Vérité - May 2013

ISSUE #3

V é r i t é MAY 2013 EDITION

FILM CRITICISM & CINEMATIC DISCUSSION

M U D

Is Jeff Nichols the future of American Cinema?

also...

Our Children / Lore / Paul Duane / Anurag Kashyap / The Murderer Lives at 21 / reviews / and more...

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Editor’s Letter

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here’s a wonderful gratification when editing a magazine that focuses on the smaller cinematic releases, the movies that somehow exist between the margins, because we’re able to enjoy films of endless variety. And we don’t just mean on an international scale or by genre. We get to see how different artists express themselves and to witness personalities and emotions bleeding through the screen; demanding our attention, heightening our senses and, offering cinematic pleasure from different places and perspectives.

Looking back over this issue, we believe you’ll struggle to find a magazine that celebrates such a wide variety, allowing you to really explore and discover films and filmmakers that you might not be familiar with.

We take a journey to Arkansas, discussing the first three features of the extremely talented Jeff Nichols, we shift our gaze to two critical favourites in Joachim Lafosse’s Our Children and Cate Shortland’s Lore before discussing Paul Duane and David

Cairn’s new documentary about the forgotten French master Bernard Natan.

It excites us to bring you this content and we hope you enjoy reading it. Our aim when we started Vérité was to provide a loving but critical celebration of the kinds of cinema we believe should be applauded and, as we move forward onto our third issue and begin to plan our fourth, we believe we’re getting the hang of it.

As you’ll probably notice this is the first issue that we’re now charging for – our intention is to have a publication that enable us to pay our great contributors for their fantastic work and amazing content. So moving across to the Apple Newsstand as well as e-junkie and charging a small fee for the magazine is the next organic step in our progression to becoming a self sustaining publication.

Like always, we thank you for your continued support and appreciate the humbling feedback we’ve received. All we can say right now is keep your eyes peeled; we’ve got exciting times ahead.

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Thanks for reading, Jordan McGrath & David Hall

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“I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between.”

François Truffaut

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Contents Features

Columns

Reviews

American Dreamer - p8

The World Anew - p38

The Reluctant Fundamentalist - p48

Jordan McGrath provides an autopsy of Jeff Nichols’ earlier efforts as David Hall tackles his latest, Mud.

Evrim Ersoy continues his steller insight into the filmmakers that exist off the mainstream radar. This month’s subject - Anurag Kashyap.

The Comedian - p49 A Portrait of James Dean- p50

Who Could Kill a Child - p14 Kelsey Eichhorn delves into the dark depth’s of Joachim Lafosse’s Our Children. Also, includes a interview with the director.

Masters of Cinema - p42

Robert Makin discusses the new Masters of Cinema release of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s debut feature The Murderer Lives at 21.

I’m So Excited - p51 Something in the Air - p52 Mud - p53

Germany Year Zero - p20

In Defence... - p46

Angela Peters interviews the director of the wonderful Lore, Cate Shortland.

David Hall takes the reigns for this month’s In Defence... as he tells us why he adores Sofia Coppola’s audience splitter, Marie Antoinette.

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Populaire - p54 No One Lives - p55

Join the Conversation

@veritefilmmag

facebook.com/VeriteFilmMagazine VERITE MAY 2013

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AMERICAN DREAMER Over the course of three distinctive films – and still only 34 – Jeff Nichols is quietly becoming the key American storyteller of the modern era, a chronicler whose work radiates quiet grace and warm humanity. Jordan McGrath puts the director in context and looks at his first two works, while David Hall wallows in the deep southern soulfulness of Mud.

words by Jordan McGrath & David Hall

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hen asked “What elements are needed to make a compelling movie?” Jeff Nichols answers casually “There’s one thing, at some point the audience needs to be connected to the characters enough to feel emotion”. A very simple statement from the Arkansas born filmmaker - it’s not profound, revelatory or new. However, there are many filmmakers within the American market today that fail at this single task. I don’t mean to imply that it’s easy for an artist to do, only to emphasise the undeniable talent of Nichols because, with only three features under his belt – 2007’s Shotgun Stories, the Cannes 2011 Critic’s Week Winner Take Shelter and his latest, Mud, he has established himself as one of the most exciting filmmaking prospects working in American by doing exactly that.

The aforementioned are three works of mature understanding of story, of elegance, control and vision existing as pure microcosms of grander multifaceted themes of family and responsibility. Nichol’s voice is classical and poetic, with seriousness in his tone that resonates on reflection because of it. Like the early work

of his friend David Gordon Green, who actually co-produced Shotgun Stories alongside Nichols and Lisa Musket, he’s captivated by displaying real people with real problems. And still, at only 34, illustrating not only a maturity and sophistication as a storyteller but a clear understanding of how to produce highly emotive character based-drama. Whereas his filmmaking peers of a similar ages apply their skills to genre specific projects; heavily plot driven and therefore more audience friendly affairs. Names like Rian Johnson and Duncan Jones spring to mind – even Jason Reitman has stayed within the cushioned constraints of his ‘dramedy’ comfort-zone. And as their budgets and visions inflate, Nichols remains true to his low-key earthy style.

Bravely daring, challenging his audience’s cinematic experience – narratively and emotionally – in a fashion that is not necessarily commercial or even enjoyable. His films are dense beats, slicing apart human behaviour to expose all the ugliness life can offer. In Shotgun Stories it’s revenge and in Take Shelter, uncontrollable anxiety and mental illness. He uses the advantages and freedoms that independent filmmaking allows, delivering stories

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uncontaminated by studio influence. More fascinating than entertaining, bubbling with subtext, with his classic style approach of character dictating plot being something of a rare breed in the modern American cinematic landscape.

It’s the unfortunate attitude of certain cinema-going demographics, however, that has restricted his films really taking off. Nichols has stated that his intentions aren’t to make obscure art-house fair; he wants people to go watch – and hopefully – enjoy his films. Listening to him speak you know he understands the game, accepting that a film’s success is judged not only the artistic integrity but also its commercial performance. And there really isn’t a reason why his films can’t find their way to a broader audience. You can’t deny the weight of his stories but at the same time they aren’t Lynchian post-modern, multi-structural dissections of society that requires the audience to bring a pen and paper to the cinema to fully understand. They’re authentic, lyrical pieces of fiction that should be appreciated like a good novel.

Nichols’ first, Shotgun Stories, casts a spell of re-

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laxed routine. Where a bitter rivalry between two sets of brothers (joined by the same father) sparks into life when Michael Shannon’s character Son Hayes, alongside his brothers Kid (Barlow Jacobs) and Boy (Douglas Ligon), who after hearing about their alcoholic runaway father’s death decide to crash his funeral and speak their mind about his abandonment and how even if he did sober up and find Jesus with his new family that didn’t make him a ‘good’ man. Feathers are rustled and fights break out. As time passes, the encounters between the two sets of brothers escalate and as people begin to get hurt, there increasingly seems to only be one outcome.

For the first 50 minutes at least, it’s intentionally indolent, allowing us to submerge ourselves in the every-man aesthetic, the uneventful and sombre existence of the blue collar worker with dirt under his nails, far removed from the complexity of city-life and of nameless faces and concrete jungles. Nichols reveals the simplicity of rural Arkansas and small-town America living, enabling the audience to see what exactly these characters hold dear and what they’re willing to fight for. Light on dialogue but heavy in subtext, it’s a re-

venge tale in the tone of Badlands.

Observant in style, it affords large portions of runtime watching the Hayes brothers merely exist; wandering the vast plains and barely functional town of it’s mid-west locale. Fuelled by the idea of ‘It’s going to happen someday so why not today?’ and the promise of carnage it’s actually quite tame, seemingly more stimulated by the omnipresent threat of violence rather than the act itself. Nichols lets the tension simmer and burn for long periods as he carves up the bold decisions of his characters. Full of silent anger, Michael Shannon’s soft spoken lead curses his upbringing to his ‘hateful’ mother as he delivers to her some tragic news “You raised us to hate those boys and we do. And now it’s come to this”. A delicate nudge at destiny, with the brothers thrown into a situation they feel they have no escape from, made more real by the isolation of the surrounding landscape.

Expectations can kill a movie before the first frame is fed into the projector, and with those set at a ridiculous height for his follow up, it would be forgivable to not have faith in Nichols being able to satisfy those expectations. But not only does he satisfy them, he surpasses them. 2011’s Take Shelter is a family drama like you’ve never seen. There’s no way else of putting it, it’s a disaster movie. As if Roland Emmerich directed a destruction of the mind, wide in scope but incredibly personal in scale. Yes, it’s a story of anxiety and mental illness but for me – linking it back to Shotgun Stories – it’s about family protection and what extremes you would be willing to reach to make sure the people you love most are not put in harm’s way.

Once again with Michael Shannon in the lead role, it’s the story of Curtis, a line-manager at a local mining company. When apocalyptic visions begin to pollute his dreams, and melt through to the day, he builds a storm shelter in his backyard to keep his wife Samantha ( Jessica Chastain) and deaf daughter Hannah (Tova

Stewart) safe. Terrified that these visions might in fact be premonitions, he also fears they might be the onset symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia of which his mother fell victim to at the same age Curtis is now.

An emotionally draining experience, dragging Curtis and the audience through the metaphorical ringer - it’s a punch to the gut, a shot to the head and a knife to heart all at the same time. At the heart of Take Shelter is Shannon’s performance, the real centrepiece of the film, like an incredible guitar-riff at the centre of a classic record. Which could be in itself a reason why Nichols as a filmmaker doesn’t get the recognition he deserves. Michael Shannon is that impressive, delivering a turn of both helpless vulnerability and wild intensity so compelling that all you see is the character. Ideas of an author or director vanish and all you’re left with is the raw truth of the performance. The fact that together director and actor have created such a transformative, invigorating piece of cinema is second to the awe of what the actor is conveying on screen. I’m sure Nichols would take this anonymity as a compliment as his films don’t have a shred of personal ego, with his vision of creating the most humanistic of stories even more enhanced by the dedication he shows to his characters.

Mud confirms Nichols as a storyteller in the classic American mould; a confident visual stylist capable of building atmospherics and mood while sustaining nuanced characterisation and narrative. When best buddies Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and Neckbone ( Jacob Lofland) find a boat wedged in a tree on an island close to their Mississippi river home they are surprised to encounter a bedraggled, crooked-toothed occupant –

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Mud (Matthew McConaughey). Mud is on the run from some violent bounty hunters and asks the boys for help with his plan to escape the island and reunite with his childhood sweetheart Juniper (Reese Witherspoon). Neckbone, the more thick-skinned and cynical of the pair, is wary of this mysterious stranger. But for lonely and intense Ellis, whose parents are on the verge of splitting up, Mud is a kindred spirit with a righteous and noble cause to be supported no matter what the cost.

Nichols’ on-going fine work with his performers reaches new heights here. He has some fine character actors at his disposal – including a near-unrecognisable Sam Shepard as an old cohort of Mud’s; a grizzled old loner with a shady past who looks like he’s stepped out of Lynch’s The Straight Story. The mighty Joe Don Baker appears as a vengeful father who wants Mud dead. Nichols regular Michael Shannon makes it three for three (‘he just makes my stuff better’, said Nichols during a recent Q&A) as the guitar-strummin’, US punk lovin’, scuba diving uncle of Neckbone. But naturally this is the Mud show and McConaughey continues his recent astonishing run – Bernie, The Lincoln Lawyer, Killer Joe, The Paperboy, Magic Mike – with (possibly) his most affecting performance to date. Nich-

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“Bravely daring, challenging his audience’s cinematic experience – narratively and emotionally – in a fashion that is not necessarily commercial or even enjoyable. His films are dense beats, slicing apart human behaviour to expose all the ugliness life can offer.”

ols affords him both great affection and screen space.

