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Sitges Film Festival 2012

Sightseers

Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia

4-14 October 2012, Sitges, Spain

Sitges website

Now in its 45th year, Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia once again turned a small corner of Spain’s Costa Brava into a mecca for genre fans. Creating perhaps what is the most comprehensive and detailed snapshot of horror, fantasy and science fiction in 2012, the festival featured over 200 movies as well as retrospective screenings, star introductions, masterclasses and much, much more.

Blessed with balmy October weather, this quaint little town in Spain played host to some of this year’s most anticipated titles from directors such as Dario Argento, Rob Zombie and Joko Anwar. Below are some of the high and low points of the festival.

Sightseers (Ben Wheatley, 2012)

Ben Wheatley continues his ascent with this fantastic comedic character study starring the fantastic Steve Oram and Alice Lowe. Beginning with two slightly awkward new lovers embarking on a road trip and warping into something unexpectedly darker, Sightseers is continuing proof that Ben Wheatley is one of the finest directors working in the British industry right now. Special mention must go to the script, written by the leads, which is so astutely observed and full of brilliant character moments that it is destined to join the ranks of British classics of the decade. Add a killer soundtrack and you have one of the definitive films of 2012. A must-see.

Sightseers is released in the UK by StudioCanal on 30 November 2012.

Robot & Frank (Jake Schreier, 2012)

A quiet, reflective comedy drama, Robot & Frank features a terrific central performance from Frank Langella as well as able support from reliable performers such as Susan Sarandon, Jeremy Sisto, Liv Tyler and James Marsden. Set in the near future, where robots have become everyday tools, Robot & Frank focuses on Frank, a retired cat burglar who is slowly succumbing to dementia. When his son brings a medical robot to take care of him, Frank is resistant at first. However, slowly but surely a bond begins to emerge, culminating in in Frank’s desire to do one last job. Lightly wearing its science-fiction elements, Robot & Frank is a low-key marvel of emotion; human, gentle and humorous, this is a film that rewards investment in its characters and creates a believable, well-crafted world.

The Impossible (Juan Antonio Bayona, 2012)

Juan Antonio Bayona, the talented director of The Orphanage (2007), returns with The Impossible, a well-made but somewhat overwrought drama focusing on a family trying to survive the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami in Thailand. Eyes firmly on an Oscar nomination, Naomi Watts gives her all as the matriarch of the family, who is determined to survive until she is sure her son will not be left alone, while Ewan McGregor portrays the sturdy father of the family with just the right amount of pathos. However, the real bulk of the acting plaudits must fall on the three children ably portrayed by Tom Holland, Samuel Joslin and Oaklee Pendergast. With meticulous performances, the three kids manage to strike almost no false notes. As impressive and emotionally engaging as The Impossible is, high-strung Hollywood melodrama derails the film more than once. The most poignant points in the film are the low-key moments but a desire to constantly hammer home the tragedy means most of the mood is generated by effusive violins and sentimental string-pulling.

Modus Anomali (Joko Anwar, 2012)

Joko Anwar is one of the most talented genre directors right now. The fact that he is working in Indonesia – a country where horror cinema is generally not very innovative – makes this achievement doubly impressive. Although never blessed with the high budgets that most US productions get, Anwar’s films regularly display inventiveness and intellect, which is sorely lacking in the rest of the genre. With Modus Anomali, Anwar worked with an even smaller budget, turning out a truly indie feature, and the result is all the more remarkable. Focusing on John Evans, an amnesiac who wakes up buried alive, Modus Anomali tells the story of his attempts to find and rescue his family from the hands of an unidentified maniac. Largely shot on shaky cameras, but always allowing the audience to see what is happening, the film is a clever puzzle that will divide audiences. Suffice it to say that those who get on board will find themselves amply rewarded as Modus Anomali has been thoroughly thought-out and will stand up to repeated viewing. All in all, a remarkable achievement and further proof that Joko Anwar is headed for great things.

Miss Lovely (Ashim Ahluwalia, 2012)

One of the most upsetting and uncompromising films ever to come out of India, Miss Lovely tells the story of two brothers working in the seedy underbelly of Indian exploitation cinema in the 1980s. Blessed with stellar performances from all involved, the film depicts the inhabitants of the world the brothers live in: financiers, gangsters, club owners and, of course, the performers. The roster of characters seems to come from a human cesspit. With all morality corrupted and all human goodness sapped, these are brilliantly engaging monsters, all consuming each other in a desire to get to the top. It is a sad, melancholic and destructive portrait of a scene unfamiliar to most Western audiences. Never once compromising its raw emotional brutality during its running time of less than two hours, Miss Lovely builds to a climax that grabs you by the throat and does not let go until you are completely choking. Guaranteed to remain with you for months after the film ends, Miss Lovely represents a new step for Indian independent cinema that is to be encouraged, applauded and, most importantly, shown to audiences.

The Lords of Salem (Rob Zombie, 2012)

Rob Zombie creates what might be the worst and yet most entertaining film of the century. For the most part, The Lords of Salem plays like some misguided homage to John Carpenter, recreating some of unforgettable shots from The Fog (1980), until the final third becomes an LSD trip of exaggerated proportions with some of the craziest imagery known to mankind since Alejandro Jodorowsky made El Topo (1970). It is a ham-fisted attempt by Zombie to create something cerebral, which, instead, is more like an expensive Christmas panto for which there is no justification. Grand in its mediocrity, The Lords Of Salem is a recommended to anyone who wants to discover the madness of the witches of Salem. By the time the final quarter rolls, you will be aghast at the madness of the imagery with which Mr Zombie decides to bombard the audience.

Come out and Play (Makinov, 2012)

A retelling of the 70s classic Who Can Kill A Child?, Come out and Play is a lacklustre, almost shot-for-shot remake that goes nowhere. Lacking in atmosphere and suffering from a hysterical performance from one of its leads, this handsomely shot film will only impress those who have never seen the brutal, sun-soaked images of the original. Perhaps the best part of this disappointing exercise is the lovely credits and the fact that the film gets dedicated to the martyrs of Stalingrad at the very end.

Yellow (Ryan Haysom, 2012)

A special mention must go to Yellow, a neo-giallo short that has been doing the festival rounds for a while. An astute tribute as well as a clever updating, Yellow is a promising start for a clearly talented team, including director Ryan Haysom, cinematographer Jon Britt, composer Anton Maiof and production manager Catherine Morawitz. Perhaps the only problem with Yellow is a desire to over-explain the narrative; the film works incredibly well as a mood piece and an unnecessary plot development late in the film somewhat undermines its impact. However, this is a minor complaint in a piece that is clearly head-and-shoulders above most of the shorts produced today.

Evrim Ersoy

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L’Etrange Festival 2012

Motor Psycho

L’Etrange Festival

6-16 September 2012

Paris, France

L’Etrange Festival website

Nicolas Guichard reports back on some of the highlights of the brilliant Parisian feast of oddness L’Etrange Festival.

The 18th edition of the Etrange Festival in Paris once more demonstrated the capacity of the event to showcase the joyous diversity of cinema current and past, from the fun atmosphere of the Zombie Night to the premiere of Juan Carlos Medina’s Painless, or the more serious atmosphere at Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera (screened in religious silence). We are already looking forward to next year’s programme.

Knightriders (George A. Romero, 1981)
Presented as part of the Motorpsycho strand, Knightriders was Romero’s attempt to escape from zombie films. This bizarre work is notable mostly for its central premise (bikers who want to live like the Knights of the Round Table) and for the director’s insistence in injecting a political message into his films (here, a sort of anarchist utopianism). Despite the surrealism of some scenes, the political parable is weakened by longueurs in the script and a borderline kitsch aesthetic (in particular, the silly helmets and suits of armour).

