Vérité July 2014

ISSUE #16

V é r i t é JULY 2014 EDITION

FILM CRITICISM & CINEMATIC DISCUSSION

MO O D I N D I G O The Return of the Eternal Eccentric

also...

The Bride Wore Black / The Driver / Sheffield Doc/Fest Harold & Maude / reviews / and more...

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Editor’s Letter

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t the tail end of last month, Verite went along to the Prince Charles Cinema in Central London for the inaugural DukeFestZero, and a oneoff screening of oddball cult obscurity Strangers In Paradise; a little-seen, demented 80s musical directed by Fassbinder associate Ulli Lommell. In the interests of full disclosure, the evening was curated by one of our contributors Evrim Ersoy, along with his partner-in-crime Alex Kidd and we were one of the festival’s media partners. Before the film (which was screened from a cleaned-up VHS), Alex treated us to a batch of incredibly rare 35mm trailers for all sorts of fascinatingly obscure titles along with a trippy, highly unorthodox trailer for The Odessa File (1974) that you simply won’t see anywhere else (even YouTube!). There’s always a thrill in new discoveries such as these and being there when the show kicks in, especially when it comes with the additional pop, crackle and hiss of 35mm.

Why am I mentioning this? Well, in an era when Digital marches ever onward, and the cinema experience is being more geared toward the IMAX tent poles, and with so-called indie cinemas that are charging a chunk of change for tickets, we feel it’s more important than ever to support these crate diggers of cinema history.

At Verite we know from engaging with our followers on Twitter that there’s a bunch of like-minded folks across the UK, curating their own evenings, putting on screenings, and hunting down prints.

In a week’s time I’ll be attending a 16mm print of Hammer’s Hound Of The Baskervilles at a Church Hall in South London, and some of the most fun cinema experiences I’ve had over the last year have been at nights like those put on by Cigarette Burns (another friend of Verite’s) who screens cult titles at unique venues. Josh Saco emerged a few years ago as a one-man-band dedicated to preserving 16 to 35mm prints – now his nights sell out at venues across the country.

Passionate champions putting on events that bring people together for a unique viewing experience and a shared love of film- now that’s an ethos that Verite fully embraces!

So, if you run a film society dedicated to screening prints, or if you’re new to the scene with a tasty find and in need of a hungry audience - let us know!

We’re planning a feature on the UK’s film clubs and hidden treasure screenings, so if you’re abreast of something we should know- pass it on and we’ll do our very best to spread the good word.

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Thanks for reading, Jordan McGrath & David Hall

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“I would travel down to Hell and wrestle a film away from the devil if it was necessary.”

Werner Herzog

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Contents Features

Columns

Reviews

The Boy with Kaleidoscope Eyes - p8

Identity Lost & Found - p52

100 Year Old Man... - p64

Ben Nicholson talks to quirky French auteur Michel Gondry about his career and his latest outing, Mood Indigo.

Evrim Ersoy continues his expert analysis into filmmakers we should be watching. This month’s subject: Jean-Charles Hue.

Grand Central - p65 I Am Divine - p66 Joe - p67

Forever the Bride - p14

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy highlights François Truffaut’s maligned The Bride Wore Black and discusses the films it inspired.

Masters of Cinema - p56

Cleaver Patterson tackles Hal Ashby’s darkly comedic masterpiece, 1971’s Harold and Maude.

Lilting - p68 Mood Indigo - p69 Norte, the End of History - p70

Medium Cool - p20

In Defence... - p60

To coincide with the Blu-ray release of The Driver, David Hall takes an in depth look at the film as well as Walter Hill’s muscular oeuvre.

To coincide with World Cup fever, Adam Marshall defends John Huston’s 1981 film Escape to Victory.

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Patrick - p71 The Paddy Lincoln Gang - p72

Join the Conversation

@veritefilmmag

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THE BOY WITH KALEIDOSCOPE EYES As his Mood Indigo opens in the UK, Michel Gondry talks to Ben Nicholson about emotional fireworks, romance, and lo-fi razzle dazzle

words and interview by Ben Nicholson

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here are few filmmakers with such inimitable style as French director Michel Gondry. Even when his name was still gaining traction during the nineties and early noughties, many people would have already been familiar with his work. Particularly memorable are his various music video collaborations not least with the likes of Bjork, The Chemical Brothers, and The White Stripes. Whether it is the outof-body digital dreams of Hyperballad, the shifting mirrorscapes of Let Forever Be, or the animated Lego of Fell in Love with a Girl, he specialised in striking and memorable contortions of reality. Now, his work is instantly recognisable even to those with just a passing interest in indie cinema. Often admired for its sheer inventiveness, his work is regularly shot through with hypnagogic whimsy that you can easily sense is mainlined from Gondry himself. Even those well versed in his oeuvre will be surprised by the overwhelming volume of stop-motion creations and unexpected oddities that cascade into in the opening minutes of his latest film, Mood Indigo, though.

“I wanted to start with fireworks,” he told me when I

broached the subject with him during a recent visit he made to the UK. Sitting across from me in a swanky London hotel he is affable and relaxed, the contents of a glass bottle of Coca-Cola slowly wind their way up a straw being sipped below a pair of grinning eyes themselves set beneath his trademark shock of curls. “Very imaginative too, because Colin is an inventor and he makes all these systems, like the pianocktail [more on that later], and I wanted to show this instant world of happiness to contrast with what is going to happen.”

Fireworks seem an astute metaphor as the world of Mood Indigo is one that naturally explodes onto the screen. The aforementioned introductory moments are like a roller coaster around the apartment of Colin, played by Romain Duris, and the wacky and wonderful things that inhabit it.

This maelstrom of crafty recycling and Rube Goldberg-esque machinery is one that appears to chime so perfectly with Gondry’s do-it-yourself aesthetic that you can’t quite believe that it’s not of his own invention. In fact, it is based on Boris Vian’s seminal 1947 novel, L’Ecume des Jours, the name of which provides the film with its original French title. Translated into

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English several times and adapted for both screen and stage (most recently by Go Riju in 2001 as Japanese-language film, Chloe) it is a book that the director was already very familiar with. “Like every generation, you read it when you’re a kid – an adolescent – and it just sparks your imagination. Even if you’re not a big reader, you always read this book. It’s one of the books you keep talking about with your friends because there is so much inventiveness and imagination you feel that so much is possible.”

“You feel you could even write a book, in some ways.

That is what comforts you, this idea that the greatness of literature is not associated with something distant; even though it’s out there and imaginative, it feels close to you.” Indeed, the way Gondry speaks about the book is rather similar to the way that some might remark upon his films. “Yeah, I think people must have thought that the way I shoot film and video is pretty close to the way that he wrote his books and that it would be a good association.” Clearly, one such person was producer and co-writer Luc Bossi who brought the director on board after taking an initial pass at the script himself. It was clear, even at the earliest stages, they wanted to shift the focus to the love story and flesh out the characters.

“They were a little bit – I mean, he wrote it when he was in his twenties – so there were some things that were a little bit vague about the characters. They were more like

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ideas of characters, and they needed to feel a little more complex.”

The lovers in question are Colin and Chloe (played in the film by the elfin Audrey Tatou) who meet for the first time at a well-to-do party. A carefree and eligible man about town, Colin seems to be rather happy living in his fantastical apartment brimming with his absurd designs such as a crawling doorbell and a piano that instils spirits depending on the notes played and mixes them into a cocktail – the previously mentioned pianocktail. He has companions in his best friend Chick (Gad Elmaleh), solicitor-cum-chef Nicolas (Omar Sy), and a cohabiting mouse (played in a furry suit by Sacha Bourdo). When Chick unexpectedly reveals a new romantic entanglement, a sudden and profound desire to be attached overcomes our erstwhile bachelor. Naturally the central duo – portrayed by actors that have played out a decade-long romance for director Cédric Klapisch – fall fancifully, but deeply, in love. Disaster strikes as soon as their honeymoon, though, when Chloe falls terminally ill due to a water lily growing inside her lung; the only course of action to prolong their love is for Colin to keep her surrounded by fresh flowers.

“I had this experience of having a girlfriend that was really sick and I had to work to pay for her doctors and her treatment, so I could identify and add some aspect of that. It’s not always best in a relationship because the girl

sometimes comes to identify their boyfriend or husband with the sickness. You’re here and you’re trying to help a person and this person could be horrible to you. I tried to put a bit of that in the movie as my main focus was this relationship between Colin and Chloe, and the devastation of possibly losing her.” The mention of an ill ex-girlfriend seemed to gel with a general sense that Mood Indigo is a very personal film to Gondry. The visuals throughout seem to appropriate – somewhat akin to the pianocktail, in fact – Colin’s emotions with sets morphing, darkness spreading and the eventual drain of colour completely as the sickness takes a grip.

Surprisingly, it was a completely different experience, from many years ago, that inspired those particular visual motifs. “I mean, first of all when I read the book, thirty years ago – before I even knew I would become a director – [the decaying colours and landscapes were] how I saw it. Also, sometimes it’s from my own experience.

I remember taking my bike when I was a 14-year-old boy and going to see a girl because I thought that she would tell me she loves me. I was in love with her for three years, and when I got there she told me that she loved me as a little brother. I rode back and the same landscapes I had just seen seemed to be black and white, and dark, and I swear you would look at the sky and it was black. I couldn’t see the light anymore. I was really horrible, so I really experienced that.” It might sound a

curious thing for Gondry to cite this innocuous childhood rebuttal as informing his stylistic choices rather than the more recent – and arguably more relevant – scenario he mentioned only moments earlier. This is the exact point, though. There’s a famous quote attributed to Pablo Picasso stating that “every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”

It becomes clear in hearing him speak, particularly in that moment, that Michel Gondry solved the problem in much the same way that he impressively completed a Rubiks cube with his feet in an online video – by cheating. Rather than figuring out how to remain an artist, he has instead found the key to remaining a child.

This may seem a strange claim to level at a filmmaker who is often very thoughtful and philosophical in his work – in amongst the lashings of whimsy – but it actually makes a lot of sense. It is not to suggest that Gondry’s work is childish, but more that he reflects grown-up stories about grown-up people through the emotional hypersensitivity of adolescence. He has never let go of the joys and pains of that emotional tumult, and is able to evoke them for his audience. Moreover, his trademark visuals are a further example of this with their Blue Peter novelty and their childlike abandon. In Boris Vian, he seems to have reached back through the decades and connected with a kindred spirit. “I would have liked it if he was still alive so that we could talk about his ideas and

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my ideas and see how they work together – a little bit like when I worked with Bjork. Unfortunately I just had to guess and sometimes I felt like he was there above me, watching, saying “Why do you do this thing?” and so on.”

Not least, the author’s world of automaton gadgets and novelty dance crazes – move over Sambola, here comes the Biglemoi – is like the perfect playground for such a creative soul.

“Well it’s true and the fact is that I was influenced by his style of writing because, in a way, it sparked my imagination when I was a young adult and got me to start making things move. Like objects that move as humans.

This thing, between the animal and the metallic – or the machine world – and them being mixed together. I always loved that so when I read Boris Vian, it felt like home for me. Then, when I did videos it was difficult to separate what was coming from him and what was from me. The same is true with the movie; there are some images and actions we’re I’m not sure whether it was from the book or my imagination.”

“I use a lot of personal stuff,” he adds. That’s certainly true, and quite aside from his visual identity, Gondry also has a predilection for exploring the psyches of his protagonists in interesting ways. Stéphane’s flights of fancy in The Science of Sleep, the pictorial representation of disappearing memories in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless

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Mind and the effect of Colin’s demeanour on the world around him all play to this particular trend. “It’s because it’s how I experience life, I think. I’m very much… I have these very strong feelings that often come from my head mostly. Things are invading me and my space – are in my head – and my head is around all the space because I project my feelings wherever I go. Sometimes I do try to get out of this space and project onto other people my feelings, try to see how they would do if they experienced similar feelings. Until, maybe, Be Kind, Rewind, I was dealing with issues that are happening inside my head.”

And now? “Yeah, now I try to go outside a bit. But on Mood Indigo, it’s definitely back to inside my head.”

Given that this is a fully-fledged dive back into the eccentricities of his mind, it perhaps unavoidably transpires to be a heady and sometimes uneven mix of emotional turmoil and overpowering spectacle. After all, Gondry is not just channelling his youthful originality for effect, but rediscovering a highly evocative and personally formative artwork. Projecting such a creative catalyst to the screen does run a gauntlet; while characters are experience highs and lows, the audience can find themselves both dazzled and agitated by the plethora of bells and whistles at the edge of every frame. “One of the difficulties that I really didn’t want to get distracted with was to get lost with the effects. I guess some people felt that way about it in

France, but I really tried to focus on the main story and the actors and the tenderness that they have for each other even though this entire crazy world is moving around them.”

His actors, at least, were never something he had to worry about – both are extremely capable of the kind of affable whimsy that he requires for the opening half, and the more downbeat performances needed as the story progresses. Equally, Duris and Tatou have a fantastic chemistry, matured over many years. “They’re very good friends so it makes everything easier. Anything can happen and you won’t know from the result; Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey didn’t really get along on Eternal Sunshine, but you don’t see that on the screen because they are professional. Its funny how in real life things might be different, but in the case of Romain and Audrey they really have a close relationship so that makes it very easy.

To me it’s like working with a couple in big Hollywood movies – where for ten years you would have practically the same two characters and nobody would question it.

It’s just the representation of love, if you want.”

And what about his own role in the film, as Chloe’s ineffectual doctor? “I couldn’t get the actor I wanted, I couldn’t find him, so I got very upset and said ‘I will do it myself !’ but was not sure I would be good because I’ve never done that. What was for sure was that the role of

the doctor – the relationship of the doctor to his patient – has some similarities to a director and an actor. It’s in the way they depend on you, they ask you who they are, and they have this void. The doctor is able to tell this patient if he’s going to live or die, it’s a terrible power. So I used that and the result was that when I was talking to them, I got this feeling that the doctor might have to his patients, which helped I think. The result of my playing the part was that [Duris and Tatou] couldn’t stop laughing when they saw me as the doctor, but I think I liked this sort of result that it gives that when people are on the verge of laughing – it’s kind of close to the way they could look when they’re on the verge of crying. They’re restraining the tears in some ways.”

From fabulous fireworks, to misty-eyed monochrome, Mood Indigo is certainly an impressive achievement even though some viewers will undoubtedly lose sight of the touching romance in amongst all of the lo-fi razzle-dazzle. With its technical and emotional demands, Gondry says that it was the most difficult experience of his career, but one that was worth it.

And as for his foray in front of the camera? “I’m not sure I’ll do it again.”

