Issue 2: The 2017 Cambridge Film Festival Review

Take One Magazine presents

The Cambridge Film Festival Review 2017

Issue 2

#TakeOnerecommends

The Woman That Men Yearn For INSIDE

We Need To Talk About Lynne Ramsay A special focus on the Glaswegian’s audacious body of work

Sex, Pity and Loneliness A warts-and-all panorama of German city life

Loveless Layers of family contempt run deep...

PLUS

NEWS REVIEWS INTERVIEWS AWARDS

Loveless

at the Arts Picturehouse on the 25th at 20:30 and 26th at 10:00

Andrey Zvyagintsev has given us some sharp insights into Russian culture and society in recent years. After rising to international prominence with 2003’s THE RETURN, his last two films – ELENA in 2011, the story of a woman attempting to provide for her descendants, and LEVIATHAN in 2014, where a man suffers misfortune upon misfortune in a corrupt coastal town – have offered ever more abrasive insights into aspects of Russian society. His latest film LOVELESS represents both the peak of that dark examination of contemporary Russia, and of Zvyagintsev’s already impressive career.

An early dialogue exchange references the end of the world, not at the hands of the despotic madmen in charge of the planet in 2017 but to the end of the Mayan calendar, placing the film in 2012 and just a few months into Vladimir Putin’s second spell as Russian president. Against the backdrop of changing Russian society, LOVELESS examines the nature of failing relationships through the breakdown of a family. The parents Zhenya and Boris (Maryana Spivak and Aleksey Rozin) are in the throes of a messy divorce, and one argument too many tips their son Alyosha (Matvey Novikov) over the edge as he runs away to escape both their fighting.

LOVELESS plays out over many levels, each of which have something to say about modern Russian society. Dad Boris is trying to find ways to migrate to his new relationship with his already pregnant girlfriend without his strict employers getting wind, while mum Zhenya has already traded up for a richer model with a swanky apartment. When their son disappears, initially it’s just another inconvenience in their lives, an unwanted child that’s been little more than a nuisance. The layers of family contempt run deep, as we also see Zhenya’s mother display a similar contempt for her own progeny.

This is wrapped up in a procedural drama which exposes the ways in which Russian society cares for its own citizens; caring in the loosest sense of the word, of course. It becomes readily and dishearteningly apparent how easy it is for a boy such as Alyosha to slip through the cracks. The police are portrayed as useless, but a well-drilled group of local volunteers set about the task of finding the young runaway. Zvyagintsev and his regular script collaborator Oleg Nevin cleverly weave the two aspects of the story together, showing the distance and alienation endemic in Russian life at both a societal and a personal level and how, despite a surface appearance of affluence, there’s an inescapable darkness ready to swallow up anyone at a moment’s notice.

LOVELESS also plays out like a perverse thriller. The film makes an early grab for your heartstrings with a single shot which perfectly captures Alyosha’s utter despair at his situation, and from there the film never lets up. As the search pushes out into the countryside, the decay of the landscape and the buildings serves as a strong contrast to Zhenya and Boris’s current living arrangements, with cinematographer Mikhail Krichman’s icy gaze helping Zvyagintsev’s masterful grip on the tension. There’s never any release on the despair, and a coda with Boris’ new family is just one reminder that Russia is repeating the mistakes of the past and failing to learn. The only contrast here is in Zvyagintsev’s career, which continues to go from strength to strength. LOVELESS is certainly an appropriate title, but while love may be hard to muster for this film, a deep and lasting admiration should be much easier to find.

- Mark Liversidge

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More reviews, interviews, features and unabridged versions of all our printed content at takeonecff.com

Well / Kút A car with four prostitutes and two gangsters breaks down at a gas station in a remote location on the road to a border crossing... It might sound like it’s the lead-in to a joke with a punchline or even like a setup for a Quentin Tarantino film and Attila Gigor’s WELL certainly has its share of graphic and almost cartoonish violence, but there are a few other improbable characters in the film and each have a punchline of their own to deliver on a number of different registers. And even if it doesn’t have Tarantino’s name attached to it, the fact that it’s not in the English language is surely the only reason that this well-crafted tense Hungarian thriller isn’t entertaining the much wider audience it deserves.

WELL even opens with an old joke about the meaning of life being a well, but the punchline is clearly one that relies on the delivery. A well is an important place because it’s where you stop to refresh before you move on; a resting place that gives you the strength to get to where you’re going. It’s also a place where all kinds of restless travellers arrive and each have their own story to tell. If it’s the way you tell it that counts, Attila Gigor’s assured direction tells its story - or stories - with considerable flair. WELL is funny, sassy, sexy and suspenseful, hinting at a violent and explosive punchline right from the go and it delivers on everything it promises.

