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Contents October 2017
30
FEATURES
22 COVER FEATURE Dark mirror: the cinema of Stephen King
Stephen King’s monumental output offers a detailed map of the insecurities of the post-war American psyche – a distinctive mythos captured in a dizzying array of adaptations, from the auteur visions of Stanley Kubrick to low-budget video nasties. By Roger Luckhurst PLUS Kelli Weston looks at King’s use of fairytale archetypes 30 Trouble and strife
Even by the standards of Darren Aronofsky, a director who has made a career out of defying expectations, Mother! – the tale of a woman trying to create a dream family home in the face of disturbances by a series of strange guests – is a thoroughly confounding experience. He talks to Trevor Johnston 38 Love and death on Long Island
34 All I desire For female critics, talking about ogling men on screen is a subversive joy that allows for critical honesty and challenges centuries of the male gaze. By Christina Newland REGULARS
5 6
Editorial The kids aren’t all right Rushes On Our Radar: BFI London
Film Festival highlights 8
Interview: Abbey Bender talks to
Maysaloun Hamoud, whose In Between focuses on Palestinian women in Israel 9 The Numbers: Charles Gant charts breakout hits Girls Trip and The Big Sick 10 Industry: Andrew Male tunes in to Talking Pictures, the unexpected success story of digital TV 13 Dispatches: Mark Cousins remembers the surprising Jeanne Moreau Festivals
14 Kieron Corless reports from Locarno
Wide Angle
16 Preview: ahead of a retrospective at London’s Tate Modern, Elena Gorfinkel explores the world of the American artist Kevin Jerome Everson 18 Primal Screen: Bryony Dixon tests the vintage of Shiraz, a rare survivor from India’s silent era 21 Point of View: Mark Steven examines the violent connections between capitalism and slasher films
Yance Ford’s wrenching documentary Strong Island, about the killing of his brother by a white mechanic in 1992, confronts viewers with tough questions about their own complicity in racial stereotyping. By Robert Greene 42 Birdy num-num
The Indian characters Peter Sellers plays in The Millionairess and The Party are, on a basic level, grotesque constructs – but on closer examination, they contain an unwitting depth and complexity. By Hanif Kureishi
95 Letters Endings
96 Alex Dudok de Wit on the rich, bleak ambiguities that close Mira Nair’s stunning Salaam Bombay!
22 October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 1
newfilms david lynch: the art life
ďŹ lm of the month
miss sloane
also available on blu-ray 18/09/17
11/09/17
the red turtle
also available on blu-ray 25/09/17
mindhorn also available on blu-ray out now
song to song 25/09/17
slack bay 11/09/17
whitney: can i be me
also available on blu-ray out now
the midwife 11/09/17
homesick 25/09/17
chicken
also available on blu-ray 18/09/17
voice from the stone out now
the untamed also available on blu-ray 25/09/17
the fopp list
the fopp list
get the lowdown on the best new ďŹ lms in this month’s edition of the fopp list, free magazine in-store now while stocks last
fopp stores bristol college green cambridge sidney st edinburgh rose st glasgow union st & byres rd london covent garden manchester brown st nottingham broadmarsh shopping centre oxford gloucester green
my beautiful laundrette
dual format edition out now
le trou also available on dvd out now
the graduate
also available on dvd out now
lord of the flies: the criterion collection blu-ray out now
the sun also rises
dual format edition out now
joe bullet
also available on dvd 11/09/17
touchez pas au grisbi
life is sweet
dual format edition 18/09/17
blu-ray out now
torn curtain dual format edition out now
zombie creeping flesh
also available on dvd out now
the flying guillotine
the endless summer also available on dvd out now
fopp stores bristol college green // cambridge sidney st // edinburgh rose st // glasgow union st & byres rd london covent garden // manchester brown st nottingham broadmarsh shopping centre oxford gloucester green
also available on dvd out now
EDITORIAL Editor Nick James Deputy editor Kieron Corless Features editor James Bell Web editor Nick Bradshaw Production editor Isabel Stevens Chief sub-editor Jamie McLeish Sub-editors Robert Hanks Jane Lamacraft Researcher Mar Diestro-Dópido Credits supervisor Patrick Fahy Credits associates Kevin Lyons Pieter Sonke James Piers Taylor Design and art direction chrisbrawndesign.com Origination Rhapsody Printer Wyndeham Group BUSINESS Publisher Rob Winter Publishing coordinator Natalie Griffith Advertising consultant Ronnie Hackston T: 020 7957 8916 M: 07799 605 212 E: ronnie.hackston@bfi.org.uk Newsstand distribution Comag Specialist T: 01895 433800 Bookshop distribution Central Books T: 020 8986 4854 Sight & Sound is a member of the Independent Press Standards Organisation (which regulates the UK’s magazine and newspaper industry). We abide by the Editors’ Code of Practice and are committed to upholding the highest standards of journalism. If you think that we have not met those standards and want to make a complaint please contact rob.winter@bfi.org.uk. If we are unable to resolve your complaint, or if you would like more information about IPSO or the Editors’ Code, contact IPSO on 0300 123 2220 or visit www.ipso.co.uk Sight & Sound (ISSN 0037-4806) is published monthly by British Film Institute, 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN and distributed in the USA by UKP Worldwide, 3390 Rand Road, South Plainfield, NJ 07080 Periodicals Postage Paid at South Plainfield, NJ POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Sight and Sound c/o 3390 Rand Road, South Plainfield NJ 07080. Subscription office: For subscription queries and sales of back issues and binders contact: Subscription Department Sight & Sound Abacus e-Media 3rd Floor Chancery Exchange 10 Furnival Street, London, EC4A 1AB T: 020 8955 7070 F: 020 8421 8244 E: sightandsound@abacusemedia.com Annual subscription rates: UK £45, Eire and ROW £68 15% discount for BFI members
ILLUSTRATION BY SIMON COOPER AT WWW.COOPERILLO.COM
Copyright © BFI, 2017 The views and opinions expressed in the pages of this magazine or on its website are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of the BFI or its employees. The contents of this magazine may not be used or reproduced without the written permission of the Publisher. The BFI is a charity, (registration number 287780), registered at 21 Stephen St, London, W1T 1LN
Editorial Nick James
THE KIDS AREN’T ALL RIGHT Recently, in a meeting at work, a BFI colleague said, “The teenagers I know see no difference between one type of screen and another, between television and film and their phones.” It’s a common observation, but what struck me was that it was expressed with such iconoclastic urgency. The issues of youth and new technology are at the forefront of ‘BFI2022’, the Institute’s strategy for the next five years, which focuses on future audiences and future talent. My colleague wanted to make the point that the word ‘film’ is inadequate to describe the moving images we watch and how we watch them. And who could argue with that? It’s well known that we lack a handy replacement terminology for the moving image, especially in the UK, where the useful term ‘movies’ has never really been accepted. What bothered me, though, was the way my colleague deferred to teenagers. I used to find it annoying when any parent said, “My daughter [or son] says…” Then, of course, I found myself doing it, a lot. That mature adults so often use teenagers to validate their observations got me wondering if it’s a symptom of a flaw in our multi-platform movingimage culture. Is it a problem, for instance, that no one but the most uncool fogey will suggest that teenagers are wrong about anything technological, or that distinguishing between screens may be something they’ll want to do later, when they’ve had more, and better, screen-based experiences? Why is there so little resistance when any technological turn creates a facility that could be detrimental? Some answers to that are obvious: technological and cultural changes continue to move faster than our comprehension of them (hence the adulation for Silicon Valley gurus); we’ve seen media industries spend fortunes trying to persuade young people not to take digital stuff for free, without success and with disastrous consequences for some media outputs; and in the massive social realm of the internet, worrying about the perils of something ‘everyone’ thinks and does already seems beside the point. Experience tells us that young people assimilate to new tech better and quicker than mature adults, so if they’re doing something their way, the assumption is we should all just get in line. But if we wanted more give and take in the debate, what evidence can we stack up against the tech certainties of the media future? The list is short, but arresting: the niche switch back to vinyl records; the big switch back to printed books; the failure of 3D to get a bigger slice of the market; the failure of James Cameron’s Avatar to become the future of cinema (eight years, and still no sequel); and the fact that we have not yet seen a major VR work of art (of course not, it’s early days). All these indicate that not all early adopted new forms of tech succeed or reach fruition quickly.
A BFI colleague said, ‘The teenagers I know see no difference between one type of screen and another, between television and film and their phones’ But I would argue that the young have not much more to do with this battle for attention than anyone else. Teenagers are, of course, every media company’s future market, so their attitudes matter hugely, but those attitudes change, almost as fast as the technology does. And in any case, why should every response mature adults give to what teenagers are doing be that of their inner marketing manager? We all love our mobile phones while bemoaning their ability to take over our lives. I suspect that when mature adults like myself say, “My teenager says”, we’re not acceding to the genius of young talent, we’re abrogating the responsibility to assess something ourselves, thereby reaffirming – as baby-boomers and their younger siblings have tended to do all their rock ’n’ roll lives – our own onetime juvenile irresponsibility. We are all the children of modernity and, to quote Maggie Nelson’s 2011 book The Art of Cruelty, “Modernity itself could in some sense be defined as that which privileges dissociation from – even the violent destruction of – that which has come before, rather than that which secures its reverent continuation.” Parents are as addicted to this technology as their grown-up children, possibly more so, and the responsibilities of its attendant newnesses should not be dumped on the already put-upon teenager. Sight & Sound will be reporting and critiquing future tech and future talent with alacrity. We can’t wait to assess VR work that goes beyond immersing you in a situation that tantalises you with estrangement, that presents something that competes with film and TV as art and entertainment in our daily lives. In the meantime, the search for a new moving-image term goes on. Nelson’s book likes ‘image flow’, but I don’t think that will stick any better than ‘the moving image’. Perhaps we need a competition – open to all ages, of course. October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 5
Rushes
NEWS AND VIEWS
BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL HIGHLIGHTS
S Sight & Sound Gala: Zama
T Returning veterans
T Genre delights
It’s been a long wait – nine years – since Lucrecia Martel’s last feature, The Headless Woman, so Sight & Sound is especially proud to partner with the BFI London Film Festival to present the UK premiere of the singular Argentinian auteur’s fourth feature, Zama (above), on 14 and 15 October. It’s Martel’s first literary adaptation, based on Antonio di Benedetto’s 1956 existential novel about a Creole civil servant hoping to escape his remote regional posting in Paraguay. The enigmatic and disturbing 18th-century-set tale is Martel’s first period drama but expect a radical take on Spain’s colonial history: “All that heroic past and brave macho stuff makes me ill,” Martel told S&S during a Zama set visit two years ago.
The roll call of prestigious auteurs in the programme is a long one: Michael Haneke returns with his chilly satire Happy End (below), David Fincher presents his TV crime drama Mindhunter and gives a screen talk, while Claire Denis, Andrey Zvyagintsev and Hong Sang-soo are also in the mix with much-lauded new films.
Guillermo del Toro’s supernatural aquatic romance The Shape of Water is one of the most anticipated LFF films but there are plenty of other otherworldy genre gems too. Sink your teeth into Brazilian werewolf drama Good Manners (below), spooky Icelandic horror Rift and an adaptation of the hit British stage play Ghost Stories.
6 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
T Archive gems
X American indies
Courtesy of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, Mauritanian director Med Hondo’s debut Oh, Sun! (1970, below) – a scathing attack on colonialism – is one of many restoration treats in store for LFF audiences. Other neglected and classic films back in the spotlight include the first blockbuster film by a female director, Lois Weber’s The Dumb Girl of Portici (1915), Terry Gilliam’s uproarious fantasy Jabberwocky (1977) and the epic 1928 Indian romance Shiraz, with a new score by Anoushka Shankar (see page 18 for more).
Sean Baker’s The Florida Project (right), a manic candy-coloured tour of rundown motels from the point of view of a six-year-old, and the Safdie brothers’ gritty pulp thriller Good Time are just two LFF offerings showing there’s still plenty of life in the US indie scene. Another topical inclusion is the low-budget dark comedy Ingrid Goes West, about a social media stalker. Noah Baumbach, meanwhile, deploys his customary wit and psychological insight into fragile souls with his family saga The Meyerowitz Stories.
S Emerging voices
With a programe of 242 features, there’s plenty of room for discoveries. Top of our list of debuts include Léonor Serraille’s sparky portrait of heartbreak and emotional and financial freefall Jeune femme (above); Rungano Nyoni’s chilling satire I Am Not a Witch; the first feature by S&S video essayist Kogonada, Columbus; and Chloé Zhao’s journey into America’s heartland The Rider. T Brit picks
Adventurous homegrown films are plentiful this year: there’s Lynne Ramsay’s brutal You Were Never Really Here (below), featuring Joaquin Phoenix as a hitman who rescues children from sex-rings; Andrew Haigh’s saga of teenage loneliness and horses Lean on Pete; and Clio Barnard’s rural drama Dark River. And if it’s laughs in the dark you’re after, seek out Sally Potter’s black drawingroom comedy The Party and Jamie Thraves’s off-beat tale of divorce and serial killing Pickups.
i
The BFI London Film Festival runs from 4-15 October and takes place at venues across the city. See www.bfi.org.uk/lff
X Hot docs
Faces Places (right), a road trip from the 89-yearold filmmaking guerilla that is Agnès Varda, is just one of the many nonfiction highlights at the festival. Others include Ex Libri: The New York Public Library, by another prolific octogenarian, the institutional surveyor Frederick Wiseman; the late Michael Glawogger’s parting travelogue Untitled; and Radu Jude’s essay about Romanian history The Dead Nation (for more, see our Locarno report on page 14). Meanwhile, Joshua Bonnetta and Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab alumnus J.P. Sniadecki provide a timely exploration of Mexican-US border crossings in El mar la mar. Plus, two must-sees for cinephiles: Filmworker, a portrait of Stanley Kubrick by one of his former assistants; and an account of Afghanistan’s oneman film industry, The Prince of Nothingwood.
October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 7
RUSHES
INTERVIEW
THE INVISIBLE LIFE Maysaloun Hamoud’s feature debut shows aspects of Palestinian life within Israel that are both rarely seen and very familiar By Abbey Bender
In Between, Maysaloun Hamoud’s debut feature, shines a light on the trials and tribulations of three young Palestinian women living together in Tel Aviv. Laila (Mouna Hawa) is a lawyer from a secular Muslim family. Salma (Sana Jammalieh) is a DJ whose lesbianism threatens her conservative Christian family. Nour (Shaden Kanboura), first seen as an outsider by the two friends, is a religious Muslim college student with a brutish fiancé. At Cannes this year, Isabelle Huppert handpicked Hamoud to receive a Young Talents Award for the film, which is noteworthy for its naturalistic depiction of female friendship and modern Palestinian life. Comparisons with Lena Dunham’s TV series Girls and indie films in similar milieux feel inevitable, but Hamoud’s work is particularly noteworthy for its cultural specificity, the way it shows young women forging bonds and navigating through a decidedly more rigid society. I spoke to the director about her poignant depiction of these complex lives. Abbey Bender: The film feels very personal. Was any of it drawn from your own life, or were you setting out to make a particular statement? Maysaloun Hamoud: The movie is an authentic
picture of a kind of invisible life that we live here as a younger generation of Palestinians. We are not unique in having these kinds of lives. All conservative societies have more or less the same situations – and similar conflicts and dilemmas. There is a prescribed path: to finish studies, get married, and go back to the village – we don’t have a lot of big cities to escape to. This is our life. This is a particular story but at the same time it’s totally universal. As a woman in this society with all the craziness and the patriarchy, we need to raise this voice. AB: What was your path to filmmaking like? MH: I was in a totally different world. I studied
at Hebrew University and was a teacher in Jerusalem. I always wrote for myself and never thought about it as a professional way to live, but it was my passion. After going through somee critical health issues, I gained a very different ly perspective on life and decided to do what I really wanted. I don’t just want to be another person making movies, I want to say something. AB: Who are your cinematic influences? MH: I think you can feel some influence from
Pedro Almodóvar. Ken Loach is one of my se important influences. And in some ways, because ’s there are women with revenge and action, there’s e. some Quentin Tarantino that I hope you can see. For Palestinian cinema, Paradise Now [Hany Abu-Assad’s 2005 film about two young men preparing for a suicide bombing] is a very good movie. It’s the first reference for realism in Palestinian cinema, and talks about the Palestinian in Israel, not in the West Bank or in Gaza. It shows part of the Palestinian nation thatt Maysaloun Hamoud 8 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
City slickers: Sana Jammalieh as Salma, Shaden Kanboura as Nour and Mouna Hawa as Laila
We think the occupation and conflict is the most important topic to put in our movies, but I think we can do better
isn’t usually seen. We think the occupation and conflict is always the most important topic to put in our movies, but I think we can do better. AB: What were some of the challenges of avoiding stereotypes? MH: We should start with the casting. I knew
from the beginning that I wasn’t planning to use well-known actors. I needed a clean slate, without any typecasting. Because I’m in this generation I know the kind of people who live in this underground. I mixed actors and non-professional actors. Salma and her lover [Dunia, played by Ahlam Canaan] are both in front of the camera for the first time here. And behind the scenes, Salma is the graphic designer for the movie. She’s a DJ in real life and recently opened the first bar in Israel owned by two women. I don’t think you could ever tell they were non-professional actors if I didn’t tell you. This is the theme I worked on with the ensemble. We don’t want to act. We want to be. Because this is our life. Because of that the feeling of authenticity is stronger. AB: Was there improvisation? What was the screenwriting process like? MH: This is kind of funny and miserable: because
I am Palestinian but an Israeli citizen all my colleagues are Jews, so they don’t read or write in Arabic. So I wrote everything in Hebrew – it was crazy, since the movie’s basically in Arabic.
THE NUMBERS THE BIG SICK AND GIRLS TRIP
After I finished the work with the script and cast all the ensemble, I started to work with each one to write the Arabic version for the roles. And at rehearsals I gave them the space to create some of the dialogue. We changed the nuances – they say it this way, I say it that way – and tried to find out the way it felt most natural. Some magical moments popped up in this process and we kept them. All the work was worth it. AB: And the final shot of the film is so compelling. MH: The strongest feeling you go out with is one
of sweet and sour. The women are fighters, no doubt, and in fighting for freedom nothing comes without a price. Because of that, you feel that they are smashed but at the same time still strong. And you feel the glue, the sisterhood between them. They are not just three women – all of them kind of make a new woman together. AB: Do you feel part of a burgeoning indie film scene? MH: We don’t have the film world of the US
and Europe. It’s much smaller. But also, as a Palestinian and a woman it’s more difficult. I am part of a very important cultural scene and a new Palestinian wave is happening, but we are still such a small group. I think you will hear about more Palestinian filmmakers soon.
i
In Between is released in UK cinemas on 22 September and is reviewed on page 62
By Charles Gant Commentators bemoaning this summer’s poor box-office performance have tended to lay the blame on uninspired action franchise pictures; the commercial failure of 2017’s Hollywood comedies has received less attention. Usually, the summer season can be relied on to deliver at least one raunchy comedy breakout hit, from The Hangover (2009) to Bridesmaids (2011), Ted (2012) and Bad Neighbours (2014). But in 2017, successive comedies – from Will Ferrell’s The House to Baywatch, Snatched and Rough Night – have disappointed. Performing at a commercial level below the likes of Bridesmaids and Ted, but still beyond expectations, is Girls Trip, the latest variant on the ‘women behaving badly’ genre, starring Regina Hall, Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith and scene-stealer Tiffany Haddish. With more than $100 million at US cinemas, it’s the comedy hit of the year, not counting family animation or genre hybrids such as Get Out. In the UK, ensemble comedies dominated by African-American casts (the 2012 US smash Think Like a Man, for example) have often missed at the box office, while hits featuring black characters tend to be driven by star names such as Eddie Murphy, Martin Lawrence and, lately, Kevin Hart. But Girls Trip has truly connected with audiences, reaching £6.8 million at press time. Clare Binns, chief booker for Picturehouse, declares herself a fan: “Traditionally, there are films aimed at black audiences that do very well in the States, and don’t do as well here, and also don’t cross over,” she says. “What’s interesting about this one, and also very refreshing, and makes me hopeful for the world in general, is the fact that it feels that it’s just a great comedy, and it happens to have black cast members in it. It’s a comedy for everybody, and that’s why I played it not just where you might expect, namely Hackney and the Ritzy in Brixton, but also at our Central flagship.” While Girls Trip has been the season’s multiplex comedy success, the summer’s
A midsummer night’s dream: Girls Trip
indie comedy hit – and in fact the only notable indie hit of any genre – was provided by The Big Sick, co-written by and starring PakistaniAmerican Kumail Nanjiani. StudioCanal released it on 28 July and achieved sustained success, with cinemas continuing to do better with it than with a range of indie releases (A Ghost Story, Final Portrait, An Inconvenient Sequel, Maudie, The Odyssey) that subsequently came into the marketplace. At press time, it had reached £1.6 million, including £250,000 at Picturehouse venues. Says Binns, “Without naming names, there are films still being made for audiences that existed ten years ago, and those audiences have moved on. Our audiences want something smart, that deals with and can be funny about a world that we all live in.” For Binns, the appeal of The Big Sick wasn’t so much its racial difference as its relatability. “This guy is a Mr Everyman,” she says. “We all know people dealing with their cultural backgrounds, in an integrated society. That’s where we live. The Big Sick is very timely, and got it exactly right. People come out of the cinema just feeling good.” *
US COMEDIES WITH MAJORITY NON-WHITE LEAD ROLES AT THE UK BOX OFFICE
Film
Year
Gross
The Nutty Professor
1996
£12,289,542
Rush Hour
1998
£7,400,102
Girls Trip
2017
£6,840,243
Norbit
2007
£5,826,146
Bad Boys
1995
£5,120,167
Ride Along
2014
£4,156,116
Big Momma’s House
2000
£3,613,580
White Chicks
2004
£3,550,968
Are We There Yet?
2005
£3,225,161
Death at a Funeral
2010
£2,825,125
†
†
* Excludes sequels; gross at press time
October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 9
RUSHES
INDUSTRY
GOLDEN OLDIES Talking Pictures TV offers UK viewers a treasure trove of the kind of classic cinema that was once a staple of the terrestrial schedules By Andrew Male
Fair game: Albert Finney and Shirley Anne Field in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)
says Noel, “so we were able to acquire them for reasonable amounts. I bought a massive BBC library, and all of the Butcher’s Film Distributors stock, which was literally rotting in Brentford and would have been lost forever.” From 2000 onwards, Renown operated as a successful niche DVD label. Then, as interest in DVDs began to wane, father and daughter pondered the logistics of a vintage TV channel. “We wrote endless business models,” says Sarah, “but nobody wanted to invest. So in the end we did it ourselves.” Two years on, Talking Pictures is now available on Virgin, Freeview, Sky, Freesat and YouView and has accrued a significant number of vocal celebrity followers, such as Mark Gatiss, Danny Baker, Vic Reeves and Robin Ince, singing the praises of this free British repertory cinema in your front room. “Their help’s been brilliant,” says Sarah. “You know it’s from a place of love. They love these films and are just happy to see them on terrestrial television again, or, in many cases, for the first time.” In June, superfan Reeves took over the channel for a day, introducing such British cinema landmarks as Woman in a Dressing Gown
No one was showing these films any more, so we were able to acquire them. We’re literally saving them from the grave
(1957), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), Whistle Down the Wind (1961) and Hell Drivers (1957). The channel has also featured interviews with past stars of British cinema, such as Janette Scott, Roger Moore, Shirley Eaton, Valerie Leon and Sylvia Syms. “There’s many more people we’d love to interview,” says Sarah. “But at the moment we just survive on advertising – we don’t have the budgets.” There are other problems, too, including persuading some rights-holders to do deals. “There are distributors who’ve got lots of lovely old films in ‘deep catalogue’ that they refuse to do anything with,” says Noel. “They want big deals, or they’re not transmission-ready because they won’t spend money on them. We’re literally saving these films from the grave.” In July, the station acquired broadcasting rights for Laurel and Hardy’s 30s feature films from the Hal Roach Studios, following two long years of negotiations – “They didn’t know who we were, or why we wanted them,” says Sarah – and other studios and distributors have proved even more reluctant. However, the climate has certainly changed in the two years since Talking Pictures launched. “Other stations are now knocking on the same doors, hoovering up stuff we can’t afford,” says Sarah. “The BBC is now showing far more black-and-white films and Amazon Prime is gradually adding older films, so I’m waiting to see how that works.” As to Talking Pictures, there are plans to launch a streaming website in the near future, plus discussions to acquire a pair of muchloved TV series from the 50s and 60s, but until then there are always the loyal viewers. “We get DVDs sent in the post,” says Sarah, “with hand-written notes saying, ‘I’ve found a copy of this, could you play it?’ I have to explain to them that it’s a bit more complicated than that. But they always get a free badge and a nice letter back.”
i The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) 10 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957)
Talking Pictures TV is available in the UK on Virgin 445, Freesat 306, Freeview channel 81, YouView 81, Sky channel 343 and free-to-air satellite services
BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE (3)
The first sign that Talking Pictures TV might be a success was when the phones started ringing. When the independent free-to-air TV channel launched on 26 May 2015, its 24-hour diet of mainly black-and-white British cinema from the 30s to the 60s failed to cultivate the required column inches. Station boss Sarah CroninStanley wondered whether she’d made a terrible mistake. Then the calls started coming in. “It was the viewers,” Cronin-Stanley says today. “People were calling to say, ‘You’ve no idea how much you’ve changed our lives.’ Our particular target audience still phone and write. We were getting beautifully written letters and cards about Esmond Knight and Alec Guinness, people who remembered seeing such-and-such an Anthony Asquith film when it first came out. They’d call for a chat, or to tell us how much they’d enjoyed what they’d just watched.” At a time when our TV viewing is dominated by reality soaps, the next box-set, and such fractured, viewer-led streaming models as Netflix, Talking Pictures TV has become a remarkable word-of-mouth success story. From a tiny paper-strewn home office in Kings Langley, Hertfordshire, the three-person team of CroninStanley, her father Noel Cronin and her husband Neill Stanley run a TV station that now reaches more than 1.3 million viewers a week, with a roster of old films and vintage TV that, until very recently, had all but vanished from our screens. An average week’s programming on Talking Pictures will include William Wyler’s tale of World War II veterans The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), alongside Robert Fuest’s sci-fi thriller The Final Programme (1973), Ralph Smart’s TV series HG Wells’ Invisible Man (1958-59) and Herk Harvey’s cult horror film Carnival of Souls (1962), plus BFI transport shorts, US variety shows and spotlights on such under-regarded British directors as John Gilling and Lance Comfort. Much of the 24-hour roster is dictated by the large cache of films the Cronins own the rights to, the legacy of more than 25 years spent running the independent production company Renown Pictures, and Noel’s work throughout the 1970s as head of UK film distributor Dandelion. “No one was showing these films any more,”
YOUNG TALENTS AWARD
BEST DEBUT FEATURE FILM
BEST ACTRESS
WOMEN IN MOTION CANNES FESTIVAL
HAIFA FILM FESTIVAL
HAIFA FILM FESTIVAL
BEST FILM SAN SEBASTIAN FILM FESTIVAL
+++++
“Poignant and impressive, a revelatory debut feature” New Internationalists
“The free-spirited and joyful women that Hamoud portrays... are true heroines of our time” Isabelle Huppert
IN B ETW EEN A film by MAYSALOUN HAMOUD
Q&A - Sept 20 Cine Lumiere, Sept 21 Barbican Cinema, Sept 22 ICA,
IN CINEMAS SEPT 22
Peccadillo Pictures peccapics.com
B R A N D
A
N E W
R E S T O R A T I O N
MICHAEL BALCON PRODUCTION
A FILM BY
LESLIE NORMAN
SPECIAL FEATURES • NEW Interview with actor Sean Barrett • Dunkirk Operation Dynamo Newsreel • Young Veteran Ealing short • John Mills home movie footage • Behind the Scenes Stills gallery
ON BLU-RAY, DVD AND DOWNLOAD OCTOBER 2ND FOLLOW US ON
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RUSHES
DISPATCHES
JEANNE GENIE Jeanne Moreau’s magnetic screen charisma and anarchic sensibility proved a powerful draw for the great mid-century auteurs
ILLUSTRATION BY NATE KITCH
By Mark Cousins
So Jeanne Moreau has died. I knew her a bit, 20 years ago. I wanted to interview her, so we had lunch so she could suss me out, and then I went to India, about which she had a lot to say, and we exchanged postcards, and then we disagreed about Bosnia (she was a bit too proSerb, and I’d been in Sarajevo during the siege). Now that she’s gone, I’m again writing about her. I asked Sight & Sound if I could do so in the style of James Joyce’s Molly Bloom soliloquy, but they said no, which is fine because that would probably have been shite. But I don’t think I can do a standard column on Moreau, so what follows is more impressionistic. A stream of consciousness. Imagine that we’re in a bar, and chatting… What are the headlines about Moreau? The bullet points? It was said that when she was in a bad mood, it was like being blasted by napalm. Jean Cocteau compared her to metal wire. One producer called her “perversity in the shape of a woman”. She said that all her characters were anarchists. She was attracted to the freedom in the characters she played, which meant she was seldom bogged down by neuroses or politics. Like François Truffaut, she was certainly never conventionally left wing. She was a chess piece for Antonioni, an avatar for Marguerite Duras, a dancer for Orson Welles and a butterfly for Truffaut. Did she have an era? The 60s, probably. The decade that overthrew tradition and led to the shock of the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Moreau was the queen of that movement, yet she never manned the barricades. To do so would be to throw her lot in too much with the group. She was more disdainful than that. She was reading Racine when everyone else was reading Sartre. What she called the “masculine side” of her personality made her a wanderer. She often used land as a metaphor for interiority – you have to cultivate yourself. Following on from that, so many of her films – Louis Malle’s Les Amants (1958), Luis Buñuel’s saucy Diary of a Chambermaid (1964) – are about the relationship between cities and the countryside. Moreau needed the restorative qualities of the latter. In that way she was a Rousseauian. Did Moreau’s past form her? She was born in 1928. There was a scandal because her mother got pregnant by a restaurateur. The Nazi occupation made her scared of people: “I didn’t like adults… I was determined to escape the world of sex and greed.” Yet the occupation didn’t turn her into a militant, a communist. By 13 she’d read Zola and Gide. She announced that she wanted to be an actor. Her drunk father said “putain” and slapped her across the face. By the late 40s she was at the conservatoire. She had miscarriages and didn’t
Jeanne Moreau was a chess piece for Antonioni, an avatar for Duras, a dancer for Welles and a butterfly for Truffaut hang out in trendy Saint-Germain-des-Prés. She acted in shows by Cocteau, Shaw and Tennessee Williams and, pregnant at the age of 20, she said that she “had no disposition to be a mother”. Then came the 1950s. She was a hit in the theatre and knew she was magnetic, but thought that her downturned mouth, small nose and drooping eyes were too unconventional for cinema. Then Louis Malle saw her as Maggie in the play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and the result was Lift to the Scaffold (1958). It launched the Sad Women theme in her work, which continued in Antonioni’s La notte (1961), Joseph Losey’s Eva (1962) and the films with Marguerite Duras. Malle’s Les Amants was her signature – modern, but classical. She drifts, the film tries to emulate the blankness of Bresson, cunnilingus is implied for the first time in mainstream cinema, and the movie was banned in some US states; and yet it was an 18thcentury story. She and Malle had a relationship. When she split from him, to console herself she wrote to… Ingmar Bergman. She was a woman of cinema now. Moreau’s sad woman in Duras’s Moderato cantabile (1960) was almost suicidal and drank wine in the morning. During the making of it she saw L’avventura (1960) and so wrote to Antonioni. He liked her walk, and the sadness she evinced. La notte was like Ibsen directed by Le Corbusier. In it people search for, and fail to find, love. Moreau was on sleeping pills and sedatives when she
made it, and she said she had never looked so ugly. It was her sexiest part. Did she ever feel suffocated by all those auteur filmmakers? Thank god for her Happy Women. Moreau wore no make-up in Jules et Jim (1962), and laughed, and was that butterfly. She said that her character, Catherine, was a criminal, not particularly beautiful or sincere, but a real woman. She is brimming but empty. The freshness was thrilling. She was liberated from men, but also from the narrative. She was like Louise Brooks as Lulu. At this time, Moreau became powerful, chic and famous. She bought a Rolls-Royce. She had a relationship with Pierre Cardin. Then came Orson… A spent volcano? A fallen giant? “I loved and detested him,” she said. In Welles’s The Trial (1962) she was a symbol of repressed sexuality, and something similar in Chimes at Midnight (1965). That’s how Welles saw her. Chimes was a lament for the past, the opposite of her worldview. As well as the Sad Women and the Happy Women, she played the Anarchists: Jeanne in Bertrand Blier’s raucous Les Valseuses (1974), about a sexual rampage. Fassbinder’s Querelle (1982) was lawless too, but was the film misogynistic? Moreau stopped drinking for a bit in 1986, then had a huge comeback in a Racine play. She was a bohemian. She was interested in the throb of sex. After we’d argued about Serbia (and cinema – she said that it wasn’t as great as music), I ran after her in the Tuileries, carrying her handbag – outmanoeuvred by a woman twice my age, like a scene in one of her films. As she aged, her movies asked with what youth and beauty can be replaced. If there’s a theme in her work, it’s that love doesn’t last. I think she surprised me more than any film person I’ve met. October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 13
Festivals LOCARNO
YOUNG AT HEART
Class act: Isabelle Huppert as a struggling schoolteacher transformed in Serge Bozon’s Madame Hyde
At 70 years old, the Locarno festival is barely showing its age – it remains adventurous, expansive and confident By Kieron Corless
Some three months after Cannes celebrated its 70th anniversary Locarno undertook a similar operation, signalling that it too has deep, storied roots as one of the very oldest film festivals. Such celebrations can be tricky to pull off though, as Cannes discovered in May. For all the backslapping, the parties, the great and good’s encomiums, at such moments the leading festivals are still reliant on the quality of the available films to build the requisite buzz – in other words, an element of luck and serendipity, as well as programming nous. Cannes came unstuck in that regard; would Locarno fare any better? On the whole, Locarno and Cannes draw from different pools: Locarno has a tighter focus, more tilted to discovery and the formally adventurous. Down the years the festival has offered itself as a barometer of the latest independent world cinema, supported by completist historical retrospective programming. But the extra challenge it faced this August was the fact that last year’s edition was remarkable, blessed with a 14 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
bunch of variously boundary-pushing, zeitgeisty, debate-stirring films – The Ornithologist, By the Time It Gets Dark, The Human Surge, The Dreamed Path, All the Cities of the North, The Future Perfect and more. There was also a superbly curated, eye-opening retrospective of German cinema in the 50s, observed from both sides of the border. That was a tough act to follow, and in truth this year felt like a slight falling off – a good, solid edition rather than an exceptional one, at least as far as new films were concerned. (The historical material was just fine: a comprehensive Jacques Tourneur retrospective; Todd Haynes and JeanMarie Straub selections to underscore honorary awards; a restoration of Jean-Luc Godard’s brilliantly funny and tragic Grandeur et décadence d’un petit commerce de cinema, 1986; and a gathering of seminal films shown at Locarno throughout its 70-year history.) There was still plenty to get your teeth into. Locarno’s reputation continues to grow and ever more people appear to be attending, especially from North America and Canada (there’s now even a ‘Locarno in LA’ mini-festival), so that the three new cinemas the festival opened this edition seemed a necessity rather than a luxury. The mood generally seemed to be one of buoyant expansiveness, a confidence in what the festival represents and its future direction. The Tourneur programme provided a kind of backbeat, concentrating minds – in my case, on duration: a fair few new films cried out for
a dose of Tourneur’s leanness. Festival bloat is a regular complaint, but I found restlessness setting in virtually every day, even with a few of the films I actually liked. That criticism didn’t apply, though, to three documentaries that broadly adopted the essayistic mode, intriguing for the different positions they took up on the axis that runs from personal to impersonal. At the former end of the scale sits Travis Wilkerson’s Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?, a noir-tinged, agitprop-style investigation into the unpunished murder by the director’s racist great-grandfather of a black man in Alabama in the 1940s. It’s a mélange of home movies, stills, music, graphics, his own footage shot while driving, bound together by Wilkerson’s voiceover – studiedly slow and hypnotic, self-accusatory, at times angrily self-lacerating, indicting himself and whites in general as beneficiaries of structural racism and murder. The film opens out into a meditation on the violence of historical erasure; and in its later stages it edges eerily towards an almost apocalyptic imaginary, ever deeper into a cauldron of fear and secrecy. Radu Jude’s Dead Nation (screening in the London Film Festival) is cooler, operating by counterpoint, its imagery drawn from a cache of thousands of photos the director stumbled upon which portray a cross-section of Romanian society in a small town in the 30s and 40s, offset against a Jewish doctor’s diary recording the surge in
Romanian anti-semitic violence at the same time, mirroring events in Germany. The technique adroitly opens up a space for the viewer to occupy, scrutinising the photos for traces of a telling absence, signs of the rising savagery. Unlike Wilkerson, Jude is a displaced presence, glimpsed through the choice of subject-matter, which is of a piece with his ongoing political project, revealing the darker corners of Romanian history that the current powers that be would prefer to conceal. Abschied von den Eltern (‘Farewell to the Parents’), directed by the Austrian Astrid Johanna Ofner, draws on a 1960 autobiographical novel by the writer and artist Peter Weiss (best known for the play Marat/Sade), which portrays his efforts to free himself from a suffocating family and realise his artistic vocation against a backdrop of Nazi persecution (his family was half-Jewish). Weiss’s text is sensual and searching, with a lovely, free-flowing rhythm which Ofner opens up and complements with always arresting imagery, both staged and real, that expresses an unexplained personal investment in his story, a deep empathy with its subject which the film is all the better for never making explicit. Of the features I saw, one of the most curious was Serge Bozon’s Madame Hyde, a loose adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Isabelle Huppert (who unsurprisingly won the best actress prize) stars as a struggling schoolteacher in a technical school in a poor multi-ethnic area on the outskirts of Paris, the typical location for realist films about gangs and social unrest. Bozon adopts a different tack, a pointedly non-realist approach that constantly wrongfoots with its juxtaposition of elements and abrupt shifts in tone – there are various kinds of comedy, fantasy, philosophical discussion, even a musical sequence and a murder. Not everything works but Bozon just about pulls it off, thanks to Huppert, who makes her own transformation from put-upon to powerful utterly convincing, and to a striking comic performance by Romain Duris as the school head. For all its humour, at heart it’s a serious, obliquely political, even tragically minded film, fixating on how knowledge can be best transmitted, and to what extent genes or environment determine our life chances. It even includes mathematical demonstrations to show the actual process of learning, the moment of sudden revelation when a pupil finally grasps an idea or concept. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before in a film. Even more winning in some respects, although much more understated and naturalistic in demeanour, was the South Korean film The First Lap, directed by Kim Dae-hwan. The central characters are a young couple, Su-hyeon and Ji-young, who’ve been together for six years but seem somehow stuck between adolescence and adulthood, beset by lack of direction and indecision. When Su-hyeon’s period is late, things start to shift, prompting visits to their families, one bourgeois, the other working-class, during which their predicaments start to clarify; subtle emotional damage has been inflicted by both sets of parents, whom the couple are desperate not to turn into. It’s delicately observed and beautifully acted, with an unforced intimacy between the two leads. Kim, who took the prize
The sheltering sky: Astrid Johanna Ofner’s Abschied von den Eltern
for best emerging director, never puts a foot wrong and even manages to wrest moments of humour from the pathos. He also pulls off a quietly brilliant ending, completely right for the characters and the tone of the film. It’s rare that a documentary takes the top prize in the big festivals, but Wang Bing is no ordinary documentarian. Mrs. Fang, which won this year’s Golden Leopard, is at 86 minutes much shorter than the films for which he’s become internationally renowned, such as the ninehour-plus West of the Tracks (2002). It’s also in a more domestic register, an intimate portrayal of a bedridden woman in the final stage of Alzheimer’s, unable to move or speak, and the family who have to cope with her illness and, ultimately, death (which we’re not shown). Wang is not averse to holding on Mrs Fang’s face for prolonged moments, but somehow the camera’s gaze never feels invasive, more respectful and compassionate. All the while, everyday life goes on around her. Wang’s unobtrusive camera observes the family dynamics and shows how each individual copes with Mrs Fang’s illness. We also see the world outside in this ordinary working-class village in Zhejiang province; atmospheric night-time fishing trips, family and neighbours sitting outside, chatting and arguing over drinks and cards. It’s a serene,
By far the most thrilling film was ‘Cocote’, exploring morality and violence, religious rivalries and rituals, language and identity
Vicente Santos in Cocote
graceful, deeply engaged film; every cut feels in the right place, expertly modulating between interior and exterior scenes, every camera position perfectly judged. ‘Minor Wang’ was how one critic described it to me, but I think ‘concentrated Wang’ might after all be closer. For me, far and away the most thrilling film in the festival was Cocote, directed by Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias and shot in his native Dominican Republic – it took the top prize in my favourite section, Signs of Life, home to “experimental forms of narration and innovations in film language”. Cocote is all that, but it should have been in the main competition, the only glaring lapse in a programming structure that in general comes across as clear and rigorous. Arias served notice of his talent and ambition a couple of years back with Santa Teresa and Other Stories, a sinuous, multi-format dialogue with Roberto Bolaño’s colossal and unclassifiable 2004 novel 2666. In Cocote, his first fiction feature, Alberto (Vicente Santos), gardener for a rich family in the capital, Santo Domingo, returns to his family’s home in the countryside when he hears of his father’s murder. His sisters expect him not only to participate in the mourning rituals of the Nine Nights, which the more evangelically minded Alberto regards as superstition, but also to avenge his father’s death, which it transpires was ordered by a local bigwig and perpetrated by a family acquaintance. It’s practically a western set-up, and in fact Arias has woven genre elements into the mix – the suspense of ‘will he, won’t he?’, around which he syncopates brilliantly, exploring morality and violence, religious rivalries and rituals, language and identity. As well as its conceptual, thematic richness and ethnographic density, you’re almost overwhelmed by a sense of visceral, embodied filmmaking. Nothing else I saw in Locarno felt this alive, this committed. And even in a festival that showcased more than a few specimens of dynamic, innovative sound design, Nahuel Palenque’s for Cocote stood out for its capacity to bewitch and beguile, to constantly pull and push, to amplify and deepen the material with little shocks, ruptures and surprising collisions. Jacques Tourneur, who knew a thing or two about sound, would have been impressed for sure. October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 15
Wide Angle
EXPLORING THE BIGGER PICTURE
PREVIEW
GETTING IT DONE
By Elena Gorfinkel
With 131 short films and nine features, the artist Kevin Jerome Everson may well be the most prolific American filmmaker working today. He is also the most aesthetically radical, not least because of his interrogation of the intertwined formations of blackness, labour and place. Everson pursues an abstraction that is forged through a work on the photorealist image, a formalism uniquely leavened with an attentive approach to the histories and presences of the African-American working-class individuals he films. Born in Mansfield, Ohio, and based in Charlottesville, where he is professor of art at UVA (University of Virginia), Everson recovers untold histories and minor figures of AfricanAmerican life in the South and Midwest, in the wake of the Second Great Migration, which took millions of African Americans from the South to the North, Midwest and West between 1940 and 1970. Trained as a visual artist, seasoned in sculpture, street photography, painting and installation, he adopted filmmaking as his primary practice in 1997, using found footage,
portraiture, re-enactment, documentary, archival historiography and performance art. Everson’s cinema embraces the oblique and the opaque, avoiding the expository. He says that he makes his films for his subjects, rather than for an audience. His approach short-circuits a liberal white gaze that seeks a certain narrative of blackness’s representability. His images prompt us to look differently, precisely because they do not require the spectator’s participation to be complete. Everson’s subjects bear an occupational intelligence; they know what they are doing far better than the spectator. In Sound That (2014), Cleveland Water Department workers listen for underground leaks using metal rods inserted into the pavement. What they hear, how they divine such systemic flaws, remains unknown to the viewer. In the black and white R-15 (2017), the camera observes a labourer, wearing a respirator mask and headlight, smoothly hoisting himself from a stepladder on a blanched porch into a square aperture in the ceiling, a feat of disappearance. A cut to the darkness of the attic crawl space, and the wafting of particulate matter. R-15 fibreglass insulation is being blown, entrancing, luminescent, potentially hazardous. It hangs in the air, catching light. The play of chromatic contrasts and of light and texture in this space creates an evocation of the abstractions of light sculpture. The insulation expert departs, and a final shot shows the empty attic space with the fill
Nostalgia for the sleight: one of the magicians captured in Three Quarters (2015) 16 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
settled across the floor, conjuring a preternatural ‘snow’. A spotlight from the filmmaker’s camera flashes on and off. “The invisible is made visible,” Everson has said; an unknown and unseen form of work is partially revealed, while the larger mystery of its craft is sustained. Likewise, Three Quarters (2015) and Stone (2013) both feature mesmeric tricks of another kind, local magicians and street hustlers performing their own sleights of hand, trading in the marvels of crafty illusion. Everson’s films investigate the expressive capacities, conditions and materialities of unseen craft or marginalised gestures. Various tasks, processes and actions are performed ritually for the camera. Corporeal movement operates at once as training, grind, and zone of contingency: a hospital worker sorts surgical implements, dancers energetically krump (Erie, 2010), an elderly beauty-school instructor demonstrates hair-conditioning techniques, a water-skier glides, a dam worker surveys (The Island of St. Matthews, 2013), football players practise scrimmage moves (Tygers, 2014), cowboys and cowgirls practise the art of calf-roping and lassoing for the rodeo (Ten
Everson frequently describes reality as ‘a formal device’ – he uses it as a sculptural material to be moulded and carved
STILLS COPYRIGHT KJE; COURTESY THE ARTIST; TRILOBITE-ARTS DAC; PICTURE PALACE PICTURES
The American artist Kevin Jerome Everson makes films that hover between close observation and abstraction, politics and poetry
PORTRAIT OF KEVIN JEROME EVERSON BY SANDY WILLIAMS III
Five in the Grass, 2012). Sport and toil, leisure and ceremony, all elaborate a poetics of performance. Enlarging this preoccupation with performance and labour, Everson has explored the capacities of extended duration in a more purely observational mode. His eight-hour Park Lanes (2015) takes place over the course of a working day in a factory that assembles parts for bowling alleys. Tonsler Park (2017) pointedly observes workers at a polling station in Charlottesville, Virginia, on the day of the 2016 US presidential election. Their formal predecessor is Quality Control (2011), organised in seven 11-minutes takes, each the duration of a 16mm film reel. Everson scrutinises different jobs in a dry-cleaning plant in Pritchard, Alabama, among them shirtsteaming, ironing, pants-pressing and sewing. Even when keeping the camera relatively still, Everson rarely uses a stationary set-up, giving his films buoyancy and mobility. We hear small talk, joking, music playing, singing, as well as the humming of the gears of the workplace itself. The automated system of moving tracks proffers a ceaseless stream of work shirts, animating the visual space of the composition, drawing our attention outward from the methodical tasks of the workers at their stations, to the larger temporal, social and mechanical architecture within which they labour. Shades of Ozu’s drying laundry and Chaplin’s flummoxed factory worker overlap with more specific questions and trajectories about service economies in the contemporary South. Each item requires different treatment, dirt exposed in details unseen by us. Watching the pose of the middle-aged woman who works as laundry sorter, one can recognise the pull of gravity and the weight of fatigue in the repetition of her nimble gestures. Everson asks through these images how the black body is shaped by its endurance of and through the continuing grind. That sense of ongoingness is formalised as loop: the opening and closing images of the film secure a full circle, as a line of approaching shirts, moving on the track towards the camera lens, obstructs its view. Everson’s mode is routinely mistaken for straightforward documentary. Rather, Everson frequently describes reality as “a formal device” – he uses it as a sculptural material to be moulded and carved, a means to tarry between historical time and the curve or heft of a poetic time that is imagined as much as lived. Allying his art’s work with that of his subjects, Everson asserts his diegetic world as decidedly made, scripted, choreographed, framed. This impulse to shape dynamically intersects with powerful personal and archival histories. One of Everson’s most haunting recent works, Ears, Nose and Throat (2016), assembles the testimony of Shadeena Brooks, a Mansfield resident who in 2010 witnessed the murder of Everson’s son, DeCarrio Antwan Couley, and testified in the subsequent trial. Against a grainy night-time suburban intersection and glaring street lights, sharp electronic tones are heard. We observe Brooks being examined by the doctor of the title. He diagnoses a weakened vocal cord, which causes her voice to wear down and grow hoarse by evening. Brooks is then seen framed through the
Brightness, falls: at Niagara Falls in Erie (2010)
window of the listening booth, as if on a witness stand, raising her right and left hands, as her hearing is tested. On the soundtrack, she carefully describes the events that led to the shooting and death of Couley. The lack of synchronisation between sound and image produces an effect of diffusion. In the gesture of the raised hand, testing and testimony are doubled. Yet audition and witnessing are not equivalent, even if both interrogate her capacity to hear, to remember, to speak. Brooks’s presence traces a violent trauma and an ineradicable memory, threatened with being lost in her voice’s exhaustion. Ears, Nose and Throat shuttles between the specificity of a private narrative of pain and mourning, and summons a more generalisable, collective experience brutally common in America, the senseless extinguishing of black lives through gun violence. In the final segment the return of the testing beeps – heard earlier accompanying images of the street where the murder occurred – inscribes the film with belatedness; their wraithlike tones mark the pulse and rhythm of an embodied loss. The sonic, the auditory, the oral, all serve very specific aims in Everson’s oeuvre, and he often diversely stages scenes of listening, contemplation, concentration, thinking and witnessing. In Eason (2016), basketball players at
Livingstone College, North Carolina, are framed in medium close-up during halftime, while on the soundtrack we hear a rousing, sermon-like talk by coach James Stinson. The speech moves to the ‘game of life’, invoking the limited chances given African Americans; his call to action demands tribute to the dead, on behalf of those whose chances have been terminated. Students also listen to the words of the scholar Vivian Gordon, UVA’s director of black studies from 1975-80, re-enacted by Erin Stewart in Sugarcoated Arsenic (2013, co-directed with historian Claudrena N. Harold, Everson’s colleague). The original archival recording of the speech in Gordon’s own voice is replayed later over reconstructed images of the students, mobilised, marching through campus. This conception of receptivity invites pause and bids us to listen, enacting an attentiveness and generosity in relation to the image, its oblique yet moving histories. To watch Everson’s films is to see cinema’s codes and histories recalibrated. Concrete and oneiric, beguiling in their slowness and quietness, in the luminosity of their materiality – his images invite attunement, a disposition of momentary grace. The last take of Erie provides a surfeit of the unexpected, ordinary yet joyous form made so plentiful in Everson’s films. On an expedition to Niagara Falls in a bobbing tour boat, the camera is held by Everson in mid-closeup, as the Falls roll and rush off screen. Young women look outwards from the edge of the boat, their plastic see-through ponchos ruffling, inflating, shaking in the wind. The spray of the water accumulates in beads on the camera lens; a young woman and her family express awe and exuberance at the sight of the unseen. “This is crazy!” they laugh, clear ponchos filling with water and wind. The lens is subsumed by the crystalline droplets of the splashing spray, floating through a euphoric liquid turbulence. One of countless gifts of Everson’s generous, capacious art.
i Kevin Jerome Everson
The Island of St. Matthews screens at Tate Modern, London, on 8 September, followed by the film season ‘Kevin Jerome Everson: So I Can Get Them Told’, 29 September01 October. Tonsler Park screens at the BFI London Film Festival on 5 October October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 17
WIDE ANGLE
PRIMAL SCREEN
A new restoration of a silent epic opens a window on Indian filmmaking – and shows that 1928 was a good year for a Shiraz By Bryony Dixon
Almost none of the Indian films of the silent period have survived, which makes Shiraz (1928) a rare beast. Although ostensibly an equal coproduction between British, German and Indian film companies, the creative impulse all came from its Indian star and producer Himansu Rai and writer Niranjan Pal, and it was filmed entirely in India, with an all-Indian cast. The film is one of three made and financed by the same partners – the others were The Light of Asia (1926) and A Throw of the Dice (1929) – which all take classical tales as their inspiration. When you consider the complexity of putting together such a deal, the safe territory of classical or mythological sources makes a lot of sense. The principal mover and shaker, Himansu Rai was on his way to setting up a film studio, an ambition he eventually achieved with Bombay talkies in 1934, so it was natural that he should try to secure decent financing from established Western companies. He met Pal when he was temporarily based in London, taking a law degree, but it seems that the German Emelka company came on board first with Rai’s ambitious proposal for films that would appeal to both Indian and Western audiences. The Munich-based company, run by the Osten brothers, had handled some similar subjects before, and the reputation of Joe May’s Indian Tomb (1921) seemed to indicate
Seeta Devi as Dalia in Shiraz
that the international film market had some enthusiasm for romantic oriental stories. It was through Emelka that British Instructional Films (BIF) came in as the third partner. This company, run by Harry Bruce Woolfe, was set up to make nonfiction films, often on imperial themes, but it had recently ventured into features with a series of full-length dramatised recreations of battles of the Great War. The 1927 Cinematograph Films Act, which imposed a quota of British films on cinemas, gave BIF another incentive to produce fiction features, directed by wunderkind Anthony Asquith. So Woolfe must have seen Shiraz as combining appeal to the domestic film audience – many of
If ‘Shiraz’ had been a realistic story set in contemporary India, would it have found any market in the West?
whom will have had friends and family stationed in India – with the potential to expand the company’s reach into the subcontinent. It fell into line with government thinking, too: 1928 saw a major report by the Indian High Commission on the film industry there. Moreover, the Shiraz project combined a natural curiosity about India as an exotic location with the appeal of a romantic fiction feature, so satisfying Woolfe’s ambition of straddling the fiction/nonfiction divide. Had the film not had the gorgeous locations and costumes and a satisfying plot full of desert ambushes, cruel executions by despotic rulers, beautiful princesses and wicked mistresses, would it have appealed to British or German audiences? If it had been a realistic story set in contemporary India, even avoiding the issues of the oppressive power of its imperial administration, would it have found any market in the West? Possibly not – consider how long it has taken Indian film to cross that cultural gulf. Likewise, the appeal to audiences in India in the late 1920s was a complex issue. With so many different languages and religious groups, distribution of film – even in the silent days, with the possibility of different intertitles in various languages – must have been daunting. No wonder Rai chose a subject safely set in a semi-fictional past, long enough ago to be uncontroversial. The film world still uses this tactic routinely for international breakthrough blockbusters – think of all those Chinese martial arts epics of the 2000s, or Keanu Reeves in 47 Ronin (2013). With all these compromises, it’s a wonder that Rai was able to make Shiraz a convincingly good film. The team he assembled was highly competent, with the well-regarded Franz Osten (who also directed The Light of Asia and A Throw of the Dice) at the helm, and cinematography by Emil Schünemann and Henry Harris, a cameraman from BIF who would go on to be a special effects expert. The production manager was Victor Peers, who later worked with Hitchcock and in the 1950s became general manager of Granada Television; art direction was by Promode Nath, who would work on the beautiful A Throw of the Dice the following year. For the modern audience the spectacular locations are perhaps the star of the show. Permission to film inside India’s most exquisite Mughal palaces can’t have been easy to get, but Rai was persuasive ; securing the help of the Maharaja of Jaipur evidently opened doors. The cast is good, too: Rai has a natural gravitas and Seeta Devi is a joy as the scheming former favourite of Shah Jahan with rings full of concealed poison to see off potential rivals. And something of a surprise was the reaction of Anoushka Shankar, who has been commissioned by the BFI to compose the score to our new restoration, to an onscreen kiss – between the future emperor and his new queen, Mumtaz Mahal, who gave her name to the Taj Mahal. While it seemed chaste enough to me, Anoushka thought that in an Indian film of this age it was a bit of a shocker. I greatly look forward to what she brings musically and culturally to the film when it premieres at this year’s London Film Festival.
i A Taj of class: Himansu Rai and Charu Roy in the closing scene of Shiraz 18 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
Shiraz is the BFI London Film Festival Archive Gala, screening on 14 October at the Barbican
ILLUSTRATION BY MICK BROWNFIELD WWW.MICKBROWNFIELD.COM/STILLS COURTESY DEUTSCHE KINEMATHEK.