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FOREVER THE BRIDE Slated by the critics and disowned by its director, Truffaut’s unloved 1968 The Bride Wore Black has Jeanne Moreau on a bloody rampage of revenge that predates Tarantino by more than thirty years words by Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy

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ere is a story: A woman’s husband is killed on the eve of their wedding. The woman survives, but channels her grief into a mission of revenge: those responsible for the death of her betrothed will meet their end by her hand. Using her wits, charisma and unimpeachable blood-thirst, she plays with personalities – and weaponry - to achieve her goal. She avoids confronting the idea of a life after her mission is accomplished, stubbornly maintaining her rage. It is all she has, her moral code and reason to keep living. Now: does that story, and that character, sound familiar?

For modern cinemagoers, Kill Bill’s Beatrix Kiddo (Uma Thurman) is the character that comes quickest to mind. The tale of Quentin Tarantino’s vengeful Bride has lineage in multiple other films, essentially existing as the director’s pop-cultural home of mash-ups: it’s as much a

Tumblr feed of cool shit as it is a narrative film. But with Kill Bill, he defended himself from accusations of ripping off Francois Truffaut’s 1968 revenge tale The Bride Wore Black. Speaking to Movie Treasures’ Tomo Machiyama in 2003, he said he was aware of the film but had never seen it because he was not a fan of Truffaut’s work. (He also was quoted as saying “I’m a Godard fan, not a Truffaut fan”. Make of that what you will.)

Nonetheless, Truffaut’s film – based on a 1940 crime novel by Cornell Woolrich – depicted the exact narrative above a good thirty-five years before Kill Bill did. Jeanne Moreau - reuniting with Truffaut after 1962’s Jules et Jim - plays Julie, the unlucky bride of the title. On the poster to Jules et Jim, her Catherine is laughing, eyes closed, a depiction of a relaxed free spirit. Her Julie glances out from the poster, darkened, her expression unreadable.

Her performance is like that image: sapped of indicators,

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refined into something blank and ugly. Uma Thurman’s Bride was the opposite, an open abrasion of emotion.

Moreau is a sutured wound.

Alas, before Tarantino sent his and Thurman’s vengeance avatar on her four-hour journey, the storyline above stretched to India with Rajkumar Kohli’s Nagin.

Kohli’s film, released in 1976, is only inspired by The Bride Wore Black but ingests it with a sense of folklore and the catch-all masala formula (i.e. something for everyone).

The film follows a group of men that accidentally kill a male snake that is actually the shape-shifting husbandto-be of a female snake shape-shifter (Reena Roy). It is outlandish in form as it is in plot, a crossover of era-specific Bollywood horror, musical, action and romance.

Reena Roy’s snake/woman carries out her revenge on the group of men in question with bursts of gleeful victory, only for it to crumble into shattering grief. It is the most entertaining revenge film out of the three mentioned, and also the one most invested in the emotions behind death.

The similarities between these films appears, at first, to be purely incidental. Tarantino’s claims and Kohli’s loose

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incorporation of Truffaut’s story offer takes that differ wildly from the French auteurs. However, The Bride Wore Black arguably carries aesthetic similarities over to the younger directors’ films.

Aesthetically, both Kill Bill and Bride deal with honouring their creators’ influences. While less explicit than Tarantino’s love of exploitation film or Truffaut’s penchant for admiring all that is Hitchcockian, Kohli finds a way to honour a tradition of pop-mythology in Indian cinema. His film fits into the long-lasting nagin (snake) tradition, an Indian sub-genre with stories of humans shape-shifting into a snake. Despite their peak popularity in the Sixties and Seventies, gatekeepers usually disregard the B-movie allure of many nagin films. Rachel Dwyer writes in her book Filming the Gods about seeking out cinephile recognition for the genre, noting how an encyclopaedia of Indian cinema lists over five hundred films that play on the nagin theme while only discussing two of those films for their prestigious purposes. (Those films are 1949’s folklore title Nagakannika and 1954’s Nagin, which introduced the superstar Vyjayanthimala to the cinematic landscape. It shares a title with Kohli’s film and nothing more.)

All of the films deal in a whole other type of 1% fiction, with their exotic locales, stylish star casts and anything-goes morality. Truffaut was politically-speaking, one of the few critic-directors from the Cahiers du Cinema crowd whose opinions skewed closer to the conservative audience than the crowd’s expected leftist tastes.

Tarantino has kept publically schtum on his political allegiances, but recently contributed tens of thousands of dollars to the Democratic National Committee. Kohli spent much of the past decade trying to launch his son Armaan’s career, and the past year defending his son from claims of molestation. Yet these are all directors who find ways to merge together the square world of upmarket society with the renegade spirit of the popular art they are paying tribute to.

From an oft-lighthearted director like Truffaut, the dark humour and off-screen viscera of The Bride Wore Black acted as a shock to audiences and critics alike.

Speaking to Sight and Sound in 1967, he described how his male characters react to Moreau’s Julie: “[an] experimental mix of American themes and French temperament”. This also functions as an apt description of his approach to The Bride Wore Black: the bloodthirst of

American pop culture (Woolrich’s crime novels, Hitchcock’s American work) meshed into a particularly Gallic glance into sexual mores and morality. The guilty men in Truffaut’s films speak to each other about books, women and paintings in the floaty, tossed-off philosophical way that only men in Truffaut films speak.

The shock held by those witnessing The Bride soon turned to disdain. Truffaut eventually shared this opinion, later publically stating that he would have removed it from his filmography if possible. Kohli’s psychedelic film onslaught remains startling to this day, the same way that the similarly hand-crafted madness of Nobuhiro Obayashi’s Hausu can still surprise a modern audience.

If not for his savvy choices of cast and musical composers, there is the chance that Nagin would have remained a B-movie afterthought. Similarly, this is the case with Tarantino’s film, which remarkably flies out of sync with much of mid-Noughties popular film culture: a two-part, four-hour film filmed in multiple languages, with an international cast of genre luminaries, containing a set piece so bloody that it required a shift in colour before even being screened to a Western audience. Realistically speaking, if not for Tarantino’s international reputation,

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Kill Bill would have been dead in the water. (Instead, the buck ran out with his and Robert Rodriguez’ Grindhouse experiment.)

Both Truffaut and Kohli conflict their cast’s sins with visits to religious parlours. The Bride Wore Black has a scene where Moreau’s protagonist confesses her sins to an off-screen priest, the only scene in an uncomplicated film where she must recognise the extent of the havoc she is wreaking, as well as how it will linger on her soul.

For a moment Moreau cracks and looks damaged by the realisation. A second passes before she returns to her steely, glazed-over glance – an expression that, in its unflappability, functions as something of a running joke before continuing on with her mission.

In Nagin, necklaces with the Om symbol play an important part in the movie’s almost-plot, as to repel Roy’s snake-woman from attacking. For Tarantino, cinema is his church. And yet, in Kill Bill he gives Thurman a scene where she breaks out of a coffin from under the ground.

Accompanied by a choral Morricone cue and with an acknowledgement to her late master, she punches her way out and climbs through the dirt to the surface. It’s as close to a spiritual sequence as Tarantino will ever make.

If there is one thing that Truffaut’s film does not

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share with its similarly-themed successors, it is a level of cultural imprint. KB revitalised Tarantino’s career after a five-year hiatus and brought his playful genre approaches to the fore; he changed many people’s careers (young and old) in his newly explicit role as a cultural curator; for a generation unfamiliar to fringe cinema, he changed their lives. (For the record, I am one of those kids.) Nagin remains a classic of Hindi blockbuster cinema, and his Seventies run as a genre-mashing director made him responsible for starry oddities like 1979’s Jaani Dushman – probably Bollywood’s first movie to star Sholay’s Sanjeev Kumar as a werewolf.

The Bride Wore Black is still not granted the popularity of its filmic acolytes – perhaps its theme and approach were unloved in the Sixties for a factor many disregard: its timing. It feels like a case of a project that would have become a bigger and more important deal in world cinema had it come out ten years later. Alas, it was destined to deal with the level of hostility that both Kohli and Tarantino’s films side-stepped. Truffaut’s film took the shots, so that these two films – at first glance only tangentially related – could call the shots. You could call it revenge.

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Check out the teaser issue of CultTV Times... covering everything from NCIS to anime!

Broadcast the news – the first full issue of Cult TV Times will be available to buy soon at Culttvtimes.com Follow us on : (@CultTVTimes) for the latest news and issue updates For subscription enquiries contact: subscriptions@culttvtimes.com VERITE JULY 2014

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Medium

Cool

As The Driver gets a long overdue Blu-ray release, David Hall looks back at the key works of its creator Walter Hill

words by David Hall f the film critic Kent Jones was correct in once “Against the tactics of speed, of noise, observing that John Carpenter was American set tactics of slowness, cinema’s last great genre film maker, then Walter Hill must be a pretty close second. of silence.”

During his peak period (1975-1982) Hill Robert Bresson

“Action is Character” F. Scott Fitzgerald

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delivered a run of films that (like Carpenter) conveyed a thoroughly Hawksian sensibility; Westerns in chameleon skins with male protagonists at odds with society, tightlipped men following a strict code of ethics with a zenlike serenity. Hill’s second picture – the 1978 existential cat-and-mouse thriller The Driver (released on Blu-ray this month by Studio Canal) – is perhaps the ultimate distillation of that aesthetic. It also reveals the strengths, as well as some of the self-imposed limitations, of Hill’s very specific approach to genre cinema.

Hard Times (1975), The Driver (1978), The Warriors (1979), The Long Riders (1980), Southern Comfort (1981), 48 Hours (1982). Hill produced an almost unbroken run of diamond-sharp genre films that favoured direct storytelling with an aggressive, no-frills approach to staging violence through expressive framing and kinetic editing. Although unlike many of his peers and associates of the era, Hill never really had a signature

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motif or auterist stamp. What unifies Hill’s best work instead is a rigorous, classical approach to narrative. His closest contemporary during the decade in this respect was probably John Milius – another purveyor of swift, economic screenplays, featuring gruff, no-bullshit loners and warriors facing off against corrupt authoritarian figures – with whom he would later collaborate with on 1987s Extreme Prejudice.

Hill started out in the business as an assistant director to the likes of Peter Yates (Bullitt) and Norman Jewison (The Thomas Crown Affair) before he turned to directing in the mid-70s. Hill’s revelatory moment as a writer/ director came after reading Alex Jacob’s script for John Boorman’s 1967 Point Blank – a masterclass in minimalism that as Hill put it was “laconic, elliptical, suggestive rather than explicit, bold in the implied editorial style.”

Taking that as the template, Hill started turning out scripts for other filmmakers – and the results were initially mixed. His work on The Getaway (1972) dovetails perfectly with Peckinpah’s sensibilities, but in films like The Mackintosh Man (1973) there’s a diffuseness to Hill’s sparse storytelling that comes off as indifference. It’s not all Hill’s fault; he was on a learning curve.

A film like Hickey & Boggs (1972), Robert Culp’s sole

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directorial effort in which he and Bill Cosby play a couple of over-the-hill cops on the tail of missing girl, has flair and style (shot by The Conversation DoP Bill Butler) but is hobbled by Hill’s script, which is fatally uninvolving.

By the time he got the opportunity to direct his first feature (1975’s Hard Times) Hill had honed the Jacob blueprint into something approaching his own style, and with the confidence to direct, made an impressive debut feature as disciplined and rigorous as his street-fighter hero, played by Charles Bronson. A melodrama set in the Great Depression, which explores the relationship between drifting bare knuckle bruiser Cheney (Bronson) and his partner-in-crime Speed ( James Coburn) a streetsmart bookie and gambler, Hard Times sketches out the Hill ethos in embryonic form; the way men of violence are forever testing each other’s limits, and the unyielding adherence to codes and rituals that is the hallmark of a certain kind of antihero, outsider figure.

The Driver splices western and noir tropes with a fetishized visual sensibility that utilises the space within the frame to fascinatingly claustrophobic and alienating ends. The film is economical in both characterisation (no names for any of the protagonists) and length (a spry 91

“The Driver’s streamlined plot is less a narrative and more a series of ritualized behaviour, the unnamed characters collide like ghostly phantoms in the blur of the LA night. ” minutes), as well as a lesson or two that could be learnt in streamlined location filming; with Ryan O’Neill’s getaway driver ‘the cowboy’ traversing the lonely neon streets, parking-lots and empty spaces of downtown LA, all the while tailed by the bird-like presence of the ‘detective’ (Bruce Dern).

Action in The Driver defines character; the detective’s desire to catch his quarry overrides everything, including friendships, relationships and even his own career. The Driver’s streamlined plot is less a narrative and more a series of ritualized behaviour, the unnamed characters collide like ghostly phantoms in the blur of the LA night.

The film is beautiful to look at but never showy, a no-frills aesthetic bathed in muted neon. Philip H. Lapthroth lenses in a style that recalls the paintings of Edward Hopper; offsetting the muscular kinetics of Hill’s shooting style. The car chases are models of the form- terse, exciting and noisy.

The influence of European cinema is palpable. Not just the obvious and evident debt the film owes to Jean-Pierre Melville’s; Le Samurai, (Hill admits his film is essentially a US reworking of Melville’s chilly enigmatic policier) but also to Robert Bresson. Hill marries this sensibility to classical western perspective, and this cowboy lives by a

strict moral code and takes his role very seriously indeed.

He certainly doesn’t waste words (350 of them in total in Hill’s shooting script) or emotions.

Hill’s minimalist touch and refusal to sentimentalize the characters in any way turned US audiences off big time (the film did much better in Europe). Watching it now, it’s amazing just how distilled the whole thing is.

While it may in the traditional sense lack the propulsive drama of a great noir and keep its characters at arms lengths throughout, it also has a timeless almost dreamlike quality.

Very few liked The Driver much on its arrival. The film was denounced as pretentious and chilly, with Kevin Thomas of The Los Angeles Times saying “(it) plays like a bad imitation of a French gangster picture which in turn is a bad imitation of an American gangster picture”.

It wasn’t until those pop culturist magpies Tarantino and Nicolas Winding Refn explicitly homaged the film in Kill Bill 2 and Drive respectively. Tarantino is a huge fan of the director and of The Driver in particular –although one can’t think of a less Hill-like figure in terms of approach and dialogue sensibility.

