Cannes 2014: A Girl At My Door

 Dir: July Jung

Like many fans of South Korean cinema I have, over the past decade, been charmed and impressed by Bae Doo-Na, who is one of the biggest stars in her home country.  It is fair to say, however, that Bae has a rather set onscreen persona; playing the charming, slightly kooky ingenue in many of her films.  That's no bad thing, I've frequently compared Bae's onscreen charm and magnetism with that of Audrey Hepburn, which isn't something I do lightly.  However, A Girl At My Door (Dohee-ya in Korean) seems to mark a real shift.  At 34 Bae seems to be wanting to finally play a real grown up and this often tough drama offers her that chance.

Bae plays Young-Nam, as the film begins she is moving to a small town to become their Police chief.  There are hints throughout the first half of the film that this is because of a problem in her past, which saw her sent away from Seoul.  When she arrives Young-Nam soon meets 13 year old Do-Hee (Kim Sae-Ron), who is picked on by the local kids and abused by both her father Yong-Ha (Song Sae-Byeok) and her grandmother.  Doo-Hee becomes very attached to Young-Nam and, after an especially bad beating, Young-Nam takes the young girl in.  This causes tension in the town, especially when Young-Nam's past comes home to roost.

A Girl At My Door, with its non-descript title and (relatively) lighter first hour, managed to trick me when it came to what kind of film it would be.  For ten minutes at the beginning we might be about to watch a fish out of water comedy about a big city cop coming to a backwater.  Then there is a turn for the dramatic as Young-Nam's problem drinking is revealed, but as the story between her and Do-Hee takes centre stage it seems as though we're actually going to be seeing a film about how an unexpected surrogate parent comes into the life of a troubled kid.  None of these ideas is especially original, and nor, really, is the direction of the film's third act, but the way that writer/director Jung manages to continually set us up for one thing before turning in a slightly different direction keeps things interesting and works to the film's advantage.

Towards the start and the end of the film, Jung slathers on the abuse just a little hard, it's not that graphic until one late scene that I'm surprised she even got away with a clear implication of, but it comes up so regularly at times that there is a slight tragedy porn feeling.  What saves the film in these moments, as well as from a rather OTT performance from Song Sae-Byeok, is the fact that the two leads are outstanding.

Bae seems to have made a conscious choice here to shift her image and while Song spends most of his scenes yelling abuse at whoever he's sharing the screen with at that moment, she dials everything back for a reserved performance that is sometimes resolved and sometimes porcelain fragile.  There is no coasting on her looks and her charm here, even as Young-Nam comes to care for Do-Hee there is a sense that the older woman is putting up a wall (why she may be doing so is another of the interesting shifts in the film).  Throughout, Bae does some wonderfully subtle physical acting, whether it's to do with Young-Nam's relationship to Do-Hee or to alcohol.  We see the complexities etched in particularly fine detail in what emerges as one of the film's key scenes, when Do-Hee asks if she can get in the bath with Young-Nam.

Bae might simply have walked off with the movie thanks to her performance, but 13 year old Kim Sae-Ron, who may be known to western audiences as the little girl in The Man From Nowehere, gives her a serious run for her money and establishes herself as an actress to keep an eye on as she and her roles mature.  What Kim manages to capture with great clarity here is the sense of a child suddenly growing up very quickly, perhaps thanks to a new influence in her life, perhaps due to the temporary absence of an old one.Jung's screenplay and Kim's performance both advance Do-Hee's character and her process of growth incrementally.  It's incremental enough that it's not that noticeable from one scene to the next, but it's credible that she changes as much as she does.  There is also a sense, which towards the end of the film another character also gets, that there is something underlying the broken exterior of the Do-Hee we first meet, and this is something that Kim puts across subtly but strongly.  All in all  it's a remarkably nuanced piece of acting for such a young performer.

While this is a creditable feature debut for July Jung there are still a few cracks that make it feel like a debut.  Visually the film is strong, and even if it doesn't yet speak to a deeply personal eye it has several very striking images (a repeated motif of Do-Hee dancing outside, for example).  The screenplay can be more problematic.  For instance, Young-Nam's drinking feels like it should be a major theme, but it is largely shunted aside; serving mostly as a misdirection early on.  Also problematic is the fact that when, with about 35 minutes to run, the film takes a not entirely unexpected turn into very dark territory it doesn't quite have the courage of its convictions.  This means that it strains credulity more than a little in both the speed and the ease with which it finds its ending.  It's not ruinous, but it's less complex than I'd like, given the preceding 100 minutes.

Overall, A Girl At My Door has its flaws, but when it concentrates on its two central performances it absolutely commands the attention and it's well worth seeing, especially for fans of Bae Doo-Na who want to see her branch out.

Early Review: Himizu [18]

Dir: Sion Sono

Over the last 18 months Sion Sono has become one of my favourite filmmakers thanks to the brilliantly bizarre likes of Noriko's Dinner Table, Cold Fish and his 4 hour long lunatic masterpiece Love Exposure, so I was really looking forward to this film, and hoping it would be a step up from the slightly disappointing (but heavily compromised) Guilty of Romance. Unfortunately, with the possible exception of Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method, Himizu is the most disappointing film I've seen this year, and is terrible to a degree I just didn't believe Sono capable of.

Himizu is an adaptation of a Manga, but as Sono was preparing the project the Japanese tsunami and the Fukushima disaster happened, prompting him to re-set the story in the wake of those events. 14 year old Sumida (Shota Sometani) lives at his family's boat house, his Mother has run off with her lover, and his drunk Father drops in occasionally to assault him and 'confess' that he wishes Sumida had died in the tsunami. Sumida's only friends are a group of older men - refugees living around the boat house, and his only dream is to live a completely normal life. Also trying to be Sumida's friend is his classmate Chazawa (Fumi Nikaidou), who is hopelessly in love with him, but despite her sunny disposition and attempts to help him, Sumida is annoyed by and dismissive of her. After being driven to an horrific crime, Sumida decides he should rid the world of bad people, and begins walking the streets with a knife.

Where to begin? I suspect that Sono fans will read that synopsis and recognise several of the director's recurring themes; a put upon teen abused by their family (this also applies to Chazawa), parents who abandon their children, violence, sin, forgiveness and whether certain people 'deserve' to live are all things that Sono has examined before, and watching Himizu is often like watching him put all his favoured themes and ideas in to a large sack and give it a vigorous shake, before pouring out a confused mix of elements that never gel into a satisfying whole.

Tone is often an interesting balancing act in cinema, and previously Sono has maintained a solid grip on films that balance it very delicately, Cold Fish, for instance, balances on a knife edge between brutal violence and comedy, but here the ability to balance opposing tones seems to have utterly deserted him. Violence is always present in Sono's work, and it's often harsh, but while Himizu doesn't contain his most brutal violent scenes it does feature much violence against women, and does so in a way so casual and so accepted that it fast becomes offensive. Chazawa, despite repeated scenes of her saving up her 'grudges' against Sumida in the form of stones she intends to throw at him, often seems like little more than a willing sponge for abuse.

When Himizu isn't offensive, or baffling us with abrupt and grinding tonal shifts, it's often simply boring, thanks to the fact that we are treated to tiny variations on the same scenes over and over again. Besides Sumida hitting or insulting Chazawa there is much repetition in scenes of Sumida's relationship with his Father, and of the scenes in the second half that see him stalking the streets looking for evil people, or explaining his actions to other people, this too is a hallmark of what I've seen of Sono's work, and I wouldn't mind so much about the repetition if the scenes all added up to give us a complete picture of the film's characters, but I don't really feel that they do. Sumida evolves a bit during the film, but his journey from mild-mannered teen to possibly insane future serial killer is much less credible than the very similar journey undertaken by Mitsuru Fukikoshi in Cold Fish, and unfolds in stuttering fits and starts rather than as a credible arc. Chazawa feels even thinner, never really progressing beyond her starry eyed adoration of Sumida despite how badly he treats her.