It’s clear he’s a deeply flawed, possibly disturbed and definitely dangerous man. But his wide-eyed optimism and blind devotion to Juniper endear him to us and, most importantly, to Ellis, whose story this really is.

Both young performers bring an air of unaffected naturalism to their roles. Nichols gives Sheridan (from Tree of Life, strengthening the Malick connection) a lot to do and the young actor responds remarkably with a commanding and naturally affecting performance that never slips into sentimentality.

This Huck Finnish fable has been compared to Reiner’s Stand by Me but it’s a very different, looser, more ragged work. Having met the director briefly and heard him speak at length about his life, films and family, I get the feeling he is less movie magpie and more an oldschool (shotgun) story teller. In a telling, isolated scene we get to witness the quiet anguish of a character who in another, lesser movie would simply be dismissed as a cartoonish bad guy. It’s a tiny moment but indicative of a writer who allows all of his characters humility and humanity. Some critics have dismissed the film’s final

third as mechanical and tidy but I would argue Nichols actually demonstrates real confidence in his material, keeping things loose in the build-up before delivering a tightly-wound, satisfying, exciting finale that offers guarded optimism. For me if there is a flaw in Mud it is the thinness of Witherspoon’s role and the general disinterest Nichols has in her equally damaged character.

But it’s clear that Nichol’s focus in Mud is on the menfolk.

Mud completes what Nichols has called his Arkansas trilogy and the connection for me, aside from the setting, is love. Love binds the Hayes brothers in Shotgun Stories, Curtis and his family in Take Shelter and it is what drives Mud and Ellis on and keeps them believing. While there are outstanding, maverick US directors currently making great work, you don’t always get a sense they actually like people very much. It’s clear that Nichols, with his emphasis on characters in extreme circumstances who simply won’t give up on each other, truly does.

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WHO COULD KILL A CHILD? Joachim Lafosse’s Our Children takes a shocking, true life case of infanticide and searches deep for the emotional heart of the matter, eschewing tabloid sensationalism words and interview by Kelsey Eichhorn

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recently embarked on a challenge with a friend to provide each other with one-word film reviews. And while “challenge” is indeed an apt description of this endeavour, it has also been surprisingly rewarding. I am required to think carefully and comprehensively about each film-viewing experience.

And so in a word I would describe Our Children as subtle. It is little surprise that Lafosse’s favourite part of the filmmaking process is the careful and detailed development of his characters, the backbone of his story. Story-telling is an inherently organic process, and it is in the elegance of the characters that the film’s strength is grounded; from them the subtle yet essential aesthetic style will emerge, transforming the film from merely accomplished to utterly sublime.

In Murielle (Emilie Dequenne) we initially meet a gentle and joyful young woman. She is hopeful, excited, in love.

The film chronicles her slow descent into madness as she

is driven to unspeakable extremes by the subtly oppressive dominance of her adoptive father-in-law, Andre.

Dequenne’s performance is untouchable, in a subtly restrained and minimal performance there is never a moment when we are in doubt of Murielle’s emotions. And yet she remains isolated from us, with an air of impenetrable mystery. This alone would be enough to carry the film, but Murielle is hardly the only character of interest.

The undercurrent of homosexual tension between Andre (Niels Arestrup) and his protégé Mounir (Tahar Rahim), Murielle’s husband, is merely an unspoken apparition of the authoritarian parent-child relationship that has been slowly and deliberately developed throughout Mounir’s adolescence. Midway through the film there is a scene tight with apprehension, an exchange between Andre and Mounir in which Mounir is essentially requesting Andre’s permission for him and Murielle to move into a home of their own. Almost

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incomprehensibly, Andre’s response is tantamount to a refusal. It is at this stage that we begin to realise the truly damning dynamic of their relationship: theirs is an association that gives no allowance emotionally for Murielle.

The story revolves around these intricately entwined relationships. Caught in an undefined and claustrophobic love-triangle of sorts, even the most fundamental of relationships in Murielle’s life – that of a mother to her children – becomes warped and precarious under the strain.

There is naturalness to the film that is the result of careful effort on Lafosse’s part; having committed great time and attention to the development of the characters, the development of the cinematic style is the final essential piece of the puzzle, the trick to making this harrowing tale accessible.

So it is no surprise the camera treats these relationships with all the subtly they deserve. The hand-held cinematography that is so often overt slips comfortably into a background aesthetic provides a subconscious feeling that we, like Murielle, are on slightly unsteady ground. It enters the house cautiously, not entirely sure if it should be there, a voyeur Kino eye adding yet another layer of surveillance to Murielle’s already claustrophobic life. The frame groans under the weight of unrelenting observation. The camera peers at the characters from behind doorframes, capturing snippets and snapshots of conversations that leave narrative gaps to be filled by the audience’s own imagination of that ever-elusive off-screen

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space. Slowly and gradually, as if worried it might draw attention to itself, it recedes from the mounting tension until Murielle becomes completely alone, emotionally neglected in a vast, wide frame.

The English title of the film, Our Children, provides an interesting relationship to the French title, A Perdre la Raison (loosely translated “to lose one’s mind”). Though each indicates a very different emphasis in the narrative, together they present an enlightened perspective on the subtle complications in Murielle’s relationships. While the children are, in fact, “ours” – her and Mounir’s – it is the subversive behaviour of Andre as he attempts to make the children also his that pushes Murielle to eventually lose her mind. As she slowly loses her freedom, she clings desperately to the one relationship that cannot be fundamentally altered: motherhood. Consequently, as Murielle plummets perilously toward the only escape she can see, she does the only thing she can think to do: she tries to take her children with her in a desperate and ultimate act of possession.

I am a strong believer that art, in any form, must move an audience in order to be considered successful. The simple story behind Our Children, based on true-life events in a Belgian town a few short years ago, would undoubtedly command consideration. Yet it is the mastery of the narrative across the entire aesthetic design and the comprehensive approach to storytelling that elicits in the audience sympathy, empathy and a somewhat unsettling sense of naïveté and guilt. It is, simply, a true cinematic experience.

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Joachim Lafosse interview: You both wrote and directed the film, as you do with a lot of your films. When you write, do you think about the visuals from the beginning? Is that part of your process?

Um, no, I don’t. I write with a co-writer, and, in the script, we don’t have to write how to shoot the movie. We have to write and to work, during two years, to create the characters. And the rest – how to shoot, the aesthetics question – I work for that in the preparation for the shooting and during the shooting. It develops as we shoot. But now, we work for the characters. Who are they? How do they live? And that’s my favourite part of the work, in fact. When you read the newspaper, when you hear the radio, see the TV, you see the media story, and you don’t – sometimes some people think then you have your story.

In fact, no, because in the newspaper you don’t have the characters of the people who live the situation.

Our Children is based on a true incident, which, some might say, could be quite controversial as a subject, it’s quite sensitive. Were you at all intimidated by the sensitivity of the subject when you started to create the characters and the story?

Never, because if I don’t feel something personal in the story, I don’t do the movie. I have to work for three or four years to stay with the project and it’s important that it’s something personal, it feels important. I have, with this subject, I have something really personal. I know well the post-natal depression. My grandmother, and my mother, and – I know this situation. And I began to write the script before I had my son, but, I finished the script when my son was one year. And, I see the difficulties of my wife with the children, and, my own (asks translator

“It’s a movie about the danger of control and the necessity of freedom. If you have an opportunity to free yourself, you must take it.”

for word) cowardice. And if I don’t have a child, then I don’t know what tiredness really is – being a parent. I don’t have four or five children, but I can imagine what it is like for a woman with four or five children, like that.

And when you are alone, because her husband doesn’t help her…but I picked this story not because it is the story of the killing of children, I like – for me, it is the control the question of control is the subject that I tried to set with the story – don’t lose your freedom. If you stop to work, then you lose your capacity to be free with money and you begin to be dependent, and for me, that’s the subject. Now, if you read magazines for women, you believe that it is easy to be the mistress, the mother of a big family, the worker, and in fact, I think, if you ask all the women they will say to us, no, no it’s not easy. And that’s why it’s important to do a movie like this.

Is there a cultural aspect to this story? Mounir, as the husband, doesn’t help Murielle very much and Andre talks at one point of how Mounir should be careful about what Murielle would expect out of their marriage.

Yes, but, the only woman who sees the problems on Murielle, that’s the mother-in-law, she understands what is happening. I’d like to note that Murielle takes the dress, the gift at the end of the film because she likes her mother-in-law, because she has a lot of emotion for this woman, and this woman sees the problems of Murielle. And I would like the movie to say that that is the importance of the gift, not that that is a metaphor of oppression, of gender in Islamic culture or Moroccan culture, it’s not that, it’s a personal story of the characters, of Murielle. And, in fact, I liked having the opportunity to shoot a film where the character was more happy, more free in Morocco than in France, because it is about emotional freedom, and that is not only about culture. In fact the real danger in this story was about the man, the French doctor. Sometimes, I heard people say in the audience, “oh, you are saying the Moroccan culture; it’s a masculine (?) macho (?) culture” and I say “you don’t see my film”. It’s not a movie about cultural oppression, it’s not a movie about the killing of children, it’s a movie about the danger of control and the necessity of freedom. If you have an opportunity to free yourself, you must take it.

And, for me…well, we began to write the script with the character of Mounir, and that’s my favourite character.

Because Mounir – for me, the character with the worst situation, that’s Mounir. He is completely controlled by Andre. Andre gives a lot of gifts to Mounir, but Mounir doesn’t understand that the gifts are more expensive than the real value of the gifts.

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There are strings attached.

Yes, you have a debt. And debt, debt is not visible, and I like that - for the cinema, it’s a really incredible subject.

And you have this situation where Murielle discovers that she is in a couple with her husband, but, in fact, her husband is more in a couple with this other guy, than her.

And so she asks her husband to get out, to get out of the situation, to leave the house, and her husband asks his godfather and he says “no – if you do that, I stop giving you gifts”. Normally, when we have children, we educated them with the hope that they fly, and when they begin to fly, we don’t cut their wings. And yes, so, I like this sort of situation and I knew well this situation.

I wanted to ask a bit about the aesthetic decisions, when you came to the film production. There seems to be a very conscious – a hyper-awareness of framing and the use of off-screen space, it seemed to me that there was an aspect of voyeurism. Can you talk a bit about that and about how the cinematography style developed?

Yes, we would like to produce that feeling – this woman doesn’t have the possibility to keep a private life in this house. You have, all the time, someone who seems someone else in this house, and, um, to propose to the audience this feeling, we decided to use (asks translator), amos?

Translator: It’s when you use deep focus and you’ve got something in the foreground in French.

Then, when she began to feel more and more alone, we decided to use more wide angle, more wide shots, because that is the best way to make the audience feel the feeling of solitude, of loneliness. And, also, it was very important for me to shoot the children well. Not as an object of the film – you have a lot of films where when you see children, you have the feeling that the crew has said to them, “ok, quickly, get out of the shot now because you are not natural.” And I didn’t want that. That’s why I asked Emelie and Thar before the shooting began to stay with the children for a month – to go to the swimming pool, to go to the cinema with them, to create a natural link, a bond.

And, we had something incredible as well. The sequence where Thar shouts, where Mounir shouts at Murielle because the child has fallen down the stairs, and in the car, Mounir shouts “Why did you not put up the gate?!”

Or something, I don’t exactly remember. And the little girl says “Maman – why did Dad say that?” And, it was incredible – we didn’t ask the girl to say this. Normally, in the script, it’s just Mounir who speaks, and Murielle. But we tried hard to make the relationship natural with the children.