An aggressive pursuit also forms the basis for Hill’s next picture, but stylistically The Warriors shows an

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immediate change of pace, showcasing the director’s increasing visual dynamism and versatility. What remains is the same pared-down approach to storytelling –– a New York gang have to fight their way through the city after being blamed for the death of the city’s gang warlord. It’s an almost mythic, quest-like narrative with overtones of Greek tragedy. Again an appreciative audience took time to coalesce, but whereas The Driver is still only revered with a cool distance, The Warriors is now a cherished cultural totem; a true Midnight Movie whose cult was slow to build and initially marred by real-life violence. The film has an almost post-apocalyptic SF feel; richly mythic in terms of its cinematic landscape and universe. Twice in his career Hill would make comic-book fables informed by mythology, suffused with rock and roll and set in unspecific time zones. His later Streets Of Fire (1984), a box-office bomb that derailed Hill’s trajectory considerably and was disregarded on release, now has a deserved reputation as a film with tremendous, savage pulp energy. Protagonist Tom Cody (Michael Pare), the bounty hunter hired to rescue his rock singer ex-girlfriend from the clutches of a gang, is even more button-lipped than O’Neal’s Cowboy and barely registers as a screen presence. Fortunately the film has a series of astonishing set pieces and imagery, Diane Lane lip-syncing to ridiculous Jim Steinman pop-rock and the always compelling Willem Dafoe as a gang leader who has an electrifying sledgehammer battle with Cody.

Hill’s 1980 western The Long Riders has long maintained a certain cult status. It’s enjoyable enough but watching it again I found it much less satisfying than I remembered. Memorable chiefly for its conceit of having real-life siblings ( James and Stacy Keach; David, Robert, and Keith Carradine; Dennis and Randy Quaid; and Nicholas and Christopher Guest) play the Frank and Jesse James gangs. Although two set pieces (including a spectacular shootout) recall ‘Bloody Sam’ at his best. Southern Comfort (1981) on the other hand has only grown in stature. Once thought of in the shadow of Boorman’s very similarly themed Deliverance (1972), it has a tremendous cast (Keith Carradine, Fred Ward, Powers Boothe and Peter Coyote) as National Guardsmen coming a cropper, largely through their own bullish stupidity, against Cajun locals in the Louisiana swamp.

An overt Vietnam allegory as well as a Sam Fuller-like war movie of sorts, it is laced with juicy ironies the old reporter would appreciate. The sensational impact of 48 Hrs.(1982) in which the fire and ice pairing of an

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effortlessly cool Eddie Murphy and a near-psychotically grumpy (and racist) Nick Nolte as cop and convict trading insults while trying to nail a killer has faded somewhat, but Hill and Larry Gross’ script is another fine example of Hill’s perennial interest in violent men thrown together, forever trying to get the upper hand.

After the Streets Of Fire debacle, Hill appeared to go into a tailspin; following up with the desperately unfunny screwball misfire Brewster’s Millions (Hill has Howard Hawks’ flair for no-nonsense melodrama but definitely not for comedy), one of the most ineptly conceived and cynically realised films of the era. The decade would prove problematic for Hill, and he spent much of it (like John Carpenter) oscillating between quirky oddities like Crossroads (1986) and 1989’s Johnny Handsome (an underrated Mickey Rourke vehicle about a disfigured thief who undergoes facial reconstruction and seeks revenge after a jewel heist goes disastrously wrong) and pay-cheque fuelled projects such as the Schwarzenegger/ James Belushi two-hander Red Heat and the shameless Another 48 Hrs. Of the decade only perhaps Extreme Prejudice, produced for Mario Kassar and Carolco (who specialised in 80s b-flicks), an El-Paso set Wild Bunch homage featuring a tremendous closing gunfight, gets within a whisker of his former greatness.

The 90s were a mixed bag commercially and critically but Trespass (1992) is one of the unsung gems of the era; a razor-sharp and often funny re-tread of The Treasure of Sierra Madre, with charismatic turns from Ice Cube and Ice T and a spiky script (by Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis, no less) that highlighted Hill’s versatility with other’s material. By 1996s Last Man Standing, a riff on Yojimbo, the bare-bones approach that served Hill so well during his golden period was starting to look a tad archaic and underwhelming, and revealed the limitations of cannibalizing genre to the point of torpor. Also by this juncture, the hyper-inflationary techniques of contemporary action cinema as practiced by Bruckheimer, Tony Scott and Michael Bay – with sensory overload obliterating characterisation and story – was fully in play.

The noughties though have seen a sharp upswing in Hill’s fortunes, and the boom in TV for high-concept genre stories has been great for lots of forgotten directors who struggled to get film projects realised. Hill shot the pilot for Deadwood, and a new breed of writers and directors started citing Hill as inspiration. Drive of course rekindled lots of interest in The Driver, along with Refn’s inarticulate follow-up Only God Forgives, and with it he

“At Hill’s best, his work as writer and director is chokehold-tight, without a wasted word or spare moment.” owes possibly an even bigger debt to some of Hill’s work.

Ironically Drive’s biggest inspiration is probably the director who – in terms of tackling that arena of masculine, moral codes and behaviours – carried on Hill’s work into the 90s; Michael Mann. Refn’s neon-spiked genre cocktail takes its basic cues from Hill and keeps things archetypal – no back-story, no foreshadowing, no expositional dialogue. But its romantic notions are much more in line with Mann, and cover the same emotional landscape and doomed fatalism of Thief (1981) , Manhunter (1987) and Heat (1995). Mann bottled Hill’s elemental style from The Driver and infused his theatrical debut with it (they make a superb double-bill). James Caan’s jewel-thief Frank is cut from the same cloth as O’Neal’s cowboy. The two Vincent’s of Mann’s subsequent Heat and Collateral respectively could easily be Hill figures. Mann’s take on this terrain differs from Hill, and he frequently applies a modish patina of slightly pretentious mythologizing.

Where Hill’s men are all action and little talk, Mann’s have it both ways and can turn from deadpan to demonstrative with ease.

Recently, Hill made an unexpected return to the big screen last year with Bullet to the Head; a refreshingly pared-down actioner that attempted to roll back the

years for Hill and his star Sylvester Stallone. A film that marries the grizzled, bone-crushing violence of Hard Times to the mismatched pairing of 48 Hrs. it was largely derided by critics but is a rousing late addition to the Hill canon – the kind of back-to-basics pic they really don’t make them like anymore - and Hill makes those better than just about any one.

At Hill’s best, his work as writer and director is chokehold-tight, without a wasted word or spare moment.

Look at a recent genre film, such as Jim Mickle’s Cold In July, which aggressively apes Hill and Carpenter’s laconic style for 30 or 40 minutes before careering off the rails.

Hill would never allow for the flabbiness in the middle of the film that derails the picture. For with genre, less usually means much more. As Hill collaborator and friend John Milius wrote for Clint Eastwood’s ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan in Magnum Force: “a man’s gotta know his limitations”.

Hill always worked expertly and often deliberately within them to create something simple, skilfully crafted and built to last. I suspect that, unloved though it may have been in ’78, it is The Driver (and not Drive) that will remain forever in style.

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To The Wonder Neil McGlone speaks to Iranian filmmaker Mohammad-Ali Talebi

words and interview by Neil McGlone translation by Ehsan Khoshbakht

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ou could be forgiven for not readily knowing the name, Mohammad-Ali Talebi. I too was unaware of him until I saw his name written on a banner held aloft by Tilda Swinton in 2011 during her work with Mark Cousins on their joint children’s charity venture, the Eight and Half Organisation.

Mark and Tilda included Talebi’s films Bag of Rice (1998) and The Boot (1993) as part of their recommended world cinema films to introduce to children.

Whilst making A Story of Children and Film (2013) with Mark in 2012, I had the joy of watching my first Talebi film, The Boot, a charming little film about a young girl who loses one of her red wellies. Then, I saw Talebi’s Willow and Wind (1999) and was dumbstruck by its benevolence. It could easily be a silent film; the tension is nail-biting and the central performance from the young boy whose struggle we have just been witnessing for the past fifty minutes, astonishing.

Talebi recently visited the UK as part of Mark Cousins Cinema of Childhood season and toured various cinemas around the country doing Q&A’s after screenings of his films. His visit was organized with the help and support of the British Council.

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Ben Hur

Vérité: What is your earliest memory of seeing a film?

Mohammad-Ali Talebi: At the age of six, my parents took me and my five other siblings from a poor neighbourhood in downtown Tehran, where we were living at the time, to a cinema in northern Tehran. The cinema was showing a biblical epic, probably Ben-Hur (1959) and I was shocked to see how figures on the screen were much bigger than real life.

What did your parents do for a living?

My father was a simple railroad worker and my mother was a housewife.

Were there any specific films whilst growing up that had an impact on you and made you want to become a filmmaker?

My first children’s film was an 8mm film called I Have Something to Say and Only Children Would Believe That.

The story is about a young girl who draws a red rose and puts her drawing on the balcony. The sun shines on the painting and turns the red colour into yellow and once the colour of the drawing changes to yellow, the whole city turns into autumn. I sent the only print of the film to a short film festival in France. It was accepted, won a prize, but the copy was never sent back to me.

I feel I’m still like a child. I haven’t grown up, though I’m 57! I still look at the world in the way that a kid does: with a constant sense of wonder.

How did your break come to direct your first film, City of Mice, in 1985?

City of Mice was a very popular children’s TV series [a puppet show] and the then producers of the show, who were my friends and knew me for my award winning short films, asked me to direct the film version.

Your films have a very poetic, almost lyrical quality to I entered Kanoon (The Institute for the Intellectual Dethem and yet the underlying message and metaphors velopment of Children and Young Adults) at the age of 10 and around the same time I started watching as many within them are often overtly political. Can you speak films as I could. Between the ages of 10 to 20 I saw many about how important it is to you that as an Iranian filmclassics, amongst which 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is maker, both living and working in difficult conditions, to make films that highlight the importance and plight of my absolute favourite. your country and its people?

I was writing poetry since my teens. I was in love with While you were studying film and television diPersian classical and modern poets and I wanted to recting at University, I understand you made a become a poet myself. But somehow cinema was more number of short films about children. Can you talk attractive and allured me. briefly about those films and what they were about?

I must say, the difficult social conditions always bring What is it about children that fascinate you as political consciousness, and in a sense, a life without a a filmmaker? political commitment is a meaningless life. Since an early

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2001: A Space Odyssey

age I was seriously involved in political groups [of the left]. While I decided to not commit myself to any of these political parties, in terms of membership, I preserved a socialist view of life throughout my career.

Are you able to talk about what it is like to be a film-maker in Iran today?

Filmmaking in Iran is like carrying that piece of glass on an uneven landscape and in the wind. [During the There is always a great deal of suspense built into production] you meet some people who don’t understand you and definitely won’t help you. So you decide to start your films to build tension within the audience.

These sequences are brilliantly executed and equal- on your own. If you want to make a non-propaganda film in Iran, it would be as difficult as carrying the glass in ly match, if not better, similar suspense scenes in the works of the likes of Hitchcock. Is this a direc- Willow and Wind.

If you want to make a film in Iran, you will see some tor whose work you both admire and like to emuold men who talk very slowly and make long speeches late and I wonder if you could speak briefly about and the bureaucracy, which becomes insane. You have to your other cinematic influences? be patient for every shot you shoot. That’s why I think Iranian filmmakers are the most patient, stubborn filmHitchcock is an important part of my life. This is the kind makers in the world. Only after finishing the film, like of cinema I really enjoy. But I never study his films or bringing the piece of glass to the classroom, the main his methods. I would rather sit alone in a room and take troubles begin, such as not being able to distribute the pleasure in being thrilled by him. I’m also influenced by film or problems with censorship and that’s when they other filmmakers such as Robert Bresson, Aki Kaurismähave to start all over again. ki, Theo Angelopoulos, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Mike Leigh Some of our filmmakers have decided to make their and the Dardenne brothers. films outside Iran to suffer less. Maybe it happens to me I have read that Willow and Wind (1999) was origtoo, but for now I prefer to make films in Iran. inally to be made by Jafar Panahi and I wonder if you could say how you came to be involved with the film and Finally, if you were on a desert island and you when Kiarostami’s script was first written? could only take one film with you, what would that I negotiated with Kiarostami without knowing that Panahi too was interested in the project. It was only then be and why? that Kiarostami told me that the only copy is kept by Panahi. I called Panahi and asked about the script and he 2001: A Space Odyssey. told me he is not interested in directing the film anymore and that he would rather make films for adults or about them. Then I took the script and started working on it.

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Vérité’s Top 5 Directorial One Hit Wonders

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5.

Quick Change (1990) As one of the most fabled and enigmatic brats of Hollywood, when Bill Murray followed up the comically stagnant Ghostbusters sequel with his first and last directorial outing (along with screenwriter Howard Franklin), audiences were surprisingly mute. Despite the box office panning, Quick Change is one of Murray’s brightest and most personal cinematic wonders. A cult favourite that blends his token puckish japes with dyspeptic, Gramsci-flecked pessimism about his honorary hometown of NYC. Murray stars as the appropriately named Grimm, a cantankerous New Yorker so frustrated by the greed and idiocy of his fellow city dwellers that he decides to rob them. Clad head to toe in colourful clown clobber (big shoes and all); he invades an upstate bank with his love (Gina Davis) and dopey school friend (Randy Quaid) hiding amongst the hostages. The snatch goes off without a hitch but an obstacle riddled trip to escape the city for JFK airport puts them at risk of being caught by a weary detective ( Jason Robards) looking for his last big catch.

The characterisation for the supporting players is threadbare, the cinematography uninspired, and the presence of a hammy Randy Quaid exasperating, but – as far as a “Bill Murray movie” can go – this is as good as it gets. Luke Richardson

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4.

One-Eyed Jacks (1961) The legend surrounding the production of One-Eyed Jacks is infinitely more captivating than the movie itself. Originally based on a Sam Peckinpah script – and with Stanley Kubrick set to direct – both esteemed filmmakers’ efforts were scrapped for a much more egoistical production when movie star and production studio proprietor Brando plonked himself in the director’s chair.

He directs himself as the charming outlaw Rio, just out of jail and on the hunt to find the former partner that screwed him over, Dad Longworth (Karl Malden) who has since become an admired Californian sheriff. Inevitably, a shootout ensues.

What Brando lacked in camera smarts he made up for in indefatigable artiste pretension, adopting his penchant for multi-takes and meticulous character construction to inflate the relatively pedestrian Billy the Kid adulation. When Brando couldn’t find a way to cut his vision down from a five-hour running time, Paramount kicked him off the project. Dismayed and disillusioned with the film industry, Brando retired his filmmaker aspirations to focus more on the on-screen skulking. It’s a shame. Even in its compromised form, One-Eyed Jacks is an accomplished Western Revenge drama. Oozing with the archetypal Brando machismo and homoerotic intimations, and tied together with the gorgeous scenic long shots of Charles Lang’s lens. Luke Richardson

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3.

Man Bites Dog (1991) This pernicious little Belgian movie caused quite a stir at the Cannes Film Festival back in the day; where its directors/writers/producers/stars Remy Belvaux, Andre Bonzel and Benoit Poelvoorde went on to win the coveted SACD award, despite huge swathes of critical dissension. Ever since, Man Bites Dog’s harrowing melange of sociopathic terror and caustic black comedy has led to its cult status, and the three auteurs have never since collaborated.

