Past Programs
Art House - 2008
Trash and Treasure: Amree Hewitt on 'Faust'
25/09/2008
Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's Faust is a masterpiece of German Expressionist silent cinema. It was the director's last film before moving to the United States and is an adaptation of the Goethe play set during the great plague, about a man who makes a deal with the devil to become young again, and embarks on a doomed romance. It's the pick of Australian Centre for the Moving Image curator Amree Hewett.
Faust will be screening as part of the 2008 Melbourne International Arts Festival and ACMI's First Look season -- with a live performance of a new musical score (which we played snippets of in the interview) by composer Phillip Johnston on the weekend of 11 and 12 October. There are three screenings. The film is also available on DVD or online (it's public domain).
Trash and Treasure: Dean Bertram on 'Cannibal Holocaust'
18/09/2008
Today a film many considered truly outrageous. Indeed Cannibal Holocaust was banned here and in other parts of the world, and has since been unbanned, except in the UK, where it's available only in censored form. Made in l980 by the Italian director Ruggero Deodato, it's about four young filmmakers who go into the South American jungle to make a documentary on cannibals and, when they don't return, the search for them. The film outraged many for its graphic depiction of cannibalism and actual animal killings.
But some defend it as a critique of filmmaking and cultural imperialism. It's the pick of Dean Bertram, filmmaker and curator of A Night of Horror International Film Festival.
Waltz With Bashir
11/09/2008
Ari Folman's brilliant, animated documentary is based on true stories: the memories of himself and fellow 20-year-old conscripts serving with the Israeli army in Lebanon in l982.
It begins with a dream, a nightmare one of them has, decades later, of being pursued by 26 slavering hounds. Folman himself remembers very little of his military service. He begins to talk with his old comrades to fill in the gaps. Slowly, in a collage of memories and nightmares and heightened imagery, some questions return about the night the Israeli army stood by and fired flares while Christian phalangists invaded Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and Shatilla in Beirut, and massacred inhabitants in revenge for the assassination of their leader, Gemayal Bashir.
This is disturbing, original film-making, which explores the troubled psyche rather than putting perpetrators and collaborators on trial. It raises universal questions, in a form which will trouble all our dreams. One of the best films this year.
Funny Games
11/09/2008
In Michael Haneke's 1996 film Funny Games, two polite, well-spoken young men in tennis whites knock on the door of a middle-class family cocooned with their child and their dog in a prosperous holiday home. They then proceed to torment them just for the hell of it.
The original, which came out of nowhere, was pure, unrelenting anxiety. It knotted the stomach to a degree to which we were then unaccustomed. And Haneke played some very strange games with us, the viewers, to relieve the tension.
The new film stars Naomi Watts and Tim Roth as the couple, and they are excellent. Haneke's own filmmaking doesn't miss a beat. If you saw the original, the elements of suprise may be missing but dread and suspense and nastiness are translated perfectly.
What's it all for? Haneke, one of the most unpleasant filmmakers I've ever attempted to interview, justified his original film as one which confronted us with our own complicity in violence as spectacle. I'm no longer sure about this 'epater le bourgeoisie' stance. Maybe he just enjoys beating up on his audience. Though anyone who has seen his subsequent masterpiece Cache (Hidden), knows he can make a moral point.
Welcome to the Sticks ('Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis')
04/09/2008
This is the latest comedy from the people who brought you The Dinner Guest. Yep, when the French do farce they don't muck around. Dany Boon writes, directs and stars as chief yokel in this broad comedy about a postal official (Kad Merad) transferred against his will to manage a post office in the far north of France, where the locals speak a dialect called Schti. The film milks these regional prejudices and dialect jokes quite successfully, it moves well enough, and its final episode of broad farce, when the manager's wife comes to visit, is good fun. It's a mystery to me though why this film has been breaking French box office records... they must be desperate for a laugh. I'd just call it pleasant fun.
In Bruges
04/09/2008
Oh, the agony of being a tourist with someone whose tastes are quite different to your own. In Bruges, two Irish hit men are hiding out and marking time till their absent boss, Harry, gives them new orders.
The older man, Ken (Brendan Gleeson), is quite happy with this chance to explore the medieval city, guide book in hand. The younger man, Ray (Colin Farrell), is bored witless, and either slouches outside the galleries and cathedrals Ken is methodically exploring, or whinges. Constantly.
Eventually they strike a bargain. Turn and turn about. Ray will go along with Ken's sightseeing, if Ken in turn will allow Ray a few excursions to cocktail bars, the odd dance party. If they can find them.
And so we find the two peering at Hieronymus Bosch's Last Judgement in the town's museum. It's their faces we read first, and then details of Bosch's startling, nightmarish landscape, with its fantastical mewling, shrieking and pecking, troubled souls. They begin a discussion of the difference between purgatory and hell.
'Maybe that's what hell is,' says Ray. 'An eternity spent in fuckin' Bruges.'
I must have seen Colin Farrell in half a dozen films now. In some, such as Phone Booth, he was not bad. In others, like Oliver Stone's Alexander the Great, he was abysmal. It was that kind of film.
Here, as the bored, troubled, doofus hit man Ray, he is sensational. He is in inner agony over a job which has gone very wrong, he is childlike, he is bored, he is passionate, he is cranky, he is optimistic. It is a performance of amazing range, absolutely focused, creating an annoying but likeable character.
Brendan Gleeson, one of the giants of Irish stage and cinema, is note perfect as his older, possibly gay, more experienced mentor, Ken. Both are held in suspense by the psychotic rages of their employer, Harry, a cockney Londoner
with a brutal code of honour and, inexplicably, an attachment to Bruges. Harry is a one-note character, but that note is held to perfection by the last British actor one would ever imagine as a hard man -- Ralph Fiennes.
The first phone conversation between Ken and Harry, when Ken has the temerity to question the fairytale-ness of Bruges and provokes Harry to hysterical rage, is extremely funny. Much, much of the dialogue in this film is disconcertingly funny.
Its creator, Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, has already won himself a worldwide following in theatre with such plays as The Beauty Queen of Leenane, and The Lieutenant of Inishmore. His explorations of the violent and vengeful thread of Irish culture has both impressed and at times enraged his country folk, some of whom like to point out that he was born in Britain and has lived his life as a 'visiting Irish'.