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The acting, from the entire cast, was phenomenal, and I know Emelie won the best actress award at the Cannes Festival for her role as Murielle. As a director, because you’ve spent so much time creating these characters, how much do you coach the actors through becoming those characters?

We spoke about this being an intimate subject, and that’s how I work, with a subject that is intimate to me. And that’s my truth, but it is not the whole truth of the story.

It’s dangerous to speak too much with the actors when you have something intimate like that. And, at the beginning of the production, Emelie spoke to me about what she thought about the story, and I said to her, “no, we should stop and not speak about it too much. You should go to see a post-natal specialist, speak with her about the character, about the experience.” Because when we are on the set, I don’t like the idea that Emelie will be thinking about what I think of what she has said or how she has acted, it’s dangerous. Actors have their secrets, I have my secrets, and in fact, all of these secrets become part of the movie. And I prefer that, that is a good way to do a movie.

Can you talk to me a little bit about the music?

Do you work with the same composer in all of your films? It seemed in Our Children that the soundtrack was a very subtle punctuation of the emotions in the film.

Actually, this is the first time that I’ve worked this much with the music in a film, and I liked it very much. We worked with a specialist of Moroccan music and I discovered actually that the structures of Moroccan composition have the same aesthetic qualities; they’re similar to the structure of the script. That’s why we used the repetition of the composition at the first part of the movie. And, without the music in this tragedy, you don’t have the possibility as an audience to stay in the movie, you lose the concentration. It’s a sort of breeze, the music, you get to take a breath, and, if you do a tragedy without music, it’s not possible.

Do you see a progression in your body of work?

How does Our Children fit in with your other films?

I think, with this movie, over all of my other movies, I’ve created something better. In fact, I’m more free. I discovered with the shooting and the production of the script that I have the possibility, the opportunity, to be freer, more expressive, in cinema.

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Germany Year Zero As Cate Shortland's unusual and poetic Second World War movie is released on Blu ray, Angela Peters talks to the director about the challenges of bringing her distinctive and personal vision to the screen

words and interview by Angela Peters

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ar removed from her earlier film Somersault, Lore steps into a dark place that blurs the lines for the audience between what they can comfortably comprehend about an innocent child’s journey in fleeing to safety at the end of the German reign. It is affecting because you can’t help but feel the vulnerability and immediate screen presence of these young children grappling with the loss of both their parents who have gone to face what we are led to believe will be their imminent deaths.

Saskia Rosendahl (as Lore) gives a compelling performance as the oldest of the siblings, herding her brother and sisters across the borders to the safety of their grandmother’s farm. She faces desolation, death, hunger and the beginning of reaching sexual maturity. It is a masterfully reconstructed and chilling account of what it must have been like for so many and Cate Shortland brings this all to life, keeping truthful with the story

being told in German.

If it had to be categorised one might say it is a coming of age story. It is, however, so much more than that. It is a beautiful, though difficult to watch, depiction into what it would be like to grapple with adulthood amidst losing your family, and finding everything that was ever normal to you is now completely foreign; a place where even being able to feed yourself becomes an epic mission. There is a devastating moment right at the beginning of the film where the children cannot even barter with their neighbour for milk or food.

I had the pleasure of getting to ask Cate about the journey, working with the children, the experience of showing it front of a German audience, and what is coming up next for this accomplished director. Not only were there three years of research involved, there was also ample time spent negotiating the three-way (yes, not just two but three countries) deal that would cement the making of this film.

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Cate Shortland interview: Lore is based on the novel, The Dark Room, but what drew you personally to the project?

I was drawn to the way that Rachel Seiffert writes [The Dark Room] and also the perspective of the story being told from the children of Nazis, along with the fact that the film was set in 1945 right at the end of the war. It meant it wasn’t a Holocaust film and it wasn’t a war film, but instead it was about the impact of those events on the German psyche.

Paul Welsh, Scottish producer, approached me and gave me the novel. But my husband already had a copy in the house.

Was there anything personal apart from Paul Welsh that led you to want to do it?

I had studied fascism at university when I was very young and my partner Tony’s family, are German Jews. I had two points of contact, two perspectives, one personal and one from my education.

And you had to speak German while you were over there?

I don’t speak German. In some ways, the fact that I was a foreigner made it an easier film to make. For some Germans the material is still really confronting. We aren’t looking at it as the monsters that run the concentration camps. In our film they are your mother or father. It becomes quite confronting to acknowledge that it’s not out there, but that it’s your relations who committed the crime.

Were there challenges that came with you not being German in a country where you don’t speak the language?

On the whole my experience of living in Germany and making the film has been overwhelmingly positive and an incredible experience meeting the people and working with the crew. The difficulty was occasionally screening the films and people getting quite angry about Lore, asking, “Who is Lore?” “What does she believe” “What is going to happen to her after the war” “What am I saying about German people?”

Those issues have been a little bit fraught.

What about the research into the movie?

I actually did a lot of research into her father because even though he’s not in there for a long time, his presence was really huge. I had to understand him and his role. He was in the Einsatzgruppen, which was the mobile death squad. And this research gave me a really different perspective about the war.

They weren’t mechanised gas chambers. The murder happened by hand. The research was really hard, and especially with the elderly people who had been there.

Was it difficult to find Saskia for the role?

It was really hard to find the right girl, and we had cast for three months, found the girl, and then about two weeks before the rehearsals were due to start we discovered that she was only fourteen and because of the German laws we couldn’t shoot with her. We had to re-cast by doing street castings in train stations and shopping malls. Saskia was brought in about a week before rehearsals started and I had rejected her three months earlier based on her photo, because

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she was way too beautiful. And then I met her and she was astounding.

Did it being a co-production pose as a problem?

It posed as a massive problem and I had no idea about the money and costs involved with a co-production. They spent about a year doing the contracts with the three countries with the legal fees coming out of the budget. It is pretty devastating knowing how much money the deal cost, but then without the deal we couldn’t have made the film.

Somersault is so far removed from Lore. Did you ever expect that this is what you would follow Somersault with?

After Somersault I wasn’t crazy about making another film, straight away at least. But on a gut level I knew I wanted to do something very different. And my life experiences since Somersault have been so varied. And I didn’t want to do just a simple drama. I wanted to make a bigger story. And this, though it’s just about a group of kids, has huge issues in it. I wanted something that really scared me and confronted me and Lore did that.

baby. The clichés about shooting with animals and babies were all true. We were always worried about the babies and we ended up having five babies.

It was really challenging to shoot for nine weeks with the kids as we were only allowed to shoot with the kids for four hours a day. It was really challenging to keep their interest, not by the material, but by the physical realities of making a film. I had a really great dramaturg Hanna Wolharn that I couldn’t have made the film without. She was rallying the troupes, the cast and children the whole time. She was the most beautiful woman.

Are you working on anything new at the moment?

I love writing, and I’m writing on two television shows, miniseries in Australia. One I am working on one with Sam Worthington, from Somersault, and another one on paedophilia in the Catholic Church. And I’m writing a feature so I’m quite busy.

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Lore is available on Mat 27th courtesy of Artificial Eye.

www.artificial-eye.com

What was the best moment and worst moment on set?

I think one of the best scenes to shoot was after the mother has been raped and she’s in the kitchen and she’s bleeding.

Working with Ursina Lardi (played Mutti) and Saskia for that scene, where we had scheduled three hours to shoot the scene but we shot it in about an hour would have been the best scene. It was really dynamic and really wonderful working with them both.

The hardest thing to shoot was the scenes with the little

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Verite’s Top 5 Most Anticipated at Cannes 2013

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5.

Shield of Straw 2013 The Japanese presence is strong at Cannes this year. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Like Father Like Son, the follow up to his well-received, elegant family drama I Wish, could well float the boat (or yacht) of Jury president Steven Spielberg. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the dizzyingly prolific Takeshi Miike returns with what looks to be (judging by the very commercial looking trailer) a splashy, high-octane and typically visceral thriller.

The cult pedigree is secured already, with leads Tatsuya Fujiwara (Battle Royale) and Nanako Matsushima (Ringu) heading up this story about the manhunt for a child killer suspected of murdering a billionaire’s granddaughter.

There will almost certainly be no Palme for Miike here, but Cannes is about pulp as much as prestige. So after the respectable Thirteen Assassins and Hara Kiri: Death of a Samurai and the goofy, throwaway pop charms of For Love’s Sake, we are hoping for a disreputable action fest in the mould of his earlier Dead or Alive series.DH

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4.

The Bling Ring 2013 To this writer Sofia Coppola’s career remains unblemished. Growing with each feature into one of the most interesting figures in modern cinema, her representations and dissections of vapid melancholy and everyday minutiae are always engrossing to watch. Whether she is following a woman all alone in Tokyo or an 18th Century French Princess, Coppola leads us on journeys full of naivety and sadness. so when her upcoming effort revolves around some Paris Hilton idolising, socialite wannabes who go on a stealing spree and looks like it would work perfectly alongside Spring Breakers as some sort of ‘shallow youth’ double bill, to me it’s evident that Coppola is onto another winner. With Harry Potter alumni Emma Watson, who impressed in last year’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, this could be Coppola’s first real box-office hit. JM

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3.

Only God Forgives 2013 Refn. Gosling. Two names that now, when mentioned together, inject instant curiosity about any project. And when that project is set in the under belly of Thailand’s crime scene, involves Ryan Gosling as a cop-killing manager of a kickboxing gym out for revenge, includes an unrecognisable Kristen Scott Thomas, samurai swords, and a story Gosling himself described as a ‘movie about a man who wants to fight God’, it takes serious determination to quell the drool that feels the need escape my mouth and drip down my chin.

The trailer nearly induces an epileptic fit with the neon alone. A potent looking extreme fever-dream of images that bear the stylistic finger prints we’ve come to adore whilst navigating through Nicholas Winding Refn’s varied back catalogue, it promises violence and beauty, two things this director knows pretty much like the back of his blood-stained hands. JM

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2.

Only Lovers Left Alive 2013 The return of the thin white (haired) duke sees Jim Jarmusch gatecrashing the festival with a late competition entry. Jarmusch is very much a favourite at Cannes, having won the Camera d’Or for his debut Stranger than Paradise and subsequent nods for Mystery Train and Broken Flowers. This one sounds like an interesting detour for the legendary Indie auteur who describes it as a “crypto-vampire love story” In synopsis it actually sounds an awful lot like an updating of Tony Scott’s The Hunger, with a rock musician (Tom Hiddleston) reuniting with his centuries old lover (Tilda Swinton) only to find their ageless idyll complicated by the attentions of her wild and seductive sister (Mia Wasikowska).

Can Jarmusch breathe further creative life into a genre that is enjoying a commercial (if not artistic) renaissance? We will see. Whatever he’s delivered, it certainly won’t be Twilight. DH

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1.

The Past 2013 Asghar Farhadi’s 2011 Oscar winning A Separation was an incredible international success. Challenging perceptions of the Middle East (socially and cinematically), devastatingly direct in its storytelling and even-handed in its portrayal of failing relationship – a complex ethical and moral puzzle that played out like a Hitchcockian thriller without ever providing any easy answers.