Poelvoorde stars as Ben – an amicable Belgian with an infectious smile and an unquenchable bloodlust. A murderer some hundred times over, his infamy and captivating demeanour has piqued the curiosity of a two-man film crew (Bonzel and Belvaux) who decide to follow his every move – which begins with strangling a woman in a train carriage and only gets progressively more sadistic. Soon enough, the crew’s psychoses takes over as they turn from objective bystanders to excited accomplices to the crimes. They pillage, they rape, they kill, and yet the camera – and, vicariously, our engagement with the scenes it renders pictorial – keeps on rolling. Is this a shallow would-be snuff movie, or is it an indictment of our own lurid fascination to cinematic violence?

Never since Jim McBride’s David Holzman’s Diary has there been such a film more worthy of the often-misused “mockumentary” label. Years ahead of Funny Games and The Blair Witch Project, the Franco-Belgian trio created something disgustingly irrepressible in Man Bites Dog, and its prescient bastardisation of reality TV and cinema vérité is nonetheless exhilarating today. Luke Richardson

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2.

L’appartement (1996) This BAFTA winning debut from French writer-director Gilles Mimouni has been tainted by the regrettable 2004 American remake, Wicker Park, and thus disappeared into art-film obscurity. Perhaps it’s no wonder that the director of so much promise has lurked in the shadows of daytime French TV ever since…

At the movie’s heart is Max (played ecstatically by a young Vincent Cassel), a Parisian writer who is distracted from his upcoming business trip to Tokyo by the glimpsed presence of a former love once lost, Lisa (Monica Bellucci). Desperate to see her again, he chances around town to find the woman he once left behind, while forgetting the fiancé he has waiting for him at home, Muriel (Sandrine Kiberlain).

But was it really Lisa, or someone else entirely that caught his attention?

Delivered like a reverie that Hitchcock could have cooked up, L’appartement is a frenetic and knotty romance-mystery movie with a dazzlingly assured aesthetic sensibility, featuring breathless quick-cuts and a tumbling staccato rhythm score. Such bravura within (and from outside) the frame hints at a filmmaker with an indomitable ability to work within the similar, banal confines of the “romance movie”, but still manages to inject it with some new age gusto. Let’s hope Mimouni steps out of the shadows soon to turn his place on the list here ineligible. Luke Richardson

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1.

The Night of the Hunter (1955) Actor Charles Laughton’s first and only directorial work, based on Davis Grubb’s grotty Southern Gothic noir, is the harrowing story of Rev. Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), a sociopathic con-man concealing his murderous tendencies under religious rags. After receiving a tip-off from a dying prison in-mate, he heads to swampy West Virginia to marry his buddy’s widow, take on their two kids, and swindle the $10,000 they have hidden on their property. He won’t leave without the cash, and the lord almighty will forgive any of the murderous deeds he has to commit to get it.

Mitchum’s hulking preacher is rightfully considered one of the best movie villains of all time, with a softly midnight whistle and LOVE-HATE tattooed on his knuckles to represent the eternal battle between good and evil in his own mind and society en masse. The recalcitrant and often-inebriated Mitchum was given the freedom by the sympathetic Laughton to tap into his own psychosis to support the difficult role.

The results are confounding, to say the least.

Distinct from the Hollywood machine at the time, the film feels more indebted to European cinema than the ornate Hollywood machine. Tapping into the German expressionism of the twenties, Laughton use of trippy camera angling and Stanley Cortez’s photography, the dreamlike sets and remarkable uses of chiaroscuro were deemed too much for critics and audiences to handle, and thus Laughton never returned behind the camera. Nearly sixty decades later, it has transformed into the epitome of a cult movie; a one-hit wonder that portrays Laughton as the worldclass movie director he never became. Luke Richardson

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T H FESTIVAL G T E N D A

words by Jordan McGrath

he Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) is not renowned for its glitz and glamour or even its high profile acquisitions, although the inclusion of Jim Mickle’s retro revenge thriller Cold in July and Bong Joon-ho’s explosive blockbuster with brains Snowpiercer in this year’s programme was a welcome treat for the Scottish capital’s cinematically inclined.

It was my fourth time visiting the festival and like the ones before it (especially since Artistic director Chris Fujiwara took over the reins¬) it has become one of the most consistent festivals in Europe.

Surprise after surprise of constant quality, the festivals focus on burgeoning talent and clear distinctive voices from around the globe allows the organisers to capture the best the festival circuit has to offer at the time.

Honourable mentions go to the low-budget science fiction duo of Coherence and The Infinite Man, each as intricate and mind-bending as each other and both executed in completely different ways. The latter driven by its tragic love-triangle and comedy drawn from its broad characters and the former an impressively improvised Twilight Zone jaunt, mining the endless cave of quantum theory. Samantha Fuller’s heartfelt ode to her filmmaker father, Samuel Fuller, was rather touching. Made up from performers reciting from his biography and edited alongside uller’s own archival footage from WWII and his Hollywood films, it has the sense of made for TV but definitely leaves its desired mark.

Many others such as Gia Coppola’s debut Palo Alto, the effortless poignancy of Mark Cousins and Mania Akbari’s collaborative Life May Be, Craig Johnson’s darkly comedic The Skeleton Twins and the elegant portrait of a man trying to find reason in Garnet’s Gold, EIFF’s program is always extensive and eloquent, supplying enough films to satisfy even the pickiest of cinema lovers.

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UNCERTAIN TERMS director Nathan Silver

The best I saw at this year’s festival, Nathan Silver’s delicate tale of blossoming love in the most unusual of places cements the director’s place as one of the most interesting voices working within American Indie. A melancholic master class, Silver’s authentic approach is elegantly orchestrated, as he lets his characters breathe a real essence of life into their story. And with its effortless dry wit, the drama – although heavy and serious – never becomes overbearing, the director’s understanding of his characters and his trust in his actors allows the film the opportunity to exist on a level that is way above the manufactured emotions we see in 99% of American exports.

HAN GONG-JU director Su-jin Lee

Su-jin Lee’s slow-burn drama of a teen dealing with the stresses of a traumatic and mysterious event in her recent past is an unnerving and distressing expose of a societies blind judgement as well as it’s ignorance and small minded approach to ‘taking care of your own’. Beautifully shot and performed with a final shot that truly stays with you, lead Woo-hee Chun’s silent distress as the titular character is intoxicating and moving. Su-jin Lee’s debut is a confident and brave tale that doesn’t shy away from the more disturbing moments of the story.

MY NAME IS SALT director Farida Pacha

It’s the rhythm, that feeling of methodical progress, slow but steady, that captures you in My Name is Salt. Farida Pacha’s documentary is a story of a family who, each year, with 40,000 other families, travel to the Indian salt plains after typhoon season to farm the whitest salt in the world.

Jaw-dropping in scope, the size of each saltpan and the intricate techniques used; this debutant director’s use of the camera perfectly captures the isolated beauty of the locale and the artistry of their work. Industry presented through art, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel’s Leviathan mined similar themes last year but where the latter focused on the visceral immediacy of the work, My Name is Salt washes over you with its hypnotic splendour.

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unning 17-22 June at University College London as well as other venues dotted around London, ‘Open City Docs Fest’ continues to go from strength to strength with a varied and engaging programme of screenings, various master-classes, talks and parties.

This year, the festival presented its most challenging programme to date with documentaries from all across the world with a particular focus on those emerging from the Middle East. Titles like The Auction House: A Tale of Two Brothers and The Iranian Ninja brought to the limelight a different façade of the region – much more varied then the reports we’re used to seeing on the news nightly.

The festival diversified its line-up with a variety of strands which examined everything from online social world to the limits of science whilst My Street encouraged the audience to take charge of their own environments to create films.

The Grand Jury this year was headed by Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski, which awarded the Grand Prize to Hungarian courtroom drama Judgement in Hungary, a purely observational documentary shot entirely within the confines of a courtroom which turns its lens on a trial concerning attacks on the Gypsy communities existing within Hungary.

With over 80 screenings of which 21 were UK premieres and a plethora of guests from all across the world Open City Docs Fest continues to be an exciting and challenging stop on the festival circuit and most certainly one of the most important events for London.

On the next page are two of the highlights from this year’s Festival:

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THE AUCTION HOUSE: A TALE OF TWO BROTHERS director Edward Owles

At once a doorway into a dying world and an examination of the changes of our habits, this documentary focuses on the oldest auction house in India as it fights for survival on a daily basis. The owners of the house represent two opposing camps: one steeped in tradition, the other vying for momentous change. As the two brother’s struggle against each other and the 21st Century, the inner workings of the House are slowly revealed – from the staff to the customers – in order to create a portrait of an environment against the chaotic backdrop of a modern Calcutta.

Engaging, intelligent and entertaining The Auction House: A Tale of Two Brothers represents documentary filmmaking at its finely-crafted best.

SACRO GRA director Gianfranco Rosi

Gianfranco Rosi’s exploration of Rome’s Grande A motorway is the subject of this unusual, scattershot yet entertaining documentary – his camera mainly turned on those living on the edges of this cold and fairly hostile industrial environment.

Rosi films along the highway, trying to capture a portrait of the diverse people who find themselves for one way or another, settling so close to a highway. There’s Roberto who works with the emergency services and Cesare, an eel fishermen and Paolo and Amelia – two nobles from Northern Italy whose luck has not been going well. As a cross-section of society Rosi’s subjects are truly from all walks of life – most of them not finding themselves forced to live in this environment.

As an exploration of the link between growth and settlement, the documentary is both unique and mesmerizing. Perhaps Rosi’s approach can be considered messy – however when the end result is as entertaining as ‘Sacro Gra’ exceptions should be made.

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n its third year and fast solidifying its place in London as one of the destination festivals for interesting material , SERET took place this year between 15 and 22 June in cinemas across London.

Representing Israel’s growing group of talent, the festival screened a wide variety of both film and TV to showcase the best of the country – titles such as Kidon and The Wondersh demonstrated the region’s ability to mix high-drama with jet-black comedy whilst remaining firmly focused on debated and discussion.

Below are two of the highlights from this year’s festival:

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BETHLEHEM director Yuval Adler

Focusing on the complex relationship between a Palestinian teenager and a smooth-talking Israeli agent – this complex drama full of moral uncertainties and double-dealing expertly creates an engaging thriller out of fairly routine material by creating a unique setting and populating it with in-depth characters.

The moral spectrum of the tale represents the murky grey zone where principles constantly clash with personal loyalties, and by taking no sides and treating everyone even-handedly, the script (by director Yuval Adler and co-scripter Ali Waked) manages to create a tense situation constantly creating odds against the characters which inhabit it.

Handsomely lensed and intimately acted, this is a fantastic genre piece which whilst remaining firmly committed to the principle of exciting the audience has some fairly intelligent and challenging statements to make about the nature of those involved within the world of intelligence and secret service.

S#X ACTS

director Johnathan Gurfinkel

A disquieting, upsetting affair, Six Acts follows Gili – a teenage girl and a newcomer to a cloistered, highly-exclusive neighbourhood in Israel where she makes the acquaintance of a trio of guys from her school and gets involved in an ever-escalating and worrisome number of sexual situations.

Playing like the Israeli cousin of Larry Clark’s Kids , Six Acts is both flawed and unmissable: the statements the film makes about the vicious nature of kids and the environment they exists in are designed to infuriate and challenge the audience to create debate once the film ends.

With natural, terrific performances and urgent, engaging cinematography ‘Six Acts’ purposefully creates a shut-in world in Israel , far away from the everyday politics and problems, where through an intense but cruel group to prove that some horrors are indeed universal without paying any attention to creed, religion or even location.

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Swarming with Ideas Christina Newland reports from the prestigious Sheffield Doc/Fest

words by Christina Newland

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heffield Doc/Fest is the kind of breezy, summery festival where the vibe is perfectly in keeping with the weather: casual, youthful, and often a little debauched. It featured outdoor and interactive screenings, live musical accompaniments, and even a Skype Q+A with Martin Scorsese, on the subject of his documentary A 50 Year Argument.

This one-of-a-kind documentary festival had a selection in which few films could be called poor; even the lesser ones often had their merits. Formally uninteresting films sometimes proved effective on other levels, leaving one’s gauge of success a little bit askew. With subjects ranging from gay porn to colonial wars, teen movies to important 20th century thinkers, the programming displays a wide breadth of intellectual curiosity. It is that enthusiasm for experience and hunger for knowledge that really marks Doc/Fest.

Funnily enough, I began Doc/Fest with my only fiction film of the festival; the pessimistic Vagabond (1985), a part of a four-day Agnes Varda retrospective. It is the story of a homeless young woman, Mona, who encounters a spectrum of individuals who seek to categorise and ascribe their expectations of femininity upon her. Shot in 13 long tracking shots - all moving from right to left -Vagabond’s inescapably bleak conclusion suggests the consequences of failing to abide by the laws of patriarchy and polite society. In what might be the only lighthearted

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scene of the film, Mona gets drunk and giggles with an elderly woman. The old woman knows that her nephew is waiting for her to die so he can get an inheritance. As such, the two discarded women, no longer willing or able to fulfill their feminine functions, are deemed useless by society. They laugh about it. It’s a moment of humane, subtle solidarity that speaks volumes on Varda’s standpoint, and on the tragic feminist kamikaze of her protagonist.

Peter De Rome: The Grandfather of Gay Porn tells of the life and career of the titular filmmaker, reveling in his seeming ordinariness and gentlemanly English manner.

An eloquent, affable man vaguely reminiscent of Richard Griffiths’ Uncle Monty from Withnail & I, De Rome was sexually precocious even in his halcyon days at WWII-era boarding school. Littered with grainy 8mm footage of De Rome’s casual conquests in 1960s New York – we see merchant marines, unassuming passers-by - his ‘erotic films’ are filmed with a tenderness and humour that belie the word ‘pornography’. To paraphrase De Rome himself, pornography is about performance; eroticism and sensuality are about expectation.

The film quite convincingly argues that De Rome was more than a mere pornographer, but a pioneer of gay cultural and sexual history; certainly he showed enormous bravery in shooting and sharing his movies when homosexuality was still a punishable offense. Ethan Reid’s

Vagabond

X-rated film is an involving exploration of De Rome’s experiences and recognition in an artistically legitimate underground. The film has, unfortunately, been made even timelier by De Rome’s recent passing.

A highly-anticipated film came in the form of Life Itself, a love letter to late Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert. Directed by respected documentarian Steve James (of Hoop Dreams fame), the film is formally paint-by-numbers. Yet the director’s admiration for his subject - along with the film’s endlessly engaging and heartbreaking story - supersedes whatever conventional methods it employs. The examination of Ebert’s life and career, illustrated with talking heads, is punctuated by visits with the ailing critic before his passing in 2013.

