Vérité - April 2013

ISSUE #2

V é r i t é APRIL 2013 EDITION

FILM CRITICISM & CINEMATIC DISCUSSION

SPRING BREAKE R S

And the Return of the American Indie Kings

also...

Hal Hartley / Richard Linklater / SXSW / Xavier Dolan / Bakumatsu taiyô-den / reviews / and more...

2

APRIL 2013 VERITE

Editor’s Letter

F

irst things first… thank you. The feedback and response to the first issue of Vérité was overwhelming.

When you set off on a challenge like this you can’t really predict how people will react; you can only hope that it finds an audience. And well, you have shown us – with your support and comments – that it has definitely found one. So once again, thank you for that. But everything must go on, we must take the next step forward (and hopefully upward) and keep delivering material you will find entertaining and informative.

So here we are, with our second issue. As we sat down to organise this month’s content, we started to see a connection. Korine, Hartley, Linklater – three of America’s indie greats that helped define an era of 90s independent cinema in America and whose influence is still felt today). With the rise of the Weinsteins and the Miramax empire, 90s independent cinema is one of the most interesting periods in modern cinema and the three figures we focus on this

issue all contributed to making it such a fascinating time. Korine with Kids and Gummo, Hartely with pictures like Simple Men and Amateur and – probably the most successful of the three – Linklater; racking up modern-classics like Slacker, the seminal teen-comedy Dazed and Confused and the much-loved Before Sunrise, which has spawned two sequels.

All very different from one another but all successful artistically in what they were trying to do, their contrasts highlight the excitement of that time and the variety that 90s American cinema had to offer. But it’s Harmony Korine’s career that we have chosen as our main focus point in this issue, taking you on the journey of his intriguing, if sparse, career as filmmaker.

From the wild-child, drug-taking scribe of Kids to shattering the squeaky clean images of famous Disney starlets, Korine’s unique style and voice give him standalone status as a true artist.

We very much hope you enjoy the issue and look forward to many more.

v

Thanks for reading, Jordan McGrath & David Hall

VERITE APRIL 2013

3

“If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another, with the people on the screen.�

Roger Ebert (1942 - 2013)

4

APRIL 2013 VERITE

VERITE APRIL 2013

5

Contents Features

Columns

Reviews Thursday Till Sunday - p44

Freak Like Me - p8

David Hall dissects the fascinating career of Spring Breakers director Harmony Korine.

Melancholy & Longing - p34 Evrim Ersoy delves into depths of Xavier Dolan’s short but, so far, illustrious career.

Spring Breakers - p45 A Late Quartet - p46 She Monkeys - p47

Unbelievable Truths - p14

Dan Auty takes an in depth look at the films that cemented Hal Hartley as an American indie film stable.

Masters of Cinema - p38

Andrew Nerger discusses the new Masters of Cinema release of the classic Japanese comedy, Bakumatsu Taiyô-den.

Simon Killer - p48 The Place Beyond the Pines - p49 In the Fog - p50

State of Independence - p30

In Defence... - p42

Emily Kausalik tells us why Austin and SXSW is so important when it comes to the current state of American independent cinema.

Jordan McGrath defends the audience splitting misunderstood gem, Jody Hill’s hilarious Observe & Report.

6

APRIL 2013 VERITE

Love is All You Need - p51 Bernie - p52

N O OUT OD V & DVD W NO

WINNER BEST FILM

SWEDISH GULDBAGGE AWARD

VERITE APRIL 2013

7

“If people consider something I do to be a failure or a mistake, I’m fine with that. Sometimes there’s beauty in mistakes, and the most interesting things sometimes come out of what people consider to be awkwardness.”

Harmony Korine speaking to Slant magazine, 2013

8

APRIL 2013 VERITE

FREAK LIKE ME Is Harmony Korine indeed the Mister Lonely of the American Indie scene?

Four unique and idiosyncratic films in twenty years, a half-decade in the wilderness, a handful of unfinished projects and – now – a hit movie featuring former Disney stars. Harmony Korine, 90s indie cinema’s enfant terrible, is back and causing trouble again.

David Hall salutes a true American original

words by David Hall

A

rtist, photographer, novelist and filmmaker Harmony Korine is, in many ways, a renaissance artist. Yet for many critics and commentators he’s a has-been, a flash-in-the-pan, a wind-up merchant, possibly even a fraud. It would be true to say he’s found more favour with the style bibles than film journals over the years and has been virtually canonised in the pages of Dazed and Confused and Vice.

In 1995, when his screenplay Kids (written in three weeks) was brought to the screen by director and photographer Larry Clark, Korine was a 19-year-old skateboarder with no background in film. Two years later he made his first feature Gummo (1997) immediately cementing his radical sensibility and aesthetic.

That film and its follow up Julien Donkey-Boy (1999) are two of the most daring and visionary works of the 90s; American films in theme and setting that do not look or sound like any other US pictures of the time.

The product of a restless, creative, possibly disturbed autodidact with artistic leanings outside of cinema and an aggressive, youthful desire to shake things up they bear the influ-

ence of European filmmakers – most notably Fassbinder, Herzog and Alan Clark. They are resolutely, defiantly uncommercial; alienating, often difficult to watch, non-linear, occasionally facile, frequently pretentious and always surprising. Of course they made absolutely no money which, in the era of Miramax’s ascent and following the huge financial success of Kids, ensured Korine would remain in the margins – where he has stayed, until now.

This year sees the release of Spring Breakers (2012) – a dark(ish) teen comedy-cumheist movie starring James Franco and former Disney stars Vanessa Hudgens and Selena Gomez – already by some margin his most commercially successful film as director. So in essence he’s back where he started, chronicling America’s disaffected youth. Only it’s not just the Kids that have changed. Korine is 40 now and on the outside, looking in. Is this another odd detour in his on-going, haphazard career or has Korine finally found a way to connect his subversive tendencies into the mainstream and gain a larger audience for his work?

Korine has no formal film school training.

His father was a documentary filmmaker and perhaps a formative influence – in as much as

VERITE APRIL 2013

9

there is often a detached, chronicler’s eye to much of Korine’s work. It’s a familiar story of the blossoming auteur-in-waiting; an awkward and sickly child with an unsettled upbringing finds escape through film. It’s the filmmakers in the shadows that interest Korine as well as the freaks, misfits and outsiders he has met and known in his life. His films are imperfections, beautiful (and sometimes ugly) disasters, collages of craziness and delirium. There are some YouTube clips of the young Korine making three appearances on the David Letterman show. They’re well worth checking out as they give an insight into the state of his mind as it was then (1995-98). The perceived narrative is that they’re car crashes, with the precocious writer/ director cast as difficult, laughably troubled guest. But watch closely. In at least two of the clips the director is clearly massively high. Yet that brain is working overtime and his comedic timing throughout is expert. He’s also taking the piss. It’s like performance art in itself and this aspect of Korine cannot and should not be denied. There is an underlying desire to annoy, infuriate and provoke that runs through all his works. It’s what makes him and his films a spiky, sparky and difficult proposition.

Kids – in which the carnal and narcotic misadventures of a bunch of mid-teens are put under microscopic gaze – is the picture that made Korine’s name but visually it bears no relation to the subsequent films he himself would make. Directed by Larry Clark, who would again film another of Korine’s scripts some years later in Ken Park (2002), it is a blistering and naked work that unfortunately has a rather cold, flat visual style that drains the film somewhat of energy and frequently works against the warped warmth of Korine’s script. A film of brilliant, uncomfortably real performances (including a young Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson) and Korine’s writing shows a gift for verisimilitude that comes from someone who knows, understands and is at least partly in love with his flawed, extreme subjects.

Gummo is something else altogether. I saw it at a time when I was hungrily hoovering up all the weirdest, wildest cinema I could and it was still something of a shock to the system. Viewed now, at a time when much US indie is comfortably ensconced in a moribund state of safe unchallenging quirk, it feels as if it was made on another planet. More formally daring than any of the films from his immediate peers, Gummo is the work of a natural born filmmaker and visual artist. Commencing with a voiceover telling us that a tornado has wreaked devastation on Xenia, Ohio, Gummo’s extremely loose narrative follows white trash kids Tummier and Soloman as they ride around the town on BMXs, hunting feral cats to kill so they can sell them to a local butcher in exchange for cash to support their glue-sniffing habits. There’s no story to speak of, instead a series of vignettes shows the boys encountering various disparate and

10

APRIL 2013 VERITE

marginal characters. Korine spotlights an America that simply never makes it on to the screen. It is neither documentary nor fiction; Korine using nonprofessionals in a seemingly off the cuff improvisatory way that is actually carefully controlled and pre-empted. It is by turns fascinating, alienating, repugnant and beautiful; Korine mixing up stocks, still photographs and poetic imagery like a malignant Malick. It also marked him out a director with a strong ear for unusual and startling musical choices.

Shot under the Danish Dogme 95 doctrine, Juilen Donkey-Boy is even more immediately confrontational and alienating than Gummo. Although it again eschews narrative continuity it feels slightly more focused and defined; a rich and idiosyncratic portrait of very extreme lives. Ewen Bremner is Julian, a seriously disturbed young man living with schizophrenia and trying to survive an abusive family. The film has a collage, almost tapestry-like structure, comprising of scenes that are sometimes banal and depressing, other times affecting and darkly funny. Its palette is more muted and contemplative, with a stripped bare aesthetic that contrasts against Gummo’s richer colours.

Bremner’s portrayal of mental illness and disintegration is remarkable in its consistency and Werner Herzog (an early Korine adopter) gives a darkly hilarious performance as Julien’s horrible, domineering and violent father. This is an upsetting watch at times (particularly if you have an experience of mental illness; Korine based Julien on his uncle, who is a schizophrenic) and utterly uncompromising.

With these two statements of intent it seemed as if we were at the beginning of a new and incredibly

exciting career. Around the time Korine told The Guardian “I want to change people’s expectations of what cinema can do every single time I make a film.”

In a sense, my whole approach is fuelled by anger at the mediocrity of American film, at the peddling of lies and falsity and formula, at the denigration of this century’s most powerful art form.”

Unfortunately, Korine’s personal and professional life collapsed. He separated from his girlfriend and muse Chloe Sevigny (the fantastically gifted actress who gives such remarkable performances in Kids, Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy) and prolonged substance abuse began to destroy his creativity as did near-bankruptcy. He managed to burn down two houses he was living in. He continued making art, videos and fanzines – still exploring the margins (Korine has a long standing fascination with extreme music forms including black metal and rap) and made a documentary with David Blaine. He resurfaced in 2007 on (very few) cinema screens with an odd, practically ignored film – Mister Lonely – and then, wrong footing the few people who had seen that and assumed it was to herald a more mature, restrained sensibility – delivered the sporadically amusing, infantile DIY provocation Trash Humpers (2009).