The Past, starring current arthouse darlings Bérénice Bejo (The Artist) and Tahar Rahim (A Prophet), is one of the most anticipated films of the festival and sounds very much like a companion piece to the previous film – a break-up drama with moral and political dimensions following recently-separated Bejo as she looks to start life with a new love only for family tensions to surface. When working when working in his native language, Frahadi has cemented a reputation as a class act over a short career – let’s hope his sure touch survives the transition to French language cinema. If it does this will be one to watch come prize time.DH

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WRONGED MAN

Bernard Natan was one of the great pioneers of early twentieth century European cinema, a visionary mogul, producer and innovator – so why has his name vanished from film history? David Hall unpicks the mystery and talks to the creators of a new documentary that tells the untold story of a forgotten architect of French film

words and interview by David Hall

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a Fémis on rue Francouer in Paris is the French state film school. Its illustrious and prestigious alumni include Christophe Gans, Francois Ozon and Claire Denis among others. Outside the gates there is an archway with the words ’Pathé Cinema’ emblazoned on it. But nowhere in La Fémis is there any kind of memorial, plaque or tribute to the man who helped cement Pathe’s legacy, contributed to its world standing and, indeed, built the sound studio and production company that the school now occupies. At the end of Natan, Paul Duane and David Cairn’s remarkable new documentary, not a single student from the school interviewed has heard of Bernard Natan.

Outside of film academic circles and French historians few know the story of Natan, yet it is a remarkable one.

Natan Tannenzaft was a Romanian Jewish immigrant who came to Paris in 1905 and, despite his émigré status,

volunteered to fight for the French in World War I. He returned a war hero and was granted citizenship. The industrious and ambitious Natan then turned his attentions to cinema and became a major player in the French film industry.

After a brief stint at Paramount he founded his own film company. Natan then acquired the production and exhibition of Pathé films (Charles Pathé having stripped the company and sold of most of its assets, deeming film unprofitable). Under Natan’s dynamic leadership Pathé-Natan turned over incredible profits, even in uncertain economic times. Natan was particularly adept in the areas of finance and distribution of French films, his forward thinking adoption of vertical integration securing the industry financially for decades. He brought talkies to France and invested heavily in research and development (funding the work of Henri Chrétien, who developed the anamorphic lens).

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“An absorbing portrayal of a forgotten and maligned figure, a work that will hopefully correct and restore his reputation.”

But this endeavour came at a heavy price. Natan made some catastrophic business decisions and garnered a lot of enemies. When Pathé went bankrupt in 1935, allegations of fraud surfaced and Natan was tried and imprisoned. As if this wasn’t enough, the authorities were also accusing Natan of behaviour that all but effectively buried his reputation and sealed his unfortunate legacy. He had made a brief foray into porn of the soft-core kind in 1911, but rumours began to spread about his involvement with (and performance in) sex films of a decidedly more extreme nature; including the notorious and outrageious 1926 film Le Canard. Natan’s reputation lay in tatters and his ultimate demise – at the hands of the Nazis – was a tragic and ironic one, given his former status as a national hero.

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A new documentary blending archive footage, talking heads and innovative recreations provides a ghostly and compelling testament to Natan’s life as well as offering a damning corrective to the rumours that destroyed him.

It’s a must-see for cinephiles and indeed anyone interested in film or French history. The film’s director Paul Duane (Barbaric Genius, Very Extremely Dangerous) and television writer David Cairns have collaborated to produce an absorbing portrayal of a forgotten and maligned figure, a work that will hopefully correct and restore his reputation.

Ahead of the film’s release later this year we spoke to them about Natan, his life and legacy and the rumours surrounding his supposed cinematic transgressions.

Paul Duane & David Cairn interview: How did you first hear about Bernard Natan?

Paul Duane: I’m a long-time reader of David’s blog Shadowplay and was struck by one blog post, which told a story he’d been alerted to by one of his students; that of a 1920s/30s producer and sometime owner of Pathé who concurrently had a career directing and acting in porn.

I had a feeling the story couldn’t possibly be true, which – when I went Googling – turned out to have some support. I discussed it with David and we both felt there might be a documentary in it. We knew almost nothing at this point, but soon found out a lot more.

David Cairn: I learned about Natan initially from filmmaker Neil O’Driscoll who had come across the story of Natan the pornographer. I wrote a blog post about this fascinating character, not realizing that all the readily available information was in fact wrong. From being a major figure in the history of French cinema, Natan had been reduced to a marginal figure in the history of pornography.

The film combines voice-over, archive images and dedicated it to his memory and I hope he’d be proud of dramatic recreations of Natan’s life and work. Can the work he did – I think it’s beautiful. you tell us about your artistic approach to the documentary and why you mixed it up this way?

DC: It always seemed like a challenge to tell a story PD: It came together as it went along – it wasn’t ‘designed’ as such. We started with interviews, discovered what archive there was, and when we had an idea of what the gaps were likely to be (as it turned out, largely to do with the myths that developed around Bernard Natan) we figured out a way to deal with that, bit by bit. This wasn’t the first solution – I spent a few weeks trying to figure out whether we should find actors to play David and myself, and dramatize our involvement in the story somehow. Thankfully we didn’t need to do that. David had been messing around with papier-mâché masks, told me he’d made one of Natan and said ‘maybe it’ll come in handy for something.’ That sparked the idea of shooting our ‘false Natan’ material, against back-projections taken from empty frames of out-of-copyright films set in Paris.

It was a lot of fun to do. Sadly our DoP on that material, Scott Ward, died before the film was finished. We’ve

where all the principle characters are dead, and not let it seem dry and dusty. Fortunately we were able to speak to Gisele Casadesus, 98 years old, sharp as a tack, and possibly the last surviving actor to have starred in a Natan production. But we also wanted to write a voiceover that brought us right into the story, present tense, Natan’s point of view. And at the same time to admit that this was a device, that we were using fictional tricks to tell a true story. So making the reconstructions stylised and unreal made sense too.

It works fantastically well and is very evocative.

How easy was it to get the archival footage together and to get people to talk about Natan?

PD: Getting people to talk wasn’t difficult (with one or two exceptions!) – it’s a story that’s well known to the

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older generation of film historians in France, or to lovers of the films of the ‘20s and ‘30s. However, the fact that neither David nor myself has anything better than schoolboy French was a bit of a stumbling block, particularly when you’re digging into some of the most sensitive issues in 20th century French history.

The archive material was easy enough to track down – we had one or two leads from our researcher, Christine Leteux (who does a lot of work with Kevin Brownlow), and David was indefatigable at digging through the online catalogues to find remarkable stuff – like the 360 degree head-shot of Natan, something we were very surprised to find and still have no clear idea of why it was filmed. The expense of making a film that calls for a large amount of archive is something we weren’t adequately prepared for, though, and I’d think twice before doing it again.

DC: Pathe have us a discount on the archive, but it was still a big bite out of our budget. At one point I was so enthused about the Pathe-Natan films, which are beautiful things, I thought we could use them for all our visuals.

By some chance, Natan seems to have produced a body of work with an image for every aspect of his life story.

But the cost of the materials meant we could only use a fraction of what we wanted, and in the end it forced us to be more creative.

Why do you think Natan’s work and legacy have been effectively buried until now?

PD: His story is a nexus for many sensitive issues - class, race, prejudice of various kinds, fiscal corruption and collaboration with the Nazis. Many who died in the Holocaust have been posthumously beatified, or had their stories told in one way or another.

Natan, having been tried and found guilty by a French court before his handover to the death camps, seemed to evade categorisation. It was easy to believe that, since he was a self-confessed criminal, (albeit a white-collar one), his legacy could be safely ignored, but at this distance, it feels like there was a sort of revenge taken on him for the scale of his success, and the revenge was all out of proportion to his crimes. The accusations against him of being a pornographer also worked effectively to make him a sort of figure of ridicule; too, ensuring serious people didn’t approach his story. Rather than the tragedy it now appears to have been, some may have seen it as a black comedy.

DC: Natan was a high-powered businessman, so the left didn’t like him. But he was also a Jewish emigre, so the right didn’t like him. The bad press he received was so

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enduring that you can find respected film histories still treating him as a stereotyped Jewish vulgarian figure, and I’m sure the authors would be horrified to be considered anti-semitic. They just bought the story that was created.

Where do you stand on the accusations that Natan ended up making hardcore?

PD: We thought it was clear from the evidence that he had nothing to do with any of the porno films he’s been historically associated with! There was an arrest in 1911 for involvement with a porn shoot, but Serge Bromberg of Lobster FIlms, who knows more than anyone about the era, says hardcore didn’t exist in 1911.

So we believe he had some involvement while quite young in some relatively innocent smut, got caught, thought he had cleared his name via his WW1 heroism and later business success, only to find mud being slung at him over and over again and the more successful he became the more despicable the films he was supposed to have been the star of were suggested – ending with the ne plus ultra of Le Canard.

DC: There are certainly no surviving porn films from Europe in the period of Natan’s conviction. And the other stories associating him with blue movies are all friendof-a-friend type things. People, including film professors, have been happy to claim that Natan is actually up on the screen acting in sex scenes, but when you compare the footage with photographs of Natan from any point in his life, it’s obviously not him.

Natan was truly a great figure in French cinema and yet none of the French students interviewed at the end of the film have heard of him, which is a tragedy. Do you think your film will go some way to changing that?

PD: We certainly hope so! If the film does anything (and we have only scratched the surface of what is a truly complex and difficult story to tell) it should provoke some French film historians, scholars and documentarians into bettering it, because with more money (and better French) there’s a lot that can be added to what we’ve done.

DC: We’re proud of what we managed to achieve, and feel it corrects the major myths about a figure who has to be the most traduced man in film history. But I hope it’s only the beginning.

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Natan is being released later this year.

AVAILABLE ON AMAZON KINDLE

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World ANEW 38

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Rule-breaker. Pioneer.

This is Anurag Kashyap In our regular strand focusing on outstanding filmmakers from across the globe, Evrim Ersoy looks at the work of pioneering, rule-breaking Bollywood visionary Anurag Kashyap words by Evrim Ersoy

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t’s funny; I used to come here during the London Film Festival and sneak in at the back and take notes during the Q&A with the directors I loved’, remarks Anurag Kashyap with a nervous laugh as he introduces his 2011 film That Girl in Yellow Boots at London’s BFI during the London Indian Film Festival.

‘It’s so weird to be back here now’, he adds, self-deprecating talk from a man who constantly and quite unknowingly reveals his lifelong love affair with cinema: ‘My wife used to work at the concession stand at Cineworld Haymarket’. It’s as if these cinematic credentials mean more to him than titles or money.

But this is no surprise. 40 year old Anurag Kashyap is the rule-breaker of Indian cinema – a pioneer who is determined to push at those protective, invisible Bollywood boundaries erected after years of enormous success.

Let’s get some facts straight first: Bollywood is the largest producer of cinema in India but only represents the part of the industry located in Mumbai. Bollywood is enormous, producing around 155 films each year (2012 figures), but, combined with the rest of Indian cinema industry–Tamil (Kollywood), Telugu (Tollywood) and the other regional production centres–creates a one-of-a-kind and altogether even more humongous behemoth.

Bollywood follows a strict formula: Script, dialogue, music, and dance numbers. The films are made with stars in mind, much in the way established by the original industry rule makers in Hollywood. The biggest names in Indian cinema are revered as Gods; Amitabh Bachchan’s posters are sold alongside that of Vishnu or Ganesha. People wait outside his house every week to see a glimpse of the great man. This is a culture dedicated to idolising the silver screen.

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And this is exactly one of the points Kashyap makes in his masterpiece Gangs of Wasseypur. ‘Every fucker’s got his own movie playing inside his head. Every fucker is trying to become the hero of his imaginary film. As long as there are fucking movies in this country people will continue to be fooled’, says one of the characters in the epic film’s second part. Through this sentiment, Kashyap conveys it succinctly and bluntly–as long as there is Bollywood, India will never face the realities of itself.

Almost all of Kashyap’s work celebrates and demystifies Bollywood; he’s at once in love with and infinitely repulsed by the beating heart of Indian culture.

2003’s Paanch is a violent, frightening story ripped from the newspaper headlines. However don’t even try to look for it – it never got released. The Censor Board of India refused to grant the film a certificate and still do to this day. Beyond the lucky few who caught one of two festival screenings, noone can ever know what Paanch is exactly like.