Kustom Kar Kommandos (Kenneth Anger, 1965) + Motor Psycho (Russ Meyer, 1965)
Also part of the Motorpsycho strand, this was an appropriate double bill of two 1965 films that together offered a condensed image of pop culture and a chance to feel the excitement one always feels when noting the connections between experimental and exploitation films. In one corner, Kenneth Anger’s unfinished project Kustom Kar Kommandos, of which only the first part remains, is a sort of three-minute erotic pop allegory in which a young man polishes his car to the tune of the Paris Sisters’ ‘Dream Lover’. In the other, Russ Meyer’s Motor Psycho is like a masculine version of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! , a garage film soundtracked by Bert Shefter and Paul Sawtell’s nervy track ‘The Three Weirdos’, in which three hoodlums on bikes terrorize an isolated Californian town.

11.25. The Day He Chose His Own Fate (Kôji Wakamatsu, 2012)
I was really looking forward to this film: Mishima’s futile and tragic end, filmed by the late delirious Japanese director Kôji Wakamatsu. But during the screening, I started wondering whether there was another director by the same name. No trace of his customary hallucinatory style, only a linear film during which you can’t wait for Mishima to just end it. Wakamatsu’s usual political sharpness is present in the evocation of a country under American tutelage, and his analysis of the competitiveness between lefty activists and right-wing paramilitaries. But that wasn’t enough to rescue the film and, ultimately, I couldn’t help wondering if the filmmaker’s goal may have been to ridicule Mishima’s absurd gesture. If that’s the case, he succeeded.

The Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
Screened as part of Jan Kounen’s Carte Blanche, this was the chance to see The Man with a Movie Camera on 35mm, projected on a big screen in the original conditions (no soundtrack). With its constructivist aesthetics, Vertov’s film is a pure visual pleasure, due to both its coherence and its freedom: the vertiginous thrills it offers come from the creation of a total filmic language that uses images of daily life while eschewing conventional realism.

Painless (Juan Carlos Medina, 2012)
One of the highlights of the festival was the premiere of Spanish director Juan Carlos Medina’s first feature film. With the exception of the odd mannerism, it undeniably is a superb aesthetic achievement. Just like the best Spanish or South Korean films of the past decade, it succeeds in combining elements of genre with poetic and dreamlike filmmaking. In this historical and psychological puzzle, Medina develops an allegorical thriller in which several strands (the fate of children insensitive to pain, the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and the personal story of a neurosurgeon) join up to form a pattern that is both terrifying and harmonious: a sublime film in the philosophical sense of the term.

Beyond the Forest (King Vidor, 1949)
Adapted from Stuart Engstrand’s novel, this somewhat clumsy film noir nevertheless offers an interesting take on the femme fatale, with the character of Rosa Moline, a frustrated woman, half-Lady Macbeth, half-Madame Bovary, played by Bette Davis. Her Bovarian ambition to escape from the mediocrity of her provincial life is counterbalanced by her emotional dependence on her lover. Rosa is thus the femme fatale who falls victim to her own fatality: the impotence of her desire.

The Driver (Walter Hill, 1978)
The Driver belongs to a category of film in which the main character is reduced to a function and becomes a perfect bachelor–machine: there is even a femme fatale played by Isabelle Adjani (perfect when she stays silent) to complete the system. Much indebted to Jean-Pierre Melville’s The Samurai, The Driver re-appropriates the lessons Melville learnt from Hollywood, and inscribes his solitary character (in the most existential sense) within the codes of the most emblematic genre of American cinema: the Western. The bird’s chirping of Melville’s film is replaced in The Driver by a country song that serves both as a gimmick and a psychological signifier. The archetypal psychology of Western and crime film thus seems to match the samurai’s ethic: achieving virtuosity means renouncing life.

The international science-fiction festival Les Utopiales takes place from 7 to 12 November 2012 in Nantes, France, with a film programme curated by Etrange Festival programmer Frédéric Temps. This year’s theme is ‘Origins’ and the event is presided by astrophysician Roland Lehoucq with Neil Gaiman as its guest of honour. For more information, please visit the Utopiales website.
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London Film Festival 2012 – Part 2


John Dies at the End

56th BFI London Film Festival

10-21 October 2012, London

LFF website

Mark Stafford reviews some of the highlights of the London Film Festival, including Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt and David Ayer’s End of Watch, out on UK screens this month.

John Dies at the End

Your new favourite film. A flip, funny thrill ride full of trippy headfuckery, rubber monsters, snappy dialogue and wild ideas, adapted from David Wong’s cult novel by Don (Phantasm/Bubba Ho-Tep) Coscarelli. Trying to explain the film’s singular tone is difficult: it’s like a punky horror/SF adventure infused with the snarky, iconoclastic sensibility of Fight Club.

Any attempt at a plot summary would be pretty much doomed; suffice to say that it concerns the effects of an intravenous drug called ‘soy sauce’, which has the effect of not so much opening the doors of perception as blowing them off their hinges. Users are apt to receive phone calls from the future and see physical manifestations of beings from other planes of existence, as a prelude to entering a multiverse of trouble and what looks like an inevitable spectacularly messy demise. David Wong (Chase Williamson) is trying to explain his recent life history on the sauce to a journalist (Paul Giamatti), the tale of how he and college buddy John (Andy Meyers) came by the stuff and started a chain of events that leads to them attempting to save the world from creepy inter-dimensional interlopers. Nothing is straightforward in this fast-paced genre mash-up: time and space are distorted, people aren’t what they seem, and metaphysical conundrums pop up with alarming regularity. I’m not sure if it’s about anything, exactly. There is a suspicion that it’s more smart-arsed than smart in places, and the random nature of the story means that it loses a little momentum before the home stretch, but I’m quibbling. It’s a blast, a wonderfully weird, eminently quotable midnight movie. Just don’t ask what happens to John, I wouldn’t want to ruin it for you.

A Liar’s Autobiography

Fourteen different animation studios pitch in to realise the late lamented Python Graham Chapman’s memoir, A Liar’s Autobiography, using recordings that Chapman made himself, assisted vocally by John Cleese, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam and Carol Cleveland, among others (Cameron Diaz voices Sigmund Freud). The result is a somewhat disjointed, inconsistent, hugely affectionate film that leaps from point to point through a charmed and blighted life. It’s a woozy, drifting thing, where memory often gives way to fantasy, and you’d be hard pressed to decipher from it the actual biographical detail, the who, what, where and when, of Chapman’s life. But that’s hardly the point. He emerges as a kind of anti-Kenneth Williams, utterly un-tortured by his sexuality and status, but a bugger for the bottle, as a Python song would put it, seriously destroying his health, but never apparently committing the sin of being bad company.

The animation varies from stiff and flat to gorgeous and accomplished – I loved the nightmarish delirium tremens sequence, and the Scarborough holiday moments. A bit of a mixed bag, but on the whole it’s all rather lovely.

The Hunt

Thomas Vinterberg’s outstanding film features Mads Mikkelsen as a kindergarten teacher, a likeable man in a small Danish town of other likeable types, starting to pull his life together after a messy divorce, until one day he is accused by an angelic child, daughter of his best friend, and one of his charges, of inappropriate sexual behaviour. What follows is a tense, occasionally agonising drama as a good man’s life is systematically destroyed by reasonable people reduced to violence and hatred by an unfounded suspicion. It’s all well thought through, and nightmarishly plausible. Mikkelsen puts in fine work, but then none of the performers strikes a false note. The child especially comes across as a real living, breathing girl, whose actions make sense in a little girl way, worlds away from any number of Hollywood moppets. Photography is crisp and unfussy and the whole thing is full of well observed domestic detail that add weight to the horror and heartbreak. Not an easy watch, but worth it.

The Hunt is released in the UK on 30 November 2012 by Arrow Films.

Sister

In which Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein), a slight, vulnerable-looking boy, spends his days nicking the expensive gear of holidaying skiers at a Swiss resort, so that he can sell it on to the kids at the bottom of the mountain and support his feckless older sister as she quits job after job and fools around with a succession of jerks. He’s a ballsy, resourceful kid, but it’s clear that the precarious existence he’s created cannot last forever, and something is clearly wrong with the family situation. Ursula Meier’s film is perfectly fine, in a low-key sub- Dardennes kind of way. Gillian Anderson cameos as a guest at the resort, representing a way of life lost to the little thief; the location gives the film an aesthetic buzz; and John Parish’s throbbing score is sparingly used but damn fine. It’s clearly a heartfelt piece by a smart director – wish I could say I liked it more.

