Cambridge Film Festival Review 2014 #2

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Feisty brunette Nikolaj Lie Kaas takes on a cold case as inspector “Carl Mørck” in the Scandi noir film THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES 28 Aug at 22.15; 29 Aug at 14.00

INSIDE

Meet Maris “Cherry Tobacco” Nõlvak

Powell & Pressburger ’s swan song?

THE BOY WHO TURNED YELLOW!

INSIDE

The vibrant silents of Gerhard Lamprecht come to Cambridge

FEATURE

Introducing Gerhard Lamprecht

UNDER THE LANTERN screens on Thu 4th Sep at 20:30 (St Philips) and Sat 6th Sep at 14:00 (APH) Never heard of Gerhard Lamprecht? Well, you’re in good company. Until recently, this polymath of the German film world seemed to have dropped off the radar. In the past couple of years, however, his newly-restored films have caused a celluloid stir - from a retrospective at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in 2013 to a short season of his early work at this year’s Cambridge Film Festival, audiences are paying this director some much deserved attention.

These beautiful, emotional and sometimes funny films are well worth seeking out, especially if you can get along to the show with Neil Brand at the piano.

So who was this man whose documentary style of film making explored Expressionist techniques and influenced the neo-realist movement? Maybe Hitchcock saw the early films during his time in Germany, and perhaps he even borrowed some of Lamprecht’s innovative editing ideas. Lamprecht was passionate about highlighting the contrast between the glittering wealth and bright lights of Weimar Berlin with the hard, and usually short lives of the dispossessed. In this society there were few second chances if your luck ran out.

Born in 1897 and raised in Berlin, Gerhard Lamprecht took a part time job as a film projectionist at the age of 12. Within a couple of years he had his own collection of film prints. He soon added actor, screenwriter and director to his CV; he sold his first screenplay in 1914 and even wrote scripts while he was a patient in a military hospital during the Great War. By 1919 he was head of scriptwriting at Lupu Pick’s company Rex Films. The next year he directed his first feature, and struck box office gold in 1923 with the series CONFESSIONS OF A WOMAN. He liked to work with the same team of technicians and actors where possible, always examining the vulnerable underbelly of decadence.

Lamprecht’s beautiful and touching films are filled with his passion for highlighting social inequality, especially for the working class. Perhaps because the situations in the films were so dire, especially for children, you should be ready for tears. Some of the endings are a bit twee and predictable, but the journey for the viewer is intense (and beautiful to watch) so you’ll find that you want to save that child, to rescue that wife from her vile husband, to slip a few pounds to that unemployed man. Lamprecht’s films embody the best of silent cinema from this late silent period. As a viewer you have to invest emotion, interest and imagination; however, the payback is enormous. There are few cinematic experiences as rewarding as watching a top quality silent film accompanied by great music.

So go on, open your eyes and your heart to the glorious silent films of Gerhard Lamprecht. You won’t regret it.

- Amanda Randall

read our interview with the BFI’s LAMPRECHT expert at takeonecff.com

REVIEW

Family Film Festival

screens with GLITTERBALL on 5th Sep at 18.00 at St Philips Church

The Boy Who Turned Yellow At first sight this short film comes as a disappointment, if not a bit of an embarrassment: can it really be the swansong of the great writing/directing team of Powell and Pressburger, who gave the world THE RED SHOES, THE LIFE & DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP and A CANTERBURY TALE? Not to mention the sensationally sadistic PEEPING TOM, widely reviled and believed to have put paid to Michael Powell’s career? After this lurid episode, he lurched from one failed project to another, fetching up in Australia where he directed the raucous THEY’RE A WEIRD MOB (about Italian immigrants in Sydney, written under a pseudonym by Emeric Pressburger) and AGE OF CONSENT starring James Mason and a frequently naked Helen Mirren; setting the standard for the future.

And then THE BOY WHO TURNED YELLOW, made for the Children’s Film Foundation on an extremely low budget, and it shows. Flatly shot and even more flatly acted, it also suffers from the dire costumes of the early 1970s: bell-bottom trousers, tank-tops and mini-skirts which even the hero’s male and apparently non-imaginary friend Electronic (“Nick” for short) is obliged to wear, along with a rotating yellow light on his head.

