characterised as offering a closed, completed and simple past.” History has to be simplified, with familiar themes and happy endings utilised in order to re-cast multifaceted lives into an easily digested narrative.

This codification has the power to disseminate entirely new myths of figures and events some distance from history and, perhaps more surprisingly, serve to reconstruct their subjects’ identity entirely. This is the point where the private and public lives of celebrities cross-pollinate, and life and performance blur. On the release of 8 Mile, in which Eminem played rapper B-Rabbit, the press leapt at the film as autobiography. Representation had

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Walk The Line

Milk

become interchangeable with reality. This understanding has been cemented by that veritable stamp of cinematic authenticity, the Academy Awards, drawn to the biopic year after year like moths to a flame – from Sissy Spacek’s Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner’s Daughter to Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash in Walk the Line and, more recently, Marion Cottilard as Édith Piaf in La Vie En Rose.

Sam Riley’s performance as Joy Division’s Ian Curtis in Control epitomised the importance of this perceived authenticity to audiences.

The overcooked black-and-white cinematography was intended to reflect both the period and the spirit of the band, while the music within the film was notably played by the actors rather than referring to original recordings. Despite all of this, the band’s Stephen Morris commented to the NME after the film’s premiere that “none of it’s true, really.”

“The great thing about a biography is that you can’t escape the facts,” explains Nick Moran, who brought the story of British record producer Joe Meek first to the stage, and has adapted the work to the screen in the recently released Telstar. “The history of our country is full of amazing stories from incredible characters. So many truly great British movies tend to be biographies, from Lawrence of Arabia to Elizabeth, that I think fiction should be a last resort for us – let the Americans do that, they’re great at making stuff up.”

The film charts Meek’s descent from his revolutionary work in the recording studio to the tragic decline of drug addiction and paranoia that eventually resulted in the murder of his landlady, Violet Shenton, and his own suicide. “The best way to pick Joe’s life apart was through the work,” Moran explains, detailing the process of writing the script. “I like to think we got close to what happened in the last moments of Joe and Violet’s life. Obviously no one really knows what happened, but we had the facts, the state of mind, and we know the conclusion. If you go through the songs it becomes clear what was going on in his life and in his head, especially if you look at what was going on in the world outside the flat.

His character seemed to permeate every aspect of his life, and his homosexuality was something that informed his every decision. The Meek story is totally unique, stranger than fiction, and has all of those timeless themes of Shakespearean tragedy; love, loss and the fall of a king.”

Frost/Nixon

A similarly epic journey is charted in Frost/Nixon. Ron Howard, no stranger to historical film having directed Apollo 13, brought the historical legacy of Richard Nixon firmly back into the realms of popular culture, much as David Frost’s televised interviews – on which Peter Morgan’s stage production and adapted screenplay were based – had done on their initial broadcast 30 years earlier. As with Gus Van Sant’s Milk, which leapt from contemporaneous footage from the ’70s to Sean Penn’s portrayal of the titular character, Howard’s film outlines the complex relationship with past and present very early by blending historical record with speculative conjecture in its opening few minutes, with fictional footage mixed in with documentary and news archive together with audio recordings taken from the original White House taping system. David Edelstein noted in an article for New York Magazine that Morgan’s script elevated the interviews into “a momentous event in the history of politics and media,” and Howard’s film worked hard to embellish the events with lines of dramatic dialogue which both ramped up the tension and the very significance of the interviews themselves.

An entirely fictional scene, where Nixon telephones Frost in the middle of the night, was crucial in its foreshadowing of Nixon’s admissions in the final interview. The scene had a sense of truth, seeded from the many late night telephone calls Nixon made during his career, but the call sat uncomfortably in the film as a whole. It borrowed its confused, dutch-angled aesthetic from Oliver Stone’s earlier biopic, Nixon, and the conversation served to reinforce the cinematic reality of Nixon, making the suggestion that he was dependent on drink and drugs, while raising doubts about his memory and integrity.

George Custon has suggested that the biopic serves as an accessible version of history, satisfying an audience’s desire for “a loose code of realism”, and that films which recount historical events make an assertion of truth, an

assertion that has the power to become embodied in popular culture. This vision of Nixon – crazed and irrational rather than thoroughly rational and acting criminally – is elevated and concretised by Frost/Nixon.

In a strange slip of its own self-referentiality, Sam Rockwell, who plays Frost advisor Jim Reston (on whose book both play and film were loosely based) observes in the closing scene that television simplifies, and film simplifies even further, and suggests that the many failings of Frost’s original interviews would not only be forgotten, but cease to exist. Much to the despair of historians, film has taken the place of folklore, noting that the shared experience of the past represented in cinema is constantly in flux and, more often than not, sits in opposition to history.

Stone’s account in Nixon attempted to exempt itself from the critical scrutiny which had been applied to JFK, inserting a disclaimer in the titles that the film makes ‘an attempt to understand the truth based on numerous public sources and on an incomplete historical record’, making much of the missing minutes of the Whitehouse tapes. Jean-François Richet does the same in Mesrine, each part of which open with a simple title that acknowledges, ‘All films are part fiction. No film can faithfully reproduce the complexity of a human life. To each his own point of view.’

Yet the great danger of the historical film is perhaps best expressed by the master of the form. In an interview with Newsweek, James Cameron stated his hope for Titanic: “Whatever we make will become the truth, the visual reality that a generation will accept.”

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broken eMbraCes RELEASED August 28

Pedro Almodóvar is a filmmaker of two halves: creator of burlesque, super-camp, riotously broadhumoured farce (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), versus the deeply sympathetic (melo)dramatist of stylishly dark emotional mysteries (Matador and Bad Education). Yet his films seem to resonate most powerfully when he hits on the alchemic concoction of these two tones, as in Talk To Her and All About My Mother.

After watching his latest, Broken Embraces, it’s no surprise to hear it was originally inspired by a series of migraines Almodóvar had been suffering. The product of a fractured, fevered filmic imagination it certainly is. Following an excellent opening scene in which blind screenwriter Harry Caine (Lluís Homar) enjoys a mid-morning tryst with an obliging young stranger he picked up off the street, the viewer is danced across a network of forking narrative paths and spun through a kaleidoscope of glittering cinematic references (including more than a few glossy nods to the director’s own back catalogue).

DIRECTED BY Pedro Almodóvar STARRING Penélope Cruz, Lluís Homar, Blanca Portillo

In a premise recalling that of Bad Education, Caine – a noirish pseudonym adopted after the mysterious accident which left him blind and caused him to renounce his former identity as filmmaker Mateo Blanco – is prompted into Hitchcockian reflection on his personal biography by a visit from the shifty-looking Ray X (Rubén Ochandiano) (also, unsurprisingly, not his real name; it’s all as ridiculous as it sounds), who wants to make a film with him about the recently deceased business mogul, Ernesto Martel.

Caine’s flashback takes us to Penélope Cruz, the jewel in Broken Embraces’ gloriously opulent crown, who also operates under multiple monikers: by day as Lena, Martel’s humble PA, struggling to pay for her elderly father’s spiralling medical bills; by night as Séverine, call-girl and aspiring actress. Later, after succumbing to Martel’s infatuation with her and moving in with him, she achieves her ambition (and gains a few more aspects), when Mateo casts her as the lead in his new movie, Girls & Suitcases. A re-

envisioning of Almodóvar’s own Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, it offers welcome cameos to some of his oldest stars, like Chus Lampreave, and brings his now textbook film-within-afilm trope to new heights of selfconsciousness.

Cruz’s cipher-like role sees her fast becoming Almodóvar’s faithful, glossy-coated lapdog, rather than respected muse. Though here, at least, his fixation shifts from the cleavage and padded derrière of Volver’s Sophia Loren homage, to Cruz’s chameleon visage. While making for exquisite reflections of silver screen stars from Audrey to Marilyn, this leaves Cruz little meat to grasp in her role, and the viewer at a loss as to where to pool their emotions despite the tragic twists of the multiple narratives (to reveal too much of which would spoil Almodóvar’s game). Tellingly, one of the most moving – and visually dazzling – moments in the film is an image of an ageing, blind filmmaker fondling a giant display of old, pixellated black and white celluloid.

A paean to classic cinema and

filmmaking itself, Broken Embraces will keep your average cineaste and ardent Almodóvarite entertained playing spot-the-reference. Yet somehow missing both the brash vitality and emotional generosity of his best work, it ultimately begs a reassessment of Pauline Kael’s famous description of Almodóvar as ‘Godard with a human face’.

To his and his editor’s credit, it all holds together extremely slickly, where it would have ended up a splattered mess in less expert hands. Part of the problem is just how well it all hangs together, though. Like an elaborately woven cobweb, it’s a marvel but so full of holes that it’s all too easily swept from the memory. Sophie Ivan

Anticipation. Thirty years into his directing career, a new Almodóvar release never fails to excite.

Enjoyment. A curate’s egg: visually and stylistically flawless but missing Almodóvar’s distinctive heart.

In Retrospect. All very clever and all very meta, but fast receding.

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sin noMbre

DIRECTED BY Cary Fukunaga STARRING Paulina Gaitan, Edgar Flores, Tenoch Huerta RELEASED August 14

The winner of the Directing and Excellence in Cinematography awards at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, Sin Nombre is a fascinating fusion of road movie, gangster epic and tragic love story.

Written and directed by Cary Fukunaga, this visually vibrant debut reflects the filmmaker’s firsthand experiences with Central American immigrants seeking the often-tainted promise of new lives and fresh opportunities in the United States.

Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), a teenager living in Honduras, hungers for a brighter future.

A reunion with her estranged father gives Sayra her only real option – emigrating from her home to Mexico, and then making the perilous journey on to the US, where her father has settled with a new family. Meanwhile, Casper (Edgar Flores) is a young adult living in Tapachula, Mexico, and facing an uncertain future. A member of the ultra-violent Mara Salvatrucha brotherhood, he has just inducted

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a new recruit, 12-year-old Smiley (Kristian Ferrer), who undergoes a rough initiation. When a conflict between Casper and fearsome Mara lynchpin Lil’ Mago (Tenoch Huerta) erupts, an abiding feud is set in motion.

Meanwhile, Sayra and her relatives manage to cross over into Mexico, joining countless other immigrants waiting at the Tapachula train yards. When a States-bound freight train arrives, they successfully clamber atop, as does Lil’ Mago, who has commandeered Casper and Smiley to carry out violent robberies on the already desperate and afraid human cargo. As day breaks, Lil’ Mago makes his move and Casper in turn makes a fateful decision to navigate the psychological gauntlet of his violent existence and the physical one of the unforgiving Mara. Sayra allies herself with him as the train journeys through the Mexican countryside towards the hope of new lives.

Executive produced by the poster boy pair of Diego Luna and

Gael García Bernal for Canana – their production outfit designed to foster emerging Mexican talent and films dealing with Latin American issues – Sin Nombre directly evolved from Cary Fukunaga’s 2004 Victoria Para Chino. A multiaward winning short about a truckload of immigrants who were found abandoned and suffocated in Victoria, Texas, the production led to extensive research and fresh insights into the Central American side of immigration.

Working with a tight-knit crew, including Sao Paulo-born cinematographer Adriano Goldman, Fukunaga travelled to Chiapas and Tapachula, Mexico, and met with gang members – distinguished by their striking body art – who were involved in the immigrant smuggling trade. The result is a breathless, uncompromising and frequently gruelling account of the desperate struggle for survival, and a sobering portrait of the seemingly endless cycle of poverty, violence and

retribution that thrives in the ranks of the underclass.

Mildly evocative of classic lovers-on-the-run dramas such as Days of Heaven (in Sin Nombre, the wonders of the natural world similarly provide a fleeting respite from suffering and hardship), the film also incorporates the kinetic power of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros and the topicality of the Guillermo Arriagascripted The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, as well as Amat Escalante’s thus far little seen Los Bastardos. Jason Wood

Anticipation. Trails a sizeable reputation following festival success, especially at Sundance where it was one of the ‘hot’ titles.

Enjoyment. Engrossing both in the emotionally affecting story that it tells and in its evocation of character and place.

In Retrospect. Likely to be one of the must-see foreign language titles of the year, opening our eyes to a world of desperation, hope and pain.

Moon DIRECTED BY Duncan Jones STARRING Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey, Dominique McElligott

Here is a true space oddity: a low-key, British-funded sci-fi thriller produced by Sting’s wife and directed by David Bowie’s son. Having taken professional cover behind his mother’s maiden name, Duncan Jones (christened Zowie Bowie) has earned his shot at feature filmmaking via a splashy career in advertising, where he directed a kung-fu lesbian spot for French Connection which, improbably, was every bit as good as it sounds.

Moon is a thoughtful but imperfect alternative to the braindead blockbusters that dominate the summer. With an aesthetic borrowed from Dan O’Bannon’s ‘used future’, Jones conjures the ghosts – both literal and metaphorical – of Tarkovsky’s Solaris (or perhaps Soderbergh’s glossier version) in the story of a mining contractor whose three-year stint on the moon is nearing an end.

Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is an employee of Lunar Industries, a conglomerate that controls the

RELEASED July 17

extraction of ore from the surface of the moon to fulfil the earth’s energy needs. This is a convincing landscape of industrial machinery, sweat and loneliness – a knowing reaction to the shiny surfaces of 2001. Indeed, Sam’s only companion is a computer, GERTY (Kevin Spacey), whose dispassionate voice is both familiar and sinister.

And yet Moon is full of misdirection. In an atmospheric first act, Jones effectively turns our familiarity with sci-fi archetypes to his advantage, as the audience struggles to decode the film’s signals. Should we be expecting the techno-fear of 2001? The ET intruder of Alien? The space psychosis of Sunshine? This paranoid guessing game induces a creeping sense of cabin fever that mirrors Sam’s own descent into apparent madness, as a series of hallucinations leads him to question his sanity.

Jones has achieved a lot with very little. Clearly made on a shoestring, Moon is nevertheless

full of ambition. Though it would have been easier (and cheaper) to confine the action to Sam’s quarters, there are numerous excursions to the surface. And though the special effects are more Spaceballs than Star Wars, Gary Shaw’s photography provides a high-class finish, while Jones’ glossy direction betrays the early influence of Tony Scott.

If anything, the craters in this particular Moon are a result of Nathan Parker’s screenplay rather than any technical or financial limitations. A twist at the halfway mark reveals the dark secret behind Lunar Industries’ corporate philosophy, but as the threat to Sam shifts from his sanity to his life, the film loses its interior, psychological menace, and replaces it with an external threat that is too remote to sustain the dramatic tension.

Parker is also guilty of some logical gaffes (Sam’s hallucinations are a vision of somebody he could never have met) and pedestrian resolutions. The latter stages of the

film are benign and airless, failing to provide either a serious critique of a corporation unhitched from its moral bearings, or a dramatic narrative with sufficient punch.

As ever, Sam Rockwell is an engaging presence, here balancing his trademark charm with a haunted alter ego. But Kevin Spacey is a duff choice as GERTY, a piece of stunt casting that only serves to distract from the hermetic isolation of the rest of the film. Hollywood has seeped in through the airlock, but this is a defiantly British film.

It’s one we can be proud of – in moderation. Matt Bochenski

Anticipation. A British film without gangsters that’s not directed by Tony Curtis? We never thought we’d see the day.

Enjoyment. A film of two halves. The first is an excellent example of how to stretch a budget to breaking point; the second loses the plot.

In Retrospect. By no means a masterpiece, but it’d be a harsh judge who dismissed it outright.

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adaM RELEASED July 31

DIRECTED BY Max Mayer STARRING Hugh Dancy, Rose Byrne, Peter Gallagher

To be truly engaging, romantic comedies must tread a fine line between schmaltzy melodrama and acerbic sarcasm; something that very few manage successfully.

And although writer/director Max Mayer’s first film since 1998’s best forgotten Better Living doesn’t fall heavily on either side, it certainly dips a toe or two in the stream of sentimentality.

Following the death of his father, Adam (Hugh Dancy) attempts to carry on as normal in the Manhattan apartment he shared with his dad. This is made more difficult by the fact that Adam suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, and the pragmatic way in which he handles his emotions often alienates those around him. When he meets new neighbour Beth (Rose Byrne),

The FirsT day oF The resT oF your LiFe

however, Adam feels an instant connection and the pair embark on a tentative friendship that blossoms into love. But as Adam attempts to bear the weight of his new feelings while trying to find a job and win the approval of Beth’s parents, their relationship comes under threat from the realities of everyday life.

Mayer’s screenplay could easily have wandered into Movie of the Week territory; there’s nothing so transparently worthy as portraying someone who is, for whatever reason, a social misfit – let alone one who earns the sympathies

and understanding of a so-called ‘normal’ person. Fortunately, Adam never takes the path of empty sentiment, thanks largely to the strength of its two leads. Dancy and Byrne have enough charm, grace and charisma to keep the narrative moving apace, and in the right direction.

Praise, especially, should go to Dancy for his unaffected performance as Adam, a man suffering from a condition that is still misunderstood. He never allows his character to turn into a victim, and although 90-odd minutes is not nearly long enough to explore the

many emotional and psychological facets of Asperger’s, his portrayal is straightforward enough that Adam remains the focus of the film, rather than a mere sympathetic bystander. Nikki Baughan

scatterbrained Marie-Jeanne (Zabou Breitman). Younger sister Fleur (Déborah François) and younger brother Raphaël (Marc-André Grondin) are already fighting over who gets his room, while laid-back patriarch Robert (Jacques Gamblin) smokes his cigarettes and decides to truck on with his life as a taxi driver.

The film is then split into five chapters, each concentrating on a critical moment in the life of a family member: Albert’s new life away from the brood; Fleur’s sexual

disillusionment; Raphaël’s interest in the air guitar; Marie-Jeanne’s discovery of her daughter’s secret life; and Albert’s health troubles.