CROSS-BORDER APPEAL
To celebrate the 90th Anniversary of the film’s release, Eureka Entertainment is proud to present the definitive version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in a Special Limited Edition Boxed Set as part of The Masters of Cinema Series.
£25
Limited to just 2000 copies worldwide, and illustrated with newly commissioned artwork specially for this release. The set features 2 x Blu-rays, 1 x DVD and a 100 page book all housed in a hardbound slipcase.
Exclusive to our webstore www.eurekavideo.co.uk THE SET INCLUDES • 150 minute reconstructed and restored 2010 version (including 25 minutes of footage previously thought lost to the world) on Blu-ray • Giorgio Moroder presents: Metropolis – the 1984 re-imagining of Metropolis featuring a soundtrack by Moroder himself and artists such as Adam Ant, Pat Benatar, Freddie Mercury and many more • The 2001 restoration that was considered the definitive version of the film before the discovery of the Argentina footage on DVD • A 100-page book featuring extensive writing on the film; interviews with Fritz Lang and a stunning array of rare archival imagery • PLUS, Many more special features! Please see our webstore for full details!
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Available 25th September
LUBITSCH IN BERLIN FAIRY-TALES, MELODRAMAS, AND SEX COMEDIES Lubitsch In Berlin (Six Films 1918-1921), an essential collection of early German silents that showcase the extraordinary range, subtlety and innovation of Ernst Lubitsch. This set collects six restored works from the silent phase of Lubitsch’s career and will be released for the first time ever on Blu-ray as part of the Master of Cinema Series. Special features include: High-definition restored transfers of all six films; Robert Fischer’s 2006 feature-length documentary Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin: From Schönhauser Allee to Hollywood; A booklet containing liner notes for all six features.
Available September 2017 Website: www.eurekavideo.co.uk Twitter: @mastersofcinema Facebook: EurekaEntertainment
AVAILABLE FROM
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September 2017
IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA / 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH / THE 3 WORLDS OF GULLIVER Three spectacular films, with pioneering special effects by filmmaking legend Ray Harryhausen, are presented in this stunning Limited Dual Format Edition Box Set. Featuring a beautiful 4k restoration of The 3 Worlds of Gulliver and alternative black-and-white and colourised versions of It Came from Beneath the Sea and 20 Million Miles to Earth, as well as a wealth of new and archival extras – including exclusive interviews with director Joe Dante, SFX maestro Dennis Muren, and Aardman Animation co-founders David Sproxton and Peter Lord – and an 80-page book containing new essays by Kim Newman, Dan Whitehead and Charlie Brigden. Strictly limited to 6,000 units. Available 25 September 2017
THE CHASE (Arthur Penn, 1966) UK Blu-ray and DVD premiere of a 4K restoration from the original negative. New and exclusive extras include Arthur Penn on Marlon Brando and ‘The Chase’ (2017), Matthew Penn on ‘The Chase’ (2017), Cut to The Chase: James Fox in Conversation with Richard Ayoade (2017), the rarelyseen Super 8 version, and a Limited Dual Format Edition exclusive booklet. Available 25 September 2017
SEE NO EVIL (aka BLIND TERROR) (Richard Fleischer, 1971) UK Blu-ray premiere. New and exclusive extra features include the alternative UK version, Blind Terror, an interview with actor Norman Eshley (2017), the alternative Italian opening credits sequence, the original theatrical trailer, extensive promotional and on-set image galleries, and a Limited Dual Format Edition exclusive booklet with a new essay by Chris Fujiwara. Available 25 September 2017
Buy direct from powerhousefilms.co.uk
WIDE ANGLE
POINT OF VIEW
DARK, SATANIC In an age of exploitation, perhaps only exploitation movies can show us what’s happening – only horror movies will reveal the true horror
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By Mark Steven
Horror is radical. It Follows (2014), Green Room (2015), Don’t Breathe (2016) and this year’s Get Out are only some of the most successful among a recent surge of films that articulate political antagonism through horror. These films, and many others like them, show our social world as one defined by a circumambient violence whose causes are rooted in the economy. Their affective force, a shared capacity to instil fear, is so much more powerful because it emanates from a truth familiar to every member of the working classes: we are all vulnerable to the predatory systems within which we subsist and our lives are always already precarious. By making good on this truth, the horror film has gained critical favour. As one writer put it in the Guardian earlier this year: “After a lean period in the first decade of this century, when the genre was saturated with gratuitous and largely brainless torture-porn flicks, the past few years have seen a resurgence in imaginative, brainy and – most importantly – frightening fare…” But it is precisely those mindless gross-out flicks that have always been political, in ways to which horror as a whole is only now catching up. Call them what you will – ‘gore films’, ‘torture-porn’; I prefer the messier sounding ‘splatter’ – this blood-hungry genre seems to understand that it is really about the experience of a social relation in which the very essence of our life-being is consumed against our will. It was Karl Marx who, in the 1860s, described the relationship between employers and workers as one of vampirism: “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” I want to suggest that it is less in artcinematic horror, and less still in avowedly ‘woke’ rehabilitations of the genre, than in manifestly prurient splatter that we encounter a worldview equal to the political intelligence of Marx. Splatter films often inhabit a world in which the working poor are made to face off against an economic elite: its narratives exploit a social order structured around the antagonism between two irreconcilable classes, one of which works while the other accumulates the value of that work. The perverse delight in what only appears to be violence for its own sake is a way of narrating the everyday sufferings of the overworked, unemployed and disenfranchised. It is also a way of imagining the most sadistic revenge possible, an insurgent barbarism that reacts punitively to generation upon generation of one-sided class warfare. More specifically, the history of splatter is a history of economic crises, at least in the United States. Splatter was popularised in the 1960s by the exploitation films of Herschell Gordon Lewis and fully commercialised by George A. Romero’s zombie epics. These films were being made at a time when the American economy,
Capital punishment: life in the modern economy, as depicted in Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005)
which had been enjoying an extended boom since World War II, was entering a major crisis. That crisis – caused by declining rates of profit from industrial manufacture, worsened by a global oil crisis and a series of protracted wars with socialist states – looms large in the first wave of splatter films. It is readily legible in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), in which a slaughterhouse foreclosure and a petrol shortage combine for scenes of abject carnage, as unemployed abattoir workers apply the skills of their trade to the butchery of inheriting landowners. While splatter mutated into other genres during the 1980s and 1990s – when the American
Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks
economy survived through deregulation of the finance sector – it has enjoyed something of a renaissance in the first decades of the 21st century, with the Hostel (2005-11) and Saw (2004-) films grossing millions. The global financial crisis and its local effects have become the narrative substance of several splatter films. For instance, Drag Me to Hell (2009) is, at its bare bones, about a housing eviction. What makes this film unique is how the gore itself undertakes much of the narrative labour, bodily liquids affording a meditation on financial liquidity. These new splatter films, less exuberant, more melancholic than their predecessors, are responsive not only to the contradictions that gave us the global recession but to life in the new economy. The flexibility and the precariousness of labour find themselves allegorised by such unholy figures as the human centipede. “You have nothing to lose but your chains”? Maybe. But in this new wave of splatter the affirmative glee that might attend such an imperative has drained to almost nothing; one film even suggests that the only way to cast off the shackles is to saw through your own ankles. The idea linking these films and filmmakers, that capitalism is itself a kind of horror movie, is not original. In 1916, the year before the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Lenin reasoned for the unspeakable bloodbath that would almost certainly result from an armed insurrection. His justification for probable carnage reframed it as a revolutionary necessity, whose exceptional status would distinguish it from the violence inherent to the incumbent mode of production. “Capitalist society,” he maintained, “is and has always been horror without end.” Perhaps it is not to be wondered at that cinematic gore was first realised in the work of Sergei Eisenstein, Soviet cinema’s chief ideologue, and that it enjoyed bloody and barbarous renditions in the work of other communist filmmakers. An urban guerrilla in Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967) puts it best: “The horror of the bourgeoisie can only be overcome by more horror.”
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Mark Steven’s Splatter Capital is published by Repeater Books October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 21
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DARK MIRROR
THE CINEMA OF STEPHEN KING The shifting concerns of Stephen King’s monumental output over the past four decades provide a detailed map of the insecurities of the post-war American psyche, a distinctive mythos captured in a dizzying array of adaptations, from the auteur visions of Stanley Kubrick to low-budget video nasties By Roger Luckhurst
You can’t keep up. When it comes to Stephen King, it is
the numbers that overwhelm. There are well over 50 novels to date and 11 collections of short stories, as well as his clutch of successful nonfiction books. In film, there are an astounding 239 writing credits listed on IMDb, and even if a fair few of these are credits for source material, there are easily 60 feature-length films based directly on his fiction. The proliferation is unstoppable: Children of the Corn, the 1984 slasher classic, was already the second film adaptation of the story, but went on to produce at least seven sequels and one remake. You might recall David Cronenberg’s chilly adaptation of The Dead Zone (1983), but have you seen the 80-odd episodes of the TV series
(2002-07), or the 78 episodes of Haven (2010-15) inspired by King’s story ‘The Colorado Kid’, or followed Frank Darabont’s The Mist (2007) with the recent TV series? Just this year comes the third version of It (which ends with the caption ‘Chapter One’, promising yet more), Gerald’s Game, and the opening of The Dark Tower franchise, which is surely a juggernaut already launched, however lukewarm the reviews. You can’t keep up. King is more than one of those compulsive American pulp writers in the tradition of Theodore Roscoe or Luis Senarens, ‘the American Jules Verne’, who in his prime a century ago wrote more than one million words a year using more than 20 pseudonyms. King has produced not just a body of work but a ‘mythos’,
CIRCUS OF HORRORS In Andrés Muschietti’s adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 novel It, Bill Skarsgård stars as the killer clown Pennywise, who preys on children in Derry, Maine
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King’s simple assertions of the rudimentary, primitive pleasures of horror is a recognisable stance: a fan’s
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a particular genre universe and sensibility somewhere between horror and science fiction that others can elaborate upon and develop. Just as there is a Lovecraft mythos, to which hundreds of writers and fans have contributed, there is also a King mythos. One of the best Stephen King adaptations of late, the Netflix series Stranger Things (2016-), has absolutely nothing to do with Stephen King, but instead offered a familiar retro Spielberg/King story of kids in cosmic peril, lovingly pastiched in 80s style. Andrés Muschietti’s version of It has opted for the same retro-80s world, as if Pennywise the evil clown can only be approached through the viewer’s memory of prior sources. A mythos is a self-replicating fictional universe, a self-cannibalising machine, a hall of mirrors where new reflections endlessly proliferate, no longer under the control of any one person. King once observed, perhaps a little ruefully, “I started out as a storyteller; along the way I became an economic force.” Since Carrie first appeared as a novel in 1974, and was picked up and incorporated into Brian De Palma’s run of extraordinary histrionic exercises in genre film in the 1970s, the pattern of the adaptation of King’s work has been an object lesson in modes of horror production over the last 40 years. The mainstreaming of horror by Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) produced the first auteurish versions of King with the De Palma and, later, Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). The Dead Zone (1983) was Cronenberg’s stepping-stone from the avant-garde margin to more mainstream product. King, of course, famously denounced Kubrick for making a “maddening, perverse and disappointing” version of The Shining, and instead embraced the early 1980s boom in low-budget video nasties as a subcultural riposte. King enthusiastically endorsed Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981) as a “ferociously original” piece of outsider art, and this married King’s work to that eruption of belligerently low-cultural and low-budget adaptations in the 80s, from figures such as the producer of Children of the Corn, Donald ‘Captain Budget’ Borchers (who ensured it was released under the full title Stephen King’s Children of the Corn to secure the imprimatur of the author). King
was also clearly having a lot of fun with George Romero for the two Creepshow portmanteau films (1982 and 1987), both men indulging their love of the gross-out E.C. Comics that they grew up with in the 1950s, and which caused a famous moral panic about their corrupting influence. This 80s phase also included King’s own legendarily awful directorial disaster, Maximum Overdrive (1986). It is always mildly bewildering to think that a film consistently voted the worst of its year was shot in Wilmington at Dino De Laurentiis’s studio at exactly the same time as David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. In Peter Braatz’s documentary Blue Velvet Revisited (2016), using Super 8 footage of the original shoot, there is a shot of Lynch’s parking space right next to King’s. It’s like a proof that matter and anti-matter can co-exist in the same space-time continuum after all. Somewhere between these poles of auteur film and what the critic Kim Newman calls the “trash vitality” of B-movie horror, King started to provide source material
PORTRAIT © SHANE LEONARD
ALL KING’S MEN Films and TV series based on novels and short stories by Stephen King (below) include (above, from left) Children of the Corn (1984), Stand by Me (1986) and The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
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resistance to any attempt to interpret the genre, refusing intellectual legitimation through socio-political readings for more ‘tasteful’ middlebrow Hollywood films. Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me (1986) and Misery (1990) work the psychological origins of horror rather than horror itself. Darabont’s respectful adaptations of The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999) were prison dramas, yet he had already scripted low-budget horror films and would later direct The Mist, one of the best King horror adaptations, so seemed well-attuned to the King mythos. After the success of The Usual Suspects (1995), Bryan Singer directed the overlooked Apt Pupil (1998) from King’s novella, an A-list cast in the very queasy B-list territory of a Holocaust perpetrator hiding in plain sight in the American suburbs. From the start, King’s bricks of novels were suited to the miniseries format (his vampire update Salem’s Lot was made as a two-part TV special in 1979). This format has come into its own with the rise of American Quality Television and streaming platforms in the 21st century. The unwieldy epic Under the Dome (three seasons, 2013-15) and the eight-episode time-travel Kennedy assassination drama 11.22.63 (2016) have found their form in this new media environment. Thus King’s career on film is an exemplary lesson in the production history of low-, middle- and highbrow versions of horror sources, and in the shifting ways in which multi-platform media capitalisation has exploited a recognised authorial brand. If this sounds cynical, it rather takes its lead from King’s own view of horror film as “junk food”. King asserted this aggressively anti-intellectual stance in Danse Macabre, his study of gothic fiction and horror. It was a book written not long after Kubrick’s smarting rejection of the author’s own script for The Shining (King scripted a three-part miniseries of the novel in 1997, a series that only serves to endorse fully Kubrick’s decision to take his own route through the Overlook Hotel). King’s simple assertions of the rudimentary, primitive pleasures of horror is a recognisable stance: a fan’s resistance to any attempt to interpret the genre, refusing intellectual legitimation through displaced socio-political or psychological allegorical readings. Danse Macabre insists only on a simple rhythm of risk and consolation
in horror, calling the genre inherently conservative and reassuring. It leaves a critic such as Mark Browning wondering in his recent study Stephen King on the Big Screen whether King understands much about his chosen genre at all. The point about seeing King’s universe as a mythos is that it is no longer controlled by a single author. Perhaps this was the lesson of the bruising experience with Kubrick – that The Shining was not dictated by King’s intention, but was better understood as a collection of mythopoeic stubs of narrative that could be picked up and reworked by other artists. It is striking that some of the most successful adaptations of King actively resist King’s final consoling gestures of reassurance. There is no reconstituted family at the end of Kubrick’s The Shining. The collector of ghost stories does not get to survive in Mikael Hafström’s impressive 2007 film version of the short story ‘1408’, and Darabont’s jaw-droppingly bleak rewriting of the end of The Mist, a decision which cost him millions of dollars in budget (never mind his original plan to film it in black and white), is precisely what elevates the film to greatness. What I think King has done brilliantly in his writing career, the reason his mythos so permeates US culture, is that he has provided in compelling popular narrative form an unfolding account of American post-war subjectivity. It is a psyche that has been steadily reconfigured around notions of trauma – the idea of post-traumatic stress disorder emerged in psychiatric literature in the 1970s at exactly the same time that King first entered the bestseller lists. In the early books, the focus on intrafamilial physical and sexual abuse (that is, threats from within the family rather than ‘stranger danger’) was radical and new. The study of the cross-generational paternal abuse in The Shining that nags at Jack Torrance and menaces his son Danny is coincident with the very first articulation of this logic by new advocates of trauma psychology, including anti-Vietnam campaigners and women trying to bring the silenced experience of rape trauma and incest into the public sphere. Even the sense that severe trauma can produce or enhance odd psychical abilities – as in Danny’s ‘shine’ or the
FEAR FACTORY (Above, from left) Frank Darabont’s The Mist (2007), Jack Nicholson in The Shining (1980), Kingdom Hospital (2004) and Brad Renfro in Apt Pupil (1998)
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STEPHEN KING
THE ABCS OF DEATH (Clockwise from top left) 1408 (2007), Creepshow (1982), Gerald’s Game (2017), The Dead Zone (1983) and Salem’s Lot (1979)
King’s vast oeuvre has acted as a register of American unease in ways that keep talking to his adapters precognitive visions in The Dead Zone – were shared by some quite respectable psychiatrists (Freud, after all, fully believed in telepathy). The autobiographical childhood trauma of ‘The Body’, which became Reiner’s film Stand by Me, prompted one leading trauma psychologist, Lenore Terr, to diagnose King’s entire career as a product of his own unresolved childhood trauma, in one of the main academic psychology journals. It is reductive, of course, but King’s own frank admission of his adult addictions can underpin accounts like this. The 12-step recovery from alcoholism attempted by the adult Danny Torrance in Doctor Sleep (2013), the sequel to The Shining, is directly autobiographical. By the early 1990s, the paradigm of ‘recovered memory’ had its brief moment in the sun, the idea that childhood traumas might be so severe that they were effectively encrypted and unavailable to the conscious memory until an actual or artificial crisis – induced by hypnosis – could unlock them. Right on time, King produced ‘The Library Policeman’, Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne, all of which rely on protagonists needing to confront childhood sexual abuse that they have suppressed during their messy and frustrated adult lives. The promise of consolation, even of reintegrating the fragments of the self after the horror of confronting these memories, was integral to the self-help textbooks on recovered memory. It will be interesting to see what Mike Flanagan, one of horror’s most promising young directors, will do with Gerald’s Game, released later this year on Netflix, 25 years after it first appeared in such a timely conjuncture with recovered memory therapy. More recently, King has even written the very physical trauma of his near-death experience after being hit by a van out jogging into his scripts for Kingdom Hospital (2004), turning a revision of Lars von Trier’s original TV 26 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
series into a very peculiar and hallucinatory working through of his own brush with death. Lately, the language of trauma has been accompanied by a discourse of building psychological ‘resilience’. King’s conviction of the consolatory function of his fiction, the fragile rebuilding of selves after confrontation with extreme stressor events, uncannily speaks to this moment too. Alongside consciously addressing American historical traumas in the underpinnings of his fiction, the long shadows of 19th-century violence and genocide, of Hiroshima, Kennedy and Vietnam, this vast oeuvre has acted as a register of American unease in ways that keep talking to successive waves of adapters. This is not about taste, about whether King’s fictions are in the end ‘good art’, which always seems to me to be the wrong question. It is instead to grasp his gothic melodrama as offering compelling narrative formulations in a particularly turbulent period of American history. The gothic is always the dark half of assertions of political power, the genre that acknowledges that death always rides along with imperial might. It was why it was so fulsome in late Victorian England, and why its centre of gravity moved to America in the 20th century. There, a gunslinger is always paired with a demonic Man in Black. In these Trumpian times, defined by a demagogue who seems to come straight out of the pages of The Dead Zone, it is unlikely that any of us will be exiting King’s traumatic mythos any time soon.
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The Dark Tower is out now and is reviewed on page 59. It is released on 8 September and will be reviewed next month. A Stephen King season plays at BFI Southbank, London, until 3 October. Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King and Owen King is published on 26 September by Hodder & Stoughton
TALES FROM THE DARK SIDE In his reliance on archetypal characters caught in epic battles between good and evil, Stephen King has made a career of reworking story structures taken directly from the world of fairytales
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By Kelli Weston In the introduction to the 2002 edition of The Shining, Stephen King wrote what has become one of his most famous sayings, no doubt because it seems exactly the kind of aphorism one might expect from the ‘Master of Horror’: “That truth is that monsters are real, and ghosts are real, too. They live inside us, and sometimes they win.” The second half of this quote – indeed the quieter wisdom of King’s novels – is often forgotten: “That our better angels sometimes – often! – win instead, in spite of all odds, is another truth…” For an author so thoroughly synonymous with horror, most of King’s stories are, in fact, tales of triumph, of unexpected if relatable heroes vanquishing their demons. He has thoroughly fulfilled his promise as the heir to H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe, but unlike his predecessors, King’s stories, premised as they are on the unambiguous clash between good and evil, have more in common with fairytales. And perhaps this is part of the key to his success. Most writers rely on archetypes to varying degrees but the folkloric explicitly informs King’s fiction: the Cinderella framework of Carrie (1976), his first published novel, and the allusions to ‘Goldilocks’ and ‘Hansel and Gretel’ in The Shining (1980) are just two examples among countless others. King has made a career of reworking age-old storytelling structures, so it’s no wonder his books translate so well to the big screen. No fewer than six King adaptations are set to be released this year alone – The Mist, Mr. Mercedes, Gerald’s Game and Castle Rock on the small screen with It andThe Dark Tower in cinemas – and all carry one or more of the telltale marks of a King fable: likeable everyman outsiders on perilous quests, often with a – sometimes supernatural – guardian to prepare them to confront all too familiar evil. For, as King warned us, the most horrifying monsters in his stories are frequently the ordinary people. Carrie White (played by Sissy Spacek in Brian De Palma’s 1976 adaptation), for instance – a shy high-school student whose telekinetic rage claims the lives of most of her teachers and classmates on prom night – is somehow less frightening than her malicious bullies and her religious fanatic
A woman scorned: Stephen King borrowed from Cinderella for Carrie, filmed with Sissy Spacek in 1976
mother Margaret (Piper Laurie). It is their relentless abuse that incites her violent, fiery outburst. The film opens with Carrie’s distress upon getting her first period. The students laugh and taunt her with cries of “Plug it up!” as they toss tampons at her, naked and sobbing in the shower. Eventually the gym teacher Miss Collins (Betty Buckley), the film’s resident guardian, comes to her defence. Collins, who later perishes in the prom night massacre, is Carrie’s only ally. Her English teacher makes fun of her in front of the class and the principal cannot even be bothered to remember her name. When she gets home, her mother punishes her for her ‘sin’ – in true Cinderella fashion – by dragging her, kicking and screaming, into a broom closet, where she remains locked inside until she prays for forgiveness. All of these parallels with Cinderella – Carrie’s innocence, her persecution by her peers and mother, culminating in a glamorous, shallow social gathering, a contemporary ball – become especially significant where the two narratives diverge, at the prom, the night when Carrie leaves life at the periphery and begins engaging in societal conventions. She should, at least in a happier story, be rewarded – as Cinderella was – for her efforts to conform; promotional materials, however, have already revealed
When Carrie gets home, her mother punishes her, in true Cinderella fashion, by dragging her into a broom closet
that she will end the night covered in blood. When the fateful moment occurs – when the earnest, loveless Carrie is falsely crowned prom queen only to be doused in pig’s blood by a vengeful student and her boyfriend (John Travolta) – our sympathies lie firmly with her even as she unleashes her fury upon the guilty and innocent alike. But by the end, the film has said less about the titular character than about the community that created her. In his nonfiction work Danse Macabre, King states that high school is a place of “bottomless conservatism and bigotry” and Carrie, the first King film adaptation, begins a trend of unearthing those darker aspects of society. Although not as direct a retelling as Carrie, Taylor Hackford’s adaptation of Dolores Claiborne (1995) adopts aspects of the Cinderella myth – this time with a workingclass mother – and condemns a society that stifles and endangers women. King himself has faced some criticism over the years for his portrayal of women, and film adaptations frequently reflect his failings, but Dolores Claiborne emerges as an expressly feminist film with an enduring war cry: “Sometimes being a bitch is the only thing a woman has to hold on to.” Dolores, played with steely grace by Kathy Bates (who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Annie Wilkes in Rob Reiner’s 1990 film Misery, the only King adaptation to earn an Academy Award), is a long-suffering maid, tormented by her abusive husband Joe (David Strathairn), whom she lures to his death upon realising he is sexually abusing their daughter. She is never convicted of the crime, but October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 27
STEPHEN KING
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Kitchen-sink drama: David Strathairn and Kathy Bates in Dolores Claiborne (1995)
submits to his baser impulses and begins terrorising his family with murderous intent. Once again, a kind of supernatural mentor emerges in Hallorann, who fears that Danny might be in trouble and returns to the hotel, only to be killed by Jack. Hallorann shares many characteristics of the ‘magical Negro’, a black stock character – and staple of horror cinema – whose function is to aid and frequently sacrifice themselves for white protagonists. A pitfall, perhaps, of the fairytale influence on King’s works is his recurring dependence upon this stereotype. The Green Mile (1999), based on King’s 1996 serial novel, contains one of the most well-known examples of the trope in cinema. Michael Clarke Duncan plays John Coffey, a death-row inmate with learning disabilities who boasts a range of supernatural powers, from clairvoyance to healing others with his bare hands, and whose unjust execution serves purely to enlighten the white prison guards, Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks) chief among them.
‘The Shining’ incorporates a host of fairytale traits, from the haunted mansion to the distinct mark of Bluebeard
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980)
King’s adaptations make a much stronger impact elsewhere, when human failings make way for unspeakable horror, and everyday heroes – “in spite of all odds” – still find the courage to confront institutionalised evil. King’s It, published in 1986, has been likened to the ‘Three Billy Goats Gruff’, in which three goats outsmart a greedy troll living under a bridge, but in fact the 1990 miniseries It and this year’s remake have more in common with ‘The Pied Piper’, in which a piper in colourful clothing punishes the citizens of a village by luring their children away and, in some versions, drowning them. The vicious, predatory alien that haunts the children of Derry, Maine, often takes the form of the brightly dressed Pennywise the Clown (played by Tim Curry in 1990 and Bill Skarsgård in this year’s big-screen version) and victims mainly meet their death in or near the sewers where the creature, dubbed ‘It’ by a group of outcast children, seems to live. In the miniseries, the children, who call themselves ‘the Losers’, discern that It comes and feeds on children with, it seems, the implicit permission of the adults in the town, who shut their eyes to the rash of disappearances and murders. Later, as adults, the Losers share their experiences of being let down as children by the people who should have protected them. The new film only covers the Losers’ confrontation with the monster as children and implicates the parental figures far more pointedly. They do not simply fail to protect their children – in many cases they take an active role in harming them. It is heavily implied that one character is the victim of sexual abuse while another is obsessively smothered by his mother. In both cases the children cannot depend on the adults in their lives and so are forced to take matters into their own hands.
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the community turns on her anyway. The film alternates between vivid sunlit flashbacks, unfolding the events that led to Joe’s death, and the bleak, colourless present in which Dolores has been accused of killing her wealthy, longtime employer Vera Donovan (Judy Parfitt). This prompts Dolores’s estranged daughter Selena (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to return to their small town, less out of loyalty than duty. Later it turns out that Vera has left Dolores her entire estate, a reveal underscored by a scene that juxtaposes Dolores’s strong hands in the past with her weathered, callused hands in the present, the hands of a domestic labourer. But what’s truly significant is the motherdaughter relationship and the bond between two women from opposite sides of the track. Once again the fairytale components have been set up only to be subverted. Dolores as the everywoman-turned-hero realises early on that no one will rescue her from this life; she must do it herself. And women find salvation in neither men nor romantic love, but in other abused, traumatised women. Dolores is one of the few decent parents in King lore, for frequently children are left to their own devices and therefore vulnerable to whatever preys in the night. Sometimes, as Dolores Claiborne also points out, the parents are the ones doing the preying. The Shining (1980) promises malevolent ghosts – and delivers – but writer Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) turns out to be the most terrifying thing about the film. A recovering alcoholic, Jack accepts the job of caretaker at the isolated Overlook Hotel during the winter season, when the hotel is closed, leaving him alone with his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and young son Danny (Danny Lloyd), a telepath. According to the hotel cook Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers), another telepath, Danny has what is called ‘the shining’. Before their arrival, the child has already had a premonition of the horror to come, but perhaps more importantly he has also already been on the receiving end of his father’s temper. In a drunken state, Jack once dislocated Danny’s shoulder, an event which precipitated his decision to quit drinking. The Shining incorporates a host of classic horror and fairytale traits, from the haunted mansion to the distinct mark of Bluebeard, the tale of a violent nobleman who forbids his newest bride from entering a chamber in his castle, where eventually she discovers the murdered corpses of his former wives. In the film, Jack learns that a previous caretaker killed his wife and children before committing suicide in the hotel. And upon their arrival, Dick ominously warns Danny to stay away from Room 237. Whether under the influence of the hotel’s ‘shine’ or the lengthy seclusion, Jack eventually
TROUBLE AND STRIFE Even by the standards of Darren Aronofsky, a director who has made a career out of defying expectations, ‘Mother!’ – the tale of a woman trying to create a dream family home in the face of disturbances by a series of strange guests – is a thoroughly confounding experience By Trevor Johnston First off, there are two things to say about Darren Aronof-
sky’s seventh feature, and they are surprisingly complementary. Primarily, the writer-director himself suggests his movie “should come with a warning, because it’s a pretty intense ride”. With that caveat in mind, however, critical advice for the prospective viewer would be to steel yourself, but also to resist learning anything else about the movie going in. For good or ill, Mother! is best described as confrontational cinema, and its barrelling sense of surprise will undoubtedly be more potent the less you know beforehand. Hence, if you haven’t seen it yet, stop reading now, because pretty much everything after this point constitutes a spoiler. There’s certainly much to say, but we’d hate to steal the movie from you, so discretion is advised in the strongest possible terms. IT’S A MAD MAD MAD MAD FILM
Okay, so we’re back. Hopefully you’ve survived Mother! and are now reading this with a key question in mind: “What the hell did I just watch?” A home invasion thriller? Scenes from a toxic marriage? A portrait of the artist as an egomaniac, or mother as a nervous wreck? Perhaps even some grandiose allegory about the future of life on this planet? Whether it’s some or, indeed, all of those things, it’s also nerve-shredding from moment to moment, seriously full-on content-wise and, in the sheer theatricality of its setting and scenario, a significant turn away from the modern cinematic mainstream of CGI spectacle, represented in albeit rather untypical form by Aronofsky’s previous offering, the biblical saga Noah (2014). Aronofsky, of course, has made a career out of defying expectations. His low-budget indie debut Pi (1997) combined mathematical theory and Cronenbergian psychosis in a way that was pretty darn singular 20 years ago and no less so from today’s vantage point. The followup, Requiem for a Dream (2000), used a quicksilver editing style in the service of a bruising, visceral study of addiction in various forms, and only enhanced his reputation for being at the leading edge of narrative storytelling. An edge which, according to his detractors, he promptly tumbled off with the release of The Fountain (2006), a timeand dimension-spanning fable weaving together modern-day cancer research, the Hispanic conquest of South America, and a vision of interplanetary 30 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
HOME DISCOMFORTS Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, starring Jennifer Lawrence as newly-wed Grace, mingles Buñuelian social satire with echoes of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion and Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession
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DARREN ARONOFSKY
MOTHER!
communion, whose genre-busting ambition has since attracted a select cult following after a hostile initial response. Where to go after the sight of a bald Hugh Jackman floating in an astral bubble? Mickey Rourke in a down ’n’ dirty slice-of-life grapple flick, of course! While the naturalism of The Wrestler (2008) seemed at the time to show that Aronofsky was rolling back from the carefully sculpted artifice of his previous output, its alert fascination with the immediacy of performance now looks like a pivotal moment in his filmography. That worked through into the camera that followed Natalie Portman’s doomed ballerina every step of the way towards a hallucinatory fugue state in Black Swan (2010), in which backstage melodrama, troubling body-horror and paranoid frissons proved a disarmingly compatible blend. Aronofsky’s Oscar nomination also saw the maverick indie talent taking a step closer to studio bankability, but the mega-budget digital spectacle of Noah, true to form, dodged expectations by showcasing a distinctive take on the Old Testament with one eye on the impending ecological catastrophe facing the planet in the 21st century. Repeatedly, then, Aronofsky has made somewhat oblique career choices, but even by his standards Mother! is a confounding artefact. Presumably, the box-office presence of Jennifer Lawrence in the testing lead role helped get this into production, yet the movie’s a very singular combination of abrasive and enigmatic. Putting the audience through escalating carnage as the dream home of famed poet Javier Bardem and his muse Lawrence is assailed by an ever-more rapacious assemblage of uninvited guests, it never deigns to offer a sweetening balm of explanation. Far from your usual multiplex fodder, it’s firmly in the category of what studios call the ‘passion project’ – difficult-to-market properties that auteur filmmakers simply have to get out of their system. Aronofsky, indeed, confirmed as much during what proved a slightly cagey transatlantic phone conversation well in advance of the film’s Venice Film Festival premiere. Perhaps the context wasn’t altogether conducive
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UNHOLY MATRIMONY Self-involved poet Eli, played by Javier Bardem, is oblivious to the anxieties his wife Grace has about motherhood (below) in Mother!, by Darren Aronofsky (opposite)
– negotiating a New York cab ride while on his mobile – or he was understandably wary of giving too much away at this early stage in the film’s life, but it was an exchange that left a lot tantalisingly unsaid. He did, though, confirm a suspicion that this was a script very much written on instinct rather than crafted by calculation. “I’m happy you picked up on that, because I was actually working on doing a children’s movie when I had this idea scratching at the back of my head,” says the 48-yearold Brooklynite, who’s remained faithful to his East Coast roots. “Usually, what happens in these instances is that I write the idea down and never go back to it. But this time, I had a five-day weekend at home alone, and I just decided to unleash. It just leapt out of me. It was just about going with that initial emotion I had, and basically deciding to ride the missile.” While the protagonists in Aronofsky’s previous titles have by and large had a pretty gruelling time of it – Pi’s Max Cohen, played by Sean Gullette, even puts a power drill to his head to ease his racing mind – the household at the centre of Mother! comes across as a particularly unquiet place, where Bardem’s self-involved creative quest seemingly leaves him oblivious to Lawrence’s creeping anxiety about bringing new life into this far-from-safe environment. As the father of an 11-year-old through his now-ended relationship with actor Rachel Weisz, it’s tempting, if undeniably a bit crass, to wonder whether a story about a creative artist and a young mum with seemingly divergent attitudes towards parenting is something that’s come out of his own experience of fatherhood. Is this a film he could have written before becoming a dad? That gets a wry chuckle on the other end of the line. “This is something that could only have come out of me now. I hesitate to use a baseball analogy for your British readers, but my attitude to writing is a bit like an athlete – you have lots of experience behind you, which will stand you in good stead, but when you step up to the plate, you have to take the swing. In that respect, I guess I could trace elements of the material back through the decades, and maybe see how other things in my life have influenced me, but really the sum total of everything I’ve been through creatively was the lead-up to those five feverish days of writing. Mother! was something I had to say, and it just came out.” It’s fair enough that he doesn’t want to go into specifics about his influences and inspirations, but actually one of the pleasures of Mother! – after one has recovered from its sheer visceral pummelling – is to reverse-engineer it by pondering the antecedents of its uniquely arranged components. The nerve-knotting sense of vulnerability that Lawrence’s character experiences throughout, for instance, seemingly speaks of the Polanski canon, from Repulsion (1965) through to Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and even The Tenant (1976), though the washed-out colour palette, and the idea of birth as a particular locus of fear, also perhaps recalls Possession (1981), the cult favourite directed by Polanski’s compatriot Andrzej Zulawski. There’s also a Buñuelian sense of social satire here, squeezing bitter laughter from a situation trapping us in the company of the most awful uninvited guests you could imagine – a notion traceable to theatrical origins in Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944 play Huis clos, whose keynote observation “L’enfer, c’est les autres” – usually rendered as “Hell is other people” – is also clearly at play in the
intensifying mayhem of Mother! Whether Aronofsky himself was thinking about Sartre or even, bless him, Tennessee Williams (since there’s a certain kink in the plot with distant echoes of Suddenly, Last Summer), will have to go unrecorded at this juncture, but he does reveal that the script was eased into production through a lengthy theatrical rehearsal process. “There was me, Jennifer and Javier in a warehouse, with the outline of the set taped out on the floor. We’d sit at a table with the script and then act it out, and finally in the last couple of weeks we got the other actors in. So with Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer, Domhnall and Brian Gleeson, we actually shot the whole thing on video and edited it from beginning to end. That really helped me clarify how to use a lot of the tricks that playwrights deploy to keep the action to a single set, and I guess that’s where the sense of theatricality comes from. “Some people will watch this and only see a relationship drama. What Javier’s character actually represents is something I’d like to keep secret, but there’s certainly a whole other allegorical level going on. But in order to reach that, you have to have characters who’re grounded in some sort of reality, and working with these great actors certainly helped bring out both aspects of the material. Jennifer knew that she really had to go there, and she did.” Still, though, he’s edging round what that primal surge of emotion was which launched the script in the first place. “What I can say is that it was essentially a portrait of the world in 2016. Constant news stories, constant updates on your smartphone, and we’re not going anywhere good. I remember being in summer camp as a kid, and this friend of mine argued with me that by the year 2000 we’d have the technology and the will to end world hunger. Outside of filmmaking, my work is all to do with the environment, and we’re not progressing too far along that road. What we do know now is the impact that humanity is having on the planet, how we’ve gone beyond the point where it can support what we’re trying to take out of it. There’s an apocalyptic sense that the end is already pretty much written for us, but maybe there’s still time to wake up and find another way.” His words certainly open up Mother!’s frame of reference, taking it beyond a film-à-clef reading or even a dramatic iteration of first-world problems, and hence recasting its apparent fears of dispossession at the hands of a rampaging populace into a more global overview of a world on the verge of exhaustion. As such, its framing vision of destruction and renewal – admittedly an unwieldy fit with a thriller narrative which appears to be building to a big reveal, only to turn into a somewhat exasperating celluloid Möbius strip – sees it, thematically at least, forming something of a triptych with The Fountain and Noah, in that all of them look towards the human possibilities of cyclical regeneration. From Pi onwards, Aronofsky has never been shy of reaching for a grand theory of everything to sustain his genre-hopping way with story, and while its corrosive depiction of the distance between the sexes occupies much of the foreground in Mother!, it’s also feasible to see within the film’s house of doom an internalised version of the global conflicts played out in Noah – pinpointed by Aronofsky as the tension between dominion and stewardship. Control is all very well, but taking care of the
I had a five-day weekend alone, and I decided to unleash. The script just leapt out of me. It was about going with that initial emotion, and basically deciding to ride the missile future is where priorities lie, and for all the alpha-male grandstanding on display from Russell Crowe in Noah and Bardem here, Aronofsky seemingly urges closer attention to the women’s voices, and the emotional wisdom of maternity. Right now, though, it’s the Venice premiere and the release date soon thereafter which are focusing his attention, rather than teasing out intriguing kinships within his filmography. “I’m excited that you’re making these connections,” he says. “But I always thought of Mother! as something which really stood apart. Maybe I need to go and rethink that, but the main thing for me at the moment is how to prepare people for the movie. I think it should come with a warning; it’s a pretty intense ride. If you go to an amusement park, you’re in the queue, you see the rollercoaster looming over you, and you’re already scared. How do you convey that same feeling with a film, yet without giving too much away?”
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Mother! is released in UK cinemas on 15 September and will be reviewed in next month’s issue October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 33
By Christina Newland
ALL I DESIRE PURE FANTASY Men can be dangerous, even the attractive ones, but desiring a tanned and shirtless Richard Gere in American Gigolo (1980, opposite) or an oiled-up Channing Tatum in Magic Mike (2012, above) will never put you in harm’s way 34 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
THERE TO BE LOOKED AT
In her 1988 novel Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood writes: “When I am lonely for boys it’s their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting cigarettes[…] the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don’t move, I think. Stay like that, let me have that.”
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Female critics are wary of acknowledging their own desire when writing about films for fear of being thought unprofessional, but the experience of ogling men on screen, and then openly discussing it, is a subversive joy that allows for critical honesty and challenges centuries of the male gaze
In her 2012 review of Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike, entitled ‘The Body Politic’, New York Times critic Manohla Dargis made a point of saying the unsayable. Were it not so specific to the film she was discussing, what she said could work as a manifesto for female critics: “In one school of thought, Hollywood movies are always organized for the visual pleasure of the male spectator, which pretty much leaves the female spectator sidelined. There’s no leaving her out any longer.” It’s no great revelation to say that gazing at beautiful stars in a film like Magic Mike is part of the deal of cinema admission. A century ago, rowdy audiences crowded to see films made by hustlers and vulgarians. There, the wriggling Jean Harlows and exotic Rudolph Valentinos drew audiences on a simple premise, something that can attract crowds anytime, anywhere: sex appeal. So much of moviegoing is fuelled at least partially by desire. Why then is the subject so often shunted to one side? For film critics, it seems that talking about personal desire is deemed unsophisticated. Among the critical community, there’s a longstanding attitude that writing in the first person should be avoided and that critics should maintain a degree of objectivity. But for this critic, such a critical distance sometimes seems antithetical to the entire experience of film viewing. Some of the most talented critics have shown little inclination to abide by that principle. Pauline Kael began one of her most memorable reviews – of Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine (1946) – with a deeply personal anecdote involving an argument with a boyfriend. If film criticism has never been objective, neither has desire. There’s a peculiar, individual alchemy to physical attraction – and in that way, it parallels the attitudes, backgrounds and biases that inevitably colour a person’s film criticism. That’s why talking about desire shouldn’t seem out of place. But talking about female desire is what really intrigues me. While men and women both get pleasure from looking at beautiful film stars, women really have something to gain by fully expressing that pleasure. Confronted by an industry and an artform that has long excluded women’s perspectives, when we share our most deeply individual impressions it puts us back where we belong: into the narrative of film culture. This has been true across other disciplines, too. In the literary world, for instance, the privileging of female subjectivity has become central. Increasingly, nonfiction publishing is taking on forms that would once have been considered messy or navel-gazing. A woman’s personal impressions and traditionally derided ‘feminine’ inclinations are now fodder for a new wave of writing. This approach, when imported into women’s writing about film, must include our sexual desires. Embracing the personal, physical reaction in reviews can be valuable only insofar as we can articulate that position, which is crucially where critical skill and film analysis come in. It’s not about rejecting those skills; it’s about calling into question the imposition of a masculine approach. Female writers should, where necessary, reject the pressure that comes from rigid traditionalism.