Except for its young leads, Himizu's cast is largely composed of the growing stock company that Sono works with. Cold Fish cast members Fukishoki, Denden, Asuka Kurosawa and Megumi Kagurazaka all appear, as does Love Exposure's Makiko Watanabe, the problem with these and the lead performances is that it's hard to tell how good they are through the film's uneasy and often shrill tone. With the older refugee characters - who, for some reason, seem almost to worship Sumida - Sono seems to be going for gentle comedy much of the time, and so the brutal violence that ensues when the gangster played by Denden shows up jars badly. Later next month we'll see William Friedkin's Killer Joe, and would that Himizu had one scene that combined darkness and humour as deftly as that film does when its gangster character shows up to demand payment on a debt.

While Sono's films are always turned up to eleven it's only with this one that I have felt that style begin to grate, and I think that's because this time round there's really nobody to identify with. I could sympathise with Yu in Love Exposure, and with Syamoto in Cold Fish, but from the minute he began slapping Chazawa around, this film's lead character really began to alienate me from both him and the film, and given how extreme and sometimes outlandish the events of the film are, lacking a connection to its main character fatally undermined my interest in the ensuing two hours. As the film went on the bellowed dialogue, the repetition and the constant casual violence became boring, because I just couldn't see what, beyond stating his usual themes, Sono was saying here.

Despite the setting this doesn't feel like a film that addresses Fukushima or the tsunami in any meaningful way (hopefully Sono's next, Land of Hope, will prove more interesting on that front), nor does it develop any of those themes I mentioned above in any but the most prosaic way, which is deeply disappointing given how fascinating some of the director's previous films have been under their often crazy surfaces.

There are isolated moments that suggest something interesting, but they tend to go unexplored. Most notable is Chazawa's home life, in which we see that she locks herself away in her room because her (sigh) abusive Mother (Kurosawa) is so awful. The hilariously odd moment in which we see that Chazawa's Mother is building a gallows in her living room is striking, but it amounts only to a couple of small moments and never really comes into play. The whole film is also as strikingly shot as you'd expect of Sono, with a pivotal murder scene especially well designed, but this can hardly rescue the film from its frequent lack of internal logic or that the things being so prettily lensed are frequently dull or annoying.

By the ending, my screening was the scene of openly derisive laughter (some of it, sadly, coming from me) as we tried to restrain ourselves from joining in the seemingly endless bellowing of the last line. That last ninety seconds seemed almost to sum up the film for me; I felt like Sion Sono had just shouted at me for two hours, and I really wasn't sure what he had said or why.
★★☆☆☆

Blu Ray Review: Heavenly Creatures [18]

Dir: Peter Jackson

The Film

Today, Peter Jackson is one of the major names in world cinema, and one of the most commercially and critically successful directors in the world, but it was not always so. In 1994, when Heavenly Creatures came out, Jackson was the mad maverick behind splattery black comedies like Bad Taste, Braindead and his 'Muppets from Hell' movie Meet the Feebles. It was, then, something of a surprise that he should be the filmmaker to tackle one of his native New Zealand's most infamous and shocking murder cases.

Heavenly Creatures tells the story of the intense friendship between fifteen year old Juliet Hulme (Kate Winslet) and Pauline Parker (Melanie Lynskey), which ended up, when the girls were to be separated, in the brutal murder of Pauline's Mother (Sarah Pierse). The girls, from opposite ends of the economic scale, bond over their shared history of medical problems ("All the best people have bad chests and bone diseases") and their creativity. This creativity bleeds into a fantasy world and the girls become increasingly obsessed with and dependent on it and on each other.

In many ways Heavenly Creatures is very different to Peter Jackson's previous films; it's set - largely - in the real world, deals with real people and events and is notably less extreme than the likes of Braindead, but it also shares DNA with those films, and is clearly the product of the same directorial mind. Jackson starts the film, after a shocking opening flash forward, by grounding us in the real world, we get footage from a promotional film for Christchurch, New Zealand, where the film is set, and a rather conventional looking (if beautifully shot) first couple of reels, however, as Juliet and Pauline become closer, and as their shared fantasy world develops further, Jackson allows his camerawork to become more and more extreme. As the film goes on it slips more and more frequently and freely into fantasy, and Jackson, even in the real world, plays up the oddness of his characters visually with offbeat, off centre angle choices. This, however, ceases for the climactic murder, which is rendered in brutal and disturbing detail.

What Jackson achieves by this is not just a film with a very individual feel, but one that draws us into the world and the psyche of its leading characters. The people that Juliet and Pauline dislike are seen almost as caricatures, and are shot in a larger than life way, often looming into frame (see the doctor who diagnoses Pauline as a lesbian, or the priest who comes to see a convalescing Juliet when she's hospitalised with TB), and their fantasies are rendered in stark contrast to the world around them, which is often drab. In the fantasy sequences even dowdy Pauline is transformed into a beautiful princess, colours are sharper and more saturated and everything is heightened.

The film is packed with memorable sequences and images in both the real and the fantasy worlds; an idyllic sequence early in the film in which the girls run through the woods, stripped to their underwear, singing and dancing makes for a sharp contrast with the almost nightmarish (and brilliantly cine literate) scene after they have seen a screening of The Third Man, and find themselves chased by "the most hideous man in the world", Orson Welles.

This contrast between the way the girls see the world as opposed to those around them is also drawn with a set of very strong performances. Sarah Pierse is particularly notable as Honora Parker; a mother who gets angry with her daughter through love and worry. Pauline sees her as the villain, but the film is very matter of fact about her, painting her neither as saint nor sinner and Pierse gives a very grounded performance which makes the march to the end (which, even if you don't know everything from the opening, is explicitly revealed as Pauline and Juliet plan the killing) absolutely bone chilling and deeply sad. The cafe scene at the end of the film (shot in the real location) is a great showcase for both Pierse and Melanie Lynskey, whose exhortation to her Mother to "treat yourself" to the last cream cake takes on a cold menace in context. There are also fine performances from the other actors playing the Hulme and Parker parents; Clive Merrison and Diana Kent as Juliet's upper class Mother and Father and Simon O'Connor as Pauline's fishmonger Father.

In the end though, the film rests on the shoulder of its two young stars, then sixteen (Lynskey) and seventeen (Winslet) and both making their film debut. Both are outstanding. Winslet is, at first glance, perhaps a bit over dramatic, but this is Juliet; she's a person of extremes, everything is either wonderful or ghastly, people are saints (James Mason, Mario Lanza and more) or 'the most hideous man alive', and her stories are packed with beautiful kings and queens, psychotic children and gorgeous gypsy girls. She's a drama queen, and Winslet plays that side of her perfectly. This - along with her distant relationship with her parents - also gives us an insight into why Juliet, clearly much more intelligent than Pauline, forms such an obsessive attachment to her young friend. Melanie Lynskey is also brilliant here. Her performance got less notice than Winslet's and, seventeen years later, she remains an undervalued talent. This is probably because Pauline, outside of her diary entries (all of which are real, and brilliantly read by Lynskey), she is a much more held in character. It's tough to understand a relationship like this, and a character like Pauline, but Lynskey plays her, seemingly without judgement, as just one more troubled, taciturn, teenager. By taking that starting point and moving the character credibly on through this growing obsession we get to understand how things end up as they do, because we see how Pauline, in contrast to the very open and expressive Juliet, holds her resentment in a tight ball until it explodes. These are two very contrasting and equally excellent performances.