Admittedly, there are a few nice touches that mostly occur during the moments of quiet contemplation which bookend the stretches of hysterical soap opera. But on the down side, this structure simply allows Bezançon (who also wrote the film) to sweep any texture, subtlety and deeper reflection aside in favour of concentrating on the big, meaty

events, leaving us with a portrait of a family who only appear to experience extreme highs and extreme lows. The bottom line is that life can be harsh, but dealing with tragedy will make you stronger. A heartening outlook, but hardly original. Alan Mack

Anticipation. Autism, social acceptance and love in the face of adversity. Sounds like Oprah’s Movie of the Week.

Enjoyment. The performances of Dancy and Byrne lift the film out of the melodramatic doldrums.

In Retrospect. If Max Mayer’s intention was to make a serious film about autism, he failed. If it was to make a watchable love story, he’s done okay.

RELEASED August 21

DIRECTED BY Rémi Bezançon STARRING Jacques Gamblin, Zabou Breitman, Déborah François This uninspiring French dramady embraces cliché at every turn, relying on simplistic humour, obvious emotional cues and performances straight out of Albert Square to tell its story.

Rémi Bezançon’s film offers a peek into the lives of a dysfunctional bourgeois family unit that counteracts much of the good work done by The Royal Tenenbaums and, more recently, Arnaud Desplechin’s wonderful A Christmas Tale. We open on a scene in which eldest son Albert (Pio Marmaï) puts down the Duval family dog, resulting in a period of group mourning. He then decides to move into his own flat, much to the chagrin of his mother, the

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Anticipation. Quirky French ensemble comedies are always worth a look.

Enjoyment. Originality? Moi? In Retrospect. Oh non, non, non.

ruMba RELEASED July 31

DIRECTED BY Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, Bruno Romy STARRING Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, Philippe Martz

In an age when cinema has become increasingly homogenised, it’s a rare thing indeed to find a film that feels quite unlike anything that has come before. While Rumba certainly displays a number of influences – from the physical comedy of Jacques Tati to the colourful aesthetic of Amélie – it is a wonderfully strange and unique movie that inhabits a little world of its own.

The film’s principle directors, Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon, take the lead roles as two teachers at a country school who harbour a deep love for each other and for Latin dance. Champions on the dance circuit, their existence is close to perfection. But after crashing their car in an attempt to avoid a suicidal pedestrian, their lives take

a turn for the worse. Before long, cruel fate and the machinations of an unjust universe have unravelled the world in which they live. Will they ever rediscover paradise?

Rumba throws the audience into a universe in which dialogue is, by and large, redundant. This is a film that celebrates the joy of physicality, from the central characters’ love of dance to innumerable set pieces that are a joy to behold. One scene in particular, in which the protagonists change into their dancing gear while driving their car, stands alongside some of the best physical comedy seen in

cinemas for quite some time. And yet, in amongst the tone of optimism and wonderment that permeates the film, there’s a deliciously dark edge to proceedings that stops it drowning in mawkishness.

There is also something affecting about its personal nature.

The fact that Abel and Gordon (a real life couple) play characters named Fiona and Dom suggests a connection to the material that adds an extra level of fascination.

The cinematography is also topnotch, with a riot of colours that slowly turns darker as the situation for our heroes becomes grimmer.

Indeed, it’s easy to forget that cinema is primarily a visual language in which the simplest glance can convey a whole world of emotions.

From the moments of bravura comedy to the tightly plotted series of coincidences, Rumba is a reminder of just how powerful a medium it can be. Laurence Boyce

Anticipation. Dancing and comedy. What more do you need?

Enjoyment. An exuberant and unique treat, with the occasional dark moment.

In Retrospect. A delight from start to finish.

Lars von Trier: Chaos Reigns Interview

by Jonathan Crocker

He made Nicole Kidman cry. He made Björk hide in the woods and eat her costume. He wanted John C Reilly to kill a donkey. Now Lars von Trier is suffering.

After winning Cannes’ Technical Prize for his debut, The Element of Crime, winning the third-place Jury Prize for Europa, the second-place Grand Jury Prize for Breaking The Waves, and the gold-medal Palme d’Or for Dancer in the Dark, the Danish provocateur unleashed his hotly anticipated tenth film on the world’s biggest film festival.

And he got battered. Having watched Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg go through hardcore sex, bloody ejaculation, scissor-circumcision, strangulation and – most shocking of all – a talking fox, some aghast reviewers began bleating out one-star reviews while others attacked von Trier to his face at the press conference.

LWLies sits down with von Trier in slightly calmer surroundings. We’re under the sun at the famous Hotel Du Cap, tucked on the seafront outside the madness of Cannes. As ever, Lars is gentle, friendly, funny and disarmingly open. But he grips the arms of his chair gently as we ask about the reaction to Antichrist. “Any reactions are, of course, good,” he says, eyes cast down.

“But I have felt a hostility that I didn’t expect. It’s not pleasant when people don’t like the things you do. You know, you come to your mother with a little drawing, she says, ‘That’s wonderful!’ It means she loves you.”

It’s funny that von Trier should mention his mother. Women in his films – from Kirsten Olesen in Medea to Bryce Dallas Howard in Manderlay – have suffered lovingly and at agonising length. But no one, arguably, has been forced to go through the grinder quite like Gainsbourg. Even Björk didn’t have to frig herself off against a tree. “I think it was quite hard for Charlotte, actually,” nods von Trier. “She is a very shy person, but this was a decision she made when she read the script. A decision to be there and go all the way. Again, I’ve been gifted with a very good actress.”

How, exactly, does he find these women? “Well, she was the first one to say ‘yes’!” smiles von Trier, warmly. “We approached Eva Green and I think she wanted to do it, but her agents definitely didn’t. We wasted two months on this. It was ridiculous. I was so mad, because you can’t wait two months.

And then Charlotte came in and saved everything. It was fantastic.”

Ask the filmmaker about the scenes of extreme harshness that had audiences audibly crying out during screenings and he has a simple defence.

“I think whatever you can imagine, you can shoot,” he says. “Otherwise the medium wouldn’t make any sense, if there were limitations to it. If you can think some perversity or cruelty, yes, it’s possible to shoot it.”

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FILMOGRAPHY Lars von Trier Antichrist (2009) The Boss of it All (2006) Manderlay (2005) Dogville (2003) Dancer in the Dark (2000) The Idiots (1998) Breaking The Waves (1996) Europa (1991) Medea (1988) The Element of Crime (1984)

Even a talking fox? “No, but it’s more complicated than that,” explains von Trier. “The fox comes from these shamanic journeys that I did. You can do them without drugs and without getting on a plane. You have this drum beat that takes you into this parallel world. And there I talked to this fox and it demanded to have a line. So, what can I do?”

We’re not arguing. Since anointing himself ‘von’ at film school, the Dane has spent his eye-popping oeuvre attempting a literal rewrite of the cinematic rulebook. He’s the mischievous master of world cinema: radical (the Dogme manifesto); ironic (picking Ron Howard’s daughter as his latest violated heroine in Manderlay); dazzling (100 cameras to capture Dancer in the Dark’s musical showstoppers); fearlessly experimental (swapping sets for a Brechtian chalk floor-plan in Dogville); and contrary (letting a computer direct The Boss of it All).

Von Trier drove everyone crazy along the way. Including himself. Severe depression knocked him for six shortly after finishing – of all things – his comedy, The Boss of it All. It left the Dane unsure if he would ever make a film again. More than anything, Antichrist is a deeply expressionist realisation of von Trier’s own dark psychological journey. “The source behind it and all the words that those two characters use are from my own experience,” he reveals.

Does he think there’s a way out of the woods? “If there’s a way out...” he ponders, before trailing off. “Of course, that is what is very important: to try to trick yourself and say there’s a way out. But I’ve been trying since I was six to find a way out. The only thing I can say to people is, ‘Don’t be afraid to take pills’.” He laughs. “Yeah. Because I had four very good years on medication.

Very good years. But then it stops working, unfortunately.”

No wonder von Trier believes this is his most important film. Not for you.

For him. “I’m not referring to an audience, I’m just referring to the fact that I made a film without any fear. I wasn’t afraid of making it kitsch and bad taste and politically incorrect. I think because of this thing, this mental thing, this breakdown I had, it was not important. I suddenly had a freer access to some of the things that I’ve experienced before.”

Is Antichrist the cure? “No, I don’t think so,” he admits, again gripping the chair-arms slightly. “I don’t think so. It was very helpful for me. I had to start working, to do something.” Moviemaking as therapy? “Yes, because it’s almost a religious experience. It’s like when you put these things together, the images and the sound, and suddenly things work. It’s a fantastic feeling.

It’s sex, a little bit.” Or like being God? “Yeah, I can be God!” he laughs.

“And in this universe, I’m not afraid.”

A full transcript will be available online in the week of the film’s release.

anTiChrisT DIRECTED BY Lars von Trier STARRING Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg

The first words that appear on screen? ‘Lars von Trier’. The next?

‘Antichrist’. The biggest mistake you can make with Denmark’s bad-boy auteur is taking him too seriously.

Because he’s joking. Even when he’s deadly serious. Is Antichrist a joke?

No. And yes. Label it audacious on-screen catharsis; the worst-date movie ever; and von Trier at his most vulnerable. Written when the 53-year-old was bedridden by depression, Antichrist can only really be called shock therapy.

His ‘horror’ film (although it barely fits that genre) begins in captivating beauty. Lensed in slo-mo by DoP Anthony Dod Mantle in gleaming black-and-white to Handel’s ‘Lascia Ch’io Pianga’ (translation: ‘Leave me to weep over my cruel fate’), Antichrist’s prologue sees a couple having passionate sex as the snow tumbles outside. In another room, their two-year-old son falls to his death from an open window, landing in the street below like a broken snow angel.

RELEASED July 24

Already, von Trier is messing with us. The stunning imagery runs way too close to art-school pretension for it to be anything other than deliberate. We flash to colour and real-time: the woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) crumpled with grief; her therapist husband (Willem Dafoe) taking her to an isolated cabin in a forest called Eden. Given that von Trier breaks up his movie with chapter headings like ‘Pain’, ‘Grief ’ and ‘Despair’, you get the feeling that recuperation isn’t exactly on the cards.

Sure enough, after a measured, masterfully paced first 45 minutes, Gainsbourg rapidly goes mental – along with the movie itself. Glimpsed briefly in statuette form in the prologue, a deer, a crow and a fox all provide grisly portends of what’s to come.

“Chaos reigns,” growls the Fox. Yes, it’s a talking fox. Go figure.

Scenes of beauty continue to surface – from Dafoe’s incrediblelooking face in close-up, to

Gainsbourg willing herself to blend into the grass – before von Trier finally spins over the top and down the other side. Psycho-horror goes body-horror goes tortureporn. How bad does it get? The bludgeoning of an erect penis.

A hand-job followed by bloodspunking. Female genitals scissored in graphic close-up. A man’s leg impaled then filled with a wheel.

“Nature is Satan’s church,” spits the woman. But whatever von Trier has to say about nature, sex, women, religion or anything else gets lost in his violently provocative images. We get no answers from the oddball coda. By now, Antichrist has revealed itself as anti-everything: anti-commercial, anti-critical, antihorror, anti-arthouse.

But it’s hard to think of another filmmaker who’s feverishly attempted to express his own psychological traumas with such outrageous abandon. Chaos reigns, indeed, as the mysterious violence of human nature destroys Dafoe’s

naïve attempts to calmly reason through his wife’s distress with psychobabble.

The 53-year-old Danish auteur calls it “the most important film of my career.” Powerful, daring and fractured, if Antichrist is the most serious deadpan joke ever told, it’s a self-deprecating one too. It’s thrilling to see that von Trier’s vicious sense of mischief, his moviemaking skill and his desire to smash limits and expectations all remain undimmed.

However you swallow it, this bizarre, hysterical melodrama is impossible to ignore. And the vision of von Trier sitting in bed writing it is impossible to resist. Jonathan Crocker

Anticipation. Von Trier does horror? Wow. But the trailer looked dull.

Enjoyment. The trailer left out the talking fox, the hardcore sex and the circumcision.

In Retrospect. Crazy but irresistible. Confirms von Trier as the mad master-imp of world cinema.

075

Home DIRECTED BY Ursula Meier STARRING Isabelle Huppert, Olivier Gourmet, Adélaïde Leroux

Ursula Meier has achieved a remarkable feat with Home, her feature debut. Not only has she scooped the star power of Isabelle Huppert in the lead, she actually gets her glacial Gallic leading lady to smile for a few scenes.

And it’s not just the casting that’s a novelty (even if the initially cheery Huppert does unravel into almost obligatory neurotic meltdown); Home is a forensic, quasi-surrealist but unfailingly entertaining examination of contemporary Western family dynamics.

Huppert’s Marthe lives blissfully with her husband Michel (played with great sensitivity by Dardennes regular Olivier Gourmet) and three children in a remote house, surrounded by empty fields but pitched ominously beside the dead-end of a motorway. They play hockey together, eat together, laugh (a little manically) together and, being French, unabashedly wander around naked and bathe together. The claustrophobic, unsustainable nature of this

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RELEASED August 7

closeness is thrown into stark relief when the long-threatened extension of the local ‘autoroute’ arrives, literally, on their doorstep, along with all the accompanying detritus and pollution of urban progress.

Initially, the family attempts to muddle through regardless of the high-speed traffic now cutting through their existence, resulting in a wealth of playful, startling images. Eldest daughter Justine (Adélaïde Leroux) continues her sole occupation of sunbathing in little more than bovver-boots on the newly exposed front lawn; meanwhile her younger siblings totter to school over newly laid tarmac, negotiating traffic and sticky surfaces in Wellington boots, resembling a pair of baby storks.

The film’s strength, and its charm, lies in how the themes explored – fear of change, atomisation of family, contemporary (man-made) neuroses, the irresistible tide of urbanisation – are thoroughly

and lovingly enwrapped in humour and imagery. Not only that, but Meier and her co-writers shore up the progressively dark Ballardian vision with a cast of entirely believable, sympathetic characters. Marion (Madeleine Budd), for example, as the geeky middle child – ill-at-ease with her body and in the shadow of her exhibitionist older sister – sets about transmitting her obsessive preoccupation with the health implications of this motor-invasion to Julien (Kacey Mottet Klein), her baby brother and human guinea pig. Marion enlists Julien to sample the grass for pollutants and helpfully circles spots on his back which she diagnoses as markers of lead poisoning.

Home is filled with touches like these, giving it the air of a watchable, idiosyncratic family drama, rather than the cold, cerebral exercise it might have become in another filmmaker’s hands. Like last year’s excellent but more forbidding Private Property,

which also starred Huppert, a pinhole focus on the family home and its immediate surroundings creates all the suffocation and distorted sense of perspective of a great stage tragedy. Yet Meier spins it off on a more surrealist bent – certainly owing a debt to the likes of David Lynch and some great French forbears, including Jacques Tati, making Home ripe ground for metaphors: about the road (Meier describes it as ‘a road movie in reverse’), fleeing the nest and the post-lapsarian state of modern life, to name a few. Pretty nifty for a first feature, then. Sophie Ivan

Anticipation. The presence of icy aristocracy in the form of Isabelle Huppert demands our attention.

Enjoyment. Visually inventive, darkly comic, superbly acted – there’s no catch when it comes to Meier’s first film.

In Retrospect. Prepare for this one to be rattling around the grey matter long after leaving the cinema. An auteur is born.

kaTaLin varga RELEASED July 24

DIRECTED BY Peter Strickland STARRING Hilda Péter, Tibor Pálffy, Norbert Tankó

The story that accompanies the making of Katalin Varga is almost as remarkable as the film itself. A former fine art student whose Sonic Catering Band, formed with various friends from Reading, toured throughout Europe, Peter Strickland became fascinated by cinema after viewing David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Honing his skills at Reading’s amateur Progress Theatre and working across various disciplines, Strickland’s ambition to write and direct his own feature came to fruition when his uncle died, leaving him a small inheritance. Assembling a skeleton crew, Strickland set off on what would become an intense and often precipitous labour of love.

Shot on location in Transylvania over a four-year period for under l30,000, Strickland then undertook exhaustive efforts to raise interest in an 82-minute rough cut that he touted around numerous European festivals. Despite his efforts, there wasn’t a flicker of interest until Romanian producer Oana Giurgiu – who had rejected another script

idea that Strickland had pitched her – asked to see the screener.

Recognising the raw but obvious intensity, Giurgiu persuaded her husband, Tudor Giurgiu of Bucharest’s Libra Film, to board the project as a co-producer.

Subsequent to significant sound, colour and editing refinements made in post-production, Katalin Varga had its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival 18 months later.

Banished by her husband and her village after an incident in her past is revealed, Katalin Varga (Hilda Péter) is left with no other choice than to set out on a quest to find the real father of her son, Orbán. Taking Orbán with her under another pretence, Katalin travels through the Carpathians where she decides to reopen a sinister chapter from her past and take revenge. This quest leads her to a place she prayed she would never set foot in again.

There is nothing particularly original about Strickland’s plot, which has its roots in the road and

revenge movie genres. There are even – arguably – parallels with notorious ’80s ‘video nasty’ I Spit On Your Grave (now considered, somewhat spuriously, to have feminist overtones). The director cites more highbrow touchstones in Night of the Hunter and Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors. Indeed, one of the first things that sets Katalin Varga apart is its ambiguity towards the assailant its protagonist finally confronts.

Brilliantly portrayed by Tibor Pálffy (allegedly cast because Strickland liked his moustache), what is revealed is a changed and gentle man, openly regretful of his past conduct. This three-dimensional portrait has caused consternation in some quarters, but in presenting a point of view alternative to that of the victim, Strickland has achieved an audacious masterstroke.