Mister Lonely is a strange and melancholy work, a glacial, tragi-comic tale of impersonators that at first glance seemed an unlikely return. But it bears many hallmarks of Korine; alienated protagonists, farcical interludes, unexpected violence and surrealistic flights of fancy. Diego Luna is a Michael Jackson impersonator who hooks up with a Marilyn Monroe lookalike (Samantha Morton) before heading off to a Scottish commune where they hang out with other imitators, including versions of The Queen and Madonna. There is a baffling sub plot involving Werner Herzog (again) as a pilot who flies nuns across the third world (!) getting them to skydive into villages to deliver food packages. It sounds fantastically irritating in synopsis some of the film is precious and forced. And yet it mines some gentle comedy from the bizarre scenario, frequently looks gorgeous and has a (admittedly strained) spiritual bent. It also contains possibly the most beautiful scene in all of his work; a spinning, flying nun, framed against a blue sky, falling to earth. It is a moment both inexplicable and transcendent.

If Mister Lonely feels a little like the work of someone freshly bruised from depression Trash Humpers, in stark contrast, finds Korine on maximum prankster form with the irritation factor turned up to eleven.

VERITE APRIL 2013

11

Calculated to provoke extreme reaction and ire, shot on digital and VHS tape and made to look like a found film it’s essentially a bunch of demented interludes involving delinquents wearing old Leatherface style masks humping trees and other inanimate objects, fighting each other and smashing things up.

When it isn’t repulsive it’s actually pretty amusing and occasionally horrifying, with an evident sense of fun. Which brings us to his latest film and its place in Korine’s demented body of work.

His most visually and sonically grandiose film, Spring Breakers (reviewed on page 45) – in which a quartet of high school girls’ amoral plans to fund their booze and drug partying brings them into the social sphere of a crazy pimp embroiled in a drug turf war – is otherwise surprisingly straightforward and sees the director bringing some of his distinctive style to the mainstream, with colourful, entertaining results.

His most linear film to date by miles, the movie still plays fast and loose with narrative and takes visual cues from video games (Grand Theft Auto), music videos (Hype Williams’ work especially) and postmodern cultural totems (De Palma’s Scarface).

Druggy and giggly by turns; it’s new terrain for the director, although this time around Korine is less an innovator and more a fascinated voyeur, putting his own spin on an aesthetic that has long dominated the youth cultural landscape. Along with Gasper Noe’s regular cinematographer Benoit Debie he paints a visual tone poem that is part satire of, part paean to disposable teen trash culture – all hot candy pinks and buzzing neon. A Day-Glo fantasy that turns nightmarish and more absurd as the holiday wears on.

Ironically, he’s back chronicling kids again – although the social landscape has altered radically.

When Korine wrote his first major work his disaffected teens were living at a time when outsider behaviour was clandestine, hidden, outsiders truly were so. Now teenagers want everything they do to be out there; seen, filmed, and documented. Where Korine’s work was once about about finding the beauty within ugliness, in many ways Spring Breakers represents a clear dislocation from that. If anything it’s about the ugliness, or at least the moral vacuity, at the heart of something that on the outside looks beautiful, clean and fun.

As with his script for Kids, Korine remains nonjudgemental. And while the surface prurience of the film (wall-to-wall soft flesh with the girls spending the entire move in bikinis) may suggest Korine now has more in common with his old collaborator Larry Clark than he might care to admit, there is a stronger sense that whatever his foxy quartet get up to – getting high and wasted, robbing stores, pulling heists – we know he’s on their side, rooting for them. In that respect he’s more Russ Meyer than Clark. There are

12

APRIL 2013 VERITE

some nicely subversive moments sprinkled throughout this otherwise relatively restrained and conventional (by Korine’s standards) film – James Franco’s absurd gangsta pimp Alien has the tables turned on him and is forced to fellate a pistol while being straddled by two of the girls and a beachside piano rendition of Britney Spears’ Everytime is rendered by Franco’s character quite touchingly.

Spring Breakers feels like the work of an ageing hipster who has his groove back but also an older (wiser?) director who may have tired of making films that very few people actually see. It may also be the case that Korine’s once-niche trash obsessions are very much part of the cultural landscape now; documentaries detailing the lives of people on the margins and TV and reality shows highlighting crazy behaviour are all part of the mainstream.

Either way America’s ultimate chronicler of freaks and geeks has been granted a second act. Whatever happens now, it’s unlikely to be predictable.

v

VERITE APRIL 2013

13

14

APRIL 2013 VERITE

U N B E L I E VA B L E T RU T H S Few directors defined the 90s American indie scene as perfectly as Hal Hartley. Dan Auty looks at his idiosyncratic early work... words and interview by Dan Auty

T

he term ‘auteur’ is one that gets thrown around with abandon, often used simply to describe well-respected directors; its truest meaning is a filmmaker who maintains such control over production that they can truly be considered the author, far beyond anyone else who worked on the movie. The American independent movement of the 1980s and early 90s produced more directors who match this description than perhaps any other time in US cinema; even those operating during the much hallowed earlier decade – Altman, Ashby, Scorsese et al – usually worked with equally revered screenwriters to bring their classics to the screen.

But this later period saw a wave of filmmakers who were completely in control of their product – writing and directing, but frequently photographing, editing and scoring too.

Hal Hartley was one of the most distinctive, fascinating and divisive independent directors to emerge at this time.

While the prolific output that resulted in five stand-out films in almost as many years (including 1991’s 60-minute Surviving Desire) is clearly unified by the themes, style and writing as well as Hartley’s use and reuse of many of the same performers, there is also something wildly, wonderfully chaotic about his work. They are all comedies of sorts, but also heartfelt dramas and sometimes violent thrillers too. Affairs of the heart play a big part in all but in virtually every case the central relationships are doomed to fail from the start, often barely expressed before some dark incident – arrest, rejection or death – gets in the way. And Hartley’s fascination with deeply troubled, sometimes dangerous men means that all his leading male characters (usually played by Martin Donovan or Robert Burke) are a world away from Richard Linklater’s slackers or Whit Stillman’s privileged wise-asses.

Hartley made his debut in 1989 with The Unbelievable

VERITE APRIL 2013

15

The Unbelievable Truth (1989) Amateur (1994)

Truth, one of three films from this era receiving an upcoming Blu-ray release from Artificial Eye. The Long Islandbased director went on to make deeper, more affecting films but there is a youthful energy to this story of a maybe-killer returning to his hometown after a spell in jail that makes it his funniest, most charming effort. All the filmmaking quirks that came to define Hartley’s work are here; it’s hard to describe how his characters talk to each other – ‘theatrical’ doesn’t quite cut it - but the comparison I’ve always made is that it’s like hearing the subtitles to a particularly erudite foreign-language film spoken aloud. People converse but in an oddly unrealistic manner that serves to amplify their inner character and provide much of the backstory. The late Adrienne Shelly provides a magnetic, effervescent onscreen presence as the apocalypse-obsessed teenager who falls for Robert Burke’s intense and mysterious charms and the whole film is carried by an expertly-chosen cast – a defining aspect of Hartley’s pictures – who transcend much of the self-conscious quirkiness of the script.

Trust followed in 1990 and if it initially seems like a replay of The Unbelievable Truth – another small-town story that opens with an almost identical kitchen scene involving Adrienne Shelly and an overbearing father – it quickly reveals itself to be a darker, more poignant movie. For the first quarter, it tracks the miserable experiences of its two leads – Shelly’s pregnant schoolgirl Maria and Martin Donovan’s troubled electrical genius Matthew – until they meet and form an

16

APRIL 2013 VERITE

unlikely alliance. Matthew is a fascinating character – a disturbed, sometimes violent man-child living with his bullying, OCD father. He is someone we should pity but hardly like, however Hartley’s empathy with such people (plus Donovan’s compelling performance) ensures that he emerges as a deeply sympathetic and weirdly charming protagonist.

The Unbelievable Truth gave us a surprisingly happy ending but that would be the last time two of Hartley’s ‘romantic’ leads would end up together. As in Simple Men and Amateur, Trust’s troubled love-birds end the film having reconciled their differences but forced apart by circumstance; in this case Maria looks on wistfully as Matthew is carted off to a cell for trying to blow up his former workplace. Trust was shot cheaply and quickly (in just 11 days), but it contains an understated emotional power that still resonates.

The following year Hartley worked with Donovan again in the hour-long Surviving Desire. The director has made many short films over the past two decades and although Surviving Desire is obviously not quite feature length it is such a part of this early run of films (and is so good) that it would be wrong not to include it here. It’s a bittersweet campus comedy in which Donovan’s disillusioned literature teacher sparks up a brief, ill-fated romance with a beautiful, enigmatic student, played by Mary B. Ward. Without the need for a traditional narrative structure – or to make the film particularly commercial – Hartley gives his particular gift for dialogue full reign.

Surviving Desire is simultaneously Hartley’s most verbose

Simple Men (1992)

and most playful film. Jude and his boozy pal Henry (played

by Matt Malloy, another Hartley regular) engage in witty, verbally dazzling interchanges about the nature of love, but Hartley also throws in moments of surreal visual joy. The film stops for a couple of minutes to watch a rock band in the street serenading a girl at a window; later on, Donovan and two strangers perform a silent, perfectly choreographed dance routine in an alleyway straight to the camera. It’s in moments like these that the influence of European cinema – in particular French new wave – is strongest, something that would be even more pronounced in his next two pictures.

1992’s Simple Men saw a shuffling of the cast – Robert Burke returned as lead, while Donovan took a smaller supporting role; Adrienne Shelly's collaboration with the director ended with Trust, but striking Romanian actress Elina Löwensohn joined the Hartley company for the first of four films. As the title suggests this is a movie that predominantly explores male relationships – in both of Hartley’s first two features, Shelly’s characters stood centre stage, but here the emphasis is on two brothers – Burke’s career criminal Bill and his younger, studious brother Dennis (Bill Sage) – as they search through the Long Island countryside for their estranged father, a notorious anarchist who has escaped from prison.

The influence of Godard here is potent – the elements of the crime thriller that Hartley both enjoys and subverts, the use of space and silence, and the dialogue that has never been

more literal and specific. And just in case we weren’t sure about Hartley’s affection for the French filmmaking giant, he throws in what has become his most famous scene, a brilliant homage to the dance sequence in Bande à Part, as Donovan, Sage and Löwensohn cut a rug to the pounding beat of Sonic Youth’s Kool Thing. Music always played a big part in defining the tone of Hartley’s 90s work, and here Hartley himself (under the pseudonym Ned Rifle) provides an evocative, chiming score based around shimmering synths and single guitar strums.

If the thriller elements of Simple Men were relatively understated, they are much more overt in 1994’s Amateur.

Looking back, this film does seem like the last in the first part of Hartley’s career – his most widely-seen picture was actually still a few years away (Henry Fool) but by then a more restless, experimental edge had entered his work, one which he has continued to explore over an equally fascinating second filmmaking decade. Martin Donovan plays a brutal New York gangster who spends the entire film in a state of confused amnesia, trying to figure out who he was and why someone – namely a notorious porn star played by Elena Löwensohn – would want to push him out of a window.

Amateur is an undeniably clever and funny film that throws up interesting moral questions about forgiveness and showcases a delightful performance from Isabelle Huppert, as a nymphomaniac virgin ex-nun who is trying to write erotic fiction. But for me it’s a more uneven work than his previous films, the presence of bickering gangsters, comedy torture sequences and a 90s alt-rock soundtrack making it seem very much a film of its time. Highly enjoyable but perhaps less essential than the four movies that preceded it.