I first saw Heavenly Creatures about fifteen years ago, and it has a special place in my heart. It was one of the first films that really interested me in cinema that was more offbeat and made beyond the US, and it was one of the first films that me and my best friend bonded over (yes, I realise that sounds odd, but honestly we're perfectly normal). For my money it remains as brilliant now as it ever was, it stands out in the distinguished filmographies of both Jackson and Winslet, and is a fascinating film about obsession and about murder. This, amazingly, is its first disc release in the UK, and I'm happy that a new generation of cinephiles, who may not have seen any of Jackson's pre Lord of the Rings work will now, at last, get a chance to discover this masterpiece.
★★★★★

The Disc

I received a screener copy of Heavenly Creatures, which did not include the extras. The release copy will boast a 'Looking Back' featurette with Kim Newman, Alan Jones and Rosie Fletcher and four postcards. I can't help but wish there was more; a Jackson commentary, a proper retrospective with the cast and the alternate cut, which is ten minutes or so longer, would all have been welcome.

That said, what we do have is a beautiful looking Blu Ray transfer. The film has been remastered, and looks like it was shot yesterday; the print has some grain structure, but is free of speckles and damage. The edges are sharp without seeming over enhanced, the colours pop brilliantly and there is a good deal of depth in the image (which is also, for the first time in the UK, in the film's original 2.35:1 ratio). This transfer perhaps doesn't have the jaw dropping appearance of a Terminator 2 or the 'wow, look how nicely that cleaned up' impact of some of Arrow's video nasty releases, but it's still a great job, and as good as this film is ever likely to look.

★★★☆☆

Early Review: Tomboy

Dir: Celine Sciamma

Celine Sciamma made a huge impression on me back in 2008, with her outstanding feature debut Water Lilies. Ever since I came out of seeing that movie I've been cautiously anticipating her follow up. When a new director makes something as good as Water Lilies there's always going to be a question mark over their ability to follow it with something equally impressive. Thankfully Tomboy is a confident, convincing answer to that question, and a film that really puts its director on the map.

Like Water Lilies, Tomboy concerns itself with a girl's coming of age. Here Sciamma follows Laure (Zoe Heran), a tomboyish ten year old who, on being asked her name by her new neighbour Lisa (Jeanne Disson), introduces herself as Mikael. 'Mikael' and Lisa become friends, and even share a first kiss, but Laure struggles to keep her secret from her new friend and from her family.

It's refreshing to see a movie these days which, while its focus is on young people, is truly adult, not in terms of having loads of swearing, sex and violence, but in that it deals with complex and challenging issues of identity, sexuality and the process of growing up in a way that never talks down to the audience or moralises about its characters thoughts, feelings or choices. Sciamma approaches Laure/Mikael's gender identity with sensitivity, other viewers might feel differently, but to me it felt like she never quite made an absolute determination about whether Laure is engaging in youthful experimentation here (tied with the confusion that comes with the first engagement with a sexual identity) or is truly transsexual, and for me the film's openness on this issue is a key strength, as it keeps it from being anything as trite as a cry for acceptance. Tomboy doesn't feel, to me, like a film with a heavy political message, rather its strength is as an intimate and insightful drama about a young person trying to define themselves.

As befits a film so focused on issues of the body and identity, Tomboy often lingers in close ups. Shooting on an adapted digital stills camera, with a very shallow depth of field, Sciamma gets right in to the personal space of her characters, especially that of Laure, her six year old sister Jeanne, and her, entirely male, bar Lisa, new group of friends (cast from Zoe Hernan's own real life group of friends). This brings us right in to the characters and experiences being portrayed here, and makes the film feel at times almost voyeuristic in its intimacy and reality. At the same time it's an intelligently composed and often rather beautiful film. It's a difficult circle that Sciamma squares here; making a film that feels designed and directed, without allowing any of it to ring false.

As in Water Lilies, Sciamma's insight into her characters is spot on, now 30, she still knows how to write kids who seem like kids. Even Laure's intelligent and somewhat wily sister (she exploits Laure's lie so that she can hang out with older kids) is written as a smart six year old, not as the miniature adult we have seen in films like (500) Days of Summer. This carries through into the performances. There is never any sense of acting here, especially from the outstanding Zoe Hernan and Malon Levana. Hernan deals assuredly with a complex role, it would be interesting to discover how Sciamma told her about the character, and how she understood Laure/Mikael's identity but what's really impressive here is the ease with which she shifts gears, going from unselfconciously playing with her little sister and her parents, to being more outwardly controlled when she has to fit in with a group of boys. There is a great ease to the way the actors relate, a very real sense of family created between Hernan, Levana and Sophie Cattani and Mathieu Demy as their parents, and this also applies to the scenes between the children, be it the innocent first stirrings of attraction between Lisa and Mikael, or the games that the larger group of kids play, there is just a sense here of Sciamma observing children being children.

Tomboy is full of memorable scenes and moments, from the way that Jeanne visibly considers the decision of whether to expose her Sister's lie when Lisa comes looking for Mikael, to the lovely scene when Jeanne cuts her sister's hair. There is also much to admire in the way the relationship between Mikael and Lisa is drawn, the friendship grows very organically, and there is both charm and thematic interest in a scene in which Lisa puts make up on Mikael. Of course the course of the film can not run entirely smooth, and for me Celine Sciamma's sole - minor - stumble, is having the only confrontational scene with the children, after they discover Mikael's true identity, be an almost line by line quote of a notable sequence in the similarly themed Boys Don't Cry. Is it Sciamma's homage? Is it just that there aren't many other ways to deal with that moment, especially considering the age and level of maturity of the characters? It's hard to say, but it works as a scene in and of itself, even if it is over familliar.

There is real emotional punch to Tomboy. Like Water Lilies it deals in real and raw emotion, and though the performances are never overly demonstrative, you feel it all. I may like Water Lilies more, but this film, for me, confirms Celine Sciamma as a major, major talent to watch and is one of the best of 2011 to date. I'd like to see Sciamma branch out a bit more next time, but if she keeps making coming of age movies this insightful, and this well acted, then that's just fine by me.

★★★★☆

13 Assassins [15]

Dir: Takashi Miike

13 Assassins is a stunningly simple film. It is the dying days of Japan's samurai era, and local warlord Naritsugu (Goro Inagaki) is carrying out a reign of terror, indiscriminately raping and murdering as he pleases. Despite the fact that is supposed to be off limits samurai warrior Shinzaemon (Koji Yakusho) decides that he must be stopped, and recruits another 11 elite warriors to the cause, which is clearly a suicide mission. Along the way they are joined by a 13th, a bandit with impressive fighting skills and little left to live for, before taking over a village to prepare for the showdown with the warlord's private army of samurai.

Director Takashi Miike is known in the West largely for his extreme works; gangster films, gore movies and thrillers, but he's a more versatile talent than that, his 80 plus films covering all sorts of genres (even the odd kids movie). I've often found Miike a little indulgent and his films a touch unfocused (which can perhaps be blamed on his astonishing work rate), but 13 Assassins is neither of those things; it's a single minded and tightly constructed work in which tension and action complement one another beautifully, and which treats the samurai era and the samurai characters with seriousness and respect. It builds up the main characters well (though some of the 13 Assassins do become little more than sword waving props), and the film builds effectively to both a large scale battle and a personal conflict between Shinzaemon and Naritsugu's bodyguard Hanbei (Masachika Ichimura).

