Vérité March 2014

ISSUE #12

V é r i t é MARCH 2014 EDITION

FILM CRITICISM & CINEMATIC DISCUSSION

UNDER THE SKIN Scottish Sci-fi Jonathan Glazer style

also...

The New-Wave of Documentary / Sundance / Berlinale / Serpico / reviews / and more...

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Editor’s Letter

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ell, we’ve made it. Vérité is now one year old. We began this journey back in March 2013 – to highlight some of the most unique, innovative and discussion-worthy cinema around and, in a year where we’ve supplied in-depth coverage to Blue is the Warmest Colour, The Great Beauty, Spring Breakers, Upstream Colour, Stranger by the Lake and more, I think we’ve at least partly succeeded in our original goal. As we look ahead at what 2014 has to offer us, we continue to be excited by cinema’s possibilities.

Our first cover feature was for Stoker, Park Chanwook’s western debut, the work of an undeniable modern cinema visionary. We continue into our second year with yet another exceptionally talented filmmaker – as Jonathan Glazer returns to our screens with the mysterious and hypnotic experience that is Under the Skin. Cinephiles have been salivating at the idea of Glazer’s next project ever since 2004’s under-seen masterpiece Birth and Chris O’Neill gives us the low-down on his latest on page 8.

We also widen our coverage of documentary forms, with Ben Nicholson looking at the development of the art and the impact that recent documentaries have made the last few years. On page xx he argues that we could be in the middle of a documentary renaissance.

2014’s Festival season started with a bang and we’ve got some extensive coverage in this new issue. Joseph Fahim

chronicles his time braving the high altitudes of Park City, Utah at the Sundance Film Festival. Find out some of his highlights on page 20. Vérité was also represented at this year’s 64th Berlinale – Evrim Ersoy tells us about his first year at the festival (page 38) and David Hall points out some of his favourites (page 40). You can find some individual reviews from the festival on the blog – veritefilmmag.com We’ve also begun a partnership with the Swedish Film Institute and will be discussing some of their personal favourite releases since the turn of the century, starting with Ruben Östlund’s Play.

It’s a strange feeling as we hit this milestone of one year in publishing. It takes a huge amount of effort to get this magazine out each month and although there are times when stresses are high as deadlines quickly approach, the reaction from you, our readers, is what makes it all worthwhile. And obviously, although Vérité is mainly run by two individuals, it wouldn’t be anything without our incredible writers. Their passion for cinema is as humbling as their talent. Individually fantastic voices that we’re honoured to capture within the pages of this publication.

And as we look to the future, with the ever present goal of growth and development, our original mission statement will always remain. We’re all about the good movies, baby! Viva Vérité!

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Thanks for reading, Jordan McGrath & David Hall

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“There’s nothing creative about living within your means.”

Francis Ford Coppola

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Contents Features

Columns

Reviews

Loving the Alien - p8

The Man Who Conquered the World - p46

The Grand Budapest Hotel - p60

Chris O’Neill succumbs to the seductive mystery of Jonathan Glazer’s new film, the Scarlett Johansson starring, Under the Skin.

Evrim Ersoy continues his expert analysis into filmmakers we should be watching. This month’s Subject: Rajinikanth.

Under the Skin - p61 Half of the Yellow Sun - p62 Tom at the Farm - p63

Reality Bites - p14

Ben Nicholson highlights the contemporary documentary and speaks about the form’s rise over the last few years.

Masters of Cinema - p52

Robert Makin takes a closer look at the new Masters of Cinema release of 70s police drama Serpico.

The Borderlands - p64 The Double - p65 Calvary - p66

Searching for the Independent Spirit at Sundance - p20 Joseph Fahim takes us through his time at the Sundance Film Festival and lets us know what to look out for in the next 12 months.

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In Defence... - p56 Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy takes the reigns this month as he finds fasciation in a time-capsule teen trifle You Got Served.

Exhibition - p67 The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears - p68

Join the Conversation

@veritefilmmag

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LOVING THE ALIEN Sexy Beast and Birth director Jonathan Glazer returns with a disturbing and provocative British Sci-Fi movie.

Chris O’Neill is seduced

words by Chris O’Neill

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nder the Skin’s credits unfold, without musical backing, against a black screen in simple white text. This is followed by intense close-ups of shapes, objects and light formations which are accompanied by a Mica Levi music score and the muffled sound of a female voice performing indistinct vocal exercises. The sequence is aesthetically beautiful, mesmerising, but the lack of clarification as to what exactly is happening also conjures feelings of unease, dread. Eventually, these precisely-framed images are revealed to be part of a surgical procedure creating something that resembles a human eye, before a white screen appears on which the title card Under The Skin is placed at the centre in black lettering.

An alien life form has been prepared to physically resemble a human being, so she can blend in amongst them on planet earth. Driving around in a van, she stops male passers-by asking for directions, offering them a lift. “Do you think I’m pretty?” she

flirtatiously asks in a well-spoken English accent.

Lured to a rundown house with the expectation of sex, they are taken into a dark room of never-ending vastness. There is no furniture in this barren space, which has a reflective surface. The men brought here do not leave. Task successfully accomplished, the alien goes back out onto the streets of Glasgow to repeat the procedure. She is given no name, and neither are any of the other characters in the story. The narrative is sparse, paired right down to the bone with the minimal dialogue offering little, if any, precise exposition. While evasive, Under The Skin is never confusing. Anonymity and ambiguity are used in a manner that makes the unfolding events riveting to watch.

Under The Skin is Jonathan Glazer’s third feature film, after a nine-year absence. The reason for the gap is because the director took his time to shape the project into something that he found satisfactory. It is commendable that he is so selective and thoughtful about his work, especially given that his acclaimed debut

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feature could have shaped his career in a very comfortable manner.

Sexy Beast was released in 2000, winning critical acclaim and accolades while immediately establishing what would become Glazer’s reoccurring trademarks: dazzling imagery, a welcome sense of ambiguity (in a time when cinema increasingly insisted on blatant explanation), and an oddly-slanted sense of humour. Also notable is his deft handling of actors: Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of psychotic criminal Don Logan, ranking as one of the most memorable characters of noughties British cinema, garnered an Oscar-nomination. Birth, Glazer’s sophomore follow-up, illustrated an even more assured filmmaker.

The effective fractured editing of the previous film is simplified to a more ornate but no less effective style. The so-called Opera Scene is one of Nicole Kidman’s finest screen moments. The camera tracks in over an audience in a theatre to frame a close-up of his star’s face, of which this image is held for a long time. The shot is technically beautiful, while the performance is one of subtle but immense range. On paper, Sexy Beast is a British crime thriller and Birth is a paranormal drama. The pulpy subject matter suggests that they fall into rigidly specific genres, yet they don’t. Glazer used these excessive

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narratives to explore personal themes and fascinations with aesthetics and form, and continues to do so with his latest picture.

“ISSERLEY ALWAYS DROVE straight past a hitch-hiker when she first saw him, to give herself time to size him up. She was looking for big muscles: a hunk on legs. Puny, scrawny specimens were no use to her.” So begins the Michel Faber novel Under The Skin, in which his central character prowls the lonely country roads of Scotland in a beat-up Toyota Corolla, looking for male hitchhikers to pick up. If they are physically suitable, she offers them a ride and questions them to determine if loved ones, friends, or work colleagues are eagerly awaiting their arrival. While they chat, the passengers are intrigued by the strange-looking woman who has large hands, wears thick jam-jar glasses, and makes a point of pushing her chest forward to show off her notably large breasts. Once satisfied if their disappearance will or will not be noticed, Isserley either drives them to their desired location, or injects them with ‘icpathua’, a substance that causes temporarily paralysis. Returning to a base hidden beneath a farm, Isserley hands over each specimen to other members of her race. Unlike her, they have not been surgically modified to resemble human form. Here,

the humans are processed and prepared to be shipped back to the home planet as livestock.

In adapting Under The Skin for the screen, Glazer and co-writer Walter Campbell stripped down the narrative to the bare essentials of the female alien, her mission of procuring men, and the Scottish setting. The extraneous subplots and supporting characters are abandoned, with this leanness making the story even more isolating and insular. The lonely rural roads of the first half of the story are switched for urban Glasgow, the Toyota replaced by a heavy-duty van, and the unusual-looking Isserley becomes an unnamed figure of physical perfection.

Building from here, the film version proves to be very different from the novel as regards the plot, yet it serves as a respectful companion piece since the film remains faithful in tone. What Faber made work effectively in the book – as told from Isserley’s point of view, with an occasional switch in perspective allowing the hitch-hikers to offer their perceptions of her – would not necessarily translate adequately to the screen. Instead, the signature Glazer themes of ambiguity, alienation, unease, and black humour that are in the book are robustly reinterpreted in cinematic, rather than literary, terms.

The anonymous alien is played by Scarlett Johansson who, in 2013, appeared not just in Under The Skin but also Don Jon and Her. These three films showcase the potential she demonstrated a decade ago in Ghost World (2001) and Lost In Translation (2003). There is a raw vulnerability to Johansson’s performance in this film that is maximised by Glazer to its full potential, allowing the actor to display, without a doubt, the finest work of her career to date. There are parallels between the American actor in an unfamiliar land, and the alien on a strange planet, and this is utilised to striking effect. Johansson is barely recognisable with an uncharacteristically jet-black hairstyle, pale complexion and ruby red lips, while the alien has been disguised to not even resemble her own species. Aurally, both character and actor are interacting with others by speaking in a false accent, one that is not their own. The vocal exercises heard in the opening sequence, in which the alien is practising vocal patterns, are actually mimicked from exercises Johansson was overheard using on set to help authenticate her accent. This clear, well-spoken English accent sounds almost foreign against the thick colloquial dialect heard in the film, again enforcing the sense of alienation.

Johansson totally immerses herself into her role, and her embodiment of the character makes it such an exceptional performance. The sequences of her driving around Glasgow, eyes wide open with not just intense concentration, but also bewilderment and endless surprise at her surroundings, are beguiling. One shot in particular memorably lingers for some time on Johansson’s eyes as reflected in the rear-view mirror.

It is night time; the grainy yellow of the streetlights illuminates her features. Her incongruous reaction to

the world beyond the windscreen, played only through her eyes, is mesmerising to watch. In the latter section of the story the female alien decides to abandon her mission and flees from the city to the countryside. There is a child-like sense of wonder to her character from this point on, as she discovers a world beyond her assignment. Most of these sequences contain no dialogue, and what is said is spoken by other characters. Under the Skin relies entirely on Johansson’s reaction to situations.

Sometimes these reactions are humorous, an example being a wonderful expression of bewilderment on her face while watching footage of the late British comedian Tommy Cooper on television. Sometimes it is poignant, such as the sequence where she studies her naked body in a mirror. It is the first time that Johansson has appeared fully nude on camera in a film, but there is no salacious or exploitive agenda here. There is a genuinely touching naivety to her character’s plight as she contemplates her attractive hourglass figure, believing she could seamlessly blend into human society.

Conceptually, Under The Skin is quite experimental in its aesthetic design since it mixes three very different shooting styles that, in a conventional sense, shouldn’t necessarily weave together. Yet Glazer’s overall vision is rigidly precise, appearing to be simultaneously posed and spontaneous, and effortlessly holds together.

By relocating the early action to an urban environment, the alien is thrown into the thick of the action, studying human behaviour up close as she mingles amongst the species. The One-Cam modular camera system, which can achieve a quality digital image that could be placed in small spaces, was developed specifically for Under The Skin. It allowed Glazer to film using hidden cameras, and Johansson to walk along the streets and within the shopping centres of Glasgow, interacting with people.

This approach was also used during the driving sequences, where Johansson would pull over to ask for directions from unsuspecting members of the public who had no idea that a film was being made. Also thrown into these scenes are lesser known or non-actors, whose scripted dialogue was heavily reworked and improvised during the shoot, to sound more naturalistic. Such scenes ground Under The Skin in an identifiable reality that makes the more fantastical events in the story even more disturbing.

The scenes taking place in the alien lair are stage bound. Devoid of furnishings, the sets are either shrouded in bottomless deep blacks, or burning bright whites.

This sterile atmosphere is shot with a certain amount of distance: in the outside world, the alien views the world with fascination; in this location, she is comfortable and it is the viewer who looks on with an almost scientific interest. While something never less than nefarious is suggested from the outset, these scenes have a disarming calmness to them. The actors disrobe, making them vulnerable: the alien strips down to her underwear while the men are completely nude, usually sporting a very

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prominent erection as they try to approach her. These seductions are backed by a piece of reoccurring music by Mica Levi and the slow, soft yet eerie sounds ease along the experience, making it soothing, luring the viewer into a false sense of security. When Glazer finally reveals what exactly is happening to the men who never leave this space, the imagery is disturbing and fascinating, eventually erupting into a startling music shift and visual edits of jolting effect.

The narrative shifts in the latter half of the film when the alien ventures out of Glasgow and into the countryside. The first sequence that takes place in this new setting finds her abandoning her vehicle and wandering into a thick mist. It is a serene moment for the viewer, but mystifying for the character. She has escaped the busyness of the city for a wide-open rural setting but cannot see anything around her due to the dull haze of the landscape. Backed with only the faintest of atmospheric sound, this is essentially a silent moment.

With Johansson’s face framed against a cloudy white background, visually the sequence merges the stark emptiness of the alien lair with these natural earthbound locations. This sense of claustrophobia remains, even when the imagery soon opens up to wider spaces. Several

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sequences take place in a forest where the landscape is vast but feels intimidatingly closed-in by the vertical lines of the trees, while the outer areas surrounding them are covered in snow.

Under The Skin is difficult to easily classify because of its esoteric nature. The film has elements of a road movie, with moments of documentary realism, and is essentially a coming-of-age drama in which a young person simply wants to rebel, grow up and be ‘normal’. Because the lead character is an alien from another planet, this fundamentally places the film in the realm of science fiction. It is, however, as little a straightforward science fiction picture as Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976), or Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1983) is to the traditional vampire horror movie. All three films were helmed by British directors who set out to experiment with form and content as a means of exploring issues and interests beyond genre.