As the 90s wore on and we moved into the next millennium, many of Hartley’s peers – Soderberg, Linklater, Stillman, Jarmusch – started playing with bigger budgets and bigger stars, trying to assimilate their independent sensibilities with a wider, more mainstream audience. Hartley went the other way. 2001’s One true Thing may have featured Helen Mirren and Julie Christie and had Francis Ford Coppola as executive producer but there was very little else mainstream about this oddball, Icelandic-set fable. And subsequent films – The Girl from Monday, Fay Grim, the recent Meanwhile – have seen Hartley embrace digital filmmaking and wear his independent badge with pride. There may have never been a true breakthrough movie that led a wider audience to seek out his early films but their arrival on Blu-ray will hopefully ensure they remain a vital part of the debate when this era of independent film is discussed - key work from one of American cinema’s true originals.

v

VERITE APRIL 2013

17

Hal Hartley interview: When I first discovered your films in the early 90s they seemed to belong to a wave of literate, Euro-centric independent American cinema. Did you feel part of a movement back then, or was this just a result of being able to find financing for films that were out of the mainstream at the time?

Yes, there did seem to be a little window of time when the business was willing to bet on audiences who would appreciate more variety. I think that happens from time to time, maybe in crisis moments – when the business truly doesn’t know what the next new thing will be. I was lucky to be standing there with a film at that moment. But I don’t remember anything like a ‘movement’.

Just a bunch of people with very individual ways of making films trading notes on how to get them distributed.

With three Artificial Eye Blu-rays being released in the UK and Trust getting a recent HD release the US, I’m hopeful new viewers might discover your work. Do you ever go back to look at these earlier films? Do you still feel a connection to them?

Oh yeah. When I watch them now it’s hilarious to revisit my preoccupations of 22 years ago! And I’ve had to watch them a lot recently, and very closely, as we made these HD masters. And I have a very strong connection to them. I see how I became who I am now. Watching them after all this time alongside what I make now, I see my films have never sought to avoid the situation I find Your first six or so films are marked by a revolving cast of myself in. The world I show is the world as it appears to me at the actors, who appear in main roles or cameos, sometimes time. As I get older the way the world amazes me is different and even reprising parts from earlier films. Was this purely a re- that changes how I portray it. But the world doesn’t change at all, sult of wanting to work with the same people again, or was I think. People are lovely and fucked-up the same way regardless of what happens, regardless of personal electronics, wars, financial it also an attempt to unify the films into a collective body of sorts? Certainly many of the same themes and scenarios crisis, all that.

seem to run through this initial group.

Music plays a huge role in setting the mood for most of I think we just made so many films so fast it was natural to work your films - I can’t imagine watching the likes of Simple with actors who knew me and I them. We didn’t have to introduce Men or Trust without those very distinctive scores. Do you ourselves again. And, like you say, there is a continuity of thematic write and direct with certain themes and sounds in mind, or concerns. It was fun to do sort of variations of characters. I think, does that come later while the films are in post-production? for example, Martin Donovan’s Matthew in Trust helped me when I was writing the character he would play in Simple Men. This suppressed rage. Not the same guy, but a similar rage. And that led into Amateur.

“If the sheer terror of going broke is reduced you have more energy to be creative.”

18

APRIL 2013 VERITE

It comes when the film is edited. Back then I used to think in terms of a melody that is contributing to the dialogue. I think it’s most obvious in Simple Men. Then, of course, there are the broader pieces that are more like songs and convey a mood or an attitude. I was always wary of trying to telegraph the emotion with music. That gets you into a pretty sparse creative strategy; music has to not have a personality different than the scenes themselves.

Could you talk about the longer shorts you’ve made over the years? To my mind, they allow you the character development of a feature without being tied into the narrative or structure that a 90-minute plus film usually requires. What were your reasons for making work like Surviving Desire or Book of Life in this way, and do you approach these films differently?

because the technology is cheaper, but harder because I suspect there is a lot less money available for financing.

Would you say that’s accurate?

Yes, I do approach them differently. They’re intended for a different sort of viewing. The Book of Life was commissioned by French TV as programming. The Girl from Monday was intended to be a web-based entertainment. This is back in 2003. Me and my technical genius pals thought we could make a film that we could simply set up a website for, have people enter pay; see the film and other stuff. Our excitement about the affordability of the technology was a little premature. What we had in mind didn’t work yet. But it works now! Generally, I think the way people engage with movies is different now. I see folks on the subway all the time watching movies on their mobile devices in portions.

And, otherwise, they like shorter pieces.

Like most independent filmmakers you have switched to making films digitally over the past decade. Obviously this is a more cost effective way of directing, but how do you view the digital medium on an aesthetic and technical level? Do you miss filming in 35mm or are those days long behind you?

I don’t miss 35mm motion picture film now that we have HD that can be distributed as such (theatres that can screen Blu-ray, or HDCam tape, etc). It’s a vast improvement apart from being cheaper. Of course, my filmmaking has always been about story. I have friends like Jem Cohen, whose art is about the medium and how he uses it. When he shoots a film in Super-8 he’s asking us to see something through that particular medium. My films are fiction. The particular qualities of the images are important but they serve to tell the story. So I’m less insistent on the medium.

I’ve never been a purist that way. But I think in The Book of Life and The Girl from Monday I did ask the viewer to see the story and the world through that particular medium; fast, everywhere, aggressively flat, all about momentum. Because that’s the way the world seems to be going. Certainly with The Girl from Monday I wanted to express my sadness and dissatisfaction with the wider world in the idiom with which this wider world congratulates itself in.

Yes, I agree. It’s much less expensive to make a high quality nonmainstream entertainment now. But because of this there is so much product distributors don’t have the time and resources to watch it.

I noticed you used Kickstarter to finish Meanwhile - is this a financing model you are likely to continue with?

For the right size project. I don’t think I could do that again to finance a whole production, for instance. What we did with Meanwhile was to finance the distribution of the finished film, the Video-On-Demand and DVD materials, by using this excellent service to pre-sell the products to the people. I have a few smaller projects, both films and books, that I’m considering marketing this way. It takes a lot of the speculation out of speculative capitalism. Which might not mean a lot to people who manufacture lampshades but it means a lot to people who do creative work. If the sheer terror of going broke is reduced you have more energy to be creative.

v

Amateur, The Unbelievable Truth and Simple Men and will be available on Blu-ray from Artificial Eye on May 13th, May 27th and June 10th respectively.

Trust is available on Blu-ray from Olive Films (US) Surviving Desire is available on DVD from Possible Films (US)

It seems to me that it is both easier and harder to make smaller, character-driven films like yours today. Easier

VERITE APRIL 2013

19

Verite’s Top 5 Lost 90s American Indie Gems

20

APRIL 2013 VERITE

5.

Mi Vida Loca 1994 That Alison Anders isn’t a major director now is not only disappointing, it’s downright criminal. Her CV boasts various low-key gems; Border Radio, her LA punk scene drama, the tender Gas Food Lodging, a terrific coming of age story with not one but three great female leads and the inexplicably overlooked Grace Of My Heart, her decade-hopping Brill Building valentine and one of the great films about music. But it’s Mi Vida Loca, a unique, distinctive work, one of the very few films about the consequences and realities of gang culture on young women, that makes our five.

Mousie (Seidy López) and Sad Girl (Angel Aviles) are lifelong friends whose relationship is put to the test when romantic entanglements and gang loyalties threaten to implode their union. This is a film about friendship, betrayal and survival, things that Anders, as one of the few women who experienced the ultra-competitive world of 90s indie cinema first-hand, knows all too well. Anders still works and directs (she’s found television a more welcoming home) but Mi Vida Loca reminds us this is a woman whose continued absence from cinema is a cause for dismay. DH

VERITE APRIL 2013

21

4.

Suture 1993 A bizarre quasi-remake of John Frankenheimer’s Seconds, with a dash of Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man thrown in, co-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s debut film is a genuioe curio; a beautifully shot (in gleaming black and white) thriller that suffers from that tendency of 90s indie to take itself a little too seriously but is interesting and weird enough to warrant tracking down.

In fact this knotty neo-noir is the sort of thing that Christopher Nolan can and probably should do an overhaul of. A mystery involving half-brothers, mistaken identities, amnesia and plastic surgery it has dependable Dennis Haysbert (Far From Heaven, 24) as the fall-guy in a convoluted and staged murder plot that touches on themes of race and class representations while unfurling an increasingly bizarre nourish mystery. Familiar material executed with some panache; in places it feels like the missing conduit between 70s paranoid thrillers and the sort of zippy high octane, high concept schlock of Nolan. McGehee and Siegel never really caught fire with any subsequent projects although they continue to work in the indie scene (their most recent film is 2012 comedy drama What Maisie Knew). This though is their most unusual work to date. DH

22

APRIL 2013 VERITE

IN CINEMAS

NOW

VERITE APRIL 2013

23

3.

Rhythm Thief 1994 Matthew Harrison’s second feature buzzes with the sort of urban energy that only a low-budget film from a streetwise young filmmaker can produce. Shot in just 11 days for little over $10,000, this is the tale of a hot-head called Simon, who makes a meagre living selling bootleg tapes on the mean streets of New York’s Lower East Side, while trying to avoid a gang of tough punks who have had enough of him ‘stealing’ their sounds.

There’s not much of a plot, but Harrison directs with handheld verve, and finds surprising depth in his initially unlikable lead character - a misanthropic loner with serious mother issues and no time for any relationship beyond casual flings. Unsurprisingly the movie also boasts a stellar soundtrack that mixes hip-hop, reggae and punk, providing much of the film’s freewheeling urgency; there’s also an early role for indie mainstay Kevin Corrigan. Rhythm Thief finally made it to DVD in 2008 it’s rough, raw and packed with ragged charm. DA

24

APRIL 2013 VERITE

VERITE APRIL 2013

25

2.

What Happened Was...

1994 Tom Noonan is best known as a tall, intense supporting actor in the likes of Manhunter and Synecdoche New York, but in 1994 he wrote and directed this intriguing drama, based on his own play and financed by indie production legend Ted Hope. It’s a one-set two-hander that documents a dinner date between Noonan’s shy, softly-spoken paralegal Michael and his colleague Jackie, played by Hal Hartley regular Karen Sillas.

What Happened Was... is a film in which silence plays as big a role as the dialogue, creating a spot-on, often painful recreation of the awkwardness of first dates. Wine is drunk, jokes are misunderstood, lies are told and confessions made; it’s a beautifully acted, sensitively told exploration of the daily struggle of living, working and growing older alone in a big city. Noonan’s film was one of the big hits of Sundance 1994 - beating the likes of Clerks and Go Fish to the Grand Jury prize - but has been largely forgotten since, never even making it to DVD. Thankfully it can now be streamed on Amazon Instant in the US, and is well worth checking out. DA

26

APRIL 2013 VERITE

1.