Making superlative use of his locations and mindful of cameraman Mark Gyõri’s assertion that he’d have to be totally incompetent not to make a film

that was beautiful to look at given his surroundings, Strickland’s admiration for Lynch is perhaps most evident in the striking use of sound and music, qualities for which the film won a Berlin Silver Bear. Working intuitively and often making little distinction between music and sound design (a lot of songs feature but are mixed in such a way as to sound like field recordings), Strickland and composers Steven Stapleton and Geoff Cox ensure that the film is as remarkable to listen to as it is to view. This is a potent and powerful work, and Strickland is undeniably one of the discoveries of the year. Jason Wood

Anticipation. A film that comes with a fascinating back-story – and the Berlin Film Festival reception was rapturous.

Enjoyment. For a first feature, the atmosphere and execution is nothing short of remarkable.

In Retrospect. From the very first frame, Katalin Varga commands your absolute attention.

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The Taking oF PeLhaM 123 DIRECTED BY Tony Scott STARRING John Travolta, Denzel Washington, John Turturro RELEASED July 24

Juvenile, hyperactive, obstreperous and obnoxious – there can be no mistaking who’s responsible for this macho re-make of John Sargent’s 1974 thriller.

John Travolta retreads the tired bad guy persona he adopted in Broken Arrow, Face/Off and Swordfish as Ryder, a disaffected New Yorker who hijacks a subway carriage and demands a $10 million ransom. Denzel Washington is transport official Walter Garber, ‘just a guy on the other end of the mic’, and the man assigned to handle the crisis.

Couched in the language of terrorism and unscrupulous bankers, there are several strong ideas in Brian Helgeland’s screenplay (how a political machine responds to disaster; Garber’s murky past), but

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none of them really go anywhere.

And when your plot pivots on the stock market plummeting below 12,000 points, you know your film has been embarrassingly outpaced by real life.

Perhaps that’s why Tony Scott shoots everything in nauseainducing blur-o-vision – he’s scared that if you’re actually able to focus on the details, the whole film will disappear down a giant plot hole.

So Scott’s signature style is ramped up by a factor of 10, until you feel like you’re having your eyeballs tortured by a satanic sadist.

This is a tense, talky drama shot by a man whose films only know how to shout. It’s almost as if the 65-year-old director is desperate to prove he can still kick it with the Crank generation. But

where a film like Crank embraces an authentically edgy style of videogame-era modernism, Pelham is wedded to an old-fashioned machismo and ersatz grit.

What’s strange is that both Washington and Travolta – who are both as bad as they’ve ever been – have made better versions of this film before: Washington in John Q; Travolta in Mad City.

Those were films that tried to say something real about the dehumanising effects of the modern metropolis, and the cynical manipulations of the media or politicians. In Pelham, cynicism flows from the filmmaker, who, in a final freeze-frame, offers us a vision of heroism for hire that endorses the very hypocrisy Garber purports to oppose.

After Man on Fire, Déjà Vu and now this, it’s time for Denzel Washington to unhitch himself from Scott before he does any more damage to his reputation as an authentic A-list movie star.

The title of their next project doesn’t bode well, however. It’s about a freight train speeding out of control.

It’s called Unstoppable. Matt Bochenski

Anticipation. Denzel Washington is one of the most charismatic movie stars around. Tony Scott is a hack.

Enjoyment. Actually painful to sit through at times thanks to Scott’s penchant for permanently pirouetting cameras.

In Retrospect. A career low for everybody involved. Except Travolta.

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Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Where the Wild Things Are)

FroZen river RELEASED July 17

DIRECTED BY Courtney Hunt STARRING Melissa Leo, Misty Upham, Charlie McDermott

Writer/director Courtney Hunt has been quietly critical of the mainstream film industry’s glamorisation of blue-collar America. We need only recall the ball-busting, cleavage-wielding antics of Erin Brockovich to see why.

In her timely debut feature, Frozen River, Hunt puts her money where her mouth is, and muddies the filmic romance of American poverty with an arctic, washed out cinéma vérité.

The film begins with Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo), a gambling addict who has been abandoned by her husband, finding herself destitute and unable to feed her two sons. While trying to track down her absent spouse she encounters Lila Littlewolf (Misty Upham), a young Native American woman who introduces her to a criminal underworld of

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smuggling immigrants from Canada across a frozen expanse of the St Lawrence river within the Mohawk reservation. Unsurprisingly, the stakes are as high as the financial rewards that fuel Ray’s desperate involvement, and it isn’t long before Ray and Lila’s plans go awry.

Frozen River scooped the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2008, where jury member Quentin Tarantino excitedly described the film as “a wonderful depiction of America.” His praise was echoed at the Independent Spirit Awards, which acknowledged the film’s importance with a Best Female Lead win for Leo, and a Best First Screenplay gong for Hunt. That this low-budget indie has garnered such critical attention – catapulting Leo from relative obscurity to dazzling

limelight in the process – is no surprise, but it ironically embodies the very romance of the American Dream that the film so successfully interrogates.

And one can’t help but wonder how crucial the timing of Frozen River has been to its success.

Certainly, the particular resonance the film has had for audiences across the globe cannot be separated from a timely concurrence with America’s economic meltdown. This was a historic moment in which the escapist gloss of an Erin Brockovich would have seemed misplaced.

Unlike the flawless outline of Julia Roberts in her prime, the face of Melissa Leo’s Ray is a fabric on which hardship, disappointment and tenacity have weaved their brutal contours.

Yet it seems reductive and ungenerous to consign the film’s power to serendipity alone, or to limit its scope to an unflinching exposition of breadline poverty.

Frozen River is also a taut, suspenseful thriller, a troubling of borders both cultural and national, and testament to the virtues of communion, empathy and compassion. Emma Paterson

Anticipation. The dark horse of last year’s awards season – you’ll want to know what all the fuss is about.

Enjoyment. An ‘issue film’, yes, but also an edge-of-the-seat thriller with two women at the wheel.

In Retrospect. Given the current political context, no doubt this will be hard to forget.

eMbodiMenT oF eviL

RELEASED July 4 DIRECTED BY José Mojica Marins STARRING José Mojica Marins, Rui Resende, Jece Valadão

Prolific filmmaker and master of the macabre, José Mojica Marins, has directed across numerous genres throughout his exhaustive career but truly came into his element with horror. The actor/ writer/director single-handedly created a brand new sub-genre in his native Brazil with a weird and wonderful concoction of Gothic horror, expressionism, surrealism and bloody barbarism.

With a personal life that’s just as strange as his movies, Marins became something of a sensation during the ’60s (he had his own TV show, comic book and shampoo, released a samba album, was thrown in jail and ran for congress in 1982 with the slogan, ‘A strange man for strange times’). With his 1964 cult classic, At Midnight I’ll

Take Your Soul, Marins introduced the world to his most famous creation, Coffin Joe, an evil gravedigger hell-bent on finding a suitable female to bear him a son. A Coffin Joe sequel appeared soon after in the form of This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse in 1967, and now, some 40 years later, the belated Coffin Joe trilogy is brought to a close with the final instalment, Embodiment Of Evil.

After serving a four-decade term for kidnapping, torture and murder, Coffin Joe (played by Marins himself) is released back into civilisation, and with the aid of a new assemblage of helpers and his faithful servant Bruno (Rui Resende), Joe resumes his quest to find the perfect mother for his unborn child. While haunted by

ghostly visions of those he has killed in the past, Coffin Joe must also battle a new enemy back on the streets of Sao Paulo. And this time, the crazed killer may finally have met his match.

Describing the exact workings of Marins’ film is ultimately futile, though it’s safe to say that torture, mutilation and cannibalism fuel the brutal and bizarre Embodiment Of Evil, with the director unleashing his unique brand of hallucinatory horror complete with striking visuals, Nietzschean philosophy and female nudity.

Of course, it’s all in a day’s work for Marins, who has been titillating fans with his radical style for decades, though newcomers may find the dizzying and graphic

spectacle a little too much to stomach. Dedicated followers of the director’s work will relish this relatively lavish onscreen insanity, while there’s little doubt that Embodiment Of Evil provides a sick and satisfying conclusion to the Coffin Joe trilogy, courtesy of a true idiosyncratic visionary. Lee Griffiths

Anticipation. It’s been a long, long wait for the third Coffin Joe instalment. For horror fans, this is something close to a Holy Grail.

Enjoyment. A hallucinatory nightmare updated to include splashy and colourful visuals courtesy of a much improved budget.

In Retrospect. Marins has not gone quietly into the night. This is a radical filmmaker’s satisfyingly blood-drenched swansong.

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Feminist or Fiction: Anne Fontaine and Alessandro Nivola defend the honour of France’s national treasure Words by Monisha Rajesh ‘She was shrewd, chic and on the cutting edge. The clothes she created changed the way women looked and how they looked at themselves.’ So claimed Time magazine in a 1998 issue detailing their ‘100 Most Important People of the Century’. And that’s not the only reason Coco Chanel attracts such acclaim. Rumour has it that the suntan came into fashion after Coco returned from the Riviera one summer, bronzed and beautiful, causing pasty Parisians to come out from under their parasols. And bright red nails? They were Coco’s idea too. But why all this praise for a ‘feminist’ who simply used men to clamber her way to the top?

Anne Fontaine, director of Coco Avant Chanel, explains: “Coco was the precursor to the contemporary, modern woman. She created a style that liberated and pushed women to work, and to become responsible for their own destinies. She established a style of living that was important for women to progress in society.”

Just how Coco’s early ‘style of living’ encouraged women to progress is questionable. Fontaine’s film focuses largely upon the time Coco spent as a courtesan in the home of millionaire playboy Étienne Balsan. After a failed career attempting a sister act in cabaret, Coco found little more than fluff in her pockets and arrived unannounced and uninvited at Balsan’s manor, making herself very much at home. Leeching off his wealth, his connections and his wardrobe, the cheeky minx paid her dues by allowing him to collapse drunkenly upon her after parties, or by singing to his guests as they giggled and whooped. Even after he packed her bags, frogmarched her to a horse and carriage and sent her on her way, she pulled the reigns, jumped out and ran back into the house. Without the fatherly compassion of Balsan, Coco’s destiny would have taken a lot longer to fulfil. If only it were so simple for modern day women to fleece a wealthy older man. Oh, wait…

With trademark Gallic resistance, Fontaine argues, “She was a courtesan, a poor girl who used the weapons that she had in front of her to achieve her goal. She had no moral problem with that; it was a need for survival. She was an autodidact and cunning, and she knew how to use men to serve her ends.” But the point still remains that Coco was largely dependent on the kindness of men to further herself in life, and the idea that she freed women from more than just their corsets is a little blurry-edged.

To give credit where it’s due, she did play an enormous role in refusing to conform to the expectations of the feather-wearing ladies of the 1920s.

Initial mockery soon gave way to reluctant admiration for Coco’s sharp wit and focused mind, which never allowed her to give up on her dreams.

In an interview given to The Washington Post, Andrew Bolton, curator of a

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FILMOGRAPHY Anne Fontaine Coco Avant Chanel (2009) The Girl From Monaco (2008) Nouvelle Chance (2006) Entre Ses Mains (2005) Nathalie... (2003) How I Killed My Father (2001) Agustin, King of Kung-Fu (1999) Dry Cleaning (1997) Agustin (1995) Love Affairs Usually End Badly (1993)

Chanel exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in 2005, said: “She certainly was an independent, professional woman. She lived life as a feminist, but she built her business on affairs she had with men. She was financially independent after originally borrowing from her lover.”

Although Coco took many a lover throughout her life, the one who is said to have cracked through her steel walls was an Englishman, Arthur ‘Boy’ Capel, an ambiguous character who was able to see in Coco a substance that nobody else could. Sceptics might say that Capel fell under Coco’s charms like the rest of her male companions, but Capel was also a self-made man who only wanted to give Coco the same opportunity to invent herself that he had. Alessandro Nivola, who plays Capel in the film, says: “From a practical point of view, Boy Capel was the one who helped her become a liberated woman, and without his money she would have been forced to marry some rich guy if she was going to try and live in Paris and have a career. It was really just because he offered to finance her hat business and put her up in Paris that she was able to do that.” So for argument’s sake, let’s just say that he gave her a head start.

Nivola adds: “I think the moment where she truly is liberated is when she says to both Capel and Balsan, ‘I’m not marrying either of you.’ And that’s before Capel has offered to pay for her. She’s had dalliances with both of them and like her sister she had hoped that this millionaire could help move her career on, but she decides she doesn’t actually want any of it and is going to finance her way and get there somehow. There was much more of a struggle back then,” he continues. “It was a world where the only way you could move along as a woman was by trying to court the affection of aristocrats along the way.”

Although Coco may not have made any groundbreaking discoveries when it came to using her feminine wiles, she was light years ahead of her time. Clothes became looser, slim-lined and simple. She focused on freedom in androgynous clothing that allowed women to subconsciously slip into male roles with greater ease and practicality, and her work was a mould for many modern designers.

With both Coco Avant Chanel and Jan Kounen’s Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky released this year, don’t expect either film to contain the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about France’s national treasure.

Perhaps Justine Picardie’s biography, due out later in the year, may be a tad closer to the real Coco. Hell, she may even be daring enough to touch upon Coco’s arrest for war crimes and subsequent exile from France as a Nazi collaborator. But that’s another story…

COCO AVANT CHANEL DIRECTED BY Anne Fontaine STARRING Audrey Tautou, Benoît Poelvoorde, Alessandro Nivola

If you’re looking for a glitzy montage-infused movie of handbags and gladrags, then walk away now.

This is not the story of Mademoiselle Chanel, but the story of Coco. And the two are very different indeed.

As a motherless child, Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel (Audrey Tautou) lived in an orphanage with her sister Adrienne. Convinced that their father would come to visit, she scoured the groups of parents arriving at weekends, turning forlornly away when he failed to appear. Her heart, broken by the first man to feature in her life, was put in cold storage – never to be thawed.

Throughout her research, director Anne Fontaine foraged through copious amounts of material, determined to stay

RELEASED July 31

as true to Coco as possible. It’s clear from the outset that she’s succeeded in tapping into the wilful spirit of the little lady with the huge personality. There’s an undeniable box-office benefit in choosing Audrey Tautou in the lead, but as time passes, Tautou morphs into the Mademoiselle.

Gone is the doll-faced charm of her previous roles, replaced by a harder, tougher actress. Her make-up free complexion and unplucked eyebrows endow her with a cold, icy countenance. And yet naughtiness still dances in the centre of her black eyes – the lethal combination that was Coco to a tee.

Constantly trying to break free from constraints, Coco is filmed in tight shots, echoing the oppressive nature of the society

and surroundings that just didn’t suit her. But oh, to live in an age of horse-riding, picnicking and running blindfolded through mansions giggling, all while looking pretty. In one telling scene, Coco rips open a tight, constraining corset, declaring that women need room to breathe – the birth of her motto on life.

The beauty of Fontaine’s film is the way in which she tells her tale of Coco, bridging the bits we know and love with the bits we know nothing about: we find out how she became ‘Coco’; from where the little black dress took its inspiration; how she stumbled across tweed; and when the first handbag came to life.

Lovely though this all is, if Fontaine snipped away a good 40 minutes, then so much the better. Between the grubby days

of Coco’s youth, to the suited chic ciggie-smoking days in her Paris boudoir, it’s hard to recollect what actually happens – but it’s most definitely tedious.

Beginning as the touching tale of an orphan shackled by poverty yet determined to leave the provinces for Paris, this is an epic story that gradually develops into a beautiful and beguiling homage to the first lady of fashion. Monisha Rajesh

Anticipation. There are so many films and documentaries on this woman, but there must be a reason.

Enjoyment. Tautou holds up the grand dame when others would stumble at the first hurdle.

In Retrospect. Long, but an honest, warm and funny portrayal of a great gal.

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eChoes oF hoMe RELEASED July 10

DIRECTED BY Stefan Schwietert STARRING Erika Stucky, Noldi Alder, Christian Zehnder

There is no sound, apart perhaps from the distinctive chime of the cuckoo clock, that evokes Switzerland quite like a yodel – the ululating reverberation of the human voice against Alpine nature that sets the hills alive with the sound of music. Yet for those who dismiss the yodel as an obsolete and ossified cultural form, along comes Stefan Schwietert’s Echoes Of Home to show that there’s new life being breathed into this ancient brand of singing.

Instead of presenting a stuffy musicological history, Schwietert follows three singers who, in their different ways, adapt the yodelling tradition to express their own sense of individual identity. As a child, Christian Zehnder used to believe

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that yodelling was “just awful”, but now sees it as a non-verbal way to communicate who he is and where he comes from – even if he likes mixing it up with jazz intonations and Tuvan throat singing to create a hybrid idiolect that resonates with his own personality.

Born in the US to Swiss parents, Erika Stucky incorporates yodelling, along with all manner of other cultural influences, into her bilingual, multimedia performance art, in part as an attempt to reconcile the exuberant American and conservative Swiss that she claims are at constant war within her.

Noldi Alder was born in Appenzellerland, the rural heartland of yodelling, to a multi-generational

family of renowned singers, but if he, with his haunting ‘Zäuerli’ (or slow plaints), comes closest of the three singers to the essence of yodelling, his breaches with tradition have still created palpable frictions with his father.

By letting these musical innovators speak (and sing) for themselves, and by filming them in both mountainscapes and more modern performance spaces, Schwietert shows a nation that is, for all its historical roots, multifaceted and ever-changing, so that something as primal as a yodel can also be truly modern. Their performances are intercut with file footage, home videos and family photos, creating a mannered film language that, like the music it

documents, links the present to the past in a series of echoes.

The only fault here is budgetary.

Just as the Swiss mountains require a big, echoing voice to fill them, they also demand a wide lens to capture their scale – but the digital equipment used here is simply no match for these landscapes, all but ruining several potentially sublime scenes with artifacting and distortion. Anton Bitel

Anticipation. A yodelling triptych? Talk about niche.

Enjoyment. Sounds great, but deserves to look better.