End of Watch

David Ayer’s cop drama feels at times like a recruitment ad for the LAPD gone seriously askew. It stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña playing the kind of unambiguous hero cops who’ll leap into burning buildings to rescue children – true blue, courageous, good husband and boyfriend material – which the film pits against the population of South Central Los Angeles, who, on this evidence, are all irrational, cruel and clueless, when not being actively malignant. Every house our partners enter contains another horror story, every car they stop contains a maniac with an AK 47, and as time passes their actions interfere more and more with the activities of a seriously nasty Mexican cartel, who have no qualms about putting out a hit on a couple of heroes.

The essential problem with End of Watch is that the vérité dynamics of the performances and camerawork are totally at odds with the heart-on-sleeve good versus evil schematics. The visuals are saying ‘this is real’, with all the action supposedly captured on surveillance and personal cameras, while galloping clichés and unlikely incidents are saying ‘this is horseshit’. The film starts with the legend ‘Once upon a time in South Central’ and names its main bad guy ‘Big Evil’, then knocks itself out straining for grimy authenticity.

You find yourself waiting in vain for some ambiguity to creep in, some acknowledgement of Rampart or Rodney King. Likewise, you keep expecting the ‘digital witness’ styling, which is consistently foregrounded, to actually have some significance to the story. But it doesn’t, and the horrible suspicion grows that this is just a pro-cop flag-waver with a simplistic Michael Winner agenda.

For all that, it’s actually pretty damn entertaining, largely because Gyllenhaall and Peña have a definite chemistry and are fun to watch, as are the outrageously horrible gang they’re up against, who provide some diverting, sleazy thrills. It’s funny and tense when it needs to be, has moments of oddball, Joseph Wambaugh-esque detail and it moves at an agreeable clip. But at the end of the day it’s not much cop.

End of Watch is released in the UK on 23 November 2012 by Studiocanal.
My Amityville Horror

My Amityville Horror

This fine, puzzling documentary by Eric Walter consists largely of interviews with Daniel Lutz, who is, nowadays, a worker for the UPS, but who was, back in the 70s, the oldest son of the Lutz family, who were at the heart of the ‘Amityville Horror’ paranormal case study/ media franchise. Walter gets to film Daniel playing guitar, riding around in hot rods, visiting a therapist and meeting up with various people who had a connection to the original case in some kind of quest to attain closure and peace.

The film lets everybody speak for themselves, with no editorial voice-over or evident bias, which is fair enough, though it does kind of assume that you’re familiar with the AH phenomenon, in which the Lutzes were supposed to have endured 28 days of supernatural assault after moving into a house that they picked up as a bargain after it had been the scene of a nasty mass murder (Daniel was 10 at the time). I, for one, could have done with a few more subtitles spelling out the facts where the facts are known. But this is a case where hard facts are hard to find. AH is a battleground between those who believe that it was all a hoax and those who believe the Lutzes’ account, with the waters further muddied by Jay Anson’s decidedly dodgy bestseller and the 1974 film, with its various sequels and remakes.

There are some great characters and strange ideas revealed along the way, and a visit to a psychic’s house (dozens of occult carvings, twin roosters crowing in cages, a piece of the ‘true cross’ revealed) that is weird comedy gold. But the main reason to watch is Daniel, clearly scarred by the dysfunctional home life that erupted into a media sensation. He fled home at 14 and is now estranged from his family, paranoid, intense and angry, and prone to making forceful statements that beg more questions than they answer. A brittle man in a macho shell, he recalls the subject of Errol Morris’s 2011 doc Tabloid, another film where the very idea of ‘truth’ becomes slippery and elusive. Did this stuff happen? Does Daniel need to believe it did? A film to argue over.

The Body

Julia’s Eyes writer Oriol Paulo turns co-writer and director for this wonderful piece of creepy hokum, an implausible cocktail of Hitchcock, Agatha Christie and Les Diaboliques, which, for the most part, features a man surrounded by suspicious cops being elaborately framed, apparently by a dead woman, for a murder he has committed. In a morgue. During a thunderstorm. Can we call a film delicious? I think we can.

Compliance

An effective, nasty little film from Craig Zobel. Something fishy is up at the Chick-wich fast food outlet, it’s a busy day and they’re low on bacon, when police officer Daniels phones to accuse one of their members of staff, Becky (Dreama Walker), of theft. Stressed manager Sandra (Ann Dowd) goes along with his requests, searching Becky’s things, and then, at his repeated insistence, strip-searches Becky herself. So far, so creepy, but as the day wears on and the promised cops fail to show up, the demands of Officer Daniels become more and more extreme…

Zobel clearly wants to make you feel uncomfortable and does a great job of it, stretching out the moments of stilted conversation, dawning realisation and disbelief. His film walks a fine tightrope, how far can he push this? You find yourself in a state of growing anger, hoping that someone on screen will have the balls to question the caller, or refuse his demands. Which I guess is the point. I doubt I was the only one to recall Stanley Milgram’s psychological experiments of the 60s. How far do you obey authority’s demands? What are you willing to do if given permission? Big questions for what some would dismiss as a horrible piece of exploitation. But then Zobel has the ultimate get-out clause in that Compliance is based on true events, that happened over and over again.

Although the film isn’t particularly explicit, it clearly crossed a line for many in the packed audience I was in. The sound of seats flipping up started at about the half-hour mark, and built to a crescendo, with one man yelling, ‘come on every body, time to leave!’ as Becky’s humiliation continued. The majority of us stayed though, squirming in the dark. I guess we were compliant.

West of Memphis

A long haul, two-and-a-half-hour documentary that absolutely needs that length. Amy Berg’s film details the ‘West Memphis Three’ case from 1994, when three eight-year-old boys were found dead in Arkansas, in what was suspected by the police to be a case of satanic ritual abuse. Three likely teenage suspects were rounded up and tried. The film then follows events through the 18 years they spent in a supermax prison as clamour slowly grew to overturn a miscarriage of justice and set them free. The clamour first took the shape of the documentary Paradise Lost, which galvanised the likes of Henry Rollins and Eddie Vedder into campaigning and fund-raising for the long battle, and, more pertinently, gained the attention of producer Fran Walsh and director Peter Jackson, who got on board to bankroll investigations to produce new evidence, and demolish the prosecution’s case. This is a Wingnut film, produced by Walsh, Jackson, and Damien Echols, one of the WM3.

Considering that, West of Memphis is fairly even-handed, giving voice to a fair few interviewees who still believe, or profess to believe, that the three teens committed the crime, but it’s clear where the film is coming from, and it’s difficult to argue with that perspective. The flimsiness of the original prosecution beggars belief: an alarmist conflation of dodgy ‘witnesses’, spurious medical evidence and the heavily coerced testimony of a borderline retarded teenager, it’s simultaneously blackly amusing and enraging to see it all torn apart. More enraging still is the state of Arkansas justice, where opportunities for retrial after retrial are denied for clearly political ends despite DNA evidence and new witnesses. One of the odder moments sees the campaigners praying for Judge Burnett’s bid to run for senator to succeed, purely so that he’ll no longer be in a position to stonewall.

It’s a fascinating story, full of twists and turns, dark ironies and striking characters, and Berg’s film largely shapes it as a long march to justice. Ambiguities remain, however. The outcome of the campaign is highly unsatisfactory, a baffling piece of legal chicanery that means that the likeliest suspect (Terry Hobbs, stepfather to one of the boys) is never going to see a courtroom. There is a glossed-over element of the tale, when the makers of Paradise Lost 2 seem to have tried to finger the wrong man for the crimes, based partly on the same logic of the WM3 conviction (i.e., that he was kinda funny lookin’, being a mulleted redneck, rather than a goth). And we’ll probably never know what actually happened to those boys in 1994. It’s an indication of how weird and twisted the whole thing gets that the only time Terry Hobbs is placed on a witness stand to answer questions about the murders is as a result of his attempt to sue one of the Dixie Chicks.