In his breakout hit, the 2009 Dev D, he tackles Devdas, a Bengali romance from 1917 that happens to be one of the most popular and beloved stories of Indian literature. In Kashyap’s adaptation, Dev is the son of a wealthy family who returns to his childhood sweetheart from whom the fates conspire to separate him. Their love remains unconsummated, impossible to bring to reality for the time being, but Kashyap (director and screenwriter) has other ideas. Twisting the classic tale, he takes away the tragic sting, which gives no hope to

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the youth of India– weaned on the idea that what the Gods deny, no man can bring together. ‘Here is hope’ he almost seems to say, ‘go, write your own destiny’.

The film is a visual powerhouse – Dev’s downfall from grace, a kaleidoscopic nightmare pitched somewhere between a Disney cartoon and the rave scenes from Human Traffic.

The score throbs hard with beats hitherto unknown, playing with the very nature of what a Bollywood soundtrack should be. Kashyap is not looking for a quiet word to change cinema – he is screaming down the line.

However it’s not hard to fathom – simply by looking at his next film. Black Friday is Kashyap’s attempt to examine the Mumbai blasts of 1993. Lending an almost journalistic edge to the film – examining the events that led to the blasts and the immediate aftermath. It’s hard not to think of the European masters whilst watching the whole thing – there’s the sense of the urgency of Italian filmmakers crafting their most immediate work straight after World War II. Even Danny Boyle admits that the chase in Slumdog Millionaire is inspired by the chase in Black Friday. It’s the kind of film that makes a director.

Perhaps the most impressive part of Kashyap’s art is the intense feeling of the city he captures: This is a living, breathing creation – dirty, noisy, crowded but goddamn alive all the same. Like he says in an interview – he finds Bombay films too clinical, too hygienic – he tries to show India as he sees it – raw and brutal but brilliant all the same.

“Just as Once Upon A Time in America is about the loss of innocence, Wasseypur is about India and the madness of its existence. It is a grand opera, a western of the highest scale, a character piece of the most intimate kind.”

His next film No Smoking is an adaptation of a Stephen King story – Quitters, Inc. But Kashyap makes the material his own – King’s slyly funny and frightening story becomes a neo-noir satire in Kashyap’s hands. He combines genres, brings in highly challenging hallucinatory sequences and makes it as difficult for the audience to get a handle on the material as possible – a gauntlet thrown at the masses.

Even the music is nothing like what the audience is used to.

The film is a critical and box-office failure – even though it receives attention internationally. Back to the drawing board, Kashyap goes – for something even more daring.

His next film (there’s a children’s movie in-between titled Return of Hanuman) is the before mentioned Dev D which becomes a bigger hit than even the director has any right to expect. However it’s not enough. Anurag Kashyap needs to create something bigger, more daring.

And Gulaal is born. Highly ambitious, utterly faulty and mesmerising to watch – Gulaal is a political thriller, a story of personal corruption, a revolutionary statement, a highly-charged history lesson. The plot follows the clashing parties in the fictional town of Rajpur – the students, the revolutionaries who wants to bring back the old kings of history, the corrupt politicians and the hapless pawns who get caught in the middle. The ambitions are high but the running time is not enough to let it all develop, or to let those loose ends find their place. However, no one can deny the film is a masterful watch – and the soundtrack: the soundtrack is electric – it crackles with sex, with death, with politics and anger – it’s an entity onto itself, separate from the film in its power and yet symbiotic.

Kashyap then attempted something completely left field: That Girl In Yellow Boots – a female-centric exploration of Indian male-dominated society told through the eyes of a half foreign, half-Indian girl who works as a masseuse by night and spends the days looking for her biological father.

The film is too ambitious, the script not developed enough but the subject matter is so risqué that it’s hard not to applaud Kashyap and his wife Kalki Koechlin who not only co-wrote the script but also starred in the film.

In a cinematic landscape dominated by bashful modest and old-school values, 2010’s That Girl In Yellow Boots is a loud swearword – carefully chosen in order to act as a wakeup call.

It’s fascinating –immediately relevant historical document which will remain as a milestone for years to come despite all its faults.

How do you follow that? How do you follow a film which acts as a challenge not only with its subject matter but with also its script, its production, even its structure?

The answer lies within Kashyap’s masterpiece Gangs of Wasseypur. Based on a true story, the film tells the story of Wasseypur and the three crime families who fight over the control of it. It tells the story of revenge so powerful that the promise of it resonates in generation after generation after generation. Just as Once Upon A Time in America is about the loss of innocence, Wasseypur is about India and the madness of its existence. It is a grand opera, a western of the highest scale, a character piece of the most intimate kind – but most of all it is an experiment – a daring attempt to take the Bollywood blockbuster, drag it through the mud and dirt and see what it looks like. The dialogue is filthy, peppered with everyday swearwords so while the Indian Censor Board immediately awarded it an ‘A’ (for adult), the characters hang out in rickety barns, in bloody slaughterhouses, in dirty villages. They lust, their songs are rowdy and carnal, and the entire thing sings the stained praises of mankind’s unclean soul.

It is one of the greatest films ever to have been made – not only in Bollywood but in all of World Cinema.

Kashyap seems to show no signs of slowing down – he has two films at Cannes whilst his production company is bringing a third starring the ever talented Irrfan Khan. He is a prolific figure, constantly at odds with most of the industry he works in (it’s only recently that his 14-year-long argument/silence with Amitabh Bachchan ended) but also trying to nurture talent, too – when not making films, Kayshap produces them, continues to pen them (his original role within cinema), and still lives them.

Maybe he no longer needs to sneak into the back row of the BFI to take notes from Q&A’s with his favourite directors but his all-consuming love for cinema shows no signs of diminishing. Kashyap is a talent to watch who is changing the face of the industry, one punch at a time.

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Masters of Cinema

The Murderer Lives at 21 The great Henri Georges-Clouzot polarised viewers with his brilliant, mercurial and cynical films. Robert Makin reflects on Clouzot’s life and work and uncovers the salacious pleasures of his most overlooked film words by Robert Makin

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very other weekend I take my five-year-old daughter to the kid’s club at our local cinema, followed by a dash across the road for some lunch where we’ll discuss the finer points of Paranorman and A Monster In Paris over a plate of fish and chips.

It was during one of these afternoons that an elderly gent sitting on the table beside us overheard our conversation and told us he used to go to the very same cinema when he was a young man. He then recalled the time he took a girl from work to the pictures on a date that turned into a complete disaster.

The film they saw together was such an intense spectacle that she vowed never to speak to him ever again. He couldn’t remember the girl’s name but he’d never forget the title of that damn film; it was Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear.

This story says everything you need to know about Hen-

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ri-Georges Clouzot. Even his detractors would have to admit that the clinging atmosphere that permeates his most celebrated work is hard to forget whether you enjoy the experience or not.

It also reflects how he was one of the earliest European directors to cross over to the mainstream and appeal to an audience beyond the art house circuit and its cliques of cinephiles.

Clouzot was a controversial figure who made controversial films. He spent most of the 1930s in Berlin translating German movies into French until he was fired due to his association with Jewish producers. In Nazi-occupied France he made a living writing and directing for the German owned Continental Films, which would to lead to him being labelled a collaborator in post war France and officially banned from taking part in any filmmaking until the sentence was eventually lifted.

His 1943 drama Le Corbeau had the privilege of being

hated by every political entity in existence from the left to the right and everyone in between. The Wages of Fear (1953) and the equally seminal Les Diaboliques (1955) may have brought him global recognition and success but were openly despised by the French New Wave who considered his films to be the cinema of cruelty.

And it wasn’t just the dark and dubious content of his work that raised eyebrows but also his sadistic methods. Clouzot was notorious for physically assaulting his cast members, usually by slapping them around the face, and was directly responsible for Brigitte Bardot getting her stomach pumped during the filming of La Verite (1960).

His documentary The Mystery of Picasso was made a national treasure by the French government in 1984 but flopped on its initial release in 1956 when audiences who were used to the bleak thrills of his previous titles were left less than enthralled.

The last film of his to gain any kind of public recognition was the aforementioned La Verite, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and despite the torturous experience of it conception became Bardot’s personal favourite role.

Following the death of his wife and plagued with bad health, Clouzout saw his career in the sixties slowly fizzle out. La Nouvelle Vague were constantly dismissing his work as insignificant and outdated within the pages of Cahiers Du Cinema, and apart from a series of documentaries made for French television his projects seemed cursed with adversity and destined to fail.

Most infamously his attempts to turn his visually bold screenplay L’Enfer into a feature film resulted in the production being abandoned after only three weeks due to a series of disastrous circumstances and Clouzot suffering a heart attack. The most significant moments from the fifteen hours of discarded footage would later form the basis of Serge Bromberg’s fantastic 2009 documentary Henri-George Clouzot’s Inferno.

The anguished, psychedelic, masochistic tale of tortured love, Woman in Chains (1968), would be his last feature film. His final years were spent working on a number of scripts that would remain un-filmed until he eventually succumbed to his ailing health on January 12 1977.

Clouzot’s most overlooked film is his directorial debut The Murderer Lives at 21 (1942) an irreverent comedy thriller that’s slight in plot but considerable in subversive subtext due to the strange and dramatic circumstance that surrounded its creation (a German-funded film with a French director produced in Nazi-occupied France).

Even though it’s essentially a screwball comedy whodunit, what’s most surprising is that Clouzot’s misanthropic preoccupations with death, deception, betrayal, violence, murder and corruption are all intact.

Despite the humour, this is still a bleak world of

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ruthless opportunists with shallow motivations; it’s just being addressed with a more sardonic tone rather than the signature darkness of his later work.

What’s also apparent is the influence of F.W Murnau, Fritz Lang and German expressionism, particularly during an intense interrogation scene that fills the frame with foreboding shadows and faces of intimidating stone.

The story follows the impeccably dressed and quick-witted Pierre Fresnay as Inspector Wen who’s desperately trying to solve the case of Monsieur Durand, a thieving serial killer who insists on leaving a calling card with his victims.

The investigation leads him to a Parisian boarding house where he’s convinced that one of the idiosyncratic guests is the murderer.

Disguised as a pastor he takes up residence but an already puzzling case is further complicated by the unannounced arrival of his girlfriend Mila (Suzy Delair), a struggling singer desperate to find the killer in an attempt to gain publicity and further her career.

Along with the pipe smoking, matriarchal landlady and her helper (a bird impressionist) the boarding house guests are a cracking bunch of entertainingly disturbed caricatures.

There’s the arrogant doctor with a military past who’s rumoured to have performed abortions and believes that Durand is doing society a service. There’s the doll maker who creates very creepy, faceless mechanical figures of the imagined killer to cash in on the murders, admitting that it’s horrible but it pays.

There’s also a blind boxer called Kid Robert who’s looked after by a sultry, mysterious nurse who shares an overtly sexual verbal exchange with Inspector Wen in one of the funniest scenes.

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Another deluded soul living under a preposterous affectation is the turban wearing conjurer and pickpocket Professor Lalah Poor, who spends most nights either performing his magic act or sleeping in a sarcophagus.

Last but not least is the struggling spinster who dreams of being a romance novelist but prefers concentration to inspiration and sees the opposite sex as a perverted threat.

In fact she’s so ignorant of her environment and resilient to drawing from her own experiences that when she eventually decides to write a thriller it involves vampires and castles as opposed to the murder mystery that’s evolving immediately around her.

Suzy Delair’s Mila Malou is a physical comedic force to be reckoned with. Viewers will either find her incredibly grating or endearingly chaotic as she bounces off the sets and sporadically bursts into screeching opera. One of her most memorable moments involves her desperately trying to impress a musical impresario by referring to him as a gardener who grows delicate plants, like a pile of manure warming tender roots. In the film this is taken as compliment but obviously reflects Clouzot’s feeling towards his own producers and show business in general.