In Retrospect. Universal truths about identity are successfully located in the parochial.

Mid-augusT LunCh RELEASED August 14

DIRECTED BY Gianni Di Gregorio STARRING Gianni Di Gregorio, Valeria De Franciscis, Marina Cacciotti

As single joke movies go, this droll, happy-go-lucky miniature from writer/director/actor Gianni Di Gregorio is easily one of the better ones. The joke is an oldie but a goodie, essentially suggesting that we mature from children to adulthood until, in our twilight years, those ingrained impulses from our formative years return to see us through to death.

Di Gregorio makes for a charming lead as Giovanni, a good-natured though directionless middle-aged man who enjoys a tipple whenever he can get one.

He lives with and tends to his beloved, liver-spot dappled mother in their pokey apartment in Rome,

exploiting his tragic situation in order to get out of paying rent.

He is one day confronted by the superintendent, who offers him a proposition: if Giovanni will watch over his mother for the midAugust Ferragosto holiday, then he would be willing to overlook those long-due payments.

Giovanni accepts. Then he’s saddled with an extra aunt. And then the doctor arrives, and someone needs to look after his mother too. From then on it’s virtually a babysitting movie, albeit

an amusing and lively one, with Giovanni charged with cooking meals, putting the women to bed, tending to their dietary and medical needs as well as lifting them out of their sporadic strops.

It’s a difficult film to dislike, but there is a nagging feeling that it could have been even better. Di Gregorio’s choice to play for laughs and have his own character as a broadly comedic eye-rolling overseer means that there’s no moment of realisation or emotional pay-off, however subtle, to suggest that this experience

has affected him at all. The direction, too, is a little erratic, with some shots beautifully framed and lit, and others very murky and needlessly ambling. Alan Mack

he’s no household name, but Paul still accrued a vast collection of hits, while his continued performances to this day prove that he remains very much in demand. Even a chat with Kenny Gamble, the author of many of Paul’s top tracks, fails to enlighten.

Based on a muddy argument it may be, but Olsson’s documentary manages some rock-out moments anyway. Paul is a sprightly, cheeky charmer, shamelessly stripping off layers in the heat of a musical

moment, while wife Blanche is a hoot, testing hip-hop hats on her grizzled hubby like a fussy mother hen.

Visually it’s top dollar, too – Olsson matching Paul’s husky crooning to moody urban landscapes.

But the director can’t resist jamming the breaks whenever Paul takes up a mic, turning his opus into a live greatest hits recording that totally sacrifices pacing. Shame, because Paul is worth more – his past encounters with drugs and the

KKK are grazed in song-supporting montages, but Olsson is reticent about grilling for the goods. So: black enough? Mm-hmm. Brave enough? Not quite. Josh Winning

Anticipation. Won the Satyajit Ray Award at last year’s London Film Festival, if that means anything to you.

Enjoyment. Very sweet indeed. Provides mild giggles a-plenty.

In Retrospect. A little too light and loose for its own good.

aM i bLaCk enough For you?

DIRECTED BY Göran Olsson STARRING Billy Paul, Blanche Paul, Kenny Gamble

RELEASED July 3

“I’m not telling you who Mrs Jones is,” winks ’70s soul star Billy Paul. “’Cos she ain’t my wife.”

Perched in the back of his limo, the bespectacled, baseball capwearing pensioner is referring to ‘Me and Mrs Jones’, the adulterythemed debut single that rocketed him to stardom in 1972. But when Philadelphia International Records insisted on ‘Am I Black Enough For You?’ as a follow-up, the backlash was immediate.

Why? Well, Swedish director Göran Olsson never really explains.

Chasing after Paul as he tours Brazil and Paris with his manager/wife Blanche, there are discussions of racism, and we’re repeatedly told what a ‘career-killing’ mistake the single was. Except it wasn’t. Sure,

Anticipation. A documentary about the dude who sang ‘Me and Mrs Jones’? Could be good.

Enjoyment. That’s a pretty natty set of pipes.

In Retrospect. The old fella’s still got it, but you’ll wish you knew more about him.

085

ingLourious basTerds RELEASED August 21

Inglourious Basterds starts with the best scene Tarantino has written since Dennis Hopper told Christopher Walken he’s an egg-plant in True Romance. Whisking volatile comedy with powderkeg violence, it’s as good as it gets. And it never gets that good again.

Unfolding in German, French and English, the terrific opening sees the villainous ‘Jew Hunter’, Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), murder a Jewish family hiding in a French farm. But one girl (Mélanie Laurent) escapes, growing up to run a Paris cinema where she hatches a plot to kill Hitler and the Reich’s top brass when they attend a movie premiere.

What we have here, then, is QT gleefully harnessing film’s power to rewrite history. Meanwhile, Michael Fassbender’s British agent (a film critic by training) gets orders from an unrecognisable Mike Myers to hook up with German actresscum-spy Diane Kruger to take out

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DIRECTED BY Quentin Tarantino STARRING Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz

Hitler himself. Once again, it’s tough-grrls who are the real heroes in QT’s world of violent men. And Kruger provides the trademark foot fetishism.

So where, exactly, are the Basterds in all this? Well, quite.

After Brad Pitt’s redneck halfApache leader Aldo Raine demands his squad of JewishAmerican soldiers each bring him 100 Nazi scalps, they barely feature. After fearsome introductions, infamous Nazi-killing German Til Schweiger doesn’t say a word in the film, and blanketyblank Eli Roth leaves you wishing they’d cast a proper actor as the infamous ‘Bear Jew’. Woody Allen would’ve been good.

QT’s war opus is topped and tailed by shocking massacres, but in between, the violence erupts only in short, bloody blasts. The devil is in the dialogue. Tarantino’s best action set-pieces are all verbal: the farmhouse scene, a tavern drinking

game in which an SS officer grows suspicious of Fassbender’s German accent, and, basically, every time Landa opens his mouth.

Nothing in the entire movie is as funny, frightening or sophisticated as Christoph Waltz’s unforgettable performance. All silken menace veiling sociopathic derangement, he’s full of tiny intricacies that don’t come from the script – whether carefully undoing the fastenings on a notebook, or eating apple strudel (“Ah, ah! Wait for ze cream…”).

Trouble is, the rest of Basterds drags on and on and on. Over the last decade, Tarantino’s movies have become less frequent and more indulgent. Now it’s got to the point where he repeats long dialogue scenes until you’re tired of hearing people talk. Inglourious Basterds ran very baggy at its Cannes cut of two hours and 41 minutes. It’s no exaggeration to say that an hour could have been hacked away like a Nazi scalp.

Tarantino has been wrestling with the script for more than a decade and he still hasn’t nailed it.

He even hauls in Samuel L Jackson to interject several voiceoverinterludes when he runs out of ideas for how to tell the story.

By the bizarre, blazing sadomassacre of a finale, QT has let loose completely: flashes of cinegenius curdle with crude, crazy juvenility, although it doesn’t stop this being his most purely enjoyable film since Kill Bill: Vol. 1. The banana-chinned supergeek himself obviously likes it – just wait for the last line. Jonathan Crocker

Anticipation. Can QT be trusted with one of the most painful episodes in history?

Enjoyment. Amazing whenever the Jew Hunter is on screen. Wait, is this movie still running?

In Retrospect. Too long and too full of itself, but saved by one genius performance and some hot flashes of classic QT dialogue.

35 shoTs oF ruM DIRECTED BY Claire Denis STARRING Alex Descas, Mati Diop, Nicole Dogué

Inspired by the stories of her Brazilian grandfather that Claire Denis heard as a child, 35 Shots of Rum is the film that the director claims to have always wanted to make. An attempt to interpret the man who raised her mother alone, the film began to take greater shape after Denis attended an Ozu season with her mother in Paris and recognised in the Japanese master’s work the unique articulation of feelings among family members, both present and absent. The result of these endeavours is a film that stands comfortably alongside 1999’s Beau Travail as one of Denis’ greatest achievements.

A father, Lionel (Alex Descas) and daughter, Joséphine (Mati Diop), live lovingly together in a grey apartment building in a drab suburb of Paris. Two neighbours frequently intrude – one has romantic designs on the father, the other (impossibly handsome Denis regular Grégoire Colin), has eyes for the young

RELEASED July 10

daughter. A train driver on Paris’ rapid-transit rail network, Lionel has been raising Joséphine alone ever since she was a little girl. Though the retirement of a fellow driver provides a fleeting distraction, little by little Lionel begins to realise that life is passing by and that the time to leave each other is perhaps approaching.

A former assistant to Jacques Rivette, Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch, who has since her 1988 debut with Chocolat established herself as one of the greatest voices in contemporary French cinema, Denis delicately captures the reassuring waves of Lionel and Joséphine’s everyday lives and beautifully depicts the subtle shifts in their delicately entwined relations.

The sense that father and daughter have outgrown each other is revealed in increments, with the film building to an agonisingly poignant conclusion following an excursion to Lubeck; the final resting place of Joséphine’s mother.

Taking its title from an old Caribbean drinking legend, 35 Shots of Rum is steadfast in its refusal to lapse into sentimentality.

The central relationship aside, this is never clearer than when Denis is dealing with the retirement of Lionel’s co-worker, René (Julieth Mars Toussaint). Unable to adjust to a life without the bonhomie of work, and finding himself robbed of the comfort of ritual, the man takes his own life, committing suicide on the tracks that for so long provided him with his living.

Alex Descas is mesmeric in the sixth film that he and Denis have made together. Expressing emotion with a subdued, silent and yet unfailing intensity, Descas is also by turns fragile and resolute. The film begins with Lionel and his daughter reunited in their flat together after a day of work. The intimacy between the pair is such that it appears as if they are a couple. Descas’ great skill is to subtly exercise the paternal link

and dispel this initial ambiguity.

The collaborative thread is present elsewhere. A treat to look at, the film’s crisp, winter visuals and flowing camerawork are courtesy of Denis’ regular cinematographer, Agnès Godard.

Continuing a relationship that goes back to 1996’s Nénette et Boni, the simple but extremely effective score is courtesy of Stuart Staples of Tindersticks. As ever with Denis, the use of music is exemplary. An exhilarating sequence in which Lionel enjoys a romantic dance to ‘Night Shift’ by The Commodores sends genuine shivers down the spine. Jason Wood

Anticipation. The films of Claire Denis are always beautifully realised.

Enjoyment. Establishes an intense fascination for its characters that it never for a second loses.

In Retrospect. Perhaps the pinnacle of an estimable and consistently stimulating career.

087

CLoud 9 RELEASED July 10

DIRECTED BY Andreas Dresen STARRING Ursula Werner, Horst Rehberg, Horst Westphal

‘You’re as young as the man you feel,’ the line goes. Which makes Inge (Ursula Werner) an astonishingly virile 76-year-old.

Snared in her post-retirement routine, toiling in a suffocating blanket of iron steam and sewing chores, Inge (actually in her late sixties) has been married for 30 years, and her misery is tangible.

Then she meets Karl (Horst Westphal), the 76-year-old in question, and the two recognise in each other a mirrored loneliness.

You can almost hear Barry White humming from beyond the grave.

And before you’ve taken a breath, there’s the sex. In Cloud 9’s frankly shocking pre-credit five minutes, Inge and Karl engage in a staggeringly graphic display of geriatric gymnastics. He strokes her cheek with liver-spotted hands, they kiss awkwardly, he gets between her naked thighs…

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If you’ve turned green already, chances are you won’t survive these opening moments.

But that would be doing Cloud 9 a disservice. Yes, the in-your-face, fleshy fornication is at first galling – almost hysterically so. Do we laugh at this? Is it comedy? Horror? But German director Andreas Dresen is from the Mike Leigh school of thought. Nudity itself is only fleetingly provocative, and with Cloud 9, Dresen is more interested in a probing – and, yes, explicit – exploration of lives that are meant to be winding down. Together, Inge and husband Werner (Horst Rehberg) have raised children and made a home – they have done everything that society expects – but have they truly lived?

Sound like a drag? Well, Dresen saves proceedings from the doldrums by exploring the fertile, complex age issues with fascination.

Like Leigh, he is a director interested in people and their unique internal/external worlds.

Filming in a loose, documentary style, his natural lighting hides none of the ravages of time, and long, unforgiving takes force us to inhabit the world of our elderly romantics absolutely. When Inge stands before a full length mirror, naked as the day she was born, tentatively searching her ageing folds, we’re right there with her – morbidly fascinated and repulsed, as she is.

This isn’t just softcore porn for the over seventies; Dresen is visibly peeling back the layers of society’s older patrons, exposing their hopes and fears through the heightened dramatics of a love story. As our technology-obsessed era closes in around them – wind turbines obscure their country jaunts, planes power overhead – just where do our arthritic trio belong?

Sadly, melodrama threatens to unbalance the second half of this carefully constructed opus when, inevitably, the romantic tryst is exposed. But if the only argument against the dramatic developments is that Ursula Werner’s hysterical sobbing is too real, too harrowing, you know you’re clutching at knitting needles.

Quirky observations, jokes about old age (failed erections and female masturbation among them) and some neat visual tricks make Cloud 9 a surprisingly poignant experience.

You’ll never look at your granddad the same way again. Josh Winning

Anticipation. German OAPorn? Gulp!

Enjoyment. By turns fascinating and repulsive, but always oddly moving.

In Retrospect. Daring stuff for those with the stomach.

MA Television History & Practice Some places available for an Autumn 2009 start Award winning facilities, top research results, internationally renowned staff to support your success in an exciting and expanding field.

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Robin Wright Penn: Beautiful Torture Words by Ellen E Jones When strangers accost Robin Wright Penn, they’re usually shouting, ‘Run, Forrest, run!’, or they want to talk about The Princess Bride. Filmed back when she was still Robin Wright, the flaxen-haired 20-year-old model from San Diego, it’s a witty subversion of the fairy tale adventure. Penn’s role, however, was disappointingly traditional, demanding only that she look beautiful – which, obligingly, she did. Forrest Gump, on the other hand, might be the kind of all-American awards-hoover that brings European critics out in a rash, but at least it gave Penn more room for manoeuvre. And she was undeniably moving as Forrest’s tragic sweetheart, Jenny.

As well as these memorable supporting roles in much-loved hits, Penn has given impressive performances in mediocre or little-seen films (She’s So Lovely; Breaking and Entering; The Pledge; Sorry, Haters) and done her fair share of rom-coms and weepies (White Oleander; Message in a Bottle).

But oddly, after 25 years in the business, she’s never had a leading role worthy of her talents.

Faced with the perplexing anomaly of a beautiful, talented, connected actress eluding stratospheric stardom, the press reached a consensus: she must, out of a wilful perverseness, be choosing obscure roles. But Penn is reluctant to accept the get-out clause. “It’s easy for them. They add it all up and go, ‘Ah! That’s what it is. Phew!’ But it couldn’t be further from the truth.” Her own explanation rests on a refreshing – if suspiciously egoless – version of the Hollywood casting process. “I think it’s what moves you, what resonates and, more importantly, can I bring something to that story?

Y’know, at a certain point you go, ‘No, actually I’m not the best person for this part.’ Someone else could tell the story better.”

Also, as Penn is quoted saying in several approving magazine articles during the ’90s, being a ‘mom’ came first. The birth of her second child, Hopper Jack, nixed a North African shoot for The English Patient. That’s the only missed role she’s come even close to regretting. “There aren’t many [regrets]. The reason I missed out was usually because something better came along – I got to have a child, or something like that.”

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, by contrast, has come along at exactly the right time, and her performance as Pippa leaves no doubt that she’s the best person for the part. An adaptation by Rebecca Miller of her own novel, it’s a thoughtful, inventive film about a woman who’s chosen to bury her own identity in the service of her older, more successful husband – played with typical nervy charm by Alan Arkin.

The film shunts back and forth between the wild, free spirit Pippa Lee once was (as represented by Gossip Girl’s Blake Lively) and the serene housewife she has become; impressing friends with her butterflied lamb and not much else. Entertaining cameos are scattered along the way, but it’s Penn whose gravity keeps the showboaters in orbit with a performance both understated and expressive. “I think I have an inclination towards the subtlety involved,” says Penn. “I love that sort of… beautiful torture.”

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select FILMOGRAPHY ROBIN WRIGHT PENN The Private Lives of Pippa Lee(2009) State of Play (2009) What Just Happened (2008) Beowulf (2007) Hounddog (2007) Breaking and Entering (2006) White Oleander (2002) The Pledge (2001) Message in a Bottle (1999) She’s So Lovely (1997) Forrest Gump (1994) The Princess Bride (1987) When the shoot was delayed due to a financing hiccup, Penn spent the intervening year making frequent visits to the New York home Rebecca Miller shares with Daniel Day-Lewis. “I had my archive right there, in Rebecca, knowing her and spending quality time with each other. Not that she’s Pippa by any stretch, but there were a lot of mannerisms that I observed that I felt pertained to Pippa. Her actions were the adjectives that I was looking to execute.”

Miller suggested there ought to be something visual linking past-Pippa to present-Pippa, so Penn got to work. “I literally only met Blake [Lively] for like a minute when we were doing camera tests for lighting. She kept doing this sweet thing with her eyebrows. She’s got such a great little face – she’s like a doe.” Though you barely register it when watching the film, Penn has skilfully transformed this expression – eyebrows gently raised, mouth turned up at the corners – into something revealing. As she puts it, “It’s like everything in life is such a surprise and yet nothing is a surprise.”

So, to summarise: Robin Wright Penn is excellent in her new movie because she is a talented, imaginative and hard-working actress. But isn’t there another level to this ingenious bit of casting? This takes us to the elephant in the room: like Pippa Lee, Robin Wright Penn is very often overshadowed by her more famous husband, and as Mickey Rourke demonstrated in The Wrestler, add a layer of relevant real-life back-story to a great performance and you’ve got something truly poignant.