Given that A CANTERBURY TALE’s inciting incident was a mysterious assailant who poured glue into women’s hair after dark, one shouldn’t be too surprised at the wacky development of Pressburger’s original story: after losing one of his two white mice on a trip to the Tower of London, schoolboy John catches the Northern Line home and promptly turns yellow (as do the rest of the passengers on the tube, and part of the population of Hampstead). John is then visited in the night by the equally yellow Nick, who emerges Ringu-like from the TV set and takes John on a Snowman-like tour of London’s power stations, and eventually to the Tower, populated by Beefeaters with a traditional belief in capital punishment.

And herein lies THE BOY WHO TURNED YELLOW’s charm, the sheer wealth of dramatic incidents crammed into fifty-five minutes of a film designed to appeal to young imaginations. Where else would the action be held up by a goalkeeper complaining about a mouse in his shirt, while trying to save a penalty? The budget may creak at the seams - the screenwriter Lem Dobbs (son of Michael Powell’s friend, the painter R.B.Kitaj who plays John’s geeky schoolmate Munro) describes supplying his own props and wardrobe - but in the end it’s the unpredictable story up there on the screen that counts. A message that clearly got through to Robert Eddison, the distinguished classical actor who was prepared to put up with any amount of indignity (not least the costume) in delivering a literally high-voltage performance as Nick.

So in the end, a fitting swansong to the partnership, deservedly voted the Children’s Film of the Year in both 1972 and 1973. And as with all Powell and Pressburger films from their glory years as “The Archers”, I look forward to seeing it again, especially for the yellow tube train coming into Chalk Farm station.

- Andrew Nickolds

REVIEW

To be noticed again , he tells a lie .

Charlie Says Lewis Arnold’s CHARLIE SAYS tells the brooding story of a young boy called Charlie (Conner Chapman) and the consequences of a (relatively) innocent lie he tells while on holiday with his family. The ramifications of a lie have been explored in film and literature on many occasions, often given a grand setting (ATONEMENT), providing a backdrop that allows the scale of the lie to be magnified against the tragedy of the real world. It is this sense of grand foreboding that gives CHARLIE SAYS much of its strength, as it does not have a grand backdrop and the consequences are not as you think. The nature of truth and misplaced love lie at the heart of these narratives and CHARLIE SAYS captures that wonderfully.

The opening scene demonstrates with simple beauty the love between father and son, capturing in 30 seconds the lifelong childhood memories most of us have from our holidays. From here it unfolds in to three generations. Charlie, a typically laconic boy of 10 or so, sees the world in a vertical way: not yet fully grown but observing, while only half understanding the conversations of the generations surrounding him. The teenagers, entering adulthood and talking the teenage talk with all the usual gusto but little real understanding, hoping for a drink and some sex. And the adults, wrapped up in their world, separate from that of their children and seeking some downtime while on holiday.

At heart, Charlie is still just a child with childish ambitions: to build a tyre swing, to play in the woods. He just wants to play and have fun with his dad, or his sister and her friends. He is not seeking any abnormal attention, just the usual things kids his age want to do on holiday – and he can’t understand the preoccupation of the other generations. Why should he? He is just a child, and we should celebrate that. To be noticed again, he tells a lie.

The mother (Christine Bottomley), played with beautiful understatement, has only a few spoken lines; but she is the voice of reason and exudes a great deal of love, with a look or a half spoken line in the background. The father (Gary Cargill, MALEFICENT), no less full of love and deftly played, does not know how to express his loving feelings. The teenager Luke (Elliott Tittensor, THE SELFISH GIANT), is played to great effect and provides a (naive) testosterone driven edge and pace to the piece. However, it is Conner Chapman’s performance as Charlie that is at the heart of the film: his angst riven face, lips sore and reddened from sucking, his furtive glances up at his parents, avoiding meaningful eye contact and his “dunno” responses give a real pathos to the drama.

Suspense is maintained throughout, the editing is crisp and the script tight. The sound is also wonderfully intimate: the closeness of water, of a fire burning or the background of synths murmuring, telling their own story – it all enhances the mood to great effect. There is constant eavesdropping of whispered conversations, giving this piece a sense of the wider implications of a lie, the grander sense of scale. Of the need for the rule of law (the other parents’ concern for the boy’s father, especially in a moment of lost perspective), of fascism (the unfounded accusations against the ‘hairy man’), of tribalism (family group mentality), of vigilantes and “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”. But ultimately what makes this short work is that it is not, thankfully, about those things. It is about love.