Laci isn’t sure where he is going when he arrives at the gas station. Dropped off by his mother at the station which is run by his father, a man he has never met, the young man clearly has some family issues to sort out, but he also bears a scar on his forehead that suggests that he has a past and a story of his own to tell. Laci however is more intrigued by the story the disabled pump attendant Zoli begins to relate about Chris the pit fighter dog who didn’t want to be a pit fighter, and the dog’s story does indeed seem to bear some resemblance to Laci’s own experience and give some indication where it might be heading.

It’s going to be a while before Zoli gets to the punchline however because the gangsters and the sex workers have just turned up at the gas station and don’t seem to be in any hurry to fix their broken-down vehicle and move on. Zsolti, the hair-trigger psychotic gangster ferrying the cargo for his boss Johnny, is waiting on a package that is late for delivery and everyone is getting tense and just a bit nervous as the time passes. The hiatus however gives Laci time to get to know something of the story of one of the woman, and it provokes a rather dangerous flirtation that can surely lead to nothing good.

There are a few other stories in WELL that all have a part to play in how this tense situation develops. As you can imagine, it’s all going to get rather complicated when they all converge and compete for their own happy ending punchline, and director Attila Gigor lays the ground out well for the violence that is bound to ensue. What you probably aren’t expecting is a little genuine human tenderness amidst all this mayhem, but everyone needs to drink from the well and an opportunity for relflection can awaken all kinds of unexpected emotions. One thing for sure is that Zoli is going to have a new story with a cracking punchline for the next visitors to the well.

- Noel Megahey

See WELL at the Arts Picturehouse on Tuesday 24 at 22:45

Lates @APH

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The Hollywood Reporter recently described WULU as a ‘West-African take on SCARFACE’, and rightfully so: this is a high-tension drug-running escapade, in which the dizzying heights of money and infamy come as quickly as their eventual downfall.

WULU is the tale of Ladji, a taxi-driver, who loses his job and calls on a contact to make some cash – his dream being to pull his sister out of prostitution. However, this means stepping into the underworld of drug-running in West Africa, across dangerous borders and through war-torn, desolate areas. Ladji takes to it naturally, and quickly gains both wealthy and a type of infamy as the drug-runner who can’t be stopped. But Ladji soon finds that his achievements come with a heavy price to pay.

This is French-Malian director Daouda Coulibaly’s first feature film, following the highly-lauded short TINYE SO (which played at the 2011 edition of the Cambridge African Film Festival). In WULU, Coulibaly has brilliantly woven together a fast-paced, tense thriller but with a heart – mainly in the form of his main character. He successfully catches the energy of the West-African setting: the vibrant, lively cityscapes and the open roads of the country which pulls the audience into each step Ladji takes.

Surrounded by an excellent supporting cast, actor Ibrahim Koma brings Ladji to life with a grit and subtlety, walking the line of enjoying his newfound popularity and wealth but with a grounded realism that almost feels like he can see his own doomed future. He stands incongruously amongst other characters around him and throughout the film he never descends into an unlikeable character, which fosters a care that ultimately fuels the audience’s tension.

WULU works on many levels: part action film, part road movie, but it’s also an intensely interesting story of humanity at both its best and its worst.

Wulu

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Cambridge African Film Festival

See WULU on Mon 23rd at 18:00 in the Arts Picturehouse.

The Woman That Men Yearn For

“Marlene Dietrich had an absolutely electrifying presence on camera. I mean, she captivates the camera. You can’t take your eyes off her... She moves marvellously. The expressions on her face - just a slight flicker of something in the eyes or a rise of the eyebrows - speaks volumes. She’s incredibly alluring; her sense of humour comes through. She’s a captivating lady.”

Michelle Facey, programmer at Kennington Bioscope (hosted by The Cinema Museum) spoke to Toby Miller of Cambridge 105 about Marlene Dietrich, whose film THE WOMAN THAT MEN YEARN FOR is showing at the Cambridge Film Festival.

Toby Miller: You mention in your writing for THE WOMAN THAT MEN YEARN FOR that this is a film where Marlene found Dietrich, where she found herself as an actress. What did you mean by that?

Michelle Facey: I think it perhaps has to do with feeling her image and capturing an essence by use of lighting. Curt currant was the cinematographer for THE WOMAN THAT MEN YEARN FOR and I think they worked very well together. She discovered her own way of lighting, by sitting in a photo booth and practising, and she discovered that if she turned her face upwards towards the light, it created a halo around her hair and gave her cheekbones. There’s a very distinct Dietrich moment in the woman where she’s framed in the window of the train and you can see much to recognise there in later works. And also the camera lingers on her limbs, her famously beautiful, legs in this film which are folded up underneath her on the train as she cowers, trying to escape the advances of her travelling companion played by Fritz Kortner…

TM: Is the storyline fairly representative of German cinema of this sort of mid twenties period?