The morality of violence is indeed the question around which this film revolves, one which troubles both Ray and Ken. It is resolved in a brutal, suspenseful fashion. This is not a film for the fainthearted.
But it is frequently, disconcertingly funny. And it is also beautiful. Bruges, the medieval city, is indeed a character in the film, beautifully lit by cinematographer Eigil Bryld. But more, McDonagh and his designers have taken the Bosch painting as a kind of leitmotif, echoed both in the design and in the story. It is, after all, Judgment Day in Bruges.
This film is an original: so far removed in its artistry from the standard Hollywood hit-man movie it has haunted me for days.
Colin Farrell has redeemed himself, and shown he is an actor of the first rank. And Martin McDonagh, I predict, has launched himself on a brilliant new career in film.
Thank God for the Irish. Even if one of them was born in Camberwell.
Son of Rambow
04/09/2008
Trash and Treasure: Philip Brophy on 'The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert'
21/08/2008
Today filmmaker, video artist and scholar Philip Brophy tears into this Australian classic from 1994. In case you've lived under a rock these past 15 years it's a road movie starring Terence Stamp, Guy Pearce and Hugo Weaving as three drag queens traveling to the centre of Australia in an old bus. A reinvention of Australian iconography? Not according to Philip.
You can read an expanded version of Philip Brophy's critique of the film—it's published in Currrency Press's Australian Screen Classics series.
The Edge of Love
21/08/2008
A Dylan Thomas menage a trois? In the late war years, Dylan Thomas, ever the freeloader, brought his wife Caitlin to share digs with Vera Philips, his teenage sweetheart from Swansea. Later, with Vera's husband at the Front, Thomas, the women and their babies shared adjoining cottages in Wales.
Sharman Macdonald has written this tale of friendship between two women. John Maybury's direction turns it into a salacious soft porn drama in which the women are driven by sexual tension and rivalry, and greedy Dylan wants both. The women's lingering farewells across the bonnets of vintage cars can't rescue this film after Maybury has given the sexual politics this tedious twist—it reminds me of the cabaret song about a gleeful male fantasising 'two ladies'.
Sienna Miller makes a lively Caitlin; Matthew Rhys a mischievous Dylan, and Kiera Knightley a doe-eyed, fatuous Vera. Not only is this a classic case of a director misinterpreting a script—where's the bloody poetry?
Son of a Lion
21/08/2008
It's depressing to realise how few Australian feature films have been set outside our own borders in the last 25 years, and how rarely the imaginations of our filmmakers have engaged with the culture of our neighbours.
Of course Australian documentary makers go there often, but you could probably count the feature length dramas on one hand. Peter Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously, Tom Jeffrey's The Odd Angry Shot. They were back in the 80s. Another Vietnam film or two; then Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road and last year's Kokoda. Coming up, Robert Connolly's Balibo, now filming in Timor, and Bruce Beresford's projected film on Long Tan.
In fact, most Australian films which engage with our neighbours in the regions appear to be war stories, which says something rather sad about our cultural relationships, don't you think?
All the more marvellous then to come across Son of a Lion, a feature made by a novice filmmaker, Benjamin Gilmour, in collaboration with the Pashtun people in two villages; Kohat and Darra Adam Khel in the tribal lands in Pakistan's north-west frontier.
This is is the story of 13-year-old Niaz, whose father, Sher Alam Afridi, follows the village trade. They are gunsmiths, skilled in reverse engineering. They can take a weapon—almost any weapon—and copy it. The children start young, collecting bullets on test firings in the worn hills around the villages.
Niaz's father is determined his son will follow the trade his father taught him. Niaz, however, wants to go to secondary school. His mother is dead. But his urbane uncle in Peshawar encourages Niaz in this ambition. As do some of the villagers who are poets and musicians. But his father, a former Mujahadeen, wants to enforce a harsh discipline. He closes his ears when Niaz tries to voice his concerns about the Pashtun's traditional gun culture. Only when Niaz is drawn into other drama in the village, with near tragic results, does Sher Alam change his mind.
All roles are taken by locals. Their performances are low-key and natural; dialogue is pretty minimal but it is effective. One sees the harsh beauty of the region, the basic amenities with which the villagers live. But we also see their wit and shrewdness as they discuss life, poetry and the conflict now engulfing Pashtun lands, which straddle the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
At times highly entertaining—young Niaz has to suffer a hilarious visit to a dentist in Peshawar—Son of a Lion tells a simple story with a powerful payoff.
At the Brisbane Film Festival a couple of weeks ago, Benjamin Gilmour, the film's director, was answering audience questions about how he made the film. With him was Niaz Khan Shinwari, who plays the 13-year-old hero of the film. With him too was Hyat Khan Shinwari, Niaz's father, who plays the character Niaz's uncle in the film, and who also acted as executive producer, translator and sponsor. The pair were wearing their Pashtun clothing, elegant in white shirts and trousers, sandals, waistcoats, and the characteristic flat cap with the rolled edge.
Out of the dark, from beyond the stalls, came the concerned voice of a woman who had just seen the film. 'Tell me,' she asked Niaz (who is now 17 but still looks 15), 'were you able to finish school?'
'I've done my O-Levels,' came the modest reply. 'Now I have to get my A-levels. I think I want to be a lawyer.'
The lady pressed on. 'And Is that your uncle's shop?'
'Well we own it, yes,' said Niaz. 'And he's really my father.'
The lady persisted. 'Actually,' came this cultured voice, 'I'm a chemical engineer.'
Another stereotype smashed, one hopes. It became clear that without the friendship and patronage of Hayat Khan Shinwari, a local landowner and, one guesses, village patron, Son of a Lion would not have been made. Luckily for Gilmour, Hayat Khan Shinwari is also a film-lover. The Australian Film Commission helped too, kicking in money to send him back for many retakes in 2006.
This film is a significant achievement for Gilmour and the Shinwaris, for their imagination, and persistence. Beyond that, it's the best Australian film I've seen all year.