Another cunning reference that’s gloriously insubordinate is when Mila is attempting to hunt down Durand but is arrested for riding a bike without lights. In her defence she compares herself to St Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris who managed to divert the armies of Atilla the Hun. And let’s face it, what’s a more pleasurable diversion than a good bit of cinematic entertainment?

Fresnay and Delair have a believable rapport with quickfire banter that ricochets across the screen with authenticity and genuine comic flair. It’s a double act that’s often

compared to the crime busting marital exploits of Nick & Nora Charles from The Thin Man film series. But Wen and Mila’s relationship feels a lot more risqué and modern. For a start they’re not married and don’t seem too interested in the idea, and the closest they get to any kind of intimacy is when Mila persuades Wen to let her squeeze his blackheads.

The Murderer Lives at 21 is rich in allegorical substance and at best is a mocking parody of the ludicrousness of authority and the fickle nature of social hierarchy. The plot and tone of the movie are as deceitful as its characters, with something much darker hiding beneath its playful surface.

The serial killer in Clouzot’s tale doesn’t have an intriguing and fantastical pseudonym like criminal masterminds Fantomas and Judex. His name is Monsieur Durand, the French equivalent of Mr Smith, a simple and common name that in the context of the story addresses the everyday banality that real evil often hides behind. In Clouzot’s world, evil isn’t an omnipresent supernatural force but a human choice that we are all capable of making. And just as acts of compassion are capable of bringing people together and forming a bond, so too are acts of pure evil.

v

The Murderer Lives at 21 is available on Mat 20th courtesy of Eureka Entertainment. www.eurekavideo.co.uk

“Even though it’s essentially a screwball comedy whodunit, what’s most surprising is that Clouzot’s misanthropic preoccupations with death, deception, betrayal, violence, murder and corruption are all intact.”

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In Defence...

God Save Le Queen: Marie Antoinette

words by David Hall

L

iberty taking, highly stylized and deliberately modern in outlook; Sofia Coppola’s re-imagining of Marie Antoinette’s life enraged many for its historical perspective (eschewing the devastation being wreaked upon the impoverished French hordes, food shortages and rioting) and irritated in its aesthetic contrivances (punk and new wave score, young Hollywood casting).

But looked upon now, and in the context of her work to date, this may well be her most personal and oneiric film, as well as her moist technically accomplished. Like all her works this is an opulent bauble, beautiful to look at, shot in exquisitely dreamy, gauzy hues. But beneath the candy pink exterior and the decadent set-dressing lies a melancholy tale which, although it distances itself from commentary of a political class nature, definite-

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ly engages with gender concerns. With genuine skill, Coppola weaves in subtle but pointed commentary on female relationships, sexual politics and society’s view of women throughout the ages.

Taking Antonia Fraser’s largely sympathetic and corrective biography as its basis, Coppola brilliantly casts Kirsten Dunst in the role of the fourteen -yearold Maria Antonia Josephina Johanna, the youngest daughter of Austrian empress Maria Theresa (Marianne Faithfull). When she is chosen to marry the young Dauphin of France, Louis XVI ( Jason Schwartzman) heir to the French throne, it cements an uneasy alliance between the two countries and sets in motion the course of Marie’s tragic, doomed and short life.

In an ironically misunderstood performance, Dunst essays a childlike naïf, hopelessly out of her depth,

propelled into a life of servitude – a teenager robbed of true adolescence and eventually womanhood. Coppola treats her with tenderness in these early passages; highlighting incidental detail that other directors would’ve missed – from her devastation at leaving behind her beloved dog (treated with sympathy rather than sneering), to the embarrassment of being forced to strip in a scene which sees her literally and metaphorically shedding her identity.

As a woman and a royal, Marie is expected simply to function as a vessel for reproduction. As the duchess warns her in preparation for her marriage; “All eyes will be on you.” Married to a man who has no sexual interest in her, she is nevertheless expected to remain devoted, loyal and above all to bear a son. She is chastised by supposed friends and other women, including her family. A devastating letter from her mother, accusing of failing as a wife and woman wounds her deeply.

Marie Antoinette is one of the most vilified women in history; her ‘let them eat cake’ quote the ultimate symbol of rich, vacuous vanity sneering at the poles. But this is a portrait of a very young lady, a teenager for most of the film, who has been cast as the ultimate villain; an easy target for all that was vile, corrupt and decadent in France. The criticism of Coppola for her inclusion of many indulgent scenes of Marie quaffing champagne, scoffing macaroons and trying on shoes are understandable but perhaps misguided. These are quite clearly expressions of the moments where the stymied Marie gets to act with reckless and wild abandonment, surely one of the pleasures of one of the simple pleasures of youth. But many fail to see beyond the Bolly and Blahniks.

Some perhaps felt Coppola's film lets it’s heroine off the hook somehow. But Coppola’s approach is unconventional from the setup, beginning with Marie’s arrival at Versailles and ending before her grisly departure. The film remains aloof, hermetically sealed and it’s a deliberate aesthetic choice. Like Visconti’s Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963), Marie Antoinette depicts a society detached from reality, fat and drunk on its own self-importance, unaware of the pain and suffering outside the opulent gates, and utterly doomed. But Coppola, like Antonia Fraser, sees Marie as an unwitting stooge and an easy historical target. Using melancholic new wave tracks like The Cure’s Plainsong and electronic composi-

“Dunst essays a childlike naïf, hopelessly out of her depth, propelled into a life of servitude – a teenager robbed of true adolescence and eventually womanhood.” tions from the likes of Squarepusher, she soundtracks an existence that may well be decadent but is also, for Marie, mostly lonely and isolated. This kind of existential ennui is of course Coppola’s stock in trade and clearly reflects her own backstory. And while it would be facile to draw too heavy comparisons between director and subject we have to remember that when her father’s Godfather Part 3 (a future ‘In Defence’) was utterly savaged, a great deal of vitriol was directed at the then 17 year old actress and daughter of Saint Francis.

Technically the film is an absolute triumph; Lance Alcord's cinematography captures brilliantly the gaudy, sickly charms of the Palace of Versailles and the great Italian costume designer Milena Canonero, who worked with Kubrick and was also responsible for the clothes on the TV series Miami Vice, provides the amazing costume pieces and props.

I can see what irked the critics at the time. The pop video flourishes (a brilliant aesthetic choice but one easily, lazily dismissed) the casting of rich Californians with their own accents in central roles. Dunst herself (not a popular casting choice) walks a fine line between vacuity and pity as the girl woman desperately ill-equipped to be a monarch. And perhaps the whole film was just too diffuse and gentle in its portrayal of the despised monarchy, not to mention deliberately ignorant of the wider socio-political context. But Marie and Louis ( Jason Schwartzman, very good as the noble but equally childlike king) are in many ways both victims of circumstance.

And this is a film about Marie, not a political documentary of France in the eighteenth century. As Louis takes the throne he delivers the apparently historically accurate line, “God, guide and protect us. We are too young to reign.” It’s a moment of both poignancy and prophecy, lightly worn in this cool and collected film, but there nonetheless.

An adroit and indulgent portrayal that humanises its subject in ways that so many stuffed, starched, mannequin-filled biopics consistently fail to do, Marie Antoinette delivers a revisionist essay that might fail the historical test but delivers on gender politics and creating an emotionally barren world of gilded opulence. Directed with pop cultural aplomb and dreamy visual lyricism this is Coppola’s flawed but heartfelt, new wave, feminist Barry Lyndon and like its much maligned subject, worthy of some reappraisal.

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Review by Kelsey Eichhorn

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

release date 10th May

cert (15)

director Mira Nair writers William Wheeler, Ami Boghani, Mohsin Hamid starring Riz Ahmed, Kate Hudson, Kiefer Sutherland, Liev Schreiber, Om Puri 48

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What troubles me about Mira Nair’s most recent film The Reluctant Fundamentalist is that it is a film with an identity crisis. I’ve never been wedded to the conventions of film genres, yet like it or not, the set of narrative clues we, as a collective audience, have accepted cannot simply be cast aside. It is one thing to let a story roam and explore; but as Nair’s film darts between political and personal, thriller and drama, the roving narrative never fully develops in any direction. To borrow from Lewis Carroll, “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there”. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is ripe with possibility, standing at a crossroads; I only wish Nair had chosen a road.

Ironically, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is also a film about an identity crisis. So it may be I’m not giving Nair enough credit – is her wandering narrative an intentional attempt at an aesthetic mirroring of style and substance? If so, hats off for the attempt, it is not an easy feat to accomplish. Unfortunately, this attempt falls short of realisation.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is adapted for the screen from Mohsin Hamid’s novel of the same name. When Nair and her long-term production partner Lydia Pilcher optioned the novel back in 2007, the topic, (the slow destruction of the successful and promising Wall-Street career of a Pakistani Princeton graduate in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks), was undoubtedly charged, however unfairly, by the political climate that often influences art. Yet the novel was published to acclaim and noted for its distinctly un-political perspective. The film attempts to mirror the same; yet is faced with the additional challenge of adapting a deeply personal story, constructed through flashbacks and relying heavily on first-person narration, into a two-hour visual narrative.

If pressed, I’d say the film was attempting to be a thriller – there is an emotional suspense to the protagonist Changez’s recollections, manifested in the growing tensions of the main story: an interview between Changez and an American reporter following the kidnapping of an American professor in Pakistan. Yet neither thread is developed fully enough to satisfy – the flashbacks of the past, which occupy the bulk of screen time, edges on a deeply personal psychological drama that lacks urgency or narrative rhythm. Meanwhile the “main story” of the present emerges as a subplot political thriller with narrative chasms too wide for the imagination to bridge.

Still, there is something fundamental that draws me to this film; I am reluctant to give up on it. Riz Ahmed gives a committed and compelling performance as Changez, stifled only by the limitations of his character. There are moments of brilliance in his candid exchanges with his sister and in the stubborn wisdom of his poet father. Visually beautiful, the film plays on reflections and mirror imagery while employing a barrage of emotionally charged colours to enhance every scene. But ultimately it feels as if too much of this film ended up on the cutting room floor. The success of the story depends on an emotional connection, yet at the close of the film I felt little relation to any of the characters, certainly not enough to be emotionally invested in their entwined journeys.

Review by Robert Makin

Ed (Edward Hogg) spends his days working shifts at a call centre selling insurance and his nights desperately trying to break into the London stand up comedy circuit. His flatmate and best friend Elisa (Elisa Lasowski) is a struggling musician making ends meet with the odd pub gig. When Ed begins an affair with young artist Nathan (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) it begins to put a strain on Elisa and Ed’s seemingly inseparable friendship until a drastic decision has to be made.

Ed wears a woolly hat and spends a lot of time staring out of windows mumbling, Elisa is very sensitive and plays confessional folk songs on an acoustic guitar, and Nathan makes art in an abandoned warehouse space in East London, all of them struggling to work out why London, big old stinky London, hasn’t had the common decency to make them famous yet.

It’s all very earnest and precious, and it’s also extremely pretentious and dull, to the point where I became as bored and fed up as the characters with their banal existence. As much as The Comedian is about people reaching out to connect, it’s also a film about people sitting around waiting for buses, lacking any real dramatic tension, insight or imagination.

Director Tom Shkolnik strives to achieve a form of profound naturism, so there’s the obligatory shaky hand held camera that doesn’t seem to know what it’s supposed to be focusing on, as if rudimentary equipment such as tripods lack integrity. But instead of successfully channelling the gritty aesthetics of Italian neo-realism, Cassavetes or the Dogma ’95 movement, Shkolnik has created something reminiscent of mid-nineties TV series This Life.