But it would be arrogant not to acknowledge how indebted Under The Skin is to the British genre cinema of the past. Even less audacious and more modestly straightforward examples of British science fiction and horror possess a unique slant that made these films stand apart from their American counterparts. In regards to

plot, one can find the basic story elements of Under The Skin stitched through several films. In Devil Girl From Mars (1954), a vinyl-clad Martian arrives on the Scottish highlands seeking virile Earthmen to repopulate her home planet. Most of the action takes place in a pub, while worried locals drink and try to decide how to save themselves and mankind; Vampyres (1974) features two female bloodsuckers who seductively entice male travellers back to their secluded mansion. Suspicion of their activities is raised by a boorish couple who are holidaying in a caravan in a nearby field. As with Glazer’s film, many of these films were lensed predominantly on location. Filmmakers such as Pete Walker and Norman J. Warren produced several pictures in the 1970s such as Frightmare (1974), Satan’s Slave (1976), Prey (1977) and Terror (1978) that feature cannibals, satanists, carnivorous aliens, and vengeful ghosts. These fantastical science fiction and horror stories are effectively grounded in the day-to-day setting of then-contemporary Britain, allowing them an odd sense of identifiable plausibility due to their surroundings.

There is a gruelling fascination in Under The Skin with some sort of torturous physical alteration or disturbance occurring to the human body before death. Early in the

film a young woman is procured for the female alien for clothing. The seemingly dead figure is stripped and left on the ground. Suddenly a tear runs down her otherwise motionless face as she looks on helplessly at the figure standing over her. This ambiguous moment is merely a precursor to the revelation of what happens to the men brought to the dark room: They float motionless, encased in a liquid-like substance, physically deteriorating and eventually imploding. Their innards, in the form of indistinguishable chunks of offal, rush down a shoot for processing. This sense of violation to the human body produces an unnerving primal reaction in the viewer which can be traced back to Alien (1979), the most famous science fiction-horror hybrid of all time, which was shot in Britain by a director who hails from the North East of England. Ridley Scott’s film features a man used as an incubation device for an alien species that eventually erupts through the chest of its host. Following this sequence there are a variety of suggestive death scenes in Alien that don’t explicitly state what has occurred, but the power of that startling moment is enough to imply that something horrible is taking place off-screen before each character’s demise.

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REALITY BITES Are we living through a golden age for the documentary?

Ben Nicholson investigates

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words by Ben Nicholson

he democratisation of the filmmaking process - spurred on by digital production and online distribution - has led to an enormous boom for feature length documentaries in recent years. With the past year’s substantial and prolonged successes for films such as The Act of Killing, Stories We Tell, Leviathan, and Blackfish, the medium’s profile could scarcely be higher. Indeed, some would go as far as to declare this a non-fiction Golden Age. What has truly epitomised an exhilarating twelve months in the ongoing progression of documentary cinema has been the veritable explosion of innovation both amongst the aforementioned titles and more widely.

In a society dominated by 24-hour news cycles, where footage of conflicts and revolutions are only ever a click away, a dry uninventive presentation of a factual story is

no longer enough to guarantee an audience. Luckily for eager viewers, documentarians appear to be rising to the challenge in their droves, adapting and evolving to push at the boundaries of the medium.

For years, fiction filmmakers have made a habit of utilising the style and visual trappings of non-fiction cinema to imbue their drama with a sense of ‘realism’.

Techniques such as handheld camerawork have become commonplace in everything from micro-budget horror to blockbusting action in order to mirror the visual qualities of non-fiction and lend their narrative an additional level of authenticity. Straight-down-the-line realism has traditionally been the cornerstone of documentary; not only as a mechanism to add weight to a particular argument, but because a reportage style has become synonymous with - and to some minds, necessary to - the presentation of

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The Missing Picture

the real world. Over the past few years, however, filmmakers have more and more regularly adopted alternative stylistic and technical traits to forge a new path for one of cinemas most flexible forms. Just one of the myriad methods that documentary filmmakers have used to explore their form has been to increasingly experiment with elements of narrative cinema in their work. This trend has manifested in the employment of dramatic cinematography, actors to provide imperceptible reconstructions and animation, amongst other things. They have appeared with particular force in the exceptional cinema of the last year, but what prompts directors working in non-fiction to adopt techniques such as these? Is this an attempt to stand out, to further augment their argument, or are they aiming for a deeper, more profound effect?

Despite the proliferation of reportage and talking head documentary over the years, the concept of utilising elements more readily associated with fiction film is not a new phenomenon. Almost a century ago, cartoonist and animator Winsor McCay produced the animated documentary The Sinking of the Lusitania, a propaganda piece about a dastardly German U-boat and its nefarious attack on the eponymous British ship. Presented as a hand-drawn reconstruction due to the lack of photographic record, it forms an extremely early prototype for the films of today that adopt techniques of narrative

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cinema to tell real life stories. In a great number of films that utilise animation and other forms of reconstruction within non-fiction, the motivating factor is the potential to represent on screen an incident or story that otherwise would not be possible. This was, of course, the prime purpose of McCay’s film but equally it provided the opportunity to craft a more emotionally engaging piece.

In addition to appealing to the audience’s patriotism, it infuses the disaster with a personal tragic element that subjectively plays on the emotions of the viewer. The motivations, techniques, and reasons for its success may not be the same as they are today, but this has clear echoes in modern documentary; the recreation of missing footage, bent to the director’s will.

The Missing Picture was released in the UK in early 2014 and is a documentary by celebrated Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh. Himself a survivor of life in the labour camps during the oppressive reign of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, he has spent much of his cinematic career delving into the actions and legacy of this troubling period in his nation’s history. The conceit of his latest film focuses on the fact that the only existing footage that chronicles the period in question comes in the form of governmental propaganda. There is a lost portrait of his childhood out there in the ether that needs to be shown to the world and this he does through intricate

This Ain’t California

dioramas peopled by hand-carved wooden figurines. This results in a harrowing blend of Panh’s own recollections and his attempts, via his art, to work through these memories and feelings as well as to provide a glimpse into Cambodia’s past. Through the use of what takes on the quality of a stop-motion portrait, the director not only seeks to educate about what happened - to literally provide the missing picture - but to expose the underlying pain of such horrors. Rather than allowing the distance that documentary objectivity often affords its audiences, Panh somehow forces us to confront the events in a highly intimate and personal way.

Similarly, several other recent films have adopted forms of animation as a way of representing events or ideas that could not actually be filmed. Marc Weise’s Camp 14 punctuates an interview with Shin Dong-hyuk, the former inmate of a North Korean prison camp, with evocative animated sequences portraying his internment.

There are, of course, practical considerations to take into account on a film of this sort, but Weise and Panh have both chosen a particularly artistic mode of representation over a standard reconstruction with actors. Aside from distinguishing cinematic endeavour from an episode of true crime television, there are clearly important reasons behind the decisions made. An indicator through which to understand this perhaps lies in a film that utilised a

combination of reconstruction forms, for very different effects; Martin Persiel’s self-proclaimed “documentary tale”, This Ain’t California.

A film about youthful rebellion in East Berlin, the film charts the rise of skater culture with live-wire leader, Panik, ollieing his way around the greyer side of the wall in the 1980s. It was soon revealed that a large amount of the purportedly real footage had been recreated using actors - and that the character of Panik may well have been a composite of several real life individuals. Despite the fact that much of the ‘real’ footage was fake, Persiel still used animated inserts; why? The motivation comes from the desire to place the audience inside the character’s head – introducing them to his emotion in a way that most documentaries do not. A naturally distancing medium, the use of hand drawn animation allowed Persiel to illustrate a defining moment in Panik’s life that it would not have been possible either to shoot or to pass off as legitimate footage. This stylised artistic form, with which we as audiences automatically associate character-driven narrative storytelling, was used by the director to lend what was otherwise presented as a factual film a distinct air of subjectivity.

This provides an understandable incentive for the use of animation, and similar, in non-fiction. An audience desensitised to a run-of-the-mill reconstruction, or

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Waltz with Bashir

horrifying photographs of a real life incident, are somehow more susceptible to slip into the emotional space of a moment when confronted with a format from which we naturally expect to invest in a character. In the cases of both Camp 14 and The Missing Picture, there was no footage to show of the time spent in the camps, but even if there had been, the more artful representation strikes a deeper chord with our emotional engagement. This is equally true of Ari Folman’s exquisite 2008 piece, Waltz with Bashir, in which the director’s own memories of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon by Israeli forces are presented in bewitching animation. Similarly to both the films of Panh and Weise, this device is used to portray memories which are almost a polar opposite to the usual notion of a factual account that documentaries are more traditionally in the business of selling.

The conflicting nature of subjective account and reportage style of presenting events is also something that is being toyed with in modern documentary. As with animation, this is no new idea and Orson Welles’ F for Fake is a giddy example of provocatively playing with the notion of what is real. This was also done much more recently, and in different and far subtler ways in films

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such as Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell and the thrilling The Imposter, by Bart Layton. Stories We Tell claims to be telling the strange fable of Polley’s own unusual family history and revelations about her parentage. She does this by conducting various talking head interviews with her extended family and friends, and inter-splicing their accounts with a wealth of endearing archive footage of her now deceased mother who takes on the role of central character. What begins as an examination of the way her family relays the story becomes a far more interesting and clever work when it becomes apparent that this is Sarah’s own, personalised version of events that is ultimately being presented. Having edited and constructed the film herself, she is the authorial voice and this is brought home with the late revelation that the home video footage of her mother - in a similar vein to This Ain’t California - may not be in the slightest bit real.

In Layton’s The Imposter, the subject is also the telling of stories looking specifically at serial con-artist and compulsive liar, Frédéric Bourdin. In his film, Layton blends the boundaries of what is real and what is not to create a sense of unease in the viewer. This is immediately noticeable in the stylistic choices for the talking heads that

The Imposter

are shot in a manner that may be expected by a narrative feature, but is not usually found in non-fiction. With the audience’s mind fed competing signals, Layton proceeds to allow Bourdin to spin his yarn and those watching are sucked in by his words, despite already being aware of his reputation. The Imposter ends with the rug being pulled completely from under the feet of the viewer thanks to a trap initially laid by Layton’s appropriation of cinematographic conventions from fiction cinema.

All of these examples have utilised elements of artifice more readily found in fiction cinema to provoke a subjective reaction, or encourage a subjective experience.

As a culture in which the majority of people are partly cine-literate, documentarians are probing with what they can realistically do to enhance the power and potential of the remarkably malleable medium. Documentary can don the cap of many a genre, riffing on its conventions and tics to attract and hold onto audience attention: a thriller such as Dirty Wars; a biopic such as Hawking; a sports movie such as Undefeated.

There is then the most impressive documentary of the last year that obliterated boundaries rather than teasing them. Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing takes the

power of narrative cinema at its most literal in his bold and dangerous exploration of the Indonesian genocide of the 1960s. Met with hostility when attempting to question officials and regular citizens about these buried atrocities, he finds an unlikely guide in former death squad leader, Anwar Congo. Anwar jokes and brags about the horrendous killing that he executed throughout the purges, demonstrating to camera the garroting technique that he used. Oppenheimer bizarrely convinces Congo and his cronies to reenact their murders in the movie genres of their choice – musical, gangster. The following hour is a terrifying peek into the heart of darkness. What is most startling, however, is the power that this exerts of the formerly unrepentant Congo. Only in seeing and experiencing his actions through the prism of narrative cinema (fifty years after the fact) does he truly come to comprehend the suffering he inflicted on his victims. It is as ridiculous as it is grotesque, but The Act of Killing is the most brazen example yet of a non-fiction filmmaker utilising the conventions of fiction cinema to provoke a subjective and emotional response. Whether this is a fad, or a vital step forward, it’s a fascinating rung on the ever-rising documentary ladder.

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Searching for the Independent

Spirit at Sundance A Sundance report by Joseph Fahim

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words by Joseph Fahim

ritics, me included, often fall into the trap of assessing a film festival judging by a handful of films seen while writing, conducting interviews, attending press conferences and attempting to free brief slots for eating and sleeping. The biggest amount of films a hardworking critic can do in a fest of 100+ films is 25 long features give or take — less than quarter of the output offered by most festivals. We all rely on word of mouth from other colleagues to decide what to miss and we occasionally let our prejudices guide us on what to catch.

For a professional film critic, watching a movie blind in the exceedingly short span of time that are the duration of nearly all film festivals is somewhat inconceivable at this day and age (the avoidance of the largely false hypes the social media generates is another issue).

This is what I felt at the end of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, still the mecca for independent American films and documentaries. The breadth and scope of

America’s biggest film festival was always going to be arduous to sift through, but having been accredited as a programmer for my first visit to the fest, I succeeded to watch more entries than I could ever have managed had I been reporting during the fest.

The impression I was left with about Sundance relates more to the state of American independent film rather than world cinema in general — I didn’t catch as many non-American features as I would’ve liked to, although the general census was that the World Cinema Dramatic Competition was fairly subpar, featuring little of the verve and provocative politics you get in Cannes, Venice or Berlin. And although there have been no shortage of outstanding pictures — the majority of which screening outside what was an otherwise lukewarm US Dramatic Competition — the impression you ultimately get from Sundance is that American independent cinema is in standstill, seeking to immerse in the everyday life of a 21st Century America while struggling for relevancy in

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Boyhood

an ever-changing global cinema.

All habitual themes that make up what has become to be known as a ‘Sundance movie’ were all there: juvenile delinquency (Kat Candler’s Hellion), middle-class boredom ( Joe Swanberg’s Happy Christmas), race ( Justin Simien’s Dear White People), alcoholism ( Jeff Preiss’ Low Down), economic malaise (David Wain’s They Came Together), thirty-something self-indulgent romances (Zack Braff ’s Wish I Was Here) and countless genre pics that break no new ground ( Jack Paltrow’s Young Ones, Marjane Satrapi’s The Voices, Jim Mickle’s Cold in July, John Slattery’s God’s Pocket, and Jeff Baena’s Life After Beth, to name a few). The vast majority of these films are frustratingly non-ambitious, settling for middle-of-the-road aesthetics and worn-out narratives while relying on their accomplished performers to conceal their shortcomings. If Sundance is a mirror for the future of American Indies, it certainly doesn’t look so fetching.