The Visitor
14/08/2008
Walter is an academic who tries to do as little as possible, always with the excuse that he is working on his book. He is discouraging to students, and it seems has only one passion -- music. He wants to play the piano, and perseveres despite his lack of talent.
On a visit to New York he discovers that his apartment there has been rented illegally to a young couple, Zainab and Tarek. An unlikely friendship develops between the older man and the younger, a musician who helps Walter find his own way to music.
Then Tarek is picked up on the subway, and detained as an illegal immigrant.
Thomas McCarthy, the creator of this film, is best known as an actor. He is interested in society's outsiders -- those whom others see as marginal. Grief and grieving also interest him, apparently.
His first film, The Station Agent was a bitter-sweet, often comic study of a man, mourning the death of his partner, who moves to the country seeking solitude, only to be driven mad by curious locals wanting to chat. It starred the actor Peter Dinklage, born with dwarfism, and Patricia Clarkson.
In The Visitor, McCarthy cast Richard Jenkins as Walter. Jenkins -- tall, spare, elderly and plain of face under his receding hair and horn-rimmed glasses -- is an actor of near perfect technique. He is, apparently, vanity free, and you may well be startled when you see him in this film to realise you have been watching him in a variety of supporting roles for decades, roles which move from comedy to tragedy, and in all of them he has been there to serve the movie, without a trace of ego.
His Walter is such a stiff, unyielding and unloving grump at the start of the film, that it seems nothing can penetrate those defences. All the more rewarding then for us as viewers when Haas Sleiman, as the enthusiastic Tarek toting his big African drums, manages to do so without even noticing Walter's reserve.
There is a second, striking performance from the Israeli-Arab actress Hiam Abassa who, as Tarek's mother Mouna, dominates the second part of the film. She is a strong and striking presence on screen: Mouna's warmth and intelligence play against Walter's restraint.
Director Tom McCarthy's anger at America's homeland security practices and how illegal immigrants and refugees are treated post 9/11 is expressed very clearly in The Visitor.
The parallels with Australian experience are not accidental. We never see the anonymous, privately run detention centres from the inside, only as frustrated family members and friends see them -- from the outside, behind big, bland, anonymous walls, or in cramped visiting rooms. These sequences ring true in a way the drama McCarthy has constructed doesn't quite.
I found the story The Visitor tells, the relationships it constructs, a little too contrived. Rather I have an image of a North African drummer busking in a subway underpass. I envisage a middle-class American man, a writer, walking past and wondering: how can I imagine this man's story?
Taken
14/08/2008
French film-maker Luc Besson has always wanted to make big ballsy American style action movies. He co-wrote and produced this one, which is directed by Pierre Morel. Taken stars Liam Neeson as an ex-CIA operator whose adored 17-year-old daughter, visiting Paris, is abducted by the Romanian mafia and auctioned off to Arab oil sheikhs. The film delivers the required number of fist fights and explosions, but it also exploits a patriarchal nightmare: a father's worst fears, his virginal daughter, clad in white lace, being auctioned to Arab oil sheikhs, and so manages to trivialise the very real problem of sexual slavery in which rich white men exploit poor women and children.
The Savages
24/07/2008
What happens when, in mid-life, you are called on to care for a father, who, frankly, has never cared much for you?
Laura Linney is Wendy, a playwright who supports herself temping in office jobs between grants. One day she gets a call about their father. He seems to be going well, ga ga, and Doris,his second wife, has just died.
Wendy calls her brother Jon, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. He's a successful academic, an expert on Brecht, no less. They don't see each other very often, but this is clearly an emergency neither wants to face alone. They take the plane only to discover, on arrival, that Doris's children want nothing more to do with the irascible, totally demented Lenny... beautifully played by Philip Bosco.
This is just the start of The Savages, a film which manages to find considerable wisdom, and much humour, tracing the relationship between brother and sister as they handle something which may face many of us now in mid-life.
But it's duty, not affection, which compels Jon and Wendy to take responsibility. Neither has much affection to draw on.
'Maybe he didn't abandon us,' says Wendy. 'Maybe he just forgot us.'
Just how deep those childhood scars run emerges as they wrestle with some of the problems of a parent 'in care'.
Jon has phobias so deep he cannot even raise a finger to commit to his Polish girlfriend, This is a great performance from Seymour Hoffman; just watch his body language in key scenes.
Laura Linney's Wendy is much more emotionally upfront, but she's a mess of guilt and resentment, frightened to strike out, frightened to let go. The rough justice of nursing home care disturbs her.
As brother and sister argue about what they owe their father. Does it really matter to a totally demented man that he's in a place of smells and yells and frantic routine? The deeper scars emerge, and we begin to understand why they are as they are.
But it's a tale told with much humour. Jon, for example, is pressed into presenting a film night for the nursing home partients. But maybe Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer wasn't the best choice. It's a funny-excruciating scene, as the audience starts heckling.
Ten years ago Tanmara Jenkins made a lovely little film called The Slums of Beverley Hills about teenagers forced to mix it with the upmarket 90210 Beverley Hills high school crowd while living in a series of motel rooms with bickering parents sorting out their divorce.
Jenkins has a fine sense of irony, an observant eye, and great compassion.
Now it may be a hard sell to suggest that a film about a brother and sister caring for a demented father is the film for you this weekend. But if you take the risk to go there, I think you will be absorbed, and amused. Face it, there are some parts of life which are so dire, well, you have to laugh.
Silent Light (Stellet licht)
12/06/2008
This is the third feature from Mexican director Carlos Reygadas, and comes to the Sydney Film Festival's competition already well awarded -- it shared the Jury Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. The film opens with an austere and beautiful extended shot of the night sky slowly lightening to a sunrise and then we see a man, praying at a kitchen table in the dawn. This is Johann and his wife, Esther, leaves him to pray and breaks into sobs.
They are Mennonites, and Johann (played by Cornelio Wall) has fallen in love with Marianne. He has been open with his wife about the affair, and has brought them both enormous pain. But he and Marianne are made for each other. 'You have found your perfect woman,' his father, a preacher, counsels him. 'Not everybody achieves that. In a way, I envy you.'