All of the key players are interviewed, and the unobtrusive soundtrack is by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. I wish I could say it makes the locale look starkly beautiful, but it really doesn’t, a polyester-clad trailer park hellhole of foetid water and barren scrub. But you only have to spend a hundred and fifty minutes there. I was never bored, it’s very much recommended, but viewers should be warned that it contains a lot of distressing forensic footage. And a scene where a snapping turtle attacks a dead pig’s testicles. I’m not going to forget that in a hurry.

West of Membphis is released in the UK on 21 December 2012 by Sony Pictures.
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East Asian Films at the 56th London Film Festival

Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time

56th BFI London Film Festival

10-21 October 2012, London

LFF website

Mark Stafford, Sarah Cronin and Virginie Sélavy review the most notable Japanese and Korean films that screened at this year’s London Film Festival.

Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time

Opening in Busan in 1982, Yoon Jong-bin’s Nameless Gangster is a vastly enjoyable sprawling mob saga that clearly references Coppola and Scorsese in its story of the rise and fall of a would-be godfather, but adds a caustic sense of humour and ironic distance. Introducing the story with the definition of ‘daebu’, it plays on the various meanings of the term, including ‘elder relative’ and ‘crime boss’. Choi Min-sik (Oldboy) gives another fantastic performance as corrupt customs official Choi Ik-hyun, who comes into contact with local gangster Choi Hyung-bae when he is sacked from his job. Hyung-bae turns out to be related to him and Ik-hyun takes advantage of his status as his elder relative to get involved at the top of his gang.

Ik-hyun is a fascinating multi-faceted character: a comical figure who is often ridiculed, a ‘half-gangster’ – as he is called by the brilliantly ruthless prosecutor Jo – who can never really cut it as a crime boss, he is also impressively cunning and resourceful, and despite his shameless lack of scruples and despicable conduct, he has a sympathetic and very human side in his love for his family. One of the big joys of the film is his relationship to the younger, more attractive, scarier, real gangster Hyung-bae (played by rising star Ha Jung-woo), who exudes the sort of power and authority that will always elude Ik-hyun. And yet, despite his menacing aura, Hyung-bae is a man of principle who, unlike Ik-hyun, abides by gangster codes and even traditional social rules (in his respect for Ik-hyun as his elder relative for instance), which puts him at a disadvantage when dealing with his less honourable enemies. This reversal of the usual dynamic between young and old is another of the pleasures of this exhilarating, humorous, smart gangster saga. VS

Helpless

The second outstanding Korean offering of this year’s festival was adapted from a novel by Miyabe Miyuki and directed by female filmmaker Byun Young-joo. Helpless is a captivating, intelligent thriller on the nature of love and identity that takes a hard look at what happens when a victimised character is forced to devise extreme strategies to survive. It starts like The Vanishing: young veterinarian Mun-ho is taking his bride-to-be Seon-yeong to meet his parents when she disappears at a service station. When he finds her apartment has been emptied in a hurry and the police are useless, he asks a relative who is a disgraced former cop to help him find her. As they investigate, her identity becomes more and more mysterious, and they must make sense of her possible connections to large debts, loan sharks and even suspected murder. The many revelations thrown up by their investigation repeatedly throw into question our assumptions about Seon-yeong and build a finely nuanced and affecting portrait of a complex woman. A convincing, tense, insightful thriller in which there is more than one victim, with a deep sympathy and understanding for the kind of dynamic that leads seemingly helpless characters to commit terrible acts in order to defend themselves when no one else will. VS

Doomsday Book

An apocalyptic triptych from Korea, written and directed by Kim Jee-woon and Yim Pil-Sung, the creators of The Good, the Bad and the Weird, and Hansel and Gretel. Part one is an eco-horror of waste and consumption where dodgy food production causes a kind of zombie outbreak. Part three is the tale of a family attempting to survive an impending meteor strike. Both share a wild, freewheeling sense of humour and are dizzy, bizarre satirical fun, especially the pot shots aimed at idiotic TV news coverage.

The side is let down a little by the middle section, where problems arise for a corporation when one of their robots assigned to a Buddhist temple achieves enlightenment. The tale is over-familiar from decades of SF, the robot is a poor cousin to Chris Cunningham’s Björk-bot in the ‘All Is Full Of Love’ promo and a ponderous tone takes over. It’s not bad, just a bit dull, and overall, considering the talents involved, Doomsday Book comes as a bit of a disappointment. Definitely has its moments though. MS

For Love's Sake

For Love’s Sake

Takashi Miike returns with the adaptation of a manga by Ikki Kajiwara and Takumi Nagayasu – filmed many times before – about a rich young girl’s impossible love for a boy from the wrong side of the tracks. The original title Ai to makoto means ‘Love and Sincerity’, which is also the name of the two main characters. Ai is a sweet young girl from a well-to-do family, who was rescued by Makoto while skiing as a child. When Makoto returns to Tokyo for revenge and immediately gets into a fight, Ai does all she can to save him from his delinquent life. An insanely colourful, at times kitsch teen melodrama, it mixes the badass attitude and energy of Crows Zero with the demented chirpiness of The Happiness of the Katakuris. It may not be Miike at his most ground-breaking or daring, but it is wildly entertaining. The director once more demonstrates his boundless inventiveness and impressive visual sense with a variety of animated sequences and (cheesy) musical numbers, as well as great decors, gorgeous colours and brilliantly choreographed fights, all pulsating with his customary high-voltage energy. VS

Helter Skelter

I was a big fan of Mika Ninagawa’s 2008 Sakuran, a fun, gorgeous-looking film with a fantastic female lead. Unfortunately, her second film, Helter Skelter, is a major disappointment. Ninigawa began her career as a fashion photographer, and returns to that world with a story, based on Kyoko Okazaki’s manga, about the unravelling of a top model’s career. While there are some likeable elements in this satire of the fashion industry, the film is let down by its total lack of narrative structure and an irritating subplot, while the riot of colour that made Sakuran so refreshing seems like nothing more than eye candy in Helter Skelter, helping to gloss over the film’s weaknesses.

Erika Sawajiri stars as Lilico, Japan’s hottest model and teen idol. She’s bitchy, tyrannical and stunning – but also a fake. Her looks have been created at an expensive clinic, paid for by her agent, who is still extracting a heavy price for turning her into a commodity. When Lilico is pushed aside by a younger model, her anger and frustrations are taken out on her unfortunate assistant, who’s forced to endure endless humiliations. In the meantime, a team of police, led by an obnoxious, irritating character who spouts trite philosophical soundbites, is investigating the clinic for illegally using human tissue in its patients (a sorely underdeveloped idea – although strange bruises do begin to appear underneath Lilico’s skin.) But rather than use this investigation to add an element of noir to the film, the scenes with the police are mostly shot in a very bland office, with them doing very little. They add nothing to the already fractured narrative, while the dialogue is simply excruciating.

Despite some good moments – Ninigawa does an excellent job capturing the absurdity of the industry, and the public’s obsession with beauty at all costs – the director’s inimitable style can’t make up for the unlikeable characters, needlessly frenetic pacing, and worst of all, the weak script. SC

The Samurai That Night

Adapted by Masaaki Akahori from his own play, The Samurai That Night is the story of a meek factory owner, Nakamura, who is still grieving after the death of his wife and is looking for revenge against the thug who killed her in a road accident five years earlier. The title ironically refers to Nakamura’s vengeance fantasy, which is comically and pitifully deflated in the realistically depicted modern world of the film. The film is indeed anything but an action film: it takes the classical opposition between the wronged good man looking for payback and the unredeemable evil brute but films it as a slow-paced, introspective character study. When – in another nod to the samurai film – the final big showdown in the rain comes, there is no resolution, or even progression, and both characters remain the same.