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FEMALE DESIRE
Atwood’s vision isn’t far removed from the impulse to watch men on cinema screens. It’s a oneway gaze, done in the safety of darkness, with the man as sexual object. As a result, he becomes that rare thing: a passive creature, subsumed by female desire. He’s there to be looked at. The genuine thrill this can stir need only be evidenced by any crowd of female moviegoers at a screening of Magic Mike XXL (2015), which openly panders to that very urge. There’s a reason why Atwood’s vision of the passive male sex object – and indeed, Channing Tatum’s personification of it in Magic Mike – is so powerful. When men gaze at women, however innocuously, there’s a history of dominance in that look, a presumption of ownership. Out in the real world, men have not been discouraged (until recently) from ogling women, pursuing them down the street, or catcalling. There’s no shame in it for them. But when a woman gazes at a man and openly discusses it, she’s reclaiming her desire. She’s showing the bold sexual urges that have for so long been repressed, in both cinema history and everyday life. Women are regularly tourists in their own bodies. We’re constantly encouraged to view ourselves from an external perspective and adjust accordingly. Cinema allows us to look outward. And then there’s the other fact of a woman’s life: men can be dangerous, even the attractive ones. But movie stars are a different proposition altogether. Sitting in the darkness of the cinema, it’s safe to stare. To indulge in ogling the male form with an unreturned, uninterrupted gaze can allow space for behaviour much more difficult to excuse in the real world. However unfortunate it is to point out, heterosexual female desire always runs a slight risk of leading to bodily harm. Being desirous of a tanned, shirtless Richard Gere in American Gigolo (1980) will never put you in danger. For me, looking at an oiled-up Tatum stripping down to nearly nothing has a subversive joy that watching a female stripper could never have. For queer women, that gaze is refracted differently. But regardless of sexual orientation, a female sex object has centuries of baggage behind her. The fact remains that the depiction of women on screen is still most often a fantasy extension of our facility in real life: to please men, to be attractive for them, and to expect for our bodies to be in some way public property. There’s nothing wrong with straight male desire, but it has no radical mileage. The objectification of sheer physical beauty is not dmiring the only factor in this form of female desire. Admiring a film star is not exactly the same as admiring a magauntless zine pin-up or a man on the street. There are countless matic in actors, male and female, who seem uncharismatic ive. An real life until the camera makes them come alive. cation, actor’s physicality is his method of communication, ched far beyond plot or written dialogue. His hunched shoulders, arched brows, the way he orders in a resm taurant or hails a cab, they build a story for him that extends from film to film. For me, to be attracted to him requires more than the obvious. It’s as much about a form of physical storytelling – a charisma that bursts from the seams of the performance – as it is a perfect six-pack. So, rthe act of looking that way ought to be as important for the critic or film academic as it is for thee ordinary punter. 36 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
Traditionalists within the filmwriting world seem eager to tell me what types of opinions are respectable or professional. But I’m sick of being told what’s unseemly or inappropriate
Here are some illustrations of what I mean: the flirtatious low tone of Brando’s nasal voice; Tatum’s dumb-puppy cheerfulness; Steve McQueen’s slouching, diffident gait; the young Mickey Rourke, his hoodlum posturing hiding a deep well of tenderness; Idris Elba, smooth and collected, with an iron core of internal strength; a hyperactive, fast-talking Robert De Niro tearing across the screen in Mean Streets (1973), every ounce the leather-jacketed psycho your mother warned you about; James Dean, distracted, casually putting a cigarette in his mouth the wrong way round. STARGAZING MENTALITIES
For women who want to be considered as cerebral as male critics – a preposterous thing to have to write – discussing our desires is treacherous water to navigate. There’s a real unspoken fear of seeming to justify those adjectives we’ve been called in the past: ‘girlish’, ‘giddy’, ‘unserious’, etc. Suggesting that we’re attracted to movie stars would seem to undermine our professionalism or our appearance of cool logic. Stephanie Zacharek, the film critic of TIME magazine, is unafraid of such labelling, and puts it right out there in a refreshing manner. Her review of Marc Webb’s recent family melodrama Gifted devotes a whole paragraph to Chris Evans’s mystifying hunkiness: “There’s something ridiculous about Evans’ beauty. Even with modern-day facial hair, he’s like a caricature of a 1940s football hero, yet he carries it all with a shrug. While he’s young, Evans should be playing more small-town guys who have no idea how fabulously good-looking they are. It surely can’t be as easy as he makes it look.” I wish more women would feel comfortable writing like this. But many fear expressing that desire because, in our male-dominated industry, sexual yearning means highlighting our ‘otherness’, our gendered difference, our personal impressions in a way that has been made taboo for straight men. Male critics these days tend to avoid expressing sexual desire because of being perceived as disrespectful, leering or anti-feminist. To a large extent, they should be mindful of these things. There’s nothing wrong with expressing attraction, particularly when it relates to stardom, performance and narrative, and I’d never claim men should be hounded for remarking on the beauty of Marion Cotillard or Claudia Cardinale. But there are serious limits as to how this desire can credibl be expressed without offence. Recent glossy credibly magazi profiles of famous actresses show how not magazine to appr approach the topic. In a personal interview context, journa journalists are expected to put their crushes to one side, regard regardless of the star’s personal beauty. But in practice, se this seems to be difficult for some. Outside the realm cine of cinema, garrulous descriptions of women’s appearances come off as, frankly, creepy and patronising. Tak this queasy mixture of paternalism and Take objecti objectification directed at Selena Gomez, written by a male journalist at Vogue: “As I slip an apron over her o chocolate-brown hair, for which Pantene has mane of paid her millions, and tie it around her tiny waist, I won whether her legions have felt for years the wonder sam sharp pang of protectiveness that I’m feeling same a present.” In 2016, Vanity Fair offered an even at m toe-curling profile of Margot Robbie. “She is more
26 and beautiful, not in that otherworldly, catwalk way but in a minor knock-around key, a blue mood, a slow dance. She is blonde but dark at the roots. She is tall but only with the help of certain shoes. She can be sexy and composed even while naked but only in character.” The fact is that women are used to being reduced to their physical and sexual components. Unwittingly or not, male writers have cheerfully colonised the female body for centuries – and it continues in mainstream celebrity journalism and in the cloistered world of film studies. So if the male moviegoer can no longer express his innocent desire because it has been drowned out by salivating creeps and teenagers with posters on their walls, we know who’s to blame. Perhaps that’s also why expounding on heterosexual male desire seems so stale. Films such as Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), Twilight (2008) and Magic Mike XXL all cater a little more than most to female sexual fantasy, but from problematic conception to disdainful reviews, they tend to be fraught affairs within the film community. “It’s marketed at the hennight demographic,” wailed one review of Magic Mike XXL. To be truly OK with a woman’s voracious sexuality is still new. And being able to say “I love dick” and carve out our own pathways into that unruly part of the psyche is simply a reversal of one of the oldest preoccupations of moviegoing. Traditionalists within the film-writing world – particularly distinguished older men in the industry, on social media and in person – seem eager to tell me what types of opinions are respectable or professional. But I’m sick
of being told what’s unseemly or inappropriate. Real life has enough of those limitations. Women should be given the room to be both analytical and effusive, to hungrily gaze and to contemplate what that hunger means. Examining the relationship between moviegoers and movies has always been a cornerstone of film analysis, and there are a host of new attempts to do so. As I mentioned, literature shows us a way forward. Genre-blurring work that combines memoir, cultural criticism and factual material has flooded the market, and several of these publications touch on cinema. Two recent standouts include Nathalie Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden and Durga Chew-Bose’s Too Much and Not the Mood – both impressionistic, meandering books that feature personal musings alongside astute critiques of the work they discuss. All the dirty associations of the ‘feminine’ – that which is frivolous, emotional, confessional – are now being harnessed to redefine writing about culture. Along the way, they force us to reconsider the formal parameters of that writing. Would film criticism also benefit from this sort of hybridisation? In a clickbait culture, unfazed by the traditional review format, I wonder if there’s a more radical future in impressionistic writing about film. I can’t help but think women are leading the way in this respect. At least some of our relationship to cinema is fuelled by dreams and fury and sex, and there’s a wellspring of psychological insight to be gained on the subject if explored. Those marginal pockets of female yearning are the perfect place to start.
When a woman gazes at a man and openly discusses it, she’s reclaiming her desire. She’s showing the bold sexual urges that have for so long been repressed
SEXY BEASTS (Clockwise from top left) Idris Elba in The Losers (2010), Steve McQueen in Bullitt (1968), Mickey Rourke in Angel Heart (1987), Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951); and (opposite) Chris Evans in Gifted October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 37
LOVE AND DEATH ON LONG ISLAND 38 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
Yance Ford’s wrenching documentary about the killing of his brother by a white mechanic in 1992 and the shattering effect it had on his family presents a savage indictment of injustice, confronting viewers with tough questions about their own complicity in racial stereotyping By Robert Greene Take the myriad definitions of ‘documentary’ and throw
them all out for this: the form, at its core, is about the translation of human experience, with all the complexity that implies. A mode of filmmaking commonly associated with the observation of the external, documentary is often most potent when it concerns itself with the psychic or, more directly, with the way the outside world and our interior lives interact. The realities that are often most strikingly captured are those we imagine or those we can’t escape. Strong Island director Yance Ford knows the potential of the nonfiction form well. For a decade, Ford worked as a series producer for POV, the essential documentary strand in American public broadcasting, screening hundreds of films a year. But in 2012 he left this prestigious post to make a film about the killing of his older brother 20 years earlier. The shooting of William, by a 19-yearold white mechanic named Mark Reilly, was such a cataclysmic event that it essentially tore Ford’s family apart. Another black man had been shot down by a white man and resulted in no conviction; Reilly wasn’t even charged. Ford’s film, which took home a Jury Award for Storytelling at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival – for which I served on the US documentary jury – concerns itself with the shattering trauma behind the ‘statistic’ of another young African-American man killed by gunfire. Using a singular style, Ford tells his family’s wrenching story while also carefully deconstructing the narratives we build around the deaths of black men. Much of the film consists of close-ups of Ford’s own face – and his selfaware, penetrating and uniquely crafted documentary performance creates rare pathways for understanding. Ford had to start and stop the film several times over the ten years he worked on it – once even scrapping an
entire cut – all while transitioning from a woman to a man. He has faced some confusion from viewers and critics over the structure and performative elements of the film, while still picking up awards all over the world. It sometimes feels as if Ford had to create a new kind of cinematic memoir to communicate a pain so unspeakable it took years for it to reach the air. “For four years, working at POV, no one even knew I had a brother,” Ford says when I interview him. “I was talking with a colleague and I said, ‘I have this story I want to tell.’ It was the first time I had told anyone this had happened to my family. And she said, ‘What are you waiting for?’ Despite all the fear of retaliation, and all the fear of what it would mean to face these demons and the doubts, that ‘what are you waiting for?’ question was like… I couldn’t answer it. There was no good reason anymore.” To begin the difficult process of making the film, Ford had first to unlearn some of the muscle memory that naturally comes with being a programmer, especially considering the relatively conventional fare that often gets shown on POV. “I am not going to make this film by imitation,” he recalls thinking before making the leap. “I’m not going to make this film with the unarticulated influence of the thousands of films I had watched by the time I left POV.” Ford, who went to art school at Hamilton College in upstate New York, wanted to get back on the wavelength of being an artist, but first he had to take one important step. “I stopped watching movies. I just stopped,” he says. “I started reading the Greeks. I was reading Antigone, all of James Baldwin, the Oresteia, Judith Butler. I was reading Malcolm X and Martin Luther King; all of these things that were both about divine authority, but also firstperson experiences with American racialised violence.” This allowed Ford to start over and go back, in a sense, to a former self. “I’m a formalist,” he says. “I’m a flat-out fucking formalist. Give me geometry, give me long takes. I can take this idea from [working in] still images and stage performances into film and not fucking fail.” In Strong Island, Ford’s interest in formalism is evident in every frame. With stark, often delicately disquieting images by cinematographer Alan Jacobsen, Ford (working closely with editor Janus Billeskov Jansen) crafts something both elusive and penetrating. Ostensibly a personal narrative uncovering the procedural facts HAPPY DAYS Director Yance Ford before he transitioned (opposite, far right), with sister Lauren and brother William, who was shot dead at the age of 24
October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 39
YANCE FORD
STRONG ISLAND
surrounding William’s killing and its billowing aftermath, Strong Island eventually reveals Ford’s deeper cinematic interests. While we viewers are considering the case, it becomes increasingly clear that Ford is provoking us, through his own performance and a tricky structure that plays with our expectations of William as a ‘character’, to consider our own hurtful prejudices. William is initially represented as an unquestionable victim, while Ford subtly strokes unspoken doubts we – or maybe we liberal white people who make up a large chunk of the audience – might have about a family’s ability to be ‘objective’ when talking about the death of an only son. Ford allows these doubts to linger – ‘What are they not telling us?’ – just long enough for us to notice our culpability as viewers. Then, later in the film, Ford reveals William’s aggressive actions towards his killer just before the shooting (and, crucially, his own guilt over knowing about those actions and seeing his brother as a “badass”), incidents which were later used as evidence for an all-white grand jury to determine Reilly acted in selfdefence. The structure Ford deploys forces us to ask where we stand on this non-indictment. Would we feel threatened? Would we turn a large black man like William into the character of our nightmares? Would we murder him? The conception of his viewers was in the forefront of Ford’s mind as he was constructing Strong Island. “The film had to function on two frequencies,” he explains. “It had to talk to the [African-American and minority ethnic] people who are familiar with this experience, and for those whom this film would be an affirmation. ‘No, you’re not crazy, yes, it’s always been about race, and I’m going to say it, and we’re going to say it together.’” It was also crucial, though, for the film to speak to that aforementioned white, liberal documentary audience, characterised by Ford as the viewers who are “satisfied with ‘Isn’t that sad? I feel so bad for that family. Maybe I shed a tear or two, and then I go home and I don’t think about my privilege in relation to fear of blackness.’” Ford’s canny, provocative structure has indeed produced some mixed responses. In his otherwise positive Variety review, Owen Gleiberman writes of feeling a little manipulated by a film that starts with the viewer believing William Ford was murdered “in the most disgusting and arbitrary way possible”, before introducing information one hour in that complicates the tale. This is an altercation that took place between Ford and the killer three and a half weeks before his death, suggesting that he might be capable of sudden anger. “It raises a question: on the night of the murder, could William – possibly – have behaved in a threatening manner?” Gleiberman writes. “Our answer after the first hour of Strong Island would be: No, to even ask that question is an act of racism. Our answer by the end of the movie is: we don’t know, but maybe it’s in the realm of possibility.” This “vagueness” that “leaves a hole in one’s outrage”, as Gleiberman puts it, is a typical complaint about documentaries – ‘The film creates complex feelings in me and I’m looking for easy empathy’ – and is exactly what Ford is challenging with his careful structure. “You know the story,” Ford says. “Reilly said he was afraid. And the thing that happened exactly three and a half weeks before he killed my brother scared him. That’s another part of the narrative – white people get to be afraid all the time. Things that go bump in the night can be things you shoot.” 40 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
Mark Reilly killed my brother because he could. William was ‘large, black man, scary’ and when angry black men are around, you can shoot them. Boom. End of story
Legally, it certainly matters whether or not a group of white people could perceive William as a threat, but ultimately Strong Island makes a deeper moral case. It remains tragically true that Ford was killed and Reilly was never charged with a crime. The film details how Reilly and the police successfully turned William into a character in an all-too-familiar story. “Mark Reilly killed my brother because he could,” Ford says. “There’s this reflexive action on the part of Reilly where he sees a black man and he knows black life is easy to take. If a black man is out of line in any way, there is justification for you taking his life. And that is a narrative Reilly stuck to and the one the police adopted in the investigation, and it never went away. There was no way to crack it. William was ‘large, black man, scary’ and when angry black men are around, you can shoot them. Boom. End of story.” With the film, Ford offers a way to ‘crack’ these narratives: by processing them through a controlled visual language that elevates personal pain to the realm of the spirit and creates a deeper psychological understanding of the political and social predicaments that produce that pain. Strong Island is evocatively measured and unnervingly enacted, and at its heart is an incomparable nonfiction performance by Ford himself. Throughout the film, he returns to a close-up interview where he seems to be talking directly to us. “I’m not angry,” he says haltingly, straight into the lens, before pausing and changing his expression, as if waiting for a comeback. “I’m also not willing to accept that someone else gets to say who William was. And if you’re uncomfortable with me asking these questions… you should probably get up and go.” This direct-to-viewer performance feels radical, even if it’s best understood as an evolution of documentary
enactment seen in films ranging from Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967) to Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012). Crucially, though, what Ford is doing can’t easily be dismissed as pure performance, because the most performative elements were actually produced as interviews, albeit using a highly unorthodox method. “There’s a wall of sound blankets between me and the entire crew,” explains Ford of the cocoon-like setup he concocted. “And I constructed this environment where I could be alone and still be on a film set.” Over the course of six years, this setup was used repeatedly, so interview moments we may perceive in the film as happening concurrently were actually filmed over many years, in many different emotional contexts. The camera was staged so only the lens poked through the insulating blankets, creating a tiny tunnel into which Ford’s gaze could turn. From outside this space, a handful of collaborators – all of them white – would shout out questions for Ford to answer. Many of these interviewers, from producers Joslyn Barnes and Esther Robinson to fellow filmmakers such as Robb Moss, wound up playing a kind of role themselves. This created a pseudo-dialogue between Ford and his likely white viewers, which was a kind of artistic payoff for the years Ford spent cultivating that audience at POV. “Robb became the voice of white liberal America,” Ford says. “He was also this provocateur. One time Robb phrased a question like, ‘Convince me your family was afraid.’ And I was like, ‘You want me to fucking convince you?’ and I was so fucking pissed at him for asking me that question that I was able to answer it from this place of, ‘How fucking dare you question my fear? Black people have always been afraid.’ It was brilliant.” This method allowed Ford to blend raw interview and a sharp, thoughtful style of ‘acting’ that elevated both emotional and rational truths. “Those two camera lenses… I stopped seeing them as lenses and I started seeing them as portals straight into the cinema, straight into someone’s face. I did not want someone to be able to escape my gaze, to escape my questioning.” Performance as a means of psychological expression is something Ford has been cultivating as an artist for years, and as a student he produced several provocative pieces. “I made a cage,” he says, describing one of his works. “I suspended it – you know how colleges have those square cutouts that look on to the floor below? I suspended the cage from the floor above and I climbed in. The campus
ground to a fucking halt. I had people bringing their entire classes to watch me hanging in this cage.” In a scene that can’t help but evoke what’s happening in Strong Island, Ford sat silent in this cage for more than eight hours, wearing only a sheet, making eye contact with any of the mostly white students on the campus willing to engage. “The fact that I didn’t say anything meant people were able to project whatever they thought was happening in my brain on to me, the image of a black body. It was the first experience I ever had creating a whole environment into which the audience enters.” Ford next staged a performance called Have You Seen Mark Reilly? directly using his brother’s death as material. “I invited people into an empty room,” he explains. “I had a starter pistol and a strobe light, and I had a simple set of questions. ‘Have you seen him? Does he look like you?’ and every time I asked a question I would fire the starter pistol at another person.” This performance background may be most deeply felt in Strong Island during a powerful climactic scene in which Ford creates a kind of living statue with his own body on the spot of his brother’s death. But performance permeates the entire film – which has led to some questioning of what exactly is going on. “I think when people see me and think of me performing myself,” Ford says, explaining some of the pushback he’s received, “I wonder who they think I am when the camera stops rolling. That quote – ‘If you don’t want to hear this, you can get up and go’ – wasn’t me performing. It actually came out of Yance’s mouth.” In Strong Island, Ford uses this conceptual style as a kind of blunt object designed to rupture the everyday recycled spectacle of violence against black people, and in turn creates a truly modern, profoundly felt cinematic experience. “Black America is fully aware of the narratives that have been written about it, and is fully capable of deconstructing those narratives,” Ford says. “But it is the deconstruction of those narratives that people are scared of. And it’s because they’re scared they say they’re not real, and because it’s performative, because I determine what the light will be, what the gaze will be, because I’m an artist… and because it doesn’t seem like it can possibly be this true, it has to be fake. ‘There’s something about this that’s unreliable’. And it’s just like, ‘No, it’s not unreliable, it’s just that you refuse to see it. You fucking refuse to accept it.’”
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BROKEN FAMILY Strong Island director Yance Ford (opposite) employs a direct address to camera (below right) that uses elements of performance as he explores the effects of his brother’s murder on his family, including his mother (below left)
Strong Island is screening on Netflix in the UK from 15 September
October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 41
The Indian characters Peter Sellers plays in ‘The Millionairess’ and ‘The Party’ are, on a very basic level, grotesque constructs – but they also harbour an unwitting depth and complexity, showing a sly subversion in portraying mixedrace relationships in a positive light By Hanif Kureishi
Here’s an odd thing. As a mixed-race kid growing up in the South London suburbs in the 1960s, I liked any film starring Peter Sellers, particularly I’m All Right Jack (1959), The Pink Panther (1963) and Dr. Strangelove (1964). But my two favourites were The Millionairess (1960) and The Party (1968), both of which starred Sellers as, respectively, an Indian doctor and a failing Indian actor. In both films Sellers, in brownface, performs a comic Indian accent along with a good deal of Indian headwaggling, exotic hand gesturing and babyish nonsense talk. He likes to mutter, for instance, “Birdy num-num,” a phrase I still enjoy replicating while putting on my shoes. And I’m even fond of singing ‘Goodness, Gracious Me’, the promotional song from The Millionairess, produced by the peerless George Martin. So, at the end of the 1960s, my sister, mother and I came to adore Sellers’s Indian character, repeating his lines aloud as we went about our business in the house, because we liked to think he resembled Dad. My father, an Indian Muslim who had come to Britain at the end of the 1940s to study law, was, in his accent and choice of words, upper-middle-class Indian. As a child and young man he’d spoken mostly English since his father – who liked the British but hated colonialism – was a colonel and doctor in the British Army. However, we didn’t think of dad’s accent as Indian: for us it was a mangling of English. There was a standard, southern, London accent, and he didn’t have one. He was a mimic man, but a bad one, as all colonial subjects would have to be. If the white Englishman was the benchmark of humanity, almost everyone else would necessarily be a failed approximation. Dad could never get it right. Indians were, therefore, inevitably comic. And because my father, as a father, was powerful and paternal, our teasing shrank him a little. Dad was also sweet, funny and gentle, but not wildly dissimilar – in some moods – to the hapless character Sellers plays. My sister and I had been born in Britain after all. We knew how things went and Dad didn’t. As I wrote in The Buddha of Suburbia, “He stumbled around the place like an Indian just off the boat.” If my father’s way of misunderstanding hadn’t been comic it might have become moving or even upsetting.
BIRDY NUM-NUM 42 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
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THE UNEXPECTED GUEST In Blake Edwards’s The Party (1968), Peter Sellers plays an Indian actor, Hrundi (above, opposite), who inadvertently causes chaos when he is invited to a Hollywood party
October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 43
HANIF KUREISHI
When I got older, my younger self embarrassed me. I vowed not to look at those movies again. Foolishly, I’d allowed myself to be tricked into loving a grotesque construct, a racist reduction of my father and fellow countryman to a cretinous caricature, and I’d be advised to backtrack on my choices. Yet recently, rewatching the films, when I stopped weeping, my views changed once more, and I want to think about what I liked in them. My mother had married a coloured man in London in the early 1950s, at a time when one fear in the West was of unauthorised boundary crossing, or miscegenation. It was with miscegenation that the terror of racial difference was placed. Men of colour could not and should not be desired by white women, nor should they breed with them. People of whatever colour could only go with others of similar colour; otherwise some idea of purity would be defiled. Racial separation thus ensured the world remained uniform and stable. That way the most important thing – white wealth, privilege and power – would be sustained. Nor was the crime of ‘crossing’ trivial. We should not forget that Hollywood’s Production Code banned miscegenation from the American cinema for a quarter of a century. As children of a mixed-race background, though not particularly dark-skinned (I’d describe myself as ‘brownish’), we were subject to some curiosity. People were worried for us because, surely, being neither one thing nor the other, we’d never have an ethnic home. We mongrels would linger forever in some kind of racial limbo. It would be a long time before we could enjoy being different. It is with this in mind that we should look at The Millionairess, while not forgetting that Sidney Webb, a close friend of Bernard Shaw – the author of the 1936 play on which the film was based – and a supporter of eugenics, warned that England was threatened by “race deterioration”. I was surprised to read that Shaw himself wrote, “The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man.” Despite this, we should consider how few mixed relationships were shown on screen. Anthony Asquith’s movie, made in 1960, was adapted by Wolf Mankowitz from Shaw’s play, in which the male lead is Egyptian. In Asquith’s version, a divine Sophia Loren – an aristocratic, rich Italian called Epifania Parerga – falls in love, while attempting suicide, with an Indian Muslim doctor who, at first, sees her as nothing but a nuisance. I must have seen this on television, and I don’t recall many people of colour appearing in the movies I saw at the cinema with my father, except for Zulu (1964) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962). This was also a time when black filmmakers were virtually invisible. Not only is Dr Ahmed el Kabir a Muslim man of colour and voluntarily poor, he is cultured, educated and dedicated to helping the indigent and racially marginalised. Most natives in most movies, of course, had always been shown as thieves, servants or whores, or as effeminate Asiatics. We were always considered dodgy. Roger Scruton writes in England: An Elegy, “The empire was acquired by roving adventurers and merchants who, trading with natives whom they could not or would not trust...” We were thrilled, then, that the movie would include no covert fantasy of coloured men raping white women, a 44 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
If my father and other Asian incomers seemed wounded in Britain, vulnerable, liable to abuse, patronised, tolerant of insults, racism made me want to be tougher than my father
trope which seemed to me to have been almost compulsory since E.M Forster’s A Passage to India. And The Millionairess does, in fact, have a nice Hollywood ending, with the mixed-race couple together enjoying one another. While The Millionairess looks creaky and silly in places, but is saved by the performances of the leading couple, The Party is a lovely film. Sellers, obviously a great comic actor, is at the peak of his mad inventiveness, and Blake Edwards is a brilliant director of physical comedy. Composed of a series of perfectly judged vignettes – a carousel of increasingly bizarre incidents – the movie becomes riotously anarchic as Sellers’s innocent Indian creates, inadvertently, total chaos at the house of film producer General Clutterbuck, to whose party he is mistakenly invited after blowing up his movie set. At the beginning of the movie, Sellers’s character Hrundi is shown playing the sitar, reminding us that at this time – it is the year when Sgt. Pepper was being played in every shop, party and house you visited – Indians were supposed to possess innate wisdom, beyond the new materialism of this dawning vulgar age in the West. When, soon after, Hrundi attends the smart Hollywood party, it isn’t difficult to identify with his apprehension. Don’t we all feel, when going to a party, that we are about to lose our shoe in a water feature and will spend the next hour on one leg? Yet he is even more out of place than even we would be, and unnerving in his strange, formal politeness. “Do you speak Hindustani?” he asks strangers, who are baffled by his question. “Could you ever understand me?” would be a translation. “Do you want to?” The Party was released in 1968 and I’m surprised at my enthusiasm for it at the time, since this was also the year of Enoch Powell’s grand guignol ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. If my father and other Asian incomers seemed wounded in Britain, vulnerable, liable to abuse, looked down on, patronised, tolerant of insults, racism made me want to be tougher than my father. My generation would rather resemble the Black Panthers than the Pink Panther. We knew we didn’t have to cringe and take it, for this was the era of Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis. These blacks were so sexy with their guns and
BFI N B NATIONAL ATIONAL ATION AL ARCHIVE ARCHIVE (1)/ALAMY (1)/ALAMY (1)
PETER SELLERS
open shirts and attitude, and I’d been mesmerised by the black-gloved salute of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Mexico Olympics. There’s nothing macho about Hrundi. He’s a different sort of heterosexual leading man to those usually preferred in the American cinema. When, at the party, he meets one of his heroes – a tough but charming cowboy with an iron handshake and a movie reputation for shooting Red Indians – Hrundi is offensively absurd in his sycophancy. Yet there is something to his softness. The other men in the film, those involved in the film industry, are shown to be somewhat brutal if not summary with women, whom they patronise and infantilise. Hrundi is different. Perhaps women and people of colour occupy a similar position in the psyche of the overmen, which is why his friendship with a coy French girl [Claudine Longet] who sings like Juliette Gréco is so touching. The woman and the Indian, both subject to the description of the other, the brown man coming from ‘the dark continent’ and the woman as ‘the dark continent’, can recognise one another as supposedly inferior. Both are assumed to be inherently childish. As it happens, there’s more to Hrundi’s idiocy than pure idiocy. He seems like someone who could never be integrated anywhere. And his gentle foolishness and naivety becomes a powerful weapon. If you’ve been humiliated and excluded you could become a Black Panther or, later, join Isis, taking revenge on everyone who has suppressed and humiliated you. Or you could give up on the idea of retaliation altogether. You could perplex the paradigm with your indecipherability and live in the gaps. After all, who are you really? Not even you can know. When it comes to colonialism, the man of colour is always pretending for the white man: pretending not to hate him and pretending not to want to kill him. In a way, Sellers’s baffling brownface is perfect. And in some sense, we are all pretending – if only that we are men or women. Eventually Sellers’s useful imp escapes the power and leads a rebellion. Or, rather, an invasion in the home of the white master, involving an elephant, a small army of young neighbours and the whole of the frivolous 60s. The swimming pool fills with foamy bubbles into which people disappear, until no one knows who is who. In a carnivalistic chaos they all swim in the same water. At the end of the movie, he and the French girl leave in his absurd little car. In both films, the Sellers character knows he has to be saved by a woman. And he is. Significantly, it is a white woman. Walk out tonight into the city portrayed in The Millionairess and you will see the great energy of multiracialism and mixing, an open, experimental London, with most living here having some loyalty to the idea that something unique, free and tolerant has been created, despite Thatcherism. Of the two films, The Millionairess looks the least dated since its divides have returned. It has been said that Muslims were fools for adhering to an extreme irrational creed, when the mad and revolutionary creed, all along, was that of Sophia Loren’s family: extreme, neoliberal capitalism and wealth accumulation, creating the Dickensian division in which we still live. Equality does not exist here. This city’s prosperity is more unevenly distributed than at any period in my life-
time, and the poor are dispersed and disenfranched. Not only does our city burst with rich Italians and many millionaires patronising urchins and the underprivileged, but a doctor committed to serving the financially excluded would be busy. London has reverted to a pre-1960s binary: a city of ghosts simultaneously alive and dead, of almost unnoticed refugees, asylum seekers, servants and those who need to be hidden, while many rightists have reverted to the idea that white cultural superiority is integral to European identity. Since those two films with their brownfaced hero, we have a new racism, located around religion. And today the stranger will still be a stranger, one who disturbs and worries. Those who have come for work or freedom can find themselves blamed for all manner of absurd ills. As under colonialism, they are still expected to adapt to the ruling values – now called ‘British’ – and they, as expected, will always fail. However, if the Sellers character begins by mimicking whiteness, he does, by the end of both films, find an excellent way of forging a bond with his rulers, and of outwitting them. If the West began to exoticise the East in a new way in the 60s, the Sellers character can benefit from this – for the one thing the women played by Loren and Longet lack and desire is a touch of the exotic and mysterious. It becomes Sellers’s mission to provide this touch. For Ahmed and Hrundi, the entry into love is the door into the ruling white world of status and privilege. To exist in the West the man of colour must become, as Frantz Fanon would put it, worthy of a white woman’s love. A woman of colour has little social value, but a white woman is a prize who can become the man’s ticket to ride. By way of her, being loved like a white man, he can slip into the West, where, alongside her, he will be regarded differently. Perhaps he will disappear; but maybe he will alter things, or even subvert them, a little, and their children will either be reviled or, out of anger, alter the world. A Hollywood ending tells us love must be our final destination. Yet there is more complexity to these lovely finalities than either film can quite see or acknowledge. Birdy num-num indeed.
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MIXED BLESSINGS Sophia Loren and Peter Sellers (above) in The Millionairess, which is creaky in places but looks less dated than it might now that its social and political divides have returned to the UK
The Party is released on Blu-ray and DVD by Eureka/Masters of Cinema on 16 October October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 45
The Party, Blake Edwards’ fish-out-of-water, comedy cult classic starring Peter Sellers, will be released for the first time on Blu-ray in the UK, as part of the Eureka Classics range. Special features include: A featurette on the groundbreaking filming methods utilised in the film’s production and a behind the scenes featurette on the making of the film.
Available October 2017 AVAILABLE FROM Website: www.eurekavideo.co.uk Twitter: @mastersofcinema Facebook: EurekaEntertainment
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FILMS OF THE MONTH Under siege: Juliette Navis as Delhani and Hiam Abbass as Oum Yazan in Philippe Van Leeuw’s intimate study of the effects of civil war on ordinary Syrians
Insyriated Belgium/France/Lebanon/Germany 2017 Director: Philippe Van Leeuw Certificate 15 86m 27s Reviewed by Nikki Baughan Spoiler alert: this review reveals key plot details
With the Arab Spring uprising of 2011 failing to deliver on its promises of democratic freedom, instead plunging the region into a sustained period of violent instability, filmmakers have responded by turning their cameras on the crisis in different ways. In Syria alone, where the civil war between Bashar alAssad’s government forces and rebel fighters has left an estimated 450,000 people dead, a wave of feature films has highlighted the horrific new realities of life in the country. These have, understandably, mostly taken the form of documentaries, such as Orlando von Einsiedel’s Oscar-winning short The White Helmets (2016), about the first responders who risk their lives to save others, or Matthew Heineman’s recent City of Ghosts, which profiles the fearless citizen journalists of Raqqa. Some filmmakers have, however, used the backdrop of civil unrest for fictional dramas, such as Mohamed Molas, whose 2013 romance Ladder to Damascus used the fighting to underscore themes of grief and 48 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
loss. Now, Belgian cinematographer-turneddirector Philippe Van Leeuw confronts a city in conflict head-on and, in doing so, presents a devastatingly direct and intimate study of the effects of war on ordinary people. Taking place over a period of 24 hours, the action is almost entirely contained within a besieged apartment in Damascus. The film opens in the half-light of dawn, where the sound of birdsong intermingles with that of buzzing helicopters and scattershot gunfire. At a heavily curtained window stands an elderly man, chain-smoking and gazing out at the carnage below with watery eyes. We sense, through his weary demeanour, that this is a view to which he has become all too accustomed. The camera then pans through a living room cluttered with books, ornaments and other domestic paraphernalia, past the heavily barricaded front door and through the rest of the apartment, introducing us to inhabitants whose names and relationships begin to reveal themselves. We see housekeeper Delhani (an excellent Juliette Navis) carrying on with her chores as explosions echo outside. Elsewhere, in a bedroom strewn with clothes, Samir (Moustapha Al Kar) and his wife Halima (Diamand Abou Abboud) tend to their young baby, and discuss their imminent escape to Beirut with a mixture of trepidation and relief.
Despite Halima’s protests, Samir leaves the apartment to meet with the contact who will facilitate their departure. After Delhani helps him with the barricades on the door, she watches him cross the courtyard – and is the only witness when he is shot by a sniper and collapses behind an abandoned car. Panic-stricken, she rushes to
Diamand Abou Abboud as young mother Halima
FILMS OF THE MONTH
wake the woman she calls ‘Madam’: the owner of the apartment, Oum Yazan (Hiam Abbass). When Delhani explains what she has seen, Oum Yazan decides to keep the truth from Halima in the name of the apartment’s fragile peace. As the day unfolds, we see that Oum Yazan keeps a tight rein on her wards: along with Delhani and Halima, these include her father-in-law Abou Monzer (Mohsen Abbas), her three children and her eldest daughter’s visiting boyfriend. Oum Yazan ensures that chores are done, food is eaten and studies are undertaken, maintaining an essential sense of routine that, it’s clear, helps to keep her growing helplessness at bay – particularly important given the absence of her own husband, from whom she is desperate to hear word. The responsibility of keeping such a huge secret, however, weighs heavily on Oum Yazan and, particularly, Delhani, and growing tensions are worsened by the arrival of two armed men who knock repeatedly on the door. Peering through the grimy keyhole, Oum Yazan refuses them entry. Soon, however, the inevitable happens, and they force their way in; everyone shutters themselves in the kitchen apart from Halima and her baby, who don’t make it there in time. The resulting sustained beating and rape of Halima is sensitively shot, the camera remaining tightly on her agonised face throughout, but it is deeply harrowing to watch. As the action cuts between her and the shocked group cowering in the kitchen, listening helplessly behind the door, so the true vulnerability of life in this environment becomes clear. While Oum Yazan may cling to a sense of daily normality, the choices she is forced to make – essentially, to sacrifice Halima’s safety in return for that of herself and her children – is anything but routine. When the ordeal is over, her tentative questioning of whether Halima is all right echoes with tenderness and total inadequacy. When a bloodied Halima, clinging to her baby, learns, inevitably, of Samir’s fate, the emotions of the day coalesce into a strength that surprises everyone. Ignoring all warnings, she races outside to collect his body; finding him still alive, she drags him back into the building, marked all the while by the red dots of sniper rifles that, thankfully, stay silent – likely because she is a woman. In a sudden rush of activity, Oum Yazan and Delhani fight to save Samir’s life, before friends arrive to whisk him away to what we can only hope is a place of relative safety. The camera, however, stays locked within the apartment, where an uneasy quiet rests until another dawn breaks and Abou Monzer once again stands, now weeping, at the window, the daily cycle set to repeat once more. If any small criticism can be levelled at Insyriated, it’s the dramatic licence that Van Leeuw takes with this single collective of characters. Setting his film in one location, over such a tight timeframe, means that they face a relentless conveyor belt of trauma, and could easily become empty ciphers for human suffering. Any narrative improbability or twinges of melodrama are, however, overcome both by the striking performances and the visceral, immersive filmmaking. While the cast is excellent across the board, the film belongs to Abbass and Abboud as women fighting their own personal battles with dignity and strength. As the tight-lipped Oum Yazan, Abbass is by turns redoubtable and vulnerable,
War on the home front: Hiam Abbass as Oum Yazan
Hiam Abbass and Diamand Abou Abboud powerfully convey the message that the unspeakable horrors of war extend far beyond the battleground her fear and weariness writ large on her face even as she refuses to give into it. Lebanese actor Abboud plays Halima as a woman of increasing awareness, forever changed by her experiences but never a victim of them. Between them, the two actors powerfully convey the film’s central message: that the unspeakable horrors of war extend far beyond the battleground. That’s an idea underscored by the masterful cinematography of Virginie Surdej. Expertly utilising the boundaries of this confined space, the camera creeps down shadowy corridors, eavesdrops on conversations and becomes
an all-seeing witness to events as they unfold. Indeed, while the two films may be worlds apart, historically, geographically and in terms of scale, Insyriated is reminiscent of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk in its refusal to be a mere observer. Just as Nolan forces his audience into cockpit, water and sand with his legions of Allied soldiers, so Van Leeuw demands the viewer take up closequarters residence in Oum Yazan’s apartment. It’s a setting that proves both comforting in its depiction of the minutiae of everyday life – towels are folded, teeth are cleaned, siblings argue – and uncomfortably claustrophobic. While the apartment is a sanctuary, it is also a prison – most notably for Delhani, who is desperate to leave and be with her own distant son. And, thanks to the endless drone of helicopters and the gunfire and explosions frequently peppering the soundtrack, there is also the constant, overwhelming sense that this home could, at any moment, become a tomb from which there really can be no escape.
Credits and Synopsis Producers Guillaume Malandrin Serge Zeitoun Screenplay Philippe Van Leeuw Cinematography Virginie Surdej Film Editor Gladys Joujou Art Director Kathy Lebrun Original Music Jean-Luc Fafchamps Sound Recordist Chadi Roukoz Costumes Claire Dubien ©Altitude100 Production,
Liaison Liaison Cinématographique, Minds Meet, Né à Beyrouth Films Production Companies Altitude100 Production and Liaison Cinématographique presents in co-production with Minds Meet, Versus Production, VOO and Betv, Né à Beyrouth Films Produced with the assistance of Centre du Cinéma et de l’Audiovisuel
de la Féderation Wallonie-Bruxelles, Fonds Audiovisuel de Flandre (VAF), Eurimages, La Coopération belge au Développement - DGD, Service public fédéral Affaires étrangères, Commerce extérieur et Coopération au Développement With the participation of Aide aux cinémas du monde, Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée, Ministère des affaires étrangères
Present-day Damascus, Syria. As civil war rages on the streets, several residents take refuge inside the modest apartment of Oum Yazan, including her three children, elderly father-in-law, housekeeper Delhani and the boyfriend of her eldest daughter, as well as neighbours Samir and Halima, who are planning to leave for Beirut with their infant daughter. When Samir ventures out to meet their contact, he is shot by a sniper and left for dead; the only witness to the event is Delhani, watching through a window. Delhani tells Oum Yazan, who decides to keep the news a secret in order to protect the fragile
et du développement international, Institut Français With the support of Tax Shelter du Gouvernement Fédéral Belge, Inver Tax Shelter In association with Films Boutique A film by Philippe Van Leeuw An Altitude100 Production, Liaison Cinématographique, Minds Meet, Versus Production, VOO and Betv, Né à Beyrouth Films co-production With the support of
Eurimages - Conseil de l’Europe
Cast Hiam Abbass Oum Yazan Diamand Abou Abboud Halima Juliette Navis Delhani Mohsen Abbas Abou Monzer Moustapha Al Kar Samir Mohammad Jihad Sleik Yazan Alissar Kaghadou
Yara Ninar Halabi Aliya Elias Khatter Karim In Colour [1.85:1] Subtitles Distributor Curzon Artificial Eye
peace of the apartment. As the day progresses, however, Oum Yazan realises that she must tell Halima what has happened. But before she can do so, the apartment is broken into by two armed men; while the others take refuge in the kitchen, Halima is left to face them alone. After enduring a brutal rape, a shell-shocked Halima finally hears the truth about her husband, and rushes outside to retrieve his body under the cover of night. She finds him still alive. Oum Yazan and Delhani fight to save his life before he is taken away by friends. An uneasy quiet returns to the apartment as dawn breaks.
October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 49
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The Road to Mandalay Taiwan/Myanmar/France/Thailand/India/Germany/Republic of Korea/The Netherlands 2016 Director: Midi Z Certificate 15 108m 7s Review by Tony Rayns
One of the happiest surprises in recent world cinema has been the reinvention and re-energising of a poetic social realism in East Asia. The Road to Mandalay, inspired by a real incident reported by the director’s father, tells broadly the same story that Edward Yang told 30-odd years ago in Taipei Story (Qingmei Zhuma, 1984): a go-ahead young woman realises that she needs to break away from her more conservative, backwardlooking boyfriend to carve out the future she wants. But where Yang used the story as a touchstone for urban and economic changes in fast-developing Taipei, not to mention the conflicting pulls of old values and new blank pages, Midi Z focuses on Chinese-Burmese illegals in Thailand, in the early 2010s, using the precariousness of their lives as the backbeat for a keenly observed account of the psychological cost of living outside the law in modern times. Midi Z (Chinese name: Zhao Deyin) left Burma (aka Myanmar) for Taiwan in his teens on a scholarship; he became a filmmaker and installation artist briefly trained by Hou HsiaoHsien, among others. His features, shorts, documentaries and gallery pieces (some shot ‘underground’ in Burma) have all drawn freely on his own experiences and those of members of his large extended family, but he has never made an autobiographical film as such. The scholarship he won gave him unique privileges, so he prefers to deal with those less lucky than himself: he takes the facts of Burmese poverty, economic migration and get-rich-quick enterprises (drug dealing, jade mining) as givens, and looks for real-life anecdotes which will yield insights into the contingent emotional and psychological problems. In that respect, The Road to Mandalay is his most sophisticated film yet. The film is very likely the clearest and most matter-of-fact account in recent cinema of the way the process of illicit economic migration actually works. The very first shot shows the protagonist Wang Lianqing (played by Wu Kexi, like the rest of the cast a non-professional) entering Thailand illegally; she is ferried across the Mekong river at Tchilek on a makeshift rubber dinghy, met on the Thai side by a waiting man and led up the riverbank to another waiting man on a motorcycle, who demands immediate payment – in Thai baht, not Burmese kyat. She is also expected at her next stop, a rural farmyard where a small truck is waiting to carry her and other illegal immigrants to the capital, Bangkok. Nobody says much, but the details of the journey are noted very precisely. Lianqing has reached the yard late (the motorcycle driver complains about the number of police in the countryside) and the truck driver and his other passengers are impatient to get moving. Each is charged 9,000 baht (around £180 at 2011 rates) for a seat in the truck, or 8,000 (with a travel-sickness pill thrown in) for a horizontal ride in the stowage area at the back. The night drive to the city passes through one police checkpoint, where the driver and the cop play a cat-and-mouse game over payment of the bribe demanded to allow the journey to continue. Similarly precise detail marks subsequent 50 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
Holding on by a thread: Kai Ko as Guo and Wu Kexi as Lianqing
scenes in Bangkok – both in a shared flat, where the friend who invited Lianqing to stay and promised to help proves very unwelcoming, having recently lost her own job, and in the first encounter with a Thai company boss, who gently but firmly insists that he can’t hire her without seeing a work permit – and it also underpins the rest of the film, even when the story’s emotional twists loom larger. But Midi Z has already begun seeding the emotional dimension before Lianqing even reaches the city. In the farmyard, the unusually tall illegal Guo gives up his seat in the truck cabin to allow Lianqing to travel in relative comfort while he makes do in the stowage area.
This turns out to be his first, silent pitch for her friendship, carried out with the take-command authority that turns out to be his usual modus operandi. His kindness is backed up by several later interventions in her life as his obvious attraction to the nervous, taciturn young woman edges towards possessive obsession. The story of Guo’s would-becontrolling crush on Lianqing is expertly woven through the film’s exact, sociological observation of homes, workplaces and personal predicaments. The core of the film is the chasm between the personalities, emotional needs and ambitions of these two characters. The Buddhist Lianqing soon overcomes her initial nerves and settles
Lianqing (far right) crosses into Thailand
Guo and Lianqing
The story of Guo’s would-becontrolling crush on Lianqing is expertly woven through the film’s exact, sociological observation of homes and workplaces into a routine of working hard, learning the Thai language and sending money home to her mother. She treats others well and is baffled when they don’t respond in kind, and becomes inured to paying through the nose for every step she has to take to legitimise her position in Thailand. The obstacles she meets strengthen her fundamental self-sufficiency; she even steels herself to one night of prostitution to finance a fake ID card. Her ultimate aim is to move on to a Chinese country – most likely Taiwan – where she can live an honest, high-earning life. Guo, conversely, has no interest in legitimising his position; he just wants to save enough money to open his own business back home in Burma. In his mind his escalating obsession with Lianqing justifies his every action. It’s fairly obvious, for instance, that it’s Guo who tips off the police about illegal workers in the small Chinese restaurant where Lianqing washes dishes; he’s waiting to pick her up at the police station after the police raid, ready to whisk her off to the textile factory where he works himself. His unhinged tendencies are exacerbated by the speed that he – like other workers – takes to get himself through long night shifts at the factory. His ruinous actions in the closing scenes are clearly fuelled by an addiction. Throughout, Midi Z’s aesthetic principle is:
Credits and Synopsis Producers Patrick Mao Huang Midi Z Written by Midi Z Director of Photography Tom Fan Editor Matthieu Laclau Production Designer Akekarat Homlaor Composer Lim Giong Sound Designers Tu Duu-chih Wu Shu-yao Costume Designers Rujirumpai Mongkol
Phim Umari Production Companies Presented by Fine Time Entertainment Int’l. Inc., CMC Entertainment Holding Corporation, Star Ritz International Entertainment Co. Ltd Presented and produced by Seashore Image Productions, Flash Forward Entertainment, Myanmar Montage Films, House on Fire Co-produced with Pop
Pictures Company Limited, Bombay Berlin Film Production Supported by Ministry of Culture, Republic of China (Taiwan), The Rainbow Initiative Funds for Collaborative Cultural Projects, Centre National de la Cinématographie et de l’Image Animée, Ministère des Affaires Étrangères et du Développement International, Institut Français, Berlinale World Cinema
Thailand, circa 2011. Wang Lianqing, a 23-year-old Chinese-Burmese from Lashio, illicitly crosses the Mekong into Thailand and pays to travel a wellestablished underground route to Bangkok. On the way she catches the eye of fellow economic migrant Guo, who offers friendship and help. She moves into a flat shared by other women from Burma, but soon learns that she cannot get a decent job without a work permit. She finds menial work in a small Chinese restaurant, but is ejected from the flatshare by a jealous ‘friend’. Guo suggests that she should join him working in a suburban textile factory, but Lianqing is determined to do things her own way. She moves into a room above the restaurant,
Fund (WCF) Presenters: Wang Shih-hsiung, Bob Wong, Angie Chai Supported by Asian Cinema Fund, Taipei New Horizon, Festival du Film d’Amiens, ARTE, Cinéfondation, Golden Horse Film Project Promotion, Busan International Film Festival This film received the support of Aide aux cinémas du monde, Berlinale World Cinema Fund (WCF) 2015, Atelier de
Cannes 2015, ARTE International Prize 2015, Fonds d’aide au développement du scénario du Festival International du Film d’Amiens 2014, ACF Script Developing Fund from Busan Film Festival 2012, Ministry of Culture, Republic of China (Taiwan) Script Developing Fund 2011
Cast
Wang Lianqing Wang Shin-hong Zhao De-fu Zheng Meng-lan Pan Zheng-li Kuang Jia-en Li Wan-wu Xu De-wei Dolby Digital In Colour [1.85:1] Subtitles Distributor Day for Night
Kai Ko Guo Wu Ke-xi
but after an argument with Guo she and other staff are arrested in a police raid. Bailed out, she has no choice but to join Guo at the factory – where she makes new friends and learns that she can buy an identity document in a mountain village in the north. The document turns out to be worthless, but Guo fails to pass on messages from the fixer Wuniang that Lianqing could inherit the identity of a dead girl her own age. When she finds out, Lianqing angrily breaks with Guo, now addicted to uppers to help him cope with very long shifts, and prostitutes herself to raise money for the quasi-legitimate ID. Soon after she gets it, though, Guo breaks into her bedroom, stabs her and slits his own throat. October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 51
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show, don’t tell. There’s a slight kinship with Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s films of the 1990s. Although the Chinese title Zaijian Wacheng echoes the Chinese title of Hou’s Goodbye South, Goodbye (Nanguo Zaijian, Nanguo, 1996), nothing in the plotting or pacing here resembles any of Hou’s films. What does recall Hou’s work is the director’s expectation that we’ll take narrative information and clues to the characters’ thinking from close attention to the images, not so much from what anyone says. This is already clear in the first shot, where the Burmese flag fluttering on one bank signals that Lianqing is leaving the country illegally. As Lianqing moves into an evidently fraught flatshare in Bangkok and starts to realise how hard things are going to be in Thailand, body language speaks volumes about the rivalries between former friends; Guo in particular is defined more by his stances and behaviour than by the few words he utters. The one time this poetic realism strays into expressionism is when the terrified Lianqing imagines an iguana on the hotel bed as she steels herself to surrender her virginity to an unseen client. The film combines its visual eloquence with spare, economical storytelling which does away with redundant linking scenes – no doubt partly because of Midi Z’s growing skills, though his decision to work this time with Jia Zhangke’s regular editor Matthieu Laclau probably helped too. Takes are long when they need to be; the cutting is concise and always to the point. The one seeming anomaly is the unexplained English title, which has nothing to do with Rudyard Kipling and (per the press notes) everything to do with the fact that Mandalay is the point of entry for most émigré Burmese who return home.