13 Assassins divides quite neatly into two halves; the first establishes Naritsugu's credentials as a legendary murderous bastard and charts the building of the team of 13, while the second half consists entirely of the awe inspiring battle between the 13 and the samurai army. The first half does, despite the twenty minutes that have been cut since the film's festival showings, occasionally feel like it needs speeding up, but equally it is packed with standout scenes be it the opening images of a samurai committing hara kiri, or the shockingly violent backstory of why one of the 13 so desperately wants to take down Naritsugu.

The second half; the battle, is astounding. It could easily be dull, it's basically close to an hour of swordfights, but Miike finds little dramas in many of the individual encounters, as well as keeping both camera style and choreography inventive throughout. Happily the violence isn't given the shakycam treatment often, and when it is the stylistic choice has purpose, putting us inside the viewpoint of a defeated samurai, rather than just being employed to disguise the shabby efforts of yet another director who can't shoot action. The restrained camera style (though that's all that is restrained here, despite the 15 certificate the claret flows in rivers) also means that despite the frenetic nature of the battle the action is always intelligible; I knew where people were and who they were at all times - which has not been so commonplace as you might think in recent action cinema. All this adds up to make the battle scenes involving, exciting, dramatic and fun, if you can't get swept up in the last hour of this movie you may as well give up on cinema; it's not for you.

The performances are perhaps best described as fit for purpose. The actors making up the ranks of the 13 may not have tremendous depth, but they are individual enough for you to know who they all are, and to care when they are imperilled during the battle. The leads are excellent though, with Koji Yakusho and Masachika Ichimura impressing as the two respectful but equally ruthless warriors with a history, and again this lends weight to what could easily just have been a bit of splashily violent fun.

I haven't seen as much of Takashi Miike's work as I should have, but this is easily the best I've seen from him thus far; a muscular, beautifully shot, exciting and entertaining film, but one that has enough depth to engage on levels beyond the visceral. Go and see it.

★★★★☆

Cold Fish [18]

DIR: Sion Sono
CAST: Denden, Mitsuru Kukikoshi, Asuka Kurosawa,
Megumi Kagurazaka, Hikari Kajiwara

I haven't seen his earlier works, Suicide Club and Noriko's Dinner Table, but Japanese director Sion Sono's two most recent films; this one and the four hour epic Love Exposure, mark him out as one of the most original, daring, and downright odd filmmakers in the world.

Cold Fish is very loosely based on a real case in which a rare dog breeder and his wife were hanged for at least four murders by poisoning, and one of their employees was jailed for three years for helping them dispose of the bodies. From this starting point Sono weaves an operatically over the top (and appropriately lengthy) tale of milqetoast rare fish breeder Shamoto (Kukikoshi) who is befriended and then made an accomplice by psychotic competitor Murata (Denden) who, along with his pretty young wife Aiko (Kurosawa) turns out to be a serial murderer (by the end of the film he has ammassed something like 60 victims, taking into account those he boasts of killing before meeting Shamoto). Murata uses threats against Shamoto's own young wife (Kaguazaka) and teenage daughter (Kajiwara) to make him help in making his victims bodies 'invisible'.

Cold Fish is not a reserved or a subtle film. The performances are loud and demonstrative, dialogue is often bellowed, violence is gross and bloody and humour is slapsticky. In short you have to make a decision to surrender to the film, to sink into this heightened and extreme world. I highly recommend that you do so, because once you do you're likely to find, as I did, that Cold Fish is tremendously entertaining as it mixes horror and humour, often in a single moment.

The central performances of Denden and Mitsuru Kukikoshi work for most of the film as yin and yang. Denden is all gleeful malice, doing exactly what he wants with near manic energy from one moment to the next. To begin with he comes across as the fun uncle (certainly that's how Shamoto's daughter Mitsuko is encouraged to see him), but his true colours emerge in a disturbing and well performed single take scene in which he molests Shamoto's wife Taeko with the cool detachment of somebody completely corrupt. Though he's in his late 50's, Denden plays Murata almost as a sugar high ten year old, only rather than candy his pleasure is murder. It's a creepy turn, and a paradoxically amusing one. If Murata is the rampaging id, Shamoto is the terrified part of the brain that processes consequence. He's shown as emasculated at home, repressed and fawning in his interaction with others, a weak man. However, Kukikoshi does demonstrate how Shamoto's association with Murata pushes him closer and closer to the very edge of sanity. When, in the film's deliriously overblown and spectacularly violent last half hour, he finally snaps, Kukikoshi does a spectacular 180, turning Shamoto into a more outwardly cruel version of his recent mentor, with none of the humour or pretence.

Another tremendously entertaining performance comes from Asuka Kurosawa, provocative and sexy at first glance as Murata's young wife, but emerging as probably the most dangerous character when the film shows its hand. Murata seems to kill largely for money or revenge. Aiko kills because, it seems, it turns her on. In fact the whole process of murder seems to turn her on, in one notable scene she makes out with a female co-worker just before going into a meeting where her husband and Shamoto are attempting to cover up a recent killing. Kurosawa convinces on all the levels the film asks of her; she's seductive, and can play the sweet, dutiful wife, but she's also mercenary, and incredibly dangerous (see the moment when she beats another character to death with a TV).

Sono clearly has a dark sense of humour, and one that tends towards the absurd. It's best summed up in an image from the final scenes, as one character hugs the disembowelled corpse of another in a moment of truly perverse (and rather belated) tenderness. The sheer level of blood and violence on display can also be funny, often taking on the feel of an insanely brutal Looney Tunes cartoon (aided by a bombastic, drum driven, score). And yet, Sono also attempts to ground the action in reality, making use of a grainy aesthetic which gives a slightly dirty, homemade, feel to the film, emphasising even more the extremities it indulges in.

What I found so thrilling about Love Exposure was the dizzying invention on display, and that hasn't changed with Cold Fish. Sono keeps you on your toes for the whole of the film's 146 minute running time, and nothing ever quite happens as you expect it to. I can't say that this film or its director will be to all tastes, but so far I'm enjoying being in the hands of this particular madman.


Cold Fish gets a limited UK cinema release on April 8th, and will probably tour rep cinemas following that date. However, it comes to DVD and Blu Ray on June 27th. If you'd like to buy the film, and help 24FPS out at the same time, please use the links below. Thanks!

24FPS at LLGFF 2011: The Four Faced Liar [15]

Dir: Jacob Chase

The Four Faced Liar is the first feature film written by 25 year old Marja-Lewis Ryan and while it is far from perfect, it marks her out as someone to watch in the future. The story is very generic; gay college student Bridget (Ryan) and her flatmate Trip (Todd Kubrak) meet Molly (Emily Peck) and Greg (Daniel Carlisle) in the titular bar one night, and they hit it off, Bridget and Molly in particular begin spending a lot of time together, and it becomes clear that there is some attraction between them, which places strain on Molly and Greg's very sweet and rather conservative relationship. You can probably guess, given that this is the closing film in this year's London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, how things develop from there.

That's really the problem with the film, being generic is one thing, but almost every beat of The Four Faced Liar is predictable, down to almost the last detail. Every scene you expect to see in a dramedy about a lesbian and a straight girl getting together is played out almost exactly as you'd expect it to be and the film rounds off with the last in a long series of tremendous clichés.