- Nick Kitchin

CHARLIE SAYS screens on Saturday 6th September at 22.30, as part of the TWINS PART 1 Short Fusion strand.

INTERVIEW

Maris Nõ lvak is “Laura” in

CHERRY TOBACCO

CHERRY TOBACCO tells the story of Laura (Maris Nõlvak), an eternally bored teenager beginning her journey into adulthood in a small provincial town in Estonia. Kate Bermingham spoke to co-director Andres Maimik and lead actor Maris Nõlvak ahead of the screening of CHERRY TOBACCO at Cambridge Film Festival this year.

Kate Bermingham: One of the things I liked about CHERRY TOBACCO was the way in which Laura and Joosep’s relationship was portrayed in a rather innocent, chaste light - was this the intention?

Maris Nõlvak: For me it was clear from the start, when I first read the script, that Laura is that kind of a girl for whom the platonic love is more important. That is why I focused more on the things that were going on in her head and heart, rather than on the things that were seen by the outside world. Laura is more likely to play with the possibilities than wanting anything to happen. It’s that kind of a story - a relationship where nothing happens and therefore everything is possible.

When you just know that it is in the air, then you will remain with every possible way to continue the story. Laura and Joosep have the power. They choose to do nothing, they choose the endless possibilities. Therefore, it might seem that the movie is innocent, but actually the movie is about things that could have happened but did not, because the story is controlled by its characters. And Laura is one of those persons for whom it is not necessary to do anything to feel or experience something. Maybe it is just the innocence of a young girl, but maybe it is the maturity of her soul.

KB: CHERRY TOBACCO seems to have been created in quite a simple way. Is this deliberate? To me, it helped to reveal the natural beauty of the Estonian countryside.

MN: For me, it was very comfortable to do long takes with no cuts. It helped to create the atmosphere. Also, at some point we became one -- the nature and the movie crew. We didn’t have much stuff. We only had one camera.

The nature around us made it feel more like a vacation than a job, and as the story itself was warm and beautiful ... thanks to that I had a very memorable end of the summer. I will never forget how our little crew became like a family and how we all lived and worked together like one person. We made a new world during the time we were filming in August. I think that this warmth, this breathing as one we had on the set is also captured in the film. That is what I value most about CHERRY TOBACCO. That the material side of the movie is nothing compared to the warmth put there by the people who made it.

Read Kate Bermingham’s full interview with both Maris and co-director Andres Maimik at takeonecff.com.

Meet Maris at the screening of CHERRY TOBACCO on 29th Aug at 21.15. 2nd Show 31st Aug at 13.30.

REVIEW

Ballad on Approving of the World

See FREE RANGE at the Cambridge Film Festival at 18.45 on 30 August and 1 September at 13.00 At a critical moment in FREE RANGE/BALLAD ON APPROVING OF THE WORLD, Fred (Lauri Lagle) has his own poetry read back to him. ‘How do you not be exhausted when you think of all the food you’ve eaten, and all the food you have yet to eat… How to even stand upright without sinking down along the wall, into the concrete.’ As you might have guessed from this quote, Fred does not have a career as a motivational speaker. Ironically, however, it is this very scene that gets both our protagonist and the film motoring.

FREE RANGE/BALLAD ON APPROVING OF THE WORLD follows Fred and his relationship with his newly pregnant girlfriend, Susannah (Jaanika Arum). Wild and inconsiderate, Fred’s main hobbies revolve around consuming crippling amounts of alcohol. In sitting-rooms, in parks, on beaches, the juvenile poet doesn’t mind as long as it makes his vision blur and insides churn. But what of money and providing for his family-to-be? Jobs only provide an opportunity for mischief for the Estonian James Dean who topples boxes, spurns book offers, and even insults Terrence Malick in a brief stint as a film critic! How dare he? Internal pressures mount as his relationship with Susannah deteriorates. A realisation dawns that change may be his only option.

Rarely has the philosophy of rejecting the common path seemed quite so righteous.

The immature slacker hitting the pains of real life is a common theme for film. Cinema just loves telling people to grow up. However, few present both the pleasure and pain of youth-in-revolt as well as FREE RANGE. Rarely has the philosophy of rejecting the common path seemed quite so righteous. Yet rarely has an individual’s anarchy been more agonizing to watch. The balance of the two is almost perfect. Fred, with his baby face, dishevelled hair and blood-shot eyes, is the perfect vehicle for sympathy. Even when torturing a poor tram driver, you can’t help but feel that he is the one that has the true inner pain. We long for the return of his few brief happy scenes, brilliantly indicated by director Veiko Ounpuu’s use of a bleached colour-scheme, artfully indicating Fred’s lazy longing for an idle mind.