Having lost his ability to speak due to numerous battles with thyroid cancer, Ebert found a voice in his blog, and shows an abundance of courage and humour about his situation. Some of the scenes depicting nurses suctioning the critic’s windpipe are downright macabre, but he insists upon Steve James’ presence for everything, for the sake of truth and posterity.

While heartfelt, the film doesn’t shy from his prickly, competitive relationship with Gene Siskel, showing bitterly funny outtakes from the Siskel & Ebert Show.

Among the interviewed are a tearful Martin Scorsese, but also vocal detractor Richard Corliss, who claimed that the show’s brash celebrity status and “thumbs up”

rating system vulgarised and over-simplified film criticism. Sentimental though Life Itself may be, its closeness to its subject ultimately makes it a moving and illuminating portrait of one of the foremost American critics of our age.

Concerning Violence, probably my favourite film of the festival, bases itself on the work of 1961 anti-colonialist text The Wretched of the Earth, by theorist Frantz Fanon. An impressively original mixture of spoken excerpts from the text, with the words superimposed on the screen, the film maintains its literary basis. Yet the film is strikingly visual, too, made up of mainly of Swedish archival footage of decolonisation struggles in Guinea, Liberia, Rhodesia, and Burkina Faso. The footage is in colour and almost surprisingly crisp, giving Fanon’s old words a modern continuity which is deeply disquieting.

Arguing that the “dreams of the oppressed” are always aggressive, Fanon explains the incentive for violence; that it allows colonised people to regain a modicum of self-respect. While Fanon’s argument unfolds, we witness the shocking carnage of colonial warfare, the steady resolve of women resistance fighters in Mozambique, and the snarling, casual bigotry of white Europeans.

A revolutionary call-to-arms is breathtaking in its clarity of purpose; Göran Olsson’s film posits that the wealth of Europe has been built on the robbery of the Third World. Colonised people must rise up and offer an

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Life Itself

alternate “new humanity” - not modeled on the so-called humanity of Europe, where “the only asset is individual thought.” Both blistering indictment and informative political creed, Concerning Violence contextualises the reverberations of colonial rule but also proves formally rigorous. It combines still-controversial ideology with novel and unexpectedly fresh footage.

The tension between documentary form and content, as married so wonderfully in Concerning Violence, left me noticing its dissonance in lesser films. Political earnestness, and even fantastic source material, does not a great documentary make. Audiences seem far more likely to excuse documentary film for formal weakness if it is politically progressive or informative; though it is possible to learn a great deal from a documentary without it being artistically notable.

With this in mind, I come to Regarding Susan Sontag and Last Call. Both attempt to tell compact stories of large and complicated subjects, with varying degrees of success. The latter, directed by Enrico Cerasuolo, is very much the weaker of the two. It is the convoluted story of the scientists and writers of environmentalist mainstay The Limits to Growth. The rise in global temperatures and the finite resources of the planet make for alarming subjects indeed, but the director’s vision seems unfocused.

The film moves from personal backstory to complaints of legislative inertia, from exponential growth to global

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warming, with what can only be described as sloppy enthusiasm. The warnings about sustainability in the 1970’s have now been drowned out by the belief that environmental equilibrium is no longer achievable. This should be more frightening, but Last Call is too frequently bogged down by its own logistics.

Nancy Kates’ Regarding Susan Sontag does something of a better job at holding its many ambiguous pieces together, but Sontag is such a complex, slippery figure, and Kates is unduly focused on her sexuality. A brilliant mind from a young age (she was 15 and lecturing friends on Immanuel Kant), Sontag became a celebrated intellectual, flying in the face of labels and constantly evolving, from a cultural theorist to novelist to outspoken anti-war activist.

The film tells her life story with archival footage, strip collage, flickering and intercutting abstract montages, and a great deal of loving photographs of Sontag. Kates’ obsession with the writer’s image makes for a strange irony; in one of Sontag’s most famous essays, she expresses her concern over the dominance of the photograph as the primary form of memory. It may be a playful turnaround of Sontag’s concern, but the continual mooning about her “love of being photographed” and her physical magnetism is nonetheless tiresome. Less adulatory observations prove more interesting - her struggle for canonical greatness, or as one commentator remarks, her

Concerning Violence

almost parodic high-mindedness. (“Her seriousness is a pose. She’s almost camp”.) Unfortunately, it seems that Sontag is a subject too wily, and too easy to project on, to be distilled easily into the documentary form.

Another gala event of Doc/Fest was Charlie Lyne’s exploration of 90’s teen movies, Beyond Clueless. It was held at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre and soundtracked with a live performance from infectious indie-pop band Summer Camp. Featuring a series of montages from all manner of teen movies up through the mid-2000’s, the film is a playful and inventive look at the tropes of a hugely popular but critically ignored genre. The film is organised in several chapters around teenage selfhood, conformity, rebellion and sexuality.

It seems clear that Lyne is more interested in the moods and tensions of the teenage experience, as expressed visually, than he is in explicit interpretation.

Some of the most impressive aspects of Beyond Clueless are the crescendo-building montages, which swell to a psychosexual fervor alongside the soundtrack. With a deadpan, analytical voiceover from cult teen star Fairuza Balk, the film takes a not-always-successful stab at dissecting the teen movie for its subversive impulses. As a visceral experience, the film works wonderfully - but the half-hearted interpretative focus on gems like Bubble Boy do make one feel that Lyne has returned to some of these films so that we don’t have to.

Other highlights of Doc/Fest, for me, were the storytelling strengths of Rory Kennedy’s Last Days in Vietnam and Joe Berlinger’s Whitey: the USA v. James J. Bulger. Both have the great advantage of being almost Hollywood-esque in their stature; the real-life situations they reconstruct are full of crime, corruption, personal bravery, and poisonous betrayal.

The former focuses on the evacuation of Saigon in 1975, choosing to share the stories of those final 24 hours which signaled the last American failure in Vietnam. In so doing, it also captures the desperation, opportunism, and courage of the Americans and South Vietnamese on the precipice of total disaster. Whitey tells a shocking story of FBI collusion with the Irish mob, and suggests the great lengths the Boston police force went to in order to cover up their involvement. Both weave carefully structured and surprisingly intimate personal stories into the flow of their storytelling, each making for a highly satisfying viewing experience.

Even when flawed, it’s rare to come away from a film without having been enlightened by it in some way. It seems that Doc/Fest is the place to go if you have the desire to be greatly moved, provoked, or inspired by a documentary film; the festival is passionately erudite, and you’d be hard pushed not to find something to cater to individual taste.

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Fighting Rights Kelsey Eichhorn continues our partnership with the Swedish Film Institute highlighting some of their personal favourites from their collection. This month’s addition - Patrik, Age 1.5

introduction by Swedish Film Institute

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t’s probably best if you change one of the men to a woman.” Those were the words of one of the producers of Patrik, Age 1.5 at an early stage of the project. Making a film about a same-sex couple who adopt a child was not without controversy.

But director Ella Lemhagen has always gone her own way. She chose two very popular young Swedish actors to portray the gay couple: Gustaf Skarsgård (Vikings, Kon-Tiki) and Torkel Petersson ( Jalla! Jalla!, Kopps). The film had its world premiere at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival, with sell-out screenings and countless questions from the audiences to the director.

Well-made, feel-good comedies dealing with serious subjects have often been very successful in Sweden –

think, for example, Lukas Moodysson’s Show Me Love, Josef Fares’ Jalla! Jalla! and Maria Blom’s Dalecarlians.

But how would Swedish audiences respond to this? As it turned out, they loved it. One of the most watched films in Sweden of 2008, it was a huge box office and critical success.

In the end, it was a good thing that the sceptical producer gave in. Because when little Sweden makes a gay comedy about adoption, it clearly echoes around the world. Six years have passed since the film’s premiere but it still screens by popular demand at LGBT film festivals all over the world – even in countries where it is difficult to live an openly homosexual life – and now has 59 festivals to its credit.

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words by Kelsey Eichhorn

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t’s a fairy common phenomenon that a film will fail to live up to its marketing hype. More than a few mammoth trailers these days reveal entire plots leaving little to interest or excite in the feature presentation. Even more often, expertly crafted campaigns spin out captivating poster images and enticing digital gimmicks that create an inescapable buzz to which no film could ever live up. It’s rare however, that the tables are turned. On one hand I can count the number of films which surprised me for the better, whose marketing campaigns inspired dread and boredom while the reality of the film proved anything but. Patrik, Age 1.5 is just such a film.

If I were Here!, or Regent Release, or Filmlance International or any of the other various production or distribution companies involved with the Ella Lemhagen’s 2008 remake of a popular play by Michaell Druker, I’d fire the creatives on this account immediately. The DVD cover is astonishingly kitsch, and not in the good, trendy, hipster-way that indie films have come to love in recent years. Instead, the soft-lit image of actor Tom Ljungman (who plays teenage orphan Patrik) superimposed on a baby-blue background with his signature 3 hoop earrings and a plastic pacifier stuck in his mouth screams 1990’s B-movie in a way that made me want to shove the film

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back into the cardboard Amazon packaging and return it unopened.

Luckily for me, avoidance was not an option, otherwise I might never have experienced the pure joy of this film.

Well-to-do gay couple Göran (Gustaf Skarsgård) and Sven (Torkel Petersson) have recently been approved for adoption and, after being told no countries are willing to supply a baby for a homosexual couple, are thrilled to receive a letter offering them the chance to adopt a oneand-a-half-year-old baby, Patrik. Domestic bliss, however, is not as close as it may seem; due to a typo in the Social Services letter their 1.5-year-old Patrik turns out to be a 15-year-old homophobic kid from the Swedish ghetto with a history of arrests for petty crime and assault.

While hotheaded Sven does everything in his power to get Patrik out of their home immediately, the more maternal Goran hesitantly begins to bond with Patrik as they wait for Social Services to reopen following a holiday weekend. The tension that follows may seem at times predictable, but the story is told with a tenderness and sincerity that proves infectious. Generally speaking, I am aesthete and a firm believer that film, as a visual medium, should capture and embody meaning on all levels, from editing and cinematography to plot and themes. There’s nothing particularly earth-shattering about DOP Mark

Stepimus Wieser’s camera work, nor does Thomas Lagerman introduce any new or profound techniques to the world of editing. The camera is simply observational, the editing a truly invisible art form.

The success instead lies primarily in the story itself, and, of course in the actors. While stage-to-cinema adaptations may seem a natural development, the re-imagination is often a challenge. It’s difficult to believe Lemhagen’s script is not original, belying the ease with which the major themes of Druker’s story are expanded and developed for the camera. The metaphor of growth and careful nurturing is supported by the unusual level of importance the neighbourhood places on the status of their individual garden plots. Nor is the message rooted in Patrik’s hidden gardening talent a subtle one - he nurtures and sustains Goran just as Goran supports and takes care of Patrik. While these motifs may not be the most subtle, they are certainly more than appropriate for film, and Lemhagen makes the most of the rich opportunities, embracing the bold visual colours of the flowers and sunlight and treating the divisive hedge lines as imaginary walls that shape and structure the framing of each scene.

While the script may not demand subtlety, Lemhagen certainly does - she is clearly a director who understands

the balance of power between dialogue and silence and she manages to coax from her actors performances that often capture more emotion through what is left unsaid, rather than what is said.

The film is far from a comedy, yet there is a lightheartedness to the performances of the characters that provides a compelling and sincere entry point into a sensitive issue. Scattered throughout the film are small and often humorous adjunct interactions with character actors that serve to shift the focus of the story from the issue of sexual orientation to a focus on basic human interaction. As a result it doesn’t take long to realise that the prejudice Goran and Sven have been fighting outside their home is now unfolding inside their home as they barricade the troubled youth with the knife in the unused nursery, sleeping in shifts and using the baby camera as makeshift surveillance.

Despite the tacky, not-quite retro artwork and the less-than-enthusiastic trailer, the tale of love and acceptance woven throughout Patrik, Age. 15 is heartwarmingly authentic and there is universality to its concept that sometimes the things we want the least are actually those that are the best for us.

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Identity

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Bold Observer Jean-Charles Hue

In this month’s discovery strand, Evrim Ersoy highlights the naturalistic intrigue of Jean-Charles Hue words by Evrim Ersoy

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tarting off as a video artist, Jean-Charles Hue’s work has slowly evolved over the years – his quest to discover his own identity, to understand the nature of the communities living on the edges of society giving his material a narrative unexpected.

Born in 1968, Jean-Charles Hue spent the early part of his career working as a stylish in Fashion. However it was his own obsession with trying to discover his own identity which pushed him to create solo exhibition in 2001 about the Gypsy communities existing within Spain.

The exhibition intensified Hue’s interest within the nomadic people and their lifestyles. His own heritage had connections to the Yeniche people – the third-largest population of such communities in the world with their own language/jargon called argot.

So the director set out to make a number of short films set within a Yeniche community – spending time with

Dorkels who lived on the outskirts of society in Northern France, Jean-Charles Hue investigates the existence of these modern ‘tribes’ who by choice remain separated from the modern world which at every turn threatens to engulf them.

The culmination of these shorts was his first feature La BM du Seigneur – a semi-documentary, semi-fiction creation which built upon the backstory of the people he’d been following around for so long.

The film focuses on Fred, an imposing figure within the Yeniche community who is both respected and feared – when he is visited by an angel, Fred decides to go straight: however this will prove more problematic than imagined within a community which respects toughness and mettle.

Hue’s style is naturalistic, in director contrast to the films of Tony Gatlif where the nomadic communities become lost within the stylized frame. Hue prefers to be

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inconspicuous and discreet, the camera remaining a mere observer. The dialogue is at a million miles an hour, the sound of the argot both familiar and alienating. The rituals, the attitudes and the sense of a community which has somehow remained closed to prying eyes so far creates a sense of illicit invasion – the audience participant in Hue’s slow but sure exploration.

La BM du Seigneur proved that Hue had found his subject matter – his muse and his inspiration. Fred Dorkel – who played Fred in the film as well as appearing in the previous shorts – is a man with the natural charisma of a predator: at once frightening and mesmerizing, demanding loyalty from those around him without ever resorting directly to violence. Whenever he appears on the screen, the whole frame sizzles with raw energy.

In 2012, Hue published a book with accompanying images & shorts which documented his experiences within the Yeniche community and during his time spent with the Dorkels. It was clear that Hue’s own desperate desire to understand his heritage had allowed him to connect with these people in a way which would’ve

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been inconceivable to the outsiders. Even the occasional threat of violence or a drunken bullet gone astray was not enough to frighten Hue – his curiosity and thirst for understanding greater than his fear of death.