That said, it's hard not to like this film, thanks largely to the details of Ryan's screenplay (based on her earlier stage play). The general shape of the film is familiar to the point of being hackneyed, but the character writing is top notch. Ryan shows a real knack for establishing an individual voice for each of her characters, and for detailing the relationships between them. Too often the characters in movies all sound like the writer, not so here, there aren't any moments where you feel the dialogue could be interchangeable; none of Bridget's speeches could be delivered by Molly, none of Trip's by Greg. There is also a nice sense of the closeness between old friends Bridget and Trip, and of the growing relationships between Molly and Bridget and Trip and Greg.

These qualities in the writing are also aided by strong performances. Ryan and Peck are both excellent, giving natural low key turns, and playing the film's often funny dialogue entirely straight and real. Kubrak, courtesy of a more outgoing character, has fun giving a larger performance which has most of the film's funniest moments. The only slight problem acting wise is that Daniel Carlisle can come off somewhat flat, but then Greg is such a drip that this may be a choice on his part.

24 year old first time feature director Jacob Chase handles the largely hand held visuals well, usually making sure that the camera remains unobtrusive. There is a definite guerilla feel to the filmmaking; it's not polished, and a few scenes (notably the love scenes) are perhaps a little darker than they should be, but for the most part the direction serves the film well, and energises the film enough that it doesn't feel like a filmed play.

The Four Faced Liar definitely has its issues, but there is plenty here to like, and to suggest
that many of the people involved will go on to make better more fully realised films in the future. I'd certainly suggest checking this one out though, whether at LLGFF or when it comes to DVD next month.
★★★☆☆

24FPS at LLGFF 2011: Break My Fall

Dir: Kanchi Wichmann

Almost more frustrating than a truly bad film is one that just misses the mark, one you can see the potential in, and yet have to watch as it trips over the hurdles on the way to the finish line. That's what Break My Fall is like.

The film shows us the final stages of the breakdown of the relationship between girlfriends and bandmates Liza (Kat Redstone) and Sally (Sophie Anderson), which seems to have reached a stage where the two have a deep desire to remain together, but fight whenever they are. Things are also complicated by a mutual friend, Vin (Kai Brandon Ly), who earns a living as a rent boy, but has clear designs on Sally.

There are plenty of things to admire in Break My Fall. The script is sharp, and defines its characters clearly and quickly, though it does remain dedicated throughout to making them all (except perhaps Collin Clay Chace's supportive gay friend Jamie) as unsympathetic as possible. The four leading performances are also a strong centre for the film, with Kat Redstone especially impressive as she engages with the most difficult character, one whose mood swings seem near bi-polar. There are some real standout scenes here too; a funny confrontation with a café owner made me wish that the rest of the film had a bit more humour about it, and a supremely awkward band practice after Liza and Sally have fought is both the quietest and the best scene in the film. It's also worth mentioning the excellent, uber-cool, indie soundtrack.

The problem is that while these individual bits are fine, the film just doesn't knit together as a whole. The biggest issue is that it's very hard to really identify with or care about the central relationship. We see nothing of how it was, of the happiness that Liza sometimes speaks of, and so it's hard to care much about the broken state the movie depicts it in, or root for it to get mended. It's also guilty of longueurs, many scenes run much longer than they need to (an endless scene in which Liza goes home with an older butch woman after a night out, for instance) and the last twenty minutes are an extended exercise in redundancy; this film ends with a missed phone call, the following twenty minutes change nothing, add nothing.

Break My Fall ultimately feels like an overextended short film, and that's a shame, because I suspect a 30 minute version would work really well. That said, there's enough going on here that I'll be keeping an eye on, in particular writer/director Wichmann and Kat Redstone, as I suspect that there is much more satisfying work in their future.

★★★☆☆

Early Review: Potiche

Dir: François Ozon

Every time I go and see François Ozon's latest new film, I steel myself. I have to prepare myself for the fact that this, finally, might be the one that trips him up, the film that after over 15 years at a rate of a film a year, finally spoils the best directorial batting average in cinema. Potiche hasn't done it.

An adaptation of a 1980s play, Potiche casts Ozon's 8 Women star, and legend of French cinema, Catherine Deneuve as the titular 'trophy wife' of Fabrice Luchini, who runs the umbrella factory inherited from Deneuve's father. After an employment dispute in which he is taken hostage by his workers, Luchini is hospitalised, and his wife steps into the breech, after asking advice from an old friend and communist politician (Gerard Depardieu).

The above may not read like the ideal recipe, but Ozon mixes all this, and much more, up into a brilliantly sharp and witty comedy. Ozon speaks of balancing the film's comedy with the potential for melodrama, and he's done a masterful job, even during its more melodramatic moments the film tends to remain funny, because the comedy seems woven into the fabric of the film, right down to its perfectly executed 70s aesthetic, which doesn't stop at period detail like the velvet covered telephone and Judith Godreche's Farrah hair, but carries through into such small things as the use and design of the split screens that are occasionally employed and even Ozon's shot choices and cutting rhythms.

As ever with Ozon's work, Potiche looks outstanding. It's a return to the technicolor aesthetic of 8 Women; the film fairly explodes with colour, and the use of colour as a signifier of mood is, if not subtle, beautifully executed (for example the umbrella factory instantly transforms from a grey to a multicoloured world when Deneuve takes over, signifying her warmer approach to the day to day running of the company).

Potiche isn't a reserved or subtle film, the performances are as overblown as the visuals, and the tone is often one redolent of the title of Ozon's first feature; Sitcom. Deneuve is wonderful in the lead, her forced (and enforced) perkiness in the first act giving way to a character who is much happier, in a much more meaningful and real way, during the second half of the film. She's also radiant in the part, 66 when the film was shot, she has aged like a fine wine. Unlike Deneuve, Depardieu hasn't worked with Ozon before, and this anticipated first teaming sees the great actor at his most animated for a while. Depardieu can often be a gruff and dour presence, and so it is a real treat to see him cut loose in a broad comedy, and do it with such apparent zeal. He and Deneuve share great chemistry (just look at the lovely scene where they do a dance number together), and the very obvious fact that they are having a great time is infectious for the audience.

The supporting cast is also strong, with Fabrice Luchini turning his raging patriarch up to 11 in some hilarious scenes, Karin Viard surprisingly complex in what initially seems to be just a play on the saucy secretary of a lot of 70s films and Judith Godreche and Jeremie Renier (returning to Ozon for the first time since the underrated Criminal Lovers) effective as Deneuve and Luchini's polar opposite children.

All too often over the last five years I have found myself sitting in cinemas and watch 'comedies', sinking into a spiral of depression and wondering how the world got to a point where it's trying to convince adults that poo is intrinsically amusing. Happily Potiche doesn't do that, it's a warm film, not a cruel one, where the comedy comes from incongruity, absurdity and the day to day silliness of the way people behave. Ozon also gets a lot of mileage from things we neither see (Luchini's reaction when his son goes to negotiate his release with the workers holding him hostage), nor hear (a very funny scene with Sergi Lopez making a silent cameo as a trucker who gives Deneuve a ride).

The film takes an unexpected detour into politics towards the end, but it does so without sacrificing the precisely judged tone that has prevailed throughout the film, and Ozon finds an ending which is at once gloriously barmy and utterly perfect for the film. Potiche is, at the end of the day, a souffle, it doesn't have the power of Ozon's best dramas like 5 X 2 and Le Refuge, but so what? This is a perfectly executed piece of entertainment, no more or less, it's accessible, charming, and brilliantly made, as well as being yet another confirmation of the fact that, yes, this director really can do anything.