Prior to the start of the fest, founder Robert Redford heralded the 2014 edition a return to roots, promising more underground features and less of the glamour that has tarnished Sundance’s reputation since the beginning of the noughties, but that was not entirely the case.

Hollywood stars were front and centre at the fest, attracting the limelight other smaller offerings desperately needed. Some of the A-listers that descended upon Park

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City with new productions included Kristen Stewart (Camp X-Ray), Mark Ruffalo and Zoe Saldana (the J.J. Abrams-produced Infinitely Polar Bear), Anne Hathaway (Song One), Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader (The Skeleton Twins), Keira Knightley (Laggies), Ryan Reynolds (The Voices) and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman (A Most Wanted Man, God’s Pocket).

As accomplished some of this year’s features were, there was nothing in there that matched the feverish enthusiasm that greeted Beasts of the Southern Wild, Fruitvale Station or Take Shelter from previous years…except for a sole picture that took Sundance by storm and put everything else in the shade.

Richard Linklater’s 12 years in the making Boyhood was the very last entry added to this year’s line-up and was unquestionably the one film that wholeheartedly deserves to be dubbed a masterpiece. Starring Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette, Linklater’s daughter, Lorelei, and newcomer Ellar Coltrane, this intimate family epic follows the young life of a Texas-born middle-class boy (Coltrane) from childhood to adolescence, charting his relationship with his aspiring musician father (Hawke), his academic mother (Arquette) and the multiple partners she erroneously takes along the years. Much ink has already been spilled about Linklater’s greatest achievement to date, and deservedly so. A work of great compassion made with remarkable love and dedication; Boyhood

Whiplash

is by turns grand and personal, funny and melancholic, hopeful and rueful — a Balzacian vision of modern-day middle class America that transcends its geographical boundaries to present an astonishing mosaic of broken dreams, lost loves and moral uncertainty. Most of all, it’s a film about growing up — the unbridled aspirations, the agony of separation, and the excitement of a life brimming with endless possibilities. A month and a half after seeing it at a late screening at the humongous Yarrow Theater, Boyhood continues to haunt me; leaving me with memories of a life and a world I cannot wait to revisit again.

The other highlight of this year’s Sundance was Damien Chazelle’s Grand Jury Prize winner, Whiplash, the best movie in the US Dramatic Competition by a wide margin. The Spectacular Now star, Miles Teller, plays aspiring young drummer, Andrew, who gets his major break when he’s chosen by renowned conductor, Terence Fletcher ( J.K. Simmons) to join his band. Any hopes for a smooth sailing are dashed on Andrew’s first day at the band as the sadistic Fletcher reveals his fangs.

What initially starts as a series of extreme humiliations gives way to a fascinating mentor-protégé relationship drama about art and obsession that drips with sweat, blood and tears. I’ve been a huge fan of Chazelle’s largely unseen — and for my money, vastly superior — black & white debut feature, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench

(2009). Whiplash, which was picked up by Sony Pictures for distribution, is a completely different animal with more tangible, compact narrative exquisitely written and executed with a near-perfection. The musical numbers are breathless, the performances are pitch-perfect and the dynamism of Chazelle’s direction renders him the most exciting American discovery of the year. A surefire hit Whiplash is bound to be.

An older talent who finally had his first major break in Sundance this year was Irish director Lenny Abrahamson with his fourth feature, Frank, starring Domhnall Gleeson, Maggie Gyllenhaal and a largely unseen Michael Fassbender who spends most of the film hidden under a giant papier-mâché that was the hottest piece of merchandise in Park City. Gleeson plays wannabe musician, Jon, who gets recruited by an up-and-coming progressive rock band, headed by enigmatic leader Frank (Fassbender) who, for mysterious reasons, never takes off his giant mask. Struggling to be accepted by his hostile bandmates amid the difficult recording of their first LP, Jon turns to social media as the band steadily gains a surprising cult following. Worlds away from his past social realist works, Frank largely plays as broad rock comedy before it takes a poignant route near the end. It’s less coherent than Abrahamson’s past films, tackling an amalgam of ideas such as art vs. commerce, mental illness, and absurdity of a world governed by web traffic, yet the What Richard Did

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Frank

White Bird in a Blizzard

director skilfully ties these strands together, producing a work of true beauty, wit and charm.

The most pleasant surprise of the fest for me was Gregg Araki’s deliciously depraved White Bird in a Blizzard, featuring a mouth-watering cast that includes The Descendant’s star, Shailene Woodley (an absolute revelation), Eva Green, Christopher Meloni, Thomas Jane and Angela Bassett.

Based on Laura Kasischke’s novel of the same name, the film centres on a middle-class family rocked by the disappearance of its matriarch (Green) who may have had an affair with the boyfriend of her sexually promiscuous daughter (Woodley). Araki uses Kasischke’s story to explore his signature themes of sexual emancipation, suburban disquiet and adolescent turmoil. More so than his recent works, White Bird possesses a tightly concocted narrative that lends an aura of maturity to the proceedings. It’s a typical Araki film, but it’s more polished, more thought-through and more emotionally involving; a coming of age story about a girl finding in her sexuality the liberation her mother never dreamed of having.

Critics were divided on Maya Forbes’ Infinitely Polar Bear, a whimsical autobiography about growing up with a bipolar father (Mark Ruffalo, in one of the finest performances of his career) in a late ‘70s Boston. Some critics found its treatment of manic depression too cartoonish and downright disrespectful. I was personally charmed by

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its whimsical approach that doesn’t trivialize the disease as much as presenting a fresh take of an exceedingly familiar subject often dealt with in the most forlorn fashion. The film wears its sentimentality on its sleeves, but it never descends into the manipulative Forrest Gump-like schmaltz, marching along to the moving ending with grace and humour.

Equally divisive was Mike Cahill’s sophomore effort, I Origins, his follow-up to the 2011 hit, Another Earth.

Cahill’s new sci-fi vehicle centres on a molecular biologist (Michael Pitt) attempting through a breakthrough he makes in eye evolution to disprove the existence of God. A chance encounter with a mysterious girl (Spanish newcomer Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) he meets at a party leads to a globe-spanning odyssey that would challenge the most fundamental of his beliefs. The naysayers found I Origins preachy, unfocused and rather condescending in its treatment of religion and faith, and whether you like the film or not may depend on your acceptance of its views on these subjects. Scratch the overt surface of the story and you’ll find a gorgeously lensed, deeply heartfelt meditation on love lost and found; on fate, death and grief. I Origins is, first and foremost, a love story unnecessarily dragged into religious politics that nonetheless, ultimately succeeds to transcend its miscalculations.

The most original film I saw in Sundance was Charlie McDowell’s debut feature, The One I Love, a highly

I, Origins

The One I Love

inventive relationship comedy starring Elizabeth Moss and Mark Duplass. They play a married couple who go on a retreat in a vacation house to salvage their collapsing marriage. What happens beyond this point should not be kept under wraps, but the mystery of the house that subsequently transpires forces the two to confront their self-images and the true reality of their relationship.

The divergences the film takes at the final act are quite distracting and dissonant in tone, but The One I Love remains an intriguing look at the unrealistic expectations we place on our partners and the elusiveness of acceptance and forgiveness.

Two of the biggest crowd-pleasers came from the UK. The first is Belle & Sebastian frontman, Stuart Murdoch’s, directorial debut, God Help the Girl; a musical based on his 2009 acclaimed record of the same name.

Set in Murdoch’s Glasgow hometown, Emily Browning plays a suicidal wannabe musician trying to form a pop group as she gets trapped in a love triangle between a bad boy French guitarist and her benevolent band-mate.

The narrative of the film is chockfull of plot holes and inconsistencies and the story doesn’t hold together (a lack of plausible motivations and emotion depth add insult to the injury). And yet, in spite of all its grave flaws, the film strangely got under my skin, knocked me with sheer delight and eventually won me over. God Help the Girl is a collection of splendid songs deserving a better storyline,

and yet its jovial mood, the charisma of its performers and the carefree attitude at heart of the film make it work. It’s a colourful bubble-gum of a movie; a hipster musical that was easily my biggest guilty pleasure of the fest.

The second title happens to be the very last film I saw in Sundance: Michael Winterbottom’s highly anticipated The Trip to Italy, the sequel to 2010’s The Trip. The theatrical version of the forthcoming mini-series follows the same template that made the original BBC production such a sensation: Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon continue to quarrel, impersonate countless film stars — from Robert De Niro to Christian Bale — and struggle to overcome their palpable insecurities. Like its predecessor, The Trip to Italy is an understated examination of middle-age anxiety; of frayed masculinity threatened by time, ill choices and diminishing prospects. The Italian backdrop adds a shade of warmth to the otherwise acerbic humour that remains as biting as in the first production. Some of the jokes feel recycled, the impersonations outgrow their welcome in parts, and although it does not offer any major progression to the original series, The Trip to Italy is, all in all, one of the funniest, smartest comedies of the year.

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Vérité’s Top 5 The Couture Collection

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5.

Funny Face (1957) Director Stanley Donen’s gossamer-like musical comedy proves that even as far back as the 1950s the public was obsessed with the gilded world of beautiful models, bitchy magazine editors and temperamental photographers. This story of a young girl plucked from obscurity by a scheming editrix and her top shot fashion photographer shares endless similarities with the cutthroat magazine business and refined echelons of couture.

Which is hardly surprising as the character of the editor (infused with haughty indifference by Kay Thompson) was rumoured to be modelled on real-life fashion legend Diana Vreeland, whilst the inspiration for Fred Astaire’s photographer apparently derived from super snapper Richard Avedon.

As for Audrey Hepburn in the role of the waif-like girl, catapulted to stardom by the medium of glossy magazines? She glowed as the feisty yet impressionable youngster in a film which, like the world of high fashion it depicts, has stood the test of time thanks to its effortless style, wit and sophistication. Cleaver Patterson

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4.

Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel (2011) There was never any in-between with Diana Vreeland, the eccentric fashion editor whose career at American Harper’s Bazaar and later its arch rival Vogue, spanned five decades between the 1930s and 1970s. As the documentary Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel proves, you either loved her or hated her.

Written and directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland, Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt and Frédéric Tcheng, this film feels like a fast flick through one of the magazines Vreeland edited. Spliced with archive interviews with the woman herself discoursing on her colourful life, it follows her from a childhood in Paris at the opening of the 20th century to her career at Bazaar and Vogue, before she reinvented herself as custodian of The Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute. The woman who makes Anna Wintour appear a pussycat in comparison, jumps from the screen in an acidic and gossipy cocktail which gives a fascinating insight into the career of one of fashion’s true icons. Cleaver Patterson

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3.

The September Issue (2009) The interest surrounding this fly-on-the-wall documentary was as intense as that which shrouds the hallowed couture houses of Chanel and YSL. Sold as a chronicle of the editing process for American Vogue’s biggest ever issue, the September 2007 edition, there was really only one reason people watched it: to see whether the magazine’s notorious editor, Anna ‘nuclear’ Wintour, was as bad as she’s rumoured to be, and whether the similarities between her and the character of Miranda Priestly from the hit novel The Devil Wears Prada (reputedly based on Wintour) were mere fiction.

Answer? Yes, though her legendary dismissal of anything (staff or clothes) that doesn’t meet with her exacting standards was shown to be leavened with fairness and a total dedication to the Vogue brand. Oddly enough, the one thing (or person) that everyone remembered was not Wintour, but rather her flame haired second-in-command Grace Coddington. As mysterious and alluring as Vogue itself, the magazine’s Welsh born Creative Director was the star of the show, displaying sophistication, style and wit which few in the world of fashion, or anywhere else for that matter, could hope to emulate. Cleaver Patterson

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2.

Bill Cunningham New York (2010) The world of fashion is peopled with numerous colourful characters, several of whom feature in this engrossing documentary on one of the industry’s true individuals. In an environment where people make their mark by standing out from the crowd, photographer Bill Cunningham has sustained a long career as a chronicler of fashion and street life for The New York Times, by doing just the opposite. His secret - which for thirty-five years has allowed him to capture the evolving history of style as it unfolds around him - has been his ability to immerse himself in it whilst remaining refreshingly unaffected.

Through candid discourse with Cunningham’s friends, employers and neighbours, as well as those he features in his often-blunt street shots, this film by documentary-maker Richard Press attempts to decipher photographer’s illusive appeal.

Whether it’s successful in this aim is open to debate. However the result is as stimulating and fascinating as its enigmatic subject. Cleaver Patterson

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1.

Qui êtes-vous Polly Maggoo?

(1966) Qui êtes-vous Polly Maggoo? (Who Are You, Polly Magoo?) is a veritable French fancy, as avant-garde as the space age creations modelled during its opening sequence. Shot like a pseudo-documentary, the film follows the eponymous Ms Magoo, an American fashion model, as she is pursued not only by the makers of the television show ‘Qui êtes-vous’ in-which she is to feature, but also by the prince of a small Soviet bloc country who has his own designs on the ‘girl of the moment’.

More than Polly and her escapades however, it is the fashion show that introduces the film that is truly astounding. This obscurity of 1960s cinema is worth watching for this alone, as it sums up everything about the fashion world in the space of six minutes. Here eccentric editors fawn over unwearable clothing, created by an egotistical designer and worn by emaciated models in a setting which is, quite literally, from another planet. All this set to a soundtrack of choral music makes for a piece of celluloid imagery as haunting and exquisite as anything you’d see on the catwalks of Paris or Milan. Cleaver Patterson

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T H FESTIVAL G E W N D A words by Evrim Ersoy

ith Italian cinema making waves across the world, London sees the return of one of the most prestigious film events on its calendar – Cinema Made in Italy.

Returning to Kensington’s Cine Lumiere from 5-9th March, Cinema Made in Italy promises to showcase the best of Italian cinema, as well as Q&A sessions with some of the hottest actors and directors from the country.

Organized by Institute Luce (Istituto luce cinecittà) in Italy and the Italian Cultural Institute in London, the festival will showcase 11 diverse and exciting films this year – ten fictions and one documentary. Some of the highlights can be seen on the next page.