Such a feeling pervades all over his next film – a masterpiece by any account. Premiering at this year’s Director’s Fortnight as part of the Cannes Film FestivalEat Your Bones is Hue’s greatest achievement to date: marrying the fantastic observational skills he displays in his early shorts with the clear knack he has for crafting a narrative as seen in La BM Du Seigneur. He creates a meticulous, engaging and undeniably exciting tale set once again within the Yeniche community.

Eat Your Bones opens with a shot of two boys riding on a motorcycle at break-neck speed – one of the boys is carrying a rifle and their terrifyingly fast journey over what looks like French farmland creates a sense of isolation which only intensifies once we discover them to be part of the Yeniche community living on the outskirts of the city.

The boy with the rifle is Jason – an 18 year-old who

“It may be cliché to say but there’s no other filmmaker than Hue who can capture the quest for identity with such panache and intelligence.” lives with his mother and his half-brother Mickael on a caravan site. He spends his time hunting rabbits and stealing petrol from the huge lorries which stop off at a parking lot around the corner. When we meet him, a momentous occasion is looming: he’s about to get baptized and join an Evangelical travelling group with whom they’ve been sharing the campsite with for a number of years – namely his cousin Moise whose only desire is to ensure that the young man does not get into trouble and follow in the footsteps of his brother.

That brother is Fred, released after a 15-year-prison sentence for the murder of a security guard whilst trying to hijack a food truck – who arrives in a cloud of smoke and proceeds to upset the entire status quo.

Set over the course of 24 hours as the three brothers and their cousin embark on a small road trip, the film is an electric exploration of identity, masculinity, family ties and the choices we all make. Shot at hyper-speed with dialogue to match, Hue’s sense of urgency is so engrossing that the audience will find it impossible not to be swept up in the machinations of this family. Displaying

enormous skill in reflecting the beliefs, the attitudes and the characters of these pseudo-fictional people living within a real community, Hue crafts a thriller unlike any other: a manic road-movie which celebrates the individual nature of these people.

Special mention must go to Fred Dorkel – a hulking monster of a man whose presence is pure cinema magic.

Throughout the movie it’s his fantastic energy which elevates most of the scenes to exquisite moments of delights and near the end his pseudo-magical encounter with the police may constitute the most engrossing scene in any film of 2014.

‘Eat Your Bones’ represents Hue’s skewering of the classic approach to criminality and isolation – his approach is sympathetic and in-depth, his time spent with these people clearly giving him the ability to reflect more genuinely than any other filmmaker has so far been able to. It may be cliché to say but there’s no other filmmaker than Hue who can capture the quest for identity with such panache and intelligence.

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Masters of Cinema

Harold & Maude Cleaver Patterson discusses Hal Ashby’s dark comedy masterpiece, Harold and Maude

words by Cleaver Patterson

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s with many films which have now achieved cult status, director Hal Ashby’s black comedy Harold and Maude was not an instant success upon its initial release in December 1971. Considering its core subjects of suicide and the inevitability of death with the advancement of time, its lukewarm reception at the time was perhaps not surprising. Upon reflection however, this film is as idiosyncratic as many people’s ways of dealing with the subject of death in real-life. A film which can be viewed on a multitude of levels - as highlighted by the critic Jane Graham in The Guardian - it is its refreshingly down-to-earth and outwardly irreverent approach to a subject which many of us best deal with by avoiding, which gives the film a universal appeal.

The early 1970s were a difficult era for the youth of

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America. Disenchanted by their country’s recent military forays in Vietnam and the ever present threat of nuclear war, many were overcome with a pervading sense of futility and lack of purpose in their lives. Hollywood - not an industry generally known for its sensitivity or understanding - played into these fears with films where America’s young were seen as a virtual throwaway commodity. Such films as director Terrence Malick’s negativistic 1973 drama Badlands and Tobe Hopper’s notorious The Texas Chainsaw Massacre a year later embodied the industry’s attitude to what many saw as a directionless and often worthless element of society. Add to this the potent ingredient of a spoilt and pampered upbringing, and the inevitable result was one which saw death as an escape from a life which had failed to have meaning.

The dysfunctionality of society on a more general level

was also a subject which was coming increasingly to the fore. In the past where people (particularly children and young adults) had been taught to keep their problems and feelings suppressed, the 1970s saw a generation who were encouraged to express themselves and hold nothing back. This was often depicted in film through the relationship of patients with psychiatrists, as seen in 1975s Oscar winning One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and 1977s controversial Equus and little seen drama I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, all of which dwelt on the difficulties faced by their central characters in their everyday interaction with, and withdrawal from, the world around them.

Many of these films which dealt with the issues of mental illness and the inability of individuals to interact with society took a serious, even horrific, approach - unhinged and psychologically damaged young people had been a mainstay of the horror genre since the release of Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960. Few though had injected the subject with the humour (albeit wickedly black) of Harold and Maude. Here was a film which took the socially distasteful subjects of loneliness and the advancement of old age, and made them acceptable by forcing the viewer to face them head on and embrace life and all its eccentricities when they still could.

Harold Chasen (Bud Cort) lives in splendid isolation with his over protective mother (Vivian Pickles). For escape from his suffocating existence, and in an effort to express himself, Harold has cultivated an all-consuming preoccupation with death and the means of bringing it about - in particular through suicide. As part of his interests Harold attends funerals as frequently as he can.

During one such sojourn he meets the vivacious septuagenarian Maude (Ruth Gordon) who, though in no fear of death, is equally in love with life. Together they embark on a journey of discovery and acceptance which changes their lives forever.

Harold and Maude’s uniqueness comes from a combination of elements, which if found individually within a production would warrant highlighting, but when combined result in entertainment deserving of classic status.

Upon closer inspection the true essence of the film emerges - a study of one young man and his relationship with two women, and the roles they play in each-other’s lives. As in reality a number of subsidiary characters flit repeatedly, though briefly, through the picture - Harold’s patient and long suffering analyst played by G. Wood, a perplexed priest succinctly portrayed by Eric Christmas and an unrecognisable Tom Skerritt as a sinister and deceptively laid-back motorcycle officer. It’s the perfect casting of Cort, Gordon and Pickles in the three central roles however, which lifts the film above the ranks of the ordinary.

An actor who, over a long and varied career, has refused to be typecast, Cort is quoted as saying that he knew from the moment he read the script that Harold and Maude had the potential to be a classic. In his early twenties when he made the film Cort captured perfectly the feeling of disjointedness and separation from the world around him which fuels Harold’s difficulty in ex-

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pressing himself, and the desire for recognition and love which clearly lies beneath his bizarre and macabre preoccupations.

Gordon and Pickles were equally striking as the two female influences in Harold’s life - both mother-like figures, though at opposite ends of the spectrum. Born in the closing years of the nineteenth century in Quincy, Massachusetts, Gordon was an actress of the old-school, having learnt her craft on Broadway during the 1920s and 30s. Seventy five by the time she starred in Harold and Maude, Gordon had honed the style of the unconventional older lady in the Oscar winning role of Minnie Castevet in Roman Polanski’s 1968 shocker Rosemary’s Baby. In Harold and Maude she gives the impression that she’s simply playing an extension of herself - a woman who has been everywhere and seen everything, and approaches each day with no fear and total joy in the unexpectedness of what may pop up next. Pickles on the other-hand, was English through and through. A trained dancer she hailed originally from London, her cool British stiffness was perfect for the role of Harold’s mother, who tries her best to shape her son into her own suffocating and regimented mould.

Though many other aspects of the film stand out,

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it is without doubt Harold’s suicidal vignettes - often involving a nonchalantly indifferent reaction from his mother - which lend it its uniquely arresting visual style.

Take for instance the scene which opens to the strains of Tchaikovsky’s 1st Piano Concerto as Mrs Chasen proceeds to take her morning swim in the family’s outdoor pool, seemingly oblivious to the prostrate body of her teenage son as it floats by. The film’s visually arresting style - of which this scene is a perfect example - is a fundamental part of its unique appeal, emphasising an air of bohemian decay which pervades every part of the proceedings. From the faded grandeur of the mansion where Harold and his mother live in isolated decadence, to the lively clutter of Maude’s dilapidated caravan-like home, the settings are the perfect embodiment of what the characters represent. The restrictiveness of Harold’s surroundings which stifle his self-expression sets the film’s generally muted tone, which is only emphasised

by Maude’s exuberant approach to life reflected in her ramshackled yet happy house, and complete disregard for convention as seen when she produces a bright sunflower yellow umbrella amongst a sea of black ones during one of her episodic funeral visits.

Harold’s seemingly pessimistic view of life forms

one of the film’s core themes, as seen through his eyes.

Brought up in a home where his every whim is catered for, the inevitable result is that nothing, including life, has meaning; an attitude fuelled by the apparent disinterest from his preoccupied and indulgent mother as highlighted in the film’s opening scene. Her withering admonishment upon finding the immaculately turned out Harold hanging from the rafters of her drawing room sets the caustic tone which runs throughout the film. “I suppose you think that’s very funny, Harold ...

Oh, dinner at eight, Harold. And do try and be a little more vivacious.”

If a morbid fascination with death and its various machinations was all that the film had to offer however, it would most likely not have achieved the quirky appeal which it has over the years. Instead it is Maude’s irrepressible love of life which (as is often the case in reality) balances her new friend’s preoccupation with the death that could otherwise be in danger of bordering on the unhealthy. Not that Maude denies her own end.

In fact her own acceptance of the advancement of old age and efforts to help along the inevitable makes for a bittersweet end to the film, lending it a timely relevance in the light of the euthanasia debate which is such a hot

topic today. This is highlighted when Maude and Harold first meet at the burial of a stranger which they are both attending - their mutual love of going to random funerals is one of the bonds which connects these two social misfits. Disclosing to Harold that the dead man at whose funeral they are spectators was eighty, Maude proceeds to expound on the significance of this numerical milestone.

“I’ll be eighty next week. Good time to move on don’t you think? I mean seventy five is too early. But at eighty five you’re just marking time.”

At one point Maude, whilst explaining to Harold her penchant for kleptomania, tries to pass off her old habit of breaking into pet-shops and liberating caged birds as ‘before its time’. A twisted logic which perhaps summed up better than anything else the film’s true appeal and the reason for it being frequently misunderstood by critics and audiences alike.

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Harold and Maude is available on July 14th courtesy of Eureka Entertainment. www.eurekavideo.co.uk

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In Defence...

The Sporting Diplomacy of Escape to Victory

words by Adam Marshall

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f nations could settle their differences on the football pitch, now that would be a challenge.”

Nope, not the words of the Dalai Lama or Martin Luther King Jr....Nor were they uttered by one of the great philosophers or a central figure of a major world religion. They’re not even the slogan of a hyperbolically overdramatic advert for a leading sports brand (yet).

The aphorism actually comes from the mouth of Max von Sydow, all trussed up in full regalia for his role as Nazi general and former-professional footballer Major Karl von Steiner in John Huston’s Escape to Victory. As far as sixteen word film pitches go, it’s just about as outlandish as a René Higuita scorpion kick. And yet…

Now I fully realise that I‘m likely to be preaching to the inconvertible and that, during the last few weeks,

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your local picture house has inevitably been a welcoming bastion of happiness from the quadrennial barrage of World Cup frenzy. But, as Eric Cantona would attest, films and football do not have to be mutually exclusive passions. And it’s Escape to Victory that bonds the two tighter than an Italian centre-half partnership.

As I’m sure most other ‘In defence of ’ contributors would agree, it’s extremely difficult to maintain an objective critical eye when evaluating a film that one has grown up with, can recite almost word-for-word and for which the expression ‘blinkered’ was surely first established. But it seems only the fact that the film involves sport that it’s received with such condescendingly short shrift by critics. Well, that and the fact that Bobby Moore is one of the main stars.

It’s certainly a worthy fit within John Huston’s

“Unlike the majority of other football films, its authenticity is what sets Escape to Victory apart.

Endure the action in When Saturday Comes or the excruciatingly atrocious Goal! for example, and you would be forgiven for assuming that the directors had never seen a game of football in their lives.” remarkable canon. In a familiar vein to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Moby Dick or The Man Who Would Be King, Escape to Victory’s narrative revolves around human beings taking on formidable adversaries at seemingly impossible odds. Only this time, instead of the Mexican mountains, a killer whale or a tribe of hostile Kafiristanian natives, the foe is the German national football team.

When von Steiner is brought into a (surprisingly cushty looking) prisoner of war camp to investigate the shooting of an escapee, he’s immediately drawn to an amateurish kickabout and its coach-in-chief, Michael Caine’s John Colby. Both having had their football careers cut short by the onset of the second world war, they contrive to put on a match between allied soldiers and the Germans; von Steiner sniffing a chance to give a much needed boost to the Nazi propaganda machine, Colby sniffing extra food rations and cosier barracks.

Colby’s senior officers however, register only the whiff of a possible escape opportunity, and conspire to use the match as a way back to Blighty for the line-up which

includes prisoners played by footballing legends Moore, Pelé and Ossie Ardiles, alongside, yes, Sylvester Stallone as American Captain Hatch.

And it’s the delightful absurdity of that last sentence which is an ideal kicking off point to understanding the appeal of the film. It truly is an all-star cast - it’s just that not all the cast are movie stars. Between Rocky’s II and III and with First Blood just around the corner, Stallone’s career was more or less at its zenith, while Caine and von Sydow brought the acting chops. But sharing their screen-time were Moore (the man who lifted the World Cup for England in 1966) Ardiles (already with Tottenham Hotspur by this time and a household name) and Pelé (well retired but, you know, the best player who ever laced up a boot).

But the real glee for a football fan is in the remainder of the eleven. The utility men. Gathered from the English first division, these decent league players are such an unlikely screen presence, they lend an unexpectedly authentic edge to the action. No team consists exclusively of star players, and so watching Mike Summerbee and Russell

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Osman - could there be two more quintessential names for ‘ordinary’ British footballers - urging Judge Dredd to save a last minute penalty is something to savour. Seeing John Wark shake hands with Demolition Man as he arrives in the camp, equally so.

In fact, unlike the majority of other football films, its authenticity is what sets Escape to Victory apart. Endure the action in When Saturday Comes or the excruciatingly atrocious Goal! for example, and you would be forgiven for assuming that the directors had never seen a game of football in their lives. Rather than film flat choreographed sequences, Huston - under the technical guidance of Pelé himself - simply allowed a normal football match to run as he filmed the climactic encounter. It means that the tackles and passing are the real deal.

There’s a genuine sense of competitiveness between the teams and, towards the end of the 90 minutes, a palpable sense of heavy-legged fatigue.