François Ozon is why I go to the cinema, and he's why you should too.
★★★★★

Bird's Eye View 2011 Preview: Orgasm Inc.

Dir: Liz Canner

Orgasm Inc. is a more serious and less salacious film than its title might suggest. It's a personal film from director Liz Canner, who apparently spent nine years working on this project, beginning when a drug company contacted her to ask her to edit together pornographic footage for use in a clinical trial of a cream designed to treat a newly defined condition 'female sexual dysfunction'.

Canner clearly started out pretty simply, documenting what she was doing for Vivus, and talking to various people at the company about the drug and about FSD, but the film expands with its director's horizons, as she begins to ask questions about whether FSD is a medical condition, and what the drug companies motives are for pursuing a treatment for it. Orgasm Inc. becomes, if not a full assault advocacy film, a skeptical exploration of the comodification of disease and cure, especially in the US. Canner isn't Michael Moore, and her film is inquiring rather than hectoring, but no less disturbing for it. Perhaps the most troubling sequence takes place in a private FSD clinic run by Dr Laura Berman, where we are taken through the process by which, day by day, perfectly normal sexual issues are being medicalised, with a bill of $1500 at the end of the day.

There is also a fascinating insight into the way a drug gains FDA approval for use in the US, with Canner's footage of the meeting to decide whether a testosterone patch to treat FSD should be approved providing a genuinely intimate and edifying (and surprisingly heartening) glimpse of this process. If nothing else, Orgasm Inc. raises some important questions about how we classify and treat disease in the 21st century.

It doesn't all work though. While she's not hectoring, Canner's interviews can feel a little lightweight, and you'll want to hear the answers to questions that she apparently doesn't ask. It's also a little scattershot, and though it's just 79 minutes long some sequences feel extraneous,none more so than one that opens the film, then recurs later, in which Canner sets up a camera to film a woman's face as she masturbates to orgasm. There's no real purpose to this scene, it doesn't say anything, and all it did for me was remind me that I should rewatch the video for Romantic Death by The Sun sometime soon. There's also an animated sequence depicting four FSD drugs in a race for FDA approval which seems out of step with the rest of the film; it's silly, and far too on the nose for my liking.

Orgasm Inc. could be much more developed, but as a primer on an important and under recognised issue, it certainly has merit, and is well worth the 79 minutes it will take to watch it.

Bird's Eye View 2011 Preview: Guilty Pleasures

DIR: Julie Moggan

Julie Moggan won a Best Pitch prize for her idea for a documentary exploring the world of Mills and Boon readers. Mills and Boon, in case you have never been in a charity shop, are a seemingly endless line of romance novels, written to a prescribed formula. In Guilty Pleasures, Moggan turns most of her focus on the series' readers, trying to discover how their lives are influenced by the books. She also profiles a writer (a retired doctor named Roger who writes under the name Gill Sanderson) and a cover model (the incredibly flaky Stephen).

Most of the people that Moggan looks at here aren't very appealing. There is Hiroko, whose love of the books has led her to take up ballroom dancing with such passion that her (clearly long suffering) husband sadly notes that they can't discuss having more children because it would interrupt her lessons. British housewife Shirley seems sweet enough, but her husband Phil is almost a living caricature of a chauvanist, and it is he who gets the more screentime (one cringemaking scene has him showing off his tool belt, and almost every sentence he says seems like a bad joke from a politically incorrect 70's sitcom). In India, Shumita is a middle aged woman whose husband left her some years ago for a younger model, but seems now to want to be back in her life (we meet him briefly, he's a knob). Shumita seems to have bought into the idea of lifelong romance through her reading, even though life is suggesting that she shouldn't.

It's interesting, though, that perhaps the most unrealistic ideas of love are held not by the readers but by the man on the covers of their books. Stephen comes out with an endless stream of new age bollocks, much of it revolving around the idea of his 'true flame'. He should, one suspects, be writing Mills and Boon rather than exposing his abs on the jackets. Roger is probably the most normal person in the film, there's an air of sadness and loneliness about him, but he seems to push that to the background, and for the most part is pretty happy overall.

Even though most of Moggan's subjects are rather unlikeable or annoying, there are interesting stories to be told here. Unfortunately by following so many people Moggan gets only a loose grip on her narrative threads, and ends up with little real insight. There are moments that intrigue; Hiroko's husband saying that the books give her something he can't; a couple of unpleasant meetings between Shumita and her estranged husband Sanjay; Phil's general attitude to women, but Moggan fails to make the most of them, she never seems to be there with the well placed, probing, question that would open these people and their lives up. Too often she's content with a trite image (Shirley and Phil in bed, her reading a Mills and Boon, he a true crime book called Unnatural Deaths Volume 2) or leaves something potentially intriguing (Roger writing observations of everyday people, which he says give him story ideas) unexplored.

That's not to say there aren't fascinating moments here. I don't like Hiroko, but you can't deny that she's intriguing. More than the other readers she seems desperate to engage in this dreamworld, she doesn't seem to like her husband very much. For his part he seems to love her, in one very sweet scene he practices the dance steps she wants him to learn for a competition while standing alone waiting for a train - though here, as in several other moments, there could be definite questions about how real the moment is. Hiroko's princess fantasy seems to begin to come true towards the end of the film, though how you'll feel about that is very debatable.

Roger is also interesting; a lonely man, posing as a woman and writing about love. I wish Moggan had dug into his story much more deeply, because I suspect there's a whole film there.

Ultimately, Guilty Pleasures doesn't really tie itself together very well, Mills and Boon barely figures in some of these stories (especially that of Shirley and Phil), and we don't really learn much about the brand itself. There are flashes of the better film that this might have been, but overall this award winning pitch hasn't lived up to the promise it had.

EARLY REVIEW: I Spit On Your Grave [18]

I Spit on Your Grave opens on January 11th 2011. You can see the UK trailer HERE

Dir: Steven R. Monroe

It’s not the most censored, though 32 years later you still can’t see it uncut, but of all the video nasties the original I Spit on Your Grave, which was made for peanuts by Mier Zarchi, is perhaps the most infamous, and not only because of its spectacularly lurid title. It’s perhaps one of the most difficult and distressing films I’ve ever seen and, for all its many flaws, it gets under your skin to the point that after watching it you feel like you need a shower to get it off you. It is, then, an odd choice for a remake, because what more can you do, how much more extreme can you be?

Steven R. Monroe’s film is, in general shape, very faithful to Zarchi’s blueprint. Jennifer Hills (Sarah Butler) is still a young novelist who arrives at a remote cabin to work on her second book. After a few nights some local men come calling, they break into the cabin and ultimately rape and beat Jennifer almost to death. A few weeks later Jennifer, physically recovered, enacts systematic and terrible revenge on the men who attacked her. It is, essentially, the same blueprint as every rape/revenge movie from Thriller: A Cruel Picture to The Brave One. Where Monroe’s film differs from Zarchi’s is in the amount of detail it provides. Where Zarchi’s film seemed most interested in the horror of the acts it depicted, Monroe’s takes more time to build its characters (especially those of the group of men that attack Jennifer), with the characters of the rapists this is pretty effective; they are cartoons in the original, and if anything giving them more background serves to drop them from an even greater height.

In many ways this I Spit on Your Grave is better made than the original, yet that’s also what sometimes undermines it. Though it was made for just $1.5 million, the 2010 film looks outstanding. The images are crisp and cinematic, and that’s exactly the problem. This sheen about the film (which continues with the casting, Butler in particular being rather too Hollywood pretty for her role) is a little distancing when compared to the down and dirty feel of Zarchi’s film which, whatever you feel about the morals of this choice, really did put you right in amongst what was happening, and created at times the deeply unnerving feel that what you were seeing just could be real. Put simply you watch this film, but you survive the 1978 version.