Would it be too cheeky to suggest that Mrs Sean Penn might be drawing on personal experience? Penn considers the suggestion. “No. But I’ve never cooked butterflied lamb – do you know what I mean? I raised my kids because I wanted to. I don’t ever see myself as being in that position, shall we say?” Fair enough, but isn’t it annoying to be seen as Sean Penn’s wife first and an actress second? “It doesn’t bother me because that’s the reality. It’s a fact. There’s nothing upsetting about it. It is what it is.

If somebody’s more well-known it’s pretty understandable, but I don’t think it diminishes the other.”

There is one comparison between Penn and her character that’s impossible to resist. Like Pippa Lee, Penn’s children are entering adulthood, leaving her free to embark on an exciting new phase. Unlike Pippa Lee, this doesn’t simply involve making out with Keanu Reeves. Penn was a jury member at this year’s Cannes festival, she is about to begin filming a half-live action, half-animation project with Waltz With Bashir director Ari Folman, and she’s got a Broadway play lined up for the spring. Will she be taking on more leading roles in the future? “Yeah, definitely. I hope, I hope, I hope!” Things are looking up – with one ridiculous proviso: “I mean, I know we’re in a terrible recession now. Everybody’s like ‘I wonder if I can get a job.’” Something tells us she’ll be alright.

A full transcript will be available online in the week of the film’s release.

The PrivaTe Lives oF PiPPa Lee

RELEASED July 10 DIRECTED BY Rebecca Miller STARRING Robin Wright Penn, Alan Arkin, Julianne Moore

If you fancy yourself as the kind of highbrow Heat reader who’s only interested in the personal lives of literary figures then you might want to take a seat; this is titillating stuff. It’s an adaptation of her own novel by Rebecca Miller, daughter of the great American playwright Arthur Miller, and wife of Daniel Day-Lewis. It features Zoe Kazan, granddaughter of Arthur Miller’s great collaborator and sometime nemesis Elia Kazan, and tackles the lives of writers and artists living in New England. In other words, there’s a definite whiff of the autobiographical.

Robin Wright Penn plays Pippa Lee, the enigmatic ‘model of an artist’s wife’ who has allowed herself to be subsumed into the identity of her older, more successful husband. Yet Pippa wasn’t always so suburban and serene. As events in Pippa’s present bring about an identity crisis, the film flits back

through her past to reveal the wild, sensual woman she once was.

With a female lead and a largely female cast, it’s inevitable that this will be feted in the Glamour glossies, ignored by everyone else and seen mostly by mums in slacks – but despite all that, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee doesn’t fit the modern, derogatory picture of the ‘chick flick’. It’s a ‘Women’s Picture’ in the respectful sense once applied to the melodramas of Douglas Sirk and the comedies of George Cukor.

Miller masterfully gives life to Pippa’s memories with a series of inventive but unobtrusive techniques including in-camera transitions between past and present, and even animation.

The film’s chief pleasure, however, is watching the talented cast have a ball with Miller’s fabulous characters. Julianne Moore as Pippa’s mischievous lesbian aunt

is the standout cameo, but Winona Ryder is also brilliantly funny as hopeless egomaniac Sandra, and Monica Bellucci is magnetic as a bonkers ex. Only Keanu Reeves lets the side down, once again demonstrating his God-given ability to invest even well written roles with a dead-eyed vacancy.

But then he’s only on totty duty, because really this is all about Robin Wright Penn.

She’s perky with a despairing undercurrent, expressive yet restrained, while casting Gossip Girl’s Blake Lively as the younger version is a stroke of luck (or genius) because they look uncannily alike.

Alan Arkin, as Pippa’s ageing husband Herb, doesn’t get a younger version because clearly no one else can do what Arkin does.

So it’s a tribute to the quality of the writing that you forget to chunder when presented with the sight of Lively wrapping her youthful milky

body around his crepe-paper skin.

The characters are so believable, it just makes sense.

It’s impossible to capture the complex whole of a person in one movie (or novel), but Miller uses this limitation to her advantage, by making the mystery of Pippa Lee’s true identity the heart of the film. “It’s disappointing when someone turns out not to be the person you thought they were,” says a neighbour when she walks in on Pippa making out with her grown-up son. But isn’t it lifeaffirming too? Ellen E Jones

Anticipation. The cast is intriguing, but the premise sounds dull.

Enjoyment. That mouth-watering ensemble cast doesn’t disappoint.

In Retrospect. Finally a lead role worthy of Robin Wright Penn’s talents. Let’s hope it’s the first of many.

091

Three MiLes norTh oF MoLkoM

RELEASED August 21 DIRECTED BY Robert Cannan, Corinna McFarlane STARRING N/A

At the average summer festival, ‘enlightenment’ comes in the form of a little white pill. But in the lakeside forests of Angsbacka, Sweden, it’s a little harder to swallow. This is the home of the No Mind Festival, held every year in the countryside three miles north of Molkom – and somewhere over the rainbow.

It’s a place of shamanic rituals, tantric sex, group sharing and – quite literally – tree hugging, where new agers and old hippies share in a two-week celebration of mind, body and nature.

Our Dorothy in this weird and wonderful world is a rugby wizard from Oz. Über-Bruce Nick – all perma-stubble and bruising accent – was expecting something slightly

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different when he heard of a festival where liberated Swedish chicks run around with their kit off. It’s largely through his sceptical eyes that the fortnight will unfold.

But not exclusively. Robert Cannan and Corinna McFarlane’s documentary is blessed with a surfeit of winning characters.

There’s harbour master Siddharta, passive aggressive patriarch of the group; Mervi, a troubled gran; Ljus, the California beach kid with the serial killer smile; pretty Marit; distant dad Peter; and Swedish celeb Regina Lund.

They reveal themselves to the camera with astonishing openness.

Not because they are desperate for exposure, but because Cannan and McFarlane are good enough

filmmakers to capture the awkward, embarrassing, triumphant and bizarre complexities of their lives.

It’s impossible to overstate just how intimate Three Miles North of Molkom is. Though often hilarious, it is also difficult, at times excruciating, to watch. The group sharing sessions descend into an unendurable purgatory of tortured honesty and simmering aggression. Fortunately, these moments are lightened by the filmmakers’ sensitivity, and the odd bright spot of raucous entertainment (Mervi’s fate at a beach-side lesson on ‘chi’ is jaw-on-the-floor stuff).

But Nick is the star, and it’s his journey that shapes the film. Just as his cynicism is challenged over the course of the festival, so too is the audience forced to confront its own

prejudices over the course of the film. Because let’s face it: Nick isn’t the only one who’d rather put pins in his eyes than spend a fortnight in a forest with a bunch of hippies.

But as this trip down his own personal yellow brick road becomes a much larger voyage of discovery, when the time comes for tearful farewells, he won’t be the only one reluctant to leave this bizarrely magical place. Matt Bochenski

Anticipation. Where is Molkom and why should we care?

Enjoyment. A crowd-pleasing doc with heart, humour and plenty of bite.

In Retrospect. Who knew that hippies were such fun?

Land oF The LosT RELEASED July 31

DIRECTED BY Brad Silberling STARRING Will Ferrell, Danny McBride, Anna Friel

If you’re struggling to see how yet another remake of yet another ancient TV series will engage you, try employing the help of a six-yearold. They actually tend to enjoy seeing Will Ferrell riding a T-Rex into cardboard space sets, and at least you can enjoy their enjoyment.

Has-been scientist Dr Rick Marshall (Ferrell), given the encouragement of feisty Cambridge grad Holly (Anna Friel), heads to the desert to test his time travel device – an accordion. Together with redneck yokel Will (Danny McBride), they get suctioned into the Land of the Lost. There, amidst desert plain and rainforest, and alongside a mammary grabbing primate (Jorma Taccone), they

negotiate rubber men, dinosaurs and dimensional crystals to get back home.

There’s an endearing mixture of consciously crap and clever CGI at work here, especially in the ‘tripping’ scene where music, visuals and humour combine into a riff that sums up the film’s post-post-modern objective: to recreate its TV origins, replete with homage to ’70s limitations, while simultaneously poking fun at them and creating contemporary laughs.

And you thought they were just

goofing around!

But none of this would work at all if the three leads weren’t quite so good. Ferrell does nothing new, but Danny McBride is an inspiration, and Friel holds her own as the straight girl – fresh, spunky and kinda herself.

Do we need Land of the Lost? No. But then you could say the same of a great deal of entertainment wallpaper that’s still, well, entertaining. But the film falls between demographic stools. The humour is too smart

for kids; too unsophisticated for adults. That just leaves teenagers, who may not be attracted to a self-consciously ‘family’ film.

Neither conventional actionadventure or enough of an out-there pastiche, this really is the land of the lost. Lórien Haynes

Anticipation. Would take a pterodactyl on your tail to chase you into the cinema.

Enjoyment. Ferrell goes feral.

In Retrospect. Gone and soon forgotten.

Shirin RELEASED June 26

DIRECTED BY Abbas Kiarostami STARRING Taraneh Alidoosti, Golshifteh Farahani, Mahnaz Afshar

Sometimes a film’s central conceit can be far more interesting than the film itself. In Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin, the big idea is to show not a piece of conventional narrative cinema, but rather the faces of an ensemble of Iranian actresses (and Juliette Binoche) as they watch such a film, registering joy, boredom, anxiety, revulsion and sadness in response to the unseen (but most definitely heard) events supposedly before their eyes – eyes that in fact just stare out at us as we also watch and reflect on what we ourselves can both see and hear.

This is hardly a new idea. Robert Altman did something similar in his segment of the portmanteau film Aria in 1987, re-imagining the

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Parisian debut of Jean-Phillipe Rameau’s opera Les Boréades, but turning his camera away from the performance itself and onto its decadent audience. Kiarostami himself has also played this game in Where Is My Romeo?, his contribution to the 2007 omnibus Chacun Son Cinéma, in which women are shown watching (an unseen) Romeo and Juliet.

Shirin essentially replays the same trick at much greater length, but changes the imagined film from a classic English romantic melodrama to a classic Iranian one by adapting Hakim Nezami Ganjavi’s famous twelfth-century poem about the tragic Armenian princess, Shirin, and her two star-

cross’d lovers. In fact, Kiarostami picked this particular story only after he had completed filming the physiognomic variations of his seated cast, adding it as a vibrant soundtrack in post-production.

Still, he has chosen carefully – for this unseen film-within-a-film begins with a woman falling in love with an image, is full of references to mirrors, spectatorship and the gaze, and ends with the heroine asking her accompanying ‘sisters’ (a figure for the mostly female audience) if their tears are “for me, Shirin? Or for the Shirin who lives in all of you?” What is more, with the inset film, as with its audience, it is women who are foregrounded while men appear only on the margins.

The problem, though, is that for all the probing beauty of Kiarostami’s close-ups, for all the expressiveness of the performers, and for all the technical intricacy of the sound design, Shirin depends entirely on a concept which, though confrontational almost by definition, is better suited to a shorter duration. By the 20-minute mark, the viewer has got it – and from there on in, the film is just a pretty face (or several). Anton Bitel

Anticipation. Kiarostami is the man (from Iran).

Enjoyment. Beautiful faces, but not enough (narrative) legs to justify the length.

In Retrospect. The women on screen are more absorbed by their viewing than you will be.

skin DIRECTED BY Anthony Fabian STARRING Sophie Okonedo, Sam Neill, Alice Krige

RELEASED July 24

If wasn’t based on a true story, it’s the kind of narrative that would be almost too hard to endure, let alone believe, so relentlessly cruel is it. As a metaphor for the shockingly warped mentality that presided over South Africa’s decades of Apartheid (and still indelibly lingers), the biography of Sandra Laing is hard to beat.

A black-skinned child born in the 1950s to white Afrikaner parents, Sandra spent her youth, and much of her adult life it seems, being buffeted by successive rejections not only from official institutions and society at large, but by her family (her two siblings apparently refuse contact with her to this day) and, later, her husband.

First-time feature director Anthony Fabian aims for a straightbat approach to Sandra’s story, which is certainly the strongest thing Skin has going for it. Sophie Okonedo does her best in a credulity-stretching role, grasping the baton from young Sandra, Ella Ramangwane, to play the lead from her exceptionally self-conscious, gawky teen years in the ’60s – which involve being legally ‘reclassified’ from white to black and back again – through to post-apartheid South Africa’s first free elections in 1994.

Sam Neill is convincing as Sandra’s instinctively protective but culturally blinkered father, Abraham, enraged by constant disbelief (and spells of doubt in his own mind)

regarding Sandra’s paternity; though the film’s stand-out performance belongs to Alice Krige, whose conflicting pulls as Sandra’s mother and Abraham’s long-suffering wife are profoundly expressed.

The film is elegantly shot, particularly the muted sepia tones of Sandra’s early school years; the palette seems to drain everything of colour but conveys the scale from light to dark all too clearly. Stylish production design and costumes likewise point up the barbarism of the ‘civilised’ ruling class – no more so than when the young Sandra is made to stand in a refined, oak-panelled office in front of a crowd of neatly turned-out state bureaucrats, to

endure having pencils stuck in her hair and her teeth examined to determine her race. While such visual texture evokes Sandra’s childhood environment convincingly, the melodramatic, mediocre score runs roughshod over such subtleties and highlights how fundamentally conventional Skin is. Sophie Ivan

Anticipation. Solid cast, incredible story, with a handful of festival awards to boot.

Enjoyment. It feels like sitting through an above-par misery memoir adaptation, which is, um, basically what it is.

In Retrospect. Extraordinary subject, given a prosaic treatment.

095

iChi

RELEASED July 10

DIRECTED BY Fumihiko Sori STARRING Haruka Ayase, Shido Nakamura, Takao Osawa

The wandering blind swordsman is a staple of Japanese cinema, but Ichi is a worthy addition to the canon. A female protagonist is a neat twist, but it’s director Fumihiko Sori’s sense of drama and talent for storytelling that make this so much fun. The influence of spaghetti westerns and Japanese epics is pronounced, as Ichi (Haruka Ayase) wanders from town to town searching for the truth about her father – never wanting to fight, but besting all-comers with her surprising sword skills. She meets and saves Toma (Takao Osawa), a talented Samurai too afraid to draw his weapon, and together they find themselves ridding a small town of its bandit infestation. The fight scenes are exceptional, enhancing the pathos at the heart of a film that has an unassuming appeal. Jonathan Williams

Tenderness

RELEASED June 26

DIRECTED BY John Polson STARRING Russell Crowe, Jon Foster, Sophie Traub

Tenderness is all about pain. It’s quite obvious – it’s constantly reiterated by the narrator. Subtle it isn’t. A rotund Russell Crowe plays Detective Cristofuoro, who has been assigned to the case of Eric (Jon Foster), a boy recently released from juvenile detention after murdering his parents. Cristofuoro believes that Eric will kill again and follows him obsessively. Enter Lori (Sophie Traub), a disturbed teenage girl who is infatuated with Eric. As the film develops, Eric’s murderous urges become evident despite his growing attachment to Lori. But the problem with this dark, unsettling film is that director John Polson fails to provoke any empathy with either of these characters, so no amount of clever-clever writing can make you care who kills whom. Ed Andrews

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bandsLaM

RELEASED August 12

DIRECTED BY Todd Graff STARRING Vanessa Hudgens, Alyson Michalka, Gaelan Connell

Recipe for creating a tween sensation: discover a new actor (Gaelan Connell) to play troubled teen Will like the missing link between John Cusack and Napoleon Dynamite. Add a Disney superstar (Vanessa Hudgens of High School Musical), an established Friend (Lisa Kudrow) and an OC alumnus (Ryan Donowho). Stir them into a story that blends the chaste romance of HSM, the pop nostalgia of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, the satire of School of Rock, and the imploding musical aspirations of The Commitments. With a dash of David Bowie (in cameo) for good measure, Todd Graff ’s coming-of-age musical comedy is sweet enough to please the kids, while acerbically downbeat enough to keep the attention of any accompanying adults. Anton Bitel

burMa vJ

RELEASED July 17

DIRECTED BY Anders Østergaard

The cliché that something hasn’t happened unless it’s on YouTube is lent a special kind of profundity by this inspiring and occasionally horrifying documentary. In September 2007, as protesting monks in Burma marched into the guns of an oppressive regime, the world was forced to take notice by the equally extraordinary bravery of a small band of reporters. Journalists from the Democratic Voice of Burma risked their lives to record history in the making before smuggling the footage out of the country. Anders Østergaard’s film takes on the terrifying immediacy of a home-made horror, as students pray for strength in the face of death, and a Japanese photo-journalist is brutally murdered. The DVB were there to record it, and to offer a vivid call to arms. Matt Bochenski

Mad, sad & bad

RELEASED July 31

DIRECTED BY Avie Luthra STARRING Meera Syal, Nitin Ganatra, Zubin Varla

British Asian cinema views the country through a tragi-comic prism where the various fissures of class, sex and race are rendered into something of a coherent whole. Mad, Sad & Bad attempts to take things to a new realm of ennui. True to genre form, the film’s characters are drawn from a single family. Psychiatrist Hardeep (Zubin Varla) is an arrogant womaniser, his brother Atul (Nitin Ganatra) a self-absorbed screenwriter, and their sister Rashmi (Meera Syal) a frump who still lives with their mother. But although these are not the shallow Asian stereotypes you were expecting, they are shallow stereotypes nonetheless. As a result, Mad, Sad & Bad is unengaging, even dull. Most frustratingly, its bitterness at the flip side of success for a new generation of British Asians is left unchanneled. James Bramble

sunshine CLeaning

RELEASED June 26

DIRECTED BY Christine Jeffs STARRING Emily Blunt, Amy Adams, Steve Zahn

On paper, Sunshine Cleaning sounds almost as cheery as director Christine Jeffs’ previous film, 2003’s Sylvia. Amy Adams plays Nora, a highschool princess turned down-at-heel single mum whose son has recently taken to licking pencil sharpeners at school. Emily Blunt is her Goth antisister Rose, all eyeliner and attitude. They unite, grudgingly, to clean up crime scenes in an attempt to earn school fees for the little licker. But far from being a tragic grind, Sunshine Cleaning feels like a first film – delicate, fresh and female. It’s here, working on the fringes of life, that the sisters confront the loss of their own mother. Flanked by their father, Joe (Alan Arkin), the family develops without sentiment or cliché. And it’s this realism that makes Sunshine Cleaning truly touching. Lórien Haynes

The yes Men FiX The worLd

RELEASED August 7

DIRECTED BY Andy Bichlbaum, Mike Bonanno, Kurt Engfehr STARRING Andy Bichlbaum, Mike Bonanno

This documentary follows the antics of political pranksters Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno (collectively known as The Yes Men) as they aim to expose the extent to which corporate America shits on the world.