With this exquisite film, Reygadas takes his time to place his characters within the landscape, to let us immerse ourselves in the emotional heartbeat. He has a very distinct sensibility and he's audacious in his use of the 360 degree pan, or an extreme longshot, where it is simply bodies we are seeing choreographed in space to create a feeling of powerful intimacy.
For example, there's a scene showing the literal heartbreak of Esther, the wife, who bolts from the car in a rain storm, and collapses.
Reygadas acknowledges his debts to Bresson in the way he works with actors; and to Carl Dreyer -- in particular Dreyer's Ordet, a film about love, death and resurrection.
But there is also an earthy sensibility here, as well as an insistence of cinematic purity. For me, the films of Reygadas -- the festival has also screened his first and second features, Japon and Battle in Heaven -- have been one of the eye-openers of the festival so far. And with Hunger, this film sets the competition bar high.
Hunger
12/06/2008
Hunger is set back in l981, when some 70-plus IRA prisoners in Belfast's Maze prison were 'on the blanket' in protest against Thatcher's refusal to accord them political status. They refused to wear prison clothes, and then, escalating the protest, refused to wash.
McQueen's film takes us into the heart of the Maze. First through the ritualized actions of a prison officer, who daily checks under his car for IRA bombs before going to work, and soaks his raw, bleeding knuckles in hot water as he comes on and off shift.
McQueen then puts us into a cell with a new prisoner, refusing to wear prison uniform, being inducted into the rituals of the 'no wash' process by an older inmate and being shown how to smuggle goods and information in and out. In the cell, with its shit-daubed walls, our senses are assaulted.
McQueen is exploring what it is for people to use the body as a political weapon. His tactic as a director is to make us feel those experiences on our own bodies and in so doing he brilliantly cuts through the accretions and memory and ideology through which people may have tidied away the fasting death of Bobby Sands.
He does it brilliantly. Every camera move is considered, calculated for its impact. The storytelling is almost wordless for the first 40 minutes. We are confronted with the bizarre rituals of both screws and prisoners, almost mirroring each other. No easy martyrdom is offered -- the film acknowledges the IRA's campaign of assassination of prison officers. And we do not meet Bobby Sands until our bodies have been shocked and immersed in the Maze.
Sands is played memorably by Irish German actor Michael Fassbender, and it is his body -- fading, ulcerated -- that we will see wasting. But in the centre of the film there is something quite unexpected: an audacious, 22-minute debate between Sands and a sympathetic but appalled priest, shot in a couple of takes, while Sands rehearses his decision to bring on the hunger strikes, leading with himself.
Writer-director Steve McQueen is big, black, British, iconoclastic, working class, a Turner prize winner for his video art, an OBE, a professional provocateur. He set the bar very high for the Sydney Film Festival competition with this film. It will release here in August, after it does the festival circuit.
Three Blind Mice
12/06/2008
This was one of the surprises in competition at this year's Sydney Film Festival. It's a low budget, independently financed Australian film, written and directed by Matthew Newton, an almost classic story about three naval officers on a final night of shore leave before shipping back to Iraq. At one level, it's referencing On The Town, at another it is using the device of the slow reveal as we begin to understand why one of them is thinking of going AWOL. It's clear from the start something nasty has happened involving all three, but only slowly does it emerge.
The writing is colloquial, vernacular and fresh. The performances, including Ewan Leslie as Sam and Gracie Otto as Emma, the girl Sam meets on the town, are all spot on.
It's the cinematography which lets this film down. Shot documentary style, on the fly, on a number of night shoots around Sydney, it doesn't quite do the performances or the storytelling justice. I understand why Newton went for this approach, given the resources, but alongside other films in competition such as Hunger, and Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light, where every camera move and every shot is considered, this cinematography looks, well, dingy and unremarkable, and does not serve the film.
The Orphanage ('El Orfanato')
29/05/2008
I'm not good with horror films, but as I get older, I have come to appreciate the cathartic potential in a form of entertainment designed to get your adrenaline pumping by administering a series of sharp, well timed shocks. Perhaps it actually is empowering to revisit the crime scenes of reality through the imagination. To pay your ticket, sit in the dark, where fear always festers, place yourself in the hands of experts, and then emerge, perfectly unharmed, to find everything is alright, just as Mum always said it would be.
Apart from wondering whether life doesn't hold enough terrors without paying for them, I also have a problem with the way the heroine always behaves in a terrifying situation. Why does she, for instance, creep down the stairs late at night after hearing scary noises, open doors that should remain closed, creep into cellars without turning lights on, and generally put herself at risk for no other reason than that she cannot keep her nose out of it? Horror films could easily be resolved without all the drama by simply staying in bed.
But then, there is a particular type of grown adult who can be expected to take ridiculous risks in dark isolated places when the sensible thing to do would be to go back to sleep. That would be a mother, particularly the mother of a sick child. We all accept that a mother will stop at nothing to protect her offspring. It's a bond so exclusive and so intense, it endows the mother with almost supernatural powers of endurance, intuition, and good old fashioned reckless courage. And this is why there is a whole genre of horror films which revolve around the nightmare of motherhood: What can go very very wrong on Mum's watch. If a child is dying, then the already sleep deprived and partially unhinged mother can slip over the edge into full blown dementia.
Which brings me to The Orphanage - an extraordinarily good horror film, produced by Guillermo del Toro, the director of Pan's Labyrinth, and directed by Juan Antonio Bayonna. Between them this pair have cooked up an exquisitely gothic nightmare bulging with all the familiar tropes - the arcana of domestic items which become animated by the unspeakable horror when the ordinary family home becomes a mortuary - the door knobs, cellars, attics, antique dolls, patchwork quilts, squeaking swings, and flying teacups (not to mention poisoned food and the ghosts of other dead children). The Orphanage has them all.
But then wasn't Laura asking for trouble when she decided to buy the old manor house in which she grew up? It was an orphanage then, and she was one of the inmates lucky enough to leave for a normal family life. Returning to the house to make it over into a home for children with special needs, Laura (played by the indomitable yet fragile looking Belen Rueda) and her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo), and son Simon, look all set to play happy families......