To give credit where it’s due, most of the performances here are considerably better than those of the 1978 version. Along with being given more character traits and being much more fully developed we now have some capable actors playing Jennifer’s attackers, with Andrew Howard turning an especially impressive performance as a sadistic sheriff who is also a family man (in the film’s most striking, and in some ways most horrific, scene he takes a phone call from his young daughter while the other men rape Jennifer just a few feet away) and Chad Lindberg much more convincing as a retarded adult than the original’s Matthew. On the whole, the first half of the film, documenting Jennifer’s arrival at the cabin and the series of attacks and rapes she is subjected to, works very well. It may look prettier, but the events are still just as nasty, brutal and horrendous as they were in the original film. It’s when we reach the revenge section that I begin to have real problems with this I Spit on Your Grave.

The original film is about the degradation of violence. Jennifer’s vengeance is short and brutal; an act of purging, driven, it seems, as much by a need for closure as for vengeance. It’s also surprisingly underplayed, with the gore much more implied than it is shown. This, however, is the age of Saw and thus here the vengeance is played up to a ludicrous degree. The problem is that I think we’re supposed to enjoy it, and that’s a real sticking point for me. There is an interesting question about the second half of this story, which the film never quite addresses, which is whether Jennifer actually lived through her ordeal. Butler’s performance is ambiguous, but there are definite hints here that Jennifer may be little more than a spirit of vengeance, and I think I prefer that idea to the perhaps more persuasive alternative, which has her dealing with her ordeal through complex tortures meted out to her attackers, each capped off by some meaningful detail or wisecrack to get us to embrace and applaud this extreme vigilantism. The violence here is much more explicit and dwelled on much longer than in the 1978 film, to such a degree of extremity that I began to question exactly how justified Jennifer’s actions were (especially in relation to the Sheriff). It’s unpleasant, sure, but feels more like a carrot for the audience than anything else.

This is a difficult film to review. From a technical standpoint, especially given the budget, it’s excellent and Monroe certainly shows that he knows how to discomfort an audience (a skill that will serve him well in this genre) but it’s so bound up with another film, and though the 1978 film is not, by most traditional measures (excepting Camille Keaton’s remarkable, haunted, performance, which Butler completely fails to match) as ‘good’ as this one it is undeniably the more effective film. I guess it comes down to what you want out of a movie. If you want the catharsis of cheering at Jennifer’s vengeance then this is the version for you, but if you really want the full impact of this story then stick with the 1978 version. Neither is an easy watch, but neither is uninteresting.

★★☆☆☆

A Serbian Film: BBFC Cut version [18]

Dir: Srdjan Spasojevic

You really can’t separate A Serbian Film from the hype that has surrounded it since it was first seen in January. Horror cinema has lately been going through another of those periodic patches in which it is becoming notably more extreme, with each release seeming to aim for a new high (or low, depending on your point of view) watermark in how testing an experience it can be for its audience, and it seems that for many people A Serbian Film is that latest high (or low) point – that said I’ve since heard that another Serbian film; The Life and Death of a Porno Gang, is even more extreme. Certainly this film has attracted more criticism for its violence than almost any in recent memory, with mere descriptions of scenes, especially the now infamous ‘newborn porn’ scene, serving for some as an indictment of how far the horror genre will stoop to excite its audience. It is perhaps this infamy, rather than the film’s content as such, which has resulted in the BBFC demanding 49 separate cuts – a total of four minutes and twelve seconds – to the version of the film I’m now reviewing.

This hype was one of two things I carried with me into the screening. The other was an awareness of director Srdjan Spasojevic’s repeated claims that his film, far from being a mere exercise in prurient violence, is in fact an allegorical tale about how Serbia has been mistreated by the political class. On the surface, at least, the film is about Milos (Srdjan Todorovic), a former porn star who is lured out of family life with a big payday to work for a director (Sergei Trifunovic) who says that he wants to make a hardcore art film, and tells Milos that he’s to know nothing more about the project. As the film becomes more and more depraved, with violent sex scenes, often performed with young children watching, Milos decides that he wants to leave, but when he tries he is drugged and forced to continue with ever more depraved scenes for the film.

Whatever A Serbian Film is, subtle it is not. Once you are made aware of the fact that the filmmakers claim that it is an allegory that fact is obvious in almost every scene, in fact it’s an incredibly simplistic message, casting Serbia as a rape victim and ‘porno artist’ Vukmir as the corrupt political class beating it and fucking it, if only from a distance. This is never more nakedly expressed than in the ‘newborn porn’ scene. Perhaps if I knew more about Serbian society and politics this would seem insightful and clever, but to be frank I just felt like someone was shouting an unconvincing argument at me. For all its heavy-handed attempts at bringing this message to bear on the film, I found it an empty experience. Even in this cut version it is relentlessly (often boringly) brutal, and I found little of the intelligence and weight that lifted films like Martyrs and Antichrist out of the torture porn ghetto.

I can’t deny that A Serbian Film is well made. The gore effects are brilliantly handled, with a decapitation towards the end of the film being especially nasty and convincing, and Srdjan Spasojevic definitely shows promise as a director, as the level of craft that he’s put into the design of his shots here (especially during the shooting of Vukmir’s film) is diverting. This is when it’s a real shame that the film is so heavily cut, because there is obviously real thought behind the film’s visuals and its editing (it’s notable that there is actually relatively little really explicit gore here, much of the worst violence is cleverly shot to hide some of the detail without losing the impact). There is also an almost surreal quality to the film within the film, and that sense of Milos’ entering another world when he steps on to set is heightened by the stark and stylised lighting choices and the strange, structure free, dialogue of the porn film. The acting is also largely impressive (though Sergej Trifunovic does push the boat out too far towards the end, becoming a cartoonish embodiment of the already bludgeoned in message), but whatever the level of craft there was just something missing here for me.

A Serbian Film wants to shock you. It probably will, but personally I need to be really involved in a film to be affected by it in that way, and I just wasn’t with this one. The message was so front and centre that it really got in the way, for me, of engaging with the characters on a purely human level, to me everything in this film ends up feeling like a piece of Spasojevic’s personal allegorical jigsaw. There also came a point at which the film was pushing the boat out so ridiculously far in its violence and transgression that I began guessing at the most fucked up thing they could do next, and ended up guessing much of the content of the last quarter of an hour. The one moment I didn’t see coming, by the way, is so utterly ridiculous that it too undermined any shock value of the scene.

As unconvinced and as disappointed as I am by A Serbian Film as a whole, there is enough going on here to interest me in Srdjan Spasojevic’s next film, providing that he elects to tell a story rather than provide a blood drenched and unconvincing lecture. There is, of course, the possibility that restoring the missing four minutes and twelve seconds will transform the film into the masterpiece that some have claimed it to be, but somehow I doubt it.

★★☆☆☆

Film Review: 24FPS @ RENDEZ VOUS WITH FRENCH CINEMA 2010

LE REFUGE
DIR: François Ozon
CAST: Isabelle Carre, Louis-Ronan Choisy



François Ozon is a genius. There are quite simply no two ways about it. He’s also the single most consistent filmmaker working, with a non-stop run of great films stretching from his debut (1998’s Sitcom) to Le Refuge (to be fair, I haven’t seen his previous film; Ricky yet, as it has yet to be released in the UK, though it’s coming to DVD here soon). Even for a serial genre hopper like Ozon, Le Refuge, though it’s the third part in a very loose trilogy on mourning (which also includes Under the Sand and Time to Leave), feels like a real departure. It’s a strikingly intimate film, free from the melodrama that Ozon likes, and does so very well.