This could have been interesting, were it not for the excessively simplistic characterisation, the unbearably ponderous tone and the affected, sometimes sentimental quirkiness (the main character obsessively eats custard desserts; while on a date he takes his late wife’s bra out of the pocket of his trousers; when he plays ball with his overly sweet date, just as he used to with his wife, she delivers an exasperating ode to simple things – I could go on). This is a film that is not as deep as it thinks it is and its self-important slowness just makes it tiresomely dull. VS

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60th San Sebastian International Film Festival

Blancanieves

San Sebastian International Film Festival

21-29 September 2012, San Sebastian, Spain

San Sebastian Festival website

A one-day general strike and the ongoing economic turmoil in Spain set a tone of urgency and resistance at this year’s San Sebastian International Film Festival. Despite the public spending cuts and the crisis however, the 60th edition offered an impressive selection of excellent films from both home-based and international filmmakers. Pamela Jahn reports on some of the festival highlights, which also screen at this year’s London Film Festival between 10-21 October.

Blancanieves

Shot in beautiful, sharp black and white without any dialogue, Pablo Berger’s witty, imaginative Blancanieves aptly pays tribute to 1920s European silent film and its connections with theatrical, musical and comical forms. Set in Andalusia during the golden age of bullfighting, Berger’s Snow White extravaganza centres around the adorable young daughter of a famous matador who, after a long and painful childhood under the eye of her evil stepmother, escapes from home and finds company in a troupe of wandering, bullfighting dwarfs. Having lost her memory in an accident, she doesn’t realise where her talent comes from as she follows in the footsteps of her father to become a matador, but it’s not long before her past catches up with her. In addition to the excellent performances, what makes this wonderfully grotesque adaptation of one of the Grimms’ most popular fairy tales particularly exciting is the score by Alfonso de Vilallonga, which, if slightly excessive in places, perfectly complements the creepy and dangerous atmosphere of the story. Out of the many recent Snow White reworkings, Blancanieves may well be the only one that brings something truly new to the story.

Blancanieves screens on Thursday 18 October at the ICA, London, as part of the London Film Festival.

In the House

With In the House (Dans la maison), Francois Ozon presents an entertaining portrayal of what might happen if a civilised but frustrated middle-class teacher gets too strongly attached to the literary talent of one of his pupils. Taking its inspiration from Spanish writer Juan Mayorga’s play The Boy in the Last Row, the story is carefully plotted and twisted, offering a joyously entertaining blend of genres that combines drama, thriller and comedy with some, at times eye-opening, lessons on art and the damage it can cause. The performances are exaggerated by Ozon’s playful direction and In the House works precisely because of its dramatic excesses, especially as it brilliantly blurs the line between reality and fiction. Typically for an Ozon film, some of the plotting hardly holds up to close scrutiny, but that’s part of the fun and contributes to making the film a compelling watch. Often hilarious, occasionally camp and but always incredibly smart, it’s a cut above the usual peeping tom creeper.

In the House screens on Sunday 21 October at Cine-Lumiere, London, as part of the London Film Festival.

The Delay

The Delay (La demora), the third feature from the Uruguayan Rodrigo Plá, the director of La Zona and The Desert Within (Desierto adentro), is painful to watch but for all the right reasons. The film follows a single mother to three kids who finds it hard to make a living and must also take care of her senile father. Too poor to put the old man in a home, too wealthy to qualify for benefits, she abandons him one day, struck by the idea that if she informs social care about a lost man sitting on a bench in the park, someone will eventually collect him and take care of him. Nothing much happens, but the ostensibly schematic story feels remarkably authentic: far from the suspenseful and stomach-churning thrill of La Zona, Plá does an impressive job of conveying the feel of the old stubborn man’s lonely wait, and slowly carves real and involving characters out of the pale figures in this rundown urban landscape. If only he had added a bit of a twist in the end to guide us towards a more ambivalent, and more satisfactory, conclusion.

The Delay screens on Wednesday 17 October at the Ritzy, London, as part of the London Film Festival.

The Dead Man and Being Happy

Another bold, darkly comic effort from Spanish director Javier Rebollo (Woman without Piano), The Dead Man and Being Happy ( El muerto y ser feliz) follows a dying deadpan hitman on his last road trip to nowhere. Perfectly echoing the man’s increasingly poor state of heath, the film starts off with a vengeance and slightly loses momentum towards the end, but Rebollo cares too much about his charming anti-hero to let him down. He teams him up with another lost soul, an equally secretive and oddball woman who suddenly turns up in his car at a petrol station and eventually, as they are cruising through the dreary Argentine landscape, becomes his patron saint. As road movies go, The Dead Man and Being Happy may not be the greatest ride you’ll ever take, but it’s a deftly scripted, gratifyingly awkward, quirky drama that quietly hits the target and offers some wonderfully tender insights beneath its gritty surface.

The Dead Man and Being Happy screens on Friday 19 and Sunday 21 October as part of the London Film Festival.

Argo

Surprisingly gripping and entertaining in equal measures, Argo is based on a true story about a fake Hollywood movie production that was used as a cover to help six Americans escape during the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. It’s best not to know too much about the plot before watching the film, but it’s fair to say that, despite the typically cushioned ending, Affleck deftly acts and directs himself as the CIA agent Tony Mendez, who came up with the spine-crawling, daring ‘exfiltration’ plan. Affleck manages to keep it all convincingly coherent as the narrative shifts between savvy espionage thriller, self-mocking Hollywood flick and straightforward compelling hostage drama. A survival story full of real-life drama and filmic tension, Argo feels considerably more relevant than any of the contemporary economic thrillers.

Argo screens on Wednesday 17, Thursday 18 and Friday 19 October as part of the London Film Festival.

Pamela Jahn

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Venice International Film Festival 2012

The Fifth Season

Venice International Film Festival

29 August – 8 September 2012

Venice, Italy

Biennale di Venezia website

The 69th Venice Film Festival opened with a slightly beleaguered air. The encroachments of international – Toronto overlaps with Venice – and domestic rivals seem to have taken their toll. The veteran organiser Marco Mueller had left with his address book and took over Rome, which is rumoured to be lining up an impressive roster of films for November. Meanwhile, the programme of 18 films in competition and a bunch in sidebars looked like a chance to see some festival regulars (Ulrich Seidl, Kim Ki-duk, Takeshi Kitano, Brillante Mendoza) and a couple of big Hollywood films (most notably The Master) only days before they were screening at Toronto. As a knock-on effect, there were practically no Northern American journalists on the Lido this year. And yet the festival turned out to have more than one surprise.

In an early scene from Terrence ‘The Machine’ Malick’s new offering To the Wonder, two lovers, Neil (Ben Afleck) and Marina (Olga Kurylenko), on a visit to Mont Saint Michel almost get caught with the tide coming in. Light will be captured through the spray of a garden hose, there will be mist, and rain, snow and puddles, but it is this moment of time passing, an unstoppable and dangerous flux, which the film returns to again and again. And again. And Neil and Marina’s French passion fizzles in the suburban spaces and wide skies of Oklahoma. With a firmly established aesthetic – ‘magic hour’ photography, copious voice-over, elliptical narrative – last year’s Tree of Life divided audiences along the fully clothed and the obviously nude emperor line: one thing not in doubt was that even if you hated the film, there was ambition and great technical skill. When we hear the first word of the voice-over in To the Wonder– ‘newborn’ – the heart sinks. Here we go again. The voice-over tells us why Neil and Marina are in love and what happens in their relationship while we watch them acting out the narration. There’s no reason they’re in love or out of love except what we are told. A guess might be that Neil gets bored of Marina’s interminable dancing, her embracing of the sunlight, her dashing off through fields and not only her tree-hugging but at one point twig-licking. And the film dances along with her. The Steadicam swoops and the sequences are all cut like some intellectual Michael Bay, never allowing us to settle and actually engage in character, or watch the drama unfold. This is essentially a melodrama directed by someone who doesn’t understand melodrama: there’s nothing to latch onto. No characters, no conflict. And no blocking. Afleck and Kurylenko look lost. Javier Bardem turns up as a Catholic priest and gives us some tedious preaching about love and Jesus. His social conscience is signalled by the fact that he wanders around (also looking lost) in a poor neighbourhood. The moment is insultingly flippant. What made Malick’s previous films was the way they portrayed characters in the midst of an environment that had a vital relationship to them. Here however the GPS signal is weak.