You could argue that it’s incredibly “raw” and “real”, but with its inept lighting and incomprehensible dialogue it’s as bold and groundbreaking as leaving a camera running on a busy street late at night. It also has an unbelievably dull final scene in a mini cab (as appose to a bus) that’s liable to test anyone’s patience and left me shrugging with indifference. It’s one thing capturing a slice of life, but creatively redundant if you don’t intend on doing anything with it that’s remotely interesting or captivating.

The only scenes that I found remotely convincing took place during Ed’s working hours, encapsulating the frustration and deeply depressing pettiness that takes place within dead end office jobs and the world of menial labour. It’s these moments, the capable cast and a few isolated incidents that could have been used to create a believable short film, as unfortunately The Comedian doesn’t have the narrative strength to carry the weight of a feature length movie.

To his credit Shkolnik is at least attempting to bring life to British film’s stagnant pool of rom-coms and gangster flicks and it would be interesting to see him apply his filming techniques (only shooting one take and refusing to disrupt the regular functioning of a location) to a project that’s wider reaching and less insular.

The Comedian

cert (15)

release date 31st May

director Tom Shkolnik writer Tom Shkolnik starring Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Edward Hogg, Steven Robertson, Brett Goldstein, Elisa Lasowski VERITE MAY 2013

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A Portrait of James Dean:

Joshua Tree, 1951 director Matthew Mishory writer Matthew Mishory starring James Preston, Dan Glenn, Dalilah Rain, Edward Singletary

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cert (15)

Review by Jordan McGrath

dvd release 13th May

Not your father’s James Dean biopic. Don’t expect a story about impact of fame and fortune of this rebel without a cause, as Matthew Mishory’s provocateur’s eye chronicles the quieter, instrumental era before his big break and his rise to the cinema stable we know today. With relatively unknown James Preston holstering the weight of the true ‘wild one’ with a keen understanding, this borderline art-house experiment of a film explores the widely untold stories of his highly sexualised exploits and the people that left their mark enough to carve themselves into Dean’s lasting persona.

Non-linear and dream-like in its narrative style, this is a film that doesn’t occupy itself by telling you a simple rags to riches tale but is bold enough – with more than shred of naivety thrown in – to attempt to provide an autopsy of the enigma as well as the magnetism the actor possessed. We get to see him at his most raw, nothing but a vulnerable young man who became wrapped up in something bigger than he could contain. At its core is a tragic love story of a relationship doomed from the very beginning.

Photographed with an ever-present visual swagger, Mishory and his cinematographer Michael Marius Pessah have created, aesthetically at least, a stunning piece of art. The black and white photography – high contrasts of bottomless blacks and elegant highlights – is the perfect choice to capture the era of 50’s Hollywood. It’s a hybrid mish-mash of style also, aspiring to have the realistic voyeur style of John Cassavetes but the beauty and craft of Tom Ford’s A Single Man (with a little hint of Michael Cristofer’s Gia thrown in for flavour).

Slipping and sliding with an ease through times and places, endlessly gorgeous and, more often than not, impressively holding its emotional weight intact, the film expresses the inner turmoil and regret of Dean that would so effectively fuel his method.

And it doesn’t shy away from detailing his bi-sexual leanings, explicitly illustrating both his homosexual and heterosexual conquests and peeling away the layers of his life that have seemingly been lost. And this is the element, especially his interactions with men, where it seems like Mishony wants to shock.

Like a rebel he’s depicting, the director feels the need to provoke a reaction out of his audience. And to some, it surely will, but it’s not who Dean slept with that I’m interested in but the sexual politics and how those people affected him that’s important.

The emptiness his ambition obligates him to have, his relationship with a character known only as The Roommate being used as a melancholic anchor to Dean’s true feelings.

The title ‘A Portrait of James Dean’ is, to me, of upmost importance because it hints at an interpretation, another man’s version of an individual. Not perfect, not all true. A biopic, of course, but it’s the director’s own artistic vision that carries this film, not its historical accuracy. A highly emotive work, the film lingers like the smell of a cigarette on your fingers and even though it impresses on a certain level, it still sometimes feels like nothing more than an accomplished student effort.

I’m So Excited release date 3rd May

cert (15)

director Pedro Almodóvar Review by David Hall

British viewers of Almodovar’s latest may be forgiven for thinking the Spanish maestro has adapted the 1990s BBC sitcom The High Life for the bigscreen. But no, this is actually a return to the zany, frothy camp of the director’s gloriously disreputable 80s period. Unfortunately the froth on this camp Spanish airborne Stagecoach is flat and the comedy mostly forced. If you have seen the trailer, you’ll already be familiar with the film’s surprise guests and comedic set pieces; including the amusingly choreographed but ultimately wearisome lip-sync of the Pointer Sisters’ track that gives the film its English language title. And that (perhaps ironic) exclamation mark should be heeded a as warning, for this is a bumpy return to the director’s roots that strains for shock value and laughs.

When a failure with the landing gear forces the Peninsula Flight 2549 from Madrid to Mexico into a holding pattern mid-air, three flight attendants ( Javier Camara, Carlos Areces and Raul Arevalo) drug the economy passengers and entertain themselves (and the business class clientele) while a solution is found. The more privileged patrons on board – a middle-aged virgin and psychic, a dominatrix to the stars, a philandering actor, a crooked banker on the run and mysterious, silent stranger– each have their own personal stories (which play out inside the plane and in some cases on the ground). Even the pilots (Antonio de la Torre and Hugo Silva) have their own distractions and personal entanglements to deal with while they try and land the plane safely.

More farcical than satirical, I’m So Excited finds Almodovar delving in to his usual thematic preoccupations; undersexed women, oversexed men, death, religion and the state. Almost everyone on board is in a state of sexual and emotional crisis. But the pacing and the timing is a bit off and, although some of the pointed resonances to his homeland’s spectacular recent economic crash may hit home with Spanish audiences, the satire feels slight and undercooked.

The flashbacks and ground-set stories (especially the doomed ménage a trois involving Guillermo Toledo’s lothario) are actually far more compelling than anything happening on the plane. And for a director whose lush visuals and forensic mise-en-scene have always provided great aesthetic pleasure, even when the material hasn’t been absolutely stellar, this film is disappointingly uncinematic – although there is one eerie, beautiful and striking montage towards the films’ climax. Alberto Iglesias’ jazzy, peppy score works overtime to keep the energy levels high when the farcical set-up begins to sag.

Almodovar’s last film The Skin I Live In, a stylish, funny and perverted psycho thriller and the director’s most purely enjoyable work in years, saw him reconnecting with some of his early energy and brought to a close a run of more tasteful and respectable works. While it’s good to see this director loosening up and having fun again, this is mostly economy-grade Almodovar from a legendary auteur who normally ensures (at least) a business-class journey.

writer Pedro Almodóvar starring Antonio de la Torre, Hugo Silva, Miguel Angel Silvestre, Laya Marti, Javier Camara

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Review by James Marsh

Something in the Air

release date 24th May

cert (15)

director Olivier Assayas writer Olivier Assayas starring Clement Metayer, Lola Creton, Felix Armand 52

MAY 2013 VERITE

In the spring of 1968, Gilles and his high school friends become increasingly caught up in the demonstrations that are turning ugly on the streets of Paris. After defacing their school with political slogans, they injure a security guard and are advised to lay low for the summer. While his rich girlfriend departs for England with her family, Gilles and his friends follow a group of radical filmmakers south.

Something in the Air, the new film from Olivier Assayas, has been retitled for international audiences from its original French name, Apres Mai. While no less enigmatic, the film’s new moniker steers our attention away from the political upheaval of the opening reel and towards Gilles and his friends’ character-defining escapades over the ensuing summer. Sex, Drugs, Activism and Adulthood await the adolescent protagonists, and it is difficult to shake the suspicion that Assayas is less interested in the politics of the time so much as how it lit a fire beneath those who experienced it.

Some reviews have claimed the film isn’t nostalgic, and it is true that while Assayas was certainly aware of these events, at the age of 13 he was probably too young to have been actively involved. But the reverence and enthusiasm with which he resurrects this epoch of radicalized art, free love and casual hedonism is nothing if not portrayed through misty eyes (although that might just be the pot and tear gas).

Assayas appears to dismiss this period of revolution and political activism as a phase of adolescence, no more meaningful than indulging in recreational drug use, rampant promiscuity or backpacking round Europe. It is merely a rite of passage, at least for wannabe painter, Gilles. By the film’s conclusion, the balance has been readdressed, the party is essentially over, as Gilles acknowledges the futility of this lifestyle. He doesn’t fail the cause or turn his back on his political ideals, but rather embraces the inevitability of adulthood.

After a filmography that repeatedly assesses and reappraises The Arts, Assayas shifted into a more immediate, documentarian approach for his last film, the epic Carlos. In large part, Something in the Air continues this aesthetic, albeit shooting frequent sideways glances at the radicalized and politically charged art scene that was emerging. He continues to extract fine performances from young, largely inexperienced actors, with Clement Metayer as Gilles doing particularly strong work, creating an engaging character from a mostly passive, bemused onlooker.

The central failing of Something in the Air is its simplicity and lack of depth. Taken as a wistful “How I spent the Summer of ‘68” indulgence, it works, parading a keen understanding of time and place, not to mention a fantastic range of music from the period. However, this is a slice of modern history many of us either remember firsthand or have seen recreated countless times before, to the degree that the numerous lengthy sequences of pretty young things spouting naïve political rhetoric through the thick fog of pot smoke can’t help but feel clichéd and trite. To the film’s credit, its lastgasp conclusion asks that what has come before be reassessed from another, more forgiving perspective.

Which as I’ve always understood it, is the very definition of nostalgia.

Review by Robert Makin

Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and his best friend Neckbone ( Jacob Lofland) are two fourteen-year-old boys growing up in the backwoods, Mississippi houseboat community of Arkansas. Their place of refuge from the adult world is a desolate island where a broken down and abandoned speed boat hangs suspended from a tree. But their plans of turning it into a secret camp are impeded when they discover feral fugitive Mud (Mathew McConaughey) using the island as a hideout. Claiming to be on the run from a gang of ruthless bounty hunters, Mud persuades Ellis and Neckbone to help him escape and reunite with his estranged lover Juniper (Reese Witherspoon). But can he be trusted?

After the intense and anguished turmoil of Take Shelter (2011) Jeff Nichols gives us an equally merciless natural landscape at odds with its beguiled occupants and treacherous to those who claim to understand it. Whereas his previous film certainly showcased a director with an original approach to contemporary domestic drama and modern angst, Mud is a far more focused and satisfactory movie with a lot more confidence in its story and characters.

Even though the plot isn’t particularly original, Mud’s narrative strength derives from the director’s complete commitment to a quintessentially American tradition of storytelling, creating an absorbing lyricism that doesn’t neglect the everyday importance of humour.

Nichols successfully keeps a tight and controlled rein on the drama, stopping it from falling into the bottomless pit of soap opera hysterics. When we do reach the point where it’s certain that we’re about to witness a clichéd speech drenched in syrupy Oscar bait it’s almost instantly blasted away by the sudden and terrifying jolt of the climatic scenes.

In fact it’s one of the least sentimental comingof-age films I’ve seen in a long while. Nichols has faith in his young protagonists, letting them make up their own minds as to how they understand potentially epochal events in their lives – rather than having the luxury of a wiser adult interpret them.

There’s no schmaltzy voiceover from one the boy’s future selves either.