Of course in the audience we figure out the place is full of poltergeists long before Laura does (Carlos never quite gets his head around it), and long before little Simon goes missing on the very day the attractive couple open their home for business. It kind of annoys me that the guests are children with a variety of disabilities, giving the filmmakers plenty of scope to stage a mini freak show. But then I guess there is a deep primal fear of anything different in all of us. Once Simon has disappeared, and Laura is being hassled by all sorts of spooks, the house really begins to hop with psychic energy. So a medium is called in. I knew even before she turned around that it was Geraldine Chaplin, Charlie's extraordinary daughter. It's a perfect piece of casting.
The real letdown for the heroine in these horror stories is how little help the husbands always are. The classic reassuring rationality of the "dad" is no help in a world of feral emotional chaos and supernatural disturbances, and he usually decamps right when he's needed most.
This is an exquisitely crafted, visually rich, and very well acted film which had me in tears by the time it ended. RH
Interview with Stephanie Bunbury from Cannes
22/05/2008
Julie Rigg speaks to Stephanie about what's hot at the Cannes Film Festival.
Trash and Treasure: Rod Webb on 'Katerina Izmailova'
15/05/2008
Today's guest is Eastern European Cinema expert Rod Webb, a former Sydney Film Festival director and SBS programmer who now works at Network Australia. He's chosen the 1966 Mikhail Shapiro film of the 1932 Dimitri Shostakovich opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which was banned by Stalin in 1936. It tells of the affair between a merchant's wife and her husband's labourer, and how the couple commit murder to stay together, though ultimately they're doomed.
Rats and Cats
15/05/2008
About six years ago I saw a silly short film, in black and white, about a dog called Wilfred. He was played, in a floppy dog suit, by Jason Gann, an actor whose round cheeks and eyes give him a chronically puppyish air. Now actors doing dog imitations are pretty low rent but Wilfred wasn't any dog: he was Wilfred.
Wilfred finally made it to the television screen last year as a short series on SBS.
Meanwhile the trio who created him—that's Jason and his co-writer and co-performer, Adam Zwar, with director Tony Rogers—went and made a feature film in which Jason has morphed into another Australian character. He's Darren. Darren MacWarren
Don't you remember Darren? The former Australian star of television soaps who had to flee Melbourne some years ago because of, well, indiscretions?
He's come to rest in Gladdington, a small town in Western Victoria, where he's traced by Ben (Adam Zwar) an earnest young man who writes the 'Where Are They Now?' feature for a not very well known street newspaper. Negotiations follow, and so Ben arrives in Gladdington, to find Daryl singing with a band called Black Diamond, cutting a swath with the local groupies, and living off, well, some interesting investments.
I first saw this micro budget film Rats and Cats two years ago at the Melbourne International Film festival. It's shot on HD but looks good. It's beautifully performed, though a little meandering in its story line. There is something about Jason Gann's posturing, as Darren, which deliciously parodies the swaggering Australian male,
Come to think of it there were traces of it this in Wilfred as well. There's no way that dog could have been mistaken for a Wilma.
It's got some nice swipes too, at the celebrity culture of TV soaps, Logies, Who Weekly and New Idea. I am still trying to conjure with one of Darren MacWarren's soap characters, Father Roger. He wears a dog collar and a moustache and we see him only in brief clips.
Did he become Darren's alter ego? Was he the right person to be counselling distraught blond teenagers? There are many troubling questions raised in this film.
If you Liked The Conchords, the series Radio National ran over Christmas, then I reckon you'll like this movie. Not a lot happens in it really. But it's the way it doesn't happen that counts.
Interview with Tony Rogers, writer-director, 'Rats and Cats'
15/05/2008
Director Tony Rogers reckons there's a lot to learn from his film's lead character Darren McWarren - a former Australian star of television soaps who had to flee Melbourne because of, well, indiscretions...
Interview with Stefan Ruzowitzky, writer-director, The Counterfeiters
08/05/2008
Back in March, when The Counterfeiters won the Academy Award for best foreign language film, Austria went a little crazy.
The media was full of it. The film, which had come and gone in art house cinemas, was re-released, and there was general media hoo-ha.
An Austrian film had never before won an Oscar, you see. The country has a strong, often provocative tradition of cinema, but it's usually overshadowed by the Germans.
Two months later, writer-director Stefan Ruzowitzky is still pondering how to deal with the aftermath.
Iron Man
01/05/2008
At the end of the screening of Iron Man I attended this week, a twenty-ish young person sitting near me turned to her companion and said: 'It's interesting that they've cast so many older people in this film. Not just Robert Downey Jr. Look at Gwyneth Paltrow. She must be at least 35.' Then she thought for a bit, and added, 'Well I guess John Favreaux is old too.'
Jeesh, I thought. That puts my generation of moviegoers in our place.
In fact, it's a relief to have an actor of Robert Downey's experience playing a super-hero in the latest comic strip movie. His lived-in face is a welcome change from the bland 20-year-olds usually cast in these films, and he also has his own style. That off-beat humour, that 'whoops, here I go again, I'm about to blurt something people around me may not like' expression is endearing.
I wouldn't put Iron Man up there with Downey's sophisticated performance in the vastly underrated Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. But he carries this super-hero film with ease, and Gywneth Paltrow, as his impeccably groomed and loyal assistant Pepper Potts, matches him beat for beat. She looks pretty good too, for an old lady of 35!
To backtrack. Iron Man is the latest superhero film to spin off from Marvel Comics. This time, Stan Lee of Marvel has taken the risk of producing the film himself, rather than assigning rights to big studios.
Downey Jr plays Tony Stark, a hard living playboy who has inherited a vast military weapons and armaments empire from his father. Stark likes the good life, and leaves the running of the corporation to an offsider, Obadiah Stane, played by an impressively bulked up, bald and bearded Jeff Bridges. Yet Tony Stark has inherited his father's inventive talents: he's an engineering whiz who enjoys making ever more deadly weapons which the company can market to the American military.
Then things go wrong. On a trip to Afghanistan for a field demonstration, Stark is taken hostage by a group of warlords, and told to build them a Jericho missile. In his cave, he manages instead to fashion himself a rocket-propelled Iron Man suit, blast his way out, and escape. Now he's a changed man: the reality of what his weapons do to people hits him for the very first time. Henceforth, Iron Man will be on the side of the oppressed.