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VIVA LA LIBERTA director Roberto Ando Featuring yet another finely nuanced performance from Toni Servillo, Roberto Andò’s madcap comedy-drama is one of the timeliest satires on Italian politics.

Enrico Olivieri is the leader of Italy’s opposition party and succumbing to the intense pressure he’s under; one day he simply disappears. Fearing failure, the chief aide recruits Enrico’s twin brother Giovanni to step into his shoes. But there’s a catch – Giovanni is bipolar and unhinged, returning back to society after a stint in a mental hospital. It’s not long before his eclectic and odd behaviour attracts the attention of the electorate who take to this weird man and the party’s fortunes begin to rise unexpectedly. Meanwhile, Olivieri has fled to Paris to hide out in the house of an old-flame and finds he is assisting on the set of a film.

Andò’s aim is not to make an out-and-out critique of Italian politics, but to find a middle ground between gentle comedy and sharp satire and - to a large extent - he succeeds. Armed with a talented cast, he makes the most of the outrageous situations and plays the film for broad laughs.

Toni Servillo delivers a terrific performance as Olivieri/Giovanni, with the distinction between the brothers clearly reflected in their speech and mannerism. If anything, the film needs more conviction with its ideas – as it stands it’s a pleasant diversion at best; an entertaining entry into the political satire subgenre.

THE HUMAN FACTOR director Bruno Oliviero Inspector Monaco has been trying to avoid facing the emotional consequences of the death of his wife by burying himself in as much work as possible and trapping himself within the offices of the Milanese police.

However, a curious murder case involving a high-profile personality from Milan’s nightlife will draw Monaco back onto the streets as the crime is somehow related to his wayward daughter. As the investigation deepens, the forlorn detective finds himself treading in darker waters than he ever anticipated.

Building upon Oliviero’s documentarian roots, ‘The Human Factor’ represents an intriguing and unique attempt to marry police procedural drama with an underlying human element. His decision to flesh out almost everyone involved or affected by the crime adds an interesting element to the film – a humane angle severely lacking from a lot of the examples of the genre.

The cinematography is nothing short of stunning: a beautiful, dark and mesmerizing portrait of Milan that overseas audiences will not have seen before. As Monaco digs deeper and deeper into Milan’s underbelly, the city takes on a persona of its own and anthropomorphises to become a key character in the proceedings.

Although some of the logical conclusions about the crime take too long for on-screen characters to realise, this is still a remarkable film and an interesting entry into Italy’s take on the police procedural.

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Pan-Asia Film Festival 2014

N

ow in its sixth year, this popular film festival aims to bring the best of cinema from Asia to a global audience. 2014 marks the festival being spearheaded by the East End Film Festival team for the second year running.

With seven UK premieres, the Festival – which runs between 26th February and 9th March - will screen some of the most interesting films to come out of Asia in the last year across some of London’s most prestigious cinema screens.

On the next page are some of the highlights:

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UNFORGIVEN director Sang-Il Lee The opening film for the Pan-Asian Film Festival 2014, Lee Sang-il’s lush remake of Clint Eastwood’s trangressive Western is an abject lesson in how to reimagine a story without losing sight of the original telling.

Unforgiven stars Ken Watanabe as the ageing samurai Junbee Kamata who has left his killing days behind him after seeing too much bloodshed. However, when an old friend reappears with an offer to earn some money by bounty-hunting two settlers who have harmed a prostitute, he decides to saddle in one last time, with disastrous consequences for all involved.

Re-locating the action to Hokkaido in North Japan, director Lee Sang-il manages to capture the conflict between the new and old Wild West style with an imaginative and new Japanese angle.

Also playing on the undercurrent of tension between the native of Hokkaido and the new Japanese settlers, he successfully brings the film a new sense of identity.

Slavish dedication to the original material also means that this new incarnation feels largely unnecessary. The changes feel more often than not cosmetic and take away from some of the emotional raw power of the material.

There’s no denying the incredible cinematography – the lush and equally taxing landscapes shot on 35MM astound, amaze and remind one easily the power of cinema.

Clearly a talented director, Lee will find that he can probably make even more interesting allegories to the history of Japan, the nation’s nature of violence and the plight of the outsiders within Japanese community if dealing with new, fresh material.

DANGEROUS LIASONS director Jin-ho Hur A re-imagining of the classic French 18th Century novel, this lush Chinese adaptation transposes the classic story to the grand world of 1930’s Shanghai.

The film tells the story of Ms. Mo (Chung) who recruits the help of her ex-lover Xie Yifan ( Jang) in order to corrupt a young virginal girl who is due to marry a powerful and rich figure on the Shanghai playground. Yifan considers the challenge beneath him and instead wants to seduce Du Fenyu (Zhang), a gentle and rich widow. Miss Mo encourages his efforts by throwing down a considerable gambit: if Yifan can succeed in his seduction, she will give him what he desires the most - herself.

Director Hur Jin-ho certainly creates a world of visual wonder: the grandiose elegance of 1930’s Shanghai serves the timely story well; a fittingly opulent world that is populated with rich settings and a sumptuous colour palette.

Despite its visual flare, the timely story feels oddly anaemic when compared to the original text or any of its many adaptations; especially Stephen Frears’ film from 1989. The lack of vigour is surprising considering the wickedly funny nature of the book, with the tragedy in the story’s second act losing almost all of its inherent potency. Instead, it feels as if there’s a sense of moralizing and judgment towards the two leads which detracts from the story and keeps the audience at arm’s length.

All in all, this is an interesting attempt to re-create a unique story from a uniquely Chinese angle, yet not as cinematically engaging as one expected it to be.

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...and then we take Berlin words by Evrim Ersoy

H

olding a place of high-esteem amidst the big European film festivals, Berlin International Film Festival remains one of the most prestigious platforms for new films appearing on the festival circuit.

Held each February in the beautiful city of Berlin, the festival this year celebrated its 64th anniversary - no mean feat considering the struggle of festivals with drawing audiences and more importantly, a budget.

Scattered mainly amidst the screens at the famous Potsdamer Platz, the festival is incredibly successful in creating a mini-world within Berlin’s heart. Turning into the street leading into the square begins an assault on the senses like no other: the road scattered with billboards announcing the titles playing at the festival, the restaurants and cafes teeming with people from all around the world wearing festival passes, the official cars lining up the street whilst the drivers share a smoke and a chat, autograph hunters ensconced around the red carpet from the early hours of the morning until the very night, stars standing by the doors of the hotel waiting to make their

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exit or entrance, the red carpet seeing arrivals and departures almost non-stop.

Building upon the close proximity of cinemas within the square, Berlin cleverly mixes business with art – the market screenings are also part of the hustle and bustle of everyday Festival life, two separate worlds gently mixing together as one.

Berlinale Palast is the main screen in the square. Easily holding up to 1600 people, this cinema is home to the premieres every night and during the day serves as the main screen for the numerous press corps. Two giant screens placed outside constantly relay the almost 24/7 coverage of the festival from German TV networks - an interesting and certainly unique feature.

This is repeated at the Sony Centre Complex across the road from the Palast. It’s not unusual to see locals eating lunch or tourists having a break, sat down within the complex watching some of the stars arrive. It makes for some very entertaining moments in those very rare minutes of downtime.

Within the Sony Centre you’ll find the Cinestar. With

its eight modern screens, each holding between 150 to 400 people, it is the hub for the industry screenings.

Shuttles between the market locations and the screens constantly ferry people to-and-fro and the buzz in the air is a tangible and exciting element.

Over the road, Cinemaxx Potsdamer Platz sees press running through its 19 screens, as well as members of the public. It’s an impressive complex. Housing its own bar and restaurant inside and runs films from early morning to very late night.

The festival also uses other venues within the city, some further out than others, to ensure that the audiences can reach films in locations closer to them. It’s an admirable trait; something other festivals (such as London’s very own LFF) have started experimenting with in hoping to increase audience numbers.

Much has been said about Berlin’s official line-up, but it’s harder to discover the happenings in the market. Spread out over a number of conference halls, hotel rooms and suites, Berlinale’s film market is where the business of film comes alive. Distributors, sales agents, buyers, heads of acquisitions are racked up from standto-stand picking up titles, making deals for films in post-production, securing pre-sales for films just beginning production and more. There are repertory companies that sell rights for classic titles, and stands representing almost every country in the world and the whole affair is busy and alive from dawn to dusk.

To the average cinemagoer that will most probably never need to attend a market, the room is a cornucopia of madness. The pace is frenetic, almost frightening and

meeting schedules for seasoned attendees would redefine the meaning of the word ‘busy’ but, let’s not give you the wrong picture, films and craft are still top priorities here.

Big titles and small titles all vie for their time for the audience’s gaze. From the sublime, such as director Till Kleinert’s niche take on the slasher genre, Der Samurai; to the ridiculous, with director Jordan Rubin’s Zombeavers - almost every stop on the spectrum of filmmaking is represented.

Major publications such as The Hollywood Reporter, Screen Daily and Variety publish daily magazines to cover all the deals, screenings and titles within the market. It’s not unusual to find yourself weighed down with almost a stone’s worth of glossy paper within minutes of arrival. To dig through these densely packed magazines is also part of the job: finding that key title hidden amongst others, playing a key role in the success of any release schedule.

All in all, Berlin represents an almost-perfect example of the world of filmmaking. The glamour and the grit go hand-in-hand: stars arriving in Potsdamer Platz in their best dress, while deal-makers frantically rush from room-to-room and cineastes sit back and take comfort in the latest film from their favourite directors in one of the packed-out cinemas. It’s a world of madness and momentum punctuated by the common denominator and enthusiasm in film that brings all these disparate groups together, albeit for very different reasons. Berlinale is a festival experience that comes highly recommended to anyone who’d like to see the world through different eyes.

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David Hall’s

64th Berlinale Top 3 3. WU REN QU director Hao Ning There were a lot of critics who felt Ning Hao’s lawless road movie had no place in the festival’s competition strand. But after ten days wading through rather a lot of ponderous and mediocre entries, it was bracing to watch something so amoral, nihilistic and entertaining.

And a film that, within its relatively modest parameters, achieves exactly what it sets out to do.

Hao’s film was apparently finished over six years ago and I have no idea whether it went through any reshoots or edits in that time, but the story rattles along regardless; a yuppie nightmare flick transposed to the harsh, widescreen vistas of the Taklamakan desert in Xinjiang, about a big shot lawyer Pan Xiao (Xu Zheng) who takes his violent client’s beloved mustang as down payment for getting him off a charge. A big mistake as the acquisition of the car sets in motion as series of increasingly violent and absurd encounters – with the amoral huckster receiving continual comeuppance as he tries to escape the No Man’s Land of the title.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, The Road Warrior and U:Turn provide the visual and thematic influences, Pan undergoes Bruce Campbell levels of humiliation and Jiao Jiao (Yu Nan) brings welcome humanity as a sassy hooker who provides the film’s (barely locatable) heart. Sepia-toned, blood soaked and with a rousing cod- Morricone score, this will receive a warm welcome from B-movie aficionados.

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2. KRAFTIDIOTEN director Hans Petter Moland Stellan Skarsgard had a very good Berlinale, with two restrained, underplayed performances for frequent collaborators; firstly in in Von Trier’s incendiary Nymphomaniac Vol: 1 and in this, his third film with Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland. Kraftidioten was one of the surprises of a rather disappointing competition, mining big laughs and proving the hot ticket with festivalgoers, (outside of the press screening it was incredibly difficult to get into any of the showings). I was unaware the film had already been picked up for UK distribution but it is easy to see why. This is a pacy, darkly comic treat in the mould of the recent international Norwegian hit Headhunters that blends Reservoir Dogs and Fargo (with a dash of Seven Psychopaths thrown in for good measure).

Skarsgard is the small town snow-plough man and local hero Nils, who becomes embroiled in a rapidly escalating drug war between two warring lords when his son is found dead from a supposed overdose. The adversaries – Norwegian Graven (Pål Sverre Hagen) and Serbian Papa (Bruno Ganz) – are comic psychopaths and violent hi-jinks and deadpan misadventures ensue.

There’s a lot of local comedy in this one, and while it’s hardly a work of great depth (early Tarantino is a key influence) this is an exceptionally assured and funny black comedy that should get a wider audience.

1. BOYHOOD director Richard Linklater The definite crowd favourite of the Berlinale festival, Richard Linklater’s remarkable twelveyear project appeared to be a shoo-in for the top prize. Instead the director had to settle for his own award as the top spot went to diffuse serial killer melodrama Black Coal, Thin Ice. Boyhood though, is a film whose reputation is surely only going to continue to grow regardless of trophies. A massive hit at Sundance it arrived with the kind of word of mouth that gets one worrying about disappointment, but the excitement proved justified. Despite a worrying length of 164 minutes and the jukebox overfamiliarity of using Yellow by Coldplay over the opening credits, this is a quietly amazing film that flies by, and might best be described as the film Cameron Crowe may make when he grows up – charting the trajectory from boy to man of Marcus and the milestones that occur during twelve years in Texas from 2000-2012.

Concerns this might be a gimmicky or over-engineered project proved hollow. An undertaking of this kind is incredibly risky but, however Linklater planned it, Boyhood works seamlessly. The recurring characters, including Marcus’ unlucky-in-love mum (Patricia Arquette) and perennially adolescent father (Ethan Hawke) becoming as familiar as friends and family over the films’ duration. The subtlety of Linklater’s transitions creates an extended time-lapse feel and I could happily have watched a subsequent twelve years. Given this director’s ‘Before’ trilogy, who can say that won’t happen?

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Play Go as you

The first of a 10-part series in partnership with Swedish Film Institute hightlighting some of their favourite releases since the turn of the century, Jordan McGrath takes a second look at Ruben Östlund’s provocative and troubling study in psychological and technological violence

B

introduction by Swedish Film Institute

ased on true events in Gothenburg where a gang of young immigrant boys robbed other boys with a Swedish background, mainly for their mobile phones. The unique aspect was the lack of physical violence; the robberies were committed using a rhetorical method where the robbers used the image of themselves to strike terror into their victims.