The story is of a young woman named Mousse (Carre), a heroin addict whose boyfriend (Melvil Popaud) dies of an overdose just after she has become pregnant. To see herself through both pregnancy and a methadone aided recovery she takes off to a beach house owned by a friend, where her boyfriend’s brother Paul (Choisy) soon joins her.

Le Refuge came out of Ozon’s desire to make a film with an actress who was genuinely pregnant. We’ve all seen a lot of pregnancy movies, we all know the beats; the morning sickness scene, the wacky cravings, the mid-pregnancy scare, the birth, with some poor sweaty actress grunting and everyone yelling “PUSH”, while some male figure stands on the sidelines and quite often faints. Ozon, ever resistant to cliché, gives us precisely none of those beats. That’s perhaps because Mousse never seems to want a baby, she rather wants her boyfriend Louis to remain in the world in some small way, and this is how she’s making it happen. We also know all the beats of a drug movie, but again Ozon avoids them, keeping Mousse’ struggle with addiction in the background, letting us see it through the character’s actions, demeanour and the way Carre plays her.

Isabelle Carre is an exceptional actress (see, for starters, her mesmerising performance in Anna M) and she’s spectacular as Mousse. It seems an intensely personal piece of work, especially as Ozon scrutinises her body, bump included, in extremely intimate close up. One especially great scene has her lying in the bath, simply running her hands across her belly. There’s no dialogue, but Carre communicates so much in that sequence. Many of her best moments are silent; like the way she asks a man who tries to seduce her just to rock her, and the comfort she takes in it, like the way she steps away from a boy she’s dancing with at a club when he puts his hands on her belly, like the way she reacts to Paul singing and playing the piano, with so many different emotions registering on her face. It’s a masterclass in doing a huge amount with very little. There’s also just something about Carre, her slightly gap toothed but explosive smile perhaps, that just makes you warm to her. It’s an important quality, because Mousse isn’t easy to like or to root for, but Carre embodies her so completely and brings that vital empathy to her protrayl.


Next to the experienced Carre, Ozon has cast a singer, Louis-Ronan Choisy, who had never previously acted. You’d never guess. Like Carre’s, Choisy’s performance is completely unaffected and completely resistant to cliché. They’re a strong pairing too, with the chemistry working well and a connection between them seeming to grow very organically. Choisy also wrote the film’s music, built largely around the tune of the song Paul plays and sings for Mousse. The score is well used; accentuating the emotion of key moments rather than instructing you how to feel.

There are many typically Ozon moments in the film; notably the many beach scenes, which have featured in the director’s work all the way back to his early shorts, and are a recurring image in the mourning trilogy. The look is also very identifiably Ozon; there’s a slight softness to his light which gives much of the midsection of the film, again especially the beach scenes, a slightly dreamlike glow, perhaps to signify the way that Mousse, through her recovery, is coming back into the light from the grimy grey flat in which the first few scenes take place. What’s new in his approach here is the apparent lack of any real need to impose a plot on the film, he simply allows us to spend time with Mousse and Paul, to eavesdrop on this time in their lives a little. It’s not a hugely eventful film, obviously, but the strength of the performances means that even though almost nothing really happens Le Refuge remains absolutely riveting.

The ending is somehow both inevitable and shocking. In typical style Ozon refuses to put a neat little bow on things (in some ways the ending here is an interesting inversion of the ending of See the Sea, his magnificent short feature). That will annoy some people, as will the actions of Mousse, but such is life; this is a film that acknowledges the messy nature of life and personal relationships. I’ll need to see it again before I can really place it among Ozon’s work, but right now it feels like his best since 5 X 2, and certainly his most affecting film since then. I can’t really encourage you enough to go and see this film when it opens in the UK in August, it’s yet another masterpiece from one of the greatest filmmakers currently working.


I first Saw Leaving at the 2009 London Film Festival. This is simply a re-publishing of the review I wrote at that time, because my opinions on the film didn't chage with a rewatch.

PARTIR
[Leaving]
DIR: Catherine Corsini
CAST: Kristin Scott-Thomas, Sergi Lopez, Yvan Attal



Though she’s flirted with the mainstream, and had large roles in such popular fare as Four Weddings and a Funeral and The English Patient when you mention the name Kristin Scott-Thomas you’ll mostly see blank faces staring back at you. That’s a terrible shame, because she’s among the best actresses working in world cinema.

Like last year’s I've Loved You So Long, Catherine Corsini’s film finds Scott-Thomas acting in flawless French. As Suzanne, an English woman married for some 20 years to Samuel (Attal), but now embarking on an affair with Spanish builder Ivan (Lopez), leading to a messy and bitter divorce, Scott-Thomas is just brilliant. Her dialogue is beautifully delivered, and filled with expression and meaning. This, of course, is an actor’s job, but so frequently when they are working in a second language their performances can seem rote and bereft of expression, that’s absolutely not the case with Kristin Scott-Thomas. That isn’t all that makes her performance special though. Great actors are great listeners, and when you watch her reacting to what other people say there is such richness, such emotion in her silent reactions. This is a performance played as much in the physicality of its relationships and in what plays behind the eyes as it is in the dialogue, and that’s what makes it truly special, a real, three-dimensional portrait.

I’ve seen Sergi Lopez act in three languages now; his native Spanish, French and English, and in each he’s been outstanding. He’s an actor who seems to change completely in each role. It’s genuinely difficult to connect Ivan with Capitain Vidal from Pan's Labyrinth, or with Harry from Harry, He’s Here to Help. Lopez has often played bad guys in the past, but though Ivan is an ex-con (we never discover what he did) he’s no villain. Instead Lopez plays him as a very genuine, very normal man, largely driven by circumstance - that circumstance being that he and Suzanne have fallen in love. It’s tough to play very ordinary people, because they don’t tend to have the operatic notes that it’s rather easy to reach in acting. Instead roles and films like this demand smallness, subtlety and intricacy, and Lopez delivers beautifully.

These two outstanding performances tower over the film, and that’s probably a good thing, because frankly Catherine Corsini’s screenplay and direction, though there’s nothing wrong with them, are pretty generic. We’ve seen this tale told a thousand times, and we know pretty well where it’s going to end up (though Corsini doesn’t help that with a structure that opens proceedings with a moment that takes place about five minutes from the end of the film).

Scott-Thomas and Lopez also threaten to drown out Yvan Attal’s performance. Samuel isn’t as well written as Suzanne and Ivan, and Attal ends up having to spend most of the film playing a single note. He does it well, but the character is just too thin to really register. However, when the focus is on Suzanne and Ivan, as it is for much of the 85 minute running time, Leaving is strong stuff. The chemistry between Scott-Thomas and Lopez is electric; their sex scenes pulse with energy, and whenever they share a scene once their relationship has begun you can feel that hunger for one another, especially in Scott-Thomas’ last few scenes in the film.

Leaving certainly isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty well made on the whole, and though it is short it doesn’t feel compromised by its length. The characters are strong and individual (even if Samuel isn’t the most rounded of characters) and the ending is near perfect, leaving us on a note of some ambiguity, rather than spoon-feeding us for an extra 10 minutes. The film is only really lifted out of the ordinary by the two leading performances, make no mistake though, those two performances make Leaving a must see.