It's an interesting story line this, one which embeds within it some implied criticisms of warmongering with high tech armaments in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Director John Favreaux and his cast have pulled off a highly entertaining, well paced, nicely characterised action movie.
But I am in two minds about this film or, at least, about the way it is being celebrated by some critics as a film which successfully critiques American military adventurism within a popular genre.
The fact is, Iron Man uses very high tech weapons to fight other very high tech weapons. The fact that he wears these as a kind of personal armour (Ned Kelly anyone?) doesn't actually alter this equation. It's still big toys for the boys.
You could, I think, just as easily read this film as a sad compensatory fantasy of technological invincibility, pitched at Americans sending more and more troops to die in unwinnable wars. Iron Man is an invincible good guy, on the side of the oppressed, get it?
It's those nasty arms dealers who are the problem. They keep putting weapons into the wrong hands.
Whether superior technical firepower can succeed against guerrilla forces on their own territory, as in Afghanistan where the film is set, is a question simply ignored. A superhero who helps villagers put in wells, educate their children, and grow non-opium crops anyone? I don't think so.
Ah well, it's only a movie. And a very entertaining one, at that. Just don't think too hard about deeper meanings.
Moliere
01/05/2008
Not so much a biopic of the famous French playwright but a fiction, in fact a farce -- Moliere style -- about a young playwright who is rescued from bankruptcy by a rich patron who wants to give him a makeover: teach him to act, dance, et cetera, and seduce a wealthy widow.
Fabrice Luchini plays the wealthy man, Laura Morante the widow, and Romain Duris, the current heart throb of French cinema plays, the playwright who is smuggled into the rich man's house as a priest (a la Tartuffe).
In other words, Laurent Tirard, the writer director of this film, is playing with some of the creations of Moliere in his farces. It's a romp, this film, and there are some wonderfully funny scenes, most of them stolen by Fabrice Luchini. But I don't think swashbuckler and farce is Romain Duris's best thing. I had difficulties with him as the lead character, and with the romance. It's fun, but falls a little short.
Paris
17/04/2008
A multi-strand portrait of Paris as cinema loves to depict it: with impossibly chic, centrally located apartments and narrow streets teeming with life and love. We meet Romain Duris, a dancer who needs a heart transplant, and the sister who cares for him (Juliette Binoche), a divorcee social worker with three young kids who's given up ever finding someone new. Then there's the warm-hearted stall owners down at the street market, an old fashioned community in the atomised metropolis, and the architect and academic brothers who are both negotiating some mid-life speed humps.
The film touches briefly on more political issues, too, with glimpses into the world of high fashion and African immigration that offer insights into French racism and the class divide. But this isn't really a political film, it's Klapisch's love letter to Paris, well made and unashamedly sentimental. Ultimately he's juggling too many balls and doesn't tie up all the strands successfully, but his love for Paris is contageous.
Lars and the Real Girl
03/04/2008
There are people in life who are so painfully shy they can barely cope with quite everyday encounters. But you rarely see their dilemmas explored on the screen. I think the last time I saw such a person was in Jane Campion's realisation of Janet Frame's autobiography An Angel At My Table.
Lars Lindstrom, played by Ryan Gosling, is one such pathologically shy person. He lives in a garage at the back of the frame house occupied by his older brother and sister-in-law, avoiding every overture from them to get him to come to dinner. He has a white-collar job where he can hunch over a computer and keep his interaction with fellow employees to a minimum. In conversations he can't avoid he hangs his head and wears a painful set smile while he edges away to safety. He works, he shops, he drives, he goes to church and, apart from that, just wants to be left alone. There is something very disturbing and distressing for him in social contact.
Then, one day, a huge package is delivered, a life-sized sex doll. His brother and sister-in-law (Paul Schneider and Emily Mortimer) are staggered to find Lars on their doorstep, hair slicked down, asking may he bring his friend Bianca to dinner to meet them?
Bianca is half Brazilian, he tells them. And an archaeologist, now studying to be a missionary. She's not feeling too well at the moment. Her bags have been stolen. Could Karin lend her some clothes? Could she sleep in the bedroom in the big house?
The astonishing thing about this small film is its air of genuine sweetness. There is not a smutty line, not a note out of place. It ventures across perilous dramatic ground on a tightrope and miraculously makes it to the other side, without a false step. Lars is clearly delusional. But his reluctant big-guy brother and his already concerned sister are able to get Lars to take Bianca to see the town doctor (Patricia Clarkson), who is also a psychological counsellor. She very quickly twigs that Bianca is completely real to Lars. They cannot argue him out of this belief, so they had better go along with it.
In Bianca's company Lars is more talkative and outgoing than the townsfolk have ever seen him. He blossoms. One by one and group by group, the people in this small community begin to go along with Lars'a delusion.
There are some wonderfully observed scenes here, played absolutely straight. Screenwriter Nancy Oliver won her stripes writing for the television series Six Feet Under. There was considerable psychological insight in that series, and even more in this film, as we learn, little by little, about why Lars is how he is, and what he is reclaiming in the relationship with Bianca.
But the truly delightful thing about this film is its view of human nature, as the townspeople in this community, which could be somewhere in Minnesota not too far from Lake Woebegone, take on Bianca, and Lars. Is it a mass delusion?
No, not quite, but there is a considerable grip on what the Buddhists would call loving kindness in this town. Even in the church group.
You could talk about other stories in which men have fallen in love with their own creation: Pygmalion, Faust, My Fair Lady. Bianca isn't quite that. To my mind she's pretty bland, though she becomes more interesting as more and more townspeople befriend her.
Unlikely as it sounds, the most endearing quality about this film about a man and his sex doll is its winning combination of shrewdness, sadness, and innocence.
After Him (Après lui)
27/03/2008
Two young men -- possibly gay -- are dancing, and clowning, dressing up, with wigs, and lipstick in a bedroom. They are Mathieu and his friend Franck. Then Mathieu's mother Camille comes in and, laughing, she helps fix their makeup. They set off for a party in high humour.