The film had its world première in Cannes and toured many international festivals, and the critics were virtually unanimous in declaring Östlund a genius. This was followed for three weeks by that autumn’s big film debate in the Swedish media with discussions in newspapers, online TV and specially arranged panel debates. The question was whether or not the film was racist.

Author and playwright Jonas Hassen Khemiri ignited

the discussion with an article in Sweden’s biggest daily, Dagens Nyheter, entitled “47 reasons why I cried when I watched Ruben Östlund’s film Play”. He wrote for example, “I’m sick and tired of non-whites being portrayed as criminal, violent, homophobic manipulators”. Film critic Hynek Pallas, a doctoral candidate on the subject of whiteness, quickly responded saying that, on the contrary, the film reveals the racist power hierarchy in society.

After that there were countless opinions from artists, filmmakers, debaters and culture writers, as many for as against the film’s handling of the subject. Cultural leaders confessed their own prejudices, and Östlund himself made contributions that added further fuel to the fire.

People’s opinions varied greatly – that Play was primarily about class that it highlights universal human power relations and sheds light on skin colour hierarchies. Others

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wrote that the prejudices are in the eyes of the beholder, and still others think that the film is about how the adult world is blind to the raw reality that children grow up in.

Josefine Adolfsson, screenwriter of the film She Monkeys (Apflickorna), said that the ceiling is low in Swedish film: “Most Swedish films are so mediocre and uninteresting that a film you actually want to talk about is given epithets like ‘controversial’ and ‘provocative’, even though in this case the film uses relatively cheap tricks and is deeply conservative and stereotypical”.

moralistic CCTV camera as it stands back and watches characters from afar. I called it a ‘masterclass in human behaviour and rhetoric’, where the audience are the passing witnesses to the criminal act at the centre of the film; an examiner to the situation without having the emotional connection to intervene. Although Östlund has adopted this aesthetic for his first three features (I am yet to see his forth outing, Tourist), it has never felt as vital to the overall impact of the film as it does with Play.

His first, 2004’s Gitarrmongot, shows you a glimpse at the director’s ingrained captivation with human interaction. Although it is by far the director’s weakest film, his style is (forgivably) rougher around the edges. It’s all n argument could be made that Ruben too aimless and pandering, the youthful rebellion of an Östlund would be more attuned as a psy- artist yet to mature. But there is irrefutably something chologist than a film director. A statement discoverable in Gitarrmongot, some sort of voice cravnot intended to diminish the director’s ob- ing to find a focus for it to cling onto and dissect. It was vious talent behind the camera but com2008’s Involuntary, which earned Östlund his first trip memorate his authentic voyeuristic gaze and fascination to Cannes (he would return with Play in 2011), that saw with human behaviour, as well as his success at dismanthe director find a subject fitting of his vision. Told in tling what makes us as a society tick. He’s a provocateur five unconnected stories spanning age and social class, in many ways, but as other filmmakers such as Lars von he explored the idea of group behaviour and the intrinTrier use boldness in their incitement, Östlund’s leans on sic differences of how we react to situations in part of a the side of subtle debate, opening avenues of social disgroup: either be trying to save face or show off, and what course that divide opinion. And Play is a perfect example we would do individually. The fixed eye of his camera is a of the director playing with that line. perfect technique to present a forensic illustration of the In my original review for the film, I spoke of Östlund’s behaviour of the ‘gang’ mentality. vision and how his insouciant style acts like some sort of A different approach regarding the ‘gang’ mentality

words by Jordan McGrath

A

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would return for Play, this time highlighting its ability to oppress the weaker individuals. Yet what makes Play so remarkable is that this is no general bully tale, it exists on a far more complex level. After interviewing the perpetrators, Östlund was surprised by how these young teens showed an understanding of the social prejudices and stereotypes of their race and class and how they incorporated it into their robberies, stating that they ‘fully understood the stigmatising image of the black man, which they deliberately used to create an implicit sense of menace’. Where some members of the public have wrongfully seen the ‘roles’ the gang give themselves as Östlund’s interpretation of the black youth, it in fact subverts race; using the knowledge of cultural influences and political correctness against their victims. Tim Robey, in his review for The Telegraph states ‘the movie is partly about a kind of paralysis wreaked by political correctness — a terror of being thought racist’ and he is completely correct.

In a scene where a father of one of the gang’s victims confronts the boy who stole his son’s phone, a passer-by exclaims “You can’t do that to an immigrant!” leading the father to reply “What’s the fact he’s an immigrant got to do with it, he’s a thief ”.

Of course, the father dealing with the situation physically is a misstep on the characters part - but his point is still valid. There’s no hiding that commenting on racial stereotyping is always going to be delicate ground to

stand on and, the film plays it a little too close to for comfort. I disagree with that examination and would go further and say that Östlund should be admired for having the bravery to tackle a story that has such political stigma surrounding it. The fact that it isn’t the director’s projection of black youth on screen but the projection of a heightened version of what the children believe black youth to be shows a sense of intelligence and self-image that makes these crimes shocking, impressively planned and well executed.

And the director’s choice to cast non-actors in the central roles is real turn of brilliance. Östlund trades on the realism of his actors in each of his films and the genius of their dialogue (especially in Play) and shows a responsibility and respect for his actors.

The control of his frame and the orchestration of his actors, which feels organic and improvised but was undoubtedly vigorously rehearsed to make each scene unfold in a realistic manner, is as if they were short pieces of theatre. Östlund has been on record stating that YouTube is one of his main influences, and you can see how he infuses rough realism of authentic living. It’s a truly modernistic way of filmmaking that initially many feel jarring, but delivers innovative and invigorating results.

His films may feel identifiable to Swedish society but, beneath the locale and the language, they hold truly universal themes relatable to us all.

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The Man Who Conquered The World 46

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Hail the King Rajinkanth This month, Evrim Ersoy brings us the superstar of Tamil cinema – Rajinkanth

words by Evrim Ersoy

S

ee if you can name a figure within the annals of cinema whose work can do the following – ensure instant success, grant blockbuster status to any film they’re involved in, book cinemas up to 3 months in advance for every screening, cause a riot during personal appearances and count fans in every single country of the world. You might be able to fulfil one or two criteria easily enough, but to find someone who fits the bill entirely is extremely hard – so perhaps it’s no surprise that there can only be one man who manages to do all that – Rajinikanth.

You may never have heard the name before – and perhaps it’s hard to imagine an actor whose name is not commonly heard could command such power within cinema, but there’s no-one like Superstar Rajini and there’s no way of grasping his phenomenon easily.

Most people will have come across the actor’s work

on the internet - the clips of action scenes from Indian cinema always make the rounds – the titles of the films lost but the insane, over-the-top nature of the stunts are always a highlight. Well, if John Woo made heroic bloodshed the insane opera of violence then credit has to go Rajinikanth who practically created a new sub-genre of masala film.

Masala films are comprised of blockbuster films within Indian cinema that freely mix genre, with action, comedy, romance, drama and melodrama all simmering in a melting pot; like the spices in a masala mix, all mixed together with numerous musical sequences.

Within Bollywood, masala films are everywhere, usually released in major Festival periods like Diwali. However, the influence of the masala films spread across the entire continent, with every regional cinema also producing their own flavour.

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Rajinikanth is the Superstar of Tamil cinema first and foremost. True, his star shines equally bright within every region – he has had cameos within almost every major blockbuster. His position is that of an inexplicable and fantastic figure that affects every single individual obsessed with the magic that is Indian cinema.

Born in 1950 into a Marathi family, he finished school and started various jobs, from carpenter, to coolie and bus conductor. His humble background would serve him well during his later breakthrough, as the man on the street could relate to Rajini and his success as opposed to those born within the higher castes of society.

Taking his chances with acting against his family’s wishes, Rajinikanth was noticed in a play by Tamil film director K. Balachander who advised him to learn to speak Tamil – advice which the star in the making followed and was handsomely rewarded for.

From 1975 until the end of the decade, the actor quietly formed an impressive array of roles, getting praise along the way. The young actor brought a sense of 70’s cool into his characters which the moviegoers immediately took to; the way he spoke the lines, the way he moved and even the way he flipped his cigarette was

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copied by wanna-be Rajini’s everywhere.

However, it was the 1980s that brought his breakthrough into the mainstream. He starred in Billa, a Tamil remake of the action thriller mega-hit Don that saw Rajini play dual roles. The film became his first massive commercial success, and he continued to play dual roles in films such as Johnny and Netrikan.

Perhaps one of his most successful films was in 1983 when he was paired with Amitabh Bachchan – then the biggest rising star of Bollywood – in Andha Kanoon, Rajinikanth’s first Bollywood film.

It’s worth stopping for a moment to look at Andha Kanoon, as it summarises the entire attraction of the actor and is an appropriate reflection of Indian cinema within the decade. In the film, Rajinikanth plays Vijay Kumar Singh, a bad-to-know man who we first encounter riding through the city on a motorcycle clad in all-leather while funky 70s electronica blasts through the credits. The screen is tinged with red, signifying this man’s anger as he rides through the city breaking every traffic rule. When the credits are finished, he pulls up at a decrepit burnt-down house and we get our first look at him.

Leather gloves, leather jacket and manic eyes suggest

“The international adoration for Rajini shows no signs of subsiding. His famous lines are shared over and over again on the internet, Rajinikanth facts compete with those of Chuck Norris for exaggerated humour ” Charles Bronson’s avenger in ‘Death Wish’ and the guess is proven to be true when he speaks swearing revenge on the men which destroyed his family – a destruction shown in a lurid and ugly flashback.

Vijay‘s revenge plan is somewhat hindered by Hema Malini’s Inspector Durga Devi Singh, who is also his benevolent sister. She has tried to stop her brother from committing any crimes, and her familial tragedy has only made her dedication to law stronger.

Completing this triangle of violent energy is Amitabh Bachchan’s Jan Nissar Akhtar Khan, another angry young man who has also lost his faith in the word of the law.

Vijay and Jan immediately bond, with the latter deciding to help the former exact his revenge.

A hard-hitting revenge film, Andha Kanoon is a prime example of how the masala film became popular: with catchy, yet vicious songs – for example, Bachchan’s first number is an indictment of the entire criminal system within India; and violent action. The film celebrates its anti-heroes with a glee that is not often seen in cinema.

These characters are outsiders with plenty of violence in them to make society pay for all its ills. It’s thrilling, exciting stuff.

Following the film, Rajinikanth continued into the second half of the 80s with superhit after superhit. From the heart-wrenching story of brotherly love in Padikkathavan (1985), to the story of a son’s revenge in Mr. Bharath (1986); everything he touched seemed to turn into gold.

The 90s brought complete commercial stardom for Rajinikanth with not a single box-office failure during the entire decade – a fact hard not to admire. Working with Bachchan again in 1991, he appeared in Hum, perhaps their most commercially successful pairing ever. The hits continued with Annamalai (1991) and Mannan (1992).

He also wrote his first screenplay for 1993’s Valli, where he also had a cameo. Toppling all these plaudits, his most successful film of the decade was Baasha from 1995 – an industry record breaker.

Baasha is a great example of a typical Rajinikanth vehicle: an exciting, over-the-top crime action film that encompasses almost every imaginable characteristic of both genres. He plays Manickam, a humble auto driver who keeps himself to himself and avoids confrontation wherever possible. One of his fares is a girl named Priya for whom he has developed feelings.

Manickam also has siblings, with the sister studying

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to be a doctor and the brother on his way to becoming a police officer. Through a number of strange events, people surrounding the siblings who try to abuse them inexplicably end up in hospital. The siblings confront Manickam about his true nature and his revelation becomes the turning point of the movie.

Unbeknownst to them, the humble taxi driver leads a double life as Manik Baasha - the most notorious Don in Bombay. Sporting one of the most impressive beards seen in the history of the screen and armed with killer one-liners, Rajinikanth rises to the top of the underworld by murdering all those before him. The scenes of him avenging his friends’ death by killing all those responsible are kinetic, exciting sequences shot in blazingly gaudy style. Baasha also is a friend to the people - an underworld Robin Hood – adding a kind dimension to his murderous character. Soon enough, Baasha finds himself in a direct confrontation with another Don, Mark Anthony, a pure evil, sadistic character obsessed with bringing Baasha down.

The rest of the story follows a pattern we may have seen before, with fights, confrontations and mistaken identities. But it’s Rajinikanth’s screen presence that forces the film to have a dizzying forward momentum and incredible power. By the time the final showdown has rolled, it’s hard to believe the film has been going on for over two hours.

This persona of slightly comic, exaggerated action man – a combination of Arnie, Stallone, Bronson and Eastwood – is Rajinikanth’s standard. His stunts defy every rule of gravity and physics the world knows and the set-pieces are bigger than anything Michael Bay has ever imagined.

And yet, the megastar is always a kind of everyman, appealing to the normal people in the audience in a way no other star can. Symbolically, he is one of the audience, rather than someone who appears as if he came from another world.

The following decade, Rajinikanth struggled with success, leading to his biggest film flop Baba released in 2002. Written by the man himself, the film follows the retired gangster who decides to get back into the ring and start fighting against political corruption. The distributors were so incensed by their losses on this title that Rajini repaid most of them out of his own pocket. A rare flop, the title saw Rajinikanth take a break from cinema to recoup his losses.

However, his return in 2005 was yet another success, with Chandramukhi becoming the longest Tamil film ever made. But the best was yet to come, with 2010’s Enthiran, the revived superstar made his biggest hit in India

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and worldwide.

To understand the impact of Enthiran - reportedly the most expensive Indian film ever made - one only has to look at its impact in other parts of the world. In America, the film sold out in every cinema it was scheduled to play in six weeks before release date; in the UK, it only took three months. The Rajinikanth phenomenon was spreading quick and fast.

Enthiran is an incredible, boisterous, brilliant science-fiction action film. Again in a dual role, Rajini plays K. Vaseegaran, a doctor who makes an android by the name of Chitti based on his own image (another dual role for Rajini). As they prepare for a panel evaluation, Chitti learns about the world and the despicable people that populate it. However, Dr. Bohra (Danny Denzongpa) wants to use Chitti for his nefarious means, which backfires when the evil robot gains self-awareness, kills him and creates an army of replicas.