In the Soup 1992 Alexandre Rockwell’s 1992 Sundance winner showcases a veritable who’s-who of indie acting talent - Steve Buscemi takes the lead as a pretentious, down-on-hisluck filmmaker, while the likes of Jennifer Beals, Stanley Tucci, Will Patton, Sam Rockwell, Debi Mazar and Jim Jarmusch fill out the rest of the cast. But the true star of this wry black-and-white comedy is Seymour Cassel, one of John Cassavetes’ regular performers, who delivers a wonderfully charismatic performance as an aging mobster who takes Buscemi under his wing.

The film’s winning blend of dark character-based comedy and unashamed romanticism won over many critics, but sadly it never found much of an audience. According to John Pierson’s indispensable book Spike Mike Slackers and Dykes, the producers turned down several lucrative offers from independent distributors at Sundance before trying but failing to sell the movie to major studios, who were largely uninterested in picking it up. A shame, as In the Soup remains one of the best indies of the era. DA

VERITE APRIL 2013

27

Loves Her Gun

Before You Know It

Grow Up Tony Phillips

28

APRIL 2013 VERITE

State of Independence Austin’s South by Southwest Film Festival is now an international stage for independent cinema. Emily Kausalik tells us why SXSW is the creative heart of American indie film and talks to three locally-based filmmakers about their hopes for the future

words by Emily Kausalik

B

efore I moved to Austin, TX, in 2008 I had no idea what happened to the city when the Longhorns - the football team of the University of Texas - played a Saturday home game at DKR Memorial Stadium. The entire city practically shut down as tens of thousands of Texans pilgrimaged to the city to worship Bevo and UT’s beloved burnt orange. Football is an institution in Texas; just watch an episode of Friday Night Lights to see exactly how ingrained it is in the culture here.

So when the warnings of congestion, traffic, and tourists in March of 2009 started to surface I figured I could navigate it just fine. After all, my office at UT is in a building next to the football stadium. I had only heard whispers of the festival behemoth known as South by Southwest (SXSW), and barely grasped what the name meant or the impact it has on the arts community in the United States and abroad. I figured the coordination of the University’s Spring Break recess and the SXSW Music and Film Festival was a matter of convenience,

as UT has nearly 60,000 students that fill up buses on weekdays and crowd 6th Street on weekends. But it was the other way around. SXSW gave students a chance to escape before hundreds of thousands of music fans and cinephiles flocked to the small Texan city to connect with other industry members, musicians and film-makers.

Austin is a pretty interesting place, in that it is quintessentially Texan yet somehow cosmopolitan; creative, experimental, progressive, heralding the phrase ‘Keep Austin Weird’.

It has cedar trees and palm trees, dry sand and a winding river, rolling hills to the west and flat stretches of highway to the east, glass skyscrapers and bright pink bungalows, Dell Computers and Stubb’s BBQ. It’s also the Capitol of Texas and home to one of the largest public universities in North America. The Capitol and the UT bring all sorts of people to the town of varying backgrounds and interests, and this may very well be why Austin’s music and film-making communities are so vibrant and active.

VERITE APRIL 2013

29

Lauren Modery

The city heralds itself as the ‘Live Music Capital of the World’, but if SXSW is any indication, its film-makers are going to be how Austin makes a name for itself internationally. I spoke with three locally-based film-makers to get their impression of the festival and film-making in Austin: Lauren Modern, screenwriter of Loves Her Gun; Austin Reedy, an editor and post-production member of Before You Know It; and J.C. De Leon, an associate producer on Grow Up Tony Phillips. All three have moved to Austin and have very different backgrounds that have led them to the local film-making community, and I asked them to reflect on both their experiences of making and premiering a film at SXSW as well as the future of film-making in Austin.

Austin Reedy moved to Texas in 2009 for an internship working on the film Where Soldiers Come From, and since then he’s been working on television and film in Austin, including editing work on PJ Raval’s Before You Know It. ‘Festival acceptance on any indie film is a big deal, but SXSW is a really great experience for local film makers’, Reedy remarked.

‘Not only are you screening to a huge international audience, you’re also getting a huge stage in your hometown, which is a really fun place to have a screening or a premiere. Many of the crew involved in the making of BYKI are SXSW alumni, so it was a great thing to get that recognition in a city and festival we know very well’.

Yet being a SXSW alumni or local film-maker doesn’t guarantee acceptance into the festival. ‘I think a lot of people think it’s easy for Austin-based films to get into SXSW because it is an Austin-based festival, but I don’t believe that

30

APRIL 2013 VERITE

Poster, Before You Know It

to be true’, comments Lauren Modery, local writer and blogger. ‘There were a handful of Austin and Texas-based films in SXSW this year, as there were in Sundance too! Austin is definitely coming up the ranks for producing talented filmmakers’. J.C. De Leon, however, points out an important fact, ‘Janet Pierson, the SXSW film program director, used to be an indie film producer, and she understands the plight of an independent filmmaker. She and the rest of the SXSW film team are always there to help with any questions an indie filmmaker might have’.

So while SXSW is an important piece to the Austin film puzzle, it’s not the only reason local film-makers are gaining exposure. ‘As Austin continues to grow, it will absolutely continue to be a great haven for indie filmmakers’, says de Leon.

‘I think between the Austin Film Society, the Texas Film Commission, and just an army of hard working people, Austin is a great place to make a movie’, adds Reedy. ‘We have the talent to make anything, and also because it’s a smaller market than LA or New York, most people have worked with each other before at least once, so everyone is really supportive of the work that each other is doing’. Modery’s sentiments are similar. ‘Unlike NYC or LA, you don’t have to fight one another or posture to get your way to the top. The resources are there for anyone who wants them and everyone is here to help you. The sense of community in the arts world here, particularly film, often brings tears to my eyes’.

Will Austin continue to be a place where film-makers thrive? ‘There is absolutely a supportive community, and that is one of the things that make it a great place for indie

Cast & Crew, Grow Up Tony Phillips

“Austin is a pretty interesting place, in that it is quintessentially Texan yet somehow cosmopolitan; creative, experimental, progressive, heralding the phrase Keep Austin Weird.”

filmmakers’, says De Leon. ‘The film community in Austin and Texas is growing each year’, adds Modery. ‘We have a tremendous film commission in Texas, and organizations like Austin Film Society, SXSW, Austin Film Festival, UT’s Radio-Television-Film Department helping filmmakers’. ‘I think that because of the film program at UT and a pretty great history of film making, that Austin will continue to be a place people want to make movies’, says Reedy. ‘There are tons of talented people here and people are going to continue to produce great stuff ’.

What’s next for Austin? More festivals, of course. Local film-makers and big-studio productions will share the stage at the Fantastic Fest this fall, hosted by the Alamo Drafthouse. The Austin Film Society continually screens independent films around town at great venues like the Violet Crown and the various Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas. The Austin Film Festival & Conference takes place in October, and of course, SXSW returns to Austin for another ten days of film, music, interactive, creative, and educational meetings and screenings in 2014.

As for Modery, Reedy, and De Leon, their films continue to make the independent festival circuit and the exposure from SXSW makes that possible. Grow Up Tony Phillips was recently chosen to play at the Chicago Critics Film Festival in April, and the fantastic documentary Before You Know It will enjoy screenings at the San Francisco International Film Festival in May.

v

VERITE APRIL 2013

31

I just had the weirdest dream... words by Dan Auty

I

t seems apt that the very first person to deliver any dialogue in a Richard Linklater movie is Linklater himself. In the opening sequence of Slacker, the then 30 year-old writer/director sits in the back of a cab, explaining to the bored driver his theory on life choices, and how every possible decision that can be made forms its own strand of reality. Back in 1990, this one-take monologue was really just the set up to a punchline (“shit, I should’ve stayed at the bus station!”), but more than two decades years later it does feel like a strangely prescient metaphor for a directing career that has taken many strange detours, and created any number of strands of filmmaking reality.

First and foremost, Richard Linklater is a character guy. Which is not to say his films, (whether self-written, adapted or directed from other writers’ scripts) are not frequently strong on structure or narrative. But it is the people who interest him the most. In movies like Slacker, his rotoscoped

32

APRIL 2013 VERITE

dream fable Waking Life or even ensemble works like Dazed and Confused or SubUrbia, Linklater enjoys dipping into the middle of people’s lives - sometimes for only a minute or two - before moving on. But even when faced with more than 100 characters in Slacker there is never the sense that the director views their lives as less important than someone who might stay centre stage for the entire duration.

Though an easy and obvious thing to do, I think it’s a mistake to simply carve up Linklater’s 15plus film career into wildly disparate genres. Sure, The Newton Boys might be a sort-of western, A Scanner Darkly a paranoid sci-fi thriller and Before Sunrise a sweet romantic drama, but there is a unity there - anchored by a compassion for his protagonists - that does form a singular body of work. There are certain character types that occur throughout: the well-meaning outsider thrown into a world he barely understands - School of Rock’s fraudulent teacher Dewey, naive teen actor

Unifying voices in the films of Richard Linklater Richard in Me and Orson Welles, or Wiley Wiggins taken out on a weed-and-beer fuelled nocturnal adventure by older boys in Dazed and Confused - and the insider who comes to realise that the surroundings he thought he understood have changed dramatically. Think A Scanner Darkly’s drug-addled narc cop Bob Arctor, Greg Kinnear’s slick marketeer realising the truth of his business in Fast Food Nation, Jack Black’s unexpectedly murderous Bernie or even Before Sunset’s Jesse, as he ruminates on the state of his failed first marriage.

Other commonality abounds. Despite the romantic nature of many of his films, Linklater rarely lets relationships play out in the expected ways - it takes nine years to find out, but we all know that Jesse and Celine’s anticipated meeting one year later after the end of Before Sunrise never takes place. In more conventional hands, Claire Danes’ ambitious production assistant might have ended up with Zac Efron instead of two-timing him with her charismatic director in Me and Or-

son Welles. And if Bob Arctor’s girl Donna makes things tough for him by her refusal to get intimate in A Scanner Darkly, that particular relationship takes an even bigger plunge when we discover she is also an undercover narc, using him as an unwitting pawn in a bigger investigation.

For me, Linklater’s least interesting films are those that either stick too closely to Hollywood convention (his remake of The Bad News Bears) or adaptations in which the original author’s voice overwhelms his own (SubUrbia, Tape). Linklater’s true gift is approaching his work alongside others, be they regular performers like Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy or Jack Black, or tackling the work of like-minded artists such as Mike White or Philip K. Dick. It’s through these collaborations that the director’s own voice - these common themes, characters and resolutions - has matured and developed over the years. Linklater’s body of work is one of the most fascinating in American cinema, and one that grows more quietly impressive with every film.

v

VERITE APRIL 2013

33

MELANCHOLY

& LONGING 34

APRIL 2013 VERITE

The Stylish and Lonely World of Xavier Dolan Evrim Ersoy takes us on a journey down the rollercoaster of emotions of Xavier Dolan’s first three features

words by Evrim Ersoy

X

avier Dolan is an enigma; a young director who can hear an intricate sadness in every human relationship, a writer who can expose human frailty without ever becoming judgemental, a visual virtuoso whose attention to period detail can create a sense of wonder and magic within the frame – and all these at a very tender age (24).