Whereas Tree of Life was determined to involve all elements, To the Wonder is a watercolour, the only Malick film I’ve seen not to have some fire at its heart, both literal and metaphorical.

Also set on a precarious waterline is Brillante Mendoza’s Thy Womb (Sinapupunan, 2012). Set in the out-to-sea Philippine stilted villages of Tawi-Tawi, Mendoza’s film tells the story of an infertile midwife, Shaleha (Nora Aunor), and her husband Bangas An (Bembol Rocco). Following an almost fatal shooting incident, Shaleha decides to find her husband a second wife who will be able to bear him a child. Mendoza and his actors create real people with a subtle awareness of gesture and asensitivity to the complex emotions the two characters are living through. There could not be a starker contrast with Malick’s unconvincing meandering.

Also in competition, but sadly neglected when it came to awards, was Jessica Woodworth and Petter Brosens’s The Fifth Season. Closing a trilogy of films that included Khadak (2006) and Altiplano (2009), the latest work from Belgian husband and wife team is a piece of magical realism. Seen from within the limits of a small Belgian village, a calamity strikes nature, putting the seasons out of joint. Winter refuses to budge and the crops fail, soon starvation beckons. The slow disintegration of social ties and the descent towards irrationality and cruelty is seen through the wide staring eyes of Alice (Aurélia Poirier) and Thomas (Django Schrevens), two youngsters, whose love also suffers. The Fifth Season is a deliberate and moving piece of work, which is informed also by an absurdist sense of humour that bursts from outsider and beekeeper Pol (Sam Louwyck). Here there was danger and love and an environment broken. There was also humour and wit amid the horror that made this one of the most effective films of recent years to talk to our changing relationship to the environment.

John Bleasdale

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On the Margins: The Cinema of Trent Harris

Rubin and Ed

Raindance Film Festival

26 Sept – 7 Oct 2011

Apollo Cinema, London

Raindance website

Trent Harris, who was the subject of a retrospective at the 20th Raindance Film Festival, is not the sort of filmmaker you expect people to know: operating on the margins on of US indie cinema since the early 90s, he’s the kind of figure whose work can justify the use of terms like ‘cult’ and ‘underground’. And although his films might not be easily available to the casual viewer, unlike other ‘underground cult’ works , they all easily engage the audience: humanistic portraits of unusual individuals marginalised by society ; unusual characters whose stories might have never been heard had it not been for the astute ear of this director.

In Rubin & Ed, Trent Harris focuses on two characters who personify everything that he’s interested in: mystical and the esoteric clashes set in what Marlon Brando called ‘Palookaville’ as the titular duo go on an unexpected journey into the desert to bury a frozen cat. The story is not the thing here – it’s slight, whimsical and frankly feels not-all-that-important. It’s the characters. Rubin and Ed might be kooky and weird but they’re also very real: the way they interact with each other , the way they talk all adds up to something mainstream films lack: a soul.

In his next film, Plan 10 from Outer Space Trent Harris attempts something on a much larger scale: a conspiracy theory comedy steeped in the Mormon history and Masonic lore, it’s a funny, fast-moving film that takes no prisoners. The warped logic of Trent Harris’s world is not one that alienates: the audience never feels as if they’re listening to a private joke that does not make sense. Focusing on Lucinda (played perfectly by Stefen Russell), who, through the Plaque of Kolob, discovers an alien plot to dominate the world, the film takes satiric pot-shots at any subject it can think of – add in a few musical numbers, a brilliant dance sequence and some B-movie special effects and you get a thrill ride that is hard to refuse.

The next film Trent Harris made might be his best known work – strangely enough it’s also his earliest. Shot in 1984 and 1985, The Beaver Kid Trilogy is made up of three short films: a documentary and two fictional recreations of the same story. It’s the film with which Trent Harris made a splash at Sundance and yet today, it’s as obscure a title as one can hope to find perhaps due to its unavailability on any home video format.

The original Beaver Kid was Groovin’ Gary –a young man from Beaver, Utah, whom Trent Harris runs into in the parking lot of Salt Lake City News. Gary is a vivacious and lively character: seeing Harris’s camera he immediately launches into a series of impersonations: John Wayne, and Sylvester Stallone as Rocky. He has the sort of manic energy that could power entire continents and he comes across as an intriguing, if slightly odd individual.

After their initial encounter Gary writes a letter to Harris inviting him to a local talent show he’s putting on in Beaver. What happens after this is too good to ruin: suffice it to say that Harris’s ability to identify and understand marginalised individuals clearly shows here.

The next two shorts that make up the rest of The Beaver Kid Trilogy are Harris’s attempts at recreating that important encounter with famous actors – the first one has Sean Penn taking the role of Gary, while in the second it’s Crispin Glover. It’s a fascinating experiment and one that works: Harris uses each segment to build on what really occurred: making a narrative change here, adding a slight variation there. It’s like a composer trying out different approaches to the same tune and it’s an incredible experience to watch. It’s not hard to see why the film was such a success at Sundance.

The Cement Ball of Heaven, Hell and Earth continues Harris’s fascination with the individual: this time it’s Aki Ra, a former child soldier Khmer Rouge who now spends his time defusing mines in his free time to redeem himself for his previous acts. It’s a fascinating story and Harris tells it well: within the 54-minutes running time he manages to combine a mystical view of Cambodia’s violent history with the very personal story of Aki Ra and not lose his way.

Perhaps this is why his newest film, Luna Mesa, does not work: Harris tries to turn the camera on himself and explore mystical and philosophical ideas head-on through a fictional narrative. The result is an unmitigated mess. The film comes across as pretentious and dull, and in contrast to his previous work it’s hard to see what he’s aiming for other than a sounding profound. The story of Luna never appears to be more than the aimless wandering of a spoilt woman, and the connection with the divine, which occupies the last quarter of the film, feels less like universal insight than boring twaddle.

However, Luna Mesa cannot undermine the body of work of a man who over the past 27 years has challenged the norms of what is accepted as independent cinema: by focusing on the marginal, Harris, like others before him, has captured people invisible to the rest of society. His ability to create without judgement and with a terrific sense of humour (as well as an inexplicable obsession with hubcaps!) is a sign of a master craftsman at work: a first-class filmmaker.

Long may he continue to make films!

For more information on Trent Harris, please visit his website.

Evrim Ersoy

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Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 2012

Boy Eating The Birds Food

Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

29 June-8 July 2011, Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic

KVIFF website

There was a jaunty confidence about the 47th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. If Karlovy Vary is rarely the place to uncover new masterpieces, owing to the festival’s insistence on running a competition of international premieres in between Cannes in the summer and Venice and Toronto in the autumn, it is a place where discovery and surprise are almost guaranteed, and this year was no exception.

Take, for instance, Ektoras Lygizos’s competition entry Boy Eating the Birds Food (To agori troei to fagito tou pouliou), a strangely affecting, intimate portrayal of a destitute young Greek man (Yiannis Papadopoulos) faced with the reality of having to make a living and maintain dignity in a time of economic and personal crisis. Lygizos’s promising debut is most notable for an intriguing insistence on close-ups and an impressive lead performance from Papadopoulos, who has no choice but to act his soul out as Lygizos isolates him from the world that surrounds him, with no social connections and no action to drive the arbitrary events of the sparse narrative. It was a mature and experimental film from a second-time director whose interest in audacious formal invention proved both surprising and rewarding.