And this is almost the last we see of Mathieu. Some time later Camille (Catherine Deneuve) gets a shocking phone call. Mathieu is dead, killed in a car smash. Camille is briefly numb, numb enough to call her daughter, and her ex-husband, to go to the hospital. Then hysterical, racked with grief. At the funeral she rebuffs her daughter, who wants to talk to her, and drives to the spot where the accident happened, the tree hit by the car. There she finds Franck, too miserable to come to the funeral. Catherine insists he come back with her to the wake. Other guests are appalled, and he leaves. But Catherine will not, cannot, leave him alone.
At first, I thought she was wanting not to lose Mathieu, to keep a hold of him by sharing memories with Franck, hearing stories she had not known. But soon she is crossing other boundaries.
Interviewing his university tutors. Giving him gifts. Trying to buy him out of working with his father. To run his life. Is she trying to remake Franck in Mathieu's image? Trying to replace one son with another? The relationship between Catherine and Franck (Thomas Dumerchez) is uneasy, unstable -- and later quite startling.
After Him is a third feature film from Gael Morel, a young actor turned writer-director, a protégé of Catherine Deneuve's long time collaborator, Andre Techine. It's a bold concept, this study of grief which becomes a kind of compulsion. Move on, say all the grief counsellors. But what if one can't? What if one doesn't in fact want to move on? And Catherine Deneuve gives a gutsy performance here.
I would quarrel once or twice with the tone. The notes struck. My limited experience of death, of shocking sudden death of someone close to you, is that numbness takes over. A kind of adrenaline fuelled shutdown which carries one through the painful social obligations of funeral rites. I think Deneuve gives way to a storm of grief too early in the film to be convincing. But maybe that's just my experience.
There is also the matter of the tree where Mathieu died. It becomes a great big symbol, as we know such sites do. We have all passed those sad little memorials taped to trees and other objects by a roadside.
We will revisit this tree several times in this film. And not in a good, that is dramatically convincing, way.
But these missteps aside, this film is saying something quite intelligent, and unsettling as well. With all its imperfections I think I prefer it to the celebrated Ozon film, Under the Sand, another original study of grief. After Him is well worth your attention.
Be Kind Rewind
20/03/2008
A run down video store only stocking vhs rentals is facing foreclosure. But when the main employee's layabout mate is accidentally electrocuted and then somehow erases all the tapes -- the duo stumble on a way to reverse the store's fortunes. In the surreal, parallel universe of writer-director Michel Gondry, the two (Mos Def and Jack Black) start making their own versions of all the films -- from Driving Miss Daisy to Ghost Busters -- using lo fi special fx and getting locals to help with the acting. The films become a hit. A whimsical premise about the triumph of the local and the hand made, but for all the charm, there's no real drama in these extended reveries.
The Dinner Guest (L'invite)
20/03/2008
Gerard and Collette (Daniel Auteuil and the delightful Valerie Lemercier) are a homely suburban couple thrown into panic when they must host a dinner for Gerard's boss to clinch a new job in Indonesia. But the sauve upstairs neighbour Alexandre (Thierry L'Hermitte) advises them on a complete makeover: clothes, apartment, conversation, hobbies -- to impress the boss.
Those who enjoy lightweight French comedy may be diverted by this film. Those who remember The Dinner Game may suffer déjà vu. But three fine comic actors elevate a predicable script.
There Will Be Blood
07/02/2008
The opening of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood
puts us down a hole. A shaft, dug by a sweating, whiskered man whose hands, boots, clothes, and whole body are grimed by dirt. The camera directs our gaze to the hardness of the rock the man is gouging, the dust, the strain on his muscles, the dour tenacity. He packs the hole, lights a fuse, hauls himself up a rickety ladder, slips. The fuse ignites. The man is splayed in the shaft, leg awry. And we watch every painful second as he dazedly recovers and hauls himself up the ladder once again, to lie gasping under the sky.
Meet Daniel Plainview, prospector.
Daniel Day-Lewis, one of the most gifted physical actors of a generation, a man who went and worked in a cobblers shop for months to learn a previous role, here joins Paul Thomas Anderson to present a film which, for its first fifteen minutes, has us riveted with the most extended close-up examination of physical toil we have seen for years. We will get to know this shaft, and others like it, intimately. When oil begins, for the first time, to ooze and gush in the bottom of these hard-scrabble shafts, we will feel the stuff oozing and mingling with dirt, sweat -- and more blood. Men will die in these primitive holes, and we will watch it happen, so that the black sticky fluid will enrich a man who registers his first claim lying on the dusty wooden floor of the mines office.
Such a hymn to toil -- hard physical labour -- would no doubt have been appreciated by Upton Sinclair, the socialist writer whose 1927 novel Oil was the platform on which Anderson has sprung his film.
Sinclair, a lifelong apostle for the working class, wrote nearly a hundred books, of which the most famous, Jungle, exposed the brutal working conditions in Chicago abattoirs. It led to legislation regulating both the products and the safety conditions in the industry, and eventually the Food and Drug Administration, which was not what Sinclair the Utopian socialist had in mind. He wanted the abolition of wage slavery and the exploitation of poor and often under-age workers.
But there is quite a deal of Sinclair's fascination with American archetypes: the ruthless capitalists, impoverished farmers, and slyly opportunistic evangelists in Anderson's film.
Lewis was inspired in part by a couple of scandals of the twenties: the so called Teapot Dome affair, in which Warren Harding's Secretary of the Interior was paid in no-interest loans for leasing out crown land to oil barons. He was also, it's said, inspired by some of the scandals surrounding the holy roller evangelist Aimee Semple MacPherson.
Anderson has heightened these elements in Sinclair's sprawling novel. Much of the film's drama is a conflict which plays out between Paul Dano as the preacher Eli Sunday, a man with a grievance, a man Plainview first meets when he comes to persuade the poor, godfearing Sundays that he wants a lease on their farm so he can go quail hunting with his young son.
He wants no such thing. He wants the oil he knows by then is under their hardscrabble dirt. And teenage Eli, a boy with a gift for preaching, wants royalties for a new church and a road to its doors. He will re-appear throughout this film to taunt and torment, and at one stage strike a devilish bargain with Daniel Plainview as the oilman builds his empire.