FILMS OF THE MONTH I’m stuck in Folsom Prison: Jairus McLeary’s documentary follows a mixed group of prisoners and members of the public taking part in group therapy
The Work Canada 2017 Director: Jairus McLeary Certificate 15 89m 22s Reviewed by Catherine Wheatley
Folsom State Prison is probably most famous for having hosted two Johnny Cash gigs in 1968, and for being the setting of the song ‘Folsom Prison Blues’, in which Cash tells of having shot a man in Reno, “just to watch him die”. That’s small fry compared with the crimes of many of Folsom’s current inmates, some of whom are serving multiple life sentences for violent gang-related crimes. One of the subjects of Jairus McLeary and Gethin Aldous’s documentary The Work cheerfully describes having tried to cut a man in half with a knife while high. For the Inside Circle Foundation, though, no man is beyond redemption. Twice a year it invites members of the public to join prisoners for four days of intensive group therapy. McLeary and Aldous – who both have first-hand experience of the programme – lead viewers into ‘the work’ of one such session, following bartender Charles, teaching assistant Brian and museum associate Chris as they enter the prison and engage in the process of self-healing. 52 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
We first meet the trio outside Folsom, lined up with other ‘outsiders’, clutching carrier bags and bottles of water. Soft-spoken Charles – whose father spent many years in prison – is looking for a glimpse of life on the other side. Brian, wildeyed and wired, is there for the thrill, a bit of a break from the norm. Chris, meanwhile, thinks the scheme seems “just crazy enough” to help prize him out of the rut he’s found himself in. Once inside the prison’s grey-walled chapel, the men form a circle. In the middle, James, a bearish ‘facilitator’ who sports a bandana but whose neatly trimmed beard gives him the look of The Fresh Prince’s Uncle Phil, engages the group in a call-and-response exercise. The atmosphere is strained, self-conscious (“I can’t hear you!” James hollers). But as the camera pans round the room, the men’s bodies give the lie to the feeling that we’re at a cheesy management away day. They are taut, their muscles veined and their skin etched with tattoos. They stare straight ahead like soldiers. They thrum with restrained energy. The ensuing action barely moves from this room and turns around a talking cure, yet the men’s physicality shapes the film. The circle breaks, inmates and outsiders line up opposite one another, and each newcomer is asked to select two experienced prisoners to be his guide for the next four days. A strange kind of courtly
contra dance follows, as the men wend their way towards their chosen partners, the camera bobbing behind. Later, a confrontation between Vegas and Dante, once members of opposing gangs (prisoners must leave all allegiances and racial divisions at the door), ends in them swaying like lovers, arms encircling one another. It is an extraordinary moment, made all the more poignant by Thomas Curley and John M. Davis’s sound work. The men, apparently wearing body mics, are pressed so tight together that their words become muffled; all we can hear is the beating of their two hearts. That, and anguished howls coming from elsewhere in the room, where a different kind of breakthrough is taking place. Violence can – and does – erupt very suddenly here. Many of the men rage and rail before finally bursting into tears. Although there are about 50 men participating in the workshop, the directors wisely choose
It is, at times, heartbreakingly effective at portraying the loneliness of the men inside Folsom. Many of them long not to be healed but merely to be seen
to hew closely to the small group that Charles, Brian and Chris find themselves in, alongside Dante, Vegas, Dark Cloud – a member of the Native American Brotherhood – and former white supremacist Rick. Editor Amy Foote and cinematographer Arturo Santamaria and his team take pains to mirror the dynamics of
and elated, at which point his guides proclaim him “one of us”.) And by the film’s end, all three of the outsiders are fluent in the language and gestures of the programme. Indeed, Chris’s Damascene conversion on day four serves as The Work’s climactic sequence, though his trauma is by his own admission “very small” compared with what other group members have suffered. Still, it’s interesting that almost all the men – inmates and outsiders alike – suffer variants on the same crisis: a paternal betrayal. As Rick puts it, the room is full of “fatherless sons”. Any critique of the programme or the penal system is, however, oblique and most likely unintentional. The Work is executive produced by Inside Circle’s founder Rob Allbee and CEO James McLeary – who is the director’s father – and heavily promoted on the foundation’s website. It is, at times, heartbreakingly effective at portraying the loneliness of the men inside Folsom: its most pitiful detail is the cardboard sign propped up on suicidal Dante’s lap, which reads “LADIES please WRITE Dante Granville T-54048”, and which one imagines must have been his proviso for being filmed. Many of these men long not to be healed but merely to be seen. A closing title tells us that no inmate who has taken the programme and been released has ever reoffended. If there’s no mention of what happens to the outsiders, maybe that’s because, despite appearances, they’re not really who the work is for. Credits and Synopsis Co-director Gethin Aldous Producers Alice Henty Jairus McLeary Angela Sostre Miles McLeary Eon McLeary Director of Photography Arturo Santamaria Editor Amy Foote Original Score
Adrian Miller Production Sound Recordist Thomas Curley Re-recording Mixer John M. Davis ©Blanketfort Media, LLC. Production Company Blanketfort Media presents a McLeary Brothers film
Executive Producers James McLeary Rob Allbee Gethin Aldous In Colour [1.85:1] Distributor Dogwoof
A documentary following a group of inmates and members of the public as they undergo four days of intensive group therapy inside the notorious maximum-security prison in Folsom, California. Each outsider is guided by two inmates, some of whom have participated in the programme before. The filmmakers focus on one group of men in particular. The outsiders are Chris, a museum associate who feels that he hasn’t fulfilled his potential; Charles, a bartender whose father was in prison when he was born; and Brian, who claims to be there for kicks. The insiders are Vegas, a former member of the Bloods gang serving a life sentence for kidnap; Dark Cloud, a member of the Native American Brotherhood who tried to cut a man in half; and Rick, formerly of the Aryan Brotherhood. We also meet suicidal inmate Dante and Pacific Islander Kiki, who is grieving for his dead sister, as well as Rob Allbee, an ex-convict and founder of the Inside Circle Foundation, which runs the programme. Over the course of the four days these men and others work through their emotional difficulties – talking, taking part in mindfulness exercises and role-playing. Gang politics are left at the door, and the atmosphere is mostly respectful, though there are occasional outbursts of violence and Brian proves a hostile and volatile presence. Kiki, Charles, Brian, Dark Cloud and Dante all go through cathartic experiences, as finally does Chris, who finds himself confronting the ways in which his father belittled him as a child. A closing title announces that more than 40 convicts have been released after attending the programme. None has reoffended.
‘Violence can erupt very suddenly here. Many of the men rage and rail before finally bursting into tears’ October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 53
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the work. The camera largely rests on the face of whoever is speaking, occasionally cutting to faces of other men nodding in sympathy. When the men huddle around each other, the camera rests on their shoulders, joining the fray without puncturing the solidarity. When one inmate – Kiki, a Pacific Islander – breaks down, he collapses to the floor and the men and the camera all drop, as one, to cradle him. Wider shots appear only during larger group activities. We see little of the prison beyond the chapel, and hints at the prisoners’ everyday lives lie in the background detail: the lockers labelled ‘muslims’ and ‘men’s group’, the sign reading ‘please put books back the way you found them’. Deliberately or not, then, the filmmakers align our point of view with that of the outsiders. Like them, we get short breaks from Folsom: shots of cornfields and forests mark the passage of time as the men are bussed to and from their accommodation and discuss their responses to each day’s events. Charles is immediately moved; Brian judgemental; Chris uncomfortable with the programme’s perceived pressures. “I didn’t come here to cry,” he tells the others. “I don’t wanna feel like I’m letting them down if I don’t.” A twentysomething hipster with shoulderlength hair and a diffident manner, Chris is perhaps the easiest figure for many viewers (certainly this viewer) to relate to, and his unease at times seems to be borne out by the film. One of the radical features of Inside Circle’s work is that – unlike, say, the Christian ‘Alpha in Prison’ courses, in which supposedly enlightened outsiders enter institutions to show prisoners a better way – here it’s the outsiders who learn from the prisoners, a little like AA, where initiates are given sponsors. Yet for all the programme’s good work, there’s something about the therapy-speak, the cult-like evangelism of the success stories and the quasi-religious focus on rebirth that unsettles. There is power in this process, and the stakes are highest among the men who have no freedom. Chris’s initial response is to laugh off this “hokey shit”, and it’s true that The Work verges, at times, on the parodic, with participants encouraged to “describe your armour”, “go down into the wound” and “confront your inner child”. It’s almost unbearably earnest. But by day two, Charles and Brian have both had transformative experiences. (The latter’s resembles nothing less than an exorcism: he emits an unearthly bellow, drools, weeps and emerges becalmed
Almost Heaven
Atomic Blonde
Reviewed by Hannah McGill
Reviewed by Violet Lucca
How life-affirming can a film set in a funeral home be? Significantly, it seems, in the careful hands of British director Carol Salter. In her second feature documentary after 2008’s Mayomi – she is also an experienced documentary editor – Salter turns the lonely life of a young woman training to work among the dead into a beautiful study of boundaries and connections: not only between life and death, but between members of the same family; between professional formality and profound emotion; and between friendship and romance. If the experiences of our protagonist, 17-year-old Ling Ying, can feel a little overly tailored for the cameras – and the already slight running time somewhat padded out with her meaningful gazes into the distance – the vast bulk of the film is an insightful pleasure, wonderfully attuned to both the sensitivities of late adolescence and the bafflement and hysteria that can accompany a death in the family. The camerawork, by Salter herself, is elegant, and delicately humorous visual detail abounds. The funeral home at which Ying is employed is a vast structure, at once clinical and a bit tacky, reminiscent of an early-morning airport, a car factory and a creepy modern hotel all at once. “Only vehicles with corpses allowed,” reads a matter-of-fact sign outside. The proximity of death creates an undercurrent of hysteria amid the young recruits – not to mention a double meaning for the word ‘corpse’. Practising the tactful speeches they must deliver to bereaved family members, the youths have just got past the line, “To show your respect, please keep quiet,” when they break into giggles. By the time Ying becomes frightened by the notion of ghosts, we’ve been primed to accept the idea of the place being haunted. But her nervousness also forms a convenient bridge to the film’s main narrative: a will-they-won’t-they almost-romance between Ying and her colleague Jin Hua. A website she consults for advice on managing her supernatural concerns advises, among other strategies, getting a boyfriend, for comfort and protection. “That’s possible!” cries Jin, with giveaway enthusiasm. Elsewhere,
One of those conspicuously cool media properties that is either the product of data mined from social media or savvy creative talent of a certain age, Atomic Blonde offers a strong female lead, 80s pop hits, Cold War espionage, neon lighting and a lengthy fight scene inside a cinema that’s showing Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. What occasionally makes the film more than the sum of its ‘I love the 80s’ parts is Charlize Theron as MI6 agent Lorraine Broughton, not quite nailing her British accent (a slight improvement on Rita Leeds in Arrested Development) but fighting like a professional assassin. Unlike most contemporary action sequences, the blows here aren’t constructed through fast-paced cuts that hide the lack of contact between the combatants, but instead play out in lengthy takes, shot from a distance. Impressively choreographed, these battles manage to be both suspenseful and verisimilar. The physical toll of her line of work is apparent from the start: Lorraine is first introduced soaking in an ice bath bluer than Cherenkov radiation, her face badly bruised. She then struts over to MI6 headquarters, where she receives a verbal beatdown from her superiors, who are irked that she doesn’t have the crucial piece of microfilm promised to them by Eddie Marsan’s Stasi defector, and that David Percival (James McAvoy), their long-time man in Berlin, is dead. Lorraine tells them a labyrinthine tale of Cold War subterfuge, which we see played out in flashbacks: David had gone a little too native and was telling a lot of half-truths; the KGB, Stasi and regular old GDR police always seemed to know where Lorraine would be before she got there. However, Lorraine’s brief affair with cub French secret agent Delphine Lasalle (Sofia Boutella) is a subtle sign that we’re dealing with an unreliable narrator – all her higher-ups are middle-aged men, so throwing a hot lesbian sex scene into her official report is likely a bit of misdirection. Director David Leitch, the man behind the John Wick movies, doesn’t strive for much emotional depth or believable lesbian sex, but these seem to be beside the point. Many of the needle drops – such as ’Til Tuesday’s ‘Voices Carry’ (a song about a woman being abused by her boyfriend) as David strangles Delphine to death, or A Flock of Seagulls’ ‘I Ran’ during a car chase – are so tasteless that they take you out of the action rather than complement it. In this regard, Atomic Blonde’s spirit is most like the Bond franchise, which has always walked the line between worldly sleekness and over-the-top nonsense, often in a single film. Given the current vogue for demonising Russia, with many pundits and news outlets in the US reviving ‘evil commie’ iconography while discussing Putin’s possible influence on the 2016 election, a Blonde series seems predetermined. Despite this conflation in the contemporary media, Atomic Blonde doesn’t muddle its history, making clear that the Berlin Wall fell because of mass demonstrations organised by the people of East Berlin – not because of Ronald Reagan’s tough talk. Moreover, David’s final speech – about the end of the Cold War not really being the end of secrecy and governments’ attempts to hoard information about each other – is probably the
REVIEWS
United Kingdom 2017 Director: Carol Salter Certificate 12A 72m 12s
USA 2017 Director: David Leitch Certificate 15 115m 11s
Credits and Synopsis Produced by Carol Salter Editors Cinzia Baldessari Hoping Chen Rodrigo Saquel Music Terence Dunn Sound Designer Raoul Brand
©Rocksalt Films Production Companies Rocksalt Films in association with Postcode Films A film by Carol Salter Executive Producer Elhum Shakerifar
[1.78:1] Subtitles Distributor Rocksalt Films
In Colour
A documentary filmed in China. Text explains that many young Chinese people travel very far from their homes to find work. We meet 17-year-old Ling Ying, who is training at a large funeral home. She learns to prepare the bodies for cremation, and to deal tactfully with frequently very upset family members. Her trainer is Jin Hua, only slightly older; the two become friends and share a flirtation, but he soon decides to leave the job and return home. Lonely and disillusioned, Ying finds little solace in speaking to her unsympathetic mother on the phone. She ultimately decides to retrain as a nurse.
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A matter of life and death: Ling Ying
in a beautifully observed moment of teenage awkwardness, Ying asks him to help her tidy up her hair, since she’s just been dealing with a body and is wearing surgical gloves. Baffled by the mechanics of a ponytail, Jin goes to pieces: “I don’t know what to do!” It’s hard to recall a sweeter juxtaposition of nascent love and recent death. The pair’s endearing flirtation continues as they go for fast food and hang out together in an amusement arcade. But although it’s Ying who airs her uncertainty about working in the funeral home, it’s Jin who suddenly makes the decision to leave and return to his parents’ town. Following the pleasurably tortuous modus operandi of the romantic comedy, Salter emphasises the couple’s inarticulacy in the face of their obvious feelings for one another. Jin agonises over the right wording for his resignation letter, but proves far less articulate in saying goodbye to the girl we’ve come to suspect he loves. Once Jin has left, the film follows its protagonist in adopting a much sadder mood. Salter’s tender attentions switch to the clash between the loving eulogies delivered by family members for their dead relatives and the uncaring and unsupportive attitude of Ying’s own parents, who will neither send her the additional clothes she needs for winter nor invite her for the visit she clearly craves. By the end, Ying is preparing herself for the next steps both professionally and emotionally, although the state of her familial and romantic life is left ambiguous. Salter knows how to give an audience hope, and a touch of wishfulfilment, without tightening every strand of the ponytail. She also displays a journalist’s interest in process and personality, a storyteller’s attention to irony and emotional detail, and a photographer’s keen eye for a telling or touching image.
Back to Burgundy France 2016 Director: Cédric Klapisch Certificate 15 113m 22s
Blast from the past: Charlize Theron
most honest statement about the geopolitical order Hollywood has offered in recent memory. While Atomic Blonde is not as revelatory of the potential of the action genre as George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), it’s a film that should be the standard and not the exception. Credits and Synopsis Produced by Charlize Theron A.J. Dix Beth Kono Kelly McCormick Eric Gitter Peter Schwerin Screenplay Kurt Johnstad Based on the Oni Press graphic novel series The Coldest City written by Antony Johnston, illustrated by Sam Hart Director of Photography Jonathan Sela Editor Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir Production Designer David Scheunemann Original Score Tyler Bates Production
Sound Mixer Mac Ruth Costume Designer Cindy Evans ©Coldest City, LLC Production Companies Focus Features presents in association with Sierra Pictures a Denver & Delilah Productions/ Chickie the Cop/ TGIM Films and 87eleven production A film by David Leitch Executive Producers Nick Meyer Marc Schaberg Joe Nozemack Steven V. Scavelli Ethan Smith David Guillod Kurt Johnstad
Cast Charlize Theron Lorraine Broughton James McAvoy David Percival John Goodman Emmett Kurzfeld Til Schweiger ‘Watchmaker’ Eddie Marsan ‘Spyglass’ Sofia Boutella Delphine Lasalle Toby Jones Eric Gray Johannes Johannesson Yuri Bakhtin
One of the difficulties for the reviewer of Back to Burgundy is avoiding the clichéd wine metaphors that it seems to invite with its lyrical vistas of sun-dappled or snow-covered vineyards and its roll-call of evocative Burgundian names – Meursault, Beaune, Pommard. The story unfolds (and was shot) over a year – a vintage, in fact – following the gentle rhythm of the seasons, the weather and the maturing grapes. Cédric Klapisch’s 12th feature is a departure from his usual urban milieu, whether Paris (in films such as Le Péril jeune, When the Cat’s Away and Paris) or Barcelona and other European cities (Pot Luck and its sequels). But Klapisch aficionados will recognise the directorial trope of the family chronicle. Back to Burgundy is the story of thirtysomething Jean (Pio Marmaï), who goes back to the family vineyard after ten years’ absence and renews ties with his younger brother Jérémie (François Civil) and sister Juliette (Ana Girardot). In the process he also bonds, literally and metaphorically, with the land – there is much handling of soil, pinching of leaves and tasting of grapes – while his father’s death triggers actual and symbolic questions of inheritance. The will stipulates that the estate must remain undivided, creating a mini-suspense: will the siblings be obliged to sell the estate to pay death duties or not? In classic Klapisch mode, the conciliatory ending is almost a foregone conclusion, though with a small chauvinistic twist. Jean and his partner Alicia (María Valverde) run a winery in Australia. As they patch up their ailing relationship, they resolve to sell some of their wines to keep the father’s estate together. Sacrificing some bottles of ‘New World’ wine to keep Burgundy grands crus going, surely that’s right? The film’s French title, Ce qui nous lie (‘What Links Us’), is explicit about the familial orientation. Yet the most successful scenes concern the landscape and the riotous celebration
Dolby Digital In Colour [2.35:1]
Credits and Synopsis
Distributor Universal Pictures International UK & Eire
Produced by Bruno Levy Cédric Klapisch Screenplay/ Dialogue Santiago Amigorena Cédric Klapisch With the collaboration of: Jean-Marc Roulot Director of Photography Alexis Kavyrchine Editing Anne-Sophie Bion Art Direction
East Berlin, November 1989. MI6 agent James Gascoigne is killed by Russian agent Yuri Bakhtin. Bakhtin takes Gascoigne’s watch, which contains microfilm listing the identities of all agents on both sides of the Cold War. Ten days later, London. MI6 agent Lorraine Broughton goes to MI6 headquarters to explain her recent unsuccessful attempt to recover the microfilm; she tells her bosses that there is a mole in the organisation, and that David Percival, an MI6 agent in Berlin, had begun to sympathise with the Soviets. Flashbacks show David repeatedly lying about how much he knows, and trying to have Lorraine killed. However, we also see Lorraine editing audiotapes to make it seem as if David is the mole. MI6 grudgingly buys her story. Three days after the debriefing, Lorraine meets a Soviet agent in Paris, supposedly to give him the microfilm, but assassinates him. She boards a plane to Langley, Virginia. She is in fact a CIA agent, and has tricked both the KGB and MI6.
Marie Cheminal Original Music Composed, Recorded and Directed by Christophe ‘Disco’ Minck Loïk Dury a.k.a. Kraked Unit Sound Cyril Moisson Nicolas Moreau Cyril Holtz Costumes Anne Schotte
©Ce qui me meut, Studiocanal, France 2 Cinéma Production Companies Ce qui me meut and Studiocanal present a co-production of Ce qui me meut, Studiocanal and France 2 Cinéma With the participation of Canal+, Ciné+, France Télévisions With the support of Région Bourgogne-
Present day. Hearing that his father is in hospital, Jean returns to the family home in Burgundy, France, after ten years in Australia, where he has settled with partner Alicia and son Ben. On arrival, he finds his sister Juliette in charge of the family vineyard, aided by their father’s employee Marcel and their younger brother Jérémie, who is married with a baby. Their father dies just before the harvest and Jean decides to stay to help. The siblings learn that they have inherited the estate, on condition that it remains undivided. Throughout the following year, Jean reminisces about his difficult relationship with his father. He, Juliette and Jérémie
REVIEWS
Reviewed by Ginette Vincendeau Spoiler alert: this review reveals a plot twist
François Civil, Pio Marmaï, Ana Girardot
at the end of the harvest (in the spirit of Pot Luck’s student shenanigans), while the relationships between brothers and sister are rather strained and definitely on the tearful side. Although the film was inspired by a true story told by winemaker-turned-actor Jean-Marc Roulot (who plays vineyard employee Marcel), one can’t help thinking that this is a metropolitan view of country folk, and that real winemakers would have far too much to do to indulge in the kind of introspection we see here. The fact that the estate ends up being headed by Juliette could have introduced some interesting developments about gender, given the still predominantly male world of winemaking, but her character is strangely underdeveloped, and the film dwells on her vulnerability (and tears) rather than her growing confidence and power. In an interview, Klapisch lamented the fact that “the image of our country is associated with wine, yet there is no great French film about wine”. True, but perhaps an unwise statement: Back to Burgundy is a sympathetic film, with loving and lovely images of the landscape and obvious respect for the winemaker’s craft. Difficult, though, in the end, not to give in to the inevitable wine comparison: while it’s authentically a Klapisch, this vintage is definitely a solid village appellation rather than a grand cru.
Franche-Comté In partnership with CNC A film by Cédric Klapisch
Cast Pio Marmaï Jean Ana Girardot Juliette François Civil Jérémie Jean-Marc Roulot Marcel
María Valverde Alicia Yamée Couture Océane Florence Pernel Chantal Tewfik Jallab Marouan Jean-Marie Winling Anselme Eric Caravaca father Karidja Touré Lina Ferdinand Régent-Chappey
Jean aged 20 Sean O’Gara-Mikol Ben Dolby Digital In Colour [2.35:1] Subtitles Distributor Studiocanal Limited French theatrical title Ce qui nous lie
keep the vineyard going, while pondering how to pay death duties without selling off their best assets to Jérémie’s domineering father-in-law, owner of a larger and richer estate. Meanwhile Jean misses his son, and his phone relationship with Alicia becomes increasingly difficult. Thanks to Juliette’s intervention, Alicia and Ben come to visit. Eventually, a solution is found to save the family property, and Alicia returns to Australia with Ben. She and Jean agree to sell some of their wine to pay the death duties, while drawing some revenue from the family estate, thus making sure it can carry on, under Juliette’s direction. Jean returns to Australia.
October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 55
Bending the Arc
Brimstone
USA 2017 Directors: Kief Davidson, Pedro Kos
The Netherlands/Germany/Belgium/France/Sweden/ United Kingdom 2016, Director: Martin Koolhoven Certificate 18 148m 30s
REVIEWS
Reviewed by Pamela Hutchinson
Partners in Health, the subject of documentary Bending the Arc, is a not-for-profit organisation that was founded 30 years ago in Boston and has been responsible for transformative medical schemes in places such as Haiti, Peru and Rwanda. It has saved patients with conditions including Aids, TB and cancer in parts of the world where treatment would otherwise be unavailable or prohibitively expensive. PIH achieved its results in the face of early opposition from medical experts and politicians, but now one of its co-founders heads the World Bank, and it employs more than 17,000 people in 10 different countries. The story of this pioneering initiative has been told before, in magazines and newspapers and in a 2003 bestselling book, Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder, which focuses on co-founder Paul Farmer, the medic leading PIH’s mission. So what can this film from directors Kief Davidson and Pedro Kos add to our understanding of PIH? Bending the Arc is largely narrated by co-founder Octavia Dahl, with affable interviews with leading PIH activists as well as photos and footage from throughout the organisation’s history. While the members of the PIH team are all admirable, it would have been illuminating to hear more from the people they helped, and especially the ‘accompagnateurs’ supporting patients in their own homes and communities after discharge. The film’s most powerful visual motif is that beloved trope of weight-loss stories: the
before-and-after shot. It is genuinely astonishing to see patients who were once at death’s door, skeletal and struggling to swallow their medicine, now cured, optimistic and robust, thanks to PIH’s intervention. One HIV-positive woman in Haiti was admitted to the clinic while her father was raising cash for her coffin – and is now a healthy PIH activist working on Aids prevention. Deploying this technique on the audience is one thing, but Davidson and Kos also move PIH co-founder Jim Yong Kim (now World Bank president) to tears in his interview by showing him footage of a recovered former patient, who suffered drug-resistant TB for years. The film’s other coup de théâtre is purely accidental: it comes when Rwandan health minister Agnes Binagwaho is interrupted during an interview by an urgent phone call informing her of the country’s first suspected case of Ebola. The tension is spun out as far as possible, but the moral of this particular panic is that there is a victory simply in being able to prepare for the worst. The title of the film refers to a quote from Theodore Parker, famously paraphrased by Martin Luther King Jr, to the effect that the “arc of the moral universe” is long but it “bends toward justice”. On the evidence of this film, tireless activism, philanthropy, passion, hard work and luck are required to force that curve. A more violent motto might be apt, such as the brave words spoken by a woman in a TB clinic in Peru, who mutters, as she chokes down her lifesaving pills: “Without a war, you cannot win.”
Credits and Synopsis Produced by Kief Davidson Cori Shepherd Stern Written by Cori Shepherd Stern Story Consultants John Donnelly Joia Mukherjee Cameron Nutt Cassia van der Hoof Holstein Claire Wagner Cinematographers David Murdock Guy Mossman Joshua Dreyfus Nick Higgins Kief Davidson Edited by Pedro Kos Yuki Aizawa Music H. Scott Salinas
Matthew Atticus Berger Production Sound Hunt Beaty Matthew Betlej Greg Breazeale Rafael Cabrera Mario Cardenas Michael Correa Safali Eugene Scott Hanlon Kevin Parker ©Global Health Documentary, LLC Production Companies Impact Partners presents an Urban Landscapes production in association with Scout & Scholar,
JustFilms | Ford Foundation Executive producers: Diana Barrett for the Fledgling Fund, Emerson Collective, The Pershing Square Foundation Fiscal sponsors: Utah Film Center, International Documentary Association, The Strongheart Group Made with the generous support of Impact Partners Major funding provided by Sundance Institute, Skoll Foundation, The Pershing Square Foundation, Emerson
A documentary recounting the history of Partners in Health (PIH), an American public health organisation founded in 1987 by doctors Paul Farmer and Jim Yong Kim, activist Ophelia Dahl, financier Todd McCormack and philanthropist Thomas White. The organisation’s first project is a healthcare scheme treating TB patients in Cange, Haiti. The scheme, which incorporates community support in the form of ‘accompagnateurs’ to assist patients after treatment, is replicated in Peru, where PIH encounters patients with drug-resistant TB and treats them despite the advice of the World Health Organization. PIH faces opposition from TB experts, but succeeds in curing patients and lowering the price of their drugs. PIH then joins Aids activists campaigning for treatment to
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Collective, JustFilms | Ford Foundation Additional support provided by Joanne Kagle, Virgin America, Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund, Camera One Productions, Crowing Rooster, Worldwide Documentaries Supported by a grant from Stories of Change, a project of Sundance Institute supported by the Skoll Foundation An Impact Partners and Urban Landscapes Films production Executive Producers Dan Cogan
Geralyn White Dreyfous Eric Dobkin Barbara Dobkin Rick Rosenthal Nancy Stephens Lekha Singh Patty Quillin Nina Fialkow David Fialkow Diana Barrett Joan Platt Jim Swartz Susan Swartz Matt Damon Ben Affleck Sally Osberg Sandy Herz Bernard Friedman Sean Mewshaw Desi VanTil Damon Lindelof Heidi Lindelof
In Colour [1.78:1] Part-subtitled Distributor DocHouse
be available in the developing world, first by treating patients in Haiti. Again, PIH meets resistance, but soon other organisations begin to replicate the ‘Haiti model’ of healthcare, and some of PIH’s original patients sign a declaration demanding universal healthcare for people in developing countries. Having helped to persuade George W. Bush to support the fight against Aids, PIH expands its programme in Haiti, building more clinics and hiring and training healthworkers. With the advocacy of health minister Agnes Binagwaho, PIH sets up a large-scale project in Rwanda. In 2012, Barack Obama nominates Kim as president of the World Bank. Captions reveal that PIH is now working in ten countries and that the World Bank has pledged $15bn to universal health coverage.
Reviewed by Nikki Baughan
Feeling more like an experiment in wilful provocation than coherent storytelling, Brimstone, Dutch director Martin Koolhoven’s English-language debut, piles on the thematic and visual extremism with an air of artistic pretension that fails to mask the bluntedged clout of Hollywood torture porn. In ‘Revelation’, the first of four biblically titled chapters, we see how the arrival in a late-19thcentury American frontier town of a Protestant preacher known only as the Reverend (Guy Pearce, complete with wobbly Dutch accent and jagged facial scar) causes anguish for mute midwife Liz (Dakota Fanning). While the Reverend’s chilling demeanour goes some way to explaining Liz’s fear, particularly when he stirs up community hatred following the death of a woman in her care, it’s not until the film flashes backwards in the second chapter, ‘Exodus’, that we begin to understand why she’s so afraid. Initially, however, the storylines seem unconnected. A young woman named Joanna (Emilia Jones) treks alone through the wilderness before finding refuge in a brothel, where she witnesses the appalling treatment of the prostitutes by the men they encounter. After some time, the Reverend arrives, determined to claim her, and Joanna (now played by Fanning) makes her escape by impersonating another woman to become a mail-order bride, cutting out her own tongue and changing her name to Liz. It’s clear from these desperate actions that the Reverend is a Very Bad Man. This is consolidated in the third chapter, ‘Genesis’, which flashes back further to see a very young Joanna living with her father, the Reverend, and meek Dutch mother Anna (Carice van Houten). Witness to the physical and sexual depravity the Reverend dishes out in the name of religious love, Joanna comes to realise that he has his own perverse designs on her. The arrival of the kindly, wounded Samuel (Kit Harington) – whom Joanna hides and gently cares for – teaches her that not all men are monsters, and motivates her escape. Having thus convolutedly established his characters and their relationships, Koolhoven slams it all together in the fourth chapter, ‘Retribution’, which returns to the timeframe of the first. From its title down this is a film awash in Old Testament horror, religion used as an excuse for the most heinous acts. While this is an idea with enduring resonance, and while Koolhoven may be attempting to make a statement about the brutal treatment of women by self-proclaimed righteous men, Brimstone is endlessly exploitative in the subjugation of its female characters. Claims that the Reverend’s horrific behaviour – which includes placing women in head shackles, beatings, rape and incest – is entirely the fault of the character and not his creator is made moot by the lingering gaze of Rogier Stoffer’s camera, and the lack of justification either for the Reverend’s actions or our own indulgent witness to them, beyond the catch-all of religious fervency. Similarly, arguments that this is some kind of feminist narrative because, ultimately, Liz prevails against her oppressor are undermined by the unrelenting suffering that has come before.
Bushwick
USA/United Kingdom 2016 Directors: Cary Murnion, Jonathan Milott Certificate 15 93m 49s
Credits and Synopsis Produced by Els Vandevorst Uwe Schott Written by Martin Koolhoven Director of Photography Rogier Stoffers Edited by Job ter Burg Production Designer Floris Vos Music Tom Holkenborg Sound Designer Herman Pieëte Costume Designer Ellen Lens ©Brimstone B.V./ N279 Entertainment B.V./X Filme Creative Pool GmbH/Prime Time/The Jokers Films/Dragon Films Production Companies Els Vandevorst presents a Martin Koolhoven film An N279 Entertainment and X Filme production in association with New Sparta Films, Backup Films and Embankment Films In co-production with FilmWave, Prime Time, The Jokers Films, Dragon Films, Paradiso Filmed Entertainment, AVROTROS, BNP Paribas Fortis Film Finance and Film Väst In participation with Canal+ and Ciné+ Production finance provided by Cofiloisirs
Supported by Netherlands Film Fund, Netherlands Film Production Incentive, CoBo Fonds, Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF), Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung, Deutscher Filmförderfonds, Tax Shelter of the Belgian Federal Government, Hungarian Tax Shelter, Skystone, Nanouk Holding, Stichting Abraham Tuschinski Fonds, Cine Tirol Film Commission Executive Producers Nicki Hattingh Anne Sheehan Sheryl Crown Tim Haslam Hugo Grumbar Jean-Baptiste Babin Joel Thibout Nik Powell
Wolf Jack Hollington Matthew Carla Juri Elizabeth Brundy Vera Vitali Sally Kit Harington Samuel Naomi Battrick older Sam, narrator In Colour [2.35:1] Distributor Thunderbird Releasing
Cast Guy Pearce Reverend Dakota Fanning Joanna, ‘Liz’ Emilia Jones younger Joanna Carice van Houten Anna Paul Anderson Frank William Houston Eli Ivy George Sam Bill Tangradi Nathan Jack Roth
‘Revelation’: in a 19th-century American frontier town, the arrival of a Dutch preacher known as the Reverend causes anguish for mute midwife Liz. When a woman dies giving birth under Liz’s care, the Reverend turns the community against her. ‘Exodus’: years earlier, a young woman named Joanna wanders the wilderness before finding refuge in a brothel. Years pass. When the Reverend arrives to claim her, Joanna escapes by impersonating another woman. She becomes a mail-order bride, changes her name to Liz and cuts out her own tongue. ‘Genesis’: further back in time, the very young Joanna is forced to watch as her father, the Reverend, abuses her mother in the name of religion. The arrival of the wounded Samuel, a kind man whom Liz cares for while he hides in their barn, shows her that not all men are monsters and motivates her to escape. ‘Retribution’: back in the timeframe of the first chapter, the Reverend becomes increasingly violent. He kidnaps Liz’s young daughter, resulting in a bloody showdown that ends with his death.
Reviewed by Vadim Rizov
Bushwick seems to be the type of film that exists because it was pragmatically reverse-engineered from a title that presells itself to potential viewers – in this case, the Brooklyn district whose rapid gentrification is inextricably associated with its perceived status as a rising hip neighbourhood (or, alternatively, lazy punchline about hipsters). The barebones scenario follows Lucy (Brittany Snow), born and raised in Bushwick, as she finds her neighbourhood plunged into onstreet warfare between black-clad mercenaries and peeved residents. Ducking gunfire, she meets former combat medic Stupe (Dave Bautista) and enlists his help to rescue her grandmother and sister from the combat zone. In other words, lots of running and shooting punctuated by exposition – an unobjectionable starting point for a lean genre exercise. The cardinal mistake was to shoot Bushwick as a series of ‘seamless’ long takes. Primarily using a Movi rig (operated by two people, allowing for a Steadicam-esque constant glide), DP Lyle Vincent follows Lucy and Stupe through every step of their journey. But this is no elegant De Palma crawl: on a palpably straitened budget, where the main visual attractions are quite fake CG flames and bursts of gunfire in some direction or other, the effect is less to ratchet up tension than to pad out the running time. Nor is the effect terribly convincing: each time the camera lingers a beat too long on a stair or brick wall, the visible seams linking the shots destroy the effect. The tedium is reinforced by witless dialogue in the post-Blair Witch vein of improvised hysteria – “Oh my god, oh my god, holy shit”, etc. It may not matter to viewers outside NYC that a good portion of Bushwick was actually shot in the borough of Queens, or that the opening subway station of ‘Church Ave’ is nothing of the sort (and in any case the L train shown passing through never stops there). Geographical distortion aside, what will register to non-natives is Bushwick’s confused treatment
REVIEWS
Fanning puts in a superb performance as the largely voiceless Liz. While Pearce is almost cartoonish in his sadism, she is stoic but never weak, giving the audience something to latch on to as they are dragged through Koolhoven’s nightmarish terrain. While this is not enough to save Brimstone from itself, without her it would be an entirely empty exercise in cruelty. As it is, it’s a deeply flawed and gruelling experience that, unforgivably, fails to make any kind of point.
Another country: Brittany Snow, Dave Bautista
of race and gentrification. Halfway through, the film explains what its marketing materials have already let viewers know: Bushwick is being invaded by armed mercenaries operating on behalf of Texas and former Confederate allies who wish to secede from the US. They had assumed that a zone of combat operations could be established in Bushwick on the flawed assumptions that a) as a neighbourhood still majority-minority, the residents would be too timid and weak to fight back, and b) that local laws prohibiting gun possession would result in a lack of firearms. The former reasoning is obviously racist, but representationally the film itself doesn’t do much better: every black character with significant dialogue is a would-be rapist (Brittany is accosted as a “white bitch”), gang member or sassy tough mother, a very limited matrix of familiar stereotypes. The climax has Bushwick’s residents chanting “Whose streets? Our streets!” But if the invocation of recent protests is intended as righteous, it’s undercut by the film’s almost certainly unintentional but nonetheless present racism.
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by Joseph Mensch Nate Bolotin Adam Folk Screenplay Nick Damici Graham Reznick Story Cary Murnion Jonathan Milott Director of Photography Lyle Vincent Editor J. Henry Hobeck Production Designer Sara K. White Music Aesop Rock Sound Mixer Richard Hart Costume Designer Ciera Wells-Jones ©Stupe, Inc. Production Companies XYZ Films presents a Bullet Pictures production in
association with Ralfish Films, RLJ Entertainment and Mensch Productions A film by Cary Murnion & Jonathan Milott Produced by Ralfish Films Executive Producers Dave Bautista Jonathan Meisner Cary Murnion Jonathan Milott Nick Spicer Todd Brown
Cast Dave Bautista Stupe Brittany Snow Lucy Angelic Zambrana Belinda Jeremie Harris JP Myra Lucretia Taylor Ma Alex Breaux
Lieutenant Brewer Arturo Castro Jose Quincy Chad Heathcliff Christian Navarro Eduardo Manny Alfaro Mr Argo Todd Ryan Jones Lieutenant Quaid Jeff Lima Gregory Bill Blechingberg Father John In Colour [2.35:1] Distributor Kaleidoscope Film Distribution
Brooklyn, the present. Lucy is taking her boyfriend to meet her family in the neighbourhood of Bushwick when they are plunged into street combat. When Lucy’s boyfriend is killed, she seeks refuge in an apartment but is accosted by two black men. They are about to rape her when they’re killed by Stupe, a former combat medic. Like Lucy, he is bewildered by the outbreak of violence on the streets. He reluctantly goes with Lucy to rescue her grandmother, but they find her dead. They then go to fetch Lucy’s sister Belinda. At her apartment, a fighter breaks in. They interrogate him and learn that he’s a mercenary working on behalf of a group of mostly Southern states, led by Texas, which have decided to secede from the US and had planned to set up combat operations in Bushwick, on the mistaken assumption that the residents would not fight back. Lucy, Stupe and Belinda begin to make their way to a park where the federal government is evacuating civilians, but are detained en route by gang members whose stockpiled weapons are useless without people to use them. Lucy is sent to a church to rally potential fighters. Stupe reveals that he enlisted in the Marines after his family was killed on 9/11. He is shot. Lucy and Belinda run to the park; both are killed. We see the Manhattan skyline in flames.
October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 57
Daphne
United Kingdom 2016 Director: Peter Mackie Burns
REVIEWS
Reviewed by Lisa Mullen
This debut feature by Peter Mackie Burns, who won a Golden Bear at Berlin in 2005 for his short film Milk, focuses obsessively on a powerful central performance by the charismatic Emily Beecham. Here is a talent fully in control of her considerable powers, and at first the film appears content to rely exclusively on her cool self-possession, and to aspire only to be an almost pathologically restrained exercise in close observation of her craft. But as the tension and atmosphere build, so does our emotional complicity, and the film finally adds up to more than the sum of its well-wrought parts, offering a quietly profound insight into this young woman’s attempt to navigate a world that is both familiar and brutally alien. Daphne is a brittle but functional thirtysomething, relatively privileged and living unencumbered in London; a single woman making desultory progress in her career as a chef and spending the rest of her time fooling around in the shallows of the dating pool. Underneath, she knows her life lacks meaning, and neither her explorations into Zizekian philosophy nor her mother’s turn towards spirituality and mindfulness seems to offer her a better foothold on her life. But when she witnesses a random stabbing in an all-night grocery shop, she begins to feel her fragile sense of self unravelling exponentially. The trauma is compounded by her deep but unexpressed grief about her mother’s recent cancer diagnosis, and by the not unconnected guilt she feels about her failure to help the stricken victim in the aftermath of the attack. Suddenly the raw nerve-endings of a cruel and random city seem to have been ripped to the surface, and the film follows her as she tries to find a way of surviving the emotional onslaught. Beecham, though central, is not the only highlight in a quality cast. The film is bolstered by a striking supporting turn from Geraldine James as Rita, Daphne’s mother, whose spiritual pursuits seem designed to baffle and exclude her eye-rolling daughter. In a few deftly executed lines of dialogue, James sketches in a familial context explaining everything and nothing, and somehow manages to suggest that there may be another film, called Rita, playing somewhere just out of shot. Nathaniel Martello-White also makes a good impression as Daphne’s impossibly nice potential boyfriend David, who somehow tolerates her sarcasm and dismissive behaviour, and becomes a kind of semi-present moral touchstone in the process. Meanwhile, an effective score anchors the piece with edgy piano riffs that shadow-box with the roar and grumble of the capital: the same combination of realism and romanticism that characterises the visual identity, and thematic through-line, of the film. Paralysed by her ongoing crisis, Daphne drifts around a London full of shiny surfaces and harsh laughter, bludgeoning herself with drugs and alcohol, and grossing herself out with joyless sexual encounters. For the most part, Mackie Burns simply invites us to follow her through her questionable and at times frankly irritating decisions. But the meandering plot eventually coalesces around the question of what, after all, a film can ever say about the lived reality 58 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
Under attack: Emily Beecham
of trauma and grief. At a key point, Daphne chances on one of those white-painted ghost bikes that act as informal memorials, markers of our carelessness with other people’s lives. Climbing drunkenly aboard, she whizzes the disconnected pedals around, getting nowhere. This quietly symbolic image is typical of a film that freights the everyday with metaphor. Looking for meaning, Daphne finds way too much of it in this excessively overdetermined and claustrophobically overpopulated city. How can the particularity of a single life be expressed in this lonesome cacophony? The film takes its title from Daphne’s name, the single word marking her solitude but also standing in for the definitive identity that is getting more and more blurred and slurred as her life falls apart. But while such angst-ridden narrative bones might
make this sound like a depressing watch, Mackie Burns and Beecham between them assemble a mosaic of delights that tells another story: a camera angle framing a Tube station with the uncanny symmetry of a Vermeer; a hilariously acid quip delivered suddenly, with pin-sharp timing; a flash of sympathy from a stranger on a bus. Above all, there is the gorgeous palette of saturated colour that gathers around Beecham like an otherworldly aura. Such visual style is often just so much marketable gloss, but here it all builds towards the answer that Daphne gradually weaves together from small fragments of beauty and hope. In the film’s low-key denouement, simple catharsis hits the spot when philosophy, religion and medicine have all failed. The disaster of being alive in the world can be alleviated by the alchemical mediation of, for want of a less loaded word, art.
Credits and Synopsis Produced by Valentina Brazzini Tristan Goligher Written Nico Mensinga Director of Photography Adam Scarth Editor Nick Emerson Production Designer Miren Marañón Tejedor Composer
Sam Beste Supervising Sound Editor Joakim Sundström Costume Designer Nigel Egerton ©Daphne Productions, Creative Scotland and The British Film Institute Production Companies BFI and Creative
Scotland present a production from The Bureau Developed with the support of Microwave Supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland, The Bureau, BFI Film Fund Executive Producers Lizzie Francke Robbie Allen Rosie Crerar
London, present day. Daphne is a privileged young woman, with her own flat and a promising career as a trainee chef in a fashionable restaurant. But her life feels hollow: a fling with her married boss confuses her, and the men she connects with online fail to impress her. Her friends are mainly just drinking buddies. When she witnesses a shopkeeper being stabbed in an all-night grocery store, Daphne is traumatised, partly because the incident becomes connected in her mind with her feelings about her semi-estranged,
Vincent Gadelle
Cast Emily Beecham Daphne Vitale Tom Vaughan-Lawlor Joe Nathaniel Martello-White David Ritu Arya Rachida Karina Fernandez
Beth Sinead Matthews Billie Ragevan Vasan Kumar Osy Ikhile Tom Amra Mallassi Benny Stuart McQuarrie Adam Geraldine James Rita Ryan McPartland
Jay Matthew Pidgeon Nacho Rania Kurdi Sofia Ruth Bradley Tracey In Colour [1.85:1] Distributor Altitude Film Distribution
cancer-stricken mother. She self-medicates with alcohol. Eventually a victim-support counsellor suggests that she make contact with the wounded shopkeeper, who has now recovered and is back home with his family. This act of basic human connection – achieved despite the language barrier between them – helps Daphne turn a corner. By participating with him in a mimed re-enactment of the attack, she begins to come to terms with the incident, with her own part in it, and with her place in the world.
The Dark Tower
The Emoji Movie
USA 2017 Director: Nikolaj Arcel Certificate 12A 94m 36s
USA 2017 Director: Tony Leondis Certificate U 86m 18s
The grand theatrical experience See Feature aside, what narrative cinema on page 22 can offer that its long-winded competitors in serial television cannot is concision – the experience of a satisfactory standalone artwork in which a lifetime’s worth of meaning is distilled into every word and gesture. Over the past decade or more, however, the large US-based studios have ignored the possibilities of this advantage, instead considering every planted tentpole the potential cornerstone of a franchise superstructure along the lines of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. As a result, we’re seeing such misbegotten products as this summer’s The Mummy, meant to launch a ‘Dark Universe’ using the Universal Pictures roster, and Nikolaj Arcel’s The Dark Tower, clearly intended as the opening to further adaptations of Stephen King’s series of novels of the same name, either on the big screen or small. So in spite of the movie’s box-office failure to date, we find puff pieces crowing that “The Dark Tower Exit Polls Look Promising For The TV Spin-Off”. Because of this pervasive business model we now often encounter films made with an eye to the next thing rather than the job of work at hand, with studios counting on the fact that they can get their shrinking audiences thinking like indulgent TV viewers – never mind that this one was a mess, there’s a big payoff coming down the line, just stick with it, trust the system, etc. Such a piece of work is The Dark Tower, of interest only as a symptom of the endemic laziness and galloping cynicism in contemporary big-budget filmmaking that has rendered the multiplex a near-total wasteland. The Dark Tower stars Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey, two actors of charisma and talent given precisely nothing of interest to do while playing the gunslinger Roland and the sorcerer Walter, sworn rivals. The last 20 minutes or so of the film bring on some moderately distracting gunfight choreography by Nathan
Reviewed by Violet Lucca
Choice of arms: Idris Elba
Barris, hot off Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, the only point at which the movie bestirs itself from the abiding tone of grim lethargy. Self-evident catastrophes like this are generally a prime opportunity for the clever critic to tee off with some choice zingers, but after encountering The Dark Tower in the middle of a summer where even the ‘blockbusters with brains’ have been po-faced chores, I just feel like it’s time to take up woodworking instead. Contempt for an audience I can understand, for at least contempt is a strong emotion, but how to address such placid mediocrity, such unwillingness to approach the viewer on any level other than that of cliché, such a total indifference to the possibilities for pop pleasure opened up by the making of a sci-fi/horror/western? I noticed after a few minutes that the focus was ever so slightly off at my screening of The Dark Tower – the grand theatrical experience ain’t what it used to be – but I didn’t bother talking to a manager. There’s nothing to miss. Shot by one Rasmus Videbæk, the film has the blown-out and blanched look common to lowest-bidder digital cinematography. No one involved in The Dark Tower seems to have given a damn about what they turned out, so why should anybody else?