What follows is a showdown never before seen and never to be repeated within the history of cinema – the army of Chittis wreaking havoc on the city, while Vaseegaran tries to stop his creation. The CGI sequences are astonishing, one particular feat of computer wizardry occurs when the army of Chittis merge into a giant whole to crush anything in their path; the scene supposedly took years to conclude and watching the film on a big screen it’s almost impossible not to be awe-struck. Musical numbers are equally inventive, with one song-anddance taking place inside Chitti’s robotic mind, a mash of Space Station 5 and Italo Disco videos.

The character of Chitti became so popular that Rajinikanth made a special appearance in Shah Rukh Khan’s science fiction bonanza Ra.One – reportedly the crowds started clapping and whistling as soon as the superstar made his appearance, and they did not stop until the sequence was over.

Reportedly dogged by ill-health, Rajinikanth has not made any films since Enthiran, though a motion-capture historical epic starring the great man is in the works.

The international adoration for Rajini shows no signs of subsiding. His famous lines are shared over and over again on the internet, Rajinikanth facts compete with those of Chuck Norris for exaggerated humour and his stunt sequences are watched on YouTube by millions every day.

The story of an ordinary man attaining superstar status is an interesting story in itself, but as a glance into the beating heart of Indian cinema, Rajinikanth’s filmography offers the best route.

Long reign the Superstar!

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AVAILABLE ON AMAZON KINDLE

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Masters of Cinema

Serpico Robert Makin gets down and dirty with perhaps the quintessential 70s police drama

words by Robert Makin

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t’s all about the roast beef sandwich. Ten minutes into Sidney Lumet’s seventies crime drama masterpiece we see the fresh faced, recently graduated Frank Serpico (Al Pacino) on his first beat as a uniformed New York cop. Stopping off for lunch in a greasy spoon diner with his assigned partner, he’s introduced to the owner, Charlie, who lets them jump the line and offers up some cream of chicken soup.

Much to the grievance of Charlie, Serpico decides he’d rather have a roast beef sandwich. He’s new to the game; he doesn’t know the rules and the way things work. When the sandwich arrives it’s fatty and inedible. Just as he’s about to complain his partner stops him and gives him the low down. Charlie’s an OK guy, he gives the cops free food and they give him break on double-parking during deliveries.

“Can’t I just pay for it and get what I want?” asks Frank.

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“Generally you just take what Charlie gives you,” his partner replies.

It’s the first hairline crack that will eventually lead to him watching his ideals and perceptions of what it is to be a New York law-enforcer shattering before his eyes. Frank looks down at his lean sandwich; it’s one of the small unofficial privileges that come with being in the NYPD, and it tastes like shit.

The real Francesco Vincent Serpico, known to his friends as Paco, has become part of New York folklore. A Korean War vet, he joined the force in 1959 and eventually worked his way up to becoming a plainclothes policeman in and around Brooklyn and The Bronx.

Whereas most of his fellow officers lived in the suburbs he lived downtown in Greenwich Village, the bohemian epicentre of the city’s counter-culture movement. A

laid-back tea drinker surrounded by anxious and agitated caffeine fiends, he resembled the kind of person they usually arrested rather than an actual cop. He was a loner, an outsider, and eventually a despised pariah within the force.

From 1967 onwards, along with another idealistic police officer named David Durk, he began a crusade against institutionalised corruption within the New York police force. But when the authorities that insisted on “cleaning their own laundry” continuously failed to take action he took his story to The New York Times, making the front pages in 1971.

Serpico retired in 1972 after being shot in the face during an attempted arrest on drug dealers and left for dead by fellow officers.

When the story hit the headlines it caught the attention of hard-boiled investigative journalist and author Peter Maas. In 1969, Maas had become a household name when his seminal exposé of the Mafia, The Valachi Papers, became a bestseller. It told the story of convicted informer Joseph Valachi, the first member of a mafia family to break their sacred code of silence and acknowledge the existence of a criminal underworld network known as the Cosa Nostra. It was later made into a film in 1972 starring Charles Bronson.

Serpico’s was a different kind of story, at the centre of which was a man of the times whose experiences reflected two epochal moments in American history that would define a generation: the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the shocking details that were gradually emerging in regards to the Watergate scandal.

They were profoundly significant incidents that instilled a deep mistrust of authority and an anxious paranoia over the American public. The message was that if you stood up for what you believed in and wanted to make a change for the good of mankind you would be killed, and the people in power were nothing but a bureaucracy of crooks cocooned in protective red tape. The illusion of common decency had been strangled to death in the common conscience.

With Serpico, Peter Maas had another bestseller on his hands; one that personal business manager to the stars, former insurance salesman and nightclub agent Martin Bregman thought would make a great movie. As a manager, Bregman had a number of big names as clients, including Barbara Streisand, Woody Allen, and a promising new face called Al Pacino. Bregman wanted to become a producer and make his mark on cinema, and the story of Serpico gave him that opportunity.

First on board was scriptwriter Waldo Salt.

Blacklisted during the McCarthy witch-hunts for being a member of the American Communist Party, after years of writing for TV under a pseudonym, Salt made a Hollywood comeback in 1969 with his screenplay for Midnight Cowboy. Although apparently brilliant, his original draft for Serpico was far

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too epic in scope.

Norman Wexler was brought in to bring it down to an accessible length. Son of a Detroit factory worker, the deeply troubled Wexler was a manic-depressive who suffered severe episodes of psychotic mania, once resulting in imprisonment after he threatened to assassinate Richard Nixon whilst on an airplane flight. But despite his seriously unbalanced and unpredictable mental health issues, he’d managed to carve out a successful career as a reliable scribe. His writing style was sparse and sharp; his dialogue was like a pounding rubber stamp of authenticity.

Wexler had received a Best Screenplay Oscar nomination for his work on another seventies classic, Joe (1970), the director of which was originally slated to helm Serpico. John G. Avildsen was a filmmaker with one eye on the counter culture’s effect on society and another eye on under the counter absurdity. His weird reflections of seventies mores were the kind of films that probably arrived in brown paper bags with strict instructions not to be screened during daylight hours, titles such as Turn On To

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Love (1969), Guess What We Learned in School Today (1970), and Cry Uncle (1971), one of the first films distributed by b-movie maestros Troma Entertainment and subsequently banned in Norway and Finland until 2003.

Due to artistic differences, Avildsen was dropped from the project and replaced by another hired gun, Sidney Lumet. After years of directing in theatre and then moving onto television, Lumet made his stunning cinematic debut with the stagy but compelling courtroom drama 12 Angry Men (1957). He then drifted back and forth from television to cinema, from one genre to the next, occasionally making an effective impact with films such as Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1962), The Pawnbroker (1964) and The Hill (1965).

Lumet’s increasingly eclectic output continued throughout the seventies, beginning with a documentary on Martin Luther King, King: A Filmed Record (1970), frantic crime caper The Anderson Tapes (1971), and The Offence (1972), one of the most deeply unsettling and disturbing films of the decade and featuring one of Sean Connery’s greatest performances. The following Child’s

Play (1972), a tale of schoolteacher rivalry and satanic pupils, is perceived as one of his many missteps, inciting comparisons to the John Mackenzie’s Unman, Wittering and Zigo (1971).

Nevertheless, by now Lumet had established a reputation as a pragmatic, flexible, collaborative, socially conscious director with a meat and potatoes attitude towards filmmaking. He was an energetic straight shooter with a solid ability to tell a good story. But it was with crime dramas that he really hit his stride. There was something about betrayal and corruption that brought out the best in Lumet, Serpico being one of his greatest achievements, the quintessential gritty seventies New York crime thriller, and a worthy reminder that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

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Serpico is available on NOW courtesy of Eureka Entertainment. www.eurekavideo.co.uk

“He was an energetic straight shooter with a solid ability to tell a good story. But it was with crime dramas that he really hit his stride.”

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In Defence...

Time-Capsule Teen Trifle You Got Served

words by Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy

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n 2002, the MTV personality Iann Robinson was sent on the road with the then-hot new boyband B2K. The conflict wrote itself: the host of metal show Headbanger’s Ball would butt heads with the four young men flipping girls into a frenzy across the nation, a battle waged between masculine rock and effeminate R&B, men with integrity versus shirtless airheads, the old’n’wise against the young’n’dumb. And yet, Robinson was charmed by their personalities over their work ethic and considered them to be his “four new buddies” after a few days spent discussing tattoos, videogames and marine biology. It matters not that Robinson cannot recall which member he’s talking to in a photo from his Flickr account, but what matters that he was bowled over by them. The B2K charm offensive was well underway.

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Two years later and with the charm offensive at full pelt, B2K became the stars of their first screen vehicle, Chris Stokes’ You Got Served. Stokes was the mogul behind B2K and their spiritual predecessors Immature, both signees of his record label TUG Entertainment.

(Fun fact: flavour-of-the-month Drake collaborator Jhene Aiko was originally part of Stokes’ empire.) The film, which he wrote as well as directed, takes place in the underground culture of Los Angeles street dance. Best friends and fellow dancers David (B2K frontman Omari ‘Omarion’ Grandberry) and Elgin (Marques Houston, frontman of Immature and Roger from Nickelodeon sitcom Sister, Sister) are the champions of the LA street dance scene, but are one day toppled by a villainous crew of dancers from Orange County. Their egos bruised, a series of events lead to the disillusion of their

“From a cinematic perspective, You Got Served is

not a very good film aside from the kinetic quality of its many dance sequences. But its quality is secondary to what it represents. ”

friendship, most importantly David’s incognito relationship with Elgin’s sister ( Jennifer Freeman) and a drug deal gone wrong with a local crime lord (Michael Taliferro). All roads lead to the finale, a dance contest with a $50K cash prize - “just enough money to change our life!” one character exclaims - and a guaranteed cameo in rapper Lil Kim’s new video, where David and Elgin will collide with their OC rivals.

Stokes’s move into the film arena was set to take B2K to another level of fame, yet the group had mysteriously split by the time of release. And while You Got Served was a box office success, it was critically mauled by critics more interested in making fun of urban vernacular than anything else. The New York Times spoke pleasingly with itself: “the title is street talk for ‘you have been defeated and thoroughly humiliated’”. Elsewhere, attention was called to Stokes’ too-flashy directorial decisions and large swathes of repetitive plot. His film entered pop culture almost immediately as a target to be mocked, from South Park to the Wayans Brothers and the entirety of the

Twitterverse. Houston’s career never ascended much further, Omarion’s solo career bypassed film almost entirely, and Stokes is nowadays more notorious for allegations of molestation than he is for his mid-noughties empire.

(Regarding Stokes’ purported sexual abuse, Linda Hobbs’ investigation on the matter for Vibe’s July 2008 issue is an essential read and can be found on Google Books.)

From a cinematic perspective, You Got Served is not a very good film aside from the kinetic quality of its many dance sequences. But its quality is secondary to what it represents. Stokes’ film is one of the last notable examples of the teen-pop movie vehicle, a lineage that ranges from the heights of Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night to the lows of David Kellog’s Cool As Ice. Yet the time-tested use of the silver screen as part of the pop takeover has shifted in recent years, with documentaries taking over from narrative fiction. Madonna’s 1991 docufeature Truth or Dare was once the highest-grossing non-fiction film in box office history, but has since been dethroned by non-fiction pieces like Justin Bieber: Never

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Say Never and One Direction: This Is Us. This shift in format highlights how the relationship between an act and their fans has changed: where audiences once desired to see their idols perform on screen whatever the context, they are now given feature-length glimpses into their lives that reflect the immediate persona-building of the social networking era. You Got Served may have only just celebrated its tenth anniversary but feels like a museum piece in 2014, a chronicle of a different era of star making.

As the recent successes of Never Say Never and This Is Us show, the lure of the teen ideal is a somewhat eternal concept. Idols come and go - some become cult favorites, some are brought into the canon, some fade into obscurity, and some become Scott Walker. But the intended effect remains the same: show some talented kids having fun and make an audience of (mostly) young girls lose their minds. The acts may go out of style; decibel-popping screams don’t. At the height of their powers, B2K were the biggest African American boy-band on the

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planet, a distinction that appears to have disappeared as black artists fade from the higher reaches of the Billboard charts.

The EDM-led sound that rules over modern pop is a rendering of dance music that denies the black (and gay)-supported evolution of the genre in areas like Detroit and Chicago. EDM music has become the choice genre of many modern boybands. The ones that don’t - like One Direction and new bucks The Vamps - are actively chasing traditional rock tendencies, a swift denial of the Nineties and early Noughties wave of R&B/soul influenced boybands ranging from Blue to *NSYNC. Meanwhile Miley Cyrus, undoubtedly the teenpop solo star of the moment, is one of many successful Caucasian performers that reaped rewards in 2013 performing music associated with a genre of black origin. Pharrell Williams - a collaborator to both Cyrus and Omarion - topped the Billboard Hot 100 at the end of February, making him the first black artist to do so since 2012.

Watching You Got Served in a modern context is

alarming as you find yourself aware of how music has changed on a cultural level – just as traditionally black music has become co-opted by white artists in pop music, there remains a dearth of black representation in cinema. Stokes’ film is pure popcorn fluff, with his script incorporating every tired movie trope possible from the aforementioned shadowy drug lord, a cute kid needing a mentor and an ambitious young woman offered entry to an esteemed college while lacking the funds to accept. In crafting the story around the musical acts of his empire, he places a black character in every integral role of the movie. Even though their race is never explicitly referred to onscreen, David and Elgin’s OC rivals are cocky white guys who get their comeuppance – a racial turning of the tables as old and effective as it was when Sweet Sweetback vowed to collect his dues.

Yet the dance movie genre that Stokes arguably revitalized has become a largely whitewashed cinematic space, with many like-minded street-dance films following in its wake. Hugely successful dance movie franchises like

the Step Up series get much of their energy from hiphop and R&B but relegate black characters to supporting roles without ever displaying the level of racial progressiveness that, say, the Fast and Furious franchise presents.