It remains unclear as to why Huston, far from a professed football fanatic, took on the project. Perhaps his penchant for the underdog tale made it an obvious choice and, despite an undoubted ignorance of the offside rule, he brings his greatness to it. He explores, for example, the lesser told class aspect of life in a prisoner of war camp.

“You’re escaping is just some bloody upper crust game”, Colby reproaches a cravated officer. As ever, and at the

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risk of mixing metaphors, the players are mere pawns in a game of chess being played out between the landed classes of the European superpowers. In football, the working class soldiers finally have a field of combat that they own, and it proves to be their salvation.

But Escape to Victory’s appeal isn’t in grandiose themes or subtext. It’s in Bill Conti’s instantly hummable score, a bastard hybrid of football terrace chant and war epic dramatics, with a leitmotif that reaches the portentous highs of any polished match day broadcast package, and yet transmogrifies to Pelé’s melancholy harmonica.

It’s in the eternally quotable dialogue: training as a boy in Trinidad on the streets with oranges; those two goons Hans and Anton; I don’t need you or your football team, Colby; the goal keeper will have to be on his line; Germany’s great Baumann; we’re losing 4-1, but at least we scored a goal; we can win this…who said that.

And it’s in the eyebrows raised among the British toff generals at the idea of Hatch escaping the camp…naked, in the players’ stifled giggles as the head falls off a Stallone dummy at roll-call, in poor old Tony Lewis’s broken arm, in Ardiles’s audacious flick in super slow motion, in Pelé’s picture-perfect overhead last-minute equaliser drawing the spontaneous applause of Major von Steiner.

And in doing this this this this this this this - goal. Easy.

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The 100 Year Old Man... cert (15)

director Felix Herngren writers Felix Herngren, Hans Ingemansson starring Robert Gustafsson, Iwar Wiklander, David Wiberg

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Review by David Hall

release date 4th July

An absolute monster hit in Nordic territories (it recently broke several box-office records in Sweden) Felix Herngren’s knockabout historical farce is frequently messy, often facile and astoundingly cynical but it is often very funny too – a freewheeling mash up of the recent Bad Grandpa, Zelig, Forrest Gump and Mel Brooks’ History of the World Part 1.

Based on Swedish author Jonas Jonasson’s popular 2009 novel, the film follows Alan Karlsson (Swedish comedy actor Robert Gustafsson) the deadpan, irascible codger of the title who decides to escape his care home rather than stick around for a milestone birthday he doesn’t care to celebrate.

Karlsson winds up at the local bus station and in the first of a series of unlikely coincidences and mix-ups (which become progressively more farcical as the film continues) finds himself carrying a suitcase full of drug money belonging to a drug baron (Alan Ford), on the run from a Neo-Nazi gang and eventually being tailed by an appallingly useless detective. After disposing of the corpse of one of the gang, who they accidentally freeze to death in one of the film’s more amusing moments, Karlsson teams up an ageing hippy biker and the stage is set for a potentially riotous road movie. Which sort of happens, only it’s one punctuated with cutaways to Karlsson’s preposterous backstory; how he ended up in that home, why he seems to have a love as well as a spectacular talent for explosives work and how he came to work for General Franco, Joseph Stalin and Ronald Reagan.

This Molotov cocktail of nightmarish whimsy and cheerful anarchy combined with an unsentimental, almost nihilistic approach to history sounds highly unpalatable but the result is a film that, for all its flaws and bizarre shifts in tone, is actually pretty amusing and unpredictable. What is refreshing is that, unlike many picaresque journeys through modern history which over sentimentalise or force their heroes to go on some sort of learning curve, here Karlsson remains a complete asshole, cheerful and usually inebriated, through the entire film (and most of the 20th century).

Gustafson is pretty funny (and mostly believable) in the lead, and keeps things watchable even when the twin storylines, which are yoked together in a haphazard fashion become exasperating. Perhaps the book, which I haven’t read, makes more sense in how it coincides the modern day hijinks with his backstory, but I can’t imagine it is as pitch-black and pitiless (or as amusing) as the film.

Despite its success in Nordic territories it’s anyone’s guess as to how this will go down with UK audiences. Its lead is a sexually frustrated fantasist with an erotic fascination for pyrotechnics, prepared to work with the worst kind of delusional zealots and despots of any political stripe.

He directly (and accidentally) kills a considerable amount of people throughout the movie, with no apparent motive other than enjoying blowing shit up. Actually that sounds a lot like most comic book heroes.

Grand Central release date 18th July

cert (15)

director Rebecca Zlotowski Review by David Hall

Rebecca Zlotowski’s second feature (after Belle Épine / Dear Prudence) is a frequently tense, quietly atmospheric, high-stakes melodrama set at a radiation plant where the prospect of impending meltdown, both chemical and emotional, hangs in the balance. Grand Central screened in Un Certain Regard at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and was somewhat overshadowed by two higher-profile films featuring its attractive leads Léa Seydoux and Tahar Rahim (Blue Is The Warmest Colour, The Past).

However this story of a truly toxic love affair deserves a wide audience and radiates a graceful power of its own.

Gary (Tahar Rahim) is a drifter and pickpocket, whose travels take him to a nuclear power station in the Rhône valley. His difficult past and lack of qualifications – which would normally be an impediment to finding employment – actually make him perfect for a position at the plant; which employs people prepared to handle the constant and potential deadly threat of radiation. The plant’s Forman is Giles (Olivier Gourmet) who takes Gary under his wing, offering him lodgings and introducing him to a surrogate family of workers who socialise together in the village; including co-worker Toni ((Denis Ménochet) and his fiancée Karole (Seydoux). All seems well until old demons surface, and Gary and Karole begin an intense love affair – meeting in secret at the nearby woods.

Grand Central is best in its early sequences at the plant; which have a menacing poetry and stark beauty. The clinical minimalism of the plant’s interior is juxtaposed with the lush beauty of the external surroundings. It really helps that Rahim, so often cast as a dour and muted presence, is given a more expressive role here. Charismatic but cavalier to the point of foolishness, Gary is his most nuanced performance to date. Seydoux’s Karole is confident and expressive, free in her enjoyment of desire in the same way she was in Blue Is The Warmest Color – although this is a very different kind of character.

The score by ROB (Maniac) is really interesting – contrasting electronic and classical styles, woven expertly, alternating between industrial clang and doomy, almost gothic orchestration. The perilous elements of working at the plant are handled evocatively. There’s a superficial resemblance to Mike Nichol’s underrated Silkwood (1983), about the real- life whistle blower and union activist who died in suspicious circumstances, particularly in the scenes that show the assessment ‘scrub-downs’ given to workers who accidentally expose themselves to high doses.

But Nichol’s picture was a messy liberal melodrama shot at a time when nuclear battle lines were more clearly drawn. Grand Central is a film about passion rather than politics. And if ultimately the tension of the work itself and those who have no choice but to trade safety for money on a daily basis is more dramatic than the illicit affair, there’s still something incredibly powerful about the notion that lust and passion – undeniable human urges – will always rise to the surface, even in the most explosive and potentially fatal environments.

writers Gaëlle Macé, Rebecca Zlotowski starring Tahar Rahim, Léa Seydoux, Olivier Gourmet

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Review by Cleaver Patterson

I Am Divine

release date 18th July

cert (15)

director Jeffrey Schwarz writer Jeffrey Schwarz starring Divine, Michael Musto, Mark Payne

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When a documentary is based on the highs and lows of the life of someone who was without doubt one of the world’s most famous transvestites, it hardly needs pointing out that the result could, to some degree, be controversial. The new film by director Jeffrey Schwarz which chronicles the private and public face of the entertainer and gay icon Harris Glen Milstead - better known as the larger than life drag queen Divine - is that, but also something more.

For those who know little more about Divine than the infamous excrement scene from 1972s Pink Flamingos, as well as those better acquainted with his career, this enlightening and sympathetic examination of the man behind the outrageous public character, reveals a talented and deeply sensitive individual, often misunderstood by those outside of his close circle of friends.

Nothing adds more life to a documentary than archive material of the subject themselves, as well as input from those who had contact with them first hand. Fortunately these elements are what lie at the core of this insightful and lively film. Being a performer from an early age there is no shortage of film available which shows Divine in character, both in movies and performing his signing act - a successful and lucrative branch of his career which became increasingly important during his later years.

It was his life off the screen which revealed the real Divine. In his film Schwarz gathers an eclectic array of those that knew Divine best - from actresses Mink Stole and Susan Lowe to the production designer and art director Vincent Peranio - who reveal through their personal anecdotes a man who for much of his relatively short life was plagued by insecurities and a desire to be taken seriously as the talented performer which he so clearly was.

As with many gay men, Divine’s mother Frances, was a major influence in his life. Though estranged for many years during the height of his popularity, the two were reconciled later in his life. The inclusion of archive interviews with Frances, who herself died in 2009, shed further light on her son’s often complex and private side, in footage which is both touching and poignant as she reminiscences about a man for who she was clearly proud of and cared deeply for.

However it was Divine’s relationship - professionally and personally - with the director John Waters which more than anything shaped his persona, and which as a consequence forms the frame around which this documentary hangs. Born in respectable, middle-class Baltimore, it was only after meeting Waters at high school that Divine began to give freer rein to the more extrovert side of his personality. In frequent clips throughout the film Waters himself gives full credit to Divine and the debt he himself owed to the actor, as well as their deep friendship which was to have a lasting influence on the lives of both men, and create some of the most iconic and memorable moments in contemporary cinema.

Review by Craig Williams

Let us be clear on this; Nicholas Cage is a terrific actor. His unenviable position as critical whipping boy du jour is an injustice born of questionable film choices rather than a failure of technique.

Cage’s status speaks to our inability to accept schisms in the narrative of blockbuster cinema.

He’s an outlier, an outlaw, an iconoclast. Cage is an actor whose strengths are at the polar opposites of his register. We are all familiar with the insatiable livewire of Wild at Heart and Bad Lieutenant; giddy expressions of madness straight from the heart of darkness. But his performance in David Gordon Green’s Joe is at the other end of the spectrum; all his eccentricities are present, but they are tightly coiled under a silent, suffering exterior.

Watching the force of his personality stir uneasily beneath the stillness is one of the film’s great pleasures. A piece of dusty Americana, Joe is a polished work of miserablist Southern gothic that charts the story of 14-year old Gary’s (Tye Sheridan) friendship with Cage’s titular woodsman.

He’s a foreman who’s paid by landowners to enlist his band of ragged workers to poison the trees on their land so it can be developed. Ravaged by poverty, the boy is striving to build a better life for his mother and mute sister, and shield them from the horrifying behaviour of Wade, his violent, alcoholic father, played with rugged authenticity by brilliant newcomer Gary Poulter (who sadly passed away after the film wrapped).

Much of the discussion of Joe has focused on how it, along with Prince Avalanche, its 2013 predecessor, is a return to the evocative indie sensibilities of Green’s early work, before he spent a lost decade in the mire of studio comedies. But this is a fallacy of convenience. We are actually witnessing a new, third phase of the director’s career; lifting the thematic concerns and downbeat atmosphere of his first few films, and combining them with the sheen and professionalism of his Hollywood years.

The Terence Malick riffs that once set Green’s work apart from his 90s contemporaries have now proliferated; infiltrating the indie landscape of the 21st century. Indeed, Malikana has been fashioned into an earthy, sun-kissed aesthetic for the new auteurs of the South.

It’s still present in Joe, but far less pronounced.

The dominant theme of this movement of Green’s career is our relationship with the land around us.

Joe is literally poisoning it, clearing the earth for the next phase. The picture looks and feels like the end of summer; the final rays shooting through the sadness of lives condemned to scatter through the badlands of Texas. The central triumvirate represents clashing ideals of manhood. Masculinity is both sustenance and an antagonist in Joe; something to control and channel. Joe, Gary and Wade are each defined by the degree to which they allow themselves to unleash it. The spontaneity of the early work may have dissipated, but Joe has purpose and propulsion. Green is moving in an intriguing direction, and greatness may follow.

Joe

release date 25th July

cert (15)

director David Gordon Green writer Gary Hawkins starring Nicolas Cage, Tye Sheridan, Gary Poulter

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Lilting

release date 8th August

cert (15)

writer Hong Khaou starring Ben Whishaw, Morven Christie, Peter Bowles

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Review by Stuart Barr

director Hong Khaou

Lilting is a remarkably assured and ambitious debut from writer/director Hong Khaou that explores parallel themes of loss, memory, and love that cross (and transcend) generations and sexualities.

Following a mutual loss, Richard (Wishaw) through complicated feelings of guilt and responsibility reaches out to his late partner’s mother Junn (Cheng). The Cambodian/Chinese Junn had been placed in an old people’s home by her son, the now absent but - through the magic of editing - ever-present Kai (Leung). There is a problem, Junn is openly contemptuous of her son’s ‘friend’ and has never understood why she was placed in the home, a place in which she is further alienated by her inability to speak English. Of course the reason is that Kai had not come out to his mother and was afraid of her reaction to his sexuality.

Richard strikes on a potential way of helping the elderly but proud woman when he finds out that she is sharing a tentative romance with an elderly gentleman (a wonderful comic turn by Peter Bowles). Junn and her beau cannot communicate verbally, so Richard hires the services of a translator so they can talk and find out more about each other.

This is a delicate and affecting film, which tells a deceptively simple story in a complex and novelistic style. By presenting scenes from the point of view of different characters, Khaou is able to fashion a narrative that is able to present the interior life of characters (something that is often problematic for a visual medium). Although Kai is the great absence at the heart of the film, the character also exists in the present through the memories of Junn and Richard. This also gives the strikingly handsome actor Andrew Leung a great deal of screen time.

This is a very low budget film but imaginatively shot and using the unique style of the assisted living environment to create a slightly out of time feel - the home is decorated in muted fifties colours and furnishings be more comfortable to its elderly inhabitants. By using long takes and by a fluid camera, actors playing a scene can exit the frame in one time period, and enter again in another. It sounds heavy handed and distracting, but it is achieved with grace. Cinematographer Ula Pontikos - who shot Weekend - won a Sundance award for her work here.

As Junn the formidable Chinese actress Peipei Cheng is the heart of the film. Famed for her performances in martial arts classics (from King Hu’s 1966 Come Drink With Me to Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) Cheng is by turns spiky, cantankerous and heartbreaking. Ben Whishaw is initially surprisingly low key, but as the film progresses Khaou’s script gives the audience more and more of the character and a deeply moving portrait of a relationship devastatingly lost emerges.

This is a very strong debut film that is also warm, humane and often very funny.