The other character in this film is the son who Daniel thrusts forward as he presents himself to the hardworking, Christian farm families to persuade them to sell their leases. 'This is my son, HW,' he says. 'We have no secrets. I'm a plain man, a family man and I am building the business for him. I believe in plain speaking.'
He believes in no such thing, and HW in fact is not his son. He was a baby in swaddling when his father died down Plainview's first shaft, and for reasons best known to himself, Plainview adopted him. He may even love him, as much as he can. But HW comes in mighty useful in these transactions with poor farmers.
And when, later, the boy who has always modelled himself on his so-called father is in great need, Daniel has a choice between business and family. Guess which way the oil man jumps.
In many ways this is an anachronism of a film, one which has way more in common with such great American social realist parables as John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath than it does with the oil men of Dallas or Dynasty.
It's a vehicle for Anderson, a filmmaker interested in big ideas, to re-examine some of the foundation myths of California, a state in which oil, fundamentalist Christianity and cinema have all been historical engines. And he has said the parallels with current political themes in America made the film irresistible.
With Day-Lewis driving the film, in one of the most towering, completely physical and compelling performances of his career, and with Anderson's attention to the blood and guts, to the ooze and sweat on which both wealth and ideologies were built, it should have been a masterpiece. But I found the endgame less satisfying than it should have been. It takes a very long time for HW as a man to find his way, and the closing scenes, audacious as they are, are somehow empty. Maybe this was the point.
Magnificent poetry if flawed, explosive drama from two very material boys. After you've spent time on these oilfields, special effects explosions won't easily satisfy you.
Blindsight
07/02/2008
A documentary which tells an extraordinary story: a team of six young Tibetans, all blind, scaling a peak on the north side of Mt Everest (Lhakpa Ri), all 23,000 feet of it. They're led by the blind American mountaineer Erik Weihenmayer, who himself scaled Everest in 2001.
And with them is German-born Sabriye Tenberken, another remarkable person. Blind herself, Sabriya set up the only blind school in Tibet, educating many children shunned or shut away by Tibetan families.
It's an absorbing and rewarding film, as we get to know the students and as they test their own abilities. There is tension and conflict during the climb, not least between the world view of Sabriya and the more competitive, goal driven Erik and his fellow mountaineers, tactfully but truthfully captured by British director Lucy Walker. Uneven, but a journey worth taking.
Trash and Treasure: Katie O'Neill on Trouble Every Day
31/01/2008
To start this year's Trash and Treasure series we've asked in some recent film school graduates. The first is Katie O'Neill from the Victorian College of the Arts and she's chosen the 2001 Claire Denis film Trouble Every Day.
Béatrice Dalle is the wife of a French scientist (Alex Descas). During an experiment she's exposed to a strange disease that leaves her with an uncontrollable sex drive melded with a fierce cannibalistic appetite. It's a condition that also affects one of her husband's American ex-colleagues (Vincent Gallo). He arrives in Paris on his honeymoon eager to track down the scientist and solve the mystery of the illness.
The film received harsh reviews from critics for its vivid display of cannibalistic sex, but Katie -- whose thesis was on French feminist cinema -- thinks it's got a lot to say.
The Darjeeling Limited
03/01/2008
Wes Anderson first made a name with Rushmore, the l998 film about a precocious, smart-arse schoolboy who knew about everything except what was actually happening around him. It restarted Bill Murray's screen career, and brought to notice Jason Schwartzman, who played the 15-year-old lead. And Anderson went on to make such cult hits as The Royal Tenenbaums, and a bit of a miss, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
Anderson has, from the start, a style all his own. His artifice is up-front, and he moves his characters sometimes like puppets in a doll house which come alive and say funny, and unnervingly perceptive things in deadpan tones. Hence Bill Murray.
If The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou was a tribute to the Fellini comedies all filmed on the sets of the great Roman film studios at Cinecitta, The Darjeeling Limited is an equally stylised love song to India.
And to Indian trains. The train on which this film is set is a beauty, with its peacock blue wallpapers, its elaborate panelling and friezes, and its chandeliers. It somehow catches the colours of India. It made me want to jump on board immediately.
Three brothers board a train, along with an enormous set of matched Louis Vuitton luggage, in mustard yellow leather embossed with red. The luggage is almost a train in itself, and I expected it to take on a life of its own, like The Luggage in Terry Pratchett novels which disappears frequently, savagely barks its owners' shins, and contains all sorts of unexpected objects its owners can't recall packing.
But the brothers have other issues. Francis, the eldest, played by Owen Wilson, is wearing facial bandages and gives the vaguest explanations about how he smashed his face.
Peter, played by Adrian Brody is, we learn, to become a father, and he's not sure he's ready. He and Francis engage in constant verbal scuffling. Jack, the youngest, has figured out how to disappear at key moments, and get his own way most of the time, including with their beautiful Indian stewardess.
The brothers haven't met for a year, since their father's death. Francis has summoned him because he feels a spiritual journey in India would bring them together. Francis is used to making decisions for all three. Their mother, it seems, was a bit of a bolter. Still is. They think she's somewhere in India. Should they go find her?
This is familiar Wes Anderson territory: the old ties and subliminal tensions of any suffocating nuclear family they play out once more on the train, along with lots of whimsical comedy, some of which flops. And other moments I found delicious.
But the brothers do get off the train. And are caught up in a near drowning. India as a tourist backdrop becomes, suddenly, something else. Something much closer to emotional reality. And this is what saves the film, I think.
I loved it. It not only looks totally gorgeous, it has a respect for the culture which wells up and surmounts Wes Anderson's unabashedly synthetic creation. Somewhere along the way the brothers stop being tourists and start to see the people around them. And yes, they do decide to go and find their mum...who is Angelica Huston, and who is not at all cosy.
Wes Anderson is an acquired taste, I think. Some people find his fey humour a little too precious. Sometimes it does labour. You either get him or you don't.
But be assured this is Anderson back on form. This film has all the discipline and tight storytelling The Life Aquatic lacked. Bill Murray is in there somewhere too. Along with the luggage.