Fittingly, the musical choices in the Step Up movies have leaned more and more towards the pulse of EDM, redressing the origins of street dance by separating it from its hip-hop influence. The dance movie feels as though it is regressing in matters of racial representation, which makes it emblematic of a larger problem in film culture.

Even genuine success stories like Malcolm D. Lee’s The Best Man Holiday are effectively ghettoized, with the crowd-pleasing dramedy sniffingly referred to as a “RaceThemed Film” in a now-notorious USA Today headline.

You Got Served’s breakout success was indicative of a cultural moment that has now passed, a pre-monocultural era that found Stokes and his acts at their commercial peak. The film is a trifle, but even trifles can have legacies.

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release date 7th March

cert (15)

director Wes Anderson writer Wes Anderson starring Ralph Fiennes, F. Murray Abraham, Mathieu Amalric, Saoirse Ronan

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Review by Luke Richardson

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Beyond the corduroy suits, if there’s one thing that American filmmaker Wes Anderson is famous for, it’s his meticulous pursuit for perfection in the frame, often at the annoyance and befuddlement of the audience. In his eighth film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, the indie darling shakes things up by delivering his most lurid work to date; a preposterous, bells and whistles farce that is every bit as narratively captivating as it is beautiful to look at.

Set in a gargantuan, rosé coloured Alps-side resort in pre-war central Europe, The Grand Budapest Hotel is unlike any place you’re likely to visit on your travels, not least because it resides in the fictitious country of Zubrovska. The uppity bourgeois atmosphere would be in tatters if it weren’t for Monsieur Gustave (Ralph Fiennes), a finicky hotel concierge with exacting standards, agreeable parlance and a Casanova-like appetite for the Budapest’s elderly female clientele. In a moment of rare compassion, Gustave takes the hotel’s impassive new lobby boy Zero (a deadpan star-in-the-making Tony Revolori) under his wing to teach him the tricks of the service trade.

What starts as a polished situation comedy quickly turns into a cat-and-mouse caper when one of Gustave’s most precious darlings, Madame D. (a prosthetics clad and virtually unrecognisable Tilda Swinton) kicks the bucket and bequeaths the libidinous concierge a priceless Renaissance portrait in her will. With the familial heirloom and his juvenile sidekick in tow, Gustave goes on the run from Madame D.’s maniacal son Dmitri (Adrian Brody) and his merciless henchman (Willem Dafoe) who will stop at nothing to get the painting back in the family estate.

Alongside his regular repertory (featuring Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman and then some) there’s enough room for new players to shine, including Jude Law and Tom Wilkinson playing the same humble author recounting the story from different decades; to Saoirse Ronan – debuting her native Irish accent on the big screen – as Zero’s canny love interest and prodigious pâtissier, Agatha. The biggest revelation on this extremely bankable cast list is Ralph Fiennes, who trades in his token thespian sternness for a brilliantly flamboyant portrayal of Gustave, delivering his most exciting screen appearance since Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges.

While Anderson never drops his famously stringent tableaux framing, this is perhaps his most commodious movie to date; a holistically Euro-centric portrait filled with microscopic visual gags, ornate window dressing and homages to everyone from Murnau and Kubrick; to Lubitsch, Greenaway, Tati and Egon Schiele. Supported by a hilarious and piquant script (inspired by the jovial work of Viennese writer Stefan Zweig), the film rollicks along at an irresistibly cartoonish pace, rekindling the same kinetic spark and buffoonish approach to violence as Anderson’s stop motion animation adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. Drenched in primitive, childish glee, with The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson drops us right into his labyrinthine box of toys and childish ideas. His most cinematically rapturous film to date, you’ll leave beaming from ear-to-ear and desperate to check-in again.

Review by Shelagh M. Rowan-Legg

Many books and films set in and around world events are told through the lens of a personal story, a person or persons whose daily life is affected (usually negatively) by the upheaval of war, crime or natural disaster. Such is the case with Half of Yellow Sun. Directed and written by Biyi Bandele, it is based Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel about the lives of twin sisters in Nigeria, before and during the civil war of the late 1960s.

Condensing a long, dense novel into a film is not an easy task, and sadly, the film is only partially successful. While it conveys the trials of the sisters’ love lives, the relegation of the war (by far the more interesting part) to almost cursory status leaves much to be desired.

The first half of the film introduces the sisters, Olanna (Thandie Newton) and Kainene (Anika Noni Rose); raised with an upper-class British education, they return to their home to pursue very different paths. Olanna moves to a university town to teach, and lives with revolutionary Odenigbo (Chiwetel Ejiofor); Kainene becomes a successful businesswoman and marries a white English professor, Richard ( Joseph Mawe). Most of this half is taken up with Olanna and Odenigbo’s personal problems, including his affair that leads to another woman’s pregnancy. While it can be interesting to show a personal story alongside a larger, more dangerous one like war, so much time is devoted to the personal in the first half that I almost couldn’t wait for the characters to be put in danger to make is more interesting.

The precarious political situation is discussed in what seem like obligatory after-dinner-party dialogue scenes, and inserted real news footage from the time, but it is not until nearly an hour into the film that the war begins. The use of the news footage grabs the audience’s attention, and scenes of bombing are presented in such tight frames as to feel as real to the audience as to the characters. However, there were so many scenes that I wished were longer, such as discussion on the political situation, the fate of the houseboy who was kidnapped to serve in the army, or Kainene’s business dealings, which would have been far more engaging than the rather melodramatic and almost soap-opera-esque beginning.

The film overall feels superficial; while the performances (particularly from Newton and Rose) are great, there is no time or room given for development. Presumably, Bandele has selected the parts of the book to make the narrative move, but has sacrificed emotional connection with the spectator.

A more in-depth look at the conflict would have made a stronger parallel to the sisters’ lives, a deeper engagement with the conflict more intriguing.

The film is rather too much of a cinematic ‘Nigerian Civil War for Beginners’.

Half of a Yellow Sun

release date 11th April

cert (15)

director Biyi Bandele writer Biyi Bandele starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton, Joseph Mawle

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Review by Chris O’Neill

Under the Skin release date 14th March

cert (15)

director Jonathan Glazer writers Jonathan Glazer, Walter Campbell starring Scarlett Johansson, Paul Brannigan, Antonia Campbell-Hughes

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During interviews and Q&A sessions surrounding Under The Skin, director Jonathan Glazer is evasive in his responses. He talks about the practical aspects of the production but skirts around offering any explanations of the content, preferring to leave readings open to individual interpretation.

This ethos can be applied to Under The Skin as a work in itself. It is a mesmerising film that works best when seen with as few preconceived notions as possible, so viewers can draw their own conclusions upon leaving the cinema.

It follows an anonymous female alien (played by Scarlett Johansson) who arrives on earth disguised in human form. Driving around Glasgow city in a large van, she stops male passers-by asking for directions, flirtatiously offering them a lift. Lured to a rundown house with the expectation of sex, they are taken into a dark room of never-ending vastness from which they do not leave. Task accomplished, the alien goes back out to repeat the procedure again and again. But when one particular encounter affects her deeply, she re-evaluates her mission and decides to flee to the countryside.

This leads her on a journey of self-discovery as the alien grows comfortable with her human form, and contemplates the possibilities of living as one.

As with Sexy Beast (2000) and Birth (2004), Glazer displays an audacious but lean visual style, a tantalising sense of ambiguity, and a deft handling of actors. Conceptually, Under The Skin is quite experimental in its aesthetic design since it mixes three very different shooting styles – urban scenes often shot with hidden cameras, slick stagebound scenes of the alien’s lair, and the wide-open spaces of the countryside. In a conventional sense, these shouldn’t necessarily weave together, but Glazer’s overall vision is rigidly precise, appearing to be simultaneously posed and spontaneous, and effortlessly holds together. In adapting Michel Faber’s novel for the screen, the core narrative elements have been kept, but everything else has been paired down to the bare essentials. As a result, Glazer’s third feature is spare with its narrative, which allows the filmmaker to build on it as a sensory experience. The minimal dialogue offers little, if any, precise exposition. Anonymity and ambiguity are used in a manner that makes the unfolding events riveting to watch. Johansson is a revelation. After a series of solid but forgettable studio movies and many detours into the Marvel Comics’ universe, it is easy to forget how good an actor she is. There is a raw vulnerability to her performance that is maximised by Glazer to its full potential, allowing the actor to display, without a doubt, the finest work of her career to date.

With Don Jon and Her both released recently, it is a welcome return to the type of movies where Johansson made her mark, and she will hopefully continue along this path.

Review by Shelagh M. Rowan-Legg

Canadian director Xavier Dolan’s fourth feature is a strangely affecting rural thriller adaptation of the stage play of the same name. Noir is a new territory for Dolan, but he brings to it his established themes of queer identity, the marginalized and ostracized, and the rage of raw and uncontainable love.

Tom (Dolan) drives to the Quebec farm for the funeral of his recently deceased lover, Guy. On arrival, he discovers that Guy’s mother Agathe (Lise Roy) knows nothing of her son’s sexuality, and Guy’s brother Francis (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), a seemingly stereotypical rural homophobe, wants to keep it that way on threat of violence. As Tom spends more time in the hostile rural environment and with Francis, he finds himself caught up, somewhat willingly, in the family’s dark hidden secrets.

The opening credit sequence sets up the disjointed framework: a long overhead shot shows Tom’s car - an out-of-place urban presence in this decidedly symmetric farmland - with a non-diegetic orchestral aria heard while Tom screams the lyrics to an unheard but obviously different song, one in which his rage and pain lashes out. The music then switches to a more quotidian urban thriller style as Tom wanders the empty farm searching for the family. The majority of the film’s shot focus on Tom’s face is in close-up, which is somewhat appropriate as this is his struggle and danger: trying to reconcile his acceptance of his queer identity with what he finds is the incredible hostility of the rural environment and the realization of how little he knew of his lover. The thriller overtones are part Highsmith, with the repressed pseudo-homosexuality of Francis far more overt in his tango obsessions and threats of rape, and part Hitchcock, with shades of Psycho in the Oedipal narrative and North by Northwest in its implication of the rural as a place of murder and violence in isolation. As Tom stays beyond the funeral, he almost succumbs to a kind of Stockholm syndrome, wearing Guy’s clothes and doing farm chores, becoming his double in form and subservience to Francis, who both hates and obsessively loves him. When in its thriller mode, the film creeps its relentless destruction on Tom and Francis like a fog in the night.

The film walks a fine line between its domestic drama and rural thriller generic combination, and admittedly, Dolan is not always successful at blending the two. The constant close-ups on Dolan’s pain-racked face become somewhat self-indulgent, and more focus on the mother’s pain and possible complicity in her deceased son’s troubles might have given the story a bit more spark in the third act, which drags a bit in its lack of focus. But overall, it is an effective thriller, and Dolan shows a deft hand at genre film, one he will hopefully show again.

Tom at the Farm release date 4th April

cert (TBC)

director Xavier Dolan writer Xavier Dolan starring Xavier Dolan, Pierre-Yves Cardinal, Lise Roy

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The Borderlands release date 28th March

cert (15)

writer Elliot Goldner starring Robin Hill, Gordon Kennedy, Aidan McArdle

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Review by David Hall

director Elliot Goldner

A micro-budgeted UK horror film that cuts its cloth accordingly, eschewing cheap-jack CGI in favour of atmospherics and dialogue, The Borderlands was one of the standouts of last year’s London Fright Fest – tucked away on the Discovery screen where it delighted jaded genre fans looking for a something a little different. Inevitably, with a production on this modest scale, there are a few ragged moments and off-key performances, but the accent on characterisation pays huge dividends – and the unsettling and claustrophobic dénouement offers up some of the most gripping, claustrophobic, heart-in-mouth horror since The Descent.

Splicing the contemporary (and, currently, financially successful) vogue for both occult-infused horror and found footage, the set-up is simple but effectively deployed. The Vatican deploys a team of paranormal specialists led by Deacon (Gordon Kennedy) and his cameraman and techie Gray (Ben Wheatley collaborator Robin Hill) to visit a tucked-away village in the West Country and investigate an alleged miracle in the local church.

The local priest is utterly convinced and the footage seems believable enough, but Deacon is deeply sceptical – having been here many times before, with various hoaxes unveiled along the way. Gray though, is impishly intrigued by the idea of something supernatural existing. The classic sceptic/believer set up then, entertainingly explored through our protagonists’ chalk and cheese personas.

The Borderlands, efficiently helmed by Eliot Goldner, has an effective slow-build sensibility, throwing some creepy, off-kilter moments in along the way, and has fun with some of the over-familiar tropes of both the occult and ‘reality’ horror genres.

A South America prologue aside, for the most part the film takes place in and around traditional British settings; remote cottages, the pub and the church itself. This puts it firmly in the ‘weyrd’ England tradition that dates back to M.R James and was so expertly personified in the 1970s BBC James adaptations, as well as a series of peerless and spooky short-form televisual drama from the same era. Nigel Kneale’s classic The Stone Tape, which also involves paranormal investigations, springs immediately to mind as an influence here.

Appropriating found-footage elements in a way that plays fair and make dramatic sense, The Borderlands also benefits from a brace of easy and relaxed performers – who react to the subsequent events in ways that are relatable and believable. The script, by Goldner, understands that in the world of B-movies even 90 minutes can feel like a long time if you are stuck with screeching incompetents you couldn’t care less about, and the dialogue is mostly plausible and often amusing. And the aforementioned ending – so often the least satisfactory element of even the best horror movies – is genuinely horrible, a nightmarish and logical descent for all concerned. Overall, a welcome addition to the found footage genre and great to see British horror shuffling away from the zombies and the vampires, getting back to creepy basics.

The Double release date 4th April

Review by Andrew Nerger

Rather intriguingly, The Double is one of two films coming out in 2014 that features a central character encountering a doppelgänger of themselves. (The other being Dennis Villeneuve’s forthcoming Enemy). While Enemy looks to be a nightmarish thriller, Richard Ayoade’s assured follow-up to Submarine plays as a wondrous and absurdist dark comedy that wouldn’t look out of place in the filmography of Terry Gilliam. With Gilliam languishing in the wilderness for the last decade or so, making mostly forgettable spectacles, Ayoade’s The Double is gloriously dark, frequently hilarious and oozing with Kafkaesque absurdity. It’s not only a worthy adaptation of the Dostoevsky novella, but confirms Ayoade as a bona fide talent who can deliver a film that is anything but forgettable.