Credits and Synopsis Produced by Akiva Goldsman Ron Howard Erica Huggins Screenplay Akiva Goldsman Jeff Pinkner Anders Thomas Jensen Nikolaj Arcel Based on The Dark Tower novels by Stephen King Director of Photography Rasmus Videbaek
Edited by Alan Edward Bell Dan Zimmerman Production Designer Christopher Glass Music Tom Holkenborg Sound Mixer Nico Louw Costume Designer Trish Summerville Visual Effects MPC Rise Pixel Playground Pixomondo
BUF Vitality Visual Effects Stunt Supervisor Grant Hulley Stunt Co-ordinators Pete Bucossi Kerry Greg Fight Choreographer Nathan Barris ©Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. and MRC II Distribution Company L.P. Production Companies
New York City, present day. Eleven-year-old Jake Chambers is troubled by dreams of a dark tower, a sorcerer named Walter and a gunfighter, Roland Deschain, and fancies that he sees monsters wearing human skin. Thinking Jake emotionally disturbed, his mother arranges for him to attend an upstate clinic. Convinced that the clinicians who arrive at his apartment are ‘skin people’, Jake escapes to the ramshackle house in Brooklyn that appeared in his dreams and finds a portal to Mid-World. There he encounters the gunfighter Roland, who teaches him the lore of Mid-World: Roland is the last of the
Columbia Pictures and MRC present in association with Imagine Entertainment a Weed Road production Executive Producers G. Mac Brown Jeff Pinkner
Cast Idris Elba Roland Deschain Matthew McConaughey
Walter O’Dim Tom Taylor Jake Chambers Claudia Kim Arra Champignon Fran Kranz Pimli Abbey Lee Tirana Katheryn Winnick Laurie Chambers Jackie Earle Haley Sayre Michael Barbieri Timmy Eva Kaminsky
Jill Nicholas Hamilton Lucas Hanson José Zuñiga Dr Hotchkiss
Let’s get this out of the way: emojis are not written language regressing to pictures. They represent facial expressions and real-world objects, but their use complicates and changes the meaning of a text/message. “See you soon” is different from “See you soon :)” or “See you soon ;)” or “See you soon :P” or “See you soon [three eggplants]”. The ambiguity of written language can be clarified through the use of emojis (which is why they were originally created); they create nuance; they soften, tease, enliven and ironise. In a world where children are increasingly physically remote from one another but constantly in (unsupervised) digital contact, emojis are a necessary measure. Of course, none of what is interesting about emojis is in The Emoji Movie, a children’s film made in the spirit of those vending machines that pop out rub-on Pokémon tattoos or miniature Disney princesses inside a capsule. Like those cheap toys, it trades solely on the novelty of recognition, and is meant to be forgotten almost immediately. (Another obvious parallel is those 1980s Saturdaymorning cartoons – He-Man, My Little Pony, G.I. Joe, Transformers and so on – that were essentially 30-minute toy advertisements, and have since been turned into blockbusters or direct-to-homevideo nostalgia trips.) The amount of critical ire that has been directed at this frivolous cash grab, however, is disproportionate – children’s movies have been at least this bad for a long time, and this is certainly not the worst offender. Not unlike a film adapted from a YA novel, the set-up here is simultaneously incredibly convoluted and totally stupid: Gene (T.J. Miller) is the son of two ‘meh’ emojis and lives in Textopolis, a world inside teenager Alex’s phone. Gene can’t maintain his ‘meh’ face all the time – he’s just too excitable – which is a problem because emojis are only supposed to express one emotion. While on the job (something that they vaguely train for, but are also born to do), the emojis wait on a Hollywood Squares-type set. If Alex chooses them, they are scanned by a giant finger, which then beams their image to Alex’s phone. On his first day, Gene panics while he’s being scanned into a text to Alex’s crush Addie, and appears nervously sweating, winking and waving. Chief emoji Smiler (Maya Rudolph) labels
Dolby Digital In Colour [2.35:1] Distributor Sony Pictures Releasing UK
gunfighters, sworn to protect the dark tower from Walter, for if it falls, evil will be unleashed into all contingent planes, including Earth. A soothsayer sees unparalleled psychic ability in Jake. Roland and Jake go on Walter’s trail and discover that he has killed Jake’s mother. They track him to a portal in New York City. In the ensuing melee, Walter grabs Jake and attempts to use his psychic powers to bring down the dark tower. Roland, meanwhile, forces a confrontation with Walter, who is killed in the combat. Deciding that there is nothing left for him on Earth, Jake becomes Roland’s apprentice.
Trading faces: The Emoji Movie October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 59
REVIEWS
Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton
The Glass Castle
REVIEWS
USA 2017 Director: Destin Daniel Cretton Certificate 12A 126m 47s
Gene a malfunction and sends a group of bots to delete him. This leads Gene on a Tron-lite adventure to get to the Cloud to be reprogrammed, accompanied by Hi-5 (James Corden, still forced to do funny-fat-guy shtick even though he’s an anthropomorphic hand) and Jailbreak (Anna Faris), a savvy hacker and total rip-off of Wyldstyle from The Lego Movie (2014). Littered throughout their journey into different apps (Spotify, Just Dance, Candy Crush, Dropbox, YouTube) and the various facile ‘life lessons’ about gender equality and friendship are anthropomorphised versions of other digital-age phenomena, such as spam and trolls. Their inclusion doesn’t make much sense – internet trolls are, unfortunately, real people. You shouldn’t try to learn anything about humanity or technology from this film. But The Emoji Movie isn’t drenched in irony or self-reflexive winks to the adults in the audience, which makes it stand out from the crowd. Credits and Synopsis Produced by Michelle Raimo Kouyate Screenplay Tony Leondis Eric Siegel Mike White Additional Screenplay Material John Hoffman Story Tony Leondis Eric Siegel Editor William J. Caparella Production Designer Carlos Zaragoza Music Patrick Doyle Re-recording Mixers Deb Adair Chris Carpenter Senior Animation Supervisor Sacha Kapijimpanga ©Sony Pictures Animation Inc. and LSC Film Corporation Production Companies Columbia Pictures presents in association with LStar Capital a Sony Pictures Animation film Executive Producer
Ben Waisbren
Voice Cast
Distributor Sony Pictures Releasing UK
T.J. Miller Gene James Corden Hi-5 Anna Faris Jailbreak Maya Rudolph Smiler Steven Wright Mel Meh Jennifer Coolidge Mary Meh Christina Aguilera Akiko Glitter Sofia Vergara Flamenca Sean Hayes ‘Devil’ Steven’ Rachael Ray Spam Jeff Ross internet troll Jake T. Austin Alex Tati Gabrielle Addie Patrick Stewart Poop Jude Kouyate Poop Jr, ‘PJ’ Dolby Digital In Colour [2.35:1] Some screenings presented in 3D
US, present day. Alex, a high-school freshman, receives a text from Addie, a girl he likes. Inside his phone are app worlds, including Textopolis, where ‘meh’ emoji Gene lives. When Alex tries to text back with a ‘meh’ emoji, Gene panics and starts sweating, winking and waving simultaneously. Deciding that Gene is malfunctioning, head emoji Smiler sends bots after him. Hi-5, who wants to be in the ‘most used’ emoji group, tells Gene that Jailbreak, a hacker, can help them get to the Cloud, where they can be reprogrammed. Hi-5 is almost deleted, but Gene saves him. Alex decides to get his phone wiped because it is making noises at embarrassing moments. At the last minute, Gene sends himself in a text to Addie, representing Alex’s multiple emotions about her. Addie is impressed. The emojis party in the ‘most used’ group.
60 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton
The Glass Castle, whose flashback structure skips back and forth between ‘present-day’ New York, 1989 and the peripatetic childhood of protagonist Jeannette, is filtered through the consciousness of that character, played by Brie Larson. In the film, which adapts columnist Jeannette Walls’s 2005 memoir of the same name, Jeannette is less a character in her own right than an audience and sometimes victim for her father Rex, an irresponsible, irrepressible, downright Promethean figure played by Woody Harrelson. Rex is seen in both past and present reigning over wife Rose Mary (Naomi Watts) and their four children, seen in early youth and then as adults, with the manner of a king – a dissolute and temperamental king, whose subjects are at the mercy of his whims. When first introduced, he cuts a dashing if somewhat buccaneering figure, skipping out on a hospital bill for a burn injury to young Jeannette caused by parental negligence, then taking the family off-roading in the station wagon to sleep under desert stars. A brilliant amateur naturalist with a head full of facts, he can readily answer any of the 1,000 ‘whys’ that children love to ask. As the film proceeds, however, Rex is seen in a rather less flattering light – he has a drinking problem that prevents him from carrying out any of the grandiose plans he makes, in particular a blueprint for a family manor – the namesake of the film. The flashbacks correspond roughly to the state of Jeannette’s relationship with her father in the present day: when they are on the outs, she remembers the years of scrimping and saving, planning to escape the squalor of the home in Welch, West Virginia, where the family eventually settles. When they reconcile as Rex lies on his deathbed, she remembers his moments of spontaneous generosity and decency – a pep talk during that desert campout, or a surprise visit to her Barnard dorm, where he pays her tuition with a couple of sacks full of poker winnings. The film is director and co-writer Destin
Prometheus: Woody Harrelson, Ella Anderson
Daniel Cretton’s big-budget break following the festival-circuit success of his Short Term 12 (2013), a drippy calling-card feature (also starring Larson) that was set in a group home for teenagers and proved Cretton’s ability to make a satisfactory by-the-numbers melodrama. Not having read the source material and therefore being unable to nurse the sense of betrayal shared by many reviewers, I will report that The Glass Castle is no worse and possibly even a slight improvement on his previous film. Like its predecessor, it’s hampered by its reliance on cliché – see all the material involving Jeannette’s yuppie fiancé, played by Max Greenfield – and a sense of mealymouthed politesse that precludes any possibility of real danger, but it does at least have the minor pleasures of Harrelson’s unkempt shaggy-dog performance to recommend it. (Watts is, of course, excellent as always, though remains a frightful judge of material, here having taken on a role that provides her with exactly nothing to do.) Harrelson’s Rex is a canny emotional manipulator who exploits any weakness of feeling in order to get his way, and it’s his sly spirit that, for better or worse, drives The Glass Castle – a misty-eyed memory piece that has none of the wisdom that comes of distance and circumspection.
Credits and Synopsis Produced by Gil Netter Ken Kao Screenplay Destin Daniel Cretton Andrew Lanham Based upon the book by Jeannette Walls Director of Photography Brett Pawlak Editor Nat Sanders Production Designer Sharon Seymour Music Joel P West Supervising Sound Editors Onnalee Blank Branden Spencer Costume Designers Mirren GordonCrozier Joy Hanae Lani Cretton ©Lions Gate Films Inc.
Production Companies Lionsgate presents a Gil Netter/Lionsgate production A Destin Daniel Cretton film Executive Producer Mike Drake
Cast Brie Larson Jeannette Walls Woody Harrelson Rex Walls Naomi Watts Rose Mary Walls Max Greenfield David Sarah Snook Lori Walls Robin Bartlett Erma Ella Anderson young Jeannette Walls Josh Caras Brian Walls
Shree Grace Crooks young Maureen Walls Brigette Lundy-Paine Maureen Walls Charlie Shotwell young Brian Walls Chandler Head youngest Jeannette Walls Iain Armitage youngest Brian Walls Sadie Sink young Lori Walls Olivia Kate Rice youngest Lori Walls Eden Grace Redfield youngest Maureen Walls Dolby Digital In Colour [2.35:1] Distributor Lionsgate UK
New York, 1989. Jeannette, a successful gossip columnist, is preparing to marry a young businessman but is afraid to convey the news to her parents, who are living on the streets. Through a series of flashbacks we see her unconventional upbringing in the 1970s. Her father Rex is a brilliant but feckless inventor, her mother Rose Mary an amateur painter. Jeannette grows up crisscrossing the country with her two sisters, her brother and her parents, always just one step ahead of the bill collectors. The family’s financial troubles are made worse by Rex’s drinking, which we see has not stopped in the film’s present – he and Rose Mary are now living in a Lower East Side squat, which Jeannette visits with her yuppie fiancé, whom Rex despises. In flashback we see the family settle in West Virginia, where Jeannette grows up. As Rex’s tyranny worsens, Jeannette and her siblings plan their escape to New York. Jeannette has a row with her father at her engagement party, and they become estranged. Some time later, unhappy in her marriage as her father predicted, she receives news that he is ailing. She visits him. Further flashbacks illustrate the moments of support and inspiration he provided.
Highly original, darkly comedic and infectious buddy-movie about a wheelchair-using gang of assassins.
In Cinemas from 15 September 2017 “A highly entertaining dark comedy and action-thriller ” OFFICIAL JURY – CHICAGO IFF
“Clever, inspiring, unexpectedly deep and likeable” ECUMENICAL JURY – FILM FESTIVAL COTTBUS 2016 Website: www.eurekavideo.co.uk Twitter: @eurekavideo Facebook: EurekaEntertainment Instagram: EurekaEntertainment
An unflinching depiction of one man’s descent into a vortex of desire. Suntan, an unpredictable psychological drama, full of suspense and humour, set on a hedonistic Greek Island, will be released as the part of new MONTAGE PICTURES range in a Dual Format (Blu-ray & DVD) edition. Special features include: An interview with director Argyris Papadimitropoulos and a behind the scenes documentary chronicling the films production.
Available September 2017 Website: www.eurekavideo.co.uk Twitter: @eurekavideo Facebook: EurekaEntertainment Instagram: EurekaEntertainment
AVAILABLE FROM
Home Again
In Between
USA 2017 Director: Hallie Meyers-Shyer Certificate 12A 96m 44s
Israel/France 2016 Director: Maysaloun Hamoud Certificate 15 102m 47s
REVIEWS
Reviewed by Kate Stables
Reviewed by Hannah McGill
Hollywood has produced many acting dynasties but few writing-directing clans. With this charming but slight romcom, Hallie MeyersShyer, daughter of Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer – the partnership that produced Private Benjamin (1980), Baby Boom (1987) and the Father of the Bride films (1991, 1995) – joins the family business, like the Coppolas and the Reitmans. For her debut feature, Meyers-Shyer adopts the wry, cosy style of mother Nancy’s solo hits Something’s Gotta Give (2003) and It’s Complicated (2009). Meyers’s oeuvre has long been preoccupied with women’s second acts, her most successful films featuring older women loosened up by unexpected love. Home Again, in which fearful 40-year-old LA single mother Alice (a droll Reese Witherspoon) is emboldened by having three broke young men join her household – becoming romantically involved with one of them – is cut from this template. With a premise that sounds like a noughties network sitcom, it’s a highly conventional piece, though one that congratulates itself on its own daring in having an age-gap romance and a single joke about weed. Prettily if not lavishly mounted, Meyers-Shyer’s film also borrows Nancy’s knack for creating a domestic onscreen setting that minutely reflects the heroine. Alice, buffeted by her recent separation and need to relaunch herself as an interior designer, has renovated her childhood home as a secluded feminine retreat, whose pastel fabrics, flower arrangements, outdoor yoga classes and high-thread-count sheets awe her lively male houseguests. They in turn contribute to the household in a variety of ways: “Free livein childcare, full-time tech support and sex!” as one of Alice’s friends gasps enviously. For Alice’s sweetheart Harry, his amiable actor brother Teddy and equally Alice-fixated screenwriter friend George are frankly female fantasies, barely fleshed out as characters beyond their cheerful ability to squabble, flirt, befriend Alice’s lonely tween Isabel and mend a kitchen cupboard. Only Saturday Night Live alumnus Jon Rudnitsky registers, his George a kindly pragmatist whose
Crush hour: Reese Witherspoon
reward is to be told by a drunken Alice that he’s “one of the good ones – you’re like a woman.” Despite Witherspoon’s gamest attempts, Alice and the breezily callow Harry (Pico Alexander) never strike sparks, which tanks the romantic element of the comedy. Witherspoon is nicely wry, eye-rolling over the role-reversal of his boyband pulchritude and inability to commit even to an evening out. Her second life-swiped California housewife this season, the sweetly uptight Alice is in marked contrast to the steel of Witherspoon’s character in HBO’s Big Little Lies. She’s the film’s most valuable player by a long way, finding laughs in the limpest scenes – unlike Michael Sheen, overemphatic as ex-husband Austen, seeking reconciliation and to evict the threesome. Male rivalry is presented in Meyers-Shyer’s script as sparking hilarity in verbal sniping, peacocking and a faintly ridiculous fistfight between Austen and Teddy. The Bridget Jones films did all this first, and rather better, and Home Again struggles to land its laughs here. It does better with Lake Bell’s spoilt Beverly Hills socialite Zoey, Alice’s boss from hell. But this is small beer when the movie consistently fails to find its feet as a romcom or a ‘self-realisation’ chick flick. Next to edgier or more topical romantic comedies such as The Big Sick or the (upcoming) deadpan The Lovers, it seems distinctly old-fashioned, revelling in its portrait of the remodelled family and lifegrabbing single mom as if it were novel fare.
Credits and Synopsis Produced by Nancy Meyers Erika Olde Written by Hallie Meyers-Shyer Director of Photography Dean Cundey Edited by David Bilow Production Designer Ellen J. Brill Composer John Debney Production Mixer William B. Kaplan Costumes Kate Brien Kitz ©BBG Home Again LLC Production Companies Open Road Films presents a Waverly Films production A Black Bicycle Entertainment
production in association with IMR Executive Producer Jeremiah Samuels
Cast Reese Witherspoon Alice Kinney Nat Wolff Teddy Jon Rudnitsky George Pico Alexander Harry Lake Bell Zoey Reid Scott Justin Dolly Wells Tracy Lola Flanery Isabel Eden Grace Redfield Rosie P.J. Byrne Paul Josh Stamberg
62 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
Warren Michael Sheen Austen Candice Bergen Lilian Stewart Gaylinn Dean little Alice In Colour [1.85:1] Distributor STX International
In a pivotal sequence of this melancholy Tel Aviv-set coming-of-age drama, three friends – young Palestinian women of varying levels of conventionality and familial loyalty – conspire to entrap the sleazeball fiancé who has subjected one of them to a rape. It falls to the elegant, selfassured and outspoken Laila (Mouna Hawa) to act as the bait, passing herself off as a downtrodden victim of domestic abuse in order to beg his help and then seduce him. This requires her to conceal her abundant, corkscrew-curled hair under a hijab. She and her friends undertake this process with great solemnity, not because of its religious connotations, but because Laila’s freedom and modernity are everything to her, and their renunciation – even temporarily and in a worthy cause – is a significant sacrifice. The sequence is simplistic (be free or be veiled!), improbable (a sophisticated young woman – a lawyer, no less – willingly putting herself in the hands of a known rapist?) and touching nonetheless for the sincerity it conveys and the skill with which it’s played. The same strengths and weaknesses apply to the film as a whole. There’s a cartoonish quality to its characterisation that gets in the way of Laila, her gloomy DJ friend Salma (Sana Jammalieh) and their conservative, religious third wheel Nour (Shaden Kanboura) emerging as fully fledged people: Laila’s smoking is so incessant that even the actress playing her seems to find it obtrusive at times, and the contrast between Laila and Salma’s party-girl ways and Nour’s low-key piety is hammered home with an overload of rolled eyes and clutched pearls. However, the film’s bluntness proves more effective when it is deployed to highlight how these very different women – Nour a religious Muslim and aspiring computer scientist, Laila a secular, career-minded Muslim, Salma a permanently stoned hipster lesbian from a Christian family – all see their romantic hopes and general life prospects curtailed by social and familial expectations. Laila’s romance with Ziad (Mahmood Shalabi) initially seems like pure wish fulfilment, for he is as beautiful, urbane and pleasure-driven as she is. But it takes the merest reminder of Ziad’s home and family – a visit from his more conservative sister – to start him down a slippery slope of criticising Laila’s behaviour and appearance. Salma enters a private idyll when she meets the lovely Dunia (Ahlam Canaan), but any hope of the affair earning her parents’ tolerance or approval is quashed as soon as they learn of it. The worst is reserved for the obedient and observant Nour: she is raped by her self-righteous bully of a fiancé, Wissam (Henry Andrawes), as punishment for an increasing tendency to assert herself, which he interprets as evidence of the influence of her wild new friends. The women’s status as Palestinians in an Israeli-ruled society is another complication, lightly but incisively referenced: “Who knows, tomorrow peace may erupt!” is Laila’s sardonic kiss-off to a Jewish suitor, while Salma loses a restaurant job when she stands up for her right to speak Arabic in the kitchen. Smartly utilising what power they have in See interview on page 8
Los Angeles, present day. Newly single mother Alice returns to her childhood home with her daughters. On a drunken night out, she hooks up with penniless twentysomething Harry, who is new to LA. He and his two tyro moviemaking partners Teddy and George move into her guesthouse and befriend her daughters Isabel and Rosie. George promises to be in the wings for Isabel’s school play. Alice is bullied by her interior design client Zoey. Harry bails on a dinner date with Alice, for drinks with his producer. They break up. Alice drunkenly confronts Zoey in a restaurant, and bests her. Alice’s ex-husband Austen turns up at the house, hoping for a reconciliation; he and Teddy fight in the garden. Alice asks Teddy, Harry and George to leave. Harry accuses George of being in love with Alice. The boys fall out briefly, but reconcile and move into an apartment together. Alice asks Austen for a divorce. Harry tells Alice that she deserves better than him. When a meeting with a financier is delayed, Teddy, Harry and George run out on him to arrive in time for Isabel’s school play. Isabel fluffs the start, then rallies when George arrives. Alice presides happily over a post-play dinner with family and boys.
An Inconvenient Sequel Truth to Power USA 2017 Directors: Bonni Cohen, Jon Shenk Certificate PG 97m 53s
Credits and Synopsis Produced by Shlomi Elkabetz Written by Maysaloun Hamoud Director of Photography Itay Gross Editors Lev Goltser Nili Feller Art Director Hagar Brotman Original Music M.G Saad Production Sound Mixer Tully Chen Costume Designer Li Alembik ©Deux Beaux Garçons Film Ltd Production Companies Deux Beaux Garçon Films A film by Maysaloun Hamoud In association with En Compagnie des Lamas Script developed with the support of the Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts - Cinema Project With the participation of the Leon Recanati Foundation Supported by the Cultural Administration, Israel Ministry of Culture and Sport, The Israel Film Council With the support of the Israel Film Fund, The Ministry
of Culture, The Israel Film Council, Channel 10 Gesher Multicultural Film Fund, Israel Film Council, Ministry of Culture and Sport, yes Produced with the support of the Israel Lottery Council for Culture & Arts Other Israel Film Festival & Fund In association with Gabirol Center of the Art, Tel Aviv Municipality, En Compagnie des Lamas Executive Producer Aviv Giladi
Distributor Peccadillo Pictures Ltd Israeli theatrical titles Arabic: Bar Bahar Hebrew: Lo Po Vi Lo Sham Onscreen title Bar Bahar In Between
Cast Mouna Hawa Laila Shaden Kanboura Nour Sana Jammalieh Salma Mahmood Shalabi Ziad Henry Andrawes Wissam Ahlam Canaan Dunia Aiman Daw Saleh Riyad Sliman Qais Firas Nassar Rabia Tamer Naffar Suheil Haddad In Colour [2.35:1] Subtitles
Tel Aviv, the present. Friends Laila and Salma are uninhibited participants in their city’s club scene and its drug culture. Salma’s Christian family are keen to marry her off, a process she shows limited interest in. New flatmate Nour is a religious Muslim and far more conservative. Initial suspicion between the three gives way to friendship. Laila falls for Ziad, a beautiful and worldly filmmaker, but breaks up with him when he begins to criticise her dress and behaviour. DJ and bartender Salma meets a female doctor, Dunia, with whom she begins a romance. At a family gathering they are spotted kissing, and Salma’s parents forbid them from seeing one another again. Nour asks her controlling fiancé Wissam to postpone their wedding; angered by her increasing self-confidence, he rapes her. The three women plan to blackmail Wissam by sending Laila to the charity where he works in the guise of a battered woman seeking help, and then photographing him in compromising positions with her. They succeed in persuading him to go to Nour’s father and call off the wedding. The three women go dancing together. Laila is harassed on the dance floor.
Reviewed by Philip Kemp
Over shots of melting arctic ice, An Inconvenient Sequel kicks off with a cacophony of anonymous voices rubbishing the climate-change message that its predecessor (An Inconvenient Truth, 2006) sought to convey. We hear its proponent, ex-veep Al Gore, accused of “hyperbole” and worse (though not the notorious broadcast when former Fox News attack-dog Glenn Beck compared Gore to Joseph Goebbels). Following this, we see footage of Gore getting a rough ride at a US Senate hearing in 2007. But given the man’s tireless optimism, the mood soon turns upbeat again. Interwoven with footage of floods, fires, typhoons, melting glaciers and small island nations (the Maldives, Kiribati) in peril of total submergence beneath the waves, we’re shown the upside: Gore travelling, negotiating, proselytising and, repeatedly, addressing brighteyed volunteers from all around the globe at his Climate Reality Leadership training sessions. Thanks partly, perhaps, to the input of co-director Jon Shenk, who trained as a cinematographer, Truth to Power offers a more visually acute experience than its predecessor; at the same time the material feels less PowerPoint-ish, with Gore relying more on action and eloquence, and less on graphs and charts. The most telling moments are those involving personal interface, as when Gore visits Georgetown, “the reddest city in the reddest county in Texas” (red in US politics, of course, meaning Republican, not communist), whose staunchly Republican mayor proudly announces that his will be the first town in the state to go 100 per cent renewable. The friendly joshing between the two men, coming from opposite sides of the political divide but in full accord over the essentials, is a pleasure to watch – the more so since numerous other US towns and cities, Gore tells us, are following Georgetown’s example. “If Donald Trump refuses to lead,” he adds, “the American people will.” Trump, grumbling that “we have bigger problems right now”, inevitably casts his ungainly shadow over the conclusion of the film, which has been updated since its Sundance
REVIEWS
the face of these many constraints, the women successfully conspire to blackmail Wissam into freeing Nour from their engagement. Writer/ director Maysaloun Hamoud wisely withholds any sense of triumph, however: instead, the piece ends with the trio staring blankly ahead, traumatised by what they’ve undergone and implicitly contemplating futures in which no peace of mind or fulfilment can come without colossal and painful sacrifice.
Planet terror: Al Gore
screening in January to take in the most recent events. After hailing the 2015 launch of the Deep Space Climate Observatory (previously cancelled by George W. Bush, who controversially won the presidential election against Gore in 2000) and then showing Gore hard at work at the Paris Climate Change Conference, talking, persuading, pulling every string available to secure the crucial Indian vote in favour – so much so that the unanimous outcome of the Paris agreement comes to seem like a personal triumph for him – the film might be in danger of ending on a downer with Trump’s fulfilment of his threat to pull the US out of the deal. But Gore is not to be discouraged, not even by this latest setback. “We are very close to the tipping point,” he tells us, showing us footage of the proliferation of solar panels in countries across the globe, noting: “The sun provides more energy in one hour than the world uses in a year.” He ends with a rallying cry to the faithful, “Fight like your world depends on it!” It’s a call he makes hard to resist.
Credits and Synopsis Produced by Richard Berge Diane Weyermann Source Material Al Gore Director of Photography
Jon Shenk Edited by Don Bernier Colin Nusbaum Music Jeff Beal Sound Recordist
Gabriel Monts ©Climate Change Documentary, LLC Production Companies Paramount Pictures
A decade after his climate-change documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ (2006) won him a Nobel Peace Prize, former US Democratic vice-president and one-time presidential candidate Al Gore is still touring the world, aiming to persuade people of the urgency of taking action to stem global warming. He visits Greenland to witness the steady erosion of the arctic ice field, where water expansion causes one glacier to explode. We also see footage of numerous natural disasters attributable to climate change: typhoons in Louisiana and the Philippines, devastating fires in Colorado, Chile and Australia, droughts in Syria and flooding in Miami, Chennai and New York – where his 2006 prediction, much derided at the time, that the World Trade Center memorial site would soon
and Participant Media present an Actual Films production Executive Producers Jeff Skoll Davis Guggenheim Lawrence Bender
Laurie David Scott Z. Burns Lesley Chilcott
Distributor Paramount Pictures UK
In Colour [2.35:1]
be under water came true only six years later. Tirelessly optimistic, Gore recruits volunteers for his Climate Reality Leadership Corps, starting at his home farm in Tennessee and continuing in 135 countries; we see him in action in Miami, Houston, Beijing and Manila. To date the programme has grown to include more than 10,000 people. He also visits staunchly Republicanvoting Georgetown, Texas, which is set to become the first town in the state to use electricity from 100 per cent renewable sources. As the Paris Climate Conference approaches, Gore is active publicly and behind the scenes, brokering a crucial deal to bring India onside. Success in Paris receives a setback with the election of Donald Trump, but Gore continues to maintain that the momentum behind his cause is now unstoppable.
October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 63
In the Last Days of the City
Egypt/Germany/United Kingdom/United Arab Emirates/Lebanon/USA/France/Italy/ The Netherlands/Tunisia/Cyprus 2016 Director: Tamer El Said
REVIEWS
Reviewed by Hannah McGill
It’s a common habit of filmmakers wishing to signal the resonance and depth of their stories to punctuate a character-driven narrative with snippets of doomy world news playing out on nearby televisions and radios. Reports about war back up any point the filmmaker wishes to make about man’s inhumanity to man; hints of poverty or famine emphasise the selfinvolvement of foreground characters; coming natural disasters lend heft to domestic strife. In Tamer El Said’s debut feature, this conceit is magnified to the point of hysteria. Everywhere that protagonist Khalid (Khalid Abdalla) wanders in his home city of Cairo, he is accompanied by news reports. Protests for and against President Hosni Mubarak. Bombings and uprisings across the region. Advancing swine flu. Critically important football games (Egypt is about to play in the Africa Cup). World events aren’t merely a counterpoint to his own experiences, they’re a citywide obsession. Or… are they? As the babble intensifies and revolution looms, ordinary life displays a tenacious insistence on carrying on. Khalid’s mother is still dying; he still needs a new apartment; his heart still aches for his ex-lover Laila (Laila Samy). “Bad reception?” he asks a man fiddling with a radio in the street. “No,” comes the response, “nothing to listen to.” The film is an elegy to a pre-revolution Cairo, but also a deeply introspective wrangle over the functions of creativity in time of unrest – Khalid is a filmmaker, and autobiographical elements aren’t hard to discern – and a study of what it is to belong, to a family, to a culture, or in a relationship. While adjusting to life without Laila and seeking a new place to live, Khalid is also exploring his own family history, seeking stories about his dead father from those who knew him. He discusses this process, and all the upheavals of their lives, with a trio of filmmaker friends in town for a film festival: Bassem (Bassem Fayad) from Lebanon, Hassan (Hayder Helo) from Baghdad, and Tarek (Basim Hajar), who has quit Baghdad to live as a refugee in Berlin. Khalid is also interviewing other residents of Cairo about their personal histories, snippets of which footage we see as he edits it. Though powerful affection bonds the four friends, tensions surface in the group as they debate the morality of staying in or fleeing a war-torn city. Then there’s the artist’s guilty attraction to unrest and trouble: in time of war, Bassem acknowledges, “Life has deeper meaning.” Later, an ancient calligrapher Khalid films takes the longer view: “Poetry is everywhere, waiting to be written.” And Khalid’s elderly mother reminds us that it doesn’t take a war to suffer, when she shares with Khalid the heartrending story of his sister’s death in childhood. This painfully sad element of the film – the girl was killed in a car accident, when her father was driving – is also one of its most effective. The mother’s stoical acceptance of God’s will coexists with a frank acknowledgement of her own pain, and the schism that grief created in her marriage. “I blamed him unrelentingly,” she says plainly, “and he remained utterly silent.” This silence continues, of course, since Khalid’s father is now dead. It is something of a loss to the film that the 64 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
Watchman: Khalid Abdalla
present mother’s complex and touching response to her loss is lent less narrative importance than the absent father’s unknown one. Khalid’s pursuit of his father is ineffective in narrative terms; we don’t know enough about the dead man to be interested, and Khalid’s whole project is vague and uninvolving. The fruitless pursuit of an authoritative patriarchal narrative does, however, reflect a certain tendency of the film to treat men as the repositories of important knowledge, and women as background colour: wives, mothers or objects of desire rather than autonomous individuals with equivalent intellectual depth to men. The feminine is also characterised as overtly monstrous: Bassem compares Beirut to “a whore, an old lady with a facelift: pretty on the outside, but it’s rotten”. In an anecdote about the torture of prisoners by Israeli soldiers, the perpetrators are specifically identified as female. Interestingly, it’s also one of Khalid’s female interviewees – a woman who speaks of her time growing up in Alexandria but who is never
connected to or incorporated into the film’s other narrative strands – who berates him for fetishising the past. “No more nostalgia,” she says. “I want to live now, and for the future. You talk about the past, and lament…” When Khalid protests that he’s watching, not talking, he’s sharply reminded: “Watching is not living.” At the film’s close, Khalid’s immediate life experience unites to poignant effect with all that overheard news footage. Just as a story about a deadly car bomb in Baghdad is blaring from radios, Khalid’s phone rings with news that one of the victims is Hassan, who had insisted on returning to Baghdad despite its dangers, in order to bear witness and show loyalty. All the friends’ conjecture, theorising and competition about art and nationhood has been overwhelmed by brutal reality. Whether Khalid is cured of his tendency towards aestheticised nostalgia is debatable, however, given the film’s final dreamy shots of Hassan waving farewell from a boat drifting slowly into the distance.
Credits and Synopsis Producers Tamer El Said Khalid Abdalla Screenplay Tamer El Said Rasha Salti Director of Photography Bassem Fayad Edited by Mohamed A. Gawad Vartan Avakian Barbara Bossuet Production Designer Salah Marei Music Amélie Legrand Victor Moïse Sound Mix Mikael Barre Costume
Zeina Kiwan ©Zero Production, Mengamuk Films and LDC Films Limited Production Companies A Zero Production film in co-production with Sunnyland Film, Mengamuk Films, Autonomous A film by Tamer El Said With the support of SANAD - Abu Dhabi Film Fund, AFAC - The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, World Cinema Fund, The Global Film Initiative, Cinereach, Fonds Image de la
Francophonie, The Ford Foundation, The Cultural Resource, TorinoFilmLab, the Cultural Department of the Embassy of the Netherlands in Cairo, Goethe-Insitut Kairo, The CNC Prize – Takmil Workshop, Carthage Film Festival With the participation of SANAD, The Development and Post-production Fund of twofour54 Abu Dhabi Funded by TorinoFilmLab In cooperation with the Federal Foreign
Cairo, 2009. After breaking up with his lover Laila, who has decided to leave the increasingly restive city, filmmaker Khalid seeks a new apartment. As protests mount against President Hosni Mubarak, he films residents of Cairo speaking about their histories. He also seeks, without much success, testimony about his dead father, a once well-known but now forgotten radio journalist. His elderly mother, very ill in hospital,
Office and with further support by the Goethe Institute With the support of the Creative Europe MEDIA Programme of the European Union Produced by Zero Production in co-production with Sunnyland Film, Mengamuk Films, Autonomous
Cast Khalid Abdalla Khalid Maryam Saleh Maryam Hanan Yousef
Hanan Laila Samy Laila Bassem Fayad Bassem Basim Hajar Tarek Hayder Helo Hassan Mohamed Gaber gaber Islam Kamal editor Aly Sobhy Aly Fadila Tawfik Abla Fadila Etimad Ali Hassan Etimad Zeinab Mostafa mother
In Colour [1.85:1] Subtitles Distributor ICA Films
describes the schism in her marriage that followed the death of her daughter in a car crash. Khalid’s friends, Bassem from Lebanon, Hassan from Baghdad and Tarek, also from Baghdad but living in Berlin, come to town for a film festival. The three agree to film in their separate locations and send one another footage. After they leave, Tarek calls to tell Khalid that Hassan has been killed in a bombing in Baghdad.
Journey Through French Cinema France 2016, Director: Bertrand Tavernier Certificate 12A 200m 39s
There are two important facts to note at the outset about Bertrand Tavernier’s fond survey of French cinema. The first is it’s his journey, not an objective overview. The second can be furnished from interviews: there’s an eightpart TV series (taking the place of an originally envisaged two further feature films) to follow it up. These facts immediately set a limit to the amount of carping that any critic can do along the lines of “What about Ophuls/Tati/ Pialat?” or “Where’s Darrieux/Moreau/Delon?” Tavernier fully exercises his right, as a respected filmmaker and erudite cinephile, to trace a line through this history on the basis of his personal experience. So we start with a childhood revelation of cinema’s power – in Dernier atout (1942), a movie that, decades later, Tavernier tracked down and realised was an early, dazzling effort by Jacques Becker. Once his voracious teenage viewing had changed locale from Lyon to Paris, Tavernier involved himself in writing criticism and running a cinema club, and then obtained various jobs within the industry. All this led to contacts with Jean-Pierre Melville, Claude Sautet and less well-recognised figures including Edmond T. Gréville (who had a dual career in French and British cinema) and Jean Sacha. It is hard not to bracket this ‘journey’ with the well-known, equally extended documentary essays by Martin Scorsese on American (1995) and Italian (1999) cinema. With one big difference that turns out to be Tavernier’s masterstroke: he almost never bothers to retell the plot of the films from which he extracts clips (around 600 in total), allowing him to move at great speed from one vivid highpoint to the next. In a 1998 Sight & Sound poll, Tavernier made this provocative remark: “I don’t much like [canonical] lists: too many beautiful and important films are missing, and they leave out the texture, the richness and life of cinema by not including all those ‘imperfect’ films which are more meaningful and alive than frozen, dated ‘classics’.” He remains true to his word: imperfect films are generously included in Journey if they boast some fine moments or elements – and especially if they belong to a despised or underrated popular genre. This is Tavernier’s cue to launch into, for example, an appreciative defence of Eddie Constantine’s screen career in action movies before he was elevated to hyper-ironic status in art films by Godard and Fassbinder. In this manner, Journey fully displays Tavernier’s taste for delirious inventiveness in cinema, and his predilection for what he calls “the modern”. Tavernier, in fact, deploys an ingenious, sideways manoeuvre to fulfil the obligation to include certain, widely beloved classics. Julien Duvivier and Marcel Carné, for instance, are dovetailed into the lengthy appreciation of Jean Gabin’s career as an actor. Jean Vigo is there too, but less for himself than for his close collaboration with a special composer: Maurice Jaubert, whose work only became available on disc 35 years after his death. (Other composers are also highlighted, such as Joseph Kosma and Antoine Duhamel.)
REVIEWS
Reviewed by Adrian Martin
A love supreme: Bertrand Tavernier
Journey casts the history of French cinephilia in a somewhat unfamiliar light. “Contrary to the myth about cinephiles,” Tavernier declares of himself and his early 1960s gang, “we were into politics” – and hence he provides a special place for films well outside the nouvelle vague, including Jean Panijel’s Algerian War documentary Octobre à Paris (1962) and Pierre Schoendoerffer’s Vietnam drama La 317ème section (1965). There are some special nods to critics. Not André Bazin or anybody majorly associated with Cahiers du cinéma. Rather, a disparate group of writers, each with a singular voice: Roger Tailleur (Positif), Jacques Lourcelles (author of a massive, indispensable dictionary of French film in 1992), Michel Cournot (belles-lettres journalist) and the surrealist Louis Aragon – whom, it transpires, Tavernier, as a young attaché de presse, invited to see and respond to Godard’s Credits and Synopsis Directed by Bertrand Tavernier With: Thierry Frémaux With the collaboration of: Jean Ollé-Laprune Stéphane Lerouge Produced by Frédéric Bourboulon Written by Bertrand Tavernier With: Thierry Frémaux With the collaboration of: Jean Ollé-Laprune Stéphane Lerouge Cinematography Jérôme Almeras Simon Beaufils Julien Pamart Camille Clement Garance Garnier Editors Guy Lecorne
Marie Deroudille Original Music Composed by Bruno Coulais Sound Fanny Weinzaepflen Olivier Dô Hùu ©Little Bear, Gaumont, Pathé Production Production Companies Gaumont & Pathé presents a Little Bear - Gaumont - Pathé co-production With the participation of Canal+, Ciné+, SACEM and with the support of Région Île-de-France A film by Bertrand Tavernier
With Bertrand Tavernier Thierry Frémaux Texts read by André Marcon In Colour [1.85:1] Subtitles Distributor Studiocanal Limited French theatrical title Voyage à travers le cinéma français
The director Bertrand Tavernier takes a personal journey through 50 years of French cinema, exploring the work of key directors, actors, writers and composers and featuring around 600 clips from various films, including many from underrated popular genres. He also discusses the films he enjoyed as a boy and his own early career.
Pierrot le fou (1965), resulting in a classic text. Journey Through French Cinema is a surprisingly moving film – one of the best historical compilations of its type. The tone is set in its first case study, devoted to Becker. We are instantly plunged into a whirlwind of strong, intense, memorable moments from this underrated auteur’s work – a breathless montage that would make anyone wish to see all these movies for the first time, or once again. Yet it is not simply Tavernier’s enthusiasm that communicates itself here. Each section of the documentary rests on a series of specific points – about Renoir’s staging in deep focus, or how Gabin’s famous slow walk was never exactly the same speed from one role to the next – usually illustrated by at least three separate examples. “When I place three in a row,” Tavernier has said, “that wields an effect no text can render.” Even better, Tavernier had the resources, and the influence, to make this audiovisual essay as a bona fide film for the big screen, necessitating the creation, in many cases, of new prints by the rights holders. French citizens often exude a pride about their national cinema that is admirable and even enviable, but also sometimes a little scary and blinkered. It is notable that, throughout Journey, Tavernier is willing to entertain only one other point of comparison: American cinema, which he knows and loves probably almost as well as its French counterpart. He does this in order to praise the underrated, apparently American virtue of storytelling economy (as in Becker), but also to point out the essentially French distinction within, for instance, certain crime/gangster movies, such as Sautet’s Classe tous risques (1960), with its plotless, melancholic temps morts. As French critic Christian Viviani has noted, Tavernier prizes a “novelistic approach to everyday life, showing people who work, who gather around the table in a bistro or dance hall, whose deepest emotions are translated by details, small touches, where the most spectacular events are placed ‘at eye level’”. So this history or journey is, ultimately, a lively continuation of one of French cinema’s most distinctive and enduring triumphs: its poetic realism. October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 65
Kills on Wheels
REVIEWS
Hungary 2016 Director: Attila Till
On a roll: Szabolcs Thuróczy, Zoltán Fenyvesi
Reviewed by Philip Kemp
Films centring around paraplegics and the disabled are prone to pressing a little too hard on the pathos pedal, last year’s Me Before You being a recent entry in a long, lachrymose succession reaching back to The Men (1950), The Raging Moon (1971), The Other Side of the Mountain (1975) and Coming Home (1978). Attila Till’s Kills on Wheels (the Hungarian title, Tiszta szívvel, rather intriguingly translates as ‘Pure Heart’, just whose heart this refers to being a moot point) sports a sardonic edge that refreshingly aligns it with such irreverent specimens as Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern’s Aaltra (2004) and Donavon Warren’s Wheels (2014). Till’s only previous feature, Panic (2008), took a similarly unsolemn look at people suffering from panic attacks. In Kills, the lead character, wheelchairbound ex-fireman and ex-jailbird Rupaszov (Szabolcs Thuróczy), rents himself out as a hitman to a Serbian mafioso, not in Byronic revenge against a society that degrades him but mainly because it pays well. Scarcely more noble motives attract Zoli (Zoltán Fenyvesi) and Barba (Adám Fekete), the two young disabled men who, bored and frustrated in their care home and looking for excitement, become his none-too-accomplished assistants. For his part, the Serbian, Rados (Dusán Vitanovic, his dark floppy hair and twisted grin recalling Javier Bardem’s hitman in the Coens’ 2007 No Country for Old Men), employs Rupaszov on the logic that no one will be wary of a guy in a wheelchair; which indeed proves to be the case, allowing the paraplegic to gun down a whole string of baddies in some slightly repetitive Tarantino-style shootouts. If the plot starts to strain credulity (and plot holes are frequent), there’s a reason, made clear in the film’s final reveal, though to be fair it’s hinted at throughout 66 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
the action, starting with the pre-credit sequence. While realism isn’t the aim, Till is drawing on his own real-life experience as a volunteer for disabled people. “It was crucial to me,” he has said, “to make a movie about disabled people where they finally aren’t played by actors but get the opportunity to act themselves and be the real heroes.” Of the three principal actors, two – Fenyvesi and Fekete – are genuinely disabled, as are most of the extras seen in the care-home scenes. (We might see a nod here to Miroslav Slaboshpytskyi’s remarkable 2014 film The Tribe, set in a Ukrainian home for the deaf and casting exclusively deaf actors
communicating in unsubtitled sign language.) Playing games with reality and fantasy, working in a few sarcastic side shots at a flawed society (“Hungarians call any shit a profession,” remarks Rados dismissively), the film still lets the occasional darker subtext show through, as when Zoli voices his anger at his estranged father, who, he believes, left because he couldn’t stand to see his disabled son crawling about on the floor. Kills on Wheels here and there slips off course – a wedding sequence goes on too long and doesn’t add much – but it offers an entertaining, ingenious and above all wholly unpatronising take on an often mishandled subject.
Credits and Synopsis Producer Judit Stalter Written by Attila Till Director of Photography Imre Juhász Editor Márton Gothár Production Designer
Márton Ágh Music Csaba Kalotás Sound Tamás Zanyi Costume Designer Andrea Flesch
Laokoon Filmgroup presents Supported by the Hungarian National Film Fund Executive Producers Gábor Rajina Gábor Sipos
Production Companies
Hungary, the present. Rupaszov, an ex-fireman confined to a wheelchair after an accident at work three years ago, is released from the jail he was sent to for shooting and wounding a police officer. He is met by Serbian mafia boss Rados, who offers him work as a hitman. In a local care home, Rupaszov meets Zoli and Barba, two young disabled men who share a passion for graphic art. He invites them to help him with his jobs for Rados. Zoli’s mother tells him that his estranged father will pay for an operation to ease his condition, but Zoli refuses. Meeting four heavies sent by mafia rival Tóni on some waste ground, Rupaszov kills them all. Zoli and Barba are invited to enter their book for a comic-con. With Zoli and Barba’s help, Rupaszov kills Tóni’s lawyer in the city square. Rados, watching, tells
Cast Zoltán Fenyvesi Zolika, ‘Zoli’ Szabolcs Thuróczy Rupaszov Ádám Fekete Barba, ‘Barba Papa’ Móni Balsai Zita, Zoli’s mother
Dusán Vitanovic Rados Lidia Danis Évi
Eureka Entertainment Hungarian theatrical title Tiszta szívvel
In Colour [2.35:1] Subtitles Distributor
Rupaszov he must dispose of his partners. Rupaszov pushes them into a lake, then thinks better of it and rescues them; he tells Rados they drowned. At Tóni’s house, Rupaszov kills him and his henchmen. Rados, promising him payment, instead hangs him and leaves; Rupaszov frees himself from the noose. With Zoli, he attends the wedding of Evi, a nurse he likes, but behaves badly and gets beaten up. The three confront Rados in his house. Rados fatally stabs Rupaszov, but Zoli shoots him dead. Zoli agrees to the operation. He sends the finished comic book to Rupaszov, who is his father and not disabled, living with his second family in Germany – the events we’ve seen derive from the book. At the comic-con, a jury member tells Zoli and Barba that their work is publishable.