Another bold feature debut was Czech director Iveta Grófová’s Made in Ash (A&#382 do mesta Aš), which premiered in the festival’s East of the West competition, a programme dedicated to films from Eastern Europe and the Balkans. The story follows a young Romany woman, Dorotka (Dorotka Billa), who has just graduated from high school in Eastern Slovakia and is now searching for a new and more exciting life in the Czech-German border town of A&#382, While the film bears some resemblance to the laboratory coldness (but without the cynicism) of Ulrich Seidl’s most uncompromising work, it is distinguished by the strength of its fierce, often intense and compelling, often troubling documentary feel and fierce realism. Authentic and challenging rather than moving, it’s 84 tight minutes of raw cinema, crafted with passion and delivered with conviction.

Outside the two main competition sections, two films stood out for very different reasons. Julian Roman Pölsler’s The Wall (Die Wand) is essentially a one-person drama set in a remote mountain cottage. It revolves around a woman awaking to the fact that she is held captive by an unknown force, surrounded by an invisible wall that completely isolates her and eventually compels her to delve deeply into her own mind in order to survive. In a mesmerising adaptation of Marlen Haushofer’s early 1960s bestseller of the same name, Pölsler teases out the unsettling elements of horror and fear with remarkable aplomb, helped by a magnificent performance by Martina Gedeck in the lead role. The result is an intriguing and demanding film and while it is not for everyone, it stayed with me for long after the screening.

Perhaps the most outrageously funny film of the festival was The Woman in the Septic Tank (Ang babae sa septic tank), by Philippine director Marlon Rivera. This riotous satire follows the cynical attempt of two young directors to make a film that will appeal to the Western predilection for Third-World miserabilist realism. Real-life Philippine star Eugene Domingo gleefully plays the over the top prima donna who, in order to advance her own career, accepts the role of a destitute slum mother of seven forced to sell one of her children. As the filmmakers wonder about how best to present their wildly politically incorrect story, they veer from austere realistic indie drama to corny melodrama and even musical. The cinema was packed to the rafters for this uproarious send-up of ‘poverty porn’ that proved to be an absolute crowd-pleaser.

The standout in the International Documentary section was Ilian Metev’s Sofia’s Last Ambulance (Poslednata lineika na Sofia), about the three-strong medical crew of one of the 13 ambulances that serve the 1.2 million people in the Bulgarian capital each day. Although Metev’s strictly observational approach says as much about the crumbling Bulgarian healthcare system as it does about a troubled society in the process of transition, the film is most gripping in the moments in between the action, offering a glimpse into the vulnerability and physical and psychological exhaustion of the staff and the frustration beneath their cool, professional façade. Sofia’s Last Ambulance was an apt reminder on how little it takes to create a compelling cinematic experience, and the Karlovy Vary festival once more confirmed that there is a wealth of promising talent out there ready to take the conventions of any given genre into different and unusual places.

Pamela Jahn

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Film4 FrightFest 2012

V/H/S

Film4 FrightFest

23-27 August 2012, Empire, London

FrightFest website

Film4 FrightFest the 13th duly delivered on blood, thrills and controversy with a blast of the best and the worst of current horror film. Evrim Ersoy reports on some of the most talked about films in this year’s programme.

V/H/S

An interesting exercise in combining the portmanteau picture and the found-footage genre, V/H/S is the new offering from some of the hottest indie directors on the block (Adam Wingard, David Bruckner, Ti West, Glenn McQuaid, Joe Swanberg, Radio Silence).

Following the usual genre rules, it sets out a wrap-around concerning a bunch of deadbeat guys who are hired to break into a house and find a certain VHS for an undisclosed amount of money. As they are faced with a mountain of tapes, their attempts to find the right one are the pretext for the other stories until the very final tale, which, in an unusual touch, explains the nature of what has gone before.

At two hours, the film outstays its welcome by at least one segment and the wraparound is a muddled affair delivering none of the punch expected from such a tale. However, despite all this V/H/S works very well, with some of the segments genuinely inducing a sense of dread and unease while others create a videotape reality that just delights with its own twisted logic.

The final story also pulls out all the stops making sure the entire anthology ends on a high, sending the audience out into the night feeling as if they’ve been through on a ghost ride.

All in all, definitely worth catching – although not necessarily at the cinema given the lo-fi specs.

Eurocrime! The Italian Cop and Gangster Films That Ruled the 70s

Director/writer Mike Malloy’s love letter to the underrated poliziotteschi genre of the 70s is an impressive magnum opus that not only serves as an introductory lesson to newcomers but also offers in-depth analysis that every lover of the genre will delight in.

Compiling clips and new interviews with cast and crew associated with the films, Mike Malloy divides his epic documentary into chapters explaining various aspects of the genre (beginnings, real-life crime, politics, misogyny, etc) and revealing the history bit by bit. This fragmentary approach works incredibly well: rather than alienate any audience member, Mike Malloy sensibly draws everyone in before weaving a tale of an era so madcap and unusual it’s almost impossible not to be enthralled.

Mike Malloy’s talent is apparent not only in the assured pacing but also in the well-conducted interviews with stars, directors and other crew members of the era: Henry Silva, Franco Nero and Enzo Castellari all make an appearance bringing with them some unusual tales that may never have been heard if not for this film.

An amazing achievement, this 137-minute bonanza is a brilliantly entertaining documentary: full of life and action, it’s a joyful tribute that fits the spirit of the genre it celebrates so well.

Tower Block

A disappointing exercise in survival, James Nunn and Ronnie Thompson’s Tower Block focuses on the residents of the 31st floor of a block of flats who find themselves the target of a sniper. As the incompatible bunch try to work together to survive the day, their numbers continue to dwindle.

Boasting a set-up that’s bound to intrigue, Tower Block unfortunately runs into the first of its many problems before long: the occupants of the tower block of the title all appear to be archetypes. Perhaps it’s writer James Moran’s intention to populate the floor with a microcosm of Britain and try to see how we all can work together, but, on screen, the entire cast appears theatrical and robotic and the relationships and dialogue are distinctly wooden.

However, there is also much to be admired in the film: the set pieces are incredibly tense, and once the action gets going, the stark terror caused by the sniper is shown without any compromise. This is a film that delivers on the visual front with plenty of gusto. Shame, then, that the final result ends up being so uneven: a third act descent into Scooby Doo territory and really does the rest of the film no favours. By the end of the film, we’re left with a sense of disappointment at the hollowness and emptness of the plot.

It’s hard to shake off the feeling that Tower Block might have worked better as a 30-minute short. In its current form it is just another forgettable urban thriller in a long line of low-budget British films.

Tower Block is released in UK cinemas on September 21 by Lionsgate.

Tulpa

It’s hard to tell where Federico Zampaglione’s disappointing attempt to create a neo-giallo film went wrong: Tulpa is such a strange creation full of conflicting moments that it becomes impossible to distinguish the individual good and bad points after a while.

Opening with a beautiful sequence where a bizarre S&M meeting between an unnamed man and a woman goes horrifically wrong, Tulpa centres on Lisa Boeri, a corporate financial analyst in a fast-paced cut-throat company by day, and a member of a mysterious club for spiritual and psychical release of a sexual kind at night. When someone starts to murder Lisa’s sexual partners she realises there’s a psychopath out there who has her in firmly in their sights.

While the murders in Tulpa adhere beautifully to the giallo tropes, the pacing is so uneven that any enjoyment to be gleaned from the film soon turns to boredom. Add to this a second half that grinds to an almost complete halt and it becomes impossible to understand who the film is intended for: giallo enthusiasts will not find enough visual pleasure to enjoy the film while genre newcomers will be bored stiff after a while by the awful script and the rather outrageous dubbing.

A huge mess of a film, Tulpa can only be recommended as a guide to what not to do when trying to make a neo-giallo. Here’s hoping that Mr Zampaglione’s next film fulfils the promise of his first feature Shadow and confirms him as a filmmaker to follow.

Maniac

Set across a dreamy and melancholic cityscape, Franck Kahlfoun’s take on William Lustig’s notorious 1980 shocker might well be the best genre film to be released this year.