Although the two don’t have the screen-grabbing charisma of other cultural agitators like fatso Michael Moore, as the film develops, you are left with nothing but admiration for the audacity of their stunts. These include posing as spokesmen for Dow, claiming responsibility for the Bhopal disaster live on the BBC – something which sent Dow’s share price plummeting. Exxon Mobil, The New York Times and the companies profiting from Hurricane Katrina also get hoaxed in ingenious ways, giving you the faintest hope that the entire world isn’t completely fucked just yet. Ed Andrews

The LasT Thakur

RELEASED June 26

DIRECTED BY Sadik Ahmed STARRING Tariq Anam Khan, Ahmed Rubel, Tanveer Hassan

With its story of Shakespearian melodrama relocated East (albeit to India rather than Japan) and a mad ruler brought low by his own family, there’s an echo of Kurosawa in Sadik Ahmed’s The Last Thakur.

But let’s not get carried away. The first film to be produced under a collaboration between Artificial Eye and The National Film and Television School, this is a patchy affair that sees the simmering tension in a rural village brought to the boil by the arrival of a stranger armed with an antique rifle. Showcasing a clash between the twin poles of politics and religion, The Last Thakur is handsomely shot in high-definition by Ahmed, a former director of photography, but suffers from underwritten, unsympathetic characters, and a decidedly creaky denouement. Matt Bochenski

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098 THE MESRINE ISSUE

BACK SECTION

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY AMY BROWN

24

099

IT’S NOT ONLY MUSIC FANS WHO SHOULD BE GETTING EXCITED ABOUT THE SUMMER SEASON. FROM ZOMBIE SCREENINGS TO WATCHMEN LECTURES, OVER THE NEXT FEW PAGES WE PRESENT THE ULTIMATE MOVIE-GOERS GUIDE TO THE FESTIVAL MONTHS. WORDS BY RUTH CARRUTHERS

100 THE MESRINE ISSUE

the ipsWiCh art festivaL

This celebration of the arts takes place in a variety of venues across ipswich and suffolk. Film highlights include open-air screenings of big Hollywood films such as Quantum of solace, and Decades of Film Music – a series of events showing films such as yellow submarine that are well known for their soundtrack. our piCK step by step, a film produced specially for this year’s festival by ip-art Visual Art Award 2008 Winner Lorna Macmillan.

WWW.IP-ART.COM

IPSWICH

WorKhoUse

JUNE 27 – JULY 12

WWW.WORKHOUSEFESTIVAL.CO.UK

POWYS

JUly 10-12

LOOP

An annual Welsh festival set in Llanfyllin, offering all varieties of music from reggae to dance. The cinema tent is particularly impressive, with the London sciFi Film Festival and Cambridge super-8 shorts on tour, plus films documenting the lives of Patti smith and the work of Hunter s Thompson. All profits go towards an environmentally sustainable community project.

WWW.LOOPBRIGHTON.COM

BRIGHTON

JULY 10-12

This is an easy one to get to because it’s set in the middle of Brighton inside Victoria Gardens, and is a music and digital art festival with tunes from the likes of Four Tet, Caribou and Errors that will compliment an array of different visual features perfectly. Audiovisual treats this year include Loop films, animation, VJs and film attractions in association with onedotzero. our piCK Anything curated by onedotzero is going to be cool.

noZsTocK

WWW.NOZSTOCKFESTIVAL.CO.UK

WWW.LATITUDEFESTIVAL.CO.UK

SUFFOLK

The official title is the ‘Nozstock Festival of Performing Arts, Vintage Tractors and Literature’, which takes place on a farm near Rowden Paddocks in Herefordshire. Live acts this year include The Buzzcocks and scratch Perverts, while the cinetent is showcasing a wide selection of shorts including documentaries, animation and experimenta, as well as films from onedotzero, short sip and Rural Media.

HEREFORDSHIRE

JUly 31 – AUGUsT 2

LATITUDE

our piCK Esteban sapir’s La Antena, a captivating story about the power of media and television.

JULy 16-19

Along suffolk’s sunrise coast, Henham Park hosts the 13 arenas of this year’s Latitude festival. When you’re not watching the likes of Doves and Bat for Lashes, the film and music arena is the place to be. Highlights include The Paper Cinema with kieron Maguire, and content from Comma Film. our piCK The Watchmen lecture and Q&A with Jeffrey Lewis.

our piCK New Music shorts from the BBC Film Network.

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MOOR MUSIC FESTIVAL

BIG CHILL

WWW.MOORMUSICFESTIVAL.CO.UK

YORKSHIRE

AUGUST 6-9

WWW.BIGCHILL.NET

HEREFORDSHIRE

AUGUST 6-9

Who cares about the music line-up at Big Chill this year; the film events look awesome, with everything from British sea Power performing film scores from Man of Aran; Bollywood movies; a Film4 tent; Warp Film’s world first audience participation zombie film; and a drive-in showing classic road movies. But if you do want some tunes, Emmy the Great and Noah and the Whale are two acts to look forward to, and all this takes place at Eastnor Castle Deer Park in Herefordshire.

GREEN

Heslaker Farm, North yorkshire, is host to this event, which has been tipped as one of the Uk’s best alternative festivals of recent years. A diverse range of acts includes king Creosote, Gentleman’s Dub Club and Queen Bee. The Green Room film tent will feature a selection of art house cinema like One Man in the Band, directed by Adam Clitheroe – a funny and moving portrait of contemporary musicians who play as one-person acts.

our piCK The works of video artist and music vid director Chris Cunningham.

MAN

our piCK sita sings the Blues, directed by Nina Paley, is set to be the highlight of this year’s festival.

edinBUrGh

MELA

WWW.EDINBURGH-MELA.CO.UK

WWW.THEGREENMANFESTIVAL.CO.UK

Tucked under BRECON BEACONS sugar Loaf Mountain in Wales, Green Man is a bit of a fairytale festival. This year, Jarvis Cocker and Bon iver will be playing alongside a mix of literature, theatre and comedy events.

The film tent will be showing a range of cutting edge documentaries and short arts films. And just in case you didn’t get it from the name, environmental awareness is central.

AUGUST 21-23

EDINBURGH

A break from the better-known festival that Edinburgh has to offer, the Mela is a ‘gathering’ (that’s what the word means in sanskrit) of all the diverse cultures scotland has to offer. inspired by southern Asia, last year’s film programme included screenings of Pakistani films and music documentaries. This year’s line-up is unconfirmed as we go to press, but is sure to be unique.

AUGUST 7-9

our piCK it’s a mystery! our piCK Wild Combination, a portrait of Arthur Russell.

FesTinho

WWW.ENDOFTHEROADFESTIVAL.COM

SUFFOLK

SEPTEMBER 11-13

With live acts from WWW.FESTINHO.SQUARESPACE.COM both the Uk and Brazil, including Carnival Collective and the Penguin Café Orchestra, Festinho carries on the Brazilian flavour with film screenings in the Cinema Cottage including productions from the likes of Animat. The event will be held at kentwell Hall, suffolk, and all profits go to the ABC Trust, a Uk-based charity that helps out the street kids of Brazil.

sePTeMBer 4-6

our piCK Lorna Lavelle’s documentary on the A Força da Rua project.

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end of

THE ROAD

This award-winning festival set in the intimate Larmer Tree Gardens in North Dorset promises parrots and peacocks walking around while you listen to the likes of the lovely Alela Diane and the Fleet Foxes. A crowd of 5,000 turn out for the music, organic pizza and chilled atmosphere, but this year LWLies are joining forces to add a cinema experience to the festival, to put the final, perfect piece into place. The line-up is secret for now, but all will be revealed soon.

DORSET

our piCK Design your own short ident that will be screened at the back of the main stage.

ForeiGn FesTs

FESTIVAL

INTERNACIONAL

DE BENICÀSSIM WWW.fiBerfiB.Com

VALENCIA

With big sponsors and big acts like kings of Leon, The killers and Franz Ferdinand, this may not be as independent as many other festivals, but the short film festival they have on offer is. Now in its tenth year, the film festival is known as one of the best in spain, and this year boasts an official selection of 15 shorts and films from new talent.

JULY 16-19

our piCK Future shorts’ guest festival

A CAMPINGFLIGHT To loWlAnds PArAdise WWW.LOWLANDS.NL NETHERLANDS

AUGUST 21-23

Described as ‘Glasto meets Goa’, this festival has a global feel to the huge programme of events, which include live performances from Beirut and Faith No More, mixed with street dance, global restaurants, comedy and film. The festival is set in Biddinghuizen, which is a town in the Dutch province of Flevoland, and will host both indoor and outdoor cinema.

TIME YOUR SUMMER HOLIDAY RIGHT, AND YOU CAN GRAB SOME SUN, SEA AND CINEMA.

sZiGeT

WWW.SZIGETFEST.CO.UK

BUDAPEST

Pronounced ‘see-get’, this festival manages to squeeze a large selection of music from the likes of The Prodigy and Lily Allen – along with dance, theatre, fine art, film, cabaret and crafts – onto one little island in the middle of the Danube. The open-air cinema includes a selection of shorts, a horror day, action films and silent movies accompanied by music from the French Philharmonique de la Roquette.

AUGUST 10-17

our piCK The animation workshops where anyone can learn the basics they need to make an animated short.

our piCK The programme is still TBC as we go to press.

103

The BFi BrinGs A Weird And WonderFUl World oF oBscUre BriTish cineMA To liFe.

104 THE MESRINE ISSUE

sin in the shadows of London’s lights! Prostitution! Wife swapping! Postapocalyptic Pete and Dud! What the hell is going on with the BFi’s Flipside?

The BFi, grandee of the British Establishment, is best known for its humourless dedication to the ‘canon’ of world cinema, and for publishing a long-running magazine for all those people fascinated by tax law. But something is stirring in the belly of the beast.

Flipside is the brainchild of curators Vic Pratt and William Fowler. it began as a series of monthly screenings at the southbank dedicated to the marginal world of outré cinema, from Peter Watkins’ sci-fi comic musical Privilege (1967), to some bizarre European versions of Tintin. These screenings proved a playground for the great minds at the BFi, whose vast depth of movie knowledge was opening up whole new worlds of previously marginalised exotica on screen. so successful was the series, that it’s led to the formation of an official DVD and Blu-ray catalogue, Flipside, dedicated to the weird and wonderful world of previously forgotten British films. But this isn’t just about blowing the dust off the BFi’s back catalogue. Flipside is a full-on indiana Jones job – rediscovering genuinely lost classics and presenting them with all the bells and whistles that modern technology can offer.

“Flipside is about getting film out there that is legitimately in danger of being really, truly buried and left unseen,” explains sam Dunn, Head of Video Publishing at the BFi. With the likes of Norman Cohen and Arnold L Miller’s exploitation docs London in the Raw (1964) and Primitive London (1965) among the first wave of releases, Dunn adds, “None of us are concerned to think that everything we release must be considered a ‘classic’. That’s not really what this is about. if anything, it’s about challenging that idea of what’s established and what’s considered to be a classic. something like London in the Raw and Primitive London are clearly coming from another place. But, for me, that’s interesting – that’s part of British cinema history.”

And if Dunn and his team can ruffle a few feathers along the way – raise a few eyebrows among the coffee and cake BFi crowd – then that’s all good too. “i think part of Flipside is a challenge,” says Dunn. “i think at some level it does go against what might be logical for us or the established pattern of the BFi’s activities. so i think it’s quite exciting that it maybe poses a challenge. it’s provocative – i think the BFi’s quite happy to be that, to challenge its viewers and make them think.”

There are many different reasons why a film becomes ‘lost’ (and so, paradoxically, ends up on Flipside’s radar). Dunn gives the example of The Bed sitting Room (1969), Richard Lester’s film version of spike Milligan’s one-man stage play, starring everyone from Rita Tushingham to Harry secombe to Pete and Dud. After his success with films like A Hard Day’s Night (1964), The knack… And How To Get it (1965) and Help (1965), Lester was given a no-questions-asked three-movie deal by United Artists. After making How i Won The War (1967) with John Lennon, and Petulia (1968) with Julie Christie, the idea was that the final film would see the Beatles starring in a Joe Orton script. When the Beatles demurred, Lester was left with a big pile of cash and no film to make, so he turned to spike Milligan’s improv-heavy show set in the aftermath of a ‘Nuclear Misunderstanding’.

Lester had been moving towards a less mainstream, more personal style, which came to a head in The Bed sitting Room – a film that UA had no idea how to market. it was quietly dumped in a couple of cinemas, then left to rot.

Until now. “it’s just a victim of circumstance, of a certain moment in history and being misperceived as too difficult, not entertaining,” explains Dunn.

“But i think time lends things like that a whole new perspective. Now, we all watch it and think, ‘My god, this is quite extraordinary!’”

And that’s Flipside for you – something unusual, challenging and provocative, yes, but also something quite beautiful in its own way. Not just in terms of the crystal clear presentation of Blu-ray, but because a film strand dedicated to cinema’s underclass can thrive in these cut throat commercial times. if this is obscurity, bring it on. MATT BOCHENSKI

Sam Dunn is responsible for overseeing all Flipside releases. But when you’re talking about re-discovering some of the lost classics of British film, it’s not as simple as wandering through an archive and digging something out of a dusty corner. We asked Sam to talk us through the process of discovering and restoring a series of films

by Jack Bond and the late Jane Arden – Separation (1968, “A really exquisite looking film with all kinds of psychedelic stuff going on.”),

The Other Side of the Underneath (1972, “Like a feminist El Topo.”), and Anti-Clock (1980, “A kind of surveillance, psychiatry, sci-fi thing – a bit Chris Marker.”).

Says Dunn: “Jane Arden committed suicide in late ’82 – she was known as a writer, an actress, a playwright… So she was really quite notable, but at the same time she’s just fallen off the radar. Given how few notable voices there were in British cinema in the late 1960s and 1970s, it’s amazing that she’s just been papered over and no one really knows about her in British cinema history.

“Jack Bond is otherwise known for having done a lot of Southbank shows and he in fact was effectively the Pet Shop Boys’ other director of choice along with Derek Jarman in the late ’80s.

“Jack had paid a detective a few years ago to find out if any material still existed from The Other Side of the Underneath, and had been informed that it had all been destroyed in a fire in a UK lab. He then managed to get hold of a show print from the States that was in a really ropey condition. He had it flown back to the UK and was looking at it on a bench over at one of the local Soho labs when one of the technicians who was on a break from another job wandered in with his coffee, peered over Jack’s shoulder and went, ‘Wow, this looks amazing. What is it?’ Jack says, ‘It’s this film I made in ’72, but all the negatives have been destroyed in a fire at ‘x’ laboratory.’ And the technician said, ‘Oh really? I used to work there. I don’t remember a fire. It’s still there. Give me two minutes…’ So he wanders off and makes a phone call, comes back and says, ‘Jack, I’ve found 16 cans of negatives at Technicolor.’ And that was it. So it’s literally gone from being thought lost and destroyed to… We’ve cleaned up the negs,

LOST

AND FOUND ANATOMY OF A RE-DISCOVERED CLASSIC

we’ve done all this extraordinary telecine transfer work, a lot of digital clean-up on it, and it looks like it was made yesterday.

“There are different histories with the other two films. The last time they were seen was at a retrospective at the NFT in ’83. Jack is quite open about the fact that it’s he who suppressed them in the meantime, out of a kind of personal emotional anger at Jane having killed herself.

But during that time, materials wander and get lost, so there’s been a lot of work we’ve needed to do.

“Jack’s quite a character. He’s always prided himself on not having, say, Arts Council funding or not having had an affiliation with the BFI in the past. But through a chain of circumstances involving some mutual friends, I managed to woo Jack and get to see the films, and tell him that there was nothing to fear from the BFI. It’s not a problem to get involved with… The Establishment, I suppose. And I’d like to think he’s got good things to say about how we’ve worked with his films, and how we’ve taken them from being hidden away to looking literally like they were made yesterday.”

Separation, The Other Side of the Underneath and Anti-Clock are all available on DVD and Blu-ray from July 13.