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REVIEWS
The Limehouse Golem
Metamorphoses
United Kingdom 2016 Director: Juan Carlos Medina Certificate 15 108m 57s
France 2014 Director: Christophe Honoré Certificate 15 101m 45s
Reviewed by Roger Clarke
Reviewed by Catherine Wheatley
While Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor remains stubbornly unmade, here’s a version of his second most famous novel, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. The golem of myth was a legendary instrument of supernatural vengeance, brought to life by Solomonic spells on clay, most commonly associated with the Jewish ghettos of Prague. Set in London’s East End in the 1880s, at a time when Jewish refugees were beginning to arrive from Eastern Europe, the film follows Detective Inspector John Kildare (Bill Nighy), who has been given the unenviable job of cracking the case of a serial killer dubbed ‘The Limehouse Golem’. Kildare knows that he is being set up by his colleagues to fail – it is suggested that he is gay, and consequently distrusted. His investigations lead him into the world of music hall, more specifically that of the dragged-up superstar of the era Dan Leno, where he comes across another case that has already gone to trial: a protégée of Leno’s named Lizzie Cree is being prosecuted for poisoning her husband. Kildare uncovers evidence suggesting that the late John Cree was in fact the Limehouse Golem. He fights to get Lizzie pardoned – when he makes a last-minute dash to the scaffold to arrange a reprieve, the darkness of the film’s resolution comes as a body blow. The screenplay is by Jane Goldman, and the film directed by the relatively unknown Juan Carlos Medina, who adds heat to a chilly tale. As a Florida native of Mexican heritage, he brings an outsider’s view of London very much informed by the paintings of John Atkinson Grimshaw, whose Nightfall on the Thames (painted in 1880, the year the film is set) is recreated in detail in one shot by cinematographer Simon Dennis. Further art-history references include William Blake’s The Ghost of a Flea, which is reproduced three times in different places during the film. The palette is highly saturated, and if a mirror happens to be in shot, you can be sure Medina will make full use of it. Indeed, some of the look of the film seems to be informed by the foxing effects of antique mirrors. The structure of the narrative is complex, and sometimes the fast editing makes you wish there was a little more room to breathe. Medina’s
Stylistically, Christophe Honoré is one of France’s more elusive auteurs. There’s little to link his hypersexualised yet somehow bloodless adaptation of Georges Bataille’s Ma mère (2004) with his joyous New Wave homages Dans Paris (2006) and Love Songs (2007), or indeed his fantastical children’s film Sophie’s Misfortunes (2016). Still, his works all share a certain sensibility – let’s say a seriousness – that distinguishes them from the more playful generic flirtations of compatriot François Ozon, for example. In terms of his earlier work, Metamorphoses has most in common with Honoré’s The Beautiful Person (2008), an adaptation of Madame de La Fayette’s La Princesse de Clèves starring a then unknown Léa Seydoux. Both transpose their action to modern-day France in order to capture the spirit if not the letter of the source material. Made up of 15 books and comprising more than 250 myths, Ovid’s narrative poem chronicles the history of the world from the moment of its creation to the deification of Julius Caesar. Honoré takes a dozen or so of these myths and binds them together through the figure of Europa (Amira Akili), who is seduced by Jupiter, king of the gods. After a gorgeous, silent prologue based on the myth of Actaeon – the hunter transformed into a stag by Diana, goddess of the hunt, here a flame-haired transsexual played by Samantha Avrillaud – Jupiter approaches Europa not in the form of a white bull, as Ovid has it, but as an articulated lorry, which slowly circles her in a suburban car park. Europa watches and listens as first Jupiter – now revealed as a handsome youth (Sébastien Hirel) – then Bacchus, god of wine (Damien Chapelle), and finally the iconoclast Orpheus (George Babluani) all spin stories for her of men and women transfigured into beasts or plants by the gods. The ensuing film feels like a cross between Matteo Garrone’s Tale of Tales (2015) and Eugène Green’s The Living World (2003). These stories within stories seem to fold into one another, with characters often appearing as witnesses to events that have already happened, or events that should be separated by decades but which occur almost concurrently. So Tiresias (Rachid O.), a medical specialist in sexual matters, predicts the fate of the infant Narcissus, and immediately we cut to a lithe, pillow-lipped teen on a highschool basketball court (Arthur Jacquin). Though the setting is loosely contemporary, Honoré and production designer Samuel Deshors avoid props such as phones and well-known landmarks that would ground events in a specific time or place. Much of the action happens in rural locations in southern France – an ethereal landscape of woodland and streams (elegantly shot by André Chemetoff) that evokes both Ancient Greece and Eric Rohmer’s bucolic backdrops. But other milieus – a vast retail park, a series of looming tower blocks in the unnamed banlieue through which riot police chase Orpheus and his disciples – remind us that the world the gods inhabit is not so far from our own. Likewise, Honoré’s typically astute use of music mixes Mozart and Schoenberg with drawling indie-pop from Baxter Dury and Sean Nicolas Savage.
Indignation: Bill Nighy
horror chops come to the fore in particular when he recreates some gruesome murders, unmercifully, each time with a different suspect as the protagonist – variously Karl Marx and the novelist George Gissing. He has a genuine sense for grotesque body horror. The film is also one of a select few to be coherently bibliophile in tone – the main piece of evidence here is a book, and the source of most of the suspects is the Reading Rooms of the British Library. Bill Nighy does one of his better and less mannered turns as the detective, marshalling all his reserves of pained indignation. Olivia Cooke as Lizzie is absolutely at home as an extroverted music-hall star one minute and a quietly ‘wronged’ defendant the next; Douglas Booth as Dan Leno himself brings a camp brio to his stage outings; and Daniel Mays as a loyal East End policeman continues to reveal himself as one of the most significant character actors of our time. Comparisons will inevitably be made with From Hell, a graphic novel by Alan Moore that was filmed in 2001. That movie eventually found its audience after a lacklustre original outing – perhaps Golem will do better. In all, it’s a stylish and visually striking adaptation of a popular novel, bringing Santa Muerte gothic and the Spanish-language horror heritage to a very British subject.
Credits and Synopsis Produced by Stephen Woolley Elizabeth Karlsen Joanna Laurie Screenplay Jane Goldman Based on the novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem by Peter Ackroyd Director of Photography Simon Dennis Editor Justin Krish Production Designer
Grant Montgomery Music Johan Söderqvist Production Sound Mixer Stevie Haywood Costume Designer Claire Anderson ©Number 9 Films (Limehouse) Limited Production Companies New Sparta Films presents in association with
HanWay Films, LipSync and Day Tripper Films a Stephen Woolley/ Elizabeth Karlsen/ Number 9 Films production A film by Juan Carlos Medina In association with Compton Investments Produced by Day Tripper Films Developed with the support of the BFI’s Film Fund and Film4
London, 1880. A serial killer dubbed the Limehouse Golem is terrorising the East End. Meanwhile, vaudeville performer Lizzie Cree is on trial for poisoning her husband. Detective Kildare is assigned to the Golem case and becomes convinced that Lizzie’s dead husband was the killer. He also pursues other leads, mostly connected to the British Library. His investigations lead him to interview a number of
68 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
Executive Producers Zygi Kamasa Jane Goldman Thorsten Schumacher Nicki Hattingh Christopher Simon Anne Sheehan
Cast Bill Nighy John Kildare Olivia Cooke Lizzie Cree Douglas Booth Dan Leno
Daniel Mays George Flood Sam Reid John Cree Maria Valverde Aveline Ortega Henry Goodman Karl Marx Paul Ritter Augustus Rowley Morgan Watkins George Gissing Peter Sullivan Inspector Roberts Eddie Marsan ‘Uncle’
In Colour [2.35:1] Distributor Lionsgate UK
people who were at the library on the day that a key piece of evidence – a diary of the murders scrawled over a book – is found. Kildare immerses himself in the world of music hall, and becomes suspicious of the performer Dan Leno, who discovered and promoted Lizzie. Kildare dashes at the last minute to halt Lizzie’s hanging – but in her cell she confesses to being the Golem. Kildare lets her hang.
The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl Director: Yuasa Masaaki
Transformations: Coralie Rouet, Sébastien Hirel
Paradoxically, Honoré evokes the poem’s epic feel through sparsity of storytelling. His largely non-professional cast wear little (sometimes only trainers and socks) and speak less. The most mesmeric scenes unfold wordlessly: Salmacis’s watery pursuit of Hermaphroditus is soundtracked only by gentle splashing, while Hippomenes’s courtship of Atalanta is a joyous, slapstick dash through fields and over hay bales. In a lovely touch, Echo repeats Narcissus’s words as she trails after him by signing them. The effects are similarly understated, with cutaway shots allowing human bodies to be replaced by those of animals, but impressive nonetheless. When two
lions appeared suddenly, snarling and wrestling, I was reminded of André Bazin’s comments on Chaplin and the lion’s cage, and the wonder of film being that something really is there. Metamorphoses opens with a line from Ovid: “My design leads me to speak of forms changed into new bodies.” Of course, not only human but artistic forms might be subject to transformation. Honoré’s film transmutes his ongoing themes of violence, eroticism, queerness and sorrow into a timeless reflection on the human condition. More than that, it turns Ovid’s poem into a reminder of cinema’s inherent mystery. In its own small way, it’s a great work of art.
Credits and Synopsis
Producer Philippe Martin Screenplay Christophe Honoré Director of Photography André Chemetoff Editor Chantal Hymans Art Director Samuel Deshors Sound Recordist Guillaume le Braz Costume Designer Pascaline Chavanne
partnership with the CNC In association with Palatine Étoile 11, Cofinova 10, Cinéimage 8 Developed in association with Indéfilms Initiative 2 A film by Christophe Honoré A Les Films Pelléas production
©LFP - Les Films Pelléas, France 3 Cinéma, Le Pacte Production Companies Les Films Pelléas presents in co-production with France 3 Cinéma, Le Pacte with the participation of Canal+, France Télévisions, Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée, Appaloosa Distribution and the support of Région Provence-Alpes Côtes d’Azur and Région LanguedocRoussillon in
Matthis Lebrun Actaeon Samantha Avrillaud Diana Amira Akili Europa Sébastien Hirel Jupiter Mélodie Richard Juno Coralie Rouet Io Nadir Sönmez Mercury Vincent Massimino Argus Olivier Müller Pan Myriam Guizani Syrinx Gabrielle Chuiton Baucis Jean Courte
Cast
Philemon Rachid O. Tiresias Arthur Jacquin Narcissus Damien Chapelle Bacchus Anna Camplan Eléonor Vergez Margot Guitton the Minyades Julien Antonini Hermaphroditus Marlène Saldana Salmacis Yannick Guyomard Pentheus Jimmy Lenoir Cadmus George Babluani Orpheus Vimala Pons Atalanta Erwan Ha-Kyoon Larcher Hippomenes Keti Bicolli Venus Dolby Digital In Colour [2.35:1] Subtitles Distributor Monument Releasing French theatrical title Métamorphoses
An adaptation of Ovid’s epic poem ‘Metamorphoses’ set in contemporary France. When Actaeon, a hunter, stumbles across Diana naked in the woods, he is transformed into a stag and killed by a fellow hunter. In a suburban car park, Jupiter meets Europa. He tells her how he seduced another young woman, Io, whom his wife Juno subsequently turned into a heifer and gave to Argus, a man with 100 eyes. Jupiter sent his son Mercury to kill Argus; in revenge, Juno sent a gadfly to torment Io. Europa witnesses Jupiter turn the elderly Baucis and Philemon into trees. Jupiter and Europa make love. Afterwards, Jupiter encounters Juno. They argue about who has more pleasure in sex, men or women, and turn to Tiresias, a doctor who has been both a man and a woman, to settle the debate. When Tiresias agrees with Jupiter, Juno blinds him; Jupiter consoles him with the gift of prophecy. We also meet Narcissus, and see him transformed into a flower. Europa encounters Bacchus. He tells her the story of the Minyades sisters, whom he transformed into bats, and of Hermaphroditus, who was turned into a combination of man and woman after the nymph Salmacis fell in love with him. Europa witnesses Pentheus being torn apart by the Bacchantes, Bacchus’s female followers. She also meets Orpheus, who has lost his wife Eurydice and is now the leader of a cult. Orpheus tells the story of Atalanta and Hippomenes, transformed by Venus into lions. He and his followers are massacred by the Bacchantes, but Europa is saved by her brother Cadmus. As Jupiter looks on, Europa bathes naked in a lake.
Anime director Yuasa Masaaki first gained a following with his 2004 film Mind Game, a remarkable high-speed, multifaceted fantasy. Most of Yuasa’s subsequent work has been for TV, including his slightly less intense serial The Tatami Galaxy (2010), a comedy about a timelooped college student (available in Britain). The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl is effectively a Tatami Galaxy spinoff. While not a sequel, it shares the same absurdist, adult humour and aesthetics, as well as its setting (the city of Kyoto) and source author (Morimi Tomihiko). Galaxy, though, was served up more digestibly, in 20-minute episodes. Viewers who’ve seen it will find themselves on familiar ground with this film, but newcomers may find it too much like hard work. Not that there’s much that’s serious in the film. It’s a frothy, fantastical comedy about the adventures of a very capable female college student on an impossibly long night, interspersed with the misadventures of the hapless suitor following her. There are mildly bawdy jokes involving antique pornographic shunga prints, and fairytale motifs such as epic eating and drinking contests. In the loveliest visual conceit, a second-hand book fair is portrayed as an ocean for blissful bibliophiles. The film is full of simple colours, uneven lines and cartoon distortions – when characters drink, we see the blobs go down their necks. Yuasa has long advocated ‘relaxed’, imperfect animation. One of the film’s main liabilities, however, is its merciless torrent of fast-flowing subtitled dialogue, buffeting the viewer away from the visuals. The mini story too film also offers onee mini-story many, though the finale, in qualling which the hero’s squalling relationship fears congeal into a giant dream ugh battle waged through pe, an Escher landscape, is terrific. The Night Is Short, t, Walk On Girl
Credits and Synopsis Written by Ueda Makoto Based on the novel by Morimi Tomihiko Character Design Nakamura Yuusuke Music Oshima Michiru Production Companies Science SARU, TOHO animation Fuji TV, Toho, BS Fuji
Voice Cast Hanazawa Kana black-haired girl Hoshino Gen college senior
Yoshino Hiroyuki Tengu, god of the secondhand books market Kamiya Hiroshi college fair director Kaida Yuuko Hanuki Ryouko Nakai Kazuya Higuchi Seitarou Hiyama Nobuyuki Johnny Mugihito Li Bai Suwabe Junichi Nise Jougasaki Akiyama Ryuuji underpants man Yuuki Aoi Princess Daruma Niizuma Seiko
Suda Kazuko Yamaji Kazuhiro Toudou-san In Colour [1.78:1] Subtitles Distributor National Amusements Japan theatrical title Yoru wa Mijikashi Aruke yo Otome
Kyoto, Japan. During one endless night, an unnamed boy pursues an unnamed girl through fantastical adventures.
October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 69
REVIEWS
Reviewed by Andrew Osmond
On Body and Soul Hungary/Germany 2017 Director: Ildikó Enyedi Certificate 18 115m 41s
REVIEWS
Reviewed by Philip Kemp
Lives lived in parallel evidently intrigue the Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi. In her debut feature, My Twentieth Century (1989), twin sisters born in Budapest on the day that Thomas Edison first displays electric light are separated in childhood; one grows up to be a cunning vamp, the other a high-minded revolutionary, but their lives cross and mirror each other in paradoxical ways. Enyedi’s follow-up, Magic Hunter (1994), crosscuts stories set in present-day Hungary and medieval times. And in her most recent film, On Body and Soul, which was awarded the Golden Bear in Berlin, two people who lead similarly solitary, alienated lives discover that they’ve been sharing each other’s dreams. The gradual coming together of two individuals paralysed by shyness and inhibitions also links back to an earlier Enyedi film, Tamas and Juli (1997) – itself channelling ‘lonely folks’ social comedies such as Delbert Mann’s classic Paddy Chayefsky-scripted Marty (1955). The odd couple of the present film – Enyedi’s first feature for 18 years – are Endre (Géza Morcsányi), the finance director of a large industrialised slaughterhouse, and Mária (Alexandra Borbély), a young woman newly appointed as its quality inspector. Endre, a middle-aged man whose left arm is withered – we never learn the origin of this disability – lives alone, eating solitary dinners in cafés or in his apartment. His only friend, with whom he usually shares lunch in the works canteen, seems to be Jenö (Zoltán Schneider), the tubby and heavily married HR manager. Mária, a delicate blonde in her late twenties, apparently has no friends at all: painfully withdrawn to the point of autism, she lacks all social skills, rejects friendly overtures and hates being touched. Along with all this, she possesses total recall. Asked by a psychiatrist when she first menstruated, she responds unhesitatingly: “November 5th 1998.” The films opens, though, with neither of these two – or then again, perhaps with both. In a snow-covered wood, a stag and a doe wander together searching for food, occasionally nuzzling each other gently. Scenes of these two animals, intimately and appealingly shot, recur throughout the action, in startling counterpoint to the brutally blood-drenched, shit-stained killing process we see in the abattoir; only after some time do we discover (though we might already have guessed) that they’re the spiritual personae, the avatars even, of Endre and Mária in their shared dreams. It’s the discovery of this nocturnal sharing, via the sceptical psychiatrist, that brings them together – a turning point in the plot that, in the wrong hands, could have felt intolerably cutesy. Enyedi, though, handles this along with the other stages in their hesitant, tentatively developing relationship with quiet subtlety, often depicting her solitary pair in their respective apartments with through-window night shots that recall the paintings of Edward Hopper. The director’s sympathy for her characters doesn’t preclude sly humour, often expressed through a meaningful use of close-ups – as when we’re shown Mária’s geometrically arranged dinner plate, an exact half-circle of rice confronting four symmetrically fanned70 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
Shield of dreams: Alexandra Borbély, Géza Morcsányi
out fish fingers. Much of the humour involves the deftly characterised supporting cast, not least Réka Tenki as the psychiatrist Klára, her in-your-face attitude – along with her full scarlet lips and voluptuous breasts (which she catches Endre staring at) – providing a striking contrast to the pale, reticent Mária. Pál Macsái makes a quirkily sardonic cop, grinning at the thought of some purloined cattle-mating powder causing guests at a 50th class reunion to “jump at each other like crazed animals”, and there’s a robustly profane turn from Itala Békés as an outspoken elderly cleaning lady. The film is carried, though, by its two leads. Morcsányi – remarkably enough, here making his screen acting debut in his mid-sixties – brings a rueful melancholia to his portrayal of Endre,
his long bearded face suggesting a lifetime of stoic disillusionment. But it’s Borbély’s Mária who traces the longest story arc, as she teaches herself social skills such as emoting and touching: we see her taking a stuffed black panther to bed with her, stroking a cow at the abattoir (much to the amusement of the other employees), pressing her hand down on a plate of mashed potato, watching porno movies and acting out conversations with the help of Lego characters. Perhaps the film’s most ecstatic moment comes when, having wandered through a park gazing intrusively at the entwined couples lying on the grass, she lies down herself – and then the sprinklers come on. Her look of wondering delight as she’s suddenly showered encapsulates the film’s lyrical, elliptical charm.
Credits and Synopsis Producer Mónika Mécs András Muhi Ernö Mesterházy Written by Ildikó Enyedi Cinematographer Máté Herbai
Editor Károly Szalai Production Designer Imola Láng Original Score Ádám Balázs Sound Design Péter Lukács
Costume Designer Judit Sinkovics
Film presents
©Inforg-M&M Film Production Companies Films Boutique and Inforg-M&M
Cast
Present-day Hungary. Endre, a middle-aged man with a withered left arm, is financial director of an industrial slaughterhouse. A new quality inspector is appointed: Mária Rácz, a young blonde woman, taciturn and self-contained, with an aversion to physical contact. Endre feels drawn to her, but she rebuffs his advances. A brash young man, Sándor, is hired to work as a butcher; Endre instinctively dislikes him. Cattle-mating powder is reported stolen from the medicine cabinet; the police arrive to investigate and the inspector suggests that the regular mental screening programme be brought forward. The psychiatrist asks Endre what he dreamt last night; he says he was a stag wandering through a wintry forest with a doe. Mária, asked the same question, describes the identical dream from the
Alexandra Borbély Mária Rácz Géza Morcsányi Endre
In Colour [2.35:1] Subtitles
theatrical title Teströl és lélekröl
Distributor Mubi Hungarian
doe’s angle. The psychiatrist calls them in together and accuses them of playing games with her. Intrigued by their coinciding dreams, Endre and Mária start spending time together. The psychiatrist’s report concludes that the prime suspect for the theft is Endre’s friend Jenö, the HR manager. Endre is tempted to implicate Sándor, but Jenö confesses to him. Endre and Mária spend the night together at his place, in separate beds. Mária tries listening to music and teaching herself to touch. Endre spends a night with an ex-girlfriend. Mária offers to stay over with Endre; he rebuffs her. She slits her wrist in the bath. Endre phones, saying he loves her; she binds up her wrist, goes to the hospital, then to Endre’s flat, where they make love. The next morning they both admit they had no dreams: the woods are empty of deer.
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On the Road
Director: Michael Winterbottom
REVIEWS
Reviewed by Matthew Taylor
While the title of Michael Winterbottom’s latest docu-fiction hybrid may invoke Jack Kerouac, it’s a later 20th-century literary icon that emerges as the guiding influence on Wolf Alice, the ascendant North London indie-rock quartet followed on tour in On the Road. In typically laconic fashion, frontwoman Ellie Rowsell describes how she lifted her band’s name from a short story in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, the 1979 collection that inspired Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves (1984). As she does so, Winterbottom fills the screen with a resonant quote from the tale: “She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous… a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair.” It’s a state of being that has parallels with Winterbottom’s customary spontaneity, an instinctive approach that has informed a wildly diverse and prolific body of work since his 1995 debut Butterfly Kiss. But it could also describe variously the nomadic lot of the touring musician, the act of performing on stage and, indeed, the out-of-body abandon associated with rock ’n’ roll – of being temporarily lost in music. For Leah Harvey’s fictional management minion Estelle, meanwhile, it applies twofold. Finding herself transported – along with many other nameless faces in the crowd – by the band’s vigorous live shows, she is also diverted by an intense affair with another invented character, genial Glaswegian roadie Joe (James McArdle). If the juxtaposition of fictional love affair and authentic live performance suggests a more expansive retread of Winterbottom’s 9 Songs (2004), with the episodic location-hopping recalling TV’s The Trip, there are also echoes of his playful Tristram Shandy exercise A Cock and Bull Story (2005) – Estelle’s eager-toassimilate factotum recalling Naomie Harris’s cinephilic runner in that film. (You also wonder if Winterbottom may have seen Miguel Gomes’s 2008 Our Beloved Month of August, a more slippery hybrid work in which festival performances by amateur Portuguese bands gradually give way to a fictitious romance.) Despite being an insider – albeit a lowly one who’s frequently seen scurrying around the bowels of regional venues chasing down towels and booze – Estelle remains in a sense a spectator, someone observing the talent from afar even as she lives it up with them at aftershow parties. We also learn that she’s a capable budding musician in her own right – killing time on the tour bus, she annoys and wows the crew in equal measure with her R&B-inflected ditties. Inevitably, perhaps, there are heavy shades of D.A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back (1967) in this vérité portrait of a band on the cusp of major recognition and the occasional chafing at the spotlight that ensues during the daily rounds of press and radio interviews. At almost two hours, and taking in 16 different gigs during Wolf Alice’s March 2016 UK/ Ireland tour, it’s a baggy affair that may seem a tall order for those new or indifferent to the band. Yet this capacious frame helps in some ways to reflect the distended marathon of a touring schedule, with all its inherent 72 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
Tour de force: Ellie Rowsell
repetitions, monotonies and inconveniences. You could say that the band’s sound, which betrays a sizeable debt to early 1990s shoegaze and grunge outfits, represents an odd fit for a filmmaker as restless and forward-thinking as Winterbottom. But showcased live it has an undoubtedly visceral edge, one that’s keenly brought to the fore in the sound mix. DP James Clarke nimbly captures the subtly contrasting concert dynamics at cherished venues from Nottingham’s Rock City to Glasgow’s Barrowlands, his camera settling to rest on the faces of enraptured fans for moments at a time. A relative sense of dislocation, of being unmoored in time – Carter’s fugue of the continuous – Credits and Synopsis Produced by Melissa Parmenter Anthony Wilcox Director of Photography James Clarke Editor Marc Richardson Sound Recordist Sam Mathewson Production Companies Lorton Entertainment presents a Revolution Films
production Executive Producers Julian Bird Abi Gadsby Declan Reddington
Cast James McArdle Joe Leah Harvey Estelle Wolf Alice: Ellie Roswell Joff Oddie Joel Amey
Theo Ellis Wolf Alice Swim Deep Bloody Knees themselves Paul Popplewell Smiley Jamie Quinn Gary Shirley Henderson Joe’s mum In Colour Distributor Lorton Distribution
A film following rising London band Wolf Alice on the road during its 2016 tour of the UK and Ireland. Concert footage accompanies scenes of the band taking part in press and radio interviews, the road crew’s routine preparations and life backstage and on the tour bus. Romance blossoms between a pair of fictional characters, management intern Estelle and roadie Joe. In Glasgow, Joe awkwardly reconnects with his alcoholic mother. Estelle and Joe part ways back in London, with Joe set to join the band for a subsequent US tour.
seems to affect the band while in transit, with Rowsell musing on the difficulties of maintaining friendships and keeping in touch with parents. Much of the pleasure of On the Road derives from Winterbottom’s observational mode, which luxuriates in the day-to-day rituals that make up being in a band – the road crew’s lugging of gear on and off stages, meetings with venue management, radio sessions, backstage horseplay. A unique form of camaraderie emerges over the tour, particularly with Wolf Alice’s support bands Swim Deep and Bloody Knees (whose sets we also glimpse). When the focus turns to the burgeoning relationship between Estelle and Joe, the results can be less cohesive. While Harvey and McArdle are appealingly natural performers in their lightly sketched roles – an ice-cream parlour tête-à-tête is a highlight, with Estelle surprised at the grizzled Joe being only in his mid-twenties – and their love scenes shot with characteristic candour, these segments don’t always align seamlessly with the whole. Interestingly, it’s the moments where the past intrudes on the all-important present that find the film most at odds with itself: Estelle’s wistful reminiscences of her childhood in Peckham don’t fully register, while a scene where Joe hesitantly reunites with his alcoholic mother (Shirley Henderson) feels curiously tacked on. There’s no manufactured drama where the band itself is concerned – when bassist Theo Ellis is forced through injury to sit out the final London shows, he slips out of the film suddenly and quietly, not to be seen again until an end-credits appearance in grainy footage from the band’s subsequent US tour. Then again, it’s the absences – the bland stillness of a dressing room after a euphoric show, a solitary fan’s plea for an after-party that won’t happen, Estelle affectlessly reciting the American cities Joe and the band will visit without her – that linger in this often captivating chronicle.
The Reagan Show
France 2016 Director: Hélène Angel Certificate 12A 105m 10s
USA 2017 Directors: Pacho Velez, Sierra Pettengill
Reviewed by Ginette Vincendeau
Reviewed by Henry K. Miller
School and schoolchildren are a favourite topic in French films, finding a particular echo in a country whose entire cultural life – literature, art, film and television – is mapped on to the school year, with its long summer recess and the all-important rentrée in September, always a major ‘news’ event. Documentaries and fiction films alternate between passionate tributes to brilliant teachers and boisterous but basically adorable children (François Truffaut’s Small Change / L’Argent de poche, Gérard Lauzier’s The Best Job in the World, Nicolas Philibert’s Etre et avoir) and exposés of school as a mirror of dysfunctional society (Bertrand Tavernier’s It All Starts Today, Laurent Cantet’s The Class). Hélène Angel’s feature Primaire (‘Primary School’) stands uneasily between the two, veering from moments of social drama to cute comedy. We learn quite late in Primaire that the school in which the story takes place is in Grenoble, explaining the predominance of white children, with only a sprinkling of boys and girls of Asian or African origin. In keeping with the French secular model, no community or religious issues intrude, and the school is a haven of learning and play, epitomised by the year-six class of Florence Mautret (Sara Forestier), a charismatic teacher adored by her pupils. Her affectionate mastery of the children is contrasted with her intern’s inability to interest or control them when she is in charge. So when Florence falls apart during a school inspection, the viewer knows that this is due to personal problems, and her public breakdown appears to have no impact on her career. This is not the only fairytale aspect of the film: a lovely girl miraculously starts reading on the last day of school (illustrating Florence’s claim that no child leaves her class without basic skills); the chaotic school play is a last-minute success; a girl with learning difficulties makes huge progress; the school’s lost pet rabbit turns up unharmed; Florence’s stressful relationship with her exhusband (Antoine Gouy) and disputes about their son Denis (Albert Cousi) are happily sorted. On the verge of quitting, Florence changes her mind and we see her greet a new class at the rentrée.
There’s a good joke in Family Guy where Peter goes back in time to the mid-1980s, makes a mess of his younger self’s first meeting with his future wife Lois, then has to go back repeatedly to put things right. Naturally, there are a lot of Back to the Future (1985) references, and the best of them comes when Peter hears who’s in the Oval Office. “Ronald Reagan? The actor? He’s president?” The Reagan Show is a bit like that. Yes, now it can be told: Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States, was once a Hollywood actor, and – get this – his former profession had some bearing on his presidency. For the first time, the hitherto sober and virtuous pursuit of democratic politics, once the preserve of the scrupulous and the self-effacing, took on elements of stagecraft, and at points it even resembled showbusiness… You don’t need to have lived through the Reagan years to find this premise familiar, and you don’t need much acquaintance with American (or indeed any) history to see its flaws. Not that the filmmakers claim originality of insight. One of the first clips in this compilation of clips, taken from contemporary television news and from the White House’s own archive, features Reagan’s communications director telling an interviewer that media management is an integral part of modern government and that the White House “has become more of a stage, a theatre”. It was a mainstream talking point at the time. But the filmmakers do not go on to reveal what the stagecraft covered up; by confining themselves to TV images they make this impossible. What they do instead for the most part is give a digest of Reagan’s summit meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet premier from 1985, as they were relayed to the viewing millions across the world. This is not uninteresting, but it does not add up to anything like the slamdunk critique it purports to be; in fact, except for the mostly light-comedy score, it could just as easily be a celebration of what Reagan and Gorbachev achieved. The gravamen of the filmmakers’ accusation – these bits get the Beethoven’s Seventh treatment – seems to be that Reagan almost scuppered the talks by insisting on proceeding with the so-called Star Wars programme, a missile-defence shield that would have extended US military power into space. But he didn’t. The summits led to a nuclear arms reduction treaty signed in 1987; and, in the end, though a caption tells us that both sides claimed victory, seasoned observers of the international scene may dimly recall what happened next. Of all Reagan’s foreign-policy initiatives – outstandingly, from a 21st-century perspective, the backing of the Afghan mujahideen – this is, on the face of it, a perplexing one to pick out for criticism; and because there is virtually no perspective other than that provided by the news networks, the face of it is all we get. The strangest moment comes when the Iran-Contra scandal breaks – in the film, all we hear of this is that the Reagan administration was caught making an arms deal with Iran to obtain the release of American hostages being held by Hezbollah, Iran’s client in the Lebanon. But what we don’t hear is how the scandal developed – money from the deal was being remitted to Nicaraguan
The class menagerie: Sara Forestier
Such heartwarming occurrences exist in real life, of course, but the film’s refusal to contemplate the fact that best intentions and heroic effort may fail moves it into the realm of implausibility. However, the problem is less Primaire’s attempt to weave social problems into a feelgood movie than the clumsy and biased way in which it does so. The glowing portrayal of Florence as teacher and single mother (Denis is also a pupil in her class), helped by Forestier’s excellent performance, is stereotypically contrasted with the vilified Christina (Laure Calamy), who abandons her son Sacha (Ghillas Bendjoudi), seemingly for purely selfish reasons. Sacha disrupts Florence’s class but she rescues him thanks to Mathieu (Vincent Elbaz), Christina’s irresponsible yet sexy ex-lover. Although there is talk of Sacha going to a foster family (echoing the plot of Small Change), the epilogue, with an ecstatic Florence and Mathieu riding on his moped, suggests a happy famille recomposée in the making. Also awkward is the clash between naturalistic scenes of classroom activities and oddly theatrical moments, in particular Florence’s tearful speech to the class and the inspector about the wonders of learning. Primaire contains enjoyable scenes, because children are great natural actors and nothing can totally dampen their energy and colourful presence. But ultimately neither they nor Forestier can save the film from illustrating the other, unfortunate meaning of its title: ‘unsophisticated’.
Credits and Synopsis Produced by Hélène Cases Screenplay Hélène Angel Yann Coridian In collaboration with: Agnès de Sacy Olivier Gorce Original Idea/ Adaptation Hélène Angel Director of Photography Yves Angelo Editing Sylvie Lager
Christophe Pinel Art Direction Nicolas de Boiscuillé Original Music Composed and Orchestrated by Philippe Miller Sound Antoine-Basile Mercier Arnaud Rolland Olivier Dô Hùu Costumes Catherine Rigault ©Lionceau Films,
Studiocanal, France 2 Cinéma Production Companies Lionceau Films and Studiocanal present a Lionceau Films, Studiocanal, France 2 Cinéma co-production With the participation of Canal+, OCS, France Télévisions With the support of Région Île-de-France In association
Grenoble, present day. Florence is a devoted primary school teacher who lives in a flat above the school with her son Denis, a pupil in her class. The arrival of Sacha, a neglected child whose mother has disappeared, disturbs both her class (children reject him because he smells) and her life. She is attracted to Mathieu, disorganised but sympathetic, who cares for Sacha on and off. She is also fighting her estranged husband, who wants to take Denis to Java for a year. As we follow
with Indéfilms 4 With the support of Centre National du Cinéma et de l’image animée
Cast Sara Forestier Florence Mautret Vincent Elbaz Mathieu Patrick D’Assumçao Monsieur Sabatier Guilaine Londez Madame Duru
Olivia Côte Marlène Peillard Lucie Desclozeaux Laure, trainee Albert Cousi Denis Mautret Ghillas Bendjoudi Sacha Drouet Laure Calamy Christina Drouet Antoine Gouy Denis’s father Denis Sebbah M. Hadjaj Frédéric Boismoreau Rémy the caretaker
Eric Bougnon teacher In Colour [1.85:1] Subtitles Distributor Studiocanal Limited UK publicity title Elementary
Florence’s daily routine in the classroom, Sacha’s mother is found – but she continues to reject the boy and he is threatened with placement in a foster family. A teaching inspection and a mediation session to settle her son’s situation put further pressure on Florence, with the result that she decides to hand in her notice. However, the school play is a success and a pupil with learning difficulties suddenly starts to read; Florence decides to continue teaching.
October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 73
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Primaire
Shin Godzilla Director: Anno Hideaki Certificate 12A 119m 51s
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Reviewed by Tony Rayns
An actor’s revenge: Ronald Reagan
paramilitaries, the administration’s covert support of whom would make another more obvious target for censure than the signing of an arms reduction treaty with the USSR. I have entertained the possibility that I’m missing something, that the filmmakers are themselves engaging in retro 80s postmodernism, and living up to the edict of Prof Brian O’Blivion, the spoof Marshall McLuhan character in Videodrome (1983): “Television is reality, and reality is less than television.” Maybe the choice to rely almost solely on clips is the point. But this only takes us back to the non-revelation that Reagan was an actor, and there is a whole tradition of novels and films more sophisticated than this one – recently Pablo Larraín’s Jackie (2016) – that explore the stage management of history by Reagan’s forerunners. The film ends with an American anchorman sententiously intoning: “I shudder when it’s suggested that politicians who come after him are going to have to succeed first on television.” If irony is intended by this, it isn’t nearly laboured enough – it really seems to be meant seriously. Ditto when another newscaster remarks, even more preposterously,
that “in the Gorbachev era, the Soviets have become image-conscious” – not something that anyone working in the tradition of Esfir Shub, inventor of the compilation film, should allow into their own compilation unmocked. TV entails volume. One caption says that there is more film and video footage of Reagan than of his five immediate predecessors – Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter – combined, but apart from the fact that he was the only one of them to complete two terms (and two of them, quite memorably in one case, didn’t complete one), that is largely a reflection of technological change. Video hardly existed when Kennedy was elected in 1960. By 1980, the year of Reagan’s election, which also saw the launch of CNN, the first 24-hour news channel, video was in the home. Amid all this white noise, newscasters can and will say anything to cut through, and will choose vox-pop talking heads on the same principle. To treat them as truth-tellers in a world gone mad, and attempt to make serious history out of their blather alone, is nonsensical, and the filmmakers lack the critical perspective necessary to make sense of it.
Toho’s Godzilla reboot was a smash in Japan last year, but its path into international distribution has been rocky. (The DCP under review still had the Australian distributor’s logo at the top, and a quick Google reveals that initial distributor Altitude let the UK rights lapse after a festival screening in Glasgow.) The main reason the film is a tough sell to western viewers is that it’s less the usual monster rampage than an extended satire of Japan’s political inertia – and a bitter reflection on the aftermath of 2011’s tsunami and nuclear disaster in eastern Japan. Like the original Godzilla (Gojira, 1954), it’s primarily aimed at the domestic audience. The bizarre half-Japanese English title (‘shin’ most often means ‘new’ but could also mean ‘god’) reflects doubts about the film’s global potential. Written and co-directed by master animator and self-defined clinical depressive Anno Hideaki (Neon Genesis Evangelion, 1995-97), the film is a fast-paced two-hour collage of panicky meetings, cryptic-clue problem-solving sessions and breaking news flashes, all with quick-fire subtitling, with the odd scene of Tokyo-trampling thrown in; ministerial bickering and buckpassing accounts for a lot of the running time. Godzilla’s rapid evolution from clumsy, bug-eyed youth to full-grown ambient nuclear furnace emitting mauve death-rays is not really the subject; this time the monster is a symptom, not the protagonist. The images of urban destruction deliberately evoke the devastation of the Fukushima area after the tsunami, as does the talk of spreading background radiation, and the satire of the government’s dithering, incompetent response to disaster (it’s like The Thick of It without the profanity) reflects widespread criticisms of the Japanese government in 2011. Political satire of any kind is a rarity in conformist Japan, so it’s a surprise than Anno goes further than mere disrespect. The film has broader subversions hidden in plain sight. Insights into the physics and chemistry of Godzilla’s rapidly mutating body come from an academic thrown out by the Japanese establishment; he has committed suicide in Tokyo Bay but left behind his notes and charts.
Credits and Synopsis Produced by Sierra Pettengill Written by Josh Alexander Pacho Velez Co-written by Francisco Bello Edited by Francisco Bello Daniel Garber David Barker Music Laura Karpman Supervising
Sound Editor/ Re-recording Mixer Ryan M. Price ©The Reagan Years, LLC Production Companies In association with Impact Partners and Artemis Rising Foundation Fiscal sponsorship: Documentary
Educational Resources Made with the generous support of Impact Partners Supported by Catapult Film Fund, Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program with support from JustFilms Ford Foundation, Cinereach, LEF, Tribeca All Access
A compilation of broadcast news and internal White House TV footage telling the story of US president Ronald Reagan’s arms reduction summits with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s, which culminated in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces
74 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
Program Executive Producers Dan Cogan Amy Entelis Houston King Regina K. Scully Film Extracts The Winning Team (1952) This Is the Army (1943) She’s Working Her Way through College (1952)
That Hagen Girl (1947) The Bad Man (1941) Code of the Secret Service (1939) Desperate Journey (1942) Cattle Queen of Montana (1954) Law and Order (1953) The Day After (1983)
[1.33:1] Part-subtitled Distributor Dogwoof
In Colour and Black & White
(INF) Treaty, signed in 1987. The Treaty came into force the following year, shortly before the end of Reagan’s second term. The footage includes reflections on the effect that Reagan’s former career as an actor had on his closely stage-managed performance as president.
Easy strider: Shin Godzilla
Step
USA 2017 Director: Amanda Lipitz Certificate PG 83m 39s
Credits and Synopsis Co-director Higuchi Shinji Chief Producer Ichikawa Minami Producers Ueda Taichi Sato Yoshihiro Shibusawa Masaya Wadakura Kazutoshi Screenplay Anno Hideaki Cinematography Yamada Kosuke Editors Sato Atsuki Anno Hideaki Art Directors Hayashida Yuji Sakushima Eri Music
Sagisu Shiro Sound Nakamura Jun Production Companies Toho Co., Ltd, Toho Pictures, Cine Bazar Executive Producer Yamauchi Akihiro
Cast Hasegawa Hiroki Yaguchi Rando Takenouchi Yutaka Akasaka Hideki Ishihara Satomi Kayoko Ann Patterson
Osugi Ren Okouchi, prime minister Mansai Nomura Godzilla In Colour [2.35:1] Subtitles Distributor National Amusements Japanese theatrical title Shin Gojira
Japan, now. An abandoned yacht is found drifting in Tokyo Bay and the Aqualine Tunnel under the bay springs a serious leak. Amid government departmental disarray, deputy cabinet secretary Yaguchi Rando becomes convinced that a huge sea creature is responsible – a hypothesis soon confirmed by TV news reports. The dinosaur-like creature wades upriver and ashore, leaving a trail of death and destruction. Under attack the creature collapses but quickly revives in an evolved form and goes to ground in the sea. As bureaucrats bicker and it emerges that the creature is radioactive, Yaguchi convenes a crisis committee of rebel academics, nerds and other oddballs to develop new strategies. US envoy Kayoko Ann Patterson arrives in Tokyo on the trail of Maki Goro, a renegade zoologist and anti-nuclear activist who predicted the appearance of such a creature. Maki was forced into exile but recently returned to Japan; it was his yacht found in the bay, and his notes dub the creature ‘Godzilla’ in English, ‘Gojira’ in Japanese. Godzilla resurfaces at Kamariya, now twice the size, and heads towards Tokyo, apparently strengthened by military bombardments. Prime Minister Okouchi and most of his cabinet are killed when a ray from Godzilla brings down their helicopter; Satomi Yusuke becomes acting PM. With the UN threatening to deploy a thermonuclear bomb, Yaguchi’s team cracks a riddle in Maki’s notes and figures out that Godzilla can be temporarily ‘frozen’ by altering its body chemistry with coagulants. At great cost of life, the plan succeeds.
Reviewed by Violet Lucca
A touching and funny documentary that says more about contemporary African-American life than about dance, Amanda Lipitz’s Step couldn’t be timelier. Following three seniors at the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women – Blessin Giraldo, Cori Grainger and Tayla Solomon – as they apply to colleges and prepare for their final competition as part of the ‘Lethal Ladies’ step team, the film gives voice to the unique struggles of black women across generations, and deconstructs the ‘strong black woman’ stereotype. The event that quietly presides over the film is the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who sustained fatal spinal-cord injuries while in Baltimore police custody. The conditions of Gray’s death became international news in 2015 following citywide protests (some of which turned violent, leading governor Larry Hogan to declare a state of emergency) and national demonstrations organised by the Black Lives Matter movement. For the women and girls in Step, Gray’s passing was not an abstraction. The team’s new coach, Gari McIntyre, introduces herself as someone who lives on Gray’s block; McIntyre has the team take roses to Gray’s memorial, gives them ‘the talk’ about police brutality, and tells them that as black women they have it harder than other demographics. Afterwards, Blessin remarks: “It could’ve been us, and it still can be.” Later, this is incorporated into one of their step routines as a chant. The threat of the violence that ended Gray’s life is just one of the obstacles that Blessin, Cori and Tayla all face, because despite their shared age, race, gender and love of stepping – a dance form that evolved from African foot dances and has been practised by fraternities and sororities at historically black universities for more than a century – they are very different. Blessin is beautiful, talented, intelligent and outgoing, but struggles to be successful because she hasn’t learned adequate coping skills (her mother suffers from depression, and frequently fails to attend important school events). The dysfunction of her home life comes into sharp focus when she’s giving herself a facial and there’s no food in the refrigerator for her and her six-year-old nephew – they have to wait until an adult comes home to get something to eat. Like many of the girls around her, Blessin is just a kid, but isn’t always allowed to be one. Cori’s family also struggles financially, to the
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The useless politicians (played by Japan’s bestknown character actors: Osugi Ren, Emoto Akira et al) are trumped by a relatively youthful civil servant, Yaguchi (Hasegawa Hiroki), who is not only the first to ‘get’ Godzilla but also the one who realises that only non-consensus thinkers will come up with the right ideas. Yaguchi convenes an ad-hoc committee of oddballs, otaku and misfits (played by indie filmmakers: Tsukamoto Shinya, Hara Kazuo, Inudo Isshin, Ogata Akira et al) and is himself defined by his Oshima-like insistence on using the term kono kuni (‘this country’) rather than the conventional consensus term waga kuni (‘our country’). Stronger blows than these to Japan’s ultraconservative body politic were launched in Suzuki Yohei’s landmark indie mind-melt Ow (Maru, 2014), but it’s kind of amazing that Anno managed to sneak anything of the sort into a big-budget Toho blockbuster. It’s a pity Toho didn’t stump up for higher-quality CGI, but Nomura Mansai deserves a shout for playing the first-ever Japanese motion-capture Godzilla.
Scene-stealers: Tayla Solomon
point where their electricity is turned off after her stepfather loses his job. As Cori sits on her stoop, she sullenly notes: “Comfortability is cyclical… one thing goes bad, then another thing goes bad…” Yet despite these hardships, she graduates as class valedictorian and nabs a full-ride scholarship to a prestigious university. Tayla, reserved but wise, is most often glimpsed rolling her eyes – her mother Maisha attends almost every step practice and, in addition to serving as unofficial assistant coach, sometimes clowns around dancing. (Maisha is a total scenestealer, the kind of ‘extra’ mum you can only appreciate if you don’t have one just like her.) The release stepping offers each of the girls is clear, and the pride they have in their moves is apparent even in their practices. The history of stepping isn’t covered here, but in many ways that isn’t the point. Getting to know these young women is undoubtedly the most enjoyable part of Step, and forgives the occasionally outof-focus or shaky camerawork. Despite these technical problems, the dance numbers the Lethal Ladies perform are beautifully assembled, and convey the power and precision involved in realising them. Lipitz does show other teams’ step routines at various competitions, but only very briefly – she wants us to root for ‘our’ girls. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to.
Credits and Synopsis Produced by Steven Cantor Amanda Lipitz Director of Photography Casey Regan Film Editor Penelope Falk Music Laura Karpman Raphael Saadiq Audio Supervisor Jonathan Field ©Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation Production Companies
Fox Searchlight Pictures presents Amanda Lipitz Productions, Epiphany Story Lab, Vulcan Productions, Inc. and Impact Partners present a Stick Figure production Executive Producers Dan Cogan Geralyn Dreyfous Jenny Raskin Scott Rudin Paul G. Allen Carole Tomko Micheal Flaherty
Valerie McGowan Phillip Glasser Barbara Dobkin Regina K. Scully Debra McLeod Jay Sears Ann Tisch Andrew Tisch In Colour Distributor 20th Century Fox International (UK)
A documentary following the progress of the ‘Lethal Ladies’ step team at the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women. At the start of the school year in September 2015, Gari McIntyre takes over as the new team coach. Team members Blessin Giraldo (a founder of the team), Cori Grainger and Tayla Solomon apply to colleges and prepare for their final step competition at Bowie State University. The young women’s families and Paula Dofat, director of counselling at the school, are also key figures in the documentary. Blessin is accepted to BridgeEdU, a yearlong college preparatory programme; Cori wins a full scholarship to Johns Hopkins, her first choice; Tayla is offered a scholarship to Alabama A&M. The team wins the top prize at Bowie.
October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 75
Tramontane
The Vault
Reviewed by Anton Bitel
Reviewed by Anton Bitel
“Send me an answer… and relieve me. Even if you wish to accuse me, don’t spare me. Send me an answer.” These lyrics – a plea for truth, however painful – are from a traditional song performed in the opening scene of Tramontane by a 24-year-old musician (Barakat Jabbour) during an outdoor gathering of family and friends at the villa of his uncle, village bigwig Hisham Ralek (Toufic Barakat). It is a joyous, celebratory occasion, from which discordant realities – such as Hisham’s old comrade-at-arms Omar (Raymond Haddouni) – are strictly excluded. Significantly, the musician’s widowed mother Samar (Julia Kassar), Hisham’s sister, dismisses Omar at the villa’s gate with a deception, claiming that her brother is away in Beirut. The Raleks, it will emerge, have long been living a lie. Both literally and metaphorically blind, the musician is – or at least thinks he is – Rabih, which is also the Arabic title of Vatche Boulghourjian’s feature debut, marking both the young man’s identity and its fictionalisation as the film’s central theme. Applying for a passport so that he can travel to Europe with his band, Rabih discovers that his identification papers are all false, leading him to go on something of a wild goose chase, first to the tiny hamlet of Kfarlaya in Lebanon’s south, then to the salt fields of Enfeh, an Armenian orphanage in Jbeil, a psychiatric hospital in Wardieh and finally across the mountains (hence the film’s English title) to the village of Wadi El Tin. Along the way he hears a series of tall tales about his own lost past and his country’s, as the tangled, traumatic history of sufferings and crimes in Lebanon’s civil war is conveniently dissembled, forgotten or (re) forged. Here, identity is both contested territory and a minefield – and we are left, with Rabih, to piece together exactly who he is, and how his ex-
The Vault opens with the sound of a distorted male voice reporting a robbery in progress and a hostage situation. The credits then play over a beautifully edited montage of overlapping images: headlines about the Centurion Trust Bank siege, blueprints (2D and 3D) of the bank’s interior and impressionistic close-up shots of the horrific situation inside, as injured people with money bags over their heads are dragged into the vault and set alight with petrol, turning the whole building into an inferno. All this unfolds to the ironically calming tune of Tommy James and the Shondells’ 1968 classic ‘Crimson and Clover’. With the credits over, we see the pristine bank exterior, and assistant bank manager Ed Maas (James Franco) inside, making himself a drink in the staff kitchen. As he emerges into the atrium, Andrew Shulkind’s circling camera picks out two women acting suspiciously. Indeed, sisters Leah and Vee Dillon (Francesca Eastwood and Taryn Manning), with the help of their brother Michael (Scott Haze) and two male accomplices (Keith Loneker and Michael Milford), are about to rob the bank. So it is natural to assume that the opening sequence was a flashforward, and that the rest of the film will catch up with its introduction: these five desperate criminals will break their ‘one rule’ not to harm anyone – actually they break it almost as soon as the robbery begins – and the situation will somehow deteriorate over time into the hostage holocaust already foreshadowed. In fact the prologue was a flashback to events from 1982 (the same year that Joan Jett and the Blackhearts’ cover of ‘Crimson and Clover’ came out), but much as the bank today is built on the foundations of that older, fire-damaged structure, so there is the sense that a cover version of a past tragedy is being played out “over and over” (as the song’s lyrics put it). Where Spike Lee’s Inside Man (2006) anatomised a raid on a bank concealing traces of a terrible history, The Vault adds its own supernatural spin, while still retaining a ghostly version – or versions – of the ‘inside man’, forever reliving the horrors of the past. For, working with his frequent writing partner Conal Byrne, director Dan Bush (The Signal, FightFuckPray, The Reconstruction of William
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Lebanon/France/Germany/United Arab Emirates/ Qatar/USA/Italy/Jordan 2016 Director: Vatche Boulghourjian
USA/United Kingdom 2017 Director: Dan Bush Certificate 15 91m 23s
Who do you think you are?: Julia Kassar
military ‘uncle’ came across him as a baby, using shreds of testimony that, though conflicting, point to unpleasant truths about Hisham’s wartime conduct. Meanwhile, those who lost ‘Rabih’ as a child, no less than those who gained him, wish to leave the unsavoury facts buried. In a small scene near the beginning of the film, Rabih seeks a violin for use in his upcoming European concert. “It’s an old violin,” the salesman explains. “It sounds like silk. Her grandfather brought it from Egypt. We don’t know its exact origin.” This instrument, without precise provenance but still capable of making beautiful music, is a clear analogue for Rabih himself, who in the film’s final sequence is shown publicly performing the same classical piece that he sang at the beginning, only in “a new arrangement”, the lyrics now a lament for a nation’s self-deception (with Samar and Hisham again in the audience). Like Rabih, the film uses its art to rearrange Lebanon’s past as a way to look to the future. At times meandering, and heavy-handed with its symbolism, Tramontane nonetheless earnestly avoids any false notes.