Mood Indigo release date 1st August

Review by Ben Nicholson

Michel Gondry has regularly delved into the sub-conscious in his movies; the altered memories of Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, the lucid dreams of The Science of Sleep. His latest film, Mood Indigo, is no exception, bringing the director’s DIY aesthetic to the cocktail-mixing piano and autonomous/automaton household objects of writer Boris Vian. Based on the novelist’s cult classic L’Écume des jours, it blends the source’s inventive universe and the personal preoccupations of the director.

Adapted for the screen by Gondry and producer, Lu Bossi, this is a tragic and affecting love story that happens to be buried beneath an avalanche of the filmmaker’s trademark style.

The potentially overwhelming levels of visual creativity commence right from the start as the film drops audiences straight into the surreal and madcap life of the charming Colin, played by Romain Duris.

Colin is an inventor and gentleman of leisure who lives in a polychromic apartment bursting with living appliances, knitted food and a manservant named Nicolas (played wonderfully by Omar Sy). While Gondry is clearly a perfect choice to bring Vian’s surreal world to life, this also creates a problem when their combined flights of fancy threaten to undermine the touching romance at the film’s core.

That begins when Colin, jealous that his best pal has a girlfriend, decides that he wants one too. He promptly meets and falls in love with Chloe (Audrey Tatou) only for her to contract a terminal illness on their honeymoon when a water-lily takes root in her lung. Informed that the only method of treatment that may prolong Chloe’s life is to keep her surrounded by fresh flowers, Colin works various jobs and empties his safe to extend their time together hold. Where it is exhausting earlier on, Gondry’s vision finds its feet here as the lovers’ combined malady manifests by shaping the surrounding world.

Their apartment slowly shrinks and decays and the same landscapes that had been bright and colourful on their optimistic wedding day are now barren and desolate. Duris and Tatou do a fine job of portraying this touching central romance - having appeared opposite one another several times before - even if their characters remain largely underwritten. In truth, they are generally playing second fiddle to the effects anyway, and that is without the plethora of other characters. As with the visuals, there is an awful lot being crammed in to a story that, in essence, craves simplicity. Even the most interesting asides - like the challenging of stereotypes associated with Nicolas’ character - are muddied in amongst Vian’s thinly veiled swipe at Jean-Paul Satre (for whom Vian’s wife left him). An oblique framing device involving a room full of typewriters producing the film’s plot - intended to represent the original book - doesn’t clarify matters any further.

It’s a shame because this is a genuinely enjoyable and poignant tale of love and loss that perfectly suits Michel Gondry’s idiosyncrasies. It just could have done with a few less of them obscuring its tender heart.

cert (12a)

director Michel Gondry writers Michel Gondry, Luc Bossi starring Romain Duris, Audrey Tautou, Gad Elmaleh

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Review by Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy

Norte, the End of History release date 18th July

cert (TBC)

director Lav Diaz writers Lav Diaz, Rody Vera starring Sid Lucero, Angeli Bayani, Archie Alemania

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Lav Diaz is a patient man. Over the last fifteen years of his directorial career, he has helmed films lasting anywhere from five to ten hours, meaning the four-hour Norte seems comparatively bitesized. Yet at four hours, this is a sprawl that affirms the Filipino director’s unhurried approach. His film opens with a café debate on morality and nihilism, culminating ten minutes later on an acknowledgement towards the “discourse of the hungry”. If discourse is for the hungry, then Diaz appears to be demanding we feast, feast, feast.

That café back-and-forth introduces us to the intense law school dropout Fabian (Sid Lucero).

Minutes later, he absentmindedly fidgets with a knife while sat in his flat; the first threat of his academically-based fury will bubble over into something ugly, something more primal. Meanwhile, a harried young mother called Eliza (Angeli Bayani, the film’s MVP), pawns off treasured belongings to keep afloat, forced into a breadmaker role after her husband (Archie Alemania) breaks his leg. The introduction of an unscrupulous pawnbroker (Mae Paener, playing her loan shark as a haughty neighbourhood Queen Bee) nudges us in the direction of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment; a throwaway remark about murdering for a greater good later nails it down. If it hasn’t clicked, Diaz wants you to consider his work with the weight that one would towards a great novel. The Crime occurs an hour and change into Norte, leaving plenty of time for the now-expected art-house Punishment: in prison cells, in stately houses, on farmland, on motorways.

And yet, Norte is rarely a punishing viewing experience. Although the final hour largely finds the director spinning his wheels until An Event Occurs, Diaz’s patient approach allows room for scenes to play out in a way that feels organic, like when Eliza’s daughter potters around a cramped garden or when Fabian’s girlfriend-of-sorts rambles around a bare room waiting for a beer. The horrors of its world occur out of the frame, yet Diaz and cinematographer Lauro Rene Manda’s lingering on the before and after works wonders: each seismic event is bookended by frantic contemplation and hand-wringing. Every scene plays out like a movie in miniature.

Early in the film, Fabian and his friends discuss a 2012 Daily Inquirer article about a doomsday cult.

The article (published in that year’s December 22 edition) focuses on the High-World organisation based in Surigao del Norte and their claims that corrupt leaders are responsible for delaying the “end of the temporal world”. It’s treated as a cute gag by the film’s characters, but gains topical relevance as the narrative spirals on. Diaz’s story spans over four years and into the near future, offering glimpses of unexplained grimness. Mysterious fires rage across waters and on land, armed forces patrol communities at dawn and dusk, a character death appears across utterly surreal as it is tragic. Doomsday vibes creep into the world of Diaz’s characters, but it is kept at bay by human corruption. It’s funny: the ultimate Punishment, kept at bay by one great Crime.

Review by Christopher O’Neill

While announcements of remakes are usually met with scepticism amongst horror enthusiasts, the news that Mark Hartley was going to helm a redoing of the 1978 film Patrick (1978) was welcomed. Hartley seemed to be the ideal filmmaker for the project, since his documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! was a labour of love dedicated to Australian exploitation movies of the 70s and 80s. His reimagining of Patrick, which arrives on UK shores carrying the subtitle Evil Awakens, is not without merit but proves to be a very mixed bag and ultimately a disappointment.

Fleeing from a broken marriage, Kathy Jacquard (Sharni Vinson) takes up a nursing position at a private hospital. Run by renegade neurologist Dr. Roget (Charles Dance) and his daughter Matron Cassidy (Rachel Griffiths), it is a foreboding building located on the outskirts of a remote seaside town. Kathy takes particular interest in a clinically comatose patient named Patrick ( Jackson Gallagher), a mysterious young man at the centre of Dr Roget’s questionable medical experiments. While her colleagues consider Patrick to be completely brain dead, Kathy starts to believe otherwise. A series of strange and unexplained incidents begin happening to people in Kathy’s life, and it soon becomes apparent that Patrick has telepathic powers as well as an obsessive affection for her. As the ad sleek says, “the only thing more dangerous than his hate IS HIS LOVE”.

The remake follows the same basic plotline as its predecessor but Hartley takes a more grandiosely gothic approach. Gone are the disarmingly sunny exteriors and the brightly-lit interiors of the suburban clinic. This time it is a decaying mountaintop mansion surrounded by dark skies with CGI-generated swirling mists. With the wide cinemascope compositions used to their full potential, several split diopter shots, and most explicitly the Pino Donaggio score, this Patrick is clearly influenced by the work of Brian De Palma. It is a style of filmmaking where the form takes precedence over the content, and Hartley often succeeds in creating effective set pieces (the pre-credit sequence is particularly noteworthy) and an overall atmosphere of dread.

What is a disservice to Patrick, unfortunately, is the screenplay. One of the key reasons that classic Ozploitation movies are held in such high regard is their quirky take on genre filmmaking. Everett De Roche’s original 1978 script is not without faults but the narrative has lots of imaginative details and is peopled with characters with enough depth to make them interesting, if not sympathetic. Justin King’s 2013 reimagining completely misses this point since it lacks humour and subtle character flourishes and as a result often reduces the film to being ploddingly formulaic. Sharni Vinson is a likably perky heroine though, ande Peta Sergeant lends solid support as a co-worker and confidant but the life and soul of Patrick is clearly Charles Dance and Rachel Griffiths as the villainous keepers of the clinic. Their enthusiastically theatrical performances are delivered with relish, and add a much-needed jolt that the dry screenplay desperately needs.

Patrick

release date TBC

cert (TBC)

director Mark Hartley writer Justin King starring Charles Dance, Rachel Griffiths, Sharni Vinson

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The Paddy Lincoln Gang cert (TBC)

directors Ben Jagger writer Alistair Audsley starring Dean S. Jagger, Joseph DiMasso, Richard Wagner

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Review by Kelsey Eichhorn

release date TBC

There’s plenty to seduce in Ben Jagger’s The Paddy Lincoln Gang: sex, drugs, rock’n roll, and, the epitome of it all, an Irish accent, (recently voted “sexiest accent in the world” according to various Internet polling sites, so ladies, beware!). As if that weren’t enough- there’s also some breath-taking cinematography that captures that somewhat clichéd yet still intoxicating sun-spot sheen that’s become synonymous with indie films. So, given all the enticing distractions, it took a while to realise that there’s not much happening in this film. About halfway through I found myself checking the timer on the Vimeo player, realising I was still waiting for the penny to drop, still struggling to find the meaning and purpose.

The idea for the Paddy Lincoln Gang grew out of a short film called “A Night at Robert McAlisters” which garnered reasonable levels of success on the festival circuit. Unfortunately, it’s clear the transition of narrative from short to feature proved to be director Ben Jagger and writer/producer Alistair Audsley’s downfall. The film tells the story of Robert McAlister (Dean Jagger), an Irish rocker transplanted from “somewhere we’ll call Dublin” to Los Angeles here he cobbles together a rock band from erstwhile renegades Eddie and Rick and shy-but-brilliant musical prodigy Tom. Like all good rock stories, the film sees The Paddy Lincoln Gang on the brink of success with Tom providing heartrending guitar riffs while Rob draws on his tortured past for that haunting lyrics required of every good rock ballad.

I’m a huge fan of indirect storytelling and non-progressive narratives and these aesthetic styles require careful attention to detail and a very subtle balancing act, walking the line between intrigue and just plain confusion. The recurring flashbacks to a dingy basement room that plague Rob’s memories offer the possibility of some fascinating non-linear editing that is disappointingly unrealised. Sub-par acting performances from key characters Tom (Demetri Watkins) and band manager Dan (Stephen Bridgewater) continuously disrupt the cohesion of the film’s narrative world while strong presence Leyla (Amy Lawhorn) is afforded minimal screen time.

I really wanted to like The Paddy Lincoln Gang.

At one stage of the film, midway through the story, Rob meets girlfriend Leyla at a diner. He’s joking and jovial; a trait we’ve learned is a deferral mechanism, while she’s subdued and reserved. The tension’s been bubbling somewhat obviously below the surface for the entire film and now Leyla finally breaks. “Tell me something; anything about your past….the whole man of mystery thing is getting really fucking old, Rob.” I couldn’t agree more. The key to the brooding psychological tale Ben Jagger is trying to weave is the tormented soul that lives in rock ’n roll heartthrob Rob. And while Jagger’s performance carries the film as adeptly as he possibly can with the material provided, mystery is dependent upon intrigue, and Robert’s character is impenetrable. With no point of reference or relation it’s difficult to invest in his story, making the film’s conclusion all the more sensationalist and unsatisfactory.

In the Berberian Sound Frame: Studio (2012)

words by Adam Marshall

I

n addition to inspiring biopics of wildly varying quality, directors frequently owe the aesthetic of their films to the great masters - from Kubrick’s Hogarthian Barry Lyndon to Jamie Foxx raiding the wardrobe of Gainsborough’s Blue Boy for Django Unchained. And it’s to the European tenebrist painters that Peter Strickland owes a visual debt in one of the most striking shots in Berberian Sound Studio.

A walking doormat of a man, protagonist Gilderoy is a sound engineer flown in to Italy to work on a sleazy giallo gorefest. Professionally and socially out of his comfort zone, a milieu of disgustingly explicit celluloid violence, hostile non-anglophone colleagues and an expenses receipt that he just can’t get reimbursed, causes him to slowly unravel.

But not all of his anxieties are exclusive to the film industry. It’s the frustration of a monotonous grind of repetitive daily tasks with which most of us will sympathise. Whether

it’s filling endless spreadsheets, stuffing documents in to filing cabinets or tearing out radish tops to simulate the sound of a witch being scalped, repeating the same job day after day after day can do funny things to a person’s mental health. Especially if that person is also under-appreciated.

Which is exactly how Gilderoy feels. Despite being heralded on arrival as a ‘magician’, the plaudits soon give way to the kind of dressing down heard daily in offices everywhere: “Let me tell you what it is to be professional - you don’t question; you don’t argue; you don’t look at your watch. You just do the work you’re told to do and keep your personal opinion where it belongs.” He is an invisible cog in a machine that doesn’t give a damn about him. An anonymity reflected by his domestic life back home, with his mother for a housemate and a friendship group consisting solely of the local Oddfellows.

So when, during yet another power cut in

the studio, he has the opportunity to demonstrate his craft before a captive audience, Gilderoy revels. Conjuring the sound of a UFO using only a lightbulb and a wire rack, candlelight illuminates the bewitched looks on his colleagues’ faces. Strickland cites Caravaggio’s use of chiaroscuro as an influence of sorts, but the scene coincidentally casts an uncanny resemblance to Joseph Wright of Derby’s masterpiece An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump; Gilderoy is the scientist - the artist indeed - dazzling his observers with a spectacle of the likes they have never before seen.

Finally he matters. Years of solitary graft, mixing sound for pedestrian tourist videos, collecting cans of field recordings and mastering his trade as a foley artist pay off. Gilderoy’s no longer just another name in the end credits; he takes centre stage. This anachronistic magician can finally shine under the glow of the candles. Until, that is, the lights are switched back on…

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Jordan McGrath

David Hall

Founder / Editor-in-Chief / Designer

Managing Editor

jordanmcgrath@veritefilmmag.com

davidhall@veritefilmmag.com

thanks: Contributors Ben Nicholson Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy Neil McGlone Evrim Ersoy Stuart Barr Cleaver Patterson Kelsey Eichhorn Luke Richardson Adam Marshall Christina Newland Christoper O’Neill Craig Williams

Proofing David Hall, Dan Auty & Jessica Chamberlain

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Image credits: StudioCanal - 1,8,11,12,13,71,75 / BFI - 14,15,16,17,18,19 / Cannes Film Festival - 28,29,30,31 / Swedish Film Institute - 48, 50, 51 / Eureka Entertainment - 56,57,58,59 / Legendary Pictures - 60, 61, 62 / Common People Productions - 64 / Attitude Film Distribution - 65 / Soda Pictures - 66 / Icon - 67 / Indefinite Films - 68 / eOne Entertainment - 69 / 20th Century Fox - 70 / Metrodome - 72

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