It’s hard to write about Dolan’s early life because most of it is so recent: Born in 1989 he was a child actor from the age of 4, working in commercials first and moving on to television series.

However it was his directorial debut at the Cannes Film Festival at the age of 19 that placed him into the limelight proper – his first feature, 2009‘s J’ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother) received a standing ovation at the festival and became one of the most-talked about films that year.

A semi-autobiographical affair, J’ai tue ma mere deals with 16-year-old Hubert Minel and his relationship with his single mother Chantale. Written and directed by Dolan, the character of Hubert embodies all the insecurities and uncontrolled anger of the teenage years. His inability to communicate with his mother pushes him further and further into an internal world of his own. Hubert denies his mother’s existence in public, lying in school that she is dead, hides his sexuality from her and is envious of his best friend Antonin – whose relationship with his own mother seems the very picture of pleasant perfection.

Upon first glance, this may seem over-familiar; after all, the parent-child conflict is a cornerstone of modern cinema.

However, Dolan manages to give this material an exquisite spin; both stylistically and in his treatment of Chantale, Dolan’s voice is as fresh as anyone can hope.

VERITE APRIL 2013

35

Laurence Anyways (2012)

“Visually Laurence Anyways is a masterpiece – choosing to shoot in 4:3, Dolan makes each frame an exquisite painting.

A touch of the old masters is undeniable as both depth and tracking are used in the way a painter accentuates emotion with a brushstroke.”

36

APRIL 2013 VERITE

Though our attention is trained on Hubert throughout the film, Dolan allows the character of Chantale to have a voice. While focusing on the teenage protagonist is nothing new giving the diametrically opposed parent some depth and a means of expression certainly is, elevating what would be treated very rudimentarily in other hands to the kind of dynamism and complexity akin to the work of John Cassavetes.

Dolan’s talent lies in his distinct understanding of the style and feel of cinema and how adept he is at blending the visual with the internal existence of his characters – his use of slow-motion might be called a purely aesthetic choice had it not also revealed through the frozen glances of the onlookers the desire, the loss, the longing and even the fear of the lead characters. With an aesthetic that combines the best of Godard and company with the stylistic brilliance of 50’s melodrama, Dolan employs stark colours and slow-motion sequences to create magical-realism that audiences of this sort of indie drama fare are unaccustomed to. Each one of his films shows a talent on the move, someone who is constantly learning and improving.

2010‘s Les Amours Imaginaires, (Heartbeats), Dolan’s second feature, takes his grasp of style to a new level. If J’ai tué ma mère” is Dolan’s first toddling steps into filmmaking, Les Amours Extraordinaire represents a boldness and experimentalism

Les Amours Imaginaires (2010)

J’ai tué ma mère (2009)

Over the course of 160 mesmerising minutes, Dolan tracks these two people as they try to adjust to the seismic shifts within their relationships’ bedrock: together, apart, with others, with friends, with family. Wisely setting the story in 1989, Dolan makes the most of fashion and location, lending a real sense of time and place.

Visually Laurence Anyways is a masterpiece – choosing to shoot in 4:3, Dolan makes each frame an exquisite painting. A touch of the old masters is undeniable as both depth and tracking are used in the way a painter accentuates emotion with a brushstroke. Montreal emerges as a city both hostile and accepting – the scene where Laurence stumbles for a payphone perhaps being the best example.

If there’s one thing to emerge from his films, it’s Dolan’s sense of humour; his visual flourishes are playful with nods to styles past.

His recreation of a party in the early 90’s takes the excesses we all know so well and fondly mocks them. Here is a director who comments on the state of love within our world through people who we may not approve of but begrudgingly recognise in ourselves.

In trying to film the basic essence of human relationships, Dolan makes his films almost impossible to summarize; they are more like experiences that happen to you.

In one of the fragments from Auguries of Innocence William Blake writes: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, /Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand /And Eternity in an hour” – there can be no more fitting words to describe the youthful vigour, audacity and wit of Xavier Dolan.

gained from a first growth spurt. Whilst the plot here remains fragmented and ultimately shallow, the film dares and taunts the audience to look away. From the costumes of the characters to slow-motion sequences set within forests and parties and anywhere else Dolan can imagine, this is like an MGM musical seen through the lens of a French auteur.

In Les Amours Imaginaires Dolan focuses on an unusual love triangle: best friends Frances and Marie meet pretty boy Nicolas at a dinner party and immediately feign a lack of interest in him.

However as the three end up developing a friendship over the course of the next few weeks, both begin to fall for Nicolas which threatens the delicate fabric of the trio’s existence.

Dolan’s characters in Les Amours Imaginaire might seem shallow – they pose and dismiss other people with the certainty of youthful arrogance. However, their heartbreak and loneliness is very real. Letting the audience see the humanity within these shallow characters, Dolan creates drama and understanding where there generally is none for children playing at aloof adults by way of hormonal temerity.

It’s no surprise to read that Dolan has a love-affair with directors of the French New Wave. You can see touches of Jules et Jim all over Les Amours Imaginaire. However it’s also his tributes to films like The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg which really charm; the film is not a geek-referencing exposition for Dolan but a place where he can explore human desires with style.

The final film in Dolan’s filmography, Laurence Anyways, is also his most accomplished – a 10-year story of Laurence and Fred, a La Folie d’Amour: The Xavier Dolan Collection is a availmarried couple whose lives begin to change with Laurence’s announcement that he can no longer hide the fact he wants to lives as able in stores now courtesy of Network Releasesing www.newtorkonair.com a woman.

v

VERITE APRIL 2013

37

Masters of Cinema

Bakumatsu Taiyô-den Andrew Nerger uncovers a Japanese comedy classic, littleknown to western audiences – Bakumatsu Taiyô-den words by Andrew Nerger

H

ere’s a question for all you cineastes: what do you think about when you hear the phrase Japanese cinema?

I think of countless disparate things directors, genres, characters. I think of Akira Kurosawa, Samurai films, The Seven Samurai, Yashjiro Ozu, Tokyo Story, Kenji Mizoguchi, Sansho the Bailiff, Godzilla, Battle Royale, Takeshi Miike, Audition, Studio Ghibli, Totoro.

Kind of an odd thought process perhaps but those examples shaped my appreciation of Japanese cinema. However I look through that list and realise, with the exception of some giant monsters and the mystical creatures that saturate Studio Ghibli’s output, there is a surprising lack of levity.

Which brings me to my next question: ‘can you name a single Japanese comedy?’ I would hazard a guess many of you would struggle to name one, let alone a few. Until recently I counted myself amongst that group and it seems

38

APRIL 2013 VERITE

like the vast majority of online critics are the same. Search for ‘Japanese-Language Comedy Feature Films’ on IMDb and the titles with the most votes are Ichi the Killer and Zatoichi! Both are darkly comic to be sure, but something (perhaps the blood?) prevents me from classifying either as a pure comedy.

The lack of Western knowledge of Japanese comedy is odd when you consider the Japanese film industry is one of the biggest globally. In 2010, it was fourth in the list of most films made per country behind only India, the US and China. I find it odd that such a giant in the film industry would have relatively few comic titles released in the West.

Perhaps all in the name of commercialism, Japanese comedy is destined to be ignored and neglected.

Who better then to reverse this situation than that that champion of forgotten classics Eureka, who are correcting this neglect with the release of a very special Japanese comedy called Bakumatsu Taiyô-den.

Perhaps the closest thing I’ve seen to a Japanese screwball comedy, Bakumatsu Taiyôden feels about as far from the more formal Ozu as it is possible to get. Set in a high-class brothel in Shinagawa’s pleasure district, the film was co-written by Vengeance is Mine director Shohei Imamura and has a surprising amount of levity given the seriousness of his later work.

Originally released in its native Japan in 1957 it was recently named as the fifth best Japanese film of all-time by Kinema Junpo, a kind of Japanese equivalent of Sight and Sound, placing higher that classics such as Rashomon, Ugetsu and My Neighbour Totoro. Clearly this is a film that demands serious attention.

The opening of the film proudly proclaims: ‘Celebrating the Third Anniversary of Resuming Film Production’. A poignant reminder to think that, some 12 years after the bomb, the country was still essentially recovering from the fallout of World War II. The film is set during the turbulent 1860s (In the final years of the Shogun rule) which historically was a time of great upheaval and change. Prior to this, Japan had been staunchly isolationist. No foreigners were allowed in and no Japanese were allowed out – under a strict penalty of death.

All of this changed with the signing of the Convention of Kanagawa with the Americans in 1854. Overnight, Japan was no longer isolationist and foreigners soon came into the country in their masses to trade their wares, all of which led to some degree of unease. As such, it easy to see why Bakumatsu has many parallels to the American occupation of Japan following the conclusion of the war in 1945.

Baumatsu portrays this transitional period with a sub-plot featuring a few revolutionary Samurai who aren't happy with the new living conditions and who plot to blow up the foreign living quarters. All heavy stuff to be sure but the comedy comes out when the inept group ‘lose’ some dynamite and then later decide whether to follow through with their ‘explosive’ plan using a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors.

At the heart of the film is Japanese comic Frankie Sakai, who is perhaps best known to Westerners for his role in the 80s TV miniseries Shogun. Bakumatsu was one of his first roles and in the film it’s really easy to see why Sakai later became a national treasure.

His character of Saheiji, a crafty grifter who stays in the brothel yet doesn’t have a penny to his name, is easily one of the most memorable in Japanese cinema.

But if Sakai is good, the women are perfect

VERITE APRIL 2013

39

comic foils to his crafty character. Sachiko Hidari (who was later in Schrader’s Mishima) plays the character of Osome with wicked glee. She has spiralling debts and decides she will kill herself as part of a fashionable ‘love suicide’ in order to get out of her predicament. The only problem is that she needs a ‘lover’ to help her with this act. After she finds a suitable mate (a clueless bookseller) and convinces him to follow through with the deed - she changes her mind with the quip: “After a nap, I can’t be bothered. Can’t we put it off ?”

Elsewhere her rival Koharu promises her hand in marriage to two different suitors and plays each of them off each other in order to benefit financially – a plan which unravels as a high comedy of errors that is more like an episode of Frasier than a samurai film.

All of these supporting characters, the samurai and the prostitutes eventually come to rely upon Sakai’s character. Despite being poor his intelligence and ability to stay cool under pressure has them all eating out of his hand.

I saw his character as a perfect mix of Mifune’s drifter in

Yojimbo mixed with William Powell’s hobo turned butler extraordinaire in My Man Godfrey; a total hoot.

Extras on the disc were unavailable at the time of writing but the print of Bakumatsu Taiyô-den is as good as we have come to expect from Eureka. A Funny, warm charming work then, and I am proud to be able to now finally name a pure Japanese comedy.

v

Bakumatsu Taiyô-den is available on April 22nd courtesy of Eureka Entertainment. www.eurekavideo.co.uk

“Recently named as the fifth best Japanese film of all-time by Kinema Junpo, a kind of Japanese equivalent of Sight and Sound, placing higher that classics such as Rashomon, Ugetsu and My Neighbour Totoro.”