105

AN AT-A-GLANCE GUIDE TO THE DVDS AVAILABLE JUNE 29 COMING YOUR WAY OVER THE NEXT BLOODY MAMA 1970 TWO MONTHS. FOR FULL REVIEWS OF DIRECTED BY ROGER CORMAN ALL THESE FILMS, HEAD OVER TO WWW.LITTLEWHITELIES.CO.UK ON THE WEEK OF RELEASE, OR SIGN UP FOR OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER

Move over Jocasta, the new queen of dysfunction is coming to town, and she’s bringing her bat-shit crazy sons with her. This gruesome ’70s B-movie, loosely based on the life and crimes of Ma Baker, is a gun-toting sprawl of sex, drugs, robbery and mum-love. NF

AMERICAN TEEN 2008 DIRECTED BY NANETTE BURSTEIN

Apparently, Mean Girls wasn’t actually a documentary, which left the gap in the market wide open for Nanette Burstein. Like a particularly diligent media studies student, Burstein filmed four final year high-school students every day for 11 months, resulting in this sensitive portrayal of teenage life in indiana. NF

CHE: PART ONE CHE: PART TWO 2008

DIRECTED BY STEVEN SODERBERGH

There have been a few attempts to document the life of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, though soderbergh’s sprawling biopic gets closest to the spit and sawdust of guerrilla warfare. As with their Cannes premiere, the films are best experienced in a single sitting. The harrowing attempt to instigate revolution in Bolivia which drives Part Two is a dramatic counterpoint to Che’s earlier successes in Cuba. KM

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD 2008 DIRECTED BY SAM MENDES

Mendes revels in 1950s period detail in this attempt to bring Richard yates’ novel of the same name to the big screen. Unfortunately, a comically theatrical performance from kate Winslet and a miscast Leonardo DiCaprio fail to breathe life into the beautifully realised sets, with the hopeless and inevitable tragedy of the story reduced by the pair to mere melodrama. KM

GRAN TORINO 2008 DIRECTED BY CLINT EASTWOOD Most notable as his last acting role, Eastwood channels the spirit of Harry Callahan into Gran Torino protagonist Walt kowalski, a grouchy, racist, sabre-rattling and God-hating pensioner. The film raised a smattering of questions about attitudes towards race in the Us on its theatrical release, though any larger social comment is undone by a litany of two-dimensional characters. KM

A RAGE IN HARLEM 1991 DIRECTED BY BILL DUKE

A very loose adaptation of Chester Himes’ classic crime noir novel of the same name. Robin Givens is the gangster’s moll doing her best to keep hold of a truckload of stolen gold while falling for dumpy mummy’s boy Forest Whitaker. AG

WONDERFUL TOWN 2007

BY WILLIAM ALDERWICK, ANTON BITEL, ADAM LEE DAVIES, PRISCILLA EYLES, NELL FRIZZELL, ABI GLIDDON, JAMES MANSFIELD, KINGSLEY MARSHALL, LIMARA SALT, JW SMITH, IAN VIGGARS 106 THE MESRINE ISSUE

DIRECTED BY ADITYA ASSARAT

Aditya Assarat’s poetic and dreamlike debut feature is set in the Thai town of Takua Pa, where two youngsters fall in love amidst the wreckage of the tsunami that devastated the area in 2004. JM

WENDY AND LUCY 2008 DIRECTED BY KELLY REICHARDT

Another strangled hymn to community delivered by those just the wrong side of the city limits, Reichardt follows up the monumental stillness of Old Joy with an outwardly simple tale about a girl and her dog that will break your heart into weeping pieces. ALD

AVAILABLE JULY 6 THE SECRET OF SANTA VITTORIA 1969

DIRECTED BY STANLEY KRAMER

This overlooked classic features a fine comic performance from Anthony Quinn as italo Bomboloni, a drunk living in the small town of santa Vittoria in wartime italy who accidentally becomes mayor and consequently plots to hide the town’s wine from the incoming Germans.

No extras. PE

GLASS: A PORTRAIT OF PHILIP IN TWELVE PARTS 2007 DIRECTED BY SCOTT HICKS

For 18 months, director scott Hicks followed classical composer Philip Glass across three continents, gaining unprecedented access to the musician as he engaged in a number of activities including writing 18 symphonies and film scores and riding a Coney island rollercoaster for the last time. LS

BLIND LOVES 2008

FLASH OF GENIUS 2008

THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES 2007

DIRECTED BY JURAJ LEHOTSKY

DIRECTED BY MARC ABRAHAM

DIRECTED BY VADIM PERELMAN

Dreamlike fantasy sits alongside the realism of heartbreak and humour in this documentary portrait of how four visually impaired people found love, from new slovakian director Juraj Lehotsky. LS

A film about the man who invented the intermittent windscreen wiper only to have his idea stolen by auto giant Ford may not sound like the most riveting prospect. However, Greg kinnear’s solid central performance as inventor Bob kearns is thoroughly engaging. IV

A teenager who cannot wait for her life to start gets caught up in a Columbine-style shooting, and 15 years later finds the problems of her past life catching up with her. Vadim Perelman’s second feature is an elegant rites-of-passage diptych with an overplayed twist. AB

DOUBT 2008

DIRECTED BY JOHN PATRICK SHANLEY

A suggestion of impropriety in a Catholic school sparks tension between Philip seymour Hoffman’s progressive Father Flynn and his uptight nemesis sister Aloysius, played by Meryl streep. Echoing Ron Howard’s tepid direction of Frost/Nixon, writer/ director shanley belies the theatrical origins of his own screenplay with a film that is cinematically flat, and driven entirely by its dialogue. KM

HIGHLANDER: SPECIAL EDITION 1986 DIRECTED BY RUSSELL MULCAHY

The ’80s cult classic makes its way into the twentyfirst century with this special edition DVD and Bluray. When Connor MacLeod tops The kurgan’s hit list he becomes protégé to Juan Ramirez (sean Connery), who teaches him the ways of the immortal and how to be the only one. LS

A CHILD IS WAITING 1963 DIRECTED BY JOHN CASSAVETES

Tough love or TLC? in a boarding school for developmentally challenged children, Judy Garland and Burt Lancaster battle over the best way to care for them. sensitive and complex without being bleeding-hearted, the film suggests that adults are generally the ones with the biggest problems. AG

BRONSON 2009 DIRECTED BY NICOLAS WINDING REFN Michael Peterson (Tom Hardy) reinvents himself as Britain’s most violent prisoner, Charles Bronson, even as director Refn refashions hardman biopic conventions into something altogether more artful, elusive and camp. Monologues from the ‘real’ Bronson are included among the extras. AB

AVAILABLE JULY 20 REQUIEM FOR BILLY THE KID 2006 DIRECTED BY ANNE FEINSILBER

Part poetic evocation and part road movie mixed with interviews and film footage, this is an intriguing examination of the legend and myth that shrouds Billy the kid’s murder. The film’s narrator sets off on a search for the kid’s shadow in Mexico in the vain hope of uncovering whether Pat Garrett really did kill Billy the kid that night, or if he escaped across the border. LS

MARLENE 1984 DIRECTED BY MAXIMILIAN SCHELL Maximilian schell bravely took on the task of interviewing Hollywood legend Marlene Dietrich and had no idea what he was getting into. After years of public silence she refused to let him film her or her apartment, and ignored his questions.

The result was a fascinating look at the enigma of a star. LS

AVAILABLE JULY 27 IL DIVO 2008 DIRECTED BY PAOLO SORRENTINO An engrossing and fascinating look at the complex political career of former italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti. it looks great, it sounds great, and Toni servillo is fantastic in the central role.

Watch this film. JWS

LISBON STORY 1994

DIRECTED BY WIM WENDERS

in Wim Wender’s 1994 Lisbon story, director Friedrich Monroe attempts to shoot from first principals to make a silent movie as if the entire history of cinema had never happened. When this fails he calls on an old friend and sound engineer, to rescue his footage through a cryptic postcard.

Cue a classic Wenderian quest. WA

AVAILABLE AUGUST 10 TOUCH AND GO 1955 DIRECTED BY MICHAEL TRUMAN This Jack Hawkins-starring Ealing comedy is light, airy and easily forgettable, even though it is part of a genre that relies on frivolity. One for die-hard Ealing fans only. IV

FRIDAY THE 13TH 2009 DIRECTED BY MARCUS NISPEL

What do you do with a seminal (but crap) horror from 1980 that spawned innumerable pointless sequels and execrable slice-’n’-dice imitators? ‘Reimagine’ it! Marcus Nispel (the man responsible for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake) directs the ultimate by-numbers slasher. Expect sequels. AB

AVAILABLE AUGUST 17 IN THE LOOP 2009

DIRECTED BY ARMANDO IANNUCCI

James Gandolfini and Tom Hollander join the circus as unhinged Whitehall maven Malcom Tucker and co spin iannucci’s scabrous political farce The Thick Of it into big screen gold, losing none of the TV series’ brio or intelligence along the way. ALD

AVAILABLE AUGUST 24 IS ANYBODY THERE? 2008 DIRECTED BY JOHN CROWLEY

A fairly slight tale of friendship, dementia and impending death featuring solid performances from Michael Caine and young Bill Milner. it reaches for the heartstrings but only just manages to play a tune worth hearing. JWS

BLUE EYELIDS 2007 DIRECTED BY ERNESTO CONTRERAS This little Mexican gem re-invents the boy-meetsgirl story and perfectly shows the wonderful awkwardness of a first date and the progressive steps that lead to a relationship. A dreamy debut

by Ernesto Contreras that makes the most primary human emotions seem like new concepts. LS

RACE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN 2009 DIRECTED BY ANDY FICKMAN

Dwayne Johnson lends his considerable charisma to an otherwise generic family adventure film from Disney. you know exactly what to expect: kid protagonists, some chase scenes that’ll make you wish you were in a theme park, and a complete lack of dramatic tension. JWS

THE BURNING PLAIN 2008 DIRECTED BY GUILLERMO ARRIAGA

Guillermo Arriaga writes and directs his feature film debut, a typically multi-tiered story connecting disparate characters separated by time and place. The stories all revolve around a theme of guilt and redemption, and feature a stellar cast including kim Basinger, Charlize Theron and Joaquim de Almeida. PE

107

SPILLING

MilK

Lance Black is a boy – a gorgeous one – politically aware and incapable of reducing anything to a sentence. Gus Van sant sits wry and quiet, prepared to let Lance run with it until an interjection hits him. Van sant had been looking for a Harvey Milk project for over 15 years, but it wasn’t until he read Black’s script that he found his voice.

With Milk available now on DVD and Blu-ray, we sat down to talk to Van sant and Black about how and why it finally came into being.

LWLies: What was your motivation for making and writing milk? van sant: To preserve Harvey’s legacy. To not let the story be forgotten.

To popularise it.

Black: it was a story i knew as a teenager and i felt his message was getting lost. Grass roots activism has practically disappeared. Though i think populist politics have begun to come back again with Obama, and also with the reaction against Proposition 8 [the law against samesex civil partnerships in California]. i think grass roots activism is starting up again.

LWLies: has there been anybody like harvey since?

Black: A lot of the great ones died. it’s a setback for the gay community.

AiDs took many of the progressive leaders away, and we were left with more conservative folks who didn’t demand as much. van sant: i think Derek Jarman was reminiscent of Harvey. i knew him in ’84 until he died, though i didn’t see him the last couple of years when he went down to his beach house. But he was in your face with facts and figures and theories and conspiracy theories; he was a fanatic. Harvey was somewhat like that. There was a kinship there.

LWLies: You don’t get that energy from Jarman’s films. van sant: i know – they are so lyrical but they are infused with gay politics.

Though always beautiful, they are very complicated and didactic and the images are so specific. Or he uses concrete political and literary references but they are never simple. He inspired me.

LWLies: did you feel a responsibility to milk’s legacy? there was a sensitivity towards the real characters – photographically and through your use of original documentary footage. van sant: i was trying to bring you into that period and the easiest way to show you is through a photograph – to give it authenticity. And we tried to match this with the whole aesthetic. We were going to shoot Milk in a different fashion as well – make it all look like the documentary footage – but we had resistance from the financiers. We could’ve shot it all on 16mm, but for them that was over the edge. They felt it was the wrong thing but it might’ve been the right thing.

LWLies: as it stands, it’s a more mainstream film. van sant: i have this weird relationship with what mainstream is. The laws of mainstream are evasive. As soon as there’s an advance in what mainstream is, it changes. it used to be the case that if you didn’t use a tripod, it wasn’t a mainstream film – and now nobody uses a tripod. it’s like, ‘When did that happen?’ so to shoot in docu-style on 16mm will at some point become mainstream.

LWLies: What’s next for you both? van sant: Lance is adapting Tom Wolfe’s The Electric kool-Aid Acid Test, and that has been a project i’ve been involved with trying to get off the ground for 20 years. you could call it a passion project. LÓRIEN HAYNES

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9 8 6

EX-RENT HELL

1

DIRECTED BY STEVE MINER STARRING C THOMAS HOWELL, RAE DAWN CHONG, JAMES EARL JONES BOX NOTABLES ‘RETAIL PRICE £69.99’ STICKER TAGLINE ‘A COMEDY WITH HEART AND SOUL’ TRAILERS MONTE CARLO, CRIME STORY, CYCLONE, ENEMY TERRITORY CHERRYPICK “THIS IS THE COSBY DECADE; AMERICA LOVES BLACK PEOPLE!”

As ethically sketchy and unashamedly cavalier as any of the blackguards or knaves this column has yet ushered into your presence, this 1986 journey through the nine-dimensional labyrinth of positive discrimination is as elegant and worthwhile as tits on a bull. Wasting no time in messing with our moral gyroscopes, director steve Miner’s would-be underdog yarn encourages us to root for over-privileged whitebread slap-magnet Mark Watson (C Thomas Howell) as he tramples over every minority that gets in his way in order to win a scholarship to that Promethean cradle of overarching human idealism, Harvard Law school.

His rich father has taken his progressive therapist’s throwaway advice about unfettering himself from social obligations to heart, and has bestowed upon his son the greatest gift it is his to give by cutting him off without a red cent. This forces the boy to become a man by paying his own college tuition to the tune of $54,000. Mark is, however, nothing if not his father’s son, and dad most assuredly did not get where he is today by hard graft…

After visiting a chum who’s attending ‘sun-Tan Lotion College’, Mark downs a handful of untested pills that pigment his milky skin the colour of milky coffee, slips on some Ray Bans and – with no indication as to how he teased his glistening slick of chestnut hair into a serviceable Afro – jive-talks his way into a scholarship reserved for the most promising black student in LA. yes, Mark has – and there’s no way to sugarcoat this – ‘browned up’.

Once on campus, the film is free to divide its time between making capital of white assumptions that all African-Americans are either Black Panthers or hepcat pimp-daddies, while dispelling the myths of innate basketball prowess and across-the-board good fortune in the trouser department. This kentucky-fried flim-flam continues until our undercover brother falls in love with the girl whose scholarship he swiped and all kinds of racial, class and gender hell break loose.

Howell, although looking only slightly more authentically AfricanAmerican than an iced bun, is quite winning in the role that completely derailed his promising career. He is supported by a strong cast headed by James Earl Jones, who distinguishes himself as Mark’s gnarly-but-benign Criminal Law professor. A proud black educator who gives his students of colour no special treatment, Jones stands apart from the film’s broiling ethnic maelstrom until the script forces him to blot his copybook by referring to the bulk of his class as ‘white shits’. Also of note is an early showing by Elaine from misanthropic TV smash seinfeld as an old highschool pal of Mark’s named – rather confusingly after one’s partaken of the requisite quantities of bad booze to make it through this baloney – Lisa simpson. None of them, however, can divert the film’s kamikaze plotting from zeroing in on a Pearl Harbour of racial iniquity.

After a farcical scene revolving around an unexpected visit from Mark’s parents, his white girlfriend, his black girlfriend, a selection of ski masks and a Beach Boys medley, our protagonist reluctantly comes clean. The little turd should be looking at an educational stint in the Big House, but instead, Professor Jones and the school board are so impressed by the life-lessons that this brass-necked yahoo has learned during his time en noir that they accede to an outrageous programme of guilt-assuaging martyrdom that sees Mark allowed to continue his studies as a honky, the misappropriated scholarship reverting to its rightful recipient and the rest of us wondering whether the Civil Rights Movement was a collective hallucination.

There’s an old poker player’s maxim that reminds anyone thinking of sitting in on a game to take a long, hard look around the table and if, after a reasonable period of considered inspection, you can’t spot the sucker – then, buddy, it’s you! it’s a hoary old adage that springs to mind time and time again when, upon settling down to one of the films that fug up these pages like a tyre fire, we’ve felt a comparably crimson-cheeked sting of discomfort that we’ve been dealt a dead man’s hand. Again. ADAM LEE DAVIES

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The Archive No.

4

Words by Jason Wood

‘They’re young… They’re in love… And they kill people.’

A Robert Benton and David Newmanscripted project that was originally destined for either Jean-Luc Godard or François Truffaut to direct, Bonnie and Clyde (which, in its cross-cutting devices, would borrow from the Nouvelle Vague) marked a pivotal moment in American cinema. The canny merging of a staple American genre with dynamic young leads, a no-holds-barred attitude towards sex and violence, and a contemporary social relevance, ensnared the counterculture audience of the late ’60s and directly led to the creative freedom the studios accorded the ‘New Hollywood’ filmmakers of the 1970s.

Based loosely on the Depression-era exploits of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, the film begins as Clyde (Warren Beatty) tries to steal the car of Bonnie Parker’s mother. Bonnie (Faye Dunaway) is seduced by Clyde’s outlaw demeanour, and he further stimulates her by robbing a store in her presence. Clyde steals a car, with Bonnie in tow, and their legendary crime spree begins. The two move from town to town, pulling off petty heists, until they join up with Clyde’s brother Buck (Gene Hackman), his shrill wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons), and a slow-witted gas station attendant, CW (Michael J Pollard). The new gang robs a bank, and Clyde is soon painted in the press as a contemporary Robin Hood when he allows one customer to hold onto his money. With the police on their tail, and the gang constantly on the run, their fugitive status intensifies after they kidnap a Texas Ranger. The act comes back to haunt them when the Ranger returns to lead a raid that leaves Buck dying, Blanche captured, and both Clyde and Bonnie injured. The ever-loyal CW takes them to his disapproving father’s house and ultimately into a police trap that ends with one of the bloodiest deaths in cinematic history.

Originally inciting critical revulsion for refusing to assert a clear morality, and no small degree of fear in Warner Bros, the studio under whose aegis it was reluctantly made after much hectoring by producer/star Beatty, the film became a genuine social phenomenon after it was re-released (again at the behest of Beatty) and went on to gross over $20 million.