The cast are superb, from the incredibly believable adolescent leads to McConaughey finally getting a part he can sink his broken teeth into. Michael Shannon has a short but memorable role as Neckbone’s pearl diving uncle Galen and Sam Shepard (the grizzled patron saint of dysfunctional love stories) is the mysterious and all-seeing neighbour Tom Blankenship. And Reese Witherspoon takes great relish (along with McConaughey) in playing against the usual rom-com archetypes she’s lumbered with as the capricious and sultry Juniper.

It’s always questionable as to whether or not this fabled vision of rural southern America has ever actually existed outside the vivid imagination of enthusiastic novelists and filmmakers but I am convinced the emotional pull and solid characterisations that give this film its lucid flow come from a very real place.

Mud

release date 10th May

cert (15)

director Jeff Nichols writer Jeff Nichols starring Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon, Tye Sheridan, Jacob Lofland

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Populaire

release date 31st May

cert (12a)

writers Régis Roinsard, Daniel Presley, Romain Compingt starring Deborah Francois, Romain Duris, Berenice Bejo

54

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Review by David Hall

director Régis Roinsard

Immaculately prepared, lovingly detailed and frequently beautiful to look at; Populaire is a cinematic cupcake whose ingredients are ultimately far too predictable to truly satisfy. There’s some fun to be had in this tale of small-town girl turned champion typist and the leads (particularly the luminous Deborah Francois, from chilly French thriller The Page Turner) are spiky but this over-familiar recipe lacks surprise and, more surprisingly, warmth.

Local small-town shop girl Rose (Francois) dreams of excitement and escape and when she successfully bags the role of secretary to suave insurance man Louis (Romain Duris) things seem to be looking up. Louis picks his women based on looks first, skills second and is surprised to discover Rose has lightning fast, if unorthodox, typing skills. Spying a way to make a sweet fortune, he moves her into his house and sets her on a rigorous training course to get her into a typing competition. Inevitably romance ensues – only Louis has a secret heartbreak; the ex he loved and lost (The Artist’s Bernice Bejo).

Tackling this kind of ersatz screwball comedy is notoriously tricky as viewers of modern-day riffs on the genre such as Down with Love (2003) will be aware. Populaire takes a great deal of inspiration (aesthetically at least) from Matthew Weiner’s brilliant and emotionally complex TV show Mad Men and, for the opening 40 minutes or so, reigns in kitschy cuteness – to a degree. Francois is agreeably spiky and feisty (hers is the kind of role you could imagine a younger Audrey Tatou quirking into sickly submission) while dapper Duris has a nice line in retro sexism and prickliness. Homages abound – there are Billy Wilder style credits, Doris Day nods and, in keeping with The Artist whose quirky success this film is surely attempting to emulate, there is even a lengthy, brazen Vertigo steal. Yet with plenty to engage the eye there is actually very little in the way of drama, surprise or romance.

Populaire’s set up hints at some potentially sassy, retro rom-com fun, exploring changing social attitudes and mores. After all, why else go to the pains of setting it in ’59? The great screwball comedies gave an acerbic twist to even the most formulaic scenarios, but the social and sexual undercurrents here are junked entirely in favour of the film’s underdog story. Where the film truly comes to life is in the training montages and championship type-offs. In this respect Popluaire turns into a kind of Remington Rocky, with the breathless encounters shot and edited in ruthless and entertaining style. The film becomes heavily over reliant on these though – and the ending feels drawn-out and perfunctory.

At a crucial point in the final contest, Louis’ buddy says to his emotional cold fish of a friend; “America is for business, France is for love.” But Populaire proves the French can be as machine-tooled in shucking superficial romantic comedies as their US counterparts. Formulaic and a little soulless, the taste of this sweet treat is destined to fade from memory pretty quickly.

No One Lives

release date 31st May

cert (18)

director Ryûhei Kitamura Review by Evrim Ersoy

Ryûhei Kitamura is an incredibly visual and kinetic film-maker – from the hand-held lo-fi energy of Versus to Midnight Meat Train’s beautiful shot-countershot aesthetics, he injects each movie with a unique angle making the material unmistakably his.

His latest effort No One Lives is no different: What on paper could be a po-faced kidnap/revenge drama becomes a manic love-letter to B-movies in Kitamura’s hands.

Luke Evans stars as an unnamed man (only referenced as Driver in the film) who is travelling with his girlfriend Betty (played by Laura Ramsey) and gets kidnapped by a gang of ruthless criminals wanting to make up time for a job interrupted earlier in the day.

However, appearances can be misleading and when Betty gets killed accidentally; the situation gets a lot worse than any of the gang members could have anticipated.

Half the fun in No One Lives comes from the unravelling plot and the unusual turns it takes which makes it imperative that there should be no spoilers.

Suffice it to say that Luke Evans turns in an entertaining performance as Driver – silent, efficient and very, very sadistic.

Those who have seen his previous work will recognise the usual Kitamura trademarks: A kinetic camera style, an extended use of symmetrical camera shots to establish characters within the framework of the film and over-the-top set-pieces. Indeed these set-pieces serve as reminders of how gore can be used effectively within the genre and Kitamura takes some perverse pleasure in trying to push the boundaries of the violence on screen to the limit. The interaction between the gang members and Driver is kept glib and mercifully short – though the film veers between camp and serious throughout, a balance is struck pretty early on which never derails the picture.

The photography is beautifully shot – the nighttime scenes and the use of blues and reds make for gorgeous mise-en-scene. A terrifically placed homage shot packs a meaningful punch line whilst the general mise-en-scene reeks of genre love: although the locations might seem clichéd, it is clearly obvious that Kitamura is clearly indulging his love of American horror.

Kitamura keeps the action exciting by limiting the locations used– by not overstretching thin material, Kitamura makes the over-the-top plot and the generic characters work, delivering an intense sense of excitement.

Although most of the cast is stuck with an array of B-movie tropes, they are more than game for the material. Lee Tergesen as Hoag throws in a particularly good performance: acting as the balancing board between Driver and Flynn he brings a sense of reality to the proceedings in the first half.

Clocking in at a commendable 86 minutes, No One Lives achieves exactly what it sets out to do: Entertain the audience whilst making another entry to midnight movie cannonhood. The fact that the film is almost immediately forgettable does not really affect the result: Think of No One Lives as a beautiful canapé from the kitchen of Kitamura whilst we wait for him to indulge us with another main course.

writer David Cohen starring Luke Evans, Adelaide Clemens, George Murdoch

VERITE MAY 2013

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“A good-looking new digital film magazine” Mark Kermode

Vérité Vérité is a new digital monthly magazine dedicated to offbeat, independent and foreign-language cinema.

ISSUE #1

ISSUE #2

V é r i t é

V é r i t é

MARCH 2013 EDITION

APRIL 2013 EDITION

FILM CRITICISM & CINEMATIC DISCUSSION

STOKER

And Korea’s Hollywood Pressure

FILM CRITICISM & CINEMATIC DISCUSSION

Our motivation is simple - to provide a platform for interesting, provocative film criticism and discussion of films and filmmakers that excite and inspire us.

SP R I N G BREAKE R S

And the Return of the American Indie Kings

also...

also...

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

steven soderbergh / death waltz records’ top soundtracks / claude chabrol / reviews / and more...

Vérité digs a little deeper; covering world cinema in a passionate, critical and celebratory way. The magazine carries regular retrospective content as well as features on new talent and contemporary reviews.

So far we have introduced readers to the work of Indonesian director Joko Anwar and French-Canadian fan-favourite Xavier Dolan, profiled the enigmatic Harmony Korine and taken the temperature of the Korean film industry.

And we have carried exclusive interviews with filmmakers such as Hal Hartley, Cate Shortland and Jeff Nichols.

Vérité carries original writing from fresh and dynamic voices on cinema combined with stylish design and layout.

With an international focus – and writers based in Hong Kong, the United States, Europe and the UK – Vérité already has global reach and our audience is growing. With only two issues published our circulation sits at an average of 4000 per issue.

We want to spread the word further and build a loyal audience hungry for new and exciting film comment and content eager to read about filmmakers other publications don’t always shine a spotlight on.

And we have big plans for 2013, including an expanded website and extensive festival coverage.

Our current media partners include Eureka Entertainment, The Works, Metrodome and Artificial Eye. Vérité is seeking partnerships and new opportunities for collaboration from media partners. We also have competitive rates for advertising throughout the magazine (rate of £75 per full page ad).

For more info, interviews and media opportunities contact: jordanmcgrath@veritefilmmag.com davidhall@veritefilmmag.com

Viva Verite!

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MAY 2013 VERITE

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In the Once Upon a Time Frame: in America (1968) “You don’t understand, Jill. People like that have

something inside... something to do with death.”

words by Emily Kausalik

Y

ou can hear it already. The lilting tune of a harmonica, if you can even call it a tune. It’s no My Darling Clementine, not even close to the Copland-esque Americana that dominated the scores of John Ford’s iconic Hollywood westerns that Sergio Leone loved so dearly. Instead it floats in the air in a foggy haze, echoing through an unknown past filled with strife and heartache.

Those years, that angst, the long- and hardfought battle against the pains of the past, are more visible than ever in the blue eyes of the Man With The Harmonica as he stares down the prey he’s waited his entire life to strike down. It feels like it takes a lifetime to find out just what exactly Harmonica is looking for, and when that horrible moment is finally revealed its apparent Harmonica himself has waited a lifetime to get what he wants. A lifetime of waiting for the perfect moment to strike down the ruthless assassin Frank.

Whether the harmonica was one of Frank’s signature tools in the sadistic torture of his prey is a question left unanswered. But what is clear is that beat up, chromatic harmonica left its mark on one very special occasion. The events that transpired that fateful day hide behind those drooping green eyes. Harmonica’s sun-beaten face may look stern and unforgiving but the sorrow in his eyes is undeniable.

Along with the revelation of their shared past—one that drives Harmonica but was long

ago forgotten by Frank—comes the revelation of that horrible tune.

That harmonica could have very well been sewn to his mouth; the moment that Frank placed that instrument to his lips was the moment the Man With The Harmonica was born. This unyielding mystery of a man was Frank’s creation, so too was the only tune he would ever play through its rusty, beaten up reeds. Harmonica’s song doesn't come from dementia, it’s not a figment of his imagination and it’s not a chromatic, a melodic tune meant to abstractly represent the torment of not being able to save his ill-fated brother. Rather, it’s the sonic embodiment of exasperation, an exhalation of despair and heartache captured forever in the reeds of a mouth organ.

It means nothing to Frank, to Cheyenne, even to Jill. But it means everything to the Man With The Harmonica. That song is his means of communication; while Cheyenne jokes that, ‘Instead of talking, he plays,’ what no one realizes is Harmonica is telling more about himself and what he wants in that rasping, wheezing chromatic tune than words could possibly express. It may very well be the only song he knows, and the only song he ever knows. A song of death, of revenge, of the lives of the frontier individualists being destroying by progress and the American conquest of the Wild West via steam engine. But it’s only at this very moment, behind these very eyes, that the truth of the man and the song are finally revealed.

v

VERITE MAY 2013

57

Jordan McGrath

David Hall

Founder / Editor-in-Chief / Designer

Managing Editor

jordanmcgrath@veritefilmmag.com

davidhall@veritefilmmag.com

thanks: Contributors Emily Kausalik Evrim Ersoy Robert Makin Kelsey Eichhorn James Marsh Angela Peters

Proofing Celina Grace

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MAY 2013 VERITE

Image credits: eOne Entertainment: 1,8,10,11,12,53,54,57 / Peccadillo Pictures: 14,15,16,50 / Artificial Eye: 20,52 / Paul Duane: 32,34,35 / Eureka Entertainment: 42,43,44,45 / Columbia Pictures: 46 / Mara Pictures: 48 / Trinity Films: 49 / Pathe: 51

VERITE MAY 2013

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