40

APRIL 2013 VERITE

VERITE APRIL 2013

41

In Defence...

The American Nightmare of Observe & Report

words by Jordan McGrath

P

lacing a song titled ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’ over your opening credits takes balls and a certain level of confidence in your work.

Like the final words of Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds it is evidence of an artistic swagger that risks dividing viewers. And as contemporary directors go there isn’t a modern filmmaker who sits on the farthest ends of audience’s tastes than Jody Hill. Some hail him as a master exploring the gross, unapologetic and incongruous lives of characters you inherently loathe, others see him as vulgar and obscene – a peddler of crass, dark humour looking for disgusting shock-for-shock’s sake cheap laughs.

For me, Hill’s career to-date is a wonderful boundary pushing journey that often feels like a personal quest by the director as to what extent certain questionable situations can be considered funny. And it’s his unique version of transgressive cinema - he uses comedy through social cir-

42

APRIL 2013 VERITE

cumstance to create an unsettling effect - which makes his films memorable and striking. My metaphorical line-inthe-sand as to what I personally find humorous may be a little more lax than others, but anyone who claims Observe and Report doesn’t hold a message within its extremes is, to my mind, misguided Through Ronnie, with his gun obsession and personal 'smiting' idea of what justice is, the film highlights and exposes the ridiculousness of what certain groups in America sees as masculinity. Ronnie believes he knows what it is ‘to be a man’. With his infantile behaviour, including his thoughts on gun control and race – he’s a twisted take on what, from a liberal perspective, embodies deeply conservative America. The film is as much commenting on elitist liberalism as the insanity of some conservatives. It places a severely unqualified individual into a position of power, a place where Ronnie believes he has a right to make deci-

sions with his ‘gut’ instinct or with little or no evidence.

Does that remind anyone of any former Leaders of the Free World?

Rogen, who up to that point had stretched his acting chops to nothing more than likeable, guffawing stoners, had a challenge with Ronnie. He ups his game considerably here. His version of a sociopath with a heart of gold is like Travis Bickle with the voice of Kermit the Frog. Childish rhetoric followed by terrifying violent punishment is very scary to witness and we see the world of this movie through the severely disturbed perspective of Ronnie. A world where he lovingly tucks his alcoholic passed-out mother with a kiss on the brow after she drunkenly collapses and thinks it’s cute, anybody not Caucasian looks suspicious and justice for the local skateboard gang who practice their skills in a ‘no skateboard’ zone is a brutal beating.

Jody Hill is famous (or infamous depending on who you ask) for creating difficult characters. Fred Simmons in The Foot Fist Way, Eastbound & Down’s Kenny Powers and Ronnie all believe in their own ego. They think the world should adapt to them. But unlike those two works, Observe and Report does not have a ‘normal’ character to act as a tonic to the absurdity of its lead. Filling a film full of unlikeable characters in theory seems like a ridiculous idea but there’s a sadistic satisfaction in watching a story unfold with people unable to develop, who can’t and will never learn anything. Part of me believes Hill conducted this experiment intentionally to see if a narrative centred on characters with absolutely no self-awareness or realisation of their outrageous and often inept behaviour could work. If that’s the case it does, with shockingly hilarious results.

What Hill also does incredibly well, and what saves this from just being another tasteless gross-out comedy, is a kind

of dumb-intelligence. Yes, it’s bold and in your face but it hits home like a bullet to the chest. It’s a difficult thing not to get sucked into the farcical nature of Ronnie’s story but Hill manages to keep just the right distance between absurdity and realism.

With some scenes, aesthetically and tonally, playing out with the completely opposite sentiment as the scene is contextually. A memorable scene sees Hill juxtaposing Rogen’s warm, comforting monolague delivery, played alongside a romanticised and soothing score, as Ronnie describes majestically performing a mass killing to a Police psychologist.

Hill’s bravery to present this like an uplifting piece of cinema, understanding that the comedy as well as the disturbing nature of the scene, comes entirely from the misguided world view of Ronnie.

And I think that’s what people missed with Observe and Report. All they saw was the surface level vulgarity and not what that vulgarity was actually satirising. Hill never once asks you to sympathise or empathise with Ronnie and he doesn’t condone any of his actions. Instead he offers an unfiltered view into his warped universe, his American Dream where he’s the hero, barrel-chested and proud, with a smoking shotgun in his hands. You can’t begrudge anyone who is offended by the gratuitous brutality on show. However to call the film misogynistic or racist is just lazy and a misunderstanding of what Hill is actually trying to present.

Foul-mouthed, hilarious, shocking and fearless, Observe and Report is a crescendo of violence and obscenities that can, in the opinion of this writer, take its place alongside the best black comedies to come out of America. Jody Hill’s voice is one that I’m sure will continue to split and divide audiences but he’s surely a breath of fresh air and for that alone, he should be applauded.

v

“Rogen’s version of a sociopath with a heart of gold is like Travis Bickle with the voice of Kermit the Frog. Childish rhetoric followed by terrifying violent punishment is very scary to witness.”

VERITE APRIL 2013

43

Thursday Till Sunday director Dominga Sotomayor Castillo writer Dominga Sotomayor Castillo starring Santi Ahumada, Paola Giannini, Francisco Pérez-Bannen

44

APRIL 2013 VERITE

cert (12a)

Review byJordan McGrath

release date 5th April

A drama centred on the breakdown of a relationship and family. A minimal cast. Set mostly within the confines of a car. With that in mind, one thing is for sure – Chilean debutant writer/director Dominga Sotomayor Castillo didn’t make it easy for herself. However, helped along by its rougharound-the-edges aesthetic and naturalistic style, it somehow ends up being a risk worth taking.

In the dead of night Lucia’s (Santi Ahumada) parents wake her and her younger brother from their slumber to start their long journey to north Chile for a weekend camping trip. Piling themselves into their station wagon the journey that lays in front of them may – on paper – look like it’s from route A to B, however, it will end up as one that both children and parents will remember for the rest of their lives.

Telling a story of a parental break-up could seem clichéd and overdone but, rather intelligently, what Castillo does is tell this story through the point-ofview of pre-teen Lucia, leading us down an unlikely road, both physical and metaphorical, as she discovers the inevitable conclusion of her parents’ separation.

First-timer Ahumada manages to express that inner development with astounding ease, giving a performance so natural that you’d swear she didn’t even know cameras were rolling.

With an astute child’s eye, the director shoots the film perfectly - much of it from the back seat looking at the backs of Lucia’s mother’s and father’s heads. Although it’s pretty evident where the conflict between the adults will end up, it’s the unique childhood perspective that makes it work.

Their relationship is not one of high tempers, raised voices or clashing personalities. The parents are sly with the discussions of their future, trying to keep their domestic issues hidden from the children, which makes it harder for Lucia to decipher.

It may, at times, feel rather tedious but there’s a sense of lasting and resonance in this treatment.

Of how this journey, probably their last as a family, will live on and be remembered by its characters.

Slow and dull, dusty and desolate, there’s no energy, no fun, which may be exactly what the characters are feeling and the directors intention but, as a viewer it may have just needed something more, something to dissuade the viewer staring out the window at the passing world as Lucia does.

After a confrontation between the parents, the family are left lost in the Chilean desert, driving around aimlessly without direction. With this Castillo asks the question ‘What’s next for the family?’ but doesn’t answer, not seeing the need to offer a resolution. However, what she does is feed you the truth of the parents separation and that’s that they don’t know, so why should the audience? It’s an uncomfortable feeling, neither optimistic nor pessimistic; she lets it linger and allows the audience to create their own future of what will come.

Spring Breakers

release date 5th April

Review byDavid Hall

“I got Scarface on re-peat!” Midway through Harmony Korine’s enjoyable sun-kissed heist fantasia, white-boy gangsta Alien ( James Franco) delivers a speech of glorious, righteous insanity – rolling on about all the ‘shit’ he owns in his lavish beachside apartment. In Spring Breakers, everything’s on repeat – days and nights blur into a chemical fug, sequences and lines of dialogue are looped and Skrillex’s bruising brostep provides a wall of sound for the hyperreal teen bacchanal.

Bored by school and terrified at the prospect of missing out on spring break, a lissom quartet of high-school hotties rob a burger joint to fund their partying. The joy is short-lived and they’re busted

by Florida feds but a saviour – “the answer to your prayers” – is at hand in the form of Franco’s grotesque pimp. He bails the girls out, moving them into his crib while he hatches a plan to avenge nemesis Archie (Gucci Mane) over a drug turf war.

Things get a little too dark for Faith (Selena Gomez) so it’s left to the trio of Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson) and Cotty (Rachel Korine) to take over the reins.

The most unconventional element of Spring Breakers is how Korine, whose fascinating stop-start, performance art-like career has until now existed on the margins, ended up at the helm. For this is certainly his most straightforward film. That’s not a criticism although anyone anticipating a searing indictment of vapid youth culture may be surprised; those looking to unearth a statement will leave bemused. The girls’ desire for fun and living in the ‘now’ consumes all, overriding narrative and social commentary. There’s no moral line being drawn here.

Korine seems at least partly in love with what he’s horrified by.

Visually Spring Breakers has the now overfamiliar aesthetic nailed; wall to wall ‘Big Pimpin’’ style T&A shots along with slow-motion cutaways to attractive young folks getting artfully wasted. Breakers teeters on (soft) teensploitation, Korine truly gets ‘all up in that ass’, although it’s relatively tame stuff. The darker neon tone of the latter half, where the influence of Belgian cinematographer Benoît Debie is more keenly felt, is far more arresting and trippy.

The overall effect is queasy and druggy – giggly rather than nightmarish. Alien is by turns sleazily malevolent and surprisingly tender (he serenades the girls with a piano-led, sunset rendition of Britney’s Everytime). The dénouement involves girls, guns and gangsters and is farcical, surreal and artful – Scarface by way of Terry Richardson. Skrillex’s mid-frequency basslines are the perfect musical foil; unthreatening aggression, pleasurably empty thrills. The instrumental pieces with Cliff Martinez offer a soothing, melancholy flipside.

It’s going to be exciting to see where Korine goes next. When he started out, penning the incendiary Kids as a 17-year-old skateboarder, he was an active participant in the world he was observing. Spring Breakers is the work of an ageing hipster on the outside looking in; a VICE magazine David Attenborough – alternately bemused, troubled, aroused and fascinated by his subjects.

cert (18)

director Harmony Korine writer Harmony Korine starring James Franco, Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine

VERITE APRIL 2013

45

Review by Stuart Barr

A Late Quartet

release date 5th April

cert (15)

director Yaron Zilberman writers Yaron Zilberman, Seth Grossman starring Christopher Walken, Catherine Keener, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Imogen Poots

46

APRIL 2013 VERITE

A Late Quartet is unashamedly elitist in the social milieu it portrays – one plot strand involves an attempt to win a six-figure auction in order to buy the perfect violin. The themes however are universal – fidelity, infidelity, ageing, professional jealousy and parenthood.

Peter Mitchell (Christopher Walken) is a cellist and founding member of an acclaimed string quartet. The group meet after their annual break to prepare for the new concert season. But something is off; Mitchell just can’t hit his cues. The others dismiss this as rustiness but he seeks medical advice. The diagnosis is unwelcome to say the least; early stage Parkinson’s disease.