The portrayal of Bonnie and Clyde as rebels and sympathetic anti-heroes who stood shoulderto-shoulder with the poor working folks of the 1930s struck a chord with young American audiences, convincing the studios of their importance in generating box office hits.

The critical tide also turned, landing Bonnie and Clyde on the cover of Time as cultural commentators came to find favour in the film’s redefining of violence and the re-casting of its criminal protagonists as pin-up anti-heroes.

Viewed retrospectively in terms of director Arthur Penn’s subsequent career – crudely defined as a series of highs (particularly 1975’s Night Moves) followed by what is popularly viewed as the director’s irreversible decline – the film also marked the clearest realisation of Penn’s interest in the tension between oppression and vitality.

The charismatic Beatty and sultry Dunaway aside (look out also for a delightful cameo from Gene Wilder), the brightest stars in the film’s brimming firmament include Theadora Van Runkle’s trendsetting costumes, Dean Tavoularis’ historically authentic art direction, and Burnett Guffey’s cinematography. One of only two victories among 10 Academy Award nominations (Parsons was the other), Guffey emphasises the muted colours and tones of the period to give the impression, the many ambiguities aside, that we may be watching an historical document. As Benton and Newman would later comment of their screen creations, Bonnie and Clyde weren’t bank robbers, “they were aesthetic revolutionaries.”

Bonnie and Clyde 1 9 6 7

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LWLies salutes the visionaries whose imagination, passion, madness and genius inspires our love of movies. Words by Matt bochenski

As Truffaut and Godard took to the streets of Paris in the early ’60s, the ripples of the New Wave penetrated the Iron Curtain. In Lithuania and Czechoslovakia, a generation of young men wrestled with the constraints of the Soviet system, using the new authorial language of cinema to express themselves. Access to international festivals provided a forum for the exchange of ideas, and the development of a new scholarship equipped to interpret and define this new cinema.

Away from the glare of Cannes and Venice, beyond the gaze of all but the most dedicated critics, other cinemas flourished too. Against the grim communist backdrop of the 1960s, Polish cinema came of age. The likes of Andrzej Wajda had been making films since the early 1950s, but it was the emergence of Jerzy Skolimowski that hauled the country’s cinema towards a thrilling modernity.

Skolimowski was 22-years-old in 1960. Coming of age in communist Warsaw, there was no James Dean, no Marlon Brando, no rock ‘n’ roll. There was no symbol

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of youthful rebellion because there was no symbol of youth at all. But Skolimowski had an instinctive sense of his individuality, his outsider status in a system that only recognised the collective.

“I was trying to be a poet,” he says today, in London. Skolimowski is the guest of honour at the premiere of his new film, Four Nights With Anna, accompanied by a retrospective of his early work at Kinoteka, the Polish Film Festival. “I was writing rebellious poetry, maybe even in too much of a pretentious way,” he continues. “But it was the content of rebellion, and the form, that were important – trying to show things differently.”

In 1959, François Truffaut had agitated against the ‘cinéma de papa’ in a famous essay for the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. Truffaut’s argument that the old ways needed to be overturned struck a chord with Skolimowski. “In myself there was a need for rebellion against the cinéma papa,” he says.

Before he could rebel against the system, however,

he needed to get on the inside. His poetry gained him entry into the Polish Union of Writers – he was its youngest member – and access to the Union’s recreation house outside Warsaw. It was here that he met Andrzej Wajda and the writer Jerzy Andrzejewski, who were working on a script for a film about a doctor who falls for an impetuous young girl. “Since I was the only young person in the whole estate they asked me, ‘Would you like to read it, and maybe you have some comments?’” says Skolimowski. “And I read it and I thought it was bad and I told them honestly: ‘It’s not like that – young people don’t behave like you have written here.’ Then they challenged me: ‘Why don’t you write it?’ And that very night I wrote about 25 pages, which became the film.”

The Innocent Sorcerers marked Skolimowski’s entry into Polish cinema in 1960. But it took four more years for him to find his voice as a director.

His debut, Rysopis (aka Identification Marks: None), about a young man – played by Skolimowski himself

– who spends his final day before joining the army traversing the streets of the city was a breath of fresh air; a brilliantly natural and improvisational piece of filmmaking that possessed all the electric exuberance of youth. it was a milieu that he would return to twice more, playing an extension of the same character in Walkover (1965) and Hands Up (1967). At the Berlin Film Festival in 1967, skolimowski won the Golden Bear with Le Départ, a scattershot comedy starring New Wave legend Jean-Pierre Léaud.

But, inevitably, his iconoclasm had consequences.

After the Polish authorities took exception to Hands Up (the story of a group of young physicians who recall their university days during the stalinist period), skolimowski left the country – a decision “that ruined my life.” Landing in London during the swinging ’60s, rumours abound that skolimowski took full advantage of the creative (and permissive) atmosphere, but it didn’t always translate into his films. He took a couple of Hollywood jobs to pay the

bills, but it didn’t work: “it was ridiculous. i am an honest Nouvelle Vague auteur being taken into the Hollywood structure, which just couldn’t work. How they could get such an idea, i don’t know.” in the mid ’90s, skolimowski’s life changed again during a visit to Japan. “i went to Tokyo and i couldn’t sleep because of the time difference. so i was walking through the Tokyo streets at dawn, the only quiet moments just before the mess starts – the chaos, the noise. suddenly in those empty Tokyo streets, i was attacked by the power of signs. i didn’t care if it was a political slogan or the advertisement for something. i thought, ‘i’d like to do things like this, on such a scale.’ The night that i came back from Tokyo, i took a huge piece of thin wood and some paint, and i started – boom! boom! boom! – doing this sign on a huge scale. And by pure accident the sign was like a dead animal. That very first attempt was so successful, like my first film – that strong.”

Painting dominated skolimowski’s life for the

next 15 years. Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper are both clients. The reason for his success, he says, is that it has recaptured something that he thought was lost: “When i paint, i once again become an innocent artist, only expressing what i can really do. i’m not calculating – it’s a real outburst of the need to be creative.”

Returning to film, skolimowski knows that he is entering the final phase of his career. And though he is less well known than contemporaries like Roman Polanski, and his films are less celebrated than those of Truffaut and Godard, he has no regrets. “i’m not complaining about what has happened to me. i think i got what i deserved,” he says. “if i hadn’t been as lazy a person as i am, probably i would have achieved much more, but i didn’t care. i didn’t care about making films for 15 years. When it came, it happened. But as an artist, i am so much more honest now than ever.” second Run will release Barrier and Hands Up! later this year. www.kinoteka.org.uk

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Sam Christmas

DECONSTRUCTING CANNES T H E

F R O N T

in the week leading up to the Cannes Film Festival ’09, Dean Fisher, the producer on my next movie, stingers – our second feature together – was in high spirits. The reason for this excited disposition, a rare occurrence given his cautious nature, was that he had finished his last successful project (City Rats, among the top-six selling DVDs in the Uk in April), accumulating a platter of kudos and a host of distribution companies all clamouring for his next project.

Lucky for me, that next project is a stylish and highly original crime thriller. Written by the uniquely talented Dan schaffer, creator of sony’s new ‘zomedy’, Doghouse, stingers presents itself like the offspring of a drug-fuelled night of passion between Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers.

With Danny Dyer as an OCD hitman, it requires a modest but respectable indie budget of $1 million to do it justice. in independent feature film history, the $1 million budget has seen its fair share of breakthrough movies, including Reservoir Dogs and Napoleon Dynamite, so we were confident we could produce a solid film. But there was still the small matter of tying down the finances. Where better to get your hands dirty in the grimy business of receiving investment commitments than on the

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L i N E

–

L A W R E N C E

glamorous boats and hedonistic parties of Cannes?

Oh, and business meetings take place there too.

This was to be my third Cannes in a row, and although i had never got round to actually watching a movie (those are saved for the critics and film fans that treat Cannes as their Mecca), i had sampled everything else there was to offer an indie filmmaker in the previous two years. This year i approached the entire contact-making, champagne-drinking, filmtalking, card-giving and card-receiving superficiality with a much more mature head on my shoulders, and less pie-in-the-sky expectations. i prepared myself for a hard time getting those key players to pay attention. Cannes is a festival which, because of the popularity and glamour associated with it, attracts more starry eyed amateur filmmakers and waiters with scripts than any other. As a result, distribution companies, sales agents and those higher up the ladder wear their sunglasses like armour, and do their best to avoid anyone who starts a sentence with, “Hi, i’d like to tell you about this movie we want to make…” This makes for a hard sell, or at least has done for me for the past two years.

This year, however, we were armed with a producer who was sailing on the wind of a hit film and a real page-turner of a script. We secured 28 meetings over a mere three days, and the visit ended with offers

P E A R C E

on the table and a big grin on all of our faces as we can now say with confidence that my next directorial effort will go into production later this year. An early tagline reads: ‘Obsessive. Compulsive. Disordered.’

That pretty much sums up the Cannes experience, and boy is it addictive. www.lawrencepearce.com www.twitter.com/lawrencepearce

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ON DVD AND BLU-RAY

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HMV Exclusive Let The Right One In Little White Lies mini mag

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The wind Journeys

Tomorrow enTer AT dAwn The Void DIRECTED BY Denis Dercourt ETA Late 2009

DIRECTED BY Gaspar Noé ETA TBC

Colombian director Ciro Guerra adds his name to the list of Latin American filmmakers developing a distinct brand of ethnographic cinema. Despite stunning cinematography and naturalistic performances, however, this story of an accordion player crossing the country to return his instrument struggles to hold the attention.

This handsomely produced drama sees two brothers immersed in the world of imperial-era role play, where the participants will go to any length to satisfy their honour.

Jérémie Renier and Vincent Perez are charismatic leads, and the drama is effective if skin-deep.

Technically stunning, arguably vacuous and genuinely unforgettable, Gaspar Noé’s cinematic tour de force shoots from the POV of a young drug dealer in Tokyo – even after he dies.

Gliding through time, space, life, death and narcotics, it’s a unique mindfuck… Literally, when Noé’s camera descends into a woman’s vagina during sex.

DIRECTED BY Ciro Guerra ETA TBC

The siLenT BriGhT sTAr Army DIRECTED BY Jane Campion ETA 2009

DIRECTED BY Jean van de Velde ETA TBC

Jane Campion’s much anticipated comeback – detailing the unconsummated love affair between John Keats and his ‘minxtress’ Fanny Brawne – turned out to be an exercise in middlebrow mediocrity that made the fatal mistake of confusing reciting poetry with being poetic. Ben Whishaw belly flops as the poet.

This poorly executed piece of conscience tugging from Jean van de Velde was perhaps the worst film at Cannes. The bond between a white boy and his black best friend in an African country is tested when one is kidnapped by rebels. Cue a desperate (and desperately improbable) search for the missing child.

ThirsT

DIRECTED BY Park Chan-Wook ETA Late 2009 Corkscrew kills, twisted sex, gore through a straw: call it the anti-Twilight. Spurting with red blood and black humour, Oldboy director Park Chan-Wook’s overlong vampire romance starts out as a body horror, spins off into zany comedy and killer romance, before finally rediscovering itself for a grinning, bittersweet finale.

independenCe DIRECTED BY Raya Martin ETA TBC

Raya Martin’s synthesis of poetic realism, folk art and cultural memory was one of the festival’s more singular offerings. A paean to Filipino patriotism in the guise of a silent-era family drama, Independence is a dreamlike experience that sees a mother and son, fleeing the American army, build a life in isolation in the forest.

doGTooTh DIRECTED BY Giorgos Lanthimos ETA TBC

Channelling a Kubrickian sense of existential madness, this Greek drama exerts an icy effect. A mother and father have kept their children under virtual house arrest for their entire lives – ignorant of the society beyond their doorstep. When the outside world inevitably intrudes, long dormant tensions erupt. Darkly funny and disturbingly violent, Dogtooth has the dislocated aura of a waking nightmare.

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A Brand New Life

The White Ribbon

Cannes rang to the snap of broken hearts as Ounie Lecomte’s debut film devastated the Croisette. Based on her own experiences, she tells the tale of a young Korean girl abandoned by her father in a Catholic orphanage. But this is no Magdalene Sisters scenario.

Instead, it’s a perfectly realised examination of the fragile agony of childhood, and the easy abuse of love. Nine-year-old actress Sae Ron Kim is unforgettable in the lead.

The full title of Michael Haneke’s stark, consummate mystery-drama translates as The White Ribbon: A German Children’s Story. This being Haneke, it includes child abuse, beatings, a decapitated pet bird and searing emotional violence. But mostly, his involving snapshot of a pre-World War I rural village fish-eyes human brutality from a distance – and it’s all the more powerful for it.

DIRECTED BY Ounie Lecomte ETA TBC

The Hell of HenriGeorges Clouzot

DIRECTED BY Serge Bromberg, Ruxandra Medrea ETA TBC One of cinema’s all time greats, HenriGeorges Clouzot was nevertheless undone by the boundless ambition he brought to his 1964 film, L’Enfer. What was to be the ultimate expression of psychedelic imagery and psychological insight turned in to a nightmare that almost killed the director. With neverbefore-seen test footage and behindthe-scenes film, Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea recreate a fascinating and sobering story of the outer limits of creativity.

DIRECTED BY Michael Haneke ETA November 2009

Nymph

DIRECTED BY Pen-Ek Ratanaruang ETA TBC Eco-fantasy meets Thai-horror lite in Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s Nymph.

A couple travel to the jungle on a photography assignment, only for the husband to go missing. The distraught wife returns to their apartment – where her husband is asleep on the sofa. Weirdness ensues. This is a technically stunning but emotionally distant journey into Thai mysticism.

Eyes Wide Open DIRECTED BY Haim Tabakman ETA TBC

A homosexual affair in an orthodox Jewish community is the basis for Haim Tabakman’s sensitive study of religion, alienation and moral pressure. Building the atmosphere through an almost anthropological attention to detail, Tabakman is also supported by excellent turns from Zohar Strauss and Ran Danker.

Tales From The Golden Age Agora

DIRECTED BY Hanno Höfer, Razvan Marculescu, Cristian Mungiu, Constantin Popescu, Ioana Uricaru ETA TBC

DIRECTED BY Alejandro Amenábar ETA Early 2010

What began as a passion project for Palme d’Or winner Cristian Mungiu was opened up into a portmanteau project to showcase new Romanian directors. The resulting films – comic vignettes detailing urban legends from the Ceausescu era – are more hit than miss, and have a lot to say about the unique character of the Romanian people.

Spanish master Amenábar brings a Euclidean elegance to this epic story of female philosopher Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) who lived and worked against a backdrop of religious hatred. But he’s let down by a script that has little to say beyond asking why we can’t all just get along. And awards talk for Weisz is surely wide of the mark.

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The up imAGinArium of doCTor pArnAssus

DIRECTED BY Pete Docter ETA October 2009

DIRECTED BY Terry Gilliam ETA September 2009

Dangling lifelessly from a noose, Heath Ledger makes a startling entrance on his last ever screen appearance.

Cleverly doubled for by Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law, he ventures through a carnival mirror that conjures magical imaginary worlds.

Sadly, despite some inventive visual effects, Terry Gilliam’s clumsy oddball fantasy can’t quite do the same.

fish TAnK

DIRECTED BY Andrea Arnold ETA September 2009 Good enough to have taken the Palme d’Or, Red Road writer/director Andrea Arnold comes up with a near-perfect Dardennes-style drama that’s harsh, delicate, funny and beautifully observed. With perfect performances from non-pro Katie Jarvis as an angsty Essex chav who dreams of escape, and Michael Fassbender as her mother’s boyfriend.

To die LiKe A mAn DIRECTED BY João Pedro Rodrigues ETA TBC

Imagine if Pedro Almodóvar lost his zest for life and succumbed to anomie. To Die Like A Man would be the film he’d make. Following the last months of a faded drag artist in a Lisbon stripped of glamour, it boasts some bold choices from director João Pedro Rodrigues, but lacks the warmth to truly arrest.

AdrifT

DIRECTED BY Heitor Dhalia ETA TBC A young girl’s sexual awakening is set against the backdrop of family infidelity in an exclusive Brazilian beach resort. Newcomer Laura Neiva smoulders sensationally, but with little social comment, Heitor Dhalia’s film plays out like a glorified episode of The OC.

Tears from heaven… This is Pixar’s most emotional film yet and its most outlandish – featuring a balloonpowered flying house, talking guarddogs and a giant multi-coloured bird called Kevin. This wondrously bittersweet comedy about a lonely old man on the adventure of a lifetime can’t quite topple Finding Nemo as Pixar’s masterpiece, but it’s probably the most moving cartoon ever made.

preCious DIRECTED BY Lee Daniels ETA Late 2009

Mariah Carey’s staggeringly authentic turn as a welfare officer is just one reason to see this exploitation melodrama about an obese, illiterate 18-year-old Harlem girl (Gabby Sidibe) who’s abused to hell and back by her parents. Artlessly directed by Lee Daniels, its wallop arrives via fearless performances, breathtaking domestic violence and a truly gutpunching finale.

TeTro

DIRECTED BY Francis Ford Coppola ETA TBC Toying with guilt, family, youth, innocence and art itself, Francis Ford Coppola’s second directorial effort in 12 years stars Vincent Gallo and DiCaprio-lookalike Alden Ehrenreich as two brothers reunited in Buenos Aires. Shot in monochrome, it’s too self-conscious to stick. But it’s intriguing to see how the Hollywood godfather’s obsessions have changed – and stayed the same.

moTher DIRECTED BY Bong Joon-Ho ETA TBC

Back in the killer-thriller genre for the first time since his modern masterpiece Memories of Murder, Korean director Bong Joon-Ho untwists a surprising, melancholy mystery-drama about a schoolgirl’s murder, a boy with a goldfish memory, and a mother driven to the edge. It’s slow-burn, compulsive and masterfully shot.

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