FREE RANGE possibly lacks activity or plot points, but as a character study it is flawlessly acted and taken to its full conclusions. Get your woollen tank-tops out of the attic, never will they seem more cool than just after this Estonian adventure.

- Edd Elliott (Deputy Editor)

if you loved BELLEVILLE RENDEZVOUS try Chomet’s live action comedy ATTILA MARCEL, screening 31 Aug at 18.30

REVIEWthe director: 29 Aug at 16.00/31 Aug at 1.30 Meet

The White City Thomas Dekker as the implausibly hard-drinking, sexually ambiguous Kyle

REVIEW Installing themselves in a friend’s Tel Aviv apartment while he is in Italy making cheese, a young American couple, Kyle (Thomas Dekker) and Eva (Haley Bennett), take in the city’s sights, enjoy its occasionally louche nightlife and attempt to work on their respective artistic projects. The implausibly hard-drinking, sexually ambiguous Kyle is an experimental film-maker, smirkingly pitching his style as ‘Stan Brakhage meets Kenneth Anger’. The elegant Eva, with a fondness for vintage-style clothing that extends into the bedroom, is a poet whose modest hesitancy about her own work owes much to Kyle’s dominating presence.

When they meet Avi, a handsome would-be actor recently out of the Israeli army and casting about for a job in the country’s troubled economy, the first sparks of mutual attraction fly between him and Eva. However it is Kyle, characteristically enough, who pursues Avi, at first as a performer in his film, and later as an object of desire. Though Eva has found her own distractions, she can hardly fail to be unaware of Kyle and Avi’s growing closeness…

For much of its length THE WHITE CITY loosely follows both Kyle and Eva as they navigate Tel Aviv together and separately.

However, at times it feels more like ‘The Kyle Show’ (a perception which the character himself would no doubt applaud): a twisted, polymorphously perverse rom-com where Kyle has to choose, or chooses not to choose, between Eva and Avi. (The similarity of their names can hardly be a coincidence.)

The real heart of the film – always assuming it contains so sentimental an organ – is the relationship between Kyle and Eva. The idea of a couple whose relationship is tested by a journey to a foreign country is a regular cinematic theme, from Rossellini’s VOYAGE TO ITALY in 1954 to Roger Michell’s LE WEEK-END last

year; but this couple is so young, and their relationship so short-lived, that they really have no business already being quite this bored with each other. While neither of them can claim to be exactly sympathetic, Kyle – selfcentred, manipulative, unscrupulous and just plain rude – is outstandingly unpleasant; and Dekker plays him with such reality (not to mention relish) that he would probably be advised to steer clear of people who have just seen the film, just in case they feel the need to punch him in the face.

As often with such clearly unbalanced relationships, the film’s unspoken question is why the more hard-done-by partner, in this case Eva, doesn’t get out. But then, Eva has her own secret weapon: if Kyle is unpredictable because of his wilfully arbitrary nature, Eva proves equally so through her sheer inscrutability. While she knows exactly how to get a rise out of him through small actions,he cannot really tell which of his daily outrages will finally make her lose her cool. When she finally does so, Kyle’s carefully maintained carapace of anaesthetised irony briefly cracks, and it is a testament to Dekker’s performance that this moment of sorrowful repentance proves so persuasive.

The relationship is not all play-acting, however, and Eva is clearly uneasy with aspects of it, allowing herself to charm and be charmed by a sad-eyed Israeli poet who so expertly mingles flirtation with genuine interest that Eva cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. As it turns out, she enjoys being lionised by the poet and his friends only long enough for it to annoy Kyle, whereupon she meekly follows him home.

One disadvantage of a film like this that focuses so strongly on character at the expense of plot is that it is difficult to bring it to a conclusion. However, while the film’s abrupt ending – owing more than a little to The Sopranos – may baffle or annoy, it is perhaps better read as a sign that Barklow and Kofman know exactly how much rope to give their characters to let them hang themselves, and they go on filming until it runs out.

- Stephen Watson

©TAKE ONE 2014 Editor/Design: Rosy Hunt Managing Editor: Jim Ross Deputy Editor: Edd Elliott