MF: Yeah, it’s a 1929 film and it’s very much in the same bracket or genre as PANDORA’S BOX. It’s a woman of intrigue, who is able to manipulate men, who’s very passionate and alluring. It certainly is of the genre of the time, of passion, jealousy, intrigue and possibly murder!

TM: What was her relationship with her silent career? Was it an attempt to mythologise her background?

MF: That’s certainly true - between her and Sternberg, they carried on improving upon the story, and changing it to greater mythologies them both. They made seven films together, it was a remarkable relationship but Sternberg certainly wanted to make it appear that she sprang forth fully formed, only with his direction, in THE BLUE ANGEL. TM: In 1929 how big a star was she in Germany? I know she’d done some work on stage and some in cabaret but at this point, pre-THE BLUE ANGEL, how well known was she as an actress?

MF: She was very well known, she was in magazines and she’d been to Austria and played on stage with Willi Forst, who was a big German song star.

She had an affair with him and they made the film CAFÉ ELECTRIC together. He was the one responsible for teaching her how to play the musical saw, which she would play later for American troops!

Her star was absolutely on the rise, and people in the German press at the time knew that she would inevitably leave and go to Hollywood even before it happened. It was just accepted...

See THE WOMAN THAT MEN YEARN FOR on Sunday 22nd at 19:00 at Emmanuel College, with live accompaniment by Neil Brand.

Visit https://cambridge105.co.uk/category/podcasts/bums-on-seats/ to listen to this and other great Festival related interviews and reviews.

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Sex, Pity and Loneliness

Two cute porcelain kittens are smashed to smithereens on the screen as a slightly sinister voice-over tells us, “When everything’s destroyed, all that remains for each particle is to revolve around itself”. Such is the fate of the characters in Lars Montag’s bleak yet simultaneously exhilarating adaptation of Helmut Krausser’s 2009 novel, a LA RONDE of contemporary German angst and frustrations.

The novel’s title is actually the other way round, the “loneliness” coming first which defines the Pfennig family whose dysfunctional existence is responsible for a lot of the spun-off action. Father Robert (Rainer Bock) is trapped in a loveless marriage, beekeeping his only consolation as the family prepares to downsize. Meanwhile his out-of-control teenage daughter Swenjta (Lilly Wiedemann) is fending off the attentions of two boys, one of them the forlorn and tormented Christian Johannes (Aaron Hilmer), the other the lascivious Mahmood (Hussein Eliraqui), not to mention her teacher Eckhardt (Bernhard Schutz) who has been duly dismissed for inappropriate behaviour.

After a wonderfully funny meltdown in his local supermarket (prompted by the absence of a new variety of Kettle Chips from the shelves), Eckhardt’s desperation leads him both to anger management classes and to create a sort of “anger shop”, patronised by several of the film’s characters, where they can take out their rage with a sledgehammer on domestic and office furniture (especially photocopiers). Having dealt with Eckhardt, the dull supermarket manager Konig (Peter Schneider) tries to impress his computer date, the artist Janine (Katia Burkle) by bigging up the anecdote at a silent disco, but she’s only interested in having sex in a disabled toilet. Janine’s models, whom she literally paints as still lives, include Pfennig (of all the likely customers she’d spotted in a DIY store, he looked the saddest) and call-girl Vivian (Lara Mandoki) whose boyfriend Vincent (Eugen Bauder) is hired by Konig’s ex-wife (Eva Lobau) for an explicit but also comic sex session. Rarely will a robot vacuum cleaner have elicited such pain and laughter.

And so the connections proliferate, driving on towards the “Pity” of the bitter-sweet conclusion where all the characters take turns in singing to the camera in an echo of MAGNOLIA’s “Wise Up”, only here it’s an ironic hymn to self-absorption (“I’m everything that I want- Nothing can keep myself from me”): scenes of self-help - at the gym, in the sauna and other bizarre German cleansing methods, both external and internal - punctuate the action throughout.

Finely cast by Montag and shot by Mathias Neumann to contrast the antiseptic railway stations and featureless apartment blocks with the warmth of Mahmood’s home and Eckhardt’s dishevelled flat (where his parrot repeatedly says “Little bitch”), SEX, PITY AND LONELINESS is a warts-andall panorama of German city life, in which racism is never far from the surface especially among the police, and possessing eight different sorts of gin and three types of tonic is thought to make a sad man calling himself “Fire Accelerant XL” irresistible on the dating circuit to a sad woman who’s photoshopped a nicer smile on her face.