Jesse Eisenberg plays lowly office worker Simon James, an unhappy man living a lonely existence.

He is chastised by his mother, ignored by his boss (a brilliantly ranty Wallace Shawn), dismissed by his colleagues and is generally a stuttering mess. Most jarringly of all, he is unable to pluck up the courage to speak to his beguiling co-worker Hannah (Mia Wasikowska) whom he admires from afar.

One day, another man named James Simon starts at his office and is everything that Simon is not confident, talkative and flirtatious with the ladies. He also happens to look exactly like Simon. Unfortunately for Simon, however, no one at work is able to see the similarity between the two because the original is so forgettable. Soon enough, this doppelgänger begins to take over Simon’s life, succeeding where he could not by impressing the bosses, taking the credit for Simon’s work and winning the heart of Hannah.

Before long, Simon begins to unravel, slowly losing grasp of his sanity and reality.

At its core, The Double feels incredibly claustrophobic. This is a world with only a handful of locations each beautifully drab, but it’s also an odd and anachronistic place. A world full with over complicated machines that wouldn’t look out of place on a 1960s Doctor Who episode, it’s all adds wonderfully to the absurdity.

Andrew Hewitt’s repetitious score really gets under your skin, and is perhaps the most unsettling score since Jonny Greenwood’s pulsating work for The Master. The cinematography by Erik Wilson is also a particular star here, with harsh artificial spotlights and the lack of natural light exposure making it feel like something out of a nightmare.

At the centre of the film’s success is Eisenberg who plays the dual role brilliantly, proving to be totally believable as both the stammering Simon and confident James. This is an even more obnoxious Mark Zuckerberg and it’s clear that the actor is having a whale of a time. Particular note must also be made of the fantastic supporting cast, including Chris O’Dowd, Sally Hawkins, Chris Morris and the ever-excellent Paddy Considine who manages to steal the show any time he is on screen.

Ayoade reimagining of Dostoevsky’s original text is something truly special. What could have been a generic thriller is something not only darkly comedic, but deeply unsettling. Much like the titular character, Richard Ayoade also leads a double life as an actor and a filmmaker. Due to the success of this, I hope that we see more of the latter very soon.

cert (15)

director Richard Ayoade writers Richard Ayoade, Avi Korine starring Jesse Eisenberg, Mia Wasikowska, Chris O’Dowd

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Review by David Hall

Calvary

release date 11th April

cert (15)

director John Michael McDonagh writer John Michael McDonagh starring Brendan Gleeson, Chris O’Dowd, Kelly Reilly, Aiden Gillen

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Writer-director John Michael McDonagh’s ambitious, flawed and surprisingly sombre follow-up to his brilliantly funny and scabrous fish-out-ofwater comedy The Guard is less broadly comic, and thrums with barely concealed rage and despair throughout. It’s still a high-concept pitch though and McDonagh, working again from his own script, doesn’t mess about setting up the ticking-clock premise. In a stark opening sequence Father James (Brendan Gleeson) receives a visit from one of his less-than-loyal flock, who gravely intones from the confidential confines of the confessional box that he was abused as a child by one of James’ elders. By way of retribution he has decided to kill James in seven days’ time. There’s no point killing a bad priest” he explains, “I’m going to kill you because you’re innocent.”

The villagers are a motley crew of eccentrics and head cases, including a rowdy butcher (Chris O’Dowd), the local medic (an extremely fruity turn from Aiden Gillan) and a cynical, nihilistic multi-millionaire (Dylan Moran) many of who give the Father a tough time and allow McDonagh ample scope to indulge his wordplay and evident love of language. On the surface this makes Calvary sound like Cluedo set in a cynical Irish community; with a bunch of rum suspects and a good man who knows who his future assassin is even if we don’t. But underneath the colourful, near-satirical surface is a melancholic mediation on the price of striving to be good in an increasingly amoral world, where the old ideas of order, community and religion are so corroded they practically mean nothing anymore Calvary is less playful than The Guard and there’s a bubbling anger that fizzes throughout the film, finally coming to the fore in the third act, which, it must be said, strains a little for grandeur (McDonagh is great on atmospherics and character but less so on story). However Gleeson remains mesmeric throughout with a high-watermark performance, alternating between bear-huggable and bellicose, playing the kind of character John Huston would’ve loved to make a film about. I loved the quieter scenes of him with his estranged daughter (a delicate and vulnerable turn from Kelly Reilly) which are shot through with tenderness and humility.

This is a tough but humane work, constantly in dialogue with itself. Gleeson’s good man in a bad world, a seeker of righteousness in a world of wrongness, is an unusual and welcome lead figure. His compassionate, bear-like Father bears the weight of the village’s collective sins, the irony being that while his predecessors will have enjoyed the respect, possibly love and almost certainly fear of the community, it is he who will bear the brunt of their awful indiscretions and pay the most terrible price. A tougher sell than The Guard and much more ragged – but in many ways this may be the richer and more complex film.

Review by David Hall

Joanna Hogg is perhaps the ultimate ‘first-worldproblems’ director par excellence, with her impeccably detailed, forensic examinations of a largely distant, relentlessly self-absorbed bourgeoisie. In her third feature, Hogg’s style of long takes and unusual, sometimes uncomfortable compositions reach almost-nauseating levels of austere claustrophobia.

Exhibition is – depending on your point of view – another masterfully controlled essay in contemporary middle-class ennui, a near-anthropomorphic study of self-imposed bourgeois paranoia and cultural insularity or 100 minutes in the company of two frequently insufferable and not especially enlightened artists. It may in fact be all of these things.

D (played by former Slits guitarist Viv Albertine) and H (conceptual artist Liam Gillick) are a creative couple, living ostensibly separate lives in a strikingly modernist West London house that serves as both home and studio. The couple are artists and performers who have spent nearly twenty years together, and it is beginning to show – in not particularly pleasant ways. D has an exhibition to plan for, but feels blocked creatively, and the fault may lie with H in some ways for her stasis. For reasons unknown they need to sell the house – much to D’s pain; she can barely discuss the selling and desperately wants prospective buyers to retain the houses architectural structure and trappings.

An interesting criticism I have heard of Hogg’s work (and one that ironically perhaps underlines is necessity) is that she makes films about rather awful people that few can recognise or sympathise with and – therefore – what’s the point? While it’s true that the central paring’s lifestyle is barely recognisable to many, there is something quite brilliant about the way she views an important strata of British society, one which has a continuing (and at times suffocating) influence over British cultural life.

While Hogg remains non-judgmental, what emerges organically in Exhibition is her character’s desperate need for private space and fear of public interaction they cannot control (D cannot abide strangers coming in and critiquing their home suggesting alterations). And yet the impressive house only ever feels prison-like and suffocating.

Gillick’s H is colossally aggravating, patronising and self-involved. There is a brilliant scene, which tells you almost everything you need to know about him, where he has a complete meltdown when a builder spends too long in his car parking space. Albertine is more nuanced and manages to be frequently affecting, a woman (potentially) on the verge of a nervous breakdown being insidiously intellectually and emotionally bullied by a passive-aggressive partner.

Oddly hypnotic, with a compelling and complex sound design reminiscent of Antonioni’s’ Red Desert score in terms of signifying existential panic, Exhibition differs from Hogg’s previous work Archipelago in one very important respect. That film dealt very explicitly with a kind of parched emotional repression unique to the English middle classes. In Exhibition the central couple have no such problems – instead it may just be that, by insulating themselves into a self-imposed coterie of self-satisfaction and artificial depth, they actually have very little interesting to say to each other or the world outside.

Exhibition

release date 11th April

cert (15)

director Joanna Hogg writer Joanna Hogg starring Viv Albertine, Liam Gillick, Tom Hiddleston

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The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears directors Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani writers Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani starring Klaus Tange, Ursula Bedena, Joe Koener

cert (18)

Review by Evrim Ersoy

release date 11th April

Dan Kristensen returns from a business trip – he feels as if something isn’t right. When he arrives at his flat within an art-nouveau block in Belgium, he finds the door locked from the inside and discovers that his Edwige has gone missing.

And so begins Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s second love-letter to the gialli of yesteryear. An aesthete’s dream, The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears is a sumptuous exercise in experimental re-purposing of the giallo vocabulary – a sensory assault which never allows the audience easy access.

If in their debut feature, Amer, the directing duo explored the sexuality of the giallo, here they focus on the detective story but as with their previous effort, all expectations need to be left at the door.

Amer was a distillate – hundreds and hundreds of giallo films purified into four key sequences; The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears is different – it’s the mystery story within each giallo viewed through a prism of madness and spatial distortion.

The construction is that of an elaborate puzzle with visual cues echoing truths to be revealed at later points within the film. The directors are clever in their use of the space and the angles within which they present it to the viewer: the initial disorientation that the viewer feels (perhaps alongside Dan) slowly leaves its place to a point of comprehension – cleverly, the more confused our characters get, the more we understand.

The film is also about stories – each person Dan encounters has a hidden history or some tale to tell and slowly these are revealed to complete a picture of the entire building’s living history. The old man upstairs with the obsessive husband, the caretaker who fetishizes certain objects and the mysterious woman all have converging narratives that never become obvious until the bitter end.

The film contains more experimentation than its predecessor, too – and some of it doesn’t work.

The Švankmajer-lite black-and-white stop-motion sequences are the weakest point within the visual narrative and only serve to slow the rhythm of the film – however for each one of these, there’s a counterpoint of magnificence: Dan awakening in a living nightmare time and time again threatened by himself no less or the arrival of the detective with its excellent use of split-screen, symmetrical imagery and reflection of characters.

Music plays an important factor in Helene and Bruno’s films and The Strange Color Of Your Body’s Tears is no exception – it teems with the exotic edges of classic giallo tracks – each one carefully chosen to reflect the action within the film. Fans of the genre will take enormous delight in spotting and deliberating upon their choices whilst newcomers will most certainly be compelled to seek out some of these brilliantly mad soundtracks.

If the film suffers from any problems, it’s its length.

A trim of two minutes, perhaps of the black-andwhite sequences, could ensure the film remains as tight and razor-sharp as Amer – but this is merely minor quibble considering the greatness of the experience on offer.

In the Frame: Reds (1981)

words by Adam Marshall

I

n the wake of the Academy Awards, David O. Russell (with his follicly spectacular American Hustle) daubed his name into Hollywood lore; becoming the first director to helm two films garnering Oscar nominations in all four performance categories. What’s more the second followed just a year after its predecessor, Silver Linings Playbook.

Prior to Russell’s brace of successes, more than thirty years had passed since the last Academy Awards acting quadruple. Warren Beatty’s Reds, only his second feature as director, scored deserved performance nominations for himself, Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson and, the only winner of the quartet, Maureen Stapleton.

Playing at around three hours and a quarter, there’s no doubt that Reds is an epic. Sprawling across the United States, Russia, Scandinavia and the Middle East, the biographical First World War era love story is set against the backdrop of the disillusionment of the American left, and Lenin’s 1917 Bolshevik uprising in Petrograd.

But its award recognition is far from the

only legacy bequeathed by Reds; its themes are equally as enduring. Pre-intermission, its focus pulls firmly on love torn Louise Bryant’s (Keaton) dilemma of choice between a journalist with strong inclinations for Socialism, Jack Reed (Beatty), and a playwright with even stronger inclinations for whisky, Eugene O’Neill (Nicholson).

It is the perennial standoff of prosaic academia versus the wilds of art. A subpar journalist and atrocious actress herself, Bryant wants the best of both men without being able to bear the worst. She admires Reed’s political optimism, ambition and drive, while rueing his reluctance to embrace romance and poetry; and falls for O’Neill’s alcohol-fuelled romance and poetry while reviling his misanthropic chasm of ambition and drive.

But it’s the second half of Reds that carries the weight of a more perpetual resonance - a thread explored with equal potency in Viva Zapata! and, coincidentally, in this year’s Oscar-nominated documentary The Square.

Beatty captures the dizzying highs and dismal lows of revolution. Spiralling from the electric, rapturous fervour of the Bolshevik push for

power, Reed soon begins to suffocate from the quotidian grind of governance.

The film’s titular colour seams through its narrative: the red of Socialist Party membership cards, blood stained battle zones and tell-tale urine from Reed’s infected kidneys (“This one even pisses red”), but for me it most significantly refers to the red tape that strangles the realisation of radical ideals.

“I can argue with cops, I can fight with generals…I can’t deal with the bureaucrats”, a frustrated Reed tells his mentor, Emma Goldman (Stapleton). When the slogans and the catcalling are no longer useful, and the fever of victory quickly begins to fade, what remains are the same intense difficulties of running a nation of peoples that the last lot had. For all the idealism of a people’s administration, the reality can be crippling when it comes.

Perhaps Reds best proves that its key strands of love and revolution are uncannily alike. One dreams about both, fights for them and may occasionally succeed in grasping their goal, but counteracting forces make them a herculean effort to maintain.

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Jordan McGrath

David Hall

Founder / Editor-in-Chief / Designer

Managing Editor

jordanmcgrath@veritefilmmag.com

davidhall@veritefilmmag.com

thanks: Contributors Chris O’Neill Evrim Ersoy Stuart Barr Robert Makin Joseph Fahim Luke Richardson Ben Nicholson Shelagh M. Rowan-Legg Cleaver Patterson Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy Andrew Nerger Adam Marshall

Proofing Luke Richardson, Dan Auty & David Hall

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Image credits: StudioCanal UK - 1,8,10,11,12,13,62,65 / Artificial Eye - 18, 67 / Dogwoof - 14 / Revolver Entertainment - 19 / Swedish Film Institute - 42,44,55 / Eureka Entertainment - 52,53,54,55 / UCA - 56,57,58,59 / Fox Searchlight - 60 / Soda Pictures - 61 / Network Releasing - 63 / Metrodome - 64,68 / eOne Entertainment - 66,69 /

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