Credits and Synopsis Producers Caroline Oliveira Georges Schoucair Writer Vatche Boulghourjian Director of Photography James Lee Phelan Editor Nadia Ben Rachid Art Director Nadine Ghanem Composer and Music Supervisor Cynthia Zaven Sound Editor and Designer Rana Eid Wardrobe
Lara Khamis ©Rebus Film Production, Abbout Productions, Le Bureau Production Companies Rebus Film Production and Abbout Productions present in coproduction with Le Bureau, Film Factory, Sunnyland Film as a member of ART Group with the participation of l’Aide aux Cinémas du Monde, Centre
National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée, Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et du Développement International, Institut Français supported by the special programme WCF Europe in co-production and with the support of Emjaaz Supported by The Doha Film Institute, The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC), The IFP Independent Film
A village in Lebanon, around 2012. When 24-yearold blind musician Rabih applies for a passport, the authorities declare his existing documents false. Rabih’s ‘mother’ Samar reveals that he was found abandoned as a baby in 1988 by his ‘uncle’ Hisham’s platoon in the war-ravaged southern village of Kfarlaya. Travelling to Kfarlaya, Rabih learns that no baby died or went missing there in 1988. Hisham’s former platoon comrade Omar directs Rabih to another comrade, Aziz, in Enfeh. Aziz claims that Hisham rescued baby Rabih from a burning car in Beirut (an incident that caused Rabih’s blindness) and took him to the Armenian orphanage, but changed his mind and claimed Rabih for himself,
76 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
Week - No Borders, The Venice Biennale College Cinema, The Sundance Institute Made with the support of the Cinéfondation of the Festival de Cannes Recipient of a production grant from the Doha Film Institute Supported by the Sundance Institute Feature Film Program and by the Sundance Institute Feature Film Creative Producing Fellowship
Developed with the assistance of the Rawi Screenwriters Lab, a project of the Royal Film Commission Jordan in consultation with the Sundance Institute Executive Producers Alexander Akoka Philippe Akoka
Hisham In Colour [1.78:1] Subtitles Distributor Arrow Films Lebanese theatrical title Rabih
Cast Barakat Jabbour Rabih Julia Kassar Samar Toufic Barakat
only to hand him over to Samar when his fiancée left him. The Armenian orphanage denies Rabih was ever there. Samar reveals that Hisham’s former fiancée is May, the sister of his comrade Nabil (said now to be in Africa). May tells Rabih that Nabil has in fact spent 20 years in a psychiatric hospital for speaking out against ‘them’. Rabih visits Nabil, who reveals that Hisham took the infant Rabih during an operation against Rabih’s father Rafik, who was already known to him, in a village on the other side of the mountains. There, Rabih finds Rafik’s elderly parents, who prefer to think of their lost grandson as long buried. Hisham obtains new false documents for Rabih, and Rabih gets his passport.
Out of the past: James Franco
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The Villainess
REVIEWS
Republic of Korea 2017 Director: Jung Byung-gil Certificate 18 123m 32s
Zero) has concocted a genre-bending haunted-bank movie where time itself vaults in mysterious ways, where heist meets poltergeist, and where the past seems destined to repeat itself, with accumulating interest. Tension here is built on questions (eventually resolved) of ethical motive: are the sack-covered or mask-wearing entities in the basement attempting to reiterate what happened earlier, or to correct it – or a bit of both? And is Ed, who helps the robbers while claiming that he just wants to minimise harm to customers and staff, being entirely transparent? Unravelling in a historical building that is a marbled locus of materialist concerns, Bush’s film breaks into the Dillon siblings’ moral vaults and reveals who they really are on the inside. Credits and Synopsis Produced by Alan Pao Alex Cutler Luke Daniels Tom Butterfield Written by Dan Bush Conal Byrne Director of Photography Andrew Shulkind Edited by Ed Marx Dan Bush Production Designer Jesse J. Clarkson Music Shaun Drew Production Sound Mixer Serena Reichenbaugh Costume Designer Karen Freed ©The Vault Productions, LLC Production Companies FilmRise, Content Media Corporation presents a Redwire Pictures, Culmination Productions and
Casadelic Pictures production in association with Jeff Rice Films, LB Entertainment A Dan Bush film Executive Producers Darby Parker Michael Becker Jeff Rice Lee Broda Gary Matthew Dmitry Paniotto John R. Sherman Jeff Gum Alex Vayshelboym Shaun S. Sanghani Dan Bush Conal Byrne Jamie Carmichael Josh Kesselman Jon Graham Hai Trieu Ton Joseph Dang Alexander Motlagh Greg Scott Scott Adler Dana Guerin Michael Guerin Scott Reed
Cast
Leah Dillon Taryn Manning Vee Dillon Q’orianka Kilcher Susan Cromwell Keith Loneker Cyrus Clifton Collins Jr Detective Iger James Franco Ed Maas Scott Haze Michael Dillon Jeff Gum James Aiken Jill Jane Clements Mary Michael Milford Kramer Debbie Sherman Lauren Conal Byrne Kirkham Lee Broda Nancy Alex Vayshelboym Ben In Colour [2.35:1] Distributor Content Media Corporation
Francesca Eastwood
A US city, 1982. In the Centurion Trust Bank, a masked robber loses his mind during a prolonged siege, and commits atrocities that culminate in setting alight staff and customers in the vault. Present day. To clear their brother Michael’s debts, estranged sisters Leah and Vee join him and hired criminals Cyrus and Kramer in a raid on the Centurion Trust. When they find the ground-floor vault nearly empty of cash, assistant bank manager Ed Maas agrees to help them disable the alarms in return for their promise not to harm anyone, and informs them that the old basement vault contains $6 million. After drilling into the vault’s door, Kramer is surrounded by dark figures – and drills into his own head. Cyrus is assailed by terrifying figures that he’d thought were hostages, and shoots himself. Head teller Susan tells an incredulous Leah of the bank’s history, and of the ghosts that haunt it. Armed police surround the bank. Believing that an insider is in contact with the police, Leah is about to torture Susan when Michael intervenes. As he opens a pipe to serve as their escape route, Michael sees a ghost. When the police storm in, Leah and Vee escape with the money, while Michael sets fire to the ghosts and himself. Confused police establish that Ed was assistant manager – and was killed – in 1982. The masked robber’s ghost catches up with the sisters outside.
78 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
Reviewed by Trevor Johnston
It says a lot about the regressive attitudes embedded in this South Korean crime thriller that its blade-wielding heroine should be dubbed ‘The Villainess’, even though its convoluted narrative reveals a woman far more sinned against than sinning. Admittedly, first impressions are deceptive. “Who is this crazy bitch?” asks a criminal henchman, after Kim Ok-bin’s petite yet ferocious Sook-hee has shot, scythed and bludgeoned her way through a queue of his nefarious colleagues in an eye-catching opening sequence seemingly designed to top the hammer-swinging highlight in Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003). Delivering a full eight minutes of non-stop slaughter, director Jung Byung-gil and his colleagues turn in a state-of-the-art display of choreography, camera movement, editing and digital post-production, creating the impression of a startling single take that’s presumably a patchwork of seamlessly blended elements. Indeed, it’s in those sequences blurring the line between live action and digital effects that the film is at its most striking – when, for instance, three motorcyclists take part in a slashing knife fight while speeding through a road tunnel, or gung-ho Sook-hee drives her car off a rooftop parking lot and through the window of the building opposite. How did they do that? A shame then that the elaborately constructed storyline supporting these choice moments of mayhem should fall so short of the melodramatic delirium it’s clearly aiming for, hampered by basic issues of credibility, opaque motivation and an insidiously unpleasant feeling that the filmmakers have drawn rather too heavily on the attitudes of sundry early-1970s Japanese exploitation pics – where women are to be valued for the sheer amount of punishment they can soak up. In plot terms, the key reference point would seem to be Luc Besson’s Nikita (1990), since the deadly skills manifested in the opening massacre get Sook-hee inducted into a secret Korean intelligence unit, where she’ll evade prison but spend the next decade as a sleeper agent on call for covert assassination assignments.
Stick it to them: Kim Ok-bin
That she swiftly falls in love with a charming neighbour who, unbeknown to her, is a fellow agent there to keep tabs on her, adds a curious romcom element to the mix. But the screenplay’s real emotional sadism emerges as it parcels out flashbacks explaining what or who it was that turned Sook-hee into a virtually unstoppable killing machine. Cue some serious daddy issues and a ruthless female-bashing villain who trained Sook-hee to join his criminal network – only for her (of course!) to fall madly in love with him. With the backstory flashbacks, present-day romance and ongoing espionage action all piled on top of each other, no wonder the narrative feels overloaded, to the point that one questions the effort of unpacking it all. Hard to fault leading lady Kim’s tigerish physical application, but she doesn’t quite have the acting chops to convince as the grand tragic heroine evidently intended. Much more convincing is the masklike restraint of Kim Seo-hyung’s steely female intelligence chief and Shin Ha-kyun’s serenely hissable crime lord, in a movie whose bursts of adrenaline just about keep it moving in the face of an intermittent expository drag factor.
Credits and Synopsis Producer Jung Byung-gil Written by Jung Byung-gil Jung Byeong-sik Cinematography Park Jung-hun Editor Heo Sun-mi
Production Design Kim Hee-jin Music Koo Ja-wan Sound Recording Kim Ki-nam Costumes Chae Kyung-hwa Action
Choreography Kwon Gui-duck ©Next Entertainment World & Apeitda Production Companies Next Entertainment World presents an
Urban South Korea, present day. Sook-hee, a young Korean-Chinese woman, is apprehended by police after killing numerous criminals in a gangster’s lair. She is taken away by the intelligence service; discovering that she is pregnant, she agrees for the sake of her child to use her lethal skills as a sleeper agent. After completing training, she settles into a new apartment under an assumed identity. Soon she is courted by neighbour Hyun-soo, who unbeknown to her is a fellow agent assigned to keep watch on her. Meanwhile, memories resurface, revealing that she saw her father murdered and was kidnapped by crime lord Joong-sang, who trained her to kill and eventually married her. On their honeymoon, she believed him murdered by a rival gang,
Apeitda production Executive Producer Kim Woo-taek
Cast Kim Ok-bin Sook-hee, ‘Chae Yeon-soo’
Shin Ha-kyun Lee Joong-sang Bang Sung-jun Jung Hyun-soo Kim Seo-hyung Chief Kwon Cho Eun-ji Kim-sun
In Colour [2.35:1] Subtitles Distributor Arrow Films Korean theatrical title Ak-Nyeo
thus prompting the violent rampage seen earlier. On the day of her wedding to Hyun-soo, Sook-hee is assigned by Chief Kwon to take out a target during the reception, and is so shocked to see Joong-sang still alive that she misses the shot, prompting Kwon to suspect her of working as a double agent in Joongsang’s employ. When Hyun-soo and her daughter are killed, Sook-hee initially believes a vengeful Kwon responsible, but the chief shows that Joong-sang is involved, and that Hyun-soo’s affections were genuine. Sook-hee confronts Joong-sang, who confesses that in expiation for killing her father he stopped himself loving her. After a chase, Sook-hee kills Joong-sang, before surrendering to the authorities.
Wolf Warrior II
USA/United Kingdom/France 2016 Director: Taylor Sheridan Certificate 15 107m 0s
People’s Republic of China 2017 Director: Wu Jing Certificate 15 123m 5s
Reviewed by Samuel Wigley
Reviewed by Trevor Johnston
Not quite screenwriter Taylor Sheridan’s directing debut, Wind River is a confident flexing of muscle from the man behind the scripts for Sicario (2015) and Hell or High Water (2016) – two of the more gripping dramas to come out of Hollywood in recent times. Switching the desert heat of the American Southwest for the snowy wildernesses of Wyoming, it rounds off a trio of films forged in the borderlands between the modern western and the thriller, but with a contemporary political edge that’s missing from the obvious Coen brothers touchstones Fargo (1996) and No Country for Old Men (2007). Inspired by the grim fact that no statistics are collected on missing Native American women, Wind River stars Jeremy Renner as Cory Lambert, a huntsman and tracker for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, who discovers the body of a young Native woman out in the snow on the vast Wind River reservation. During the murder investigation that ensues, Lambert’s assistance is called upon by flown-in FBI agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen), who recognises that he has invaluable knowledge of a terrain where she can only play fish out of water. This Twin Peaks-y set-up offers fertile ground for all kinds of cross-cultural confusions, as the bigcity detective moves not just into rural territory but out of federal legislature altogether. In fact, Sheridan offers something rather more sober. Our glimpses of life on the ‘res’ point to a deflated existence in which communities have been beaten down by economic disenfranchisement. Lambert’s own estranged Native American wife has the promise of a job in Jackson, but otherwise the world of Wind River is sluiced with sadness. Renner’s taciturn hero harbours his own heartbreak, which increases his thirst for retribution for the dead woman. Here, Sheridan’s
Wolf Warrior II, at the time of writing the most successful Chinese film of all time at its home box office, shows director/star Wu Jing taking a leaf out of Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo playbook by combining explosively cartoonish action fare with flag-waving sentiment. The first Wolf Warrior (2015) saw the People’s Liberation Army’s elite special ops unit attacked by evil foreign mercenaries financed by a drug-dealing Mr Big; with more money to spend this time, the scene changes to an unnamed African republic, where bloodthirsty English-speaking mercenaries are in the pay of paramilitary insurgents whose idea of revolution is no doubt far removed from the Maoist model. Although the villains’ heavy weaponry sees them laying waste to pretty much everyone and everything in their path, there’s still ample scope for Wu the performer to pirouette his way through sundry loose-limbed set-tos in which his burly opponents invariably come off much worse. To some extent, we’re not so far removed from the sort of high-energy, unabashed popcorn flick Jackie Chan might have turned out in his younger days, since the script carefully gives Wu’s sinewy former special ops warrior sound humanitarian motivations for offing baddies by the truckload as he attempts to rescue the mother of his African comedy-relief godson and save a ‘Chinese-invested’ hospital on the front line of a deadly viral outbreak. What’s different is that Chan’s directors always kept the camera running, to show off the star’s physical dexterity, whereas here the combat highlights are chopped into shorter shot-lengths that suit Wu’s more limited martial-arts capabilities. Even more apparent, however, and light years away from the halcyon days of yesteryear’s Hong Kong pulp cinema, is the sense that Wu’s derring-do goes hand in hand with Chinese national prestige. The film carries a definite sense of pride in China’s growing influence on the ground in Africa, and the story is framed to show that being a permanent member of the UN Security Council delivers respect on the global stage (here the insurgent leadership is against the killing of Chinese civilians, lest it poison future diplomatic relations), while it also at times frustratingly limits the deployment of China’s abundant military firepower. So there’s not a hint of irony in Wu’s virtually indestructible action man proudly brandishing the Chinese flag, which for western viewers may sit rather uneasily with the film’s laughably excessive shoot-’em-up highlights elsewhere – given that Leng’s the sort of guy who’ll never walk through a door if he can jump
Last man standing: Jeremy Renner
film partially reverses the logic of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), in which John Wayne’s hunt for the Comanche who kidnapped his niece is fuelled by bitter racism. Instead, the brutal murder in Wind River – depicted in flashback during the film’s big reveal – hints at the wider exploitation of the Native population by white America, with the dead woman, Natalie (Kelsey Asbille, who makes an impression in her one scene), one more tragic victim of the historic desecration. Yet, despite this liberally minded switchback, Sheridan still presents us with a white male saviour: Lambert is the last man standing in a quest for vengeance that ultimately leaves both the woman detective and the Native community on the sidelines. If there’s something dyed-in-the-wool about Wind River’s final presentation of the order of things, there’s no denying the atmospheric sweep of the piece. As shot by British cinematographer Ben Richardson, known for Beasts of the Southern Wild (2013) and several Joe Swanberg pictures, there’s a grandeur about the landscape’s place in the drama that evokes the great revenge westerns of Anthony Mann – not least in the climax on Gannett Peak, the highest mountain in Wyoming.
Credits and Synopsis Produced by Basil Iwanyk Peter Berg Matthew George Wayne Rogers Written by Taylor Sheridan Director of Photography Ben Richardson Edited by Gary Roach Production Designer Neil Spisak Composers Nick Cave Warren Ellis Sound Mixer Jonathan Earl Stein Costume Designer Kari Perkins ©Wind River Productions, LLC Production Companies The Weinstein Company and Acacia Entertainment present in association with Synergics Films, The Fyzz Facility, Riverstone Pictures, Voltage Pictures, Wild Bunch, Star Thrower Entertainment and
Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana a Savvy Media Holdings, Thunder Road, Film 44 production A film by Taylor Sheridan Financed and produced in partnership with Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana Executive Producers Erica Lee Jonathan Fuhrman Braden Aftergood Tim White Trevor White Christopher H. Warner Wayne Marc Godfrey Robert Jones Nik Bower Deepak Nayar Nicolas Chartier Jonathan Deckter Joni Sighvatsson Vincent Maraval Brahim Chioua Agnes Mentré
Cast Jeremy Renner Cory Lambert Elizabeth Olsen
Jane Banner Gil Birmingham Martin Graham Greene Ben James Jordan Pete Mickens Jon Bernthal Matt Julia Jones Wilma Kelsey Asbille Natalie Martin Sensmeier Chip Norman Lehnert Dale Tokala Clifford Sam Littlefeather Apesanahkwat Dan Crowheart Tantoo Cardinal Alice Crowheart In Colour [2.35:1] Distributor STX Entertainment
Wyoming, the present. Separated from his wife following the tragic death of their daughter, Cory Lambert, a huntsman and tracker for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, collects his son for a trip to the Wind River Indian reservation, where the boy’s grandfather lives. While out on the reservation, Lambert discovers the dead body of local Native American woman Natalie. FBI agent Jane Banner flies in from Las Vegas to head the homicide investigation, enlisting Lambert’s help, since he knows the area well. Lambert deduces that the victim had been running barefoot in the snow before she collapsed. Lambert and Banner visit Natalie’s grieving parents. Banner tells her father that he will seek vengeance. The pair follow a lead to the home of a notorious local family, where they are attacked with pepper spray. Later, they discover a second body, that of a security contractor working at a local drill camp. When they visit the camp with local policemen, tensions with the security staff escalate into a standoff that results in several of the aggressors being shot, though one manages to escape. In flashback, it’s revealed that Natalie and the security contractor were disturbed in bed one night by the latter’s drunk colleagues returning home. The men attacked and raped her, killing her boyfriend as he tried to stop them. She fled through the snow. Lambert tracks the escaped and injured man – Natalie’s key assailant – and finds him high in the mountains. Rather than shooting him, he allows him to crawl away to certain death in the snow.
The path of excess: Wu Jing October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 79
REVIEWS
Wind River
Zoology
REVIEWS
Russia/France/Germany 2016 Director: Ivan I. Tverdovsky Certificate 15 90m 45s
through a window instead. That said, while much of the bloodletting and explosions are too obviously digital in provenance, the capacious budget also allows for some wellmounted mischief involving armoured tanks, and a fairly satisfying climactic biff-off with journeyman US supporting player Frank Grillo’s hissable mercenary thug Big Daddy. But not before the latter utters the deathless line: “I guess the Chinese military aren’t as lame as I thought.” Which says it all about the film’s preference for ideological messaging over basic credibility. Credits and Synopsis Producers Guan Hailong Zhang Miao Ji Daoqing Produced by Jiang Ping Zhao Haicheng Li Yang Zhao Jianjun Xu Zhiyong Jiang Defu Liu Kailuo Deng Hao Wu Yan Screenplay Wu Jing Dong Qun Liu Yi Director of Photography Peter Ngor Editor Cheung Kai Fa Production Designer King Man Lee Wang Ligang Music Composed, Conducted and Produced by Joe Trapanese Sound Recordist Wang Yu Wardrobe Head Chi Weiwei Gao Yusheng Action Directors Sam Hargrave Jack Wong Wai Leung Production Companies
Beijing Dengfeng International Culture Communications Co., Ltd., Spring Era Film Co., Ltd., Jetsen Culture Industry Group Co., Ltd., Chao Feng Pictures LLC, Horgos Orange Image Media Co., Ltd., Khorgos Dengfeng International Culture Communications Co., Ltd. present in association with China Film Co., Ltd., Deer Pictures Co., Ltd., Bona Film Group Company Limited, Beijing Jingxi Culture & Tourism Co., Ltd., Wanda Media Co., Ltd., 1 Verge Information Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd., Jiahui Culture And Media Co. Ltd., Star Era Movie & TV Culture Media Co., Ltd., YouKu Co-produced by Beijing Dengfeng International Culture Communications Co., Ltd., Chao Feng Pictures LLC, China Film StudioCo., Ltd. Presented by Wu Jing, Lv Jianmin,
Xu Ziquan, Guan Hailong, Yu Baimei
Cast Wu Jing Leng Feng Frank Grillo Big Daddy Wu Gang He Janguo Hans Zhang Zhuo Yifan Celina Jade Dr Rachel Smith Ding Haifeng Captain Zhang Chunyu Shanshan Lin Zhixiong Yu Nan Long Xiaoyun Yu Qian Qian Bida Shi Zhaoqi head Shi Dolby Atmos In Colour [2.35:1] Subtitles Distributors Trinity Film & CMC Pictures Chinese theatrical title Zhan lang II
The Indian Ocean, present day. When a Chinese naval vessel is attacked by pirates, fearless Leng Feng dives into the sea to tackle the marauders. He is a former member of the ‘Wolf Warrior’ squadron, a special ops division of the People’s Liberation Army – some time earlier, he was discharged from the PLA and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for the manslaughter of a property developer who threatened to demolish the family home of a fallen comrade. Making a new start in an unnamed African republic, where Chinese investment has improved the lives of local people, Leng finds himself caught up in civil conflict, with paramilitary rebels calling on the services of brutal foreign mercenaries. Evidence suggests that the mercenaries were responsible for the murder of Leng’s fiancée and fellow officer Long Xiaoyun. Leng agrees to travel behind rebel lines and rescue the staff of a Chinese-financed hospital fighting a dangerous viral outbreak. He fends off the mercenaries but can’t stop them killing the Chinese head doctor. Leng is infected with the deadly virus, but his life is saved by American medic Rachel, thanks to an experimental antidote. He kills the mercenaries’ leader Big Daddy (who he believes murdered Long) and calls in a missile strike from Chinese warships to take out their forces. He leads the civilians to the safety of a UN compound, and in return has his record wiped clean.
80 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
Reviewed by Jason Anderson
Every year yields a handful of high-concept curiosities that travel far and wide on the festival circuit but tend to be better known by snarky shorthand descriptions than by their actual titles. That’s certainly true of Zoology, a special jury prizewinner at Karlovy Vary last July, which is more widely referred to as “the Russian one about the lady with the tail”. Much to his credit, director Ivan I. Tverdovsky understands that few audiences beyond his premiere’s attendees are unlikely not to know what’s lurking underneath Natasha’s skirts during the early scenes that establish her drab, lonely, mostly miserable existence. Thankfully, the filmmaker is less interested in playing coy than in ensuring the tail looks impressive once it’s out and wiggling for all to see. A long, thick, fleshy outgrowth that’s at once spiny and muscular, it seems a curiously plausible and potentially useful addition to any human body. That Natasha’s future paramour Petya is so nonplussed about its appearance is the first of many reasons Zoology remains intriguing, even if some of the film’s other aspects could use as much attention as Tverdovsky devotes to the animatronic effects. Zoology’s stylistic audacity is another of its virtues, the director having essentially fused a melancholy, Alice Munro-like character study of a socially marginalised woman with elements of Buñuelian satire and Cronenbergian body horror. In regards to the latter debt, the mix of the erotic and the horrific in the most notorious scene in Shivers (1975) is strongly evoked when Natasha discovers one of her tail’s special abilities while nude in a bathtub. Oddly, the 29-year-old Tverdovsky has claimed to be unaware of Cronenberg and his work, so perhaps this kind of scene is sadly inevitable whenever movie heroines get anywhere near phallic objects of fantastical origin. That said, Petya’s climactic interaction with the tail is equally lusty, so it’s not just about the women for once. Otherwise eschewing the premise’s most lurid possibilities, the director opts for a flat naturalistic style more in keeping with the glum aesthetic and handheld camerawork of recent Eastern
Animal magic: Natalia Pavlenkova
European festival fare. (The film’s droll take on medical bureaucracy and the quotidian cruelties of the workplace is pure Puiu.) The prosaic visual style also makes for a starker contrast whenever Natasha experiences a tail-enhanced moment of animalistic abandon or embraces her otherness as a gesture of defiance against the stultifying, small-minded society that surrounds her. Natalia Pavlenkova conveys the character’s journey of self-discovery and empowerment with vividness and vulnerability, her charm compensating for other shortcomings in the film. The most frustrating of these is the slightness and haziness of Natasha herself, the character’s history, inner life and motivations being ultimately as obscure as the reasons for the tail’s appearance in the first place. The film’s energy also flags during Tverdovsky’s laborious efforts to demonstrate the evils of conformity and the futility of any quest for personal fulfilment, especially in a lengthy and superfluous scene when Natasha and Petya attend a ridiculous lecture by a motivational speaker. Judging by the tantalising glimpses we get in Zoology’s wilder moments, their time would be better spent learning the freakier possibilities of this new flesh.
Credits and Synopsis Lead Producer Natalia Mokritskaya Producer Uliana Savelieva Written by Ivan I. Tverdovsky Director of Photography Alexander Mikeladze Editing
Ivan I. Tverdovsky Vincent Assman Production Designer Vasily Raspopov Sound Engineer Frédéric Théry Costume Designer Anna Chistova ©New People Film,
Arizona Productions, MovieBrats Pictures Production Companies New People Film Company With financial support from Ministry of Culture of Russian Federation
A coastal town in Russia, present day. Middle-aged Natasha lives with her mother and works as an administrator at a local zoo, where she is treated cruelly by her workmates. During a visit to the hospital, she complains about back pain, but her true concern is revealed to be the 2ft appendage protruding from her tailbone. Though she is embarrassed by it, the sight does not perturb Petya, an X-ray technician with whom Natasha develops a relationship. Despite the continued harassment by her co-workers and worried talk by her mother and other women in the town about a witch in their midst, Natasha becomes more accepting of her situation
Arizona Productions Movie Brats Pictures Eurimages
Irina Chipizhenko mother Masha Tokareva Katya
Cast
Dolby Digital In Colour [1.85:1] Subtitles
Natalia Pavlenkova Natasha Dmitry Groshev Petya
Distributor Arrow Films Russian theatrical title Zoologiya
and increasingly bold due to her romance with Petya. At a nightclub, her tail escapes from her clothing as she dances, causing the other patrons to flee. Natasha is fired from her job. One night, Natasha and Petya sneak into the zoo; as they consummate their relationship in a cage, Natasha is devastated to realise that the tail is the reason Petya desires her. She returns home to find her mother painting crosses all over the apartment as protection against the witch. Natasha tearfully shows the tail to her mother, and is rebuffed. She becomes a pariah in the town. After destroying Petya’s X-ray machine in a rage, she goes home and prepares to cut off the tail herself.
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Queen bee: Akemi Negishi in The Saga of Anatahan (1953)
IN MY BEGINNING IS MY END The release of Josef von Sternberg’s rarely seen first and last films shows the continuities in a remarkable career THE SALVATION HUNTERS/ THE CASE OF LENA SMITH (FRAGMENT) Josef von Sternberg; USA 1925/29; Edition Filmmuseum Region-free DVD; 70/4 mins; 1.33:1. Features: optional musical score by Siegfried Friedrich; 20-page booklet
THE SAGA OF ANATAHAN Josef von Sternberg; Japan 1953; Eureka/Masters of Cinema/Region B Blu-ray and Region 2 DVD dual format; Certificate 15; 91 mins; 1.37:1; Features: complete 1953 version of the film (Blu-ray only); interview with Tony Rayns; visual essay by critic Tag Gallagher; interview with Nicolas von Sternberg; US Navy footage of the actual survivors of Anatahan; unused footage originally filmed for the 1958 version of the film; original theatrical trailer; booklet
Reviewed by Pamela Hutchinson
In 1960, watching The Salvation Hunters during a season of his work in Paris, Josef von Sternberg winced. “I had forgotten my first film completely, and it contained some awkward moments,” he wrote in his always entertaining and rarely 82 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
reliable 1965 memoir Fun in a Chinese Laundry. “I realised the long way I had traveled.” He had made his final film some years before, The Saga of Anatahan (1953), which in that same volume he looks back on as “My best film – and my most unsuccessful one.” The director sets his own assessment of these two films in opposition to that of the critics or the public. Recent disc releases of both The Salvation Hunters and The Saga of Anatahan invite a comparison between the two works at each end of von Sternberg’s career, however. These two stark, yet lyrical and intensely moral films, depicting the desperate acts of desperate people, have much in common, despite the years between them. The plot of The Salvation Hunters was summarised by von Sternberg thus: “Three derelicts live on a mud scow from which circumstances and environment release them after poetically conceived tribulations.” For the later film, one might simply substitute “13 Japanese men and one woman” for the derelicts, and “a remote Pacific island” for the mud scow. Von Sternberg had higher ambitions than such simple storytelling for these films, though. In the first, as an early intertitle has it, the aim is “photographing thought”, with a lesson about how “our faith controls our lives!” In the last he returns to a more cynical
theme, familiar from his collaborations with Marlene Dietrich, the power of a woman to destroy and humiliate the men she attracts. In The Salvation Hunters, the sketchy scenario of a slapstick comedy is played for tragedy, with its blankly named characters acting out a story of hope against bitter experience. The Boy (George K. Arthur), The Girl (Georgia Hale) and The Child (Bruce Guerin) live hand-to-mouth on a dredger in the port of San Pedro. The Child is bullied, and The Girl labels The Boy a coward for failing either to deal with that or to provide a decent living. They move to a tenement in a city full of beggars and thieves, and take a room across the corridor from The Man and The Woman, a pimp and a sex worker (“A woman fallen as low as her stockings,” says the intertitle). The Boy fails to find work, so The Girl tries her hand at her neighbour’s profession. Inevitably, Man and Boy clash. The Saga of Anatahan, based loosely on true events from World War II, follows 12 Japanese airmen stranded on a Pacific island, inhabited only by a plantation overseer and his wife. In the real story, there were more men, and the sole woman was far from von Sternberg’s sultry siren Keiko (Akemi Negishi, a chorus dancer, in her first screen role: she went on to a long, successful career as a film actor). She’s a Pacific Lola Lola, flashing her legs as she adopts cheesecake poses in
In ‘The Salvation Hunters’, the aim is ‘photographing thought’, with a lesson about how ‘our faith controls our lives!’
water, chalk scribbles on walls, chewing gum, real estate signs, sea gulls” surrounding her. The actors in Anatahan spoke as much English as von Sternberg spoke Japanese. He directed them via storyboards and “graphic charts” tracing the emotional journey of each character, reproduced in the Masters of Cinema booklet. Both were independent productions too, made on remarkably short shoestrings. Von Sternberg even reproduces the financial breakdown for The Salvation Hunters in his memoir, which amounts to well below $5,000, even after overspending, and was, he notes sardonically, dwarfed by the money spent on marketing. Anatahan was filmed entirely in a studio, a former aircraft hangar, with handmade props and the cast stitching their own costumes. All of von Sternberg’s photographic ingenuity was required to capture the effect of natural light in the studio, wrapping cellophane around trees or spraying them with silvered paint to create a glimmer of twilight. Just as its cheap locations suited the grit and degradation of The Salvation Hunters, Anatahan perversely benefits from interior shooting. Long tracking shots follow Keiko and her men around the jungle thickets, and the atmosphere, thick with shadows and foliage, is every bit as claustrophobic as it should be. Released on DVD by the Austrian Filmmuseum, The Salvation Hunters is packaged with a bilingual booklet, video essay and a tantalising fragment of one of von Sternberg’s lost silents, The Case of Lena Smith. The Saga of Anatahan has been issued by Masters of Cinema on dual-format DVD and Blu-ray in a 2K restoration of its uncensored version, with heaps of video extras and an illustrated booklet with an essay by Philip Kemp. These two films would be oddities in any director’s body of work but, especially when seen together, form a pleasing balance either side of von Sternberg’s more celebrated, slicker, genre-friendly titles. The distance from the California mud to the volcanic rocks of Anatahan may not be so great after all.
New releases L’ARGENT Robert Bresson; France 1983; Criterion/Region 1 DVD and Region A Blu-ray; 84 minutes; 1.66:1. Features: Press conference from the 1983 Cannes Film Festival; L’Argent, A to Z, a video essay by film scholar James Quandt; trailer.
Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton
As part of his 1966 application for admission to the newly opened Deutsche Film-und Fernsehakademie Berlin, a 20-year-old Rainer Werner Fassbinder undertook an analysis of Robert Bresson’s 1956 A Man Escaped, acutely noting: “Every set-up makes sense only in connection with the preceding one and the one that succeeds it.” Fassbinder didn’t make the cut, but he went on to have some kind of career anyway, and when sitting on the jury for the 1977 Berlin International Film Festival made sure that Bresson’s penultimate movie, The Devil, Probably (1977) went home with an award. L’Argent, Bresson’s final film, is profoundly informed by the all-consuming despair of that which preceded it, and per the young Fassbinder’s formulation, it is structured as a domino tumble of sinister causality, ending in a spree killing by Yvon (Christian Patey), a working-class labourer set on the road to disaster by the receipt of a forged bill made by some blue-blood snots. When rewatching L’Argent, every narrative detail that Bresson minutely records takes on the sinister aspect of another echoing step towards the gallows: the ATM skimming scam, the raising of a hand in violence at a prison cafeteria, the crash of a glass of white wine perilously poised at the edge of a piano. Every set-up makes sense only in connection with the preceding one and the one that succeeds it, and taken altogether they create a point by point declaration that the tainting, unavoidable influence of money has doomed the world to a state of perdition. From here, the only possible solution could be to start anew; that Bresson never realised his cherished adaptation of the book of Genesis is a fact to be greatly regretted. We must content ourselves with the great works we have, of which L’Argent stands among the greatest. Disc: A deliciously dry Cannes interview by Bresson, and James Quandt’s video essay which recounts, among other things, the time that Cahiers du cinéma had Bresson trailed by a private detective to check his claim that he never went to the movies. (He did, all the time.)
MARION DAVIES FILMS THE BRIDE’S PLAY/BEAUTY’S WORTH/ WHEN KNIGHTHOOD WAS IN FLOWER George Terwilliger/Robert C. Vignola/Robert C. Vignola; US 1922; Undercrank Prods. 75/73/115 minutes; Region 0 DVD and All-region Blu-ray; 1.33:1. Features: booklet in Knighthood with essay by Davies biographer Lara Gabrielle Fowler.
Reviewed by Michael Atkinson
Slapstick played as tragedy: The Salvation Hunters (1925)
The exhumation of the long-unseen Marion Davies filmography continues, and as we survey the strange phenomenon of October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 83
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her outdoor bath. The airmen amuse themselves during their isolation with music, scavenging and the intoxicating effects of coconut wine, while Keiko, the “Queen Bee”, bestows sexual favours on her preferred “drones”. Inevitably, the men clash. In both films the action is staged more or less in tableaux, and photographed in black and white, with von Sternberg’s editorial voice guiding the viewer. In the first film, this is done via elegantly written intertitles, while the actors remain almost static, posed against telling objects – a pair of demon’s or cuckold’s horns behind the head of The Man, a mother-and-child portrait next to his streetwalking lover. In Anatahan, von Sternberg himself provides a detached, almost monotonous voiceover while the actors (far more active and assertive than in the silent film), talk, sing and brawl in untranslated Japanese. While his monologue, which assumes the character of one of the airmen, doesn’t moralise, it can be brutally callous: “Keiko had gone into circulation.” The technique may have been inspired by the benshi film narrators of Japan’s silent-era cinema or, John Baxter has suggested, by Chaplin’s sound reworking of The Gold Rush, which provides another link back to The Salvation Hunters. Chaplin championed the film in public and wooed its star in private, hiring Georgia Hale as the leading lady in The Gold Rush (1925). It’s certain that in both cases von Sternberg saw the contributions of the actors as far less important than his own authorial voice and his directorial vision. Hale, he grudgingly said, “lent herself without question to move exactly as she was told to move, and she deserves praise for that”, and he describes how, in the manner of the Kuleshov effect, her performance gained meaning only from the mise en scène, the “reflections in
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New releases the original Second Mrs Kane, her life and career as William Randolph Hearst’s devoted mistress and pet project always looms into view. Her films, all produced as proofs of love by Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Productions, are thick with the tension between who Hearst wanted her to be – a saintly maiden in serious, “respectable” melodramas and prestige pictures – and who she really was: a clown and a pixie, prone to sticking her tongue out and dancing on tabletops. He must’ve seen, in his obviously feverish billionaire heart of hearts, a different Marion from the one we can see, who is a lovable tart, somewhat trapped in the high castle of a rich man’s distorting ardour. These three silents, all released in 1922, cover Davies’s transition into a modest star, from her first run of boilerplate melodramas to the marketing-tsunami hit of When Knighthood Was in Flower, which was touted (dishonestly, as many things in Hearst papers) as the most expensive American film ever made. Money was spent (à la von Stroheim, Hearst insisted on using real Tudor-era armour), but the film, a semi-comic take on Henry VIII and Mary Tudor’s battle against his marriage plans for her, hardly out-Griffith-ed Griffith. Cosmopolitan – the true auteur here – did seem to out-Lang Lang a bit in The Bride’s Play, the set designs of which seem to prophesy Lang’s 1924 epic Die Nibelungen, which had just gone into preproduction. Otherwise, there are vintage pleasures to be had in all three films (Davies even gets to cross-dress yet again, as though she were always itching to do Viola), but the star is often kept at a gown-and-setadoring medium distance from the camera, squelching her natural camera rapport, and the tendency of American silents towards overexplanatory title cards runs amok. Davies’s poignant story, though, remains under the skin. Discs: Clean scans of solid prints, with Ben Model’s new, very relaxing organ scores. The Library of Congress-preserved Knighthood comes on both Blu-ray and DVD; the others, DVD alone.
THE LOVE OF A WOMAN Jean Grémillon; France 1953; Arrow/Region B Blu-ray and Region 2 DVD dual format; Certificate 12; 104 minutes; 1.37:1. Features: documentary In Search of Jean Grémillon, booklet note by Ginette Vincendeau
Reviewed by Geoff Andrew
Though enormously important to the development of French cinema and arguably one of its greatest directors, Jean Grémillon seldom receives the recognition he deserves. Now best known for the Jacques Prévert-scripted Remorques (1941) and Lumière d’été (1943), he was already making very fine films in the 20s and continued to do so, despite funding difficulties, until his death at the end of the 50s. This, his last completed fiction feature, has no great reputation, yet in its own way it is rather wonderful, imbued with a grave, gentle beauty. Set on the remote Breton island of Ouessant – Ushant, in English – it centres on Marie (Micheline Presle), a 28-yearold doctor who takes over from her elderly male predecessor. Initially, her loneliness is exacerbated by the prejudices of the deeply conservative locals – particularly some of the men – but after she saves an ailing child and meets André 84 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
(Massimo Girotti), an Italian construction worker clearly attracted to her, things begin to look up. Trouble is, André too is deeply conservative, at least in his attitude to a woman’s role in life. Entirely sympathetic to his protagonist’s professional ambitions and emotional needs, Grémillon’s proto-feminist drama never sermonises or over-simplifies; with his background in documentary, not to mention a respect for island traditions derived from his own origins in the nearby French northwest, he ensures that everything here rings true to life. (A remarkable, rather tough example of his devotion to verisimilitude is a lengthy scene involving a hernia operation.) The locations are evocatively captured by Grémillon’s frequent cinematographer Louis Page, the performances very well judged, and the director’s meticulous attention to telling psychological and social details is rewarding throughout. For an added bonus, there is a fine score by the great French composer Henri Dutilleux. One only hopes we shall see more of Grémillon’s work restored and released. Disc: An excellent transfer of a digital restoration by CNC. An illuminating feature-length documentary from 1969, covering Grémillon’s entire career, has poor-quality clips but many fine interviews with the likes of René Clair, Henri Langlois, Dutilleux, Presle, Charles Vanel, Pierre Brasseur and Michel Bouquet.
THE MOURNING FOREST Kawase Naomi; Japan 2007; Eureka/Masters of Cinema/ Region B Blu-ray and Region 2 DVD dual format; Certificate 12; 97 minutes; 1.85:1. Features: stills gallery, trailer, booklet
Reviewed by Philip Kemp
The Mourning Forest plays a symphony in green – from the refulgent greens of the tea-bush rows where novice nurse Machiko (Ono Machiko) plays hide-and-seek games with elderly care-home resident Shigeki (Uda Shigeki) to the sombre, shadowed greens of the forest where they end up wandering. As always in Kawase’s films, nature plays a key role – as does her perennial theme of bereavement. Shigeki, suffering from dementia, is still mourning his wife who died 33 years ago; Machiko lost her young son in an accident for which her estranged husband blames her. The heart of the film, awarded the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2007, lies in the rambling forest journey, with Shigeki obsessively seeking his wife’s grave while Machiko trudges bemusedly
The Love of a Woman (1953)
in his wake. At one point she’s freaked out by a vision of torrentially hurtling water which, we can guess, conjures up her son’s death. Gradually a mutually protective, asexual warmth develops between them, deepening as their journey proceeds. Kawase makes sparing use of dialogue, often allowing the sounds of the forest to carry the story’s emotional charge. The film’s beautiful to look at in its 1080p presentation on Blu-ray. Eureka have missed a trick, though, in not including Kawase’s documentary Tarachime (Birth/Mother, 2006), in which she captured the last days of the greataunt who brought her up, and who suffered from Alzheimer’s at the end. With its connecting themes of dementia and bereavement, Kawase often asked for it to be screened along with The Mourning Forest. It would have fitted well here. Discs: Sparse extras. The booklet contains stills and a 500-word statement from Kawase.
PEPPERMINT SODA Diane Kurys; France 1977; BFI/Region B Blu-ray and Region 2 DVD dual format; Certificate 12; 101 minutes; 1.66:1; Features: Interview with Diane Kurys (2008), Scrapbook, booklet with essays by Michael Brooke and Sophie Mayer.
Reviewed by Kate Stables
“There’s no action, no stars, no violence, no sex, and no money,” was Kurys’s brutal summary of her autobiographical first feature. A sharpeyed, thin-skinned recreation of early 60s Parisian girlhood, its early-teen heroine Anne (an appropriately sulky and diffident Eléonore Klarwein) kicks against the pricks of an authoritarian lycée, and her high-achieving sister and strict mother. Meticulous about the textures and tensions of the era, mixing in yé-yé music and hunger for boys and stockings alongside anti-fascist activities, it brazenly celebrates its teacher-taunting schoolgirls. Kurys cheerfully admits to grabbing the classroom gag sequences from comic troupe Le Splendid when she was requested to leaven the film’s fragile, melancholy mood. Acute about the stinging disappointments of adolescence’s mutable friendships and sibling rivalries, the confessional script doesn’t skimp on Anne’s casual deceit, nor her jealousies and light-fingered transgressions. Despite frequent nods to male coming-of-age classics like The 400 Blows (1959) and Zéro de conduite (1933), its unsentimental girl’s-eye-view feels like a clapback at the boy-centred nostalgia of 70s teen-trip A nous les petites anglaises (1976). Philippe Rousselot’s handsome visuals (rebel Muriel spiralling round the playground like a firework, Anne mooching on dove-grey Normandy beaches) mask the film’s curious structure. A chronicle of tangy adolescent moments rather than a conventional narrative, with a story that slips expertly from sister to sister and back again, it’s the wistful best of Kurys’s biographical fictions, woven from a family history deftly reworked again in her Coup de foudre (aka Entre nous, 1983) and C’est la vie (1990). Disc: A fine-looking transfer, which does justice to the film’s careful period setting. Kurys’s detailed interview is charming and candid, but Sophie Mayer’s essay provides the long view, suggesting that the film’s effects linger on in the work of Catherine Breillat, Céline Sciamma and Deniz Ergüven.
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Rediscovery
GREAT SCOTT In a body of work made about and in collaboration with artists, James Scott hinted at the British New Wave that never was EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY: THE ART FILMS OF JAMES SCOTT James Scott; UK 1966–84; BFI Region 0 DVD; Certificate 15; 263 minutes; 1.37:1. Features: audio interviews with the director; booklet with production documents and essays by William Fowler, John Wyver, James Scott and Richard White.
Reviewed by Henry K. Miller
In his 1992 essay ‘L’éternel retour’, Peter Wollen wrote that there was no British equivalent of the nouvelle vague in the late 1950s and 1960s; the British Pop artists and critics who were fascinated by American mass culture never put their fascination on screen, so that “Godard’s films were the best possible substitutes for their missing English counterparts”. Fragments of that missing New Wave remain, however, and James Scott’s films about the leading Pop artists David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, and Richard Hamilton are shining examples. Far from being straightforward documentaries, they were made in collaboration with the artists and amount to artworks in their own right; Scott had been a student at the Slade during Pop art’s heyday. Love’s Presentation (1966) follows Hockney as he prepares illustrations for a book of love poems by C.P. Cavafy, a major influence. Still in his twenties, Hockney was a Swinging London celebrity, recently included in David Bailey’s Box of Pin-Ups alongside Jean Shrimpton and Michael Caine. To get away from these associations, Scott’s film, which Hockney narrates, focuses on the craft of etching and aquatinting, which he performs in his Notting Hill flat, washing off the acid in the shower and poisoning himself with the fumes. At the end of the film, Hockney reads one of the poems over the finished images, which culminate in two men sharing a bed, contentedly looking out at the reader – a passage which the film’s distributor, the British Council, censored. By contrast, R.B. Kitaj (1967) forgoes craft for ideas, expounded in an interview, with confusing results, though one of Kitaj’s images, a modified page from a 1930s issue of Life magazine featuring potted biographies of the modernist masters – Matisse, Picasso, Mondrian – stands out as both a prime instance of early postmodernism and a neatly self-reflexive moment. Richard Hamilton (1969) is a masterpiece, simultaneously distilling, embodying and analysing the Pop aesthetic of which Hamilton was a major progenitor. Reyner Banham defined Pop art as “unique works of hand-made fine art deriving their iconography and composition from mass-produced pop products such as cornflakes packs and US cars”; Scott’s film juxtaposes the two, intercutting Hamilton’s hand-made images with the adverts, pin-ups, and skylines that inspired it. In one sequence
The art life: Natasha Richardson as Kathleen Bridle in Every Picture Tells a Story (1984)
Scott breaks down a scene from Douglas Sirk’s noir Shockproof (1949) – a source for Hamilton’s Interior I and Interior II (1964) – to illustrate how for the European Pop artists much of the meaning of Hollywood films lay in the decor, not the plot. It was filmed in 1967, not coincidentally the year Godard abandoned commercial cinema, just as Pop was at the point of exhaustion. The main feature, Every Picture Tells a Story (1984), made for Channel 4, is a collaboration with an artist of an altogether more intimate kind: his father, the painter William Scott. Largely a conventional biopic, with occasional flash-cuts to his future works and brief clips from interviews functioning as a voiceover, the film is an unusually sensitive portrait of the elder Scott’s childhood and adolescence in Scotland and Northern Ireland, particularly affecting in its depiction of William’s relationship with his own father, a sign-painter whose encouragement of his son stems in part from his frustration with his circumstances – a frustration more than shared by the boy’s mother. The business of sign-painting provides a surprising echo (or foreshadowing) of the Pop
‘Richard Hamilton’ is a masterpiece, simultaneously distilling, embodying and analysing the Pop aesthetic
films, but in general Every Picture Tells a Story evokes a less image-saturated time and place. Whereas Kitaj could discover modernists in a mass-circulation magazine, William Scott owed his exposure to what were revolutionary pictures and ideas to the happenstance that a young RCA graduate, Kathleen Bridle (played by Natasha Richardson, making her debut), was living in Enniskillen and gave him lessons. At the film’s end, as his younger self arrives in the London of 1931, “the most important spot in the whole world”, the septuagenarian Scott recalls that even the Royal Academy of Arts was “untouched” by modernism “and all the other isms”. It is a great loss to British cinema that this first entry in a planned trilogy did not have the sequels it deserved. The title comes from a conversation with Kathleen – “They are painted to be looked at, not talked about,” a proposition that Scott’s art films have all tested. Chance, History, Art... (1980) and The Great Ice Cream Robbery (1971), a double-screen film (one screen on each DVD) made with and about Claes Oldenberg, rather confirm it; but the extras relating to the latter open on to another side of Scott’s very varied career, revealing that during post-production he was already working with the Berwick Street Collective on The Nightcleaners (1975), described by Claire Johnston as “the most important political film ever to have been made in this country”. It would make a fine follow-up to this exemplary package. October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 85
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Television CHARLES DICKENS AT THE BBC OUR MUTUAL FRIEND / BLEAK HOUSE / BARNABY RUDGE / OLIVER TWIST / GREAT EXPECTATIONS / DOMBEY AND SON Eric Tayler / unknown / Morris Barry / Eric Tayler / Alan Bridges / Joan Craft; UK 1958-59 / 1959 / 1960 / 1962 / 1967 / 1969; BBC/Simply Media; Region 2 DVD; 360 / 330 / 390 / 390 / 250 / 325 minutes; Certificate 12; 4:3.