Mitchell accepts this with graceful resignation.

While the other younger members of the group panic, he calmly informs them he wishes the quartet to continue and find a successor who he will introduce at a swansong concert.

Where Mitchell wishes for a graceful, dignified exit the group sees a crisis and this sets in motion a domino effect – bringing long unacknowledged tensions to the surface. The second violin Robert Gelbart (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) is unsatisfied in the shadow of the first Daniel Lerner (Ivanir), an arrogant but brilliant musician. Gelbart’s wife Juliette (Catherine Keener) the group’s violist, was involved with Lerner prior to their marriage and this adds to tensions as Daniel suspects he doesn’t have her full support. Lerner is also the violin teacher of the Gelbart’s gifted daughter Alexandra (Imogen Poots), but his devotion to musical perfection is driving her away from her instrument.

This is the stuff of melodrama but Zilberman’s first dramatic feature firmly keeps a lid on its ingredients – allowing them to slowly stew until the pressure is released through scenes of understated emotional violence. The way Hoffman enunciates the word ‘convenient’ in an argument with Keener, it may as well be a sniper’s bullet.

Its elegant shooting and editing style is matched by exquisite performances. Hoffman is superb, no-one does impotent rage better. Mark Ivanar, whose largely unremarkable CV includes a lot of heavies, plays a character who seems to have a similar relationship to his violin that a samurai has to their katana. Keener and Poots both excel, with a frosty mother/daughter relationship that leads to one of the films’ best scenes.

It is Walken though who really steals the show. A great actor often denied the opportunity to show his full range, he is given a really good role here and one that calls for more than his usual prince of darkness act. Director Zilberman is clearly in love with Walken’s face and in one dialogue-free scene, as the aging musician listens to a recording of his late wife singing, the actor breaks your heart with the tiniest series of micro expressions.

The dénouement involves a planned performance of Beethoven’s Opus 131, a piece comprised of seven movements all connected, during which each instrument will fall out of tune. This is of course the film’s ultimate theme in précis. A Late Quartet is a film of five great performances, delicately conducted, with real emotional heft.

Review by Jordan McGrath

With her debut feature, Swedish director Lisa Aschan has created a wholly complex piece of cinema that would work well sitting beside Giorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth and Alps as some sort of human behaviour trilogy. Soft in its voice but fierce with its intention, She Monkeys explores the ideals of power and control within the boundaries of youth and sexual awakening.

Whilst trying out for the local equestrian vaulting team, shy Emma (Mathilda Paradeiser) meets the confident Cassandra (Linda Molin) and, as they quickly strike up a friendship and possibly more, a subtle but sharp power struggle between them begins as Emma finds herself on the end of several small challenges orchestrated by Cassandra.

This is a surprisingly deep emotional character drama of teenage life, with an awkwardly effective sub-plot surrounding Emma’s little sister who, on the verge of puberty, begins to tackle the confusing urges and changes she has in the first stages of becoming a woman.

We’re introduced to Emma as she walks through the forest training her dog, making the animal stop when she does, using a clicker to communicate positive feedback when the dog does its task correctly. Simple and relatively unmemorable on first glance, when you look at this in relation to the following relationship between Emma and Cassandra, it’s a scene that dictates control and power and becomes a perfect tone setter for the film.

Calm and composed, the film meritoriously lets its sinister atmosphere boil up and develop, very much like the feelings within Emma. It does this slowly, some may say sluggishly, but it’s undeniably there and works much more effectively than if it was an out of character outburst. We get to witness the hook land, and watch as the feelings ripen within her as they mature from something psychological to something physical. I love a film that bides its time, letting the tension breathe and the tone become darker; it’s a skill many filmmakers shy away from and it shows the confidence of Aschan to not feel the necessity to rush.

All wrapped up in the seemingly obvious blooming of homosexual affection, it adds another level to proceedings. Blending the innocence of Emma’s sexuality, as well as her place in the moody struggle at the beginning of her and Cassandra’s relationship, with that of her younger sister who finds herself in situations that, although mightily uncomfortable to watch, provides a gaze – through a lens of youthful confusion – of the misperception of love and the start of femininity in the form of her feelings for her older cousin Sebastien.

A fantastically pitched performance from Paradeiser is the standout of She Monkeys, but that’s not to diminish any of the other elements of the film, in particular the exquisite direction from Aschan and a well-crafted script from Aschan and co-writer Josefine Adolfsson. She Monkeys delivers a character-driven story that delves in the deepest of our emotions that once it’s finished, makes you want to experience again.

She Monkeys cert (15)

dvd release 15th April

director Lisa Aschan writers Lisa Aschan, Josefine Adolfsson starring Mathilda Paradeiser, Linda Molin, Isabella Lindquist

VERITE APRIL 2013

47

Simon Killer

release date 12th April

cert (18)

writers Antonio Sampos, Brady Corbet, Mati Diop starring Brady Corbet, Nicolas Ronchi, Constance Rousseau

48

APRIL 2013 VERITE

Review by David Hall

director Antonio Sampos

Writer/director Antonio Campos follows up his well-received independent hit Afterschool (2008) with another disturbing, intense and subjective study of an alienated and lonely young male losing his grip on reality.

Recent college graduate Simon (Brady Corbet) is in Paris coping badly with recent separation from his girlfriend. There is a strong suggestion that violence has contributed to the estrangement. He mopes in his apartment, attempts a series of calls to his ex (which usually end in verbal violence), masturbates to internet porn and spends his nights wandering the streets of the city, permanently wired to his MP3 player and slipping further into disintegration. He tries and fails to make various connections with young women. Inevitably drawn to one of the city’s sex parlours he meets – and seems to emotionally connect with – Victoria (Mati Diop) a beautiful prostitute and when he learns that her clients are wealthy, often-married businessmen he suggests a blackmail plot to extort money.

Campos’s film is an intentional (and sometimes literal) head-trip that relies heavily on Dardenne’s style back-of-the-head shots and some Gasper Noe influenced visual distortion. In a way Simon Killer shares some ground with the recent Maniac remake, which also invited us inside the mind of a disturbed young man. The difference here is we are unsure as to whether Simon is indeed a killer or just very sick.

As a sensory experience in filmmaking it is largely successful and helps to flesh out what is a fairly mundane and meandering narrative.

A distant and icy proposition, with a thoroughly dislikeable lead and a Paul Schrader-like dystopian sensibility, Campos’ film will be divisive. The canny casting really helps. Brady Corbett (Funny Games.

Melancholia) who is fast becoming the go to guy for troubled males makes the title role his own, which is a tough call given that his character is so whiny, self-obsessed and awful . Corbet is an actor able to navigate a fine line between vulnerability and malevolence. His unreliable, Tom Ripley-esque narrator is a particularly passive-aggressive figure. The script hints at his backstory – he’s a neuroscience major – in ways that add to the confusion and uncertainty about his modus operandi. Cunning on the one hand, desperately naive on the other, he’s a mass of contradictions. It’s a superb performance. And the delicious Mati Diop is a revelation as the intelligent but vulnerable prostitute Victoria. The chemistry between them keeps the film engrossing even when the film begins to wander somewhat aimlessly.

Campos is part of a burgeoning collective of indie talent (producer on this is Sean Durkin whose recent Martha Marcy May Marlene is another tense indie melodrama that flirts with horror imagery) and his film is perhaps more impressive on a technical level, combining sound design and an electronic soundtrack to stunning effect and fragmenting the narrative with visual flourishes to maintain a convincingly nightmarish and nocturnal atmosphere throughout. A tough film to like but an easy one to admire.

The Place Beyond the Pines

release date 12th April

Review by David Hall

Uniting the so-hot-right-now Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper, this is a sprawling, self-consciously epic family melodrama spanning two generations – a Greek tragedy set in motion by an intense encounter between Gosling’s blue-collar, motorcycle-riding outlaw and Cooper’s rising-star cop.

Gosling plays Luke, a tattooed motorbike stuntman who regularly rides a cage of death at local carnivals. So far, so Drive. Only when he discovers his ex-love Romina (Eva Mendes) has had their baby and shacked up with a new man he is spurred into direct and violent action to provide for his child.

Hooking up with drifter Robin (Ben Mendelsohn) they start robbing banks across the state. Meanwhile rookie police officer Avery Cross (Cooper) is on a very different trajectory. But with one eye on a future political career, Cross is mounting a crime campaign that will bring him into direct contact with Luke and change both men’s live forever The first third is absolutely ferocious; high-octane, all-guns-blazing, pedal to the metal cinema. It has an opening sequence I seriously doubt will be topped this year and real life-lovers Gosling and Mendes ooze liquid chemistry. There’s a frenzied energy at play; the chases and heists hum with danger and imminent violence (Luke vomits after the first takedown). The grizzled, manky Mendelsohn (the great character actor of the moment) is compelling as Luke’s partner in crime. As the screws tighten and Luke’s actions become more desperate you feel certain you’re watching a modern American classic But Cianfrance has some further surprises to spring and revealing them would be very damaging. That said they do significantly alter the flow of what is, up until this point, a seriously cinematic and tight piece of filmmaking. As the film strains for importance and significance it loses much of its early energy and what begins as a modern-day take on Nicholas Ray’s cinema of masculine crisis winds up in much less persuasive, soapier territory.

The film starts out big and just gets bigger, packing moments upon moments in without finding time for nuance and contemplation. The script also gives the men (especially Cooper) an awful lot of acting to do while giving the women virtually nothing. By the end of his three-films-in-one deal Cianfrance has lurched into full-blown teen melodrama with homoerotic overtones and echoes of The Outsiders. It’s all incredibly watchable but he takes emotional shortcuts that rob the film of a certain amount of power.

There’s so much to admire though, especially from the leads. The tattooed, muscular Gosling is the coolest Motorcycle Boy since Rourke and he continues to build on his broodingly intense, magnetic screen presence. Cooper again shows that, with the right material, he’s an actor capable of surprising depth.

If this isn’t the classic it aspires to be (and it really isn’t) it’s not through want of trying. This is a significant step up from Blue Valentine; a big-hearted, widescreen, triple-album of a movie, perhaps more Mellencamp than Springsteen. A bright future for Cianfrance seems assured.

cert (15)

director Derek Cianfrance writers Derek Cianfrance, Ben Coccio, Darius Marder starring Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes

VERITE APRIL 2013

49

Review by Jordan McGrath

In the Fog

release date 26th April

cert (12a)

director Sergei Loznitsa writer Sergei Loznitsa starring Vladimir Svirskiy, Vladislav Abashin, Sergei Kolesov

50

APRIL 2013 VERITE

‘Anything can happen in this kind of war’ states Vladislav Abashin’s Burov with a gun pointed to the back of Sushenya (played with dejected precision by the fantastic Vladimir Svirskiy). He’s right, because no one knows how anybody will act when imminent death rears its head. Director Sergei Loznitsa’s second film to be nominated for the Palme D’Or in as many attempts, In the Fog sees him tackle the heavyweight themes of honour, loyalty and perception.