- Andrew Nickolds

See SEX,PITYAND LONELINESS at the Arts Picturehouse on Sunday 22nd at 17:15; and at Magdalene College on the 23rd at 16:30

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More reviews, interviews, features and unabridged versions of all our printed content at takeonecff.com

Lynne Ramsay and me

by April McIntyre

For me, my introduction to Lynne Ramsay began in a stuffy classroom, surrounded by fresh faced university students ready for their adventures into the world of cinema: the glitz of 20s Hollywood, the hard-boiled noir movies of the 40s, anything with subtitles (because ultimately that means it’s good, right!?) What we weren’t expecting was GASMAN (1998). A fifteen-minute trudge through Glasgow, as Da and his children Lynne and Steve walk the secluded railroad tracks to a Christmas party at a local pub. I sighed, thinking the next three years would be me, trudging through this course, wishing I was in the local pub! Fifteen-minutes later and I was mesmerised, in awe and really grateful for my Dad’s Scottish accent and therefore my ability to be able to understand what was going on. Looking around the room, it was clear some of my peers weren’t quite as lucky.

What follows in Ramsay’s short is Lynne’s realisation of her father’s infidelity, as they encounter two other children that also refer to him as “Da”.

Ramsey’s style was something I’d never seen before. The opening of GASMAN is a beautifully disembodied collage, slowly coming together to create a whole, yet still fragmented family. As well as her directorial hit, adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN (2011).

Ramsay’s most recent film, YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE (2017) premiered at Cannes this year, when Lynne Ramsay won the Best Screenplay award and Joaquin Phoenix won the award for Best Actor. Ramsay, no stranger to Cannes, also won the Prix de Jury for her 1996 film LITTLE DEATHS and for GASMAN in 1998. Her first directorial feature since 2011, YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE was cause for much anticipation.

... an almost moreish sense of unease ...

Based on the Jonathan Ames’ novella of the same title, (Ames, known for the HBO show Bored to Death - if you haven’t watched it, then do!)

Ramsay’s newest film follows Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) a veteran whose devoted himself to the rescue of sex-traffic workers until one rescue mission goes wrong. Ramsay’s focus still remains on teenagers and children, something that has been consistent in her filmmaking. Ramsay’s ability to speak through the silences between words is something she does remarkably well, her use of sound and music is something consistently praised by critics and YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE is no exception. The rich textures, candid visual style and sound of Ramsay’s films are distinctly her, and often create an almost moreish sense of unease. With Ramsay’s latest dark thriller, she continues to carve a way for herself and her unique style into a more mainstream market and to a wider audience. She will always be, for me, the first female filmmaker who made me realise what I was missing out on after being saturated with a male dominated film collection my entire life, and subsequently what the world was missing out on.

2017 has been home to several ground-breaking debuts from some fantastic female directors, actors and writers. Although, with still a way to go, this year so far has shown that the clout of the voices coming from female filmmakers is slowly, but surely, getting louder and stronger.

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN Although parts of WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN can feel a tad overdone, Lynne Ramsay’s directorial vision of this reverse-Oedipal nightmare is a fantastic film, based on Lionel Shriver’s supposedly impossible-to-film novel.

Tilda Swinton holds the central role as Eva, as we jump between the unfolding present and the past in her memories – the central defining event being a horrific act of violence committed by her son, Kevin, at his high school. If one was to pigeonhole the film into a genre it would be psychological horror, but that would be simplifying the strands of Ramsay’s film too easily. The child referenced in the title is not Damian of THE OMEN – the horror here lies in the unravelling of a mother’s mind, and her struggle to understand what drove her offspring to horrific acts and sociopathic tendencies.

Underscoring the whole affair is a nature versus nurture debate, from which Ramsay remains impressively stand-offish. In early scenes we see the apparent disdain Eva holds for the young Kevin even before he was born – as other expectant mothers chat animatedly and show off their baby bumps Eva shies away, hiding hers under baggy clothing and a disappointed gaze. Never explicitly falling either way, much to do with our subjective viewpoint through Eva, the film also depicts the apparent tendency for Kevin to wilfully toy with the emotional states of those around him. For how much of this is Eva truly responsible? Tilda Swinton’s remarkable performance leaves it very much up in the air.

Both actors who portray Kevin, particularly Ezra Miller as the teenaged version, are superb. Miller is excellent in conveying the sociopathic teenager.

His unsettling conversations and acts around his mother bring a horrible sense of unease without ever slipping into clichéd celluloid psycho territory.

The amount of blood symbolism laid on by Ramsay can be perhaps overbearing at times, as can some of early scenes of the toddler Kevin, which risk falling into the evil-toddler stereotype. Overall, however, she has put together the film in a structure that allows the actors’ performances and the more nuanced areas of the plot to come shining through. Even though Ramsay has layered the film with colours and striking vision, it resides firmly in shades of morally ambiguous grey.

- Jim Ross

RATCATCHER - Mon 23; MORVERN CALLAR - Tue 24; WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN - Wed 25; YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE - Thu 26

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