Reviewed by Robert Hanks
Though it isn’t as obvious as, say, mobile phones, easily available contraception and the rise of the duvet, one of the shifts in modern British society since the middle of the last century has been the decline of Charles Dickens. The fuss over his bicentenary in 2012, and the existence of a series like Dickensian (2015), a kind of riff on his imaginative world, disguise the extent to which he has lost currency. But for a hundred years or more, from the middle of the 19th century until well into the 20th, Dickens was a universal currency: “An institution that there is no getting away from,” Orwell called him. In a household with half a dozen books, one of them would be The Pickwick Papers and another would be A Tale of Two Cities or David Copperfield. But these days, he doesn’t infuse the culture to anything like the same extent. We still know what it means to call someone a Scrooge or a Fagin, but we’re less clear about a Pecksniff (a sanctimonious hypocrite) or Podsnappery (dismissive jingoism – a word that might bear reviving). The earliest of these BBC Dickenses, now reissued by Simply, are manifestly products of an era when his importance was unquestioned: for one thing, there’s the sheer frequency – the BBC clearly felt it was part of its remit to broadcast at least one Dickens serial a year. A delve into the BBC’s Genome website, which collects the text of every issue of the Radio Times from 1923 to 2009, reveals that they went out in prime time – eight or nine o’clock on a Friday night. The finale of Bleak House went out on Christmas Day 1959, after a Harry Belafonte special and a screening of High Noon: we’ve forgotten the true meaning of Christmas. But there’s also a sense that Dickens didn’t need selling; present the characters and the action as literally as possible, and the viewer’s imagination would do the rest. You get an impression that television is the dunce, told to sit in a corner and copy what clever literature does. Or perhaps it was just a matter of budgets. Whatever the reason, even by the standards of the time these serials seem constrained, muted, the images composed of very flat greys, the cameras more than usually reluctant to move. Each episode of the first three – Our Mutual Friend, Bleak House, Barnaby Rudge – opens with classical music played over a drawing of a building or a figure, setting a mood of gentility and selfimprovement rather than the melodrama and comedy that are Dickens’s forte. It’s only with the credits for the 1962 Oliver Twist that the camera moves at all, zooming in on the drawing of a beseeching Oliver. This is also the only programme here with its own theme tune, a sad little melody played on penny whistle and a small calliope organ, composed by Ron Grainer the year before he wrote the Doctor Who theme; the closing music turns it into a slightly oompah-pah waltz: a little less sad, but the ambiguity 86 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
Oliver Twist At their best the discs remind you how Dickens can seize the imagination – at times you seem to clutch at an intuition that it’s his world we’re living in is if anything more haunting. Great Expectations and Dombey and Son revert to classical orthodoxy, but now the music plays over evocative sounds and images: wind on the marshes and a body swinging from a gibbet for Great Expectations, waves on a rocky shore for Dombey. These later ones are a little less studio-bound, more fluid; you get little touches of the filmmaker’s art – a watch ticking insistently under domestic scenes in Dombey, emphasising that for Mr Dombey home life is something to squeeze in between business. Perhaps I’m making it all sound rather dull, which is not the case. Certainly this Barnaby Rudge is frustrating, the more so because this book is so rarely adapted. With its anti-Catholic prejudice and violent conspiracy, the story could easily feel in tune with our own nativist, suspicious times. Instead, it is uneven and emotionally muffled; even the great John Wood as Barnaby, the simpleton who wanders in and out of the story, though he has moments of visionary intensity also slips at times toward caricature. However, the adaptation of Our Mutual Friend – by Freda Lingstrom, otherwise known as the creator of the children’s puppet programmes Andy Pandy and The Woodentops – is slick. If some of the actors can’t find the speed and wit for Dickens’s dialogue, you still have a youthful Rachel Roberts giving the beautiful working-class heroine Lizzie Hexam moral toughness instead of mere innocence, and a pre-Steptoe Wilfrid
Brambell on fine gurning, self-pitying form as the rum-sodden Mr Dolls. Bleak House is less lucky in its leads – Andrew Cruickshank seems puddingy compared with Denholm Elliott’s flightily eccentric John Jarndyce in the 1985 BBC version, though Colin Jeavons, an actor whose air of barely contained madness made him hard to cast, is good as the wastrel Richard Carstone. Hugh Leonard’s adaptation of Great Expectations has pizzazz, shooting the viewer straight into an atmosphere of treachery and dread. He also adapted Dombey – well, I think, though the story is too diffuse, too dependent on shades of feeling to translate easily. The main interest in all of these is the acting: in Oliver Twist, Max Adrian – Delius in Ken Russell’s Song of Summer (1968) – as a properly villainous Fagin and Melvyn Hayes’s Artful Dodger. Hayes is also pleasingly whiny as Lizzie’s priggish, selfish brother in Our Mutual Friend. He’s one of a number of actors who make repeat appearances: Peter Vaughan offers different weights of menace as the lawyer Jaggers in Great Expectations and a blustering Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist; and Timothy Bateson is a highlight of Barnaby Rudge as the apprentice-cum-conspirator Simon Tappertit, and of Bleak House as the halfridiculous, half-sinister preening lawyer’s clerk Guppy. At their best, all these discs remind you how Dickens can seize the imagination – so that at odd moments you seem to clutch at an intuition that it’s his world we’re living in.
RONIN John Frankenheimer; US 1998; Arrow/Region B Blu-ray; Certificate 15; 122 minutes; 2.35:1. Features: audio commentary by Frankenheimer; Robert De Niro documentary; featurettes Ronin: Filming in the Fast Lane, The Driving of Ronin; new and archive interviews with DoP Robert Fraisse; archive interviews with Natascha McElhone, composer Elia Cmiral, editor Tony Gibbs, Venice Film Festival interviews with De Niro, Jean Reno, McElhone; alternative ending; theatrical trailer; booklet.
Reviewed by Robert Hanks
John Frankenheimer is the Anthony Trollope of directors – industrious, talented, at times so good that you wonder why he isn’t better. Ronin is one of those times, a thriller whose worldweary manner and brusque action pull the audience in so effectively that the scrambled denouement and lack of any real point only hit you afterward, if at all. The ronin of the title – disgraced, masterless samurai, as the opening captions leadenly explain – are a crew of ex-special forces types recruited by Irish republican Deirdre (Natascha McElhone) to ambush a car and steal an attaché case (its contents are pleasingly irrelevant): exCIA man Sam (Robert De Niro), who emerges as de facto leader; ex-KGB man Gregor (Stellan Skarsgård), who handles the tech; driver Larry (Skipp Sudduth); logistics guy Vincent (Jean Reno), who has all the local contacts; and Spence (Sean Bean), ostensibly ex-SAS. The screenplay is credited jointly to J.D. Zeik and Richard Weisz – the latter a cover-name for David Mamet; it isn’t altogether clear how much he contributed, but some of the dialogue has a fabulously downbeat, noirish epigrammatic quality: “Everyone’s your brother till the rent comes due.” The best dialogue comes in Spence’s persistent needling of Sam, and Sam’s unworried ripostes: “You worried about saving your own skin?” “Yeah, I am. Covers my body.” It’s a shame when Spence turns out a little too early on to be an excitable Soldier of Fortunereading fantasist (“Almost a bit of raspberry jam back there!” he yells after the excitement of his first shoot-out, before having to stop the car to throw up): no more needle, and also the departure of the only really relatable character. After that, the viewer has to eke out the emotional satisfaction of De Niro and Reno’s comradely regard for one another (the hint of tenderer feelings between De Niro and McElhone isn’t much more than a distraction). But the central pleasures are in the pace and framing of the brilliantly staged shoot-outs and car-chases. The measure of Ronin’s success is that echoes and ricochets of these can be found in every action film from the Bourne franchise to the Daniel Craig Bonds to Captain America: The Winter Soldier. It inaugurated a new era of international thrillers, in which New World heroes engage in high-speed pursuit through semi-or under-developed Old World metropolises, wrecking fruit-laden market stalls along the way. Almost a bit of raspberry jam back there! Disc: A generous helping of features, most of them carried over from earlier releases. Frankenheimer’s commentary is as entirely craftsmanlike and unexcitable as you’d expect. On this 4K transfer the deliberately murky,
On the case: Jean Reno and Robert De Niro in Ronin
understated palette scrubs up well, and the vrooming engines are terrific – if only there were some way of muting the over-insistent plangency of Elia Cmiral’s duduk-heavy score.
bare-midriff princesses (Caroline Munro, Jane Seymour) and have hammier sorcerers (Tom Baker, Margaret Whiting) and taller sailor heroes (John Phillip Law, Patrick Wayne). They are also given to jolly stodge between the excitements, but Harryhausen’s Dynamation creations remain joyous: a living ship’s figurehead, a sixsworded Kali (like the octopus in It Came from Beneath the Sea, Kali loses two limbs but can still see off a whole crew), a robot minotaur, prehistoric arctic beasts, bug-eyed ghouls. Discs: Besides carrying over extras from previous DVD iterations of these films – which means that the late Ray Harryhausen is seen and heard extensively – this features new interviews with Baker, Munro and Seymour (all enlightening, sweet and funny), a wealth of fascinating background material highlighting creatives like composer Bernard Herrmann and the tie-in record for 7th Voyage – Anne Leonardo’s ‘Sinbad May Have Been Bad But He’s Been Good to Me’.
THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS Ermanno Olmi; Italy 1978; Arrow Academy/Region B Blu-ray and Region 2 DVD dual format; Certificate 12; 186 minutes; 1.37:1. Features: introduction by Olmi, three
SINBAD TRILOGY
interviews with Olmi, booklet (first pressing only).
THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD / THE GOLDEN VOYAGE
Reviewed by Philip Kemp
OF SINBAD / SINBAD AND THE EYE OF THE TIGER Nathan Juran/ Gordon Hessler/ Sam Wanamaker; USA
Widely recognised as one of the culminating peaks of neorealism, Olmi’s low-key three-hour epic plays out on the flat plains of Lombardy at the fag-end of the 19th century. Four peasant families share a factory-like farmhouse; the house, the livestock, the farm implements and, of course, the fields they tend all belong to the local landowner, who takes a major share of their produce by way of rent. The film follows them through the best part of a year, quietly watching as they raise their kids, plough the fields, prepare meals, launder their sheets and cross themselves piously at every minor setback. Their lives aren’t wholly dull. They often sing and sometimes dance; travelling musicians visit and clowns cavort in the local village. A grandad surreptitiously gets up in the small hours to spread chicken manure on his tomatoes to gain an early yield. The outside world sometimes intrudes; a socialist preaches equality in the village square, and a newly married couple visiting the nearby town see chained men led through the streets. And there’s a through-story: at the outset a father, persuaded by the priest, reluctantly agrees to let his bright son attend school. On his long daily trek one of the boy’s clogs breaks; the father fells a tree to make him a new pair, and in the last act the landlord finds out and callously evicts the family. Using a non-professional cast and moving at its own contemplative pace, Clogs demands patience; but its limpid photography and warm, gentle humanism soon become beguiling. Previous releases were often dubbed into standard Italian; this one also offers the Bergamo dialect of the original. Disc: That being the case, it’s all the more irritating that about a third of the dialogue lacks subtitles. But the soft colours of the landscape come up a treat in this 4K restoration, making the most of Olmi’s own affectionate cinematography. The four extras all cover much the same ground.
1958/73/77; Indicator/Region-free Blu-ray/DVD; 88/105/113 minutes; Certificate U; 1.66:1. Features: commentaries, interviews, retrospective documentaries, Super 8 versions, isolated scores; image galleries; book of essays
Reviewed by Kim Newman
“Trust in Allah, but tie up your camel” – the catchphrase of Sinbad’s crew in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad might well have been good advice for creative artist Ray Harryhausen, working with the strictures of limited budgets and the vagaries of a Hollywood which never quite understood why his unique craftsmanship was so appealing to generations of film fans. It’s also a reminder of that odd quirk whereby a version of Islamic lore nestles in Western popular culture, manifesting in remakes of The Thief of Bagdad, the 1940s exotica of Maria Montez or Disney’s reinvention of Aladdin. Harryhausen’s first Sinbad was in development for five years because Columbia was wary of the subject after the flop of Howard Hughes’s camp girlie show Son of Sinbad. The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, made after a run of black-and-white science-fiction subjects, was Harryhausen’s first venture into colour and fantasy, made in Spain where dramatic Mediterranean backdrops and Moorish architecture highlight such Harryhausen creations as the dancing snake-woman, the manroasting cyclops and the skeleton swordsman. With a rattling Bernard Herrmann score, magnificently wooden heroics from Kerwin Matthews, nicely underplayed evil sorcery from Torin Thatcher and a pace that the later, longer films can’t match, 7th Voyage remains fresh and exciting. It’s a Boy’s Own Paper classic that’s beyond criticism – even flaws, like the hideous line readings of young Richard Eyer as a genie who sounds like a Midwestern Little League pitcher, are wholly charming. The Sinbad films of the 70s make more of their
October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 87
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DEMON LOVER DIARY OVERLOOKED FILMS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE ON UK DVD OR BLU-RAY
Joel DeMott’s account of the making of a no-budget horror flick is a bitingly funny lost classic of documentary history By Isabel Stevens
Fly-on-the-wall documentaries are most captivating when catastrophe prevails and the parasite can feed with glee; none more so than when the subject at hand is filmmaking. Why is it that so many films, from Hearts of Darkness (1991) and Burden of Dreams (1982) to American Movie (1999) and Lost in La Mancha (1999), prey on the filmmaking woes of others? Is it that documentary makers enjoy revelling in the grand follies of their fiction-making counterparts? Or do filmmakers just recognise their craft for the dark art that it is – production battles, rivalries and all – and have a desire to expose it? Back in 1975, two such ‘parasites’, Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines, made their way from Cambridge, Massachusetts (where they’d just finished studying filmmaking at MIT), to the Midwest. Kreines had been hired as a cameraman on the no-budget horror flick Demon Lover, a long obsession of a so-called friend of Kreines’s, Donald G. Jackson. DeMott, Kreines’s filmmaking partner and girlfriend, was along for the ride as part of a deal Kreines had struck with Jackson: she would make a documentary about the production of Demon Lover in exchange for Kreines working for free. Jackson and his fellow factory worker-turnednovice-director Jerry Younkins planned to shoot six minutes of their satanic blood and sex fest each day for a fortnight. Now what could go wrong? DeMott’s diary of the unravelling production is a forgotten curio of documentary film history, a hilarious, spirited and immediate piece of observational filmmaking. It’s also notable as one of the few films about filmmaking by a female director, offering a biting feminist critique of the filmmaking process. We’re not long into Demon Lover Diary before Don looks into the camera and tries to rid himself of his pesky filmmaker-fly, suggesting that DeMott stay behind as secretary while he and Jeff and the other boys go pick up the equipment. It’s an early sign of trouble to come. “I’m not going to stay and answer the phone,” DeMott whispers to us defiantly – her conspiratorial, confessional narration feels timely 40 years on, when personal and intimate female voices are on the rise. Unlike another documentary made around the shooting of a horror film, Pere Portabella’s Vampir Cuadecuc (1970), Demon Lover Diary shows little wonder or awe at the filmmaking process. Shot with a 16mm camera and tape recorder combo strapped to her shoulder, DeMott’s footage is dark, grainy and snappily edited together with lashings of her snipey voiceover, capturing the chaos – and copious lounging around – in all its dingy glory. The plot of Demon Lover may escape 88 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
Superfly: Joel DeMott filming Demon Lover Diary
The film’s lessons include: think twice before chopping your finger off at work to fund your project with the insurance you, since, apart from the odd woodenly acted scene, DeMott makes a beeline for the sidelines. Wannabe directors can derive much wisdom from Demon Lover Diary, including: think twice before chopping your finger off at work to fund your passion project with the insurance payout; don’t allow your non-professional actors (aka your girlfriends) to improvise around costly equipment with whipped cream; and don’t act like a pompous asshole if everyone’s working for free on your supposed ticket to Hollywood. “The director really
WHAT THE PAPERS SAID ‘D ‘Demon Lover Diary is… an emotional, tense a and jagged look at the a making of both films, with m more frustrations and m dangerous complications d tthan anyone anticipated. DeMott also reveals D herself, h self her lf speaking speaking ki directly to the camera, recording her own awkwardness and inexperience as she subverts the Midwesterner’s get-rich scheme… As it turned out, the diary is an infinitely more frightening and valid experience than the movie set out to be observed.’ Variety 13 February 1980
shouldn’t be carrying anything – I’m carrying the whole film,” Jackson remarks at one point. Though DeMott and Kreines were students of Direct Cinema pioneers Richard Leacock and Ed Pincus, DeMott’s acerbic voiceover is more stylised, her desire to get close to the action a far cry from the movement’s dominant mantra of ‘no-intervention’. Demon Lover Diary has more in common with the growing trend for autobiographical adventure that emerged in the 1970s – Jonas Mekas’s Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1975), Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1976) and Pincus’s Diaries (1981). So what happened to Demon Lover Diary and its makers? According to Kreines, the film played at several festivals in 1980, but then was never seen much on the big screen or released on home video (“We were never sure that those kids with their Betamaxes were going to catch on…”). The pair went on to make Seventeen (1983), a portrait of teenagers at an Indiana high-school, which won many accolades but had its own troubles, not least the refusal of PBS, which had commissioned it, to show it on TV. “That took a lot out of us,” Kreines says. “We still make films, but things have been a bit slow recently.” Jackson and Younkins were unhappy with Demon Lover Diary, claiming that DeMott and Kreines exaggerated and manipulated events; and it’s true that DeMott is unapologetic about her search for drama, confiding her glee when she orchestrates an on-set romance. Though the film’s chilling ending feels too perfect to be real, you also have the sense that it’s not impossible. I wouldn’t want to ruin it, but Jackson’s parting remark to the camera as they sit in the house of musician and NRA supporter Ted Nugent gives you some idea: “We’ll be really careful with the crossbow.”
i
Demon Lover Diary screens at BFI Southbank, London, on 26 September
ADVERTISING FEATURE
THE SHINING By Laura Mee, Auteur/Devil’s Advocates, 112pp, paperback, illustrated, £9.99, ISBN 9781911325444
Met with critical bafflement on its release, and some hostility from author Stephen King, Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of The Shining today stands as a landmark in horror cinema, if not a universally revered one. Taking a fresh look at this most analysed of films, Laura Mee situates it within the history of the horror genre and explores how Kubrick’s filmmaking style, his use of dark humour and ambiguous approach to supernatural storytelling complement genre conventions, and examines the effective choices made in adapting King’s book. The Shining showed that popular, commercial horror films could be smart, artistic and original. It is stylistically and tonally unusual, auteurist and accomplished, and remains enigmatic and unapologetic, almost 40 years after its release.
KIM NEWMAN’S VIDEO DUNGEON By Kim Newman, Titan Books, 560pp, paperback, £14.99, ISBN 9781783299393
Ripped from the pages of Empire magazine, the first collection of film critic, film historian and novelist Kim Newman’s reviews of the best and worst B movies. Over 500 of the cheapest, trashiest, goriest and, occasionally, unexpectedly good films of the past 25 years are here, torn apart and stitched back together again in Kim’s unique style. Everything you want to know about DTV hell is here. Enter if you dare! Titanbooks.com
WHY HORROR SEDUCES
CARRIE
By Mathias Clasen, Oxford University Press, 224pp, paperback, illustrated, £19.99, ISBN 9780190666514
By Neil Mitchell, Auteur/Devil’s Advocates, 100pp, paperback, illustrated, £9.99, ISBN 9781906733728
Vampires, menacing strangers, ghosts and witches, horror has been part of cinema for almost as long as pictures have moved on screens. But why are they captivating? What is the drive to be frightened, and why is it popular? This book draws on findings in the evolutionary social sciences, showing how the genre is a product of human nature. Using popular works such as Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Jaws (1975) and The Shining (1980), Mathias Clasen argues that horror works by targeting humans’ tendency to find pleasure in make-believe, allowing us to experience negative emotions at a high level of intensity within a safe context.
Brian De Palma’s 1976 adaptation of Stephen King’s debut novel is one of the defining films of the 1970s New Hollywood and a horror classic in its own right. The story of a socially outcast teenage girl who discovers she possesses latent psychic power, leading her to take retribution on her peers, teachers and abusive mother, Carrie was an enormous commercial and critical success and still stands as one of the finest screen versions of a King novel. Neil Mitchell explores the film not just in terms of a formal breakdown – its themes, stylistic tropes, technical approaches, uses of colour and sound, dialogue and visual symbolism – but also the multitude of other factors that have contributed to its classic status.
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September 2012| Sight&Sound | 89
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Books
Alien resurrection: Andrew Keir as Professor Bernard Quatermass in Quatermass and the Pit (1967)
TALES OF MYSTERY AND IMAGINATION
The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale By Andy Murray, Headpress, 342pp, ISBN 9781909394469
WE ARE THE MARTIANS The Legacy of Nigel Kneale Edited by Neil Snowdon, P.S. Publishing, 492pp, ISBN 9781786361233 Reviewed by Tim Hayes
Nigel Kneale died in October 2006, but the arrival of two books about the writer gives the run-up to the 11th anniversary of his death an air of commemoration that might readily have suited the tenth. This slight temporal misalignment rather suits the subject, given Kneale’s interest in the vexed intersections of different time periods and generations, and the way that his work finds echoes of the past appearing in unexpected places. Andy Murray’s biography Into the Unknown first appeared not long before Kneale’s passing, based around lengthy author interviews and onthe-record materials from several sources, and is now revised and updated to reflect the continuing 90 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
ripples of his subsequent influence. We Are the Martians is brand new and a clear labour of love by editor Neil Snowdon and his roster of contributors, being a hefty collection of essays, personal recollections and free associations from several points of the critical compass. Although some overlap is inevitable, the books make a complementary pair. The biography is built around Kneale’s words and his recollections of being the right man in the right place to become one of the BBC’s first staff writers – even if he was perhaps the wrong man to remain in permanent favour with Beeb management – while the critical anthology is testament to the enduring power of genre fiction to entrance viewers and readers, especially when they are young, and to influence subsequent generations of writers. The subtext in both books is uncertainty about whether the conditions exist for the same kind of things to happen today, at either end of the intellectual property production line. There was far more to Kneale than Professor Bernard Quatermass, but the character predictably looms large in these pages. Murray lays out Kneale’s hurried 1953 creation of The Quatermass Experiment, the start of two productive decades with the BBC that included a pair of further Quatermass serials, Hammer film adaptations of each, landmark dramas such as The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968) and The Stone Tape (1972), plus a
handful of works either lost or never made that could have proved equally significant. Some of these vanished into the BBC’s internal plumbing, but both books navigate sympathetically around Kneale’s own personality and the possibility that some damage was self-inflicted; Kneale’s universal use of the epithet ‘creature’ to describe anyone towards whom he felt animosity, anger or disappointment is revealing enough. He also had a significant impact on a strand of
Nigel Kneale
BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE (1)
INTO THE UNKNOWN
PHOTOFEST NYC (1)
There was far more to Nigel Kneale than Professor Bernard Quatermass, but the character looms large in these pages Threshold (2005-06), Fringe (2008-13), and teeming hordes of screen experts from Silent Witness (1996-) to NCIS (2003-). The book – which is sadly lacking an index – accommodates a couple of splendid pieces at monograph-length: Tim Lucas’s analysis of Kneale’s published prose from all eras of his career, including the novelisation of ITV’s 1979 Quatermass series, which the author felt was the best version of that story; and Stephen Bissette’s exhaustive comparison of the BBC and Hammer versions of The Quatermass Experiment, which is as much about the art of adaptation as it is the works discussed. Kneale adapted Look Back in Anger (1959) and The Entertainer (1960) for Tony Richardson, and critic Richard Harland Smith takes the opportunity to draw connections between the world views of Kneale and John Osborne, although neither book focuses its efforts on positioning Kneale within a wider literary canvas nor comparing him more narrowly with dramatists such as Dennis Potter or David Rudkin, which might have been even more revealing. Potter would be a particularly juicy parallel, given that Kneale both gravitated towards and drifted away from visions of heightened domestic stress and gender tension throughout his career. But Kneale’s cultural concerns remain relevant on their own terms anyway. He killed off Quatermass in 1979 via a despairing and depressing conflict between youth and old age, knowledge and wilful ignorance, and detected only fragile reasons for optimism. Since then everything has got worse. “Stop trying to know things,” wails a youth in Kneale’s 1979, voicing a sentiment now heard from elders in high office and echoing across the landscape this very day.
THE CINEMA OF OZU YASUJIRO Histories of the Everyday By Woojeong Joo, Edinburgh University Press, 288pp, ISBN 9780748696321 Reviewed by Alexander Jacoby
Ozu Yasujiro has been much discussed in English-language scholarship, but Woojeong Joo’s new study of the director is one of the most precise and nuanced accounts of his cinema to date. Joo focuses on Ozu’s representation of the everyday, and strives to show how this intersects with the social and political questions confronting Japan in the turbulent second third of the 20th century. In so doing, he moves beyond traditional critical polarities – eg, is Ozu traditional or modern, reactionary or radical? Rather, he argues, Ozu’s films include both traditional and contemporary elements, reflecting “the actual circumstances of modern Japanese history, where tradition coexisted with modernity as relative concepts for each other”. Joo is an adept reader of Ozu’s films. He is interested in the director’s distinctive style, but, in opposition to the primarily formalist approach taken by canonical scholars such as Noël Burch and David Bordwell, he insists that formal choices convey specific meanings. Analysing A Woman of Tokyo (1933), he discusses the expressive use of a carefully placed stove to comment on gender relations; and he intriguingly argues that Noriko’s apartment in Tokyo Story (1953) is presented as a metaphorical tomb, with her mother-in-law’s death foreshadowed by details such as the fact that the futon she sleeps on had belonged to her late son. These examples are typical of the precision of Joo’s analysis. Joo shows how Ozu’s films dramatise issues confronting different sectors of Japanese society at different moments in the country’s 20thcentury history. The analysis is very carefully contextualised and we hear much about Ozu’s situation within his studio, Shochiku. Joo’s account of the commercial pressures operating on the director – we learn, for instance, that he made Passing Fancy (1933) and A Story of Floating Weeds (1934) consciously as money-makers – is a useful corrective to any romanticised visions of a disinterested, rarefied artist. He is also attentive to the way in which Ozu’s films draw on various established Japanese generic traditions, from shinpa melodrama to post-war ‘home drama’. It is pleasing, too, that Joo examines extant scripts and contemporary reviews to analyse some of Ozu’s numerous lost early films and to relate them to the director’s surviving output. If Bordwell and the late Ozu scholar Donald Richie have also made some effort to explore the director’s lost work, they have done so in less detail. Joo shows clearly how key lost films reflect the thematic concerns of extant ones. He also discusses some of Ozu’s unrealised projects, including the Burmese-set war film he planned in 1942. The book’s treatment of Ozu’s position during the war is especially illuminating, drawing
not only on the realised films and unfilmed scripts from the period, but on Ozu’s explicit comments in hitherto untranslated interviews. The book is aimed at an academic readership, and adheres to the stylistic conventions of academic discourse. However, except in the heavily theoretically opening section, the argument is generally accessible. Occasionally one feels that the book might have benefited from more rigorous copy editing. The standards of accuracy are high, but there are occasional oddities of phrasing: for instance, one reads that Nomura Hotei, “regardless of his relegation to Kyoto in 1924 and death in 1934, remained the most successful director in Shochiku in the 1920s,” which momentarily leaves the reader wondering what effect his death could have had on the success of films in the previous decade. My main reservation is perhaps unfair, for it is not really a reviewer’s job to suggest that an author should have written a different book. Yet reading about the way in which Ozu’s work intersects with that of his Shochiku contemporary and mentor Shimazu Yasujiro – not only an influential figure, but a major artist in his own right – I was reminded of how many significant Japanese directors still dwell in the critical shadows. There is no book in English about Shimazu, nor about Ozu’s exact contemporary and colleague Shimizu Hiroshi, whose best work rivals Ozu’s for its delicacy and humanity. Nor are there monographs on such acknowledged masters of mid-20th-century Japanese cinema as Kinoshita Keisuke, Toyoda Shiro, Yoshimura Kozaburo, Shindo Kaneto or Imai Tadashi. It is surely time that auteur-based scholarship on Japanese film broadened its focus. On the strength of this admirable book, Joo might be the ideal writer to help it do so.
Joo’s account of the commercial pressures at work is a useful corrective to any romanticised visions of a rarefied artist
Tradition and modernity: Ozu Yasujiro October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 91
BOOKS
cinema history, since the first Quatermass film helped set Hammer on the path towards its ‘new gothic’ heyday, and generated a cultural response ranging from a mini-industry of Goon Show puns to François Truffaut’s ringing nonendorsement of “this sadly English film”. New updates to the book track the ongoing attempts to resurrect Quatermass, including the striking nugget that the film rights fell at one point to Tim Burton, but the name that rises above the rest is Doctor Who. The last decade has seen the BBC’s Time Lord become a rather unlikely global behemoth, and several of the show’s writers, having grown up with his work, testify to Kneale’s influence, incorporating deliberate echoes of it into the series. The well-remarked irony is Kneale’s dislike of the original programme, and the alacrity with which he turned down the chance to write for it. It’s probably not coincidental that Doctor Who doesn’t feature nearly as much in We Are the Martians, although Snowdon’s contributors do detect Kneale’s shadow in The X-Files (1993-2012),
DOLLY TREE A Dream of Beauty By Gary Chapman, Edditt Publishing, 332pp, ISBN 9781909230248 BOOKS
Reviewed by Pamela Hutchinson
“A gown should never be so spectacular that it detracts from the person wearing it,” coyly advised the Hollywood costume designer Dolly Tree. The gowns Tree designed, especially during her terrific run at MGM from the mid-1930s to the early 1940s, were certainly stunning, and only enhanced the stars who wore them, from Myrna Loy to Carole Lombard. Tree’s own name, however, is not as well-remembered as those of either the women who wore her creations, or many of her peers in the costume departments of Golden Age Hollywood studios. This fearsomely detailed and liberally illustrated volume by Gary Chapman is a serious effort to revive her reputation, and provide as meticulous as possible a record of her work. Born in 1899 near Bristol, Tree (real name Dorothy Marian Isbell) began her career as a teenage actor, on stage but also appearing in British silent films. She also drew: posters, magazine illustrations and costume designs. She designed her first stage costumes for a Chaplinthemed revue in 1915 and her first poster a couple of years later. She developed her art and acting careers in parallel until the theatrical impresario Julian Wylie hired her as a designer for his productions across the UK and Europe. In the early 1920s she was working in Paris, the first English person – and the first woman – to design
OTHER CINEMAS Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s Edited by Sue Clayton and Laura Mulvey, I.B. Tauris, 368pp, ISBN 9781784537180
Luck of the draw: Dolly Tree
Tree popularised the strapless gown, and her signature style had its origins in the period bodices she designed for Mae West same goes for Kim Knowles’s interview with Lynda Myles, who presided over the Edinburgh Film Festival in its most exciting years. What also bound the various groups together was their intense focus on the politics of film form, a source of conflict between groups with quite similar aims, and the unprecedentedly difficult language in which these conflicts
Reviewed by Henry K. Miller
As befits its subject, the loose network of film and video collectives which bloomed in the wake of 1968, this edited collection offers a variety of angles whose effect is cumulative. The ‘other cinemas’ of the title ranged from the agit-prop Cinema Action to Black Audio Film Collective; from Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, closely associated with Screen, house journal of cine-structuralism, to the ‘structural/materialist’ London Film-Makers’ Co-op, whose members at their most extreme rejected all forms of representation; and from the feminist Circles screening collective to the ‘subjective documentarist’ Stephen Dwoskin. They were united not only by their exclusion from the oligopoly of broadcasters and cinema circuits that comprised the mainstream, but also by their at best ambiguous relationship with traditional ‘art-house’ film culture. The Other Cinema itself was a distributor, and briefly exhibitor, which had its first success with Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), which it picked up and released in 1971 – five years after its debut. I could have read co-founder Nick Hart-Williams’s firsthand account at 50 times the length, and the 92 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
A 1976 1976 poster poste t r for for the th London Londo Lo d n Film-Makers’ F Fil ilm-Mak Maker kers’’ Co-op Co op
costumes for the Folies Bergère. An American paper praised her exotic, colourful designs (the sketches reproduced here in monochrome are astonishing) as “the last word in daring gowns”. In 1926, Tree, apparently a shy, unpushy woman, took the brave step of moving to New York, and Broadway, where work was not always easy to come by. Notably, however, she did design Mae West’s 1890s-style corseted ‘hourglass’ gowns for the play Diamond Lil. In her Hollywood years Tree would popularise the strapless gown, and her signature style had its origins in these period bodices designed for West. Tree’s first Hollywood job was a two-year contract with Fox, signed in 1930, and her first solo screen credit was Annabelle’s Affairs (1931), starring Jeanette MacDonald. It was at MGM, from 1933, that her movie career kicked into high gear. Working on an equal footing with Adrian, though on separate projects, Tree designed for high-profile productions including David Copperfield (1935), Libeled Lady (1936) and the Thin Man films. While she had more experience than her colleague, he had better publicity, and Tree’s work is overshadowed by Adrian’s fame, with some of her designs still, according to Chapman, misattributed. Tree left MGM in 1941, amid rumours about her alcoholism, but also with a new ready-to-wear range in the offing. This book will do wonders for our appreciation of Tree’s style, with endless photographs of her sumptuous outfits for MGM stars, accompanied by the details of their creation. This shy Englishwoman, whose design credo was “simplicity, smartness, suitability”, was responsible for gowns that epitomise the covetable excesses of Hollywood glamour. were conducted. A central premise for at least some of the filmmakers and theorists involved was that language, verbal or cinematic, is not a transparent medium of representation; that it is ideological even apart from the message it is used to convey, insofar as it produces an imaginary wholeness in the reader or viewer. In other words, both the films and the theory that proliferated around them needed to be difficult, in order to make the workings of ideology plain to see. The book contains chapters on some of the most significant intellectual currents, chiefly Brechtianism and semiotics, which led to this position. A slight weakness, at points, is that these essays risk retreading old ground, as these ideas have been academic orthodoxy, though not unchallenged, for decades. As such, I preferred those entries that historicise their material, such as Lucy Reynolds’s on Circles, and Kodwo Eshun’s on the Film and History Project’s film The Song of the Shirt (1979). There are numerous entreaties to take inspiration from the “utopian spirit, the hope in the future” of the era, as the editors put it, but Eshun’s essay, which discusses the left-wing critique of ‘welfarism’, makes plain that this is no simple task. Similarly, some of the most interesting contributions complicate the editors’ use of 1979 as an end-point. Catherine Elwes goes as far as writing that it was “a loosening of the restrictive practices of the unions under the new Tory government” that helped to usher in the “magnificent interlude” of Channel 4 in 1982. It didn’t last long, but historical ironies of this kind confront anyone wishing to revive the spirit of the 70s.
TWO CHEERS FOR HOLLYWOOD Joseph McBride on Movies By Joseph McBride, Hightower Press, 694pp, ISBN 9781946208194
PHOTOFEST NYC (1)/BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE (1)
Joseph McBride has been writing about film for a long time. (His critical study of Orson Welles and an anthology of essays he edited on Howard Hawks, both published in 1972, were among the first film books I read.) That alone would probably make this self-published collection of his writings worth investigating, but as McBride himself puts it, he is, perhaps, unusually qualified to write about film thanks to the four different aspects of his professional involvement with the cinema. Besides writing books and articles on film history, he was also for some years a reporter, reviewer and columnist for the trade paper Variety; he worked for a while in the business as a screenwriter and producer; and since 2002 he has taught in academia. He explains why he believes this multifaceted history has provided him with insights denied to most other writers on film in a lengthy opening chapter, ‘I Loved Movies But…’, in which, among other things, he touches on “the generally awful state American mainstream movies have fallen into”, the decline of cinephilia, his feelings about auteurism, the baleful influence of film theory and jargon, and his own position in film culture over the years as “a maverick, a nonconformist, an iconoclast”. While here and there his claims to having produced influential, groundbreaking work may smack a little of immodesty, there is no denying that McBride has been a significant presence in film literature, notably for his biographies of Frank Capra, John Ford, Welles and Steven Spielberg. It’s perhaps hardly surprising that so many of the pieces collected here – grouped under ‘Writers’, ‘Directors’, ‘Visiting Sets’, ‘Actors and Others’ and ‘Essays on Film and Literature’ – relate in one way or another to those four filmmakers and a few others he’s especially interested in, particularly Alfred Hitchcock, John Huston and Billy Wilder. The book’s mainly about Hollywood, then – though there are interviews with Jean-Luc Godard (predictably disastrous) and Anthony Minghella (predictably very eloquent) and an essay on Fahrenheit 451 (François Truffaut was another of his favourite filmmakers). But for every slightly unexpected piece, there is another that loops back to his most loved movies and directors. Rightly keen to acknowledge the contributions made by screenwriters, McBride includes appreciations of Capra and Ford collaborators Robert Riskin and Frank S. Nugent, not to mention Alma Reville (Mrs Hitchcock). Ford actors do well; while a celebration of John Wayne (McBride’s number one actor) is strangely unilluminating, there is a nicely observed piece on James Stewart and a very valuable interview with Lincoln Perry, better known to the world as Stepin Fetchit. Indeed, some of the best writing here concerns Ford and his films. Notwithstanding their shared roots on the west coast of Ireland, McBride’s 1970 interview with the notoriously unforthcoming director only rarely managed to penetrate behind the curmudgeonly facade; still, it makes for an entertaining read.
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Reviewed by Geoff Andrew
Wind talkers: Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich and Joseph McBride discussing The Other Side of the Wind
More rewarding are the aforementioned account of Nugent, who scripted Fort Apache (1948), The Quiet Man (1952) and The Searchers (1956), and three essays looking at Ford as an Irish-American, and at the roles played by comedy and race in his films. The last essay is the most interesting; while highlighting Ford’s unusually frequent treatment of racial issues, McBride acknowledges and analyses the many contradictions at work in his films, and neatly pinpoints the “stubborn incoherence” of The Searchers. The case made for Ford as a successful director of comic scenes is less persuasive; a comparison with Shakespeare’s tendency to balance serious or even tragic scenes with moments of ‘low’ comedy may be apposite, but I would maintain that much of the bibulous braggadocio and brawling in Ford’s films is dispiritingly broad, coarse and unfunny. Still, at least McBride
McBride has been a significant presence in film literature, notably for his biographies of Capra, Ford, Welles and Spielberg
John Ford’s The Searchers
wisely draws back from trying to defend the indefensibly dismal Tobacco Road (1941). At his best on the studio era, McBride nevertheless offers a couple of pleasing articles on the 1970s, when he himself was new to Hollywood: a 1975 piece for Daily Variety assembles the thoughts of a number of then successful writers (Robert Towne, John Milius, Paul Schrader et al, including a predictably nearanonymous Terrence Malick), while a review of Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls provides a very incisive historian’s critique of that overrated volume. As for more recent Hollywood, McBride unsurprisingly remains an advocate of Spielberg, and in one of the five new essays written for this volume comes out in support of the Coen brothers. This last is a welcome but occasionally frustrating essay, suffering from both needless repetition (we’re told a few times too many that personal filmmaking is largely unappreciated in these parlous times) and some factual errors: the barber in The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) does not have an urgent desire to get rid of his faithless wife, and Hail, Caesar! (2016) does not concentrate largely on a writer. Somewhat questionable, too, is an attempt to psychoanalyse the Coens’ characters in terms of dissociative identity disorder, and even more so the subsequent speculation on the “alienation in their upbringing”, “the special kinds of demons” and “mysterious traumas” that might have led the brothers to create such characters. Likewise, comparing A Serious Man (2009) to Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light (1962) seems, at least to this Coens and Bergman admirer, inappropriate and fruitless. That said, a compendium of this scale made up of 64 pieces written for many different organs over a great many years is bound to be a little uneven, and Two Cheers for Hollywood is well worth dipping into. Apart from anything else, McBride proudly remains a maverick and is admirably uninfluenced by fashion: who else would write, “George Stevens is the most underrated American director today,” and claim Shane (1952) as “the greatest of all Westerns”? For better or worse, McBride is very much his own man, and for that deserves a minimum of two cheers. October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 93
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FEEDBACK
READERS’ LETTERS Letters are welcome, and should be addressed to the Editor at Sight & Sound, BFI, 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN Email: S&S@bfi.org.uk
LETTER OF THE MONTH COOL BANDE LUC
GOLDEN YEARS
Your correspondent Edward O’Reilly asks, “Who now can recall the Film Club seasons on BBC2 in the 1980s, or indeed Moviedrome?” (Letters, S&S, August). I remember. I was a lonely mixed-race teenager growing up in the then barometer of Britain, Basildon in Essex. These incredible series and the films they introduced to me opened up possibilities beyond the tough housing estate, brutal school and dysfunctional family that was my entire world. Go to the BBC Genome website and type in ‘Film Club’ or ‘Moviedrome’ for an indication of the quality of cinema being screened during this period – Battleship Potemkin, Peeping Tom, Two-Lane Blacktop, among many others. I remember, aged 15, being mesmerised by Once upon a Time in the West on BBC2 on Christmas Eve 1989. These screenings changed lives. The introductions and discussions that preceded them were often stunning. This was the real Golden Age of (British) television, even though there were only four channels. Sky, Netflix and Amazon can’t compare. I can also remember the groundbreaking – but fairly short-lived – BBC film series Moving Pictures in the 1990s. That two or three decades later the BBC no longer has a dedicated television resource for real cinephiles is lamentable. Will Goble Rayleigh, Essex STICKS PICK NETFLIX MIX
Jason Wood complains that Netflix withheld Bong Joon-ho’s Okja from the majority of UK cinema screens (Letter of the Month, S&S, August). But he does not address the fact that many films – particularly foreignlanguage or arthouse – only get an extremely limited release in UK cinemas; if you don’t live in a major city it is often impossible to watch them on the big screen anyway. The online distribution strategy of Netflix et al is a welcome relief for those of us who don’t have the opportunity to watch such films in a cinema. Premieres on streaming services make new work from a diverse range of international directors more widely available to audiences, without the long wait for a DVD release. William Bhandari By email EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE
I have avoided seeing Dunkirk, for the simple reason that every review mentioned the high decibel level of the soundtrack. I shall await a mode of seeing it where I can control the volume. This is an extreme example of the wider practice of cinemas turning up the volume to a level unacceptable to many of us. Alan Pavelin Chislehurst
There’s something about Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets that brings out contempt in mainstream critics, but I expected more of Lisa Mullen’s review (S&S, September). Valerian perfectly catches the tone of European graphic novels in its staging of baroque, drily funny set pieces, and will improve with age as
indie and foreign-language cinema. I decided to see Dunkirk there, out of loyalty and so as not to be seated next to someone eating his dinner. This meant I saw it later than you. So we hadn’t “all seen it by now” (Editorial, S&S, September). It was still possible for you to spoil my chance of spotting the ticking on the soundtrack by myself. Please note that spoilers are possible across the country, outside your metropolitan centre of the world, while films are still on general release. John Dinning Cardiff
TICKED OFF
I admire your practice of not revealing key plot points without warning. However, I was late reading the September issue. I do not live in London. We have an excellent arts centre in Cardiff, the Chapter, where I get my dose of
non-geeks catch up. The bazaar sequence is not “virtual reality”, but set in overlapped dimensions – a concept typical of JeanClaude Mézières, artist of the original bande dessinée, who also worked with Besson on The Fifth Element (1997). His style continues to be highly influential on Hollywood SF. Christopher Fowler London
great works of cinema – and long impossible to see, apart from a TV transmission many years ago. I’d love to rush out and buy a copy. But it’s Region A. So that’s that. I can’t play Region A Blu-rays, and most people can’t – though many DVD players can be easily adapted to play Region 1, it’s much more difficult to get conversions to Region A. You do note that it’s Region A, of course, so alert readers are warned off (though a clearer warning might be useful). But it’s immensely frustrating – and in this case there is apparently not even a DVD version. Roger Wilmut By email
BLU MEANIES
I was delighted to see Marcel Pagnol’s Marseille Trilogy has at last been released on Blu-ray (‘Great César’s ghost’, Home Cinema, S&S, September). Your review rightly enthuses over it as one of the
Additions and corrections September p.52 Logan Lucky: Certificate 12A, 118m 32s; p.65 God’s Own Country: Certificate 15, 104m 31s; p.70 The Odyssey: Certificate PG, 122m 49s; p.75 Una: Certificate 15, 94m 8s; p.75 The Untamed: Certificate 18, 98m 011s October 2017 | Sight&Sound | 95
ENDINGS…
SALAAM BOMBAY!
Mira Nair’s stunning debut exploring the lives of Indian street children carries the narrative’s rich ambiguity through to its final scene By Alex Dudok de Wit
“Indian cinema can sometimes be lazily presented as a straight choice between Satyajit Ray and Bollywood,” writes Meenakshi Shedde, guest curator of the ‘India on Film’ celebration at the BFI Southbank in London (‘A world within: the other Indian cinema’, S&S, April). Indeed, many Western viewers – even those who have never seen a Bollywood movie – identify that industry’s trademark songs, glitz and happy endings with Indian film as a whole. This creates space for the odd independent film to break out of the country and confound expectations, as Mira Nair’s stunning first feature did in 1988. Salaam Bombay! opens on scenes of a travelling circus packing up somewhere in rural India, set to the atmospheric sitar drone of L. Subramaniam’s main theme. Eleven-year-old Krishna (Shafiq Syed), the troupe’s dogsbody, is sent on an errand; when he returns, the circus is gone. He uses his last cash to buy a train ticket to the nearest city: Bombay. “Come back a film star!” the cashier quips sarcastically. Bollywood figures loom large in Krishna’s Bombay – giant movie posters are one of the first things he encounters – but its background glamour only serves to underscore the harshness of the life he finds there. Nair’s film is closer in tone to Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist portrait of childhood poverty Shoeshine (1946) than the likes of Ramesh Sippy’s classic action-adventure 96 | Sight&Sound | October 2017
Sholay (1975). It is the plight of the faceless poor that interests her. Krishna ekes out a living in the Kamathipura red-light district, alternating between menial jobs and petty crime in the hope of earning enough to return to his home village. He is sustained by the fragile friendships he forms with the pushers, hookers and hoodlums around him. Having explored this world in her early documentaries, Nair shoots in a robust vérité style; the child ‘actors’ are all real-life street kids. (Syed himself says he ran away from his native Bangalore to Bombay “just to see if what we saw in movies were right”.) In this teeming demi-monde, people soon lose their names, and with it their individuality. After getting a job delivering tea, Krishna becomes ‘Chaipau’ (‘Tea boy’). He falls for a virgin called Sweet Sixteen, who has been sold as a valuable asset to a local brothel. The closest thing he has to a friend is an older junkie, nicknamed ‘Chillum’ after a pipe used to smoke drugs. These characters are never reduced to archetypes – the performances are too nuanced, the script (by long-time Nair collaborator Sooni Taraporevala) too sympathetic. Yet they come to embody inescapable truths of the Bombay slums, and a certain fatalism: as plot twists make clear, officialdom is against them, mainstream society all but closed to them. Salaam Bombay! is wise enough to recognise the exhilaration of Krishna’s total independence,
Is he steeling himself for adult life on the streets? Gathering his resolve to earn his money back? Or giving up? We don’t find out
while weighing it against the injustice of a system that eventually crushes anyone like him. This ambivalence comes to a head in the single-shot closing scene. Krishna has just emerged from a manic street festival in honour of Ganesha, the god of good beginnings. He has already lost his job and savings, and in the crowd he has been separated from his one remaining companion. He sits down in a quiet side street, takes a spinning top from his pocket and idly winds a piece of string around it. As the camera slowly zooms in and Subramaniam’s drone returns, the boy begins to cry. For the first time since the circus abandoned him, he is utterly alone. He has come full circle. The scene draws on many of the film’s strengths: the light-touch symbolism, Syed’s captivating expressions, Nair’s flair for communicating without words. Above all, it carries the narrative’s rich ambiguity through to the end. After a while, Krishna puts down his toy and stops crying, his sombre eyes lingering on something out of shot. Is he steeling himself for adult life on Bombay’s streets? Gathering his resolve to earn his money back? Or simply giving up? We don’t find out: the film cuts to a dedication to “the children on the streets of Bombay”, then the credits. For a more hopeful conclusion, we can look to what happened next. Salaam Bombay! was well received, picking up an Oscar nomination and two prizes at Cannes. Nair used the proceeds to set up the Salaam Baalak Trust, a non-profit that supports street kids in India’s biggest cities. It claims to have helped more than 70,000 children, some of whom have trained as actors. Not exactly a Bollywood ending, perhaps, but certainly a rare and inspiring example of a film that refuses to stop at its final scene.
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