Exposing and exploring the human condition during wartime, In the Fog takes pace in Nazi occupied Belarus. Two local partisans, whilst fighting for the resistance, travel to a remote cabin in a nearby forest where they take the quiet Sushenya from his family to execute him in the neighbouring forest. Arrested for the sabotage of a railroad after a Nazi train derails, he is released whilst the others hanged, and as the rumours spread of Sushenya’s release and seeming collaboration with the enemy, the two partisans come for their revenge. However, as they are about to carry out the execution they are ambushed leaving the victim alone with his wounded would-be killer.

Playing with the very definition of ‘hero’ Loznitsa takes his story and throws you head first into its moral dilemma, looking not only at the idea of bravery but what exactly that bravery constitutes when fighting an oppressor. Is a brash, easy-to-spot rebellion attack the right thing to do just because the opportunity arises? Is unneeded martyrdom honourable or are you just respecting a stupid act because they gave their lives? And of course, should a man be able to state his case before being put to death? The director juggles all these impasses and, in a testament to his slow-burn script with minimal dialogue, manages to confront and discuss them in depth, realsing a story of redemption through revenge.

Rhythmic in its plotting and using sparse flashbacks, it flips the archetype of its Western influences, reminding one of Tommy Lee Jones’ magnificent 2005 film The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Keeping its sullen temperament throughout, Loznitsa, alongside cinematographer Oleg Mutu, shoots the film with a gorgeous but haunting neutral palette, making you experience the palpable weight of its grizzly, earthy atmosphere. You can feel the dirt beneath your finger nails when you watch it and smell the clinging scent of death as it floods through the trees.

Wandering the dense forest, Sushenya battles his own psychological war of a life worth living. As the fog descends and the drama settles, what you’re left with is an absorbing and relentless piece of cinema.

Loznitsa has made something that will live on as one of the truest examples of the real casualties of war, painting characters with realistic, humanistic brush strokes in this tale of broken men.

Review by Stuard Barr

A change of pace for Danish director Susanne Bier following her Oscar-winning drama In a Better World / Hævnen and a lighter - some will say slighter – film, this is a romantic drama aimed squarely at the grey (or middle-aged) krone. Despite weighty topics of parenthood, cancer, divorce, and infidelity, Bier and screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen keep the film’s mood and tone breezy.

They are greatly helped by two terrific lead performances from Pierce Brosnan and Trine Drynholm as well as the beautiful Italian locations in which most of the drama takes place.

On the eve of travelling to Italy for her daughter’s wedding, Ida (Drynholm) discovers she may be in cancer remission. Returning home she walks in on her boorish husband (Bodnia) in a compromising position with his secretary. Her day gets worse when she badly prangs the expensive car of obnoxious businessman Philip (Brosnan) in an airport car park. In the film’s biggest coincidence, Philip turns out to be the father of the groom, and is hosting the wedding on his family’s Mediterranean property.

The scene is set for a farce: Ida’s husband unexpectedly arrives at the wedding with his secretary in tow; Philip is stalked by his late wife’s appalling cougar of a sister; the groom seems rather more interested in an Italian labourer than his wife-tobe. Of course Philip is not quite as hard-hearted as he appears, and Ida not as flighty. It is to the film’s great credit that, despite its apparently conventional set-up and occasional contrivances, it manages to gently subvert audience expectations whilst simultaneously serving up a generous helping of melodrama.

Usually in a romantic comedy there is a secondary romance, but here the mirroring relationships are parental. Ida’s daughter Astrid is outraged at her father’s infidelity, and tries to prompt her mother to feel her own anger. Patrick is so desperate for affection from his emotionally cold father that it may be the real motivation for the wedding.

Drynholm and Brosnan have great chemistry and are a joy to watch. Brosnan still has his movie star looks, but has clearly forsaken the gym regime for a few months (I think it’s fair to say he’s still the most handsome 59 year old man in the room). Philip is genuinely obnoxious at the beginning of the picture but his gradual softening and the revelation of the causes of his hard emotional carapace are completely convincing and quite moving, especially as the part seems to resonate with tragedies in the actor’s personal life. Drynholm is lovely playing a woman deciding to take control of her own life for perhaps the first time. That’s not to say her character is a passive doormat, rather someone who has found their life defined by illness and is given the opportunity to change it.

Undeniably a minor film from a significant director, Love Is All You Need succeeds as a gentle romantic comedy refreshingly free of gross-out gags and based around characters that seem like real human beings.

Love is All You Need cert (15)

release date 19th April

director Susanne Bier writer Anders Thomas Jensen starring Pierce Brosnon, Trine Dyrholm, Kim Bodnia, Paprika Steen

VERITE APRIL 2013

51

Review by Tom Gore

Bernie

release date 26th April

cert (12a)

director Richard Linklater writers Skip Hollandsworth, Richard Linklater starring Jack Black, Matthew McConaughey, Shirley MacLaine

52

APRIL 2013 VERITE

Richard Linklater’s latest, Bernie, is something of a low-key curio that defies easy genre-categorisation, but could loosely be described as being equal parts southern gothic-infused black comedy, documentary and character study, with such a keen eye for locale and small town mores/ eccentricities that it could almost qualify as a quasi-ethnographic text. Culled from the pages of a 1998 magazine article concerning a real-life murder case in the small East Texas town of Carthage (the author of the piece, journalist Skip Hollandsworth collaborated with Linklater on the screenplay) Bernie sees the director returning to the Lone Star State and reuniting with actors Matthew McConaughey (Dazed and Confused, The Newton Boys) and Jack Black (School of Rock).

Black plays the titular character: Bernhardt “Bernie” Tiede; an amiable thirty-something oddball from neighbouring Louisiana who moves to Carthage and finds a job as an assistant funeral director/mortician.

Through his clubbable nature and numerous good deeds, Bernie quickly establishes himself as an indispensable local institution: he sings at funerals and church services, directs and performs in musicals at the local college and spends a great deal of time consoling and spending time with the recently bereaved widows in this affluent former oil and gas-rich town.

Some people aren’t sure quite what to make of him, particularly as he shows no apparent interest in women his own age: is he gay, a toy boy on the make, or just overly generous? Such is Bernie’s popularity that even in this bible-bashing corner of ultra-conservative Texas (a long way from the anarchic/countercultural Austin of Slacker and Dazed and Confused), no-one really cares. Soon he turns his attention to the town’s wealthiest and most universally-despised figure: the recently widowed Marjorie Nugent (a perfectly acerbic Shirley MacLaine). Though initially standoffish, even Marjorie, a creature of pure malevolence loathed even by her (estranged) family, is eventually won over by Bernie’s persistent charm. They become inseparable (though the exact nature of their relationship remains ambiguous), but ultimately the good-natured Bernie is worn down by Marjorie’s relentless neediness and psychological warfare, and he eventually cracks; shooting her in a moment of exasperation.

Linklater seems more preoccupied with establishing setting here, and to the circumstances surrounding the murder rather than the crime itself. Hitherto this stranger than fiction fable has been related to us largely by means of documentary-style testimonies from the locals (some of whom are played by real-life residents). This narrative device, though initially successful, starts to wear a little thin so it is something of a relief when Matthew McConaughey (all dyed grey hair, Stetsons, and charisma) takes centre-stage as colourful, publicity-seeking District Attorney “Danny Buck” Davidson in the courtroom machinations of the final act. Determined to bring Bernie to justice, he is repeatedly undermined by the townspeople, whose affection for their local hero, now fallen from grace, remains undying. In the grand scheme of things this is minor Linklater, but still well worth a watch as a timely reminder of the director’s mercurial talents.

In the Brewster Frame: McCloud (1970) “How I yearn to throw myself into endless space and float above the awful abyss.”

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

words by Robert Makin

W

ithin the spacious enclosure of the Houston Astrodome Texas, a young introverted social outsider stands confidently upon the concrete ledge of the highest seating balcony. Strapped to his back is a pair of handmade mechanical wings. The police are in pursuit – desperate to arrest the prime suspect of a series of bizarre murders, where the bodies have been found strangled and covered in bird droppings.

The young man in question feels no remorse for the victims he has claimed to be responsible for, and is not attempting to escape any degree of emotional turmoil. He merely longs to ascend the mediocrity and hypocrisy of the adult world he has been forced to encounter.

Unperturbed by the chaos beneath him he spreads his wings, moves closer to the edge, and jumps.

The boy’s name is Brewster McCloud (Bud Cort), the anti-hero protagonist of Robert Altman’s immensely subversive follow up to the ground-breaking M*A*S*H (1970). Living within the concrete bowels of the astrodome, Brewster’s sole occupation is to build his own wings and fly. His accomplice, protector and guardian is Louise – a fallen angel who may or may not be strangling anyone who threatens Brewster’s prerogative.

The most significant victim being aging socialite Daphne Heap, played by Margaret Hamilton, better known for her iconic role as The Wicked Witch of the West in The Wiz-

ard of Oz (1939). After a raven unleashes her flock of caged doves, her body is found strangulated within her obsessively pruned garden.

An extreme close up of the murdered corpse reveals the over privileged and racist WASP is wearing Dorothy’s ruby slippers, a glittering paragon of old Hollywood being gloriously shit on by the birds she once held captive.

Poised for action on that concrete ledge during the film’s strange and unforgettable climax, Brewster could quite easily be Altman himself.

Following his own strange impulses and instincts, no matter what the consequences, his motivations and methods amid the orchestrated anarchy may seem unhinged but the tool with which he has chosen to express his ideas is both stunning and meticulously constructed.

Brewster also embodies a new generation of

young filmmakers whose creative process was one of risk, truth seeking and a frightening leap of faith. Whilst old Hollywood clicked the heels of its ruby slippers as the moral guardian of good taste, there were new visionaries who saw ambiguity as a creative virtue and believed the most heinous profanities you could possibly commit on screen were obviousness and predictability.

Brewster’s flight is exciting and heroic but extremely brief. Man may be able to achieve flight but he can never master it, and although his dream is realised it soon descends into a downward spiral of screaming hysteria. But the sudden and shocking metallic thud of him hitting the ground can still be felt today as the greatest show on earth continues to parade itself.

v

VERITE APRIL 2013

53

Jordan McGrath

David Hall

Founder / Editor-in-Chief / Designer

Managing Editor

jordanmcgrath@veritefilmmag.com

davidhall@veritefilmmag.com

thanks: Contributors Emily Kausalik Andrew Nerger Evrim Ersoy Tom Gore Stuart Barr Dan Auty Robert Makin

Proofing Celina Grace

54

APRIL 2013 VERITE

Image credits: Vertigo Films: 1,8,10,11,12,45,55 / Artificial-Eye: 14,15,16,17,46 / Arcanum Pictures: 28,30 / Lauren Modery: 28,30 / Before You Know It film: 28,31 / Universal: 32,52 / Warner Independent Pictures: 33 / Warner Bros: 33,42 / Network Distributing: 34,35,36,37 / Eureka Entertainment: 38,39,40,41,48 / Peccadillo Pictures: 47 / New Wave Films: 50 / Arrow Films: 51

VERITE APRIL 2013

55

56

APRIL 2013 VERITE