Shot largely in first-person P.O.V., it features an intense performance from Elijah Wood, who manages to portray Frank as a man both frighteningly sadistic and heart-breakingly pitiful. Frank works as a mannequin restorer and seller at a dilapidated shop in LA, which used to belong to his promiscuous mother. He has uncontrollable feeling of abject hatred and fear of women, which explode in acts of unparalleled violence. When Frank meets Ann, who wants to use his mannequins in a photography exhibition she’s preparing, the two connect in an awkward but not implausible way. However, as their relationship develops, it becomes harder and harder for Frank to control his destructive impulses.

Utilising mirrors, windows and other reflective surfaces, Khalfoun creates a glossy but emotive visual language: while the horror of Frank’s barbaric acts is never underplayed, his character comes across as a tragic figure rather than as the one-dimensional psychopath that is the stereotype of the genre. Cleverly using the soundtrack to intensify the city and Frank’s experience, Khalfoun grabs the audience when they least expect it: added into the mix are the rare appearances of Elijah Wood’s face, his eyes exhibiting a dead, hollow quality that makes his acts even more disturbing. His voice-over, delivered in a child-like whisper, speaks volumes about a man whose life has been lost for a long time: reminiscent of the protagonist Paul in Tony Vorno’s forgotten grindhouse gem Victims, Frank is equal parts abhorrent murderer and unexpected victim.

It’s hard to think of another piece of filmmaking that will manage to pack the same visual invention and emotional punch into a measly 89 minutes. Do not miss.

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dOCUMENTA (13)

The Radiant (The Otolith Group)

dOCUMENTA (13)

9 June – 16 September 2012, Kassel, Germany

dOCUMENTA (13) website

Don’t touch that meteorite: an attempt to make a beeline for the video art of dOCUMENTA (13), while politics-of-space debates rage from all directions.

As we speak, a tent embassy of sorts has been set up in the main square of Kassel, Germany. The organisers are calling themselves Doccupy, in the spirit of the Occupy movements across the globe. Simultaneously, a very public debate is raging over whether it is right or wrong for two dOCUMENTA artists to transport an ancient, culturally precious meteorite from its home with an indigenous community in Argentina to Kassel (at a huge expense), for the purposes of art.

For dOCUMENTA (13), it seems that this meteorite, along with the activities of Doccupy, is what has been grabbing the headlines across international media. dOCUMENTA(13), showcasing 200 international artists and showing for 100 days until September 16 in Kassel (along with satellite events in Kabul-Bamiyan, Alexandria-Cairo, as well as Banff and Switzerland), has run once every five years since 1955. And this year, these debates, centered on a politics of space, are threatening to steal more attention than the exhibited artworks themselves.

In her essay on dOCUMENTA, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the artistic director, states that there are four positions around which dOCUMENTA (13) is articulated: Siege, Hope, Retreat and Stage. These, she intuits, are ‘four possible conditions in which artists and thinkers find themselves acting in the present’. A zeitgeist full of contradictions; a time when contradiction is a welcomed state of mind, perhaps? Christov-Bakargiev also surmises that dOCUMENTA (13) explores ‘terrains where politics are inseparable from a sensual, energetic, and worldly alliance between current research in various scientific fields and in other knowledges, both ancient and contemporary’. In other words, political debate and creative explorations are inseparable: dOCUMENTA is a place of transition, and of being in transit within these explorations. And in the midst of an overwhelming sprawl of artworks across the city of Kassel, the legs of visitors will certainly get a sense of being in transit, if nothing else. The place is huge.

It is not unique to dOCUMENTA, of course, to debate the concept of space in a political sense within the context of art. This very debate is a hot topic right now across the art world. It’s just that the meteorite incident and Doccupy are such strong visualisations of this particular, Western world/ developing world tension, making it easy for the international media to grab a hold of it. In another recent colourful example, this year’s Berlin Biennale experienced a staged subsuming of the festival by another art group called ‘Occupy Museum’, also parroting the Occupy concept. They borrowed the turns of phrase, methodology and even some of the exact slogans used in real-world protests and uprisings – all while maintaining really cool hair…

For dOCUMENTA, however, this dedication to politics is precisely the point of its existence, as it has been since 1955. In a press release, Christov-Bakargiev expressed her welcome of Doccupy, stating that the movement ‘continues the wave of democratic protests that have been spreading across many cities in the world. It enacts the possibility of re-inventing the use of public space and appears to me to be in the spirit of the moment and in the spirit of Joseph Beuys, who marked dOCUMENTA and its history significantly, embodying another idea of collective decision making and political responsibility through direct democracy’. Doccupy’s opponents argue that the movement is an attempt to fulfil personal artistic aims by intellectually piggybacking a form of political action used in bloody situations such as those of Egypt and Syria. For the artistic director, however, Doccupy works towards the ‘germination and flourishing’ of ideas, befitting dOCUMENTA.

It follows, then, that a festival concerned with the germination and flourishing of ideas between art and politics should have such a strong video-art presence. Video possesses the immediacy and accessibility to communicate urgent political messages, and is of course widely respected for its power as a political weapon, as well as a documentary and ethnographic tool. Video art, when traditionally screened, is also far more ephemeral than other art forms in terms of the space it physically occupies. When it’s effective, it occupies the space within us (psychically) far longer than its existence in the gallery space. For dOCUMENTA (13), video pieces occupy the traditional spaces (cinematic projections) along with far more surprising spaces; they are projected on the arched ceiling of a planetarium, on hand-held iPods, within cabins in the woods, and situated as a film-in-progress within the minds of hypnosis subjects in trance. Of course, some occupy their chosen space with far greater effectiveness than others.

Every morning in Kassel, for the 100 days of dOCUMENTA (13), video artist Albert Serra shoots a part of his film, titled The Three Little Pigs. He then edits in the afternoon and shows the new extract in a dOCUMENTA cinema the following morning. The film is an audiovisual portrait of three famous German figures – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Adolf Hitler, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder – engaging in conversations taken from historical records. The artist claims that he has used the rule of three as a method to arrive at a solution that will avoid the disaster of the proverbial wolf, as well as using the third cultural approach in order to tell this story successfully – not literature or history, but film. Based on viewing just one of the daily excerpts, however, it could be argued that (similar to the attempts of Doccupy to embody their manifesto) the idea of the film is far more interesting than the results on screen.

In the adjacent cinema, another video work, this time by the Otolith Group, is being shown. It is titled The Radiant and is concerned with the aftermath of the recent nuclear disaster in Japan. The most striking aspect of it is the interview with a Japanese man in his sixties, who is arguing that spaces contaminated by nuclear radiation in Japan should now only be occupied by people of his age group or older. He argues that the young are too vulnerable and have their whole lives ahead of them, whereas he and other elderly people will most likely be at the end of their lives by the time the radiation affects them. His proposal of a self-sacrificial occupation of space in Japan based on age is both alarming and heart-warming in its urgent selflessness.

Downstairs in the Hauptbahnhof (or main train station) is an interactive sound-and-image work by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, titled Alterbahnhof Video Walk. At first glance, it appears to be very much in line with Cardiff’s earlier aural and film installations. A few minutes into the experience, however, the work causes an emotionally violent collision between the real space in the present and the real space of the past. The work plays with your experience of your present space through the artists’ re-imagining of it, via sound and images recorded in that same physical space. You play the work through a hired iPod, and are led by Cardiff’s recorded voice around the station, in synch with the movements of her video of the space. It is as if she is leading you in a tango dance between the present and the past, the real space and the recorded space. This could seem just a clever gimmick, with a few personal and uncanny touches thrown in, until it hits you that Cardiff is guiding you to one station platform in particular. It is the very platform from where so many people were transported to concentration camps during World War II – many of whom, as we are all acutely aware, never returned. It’s an inordinately emotional moment when the video forces you into this realisation. You are standing in a place of tragedy. That tragedy is dragged suddenly into the present once more. It’s a re-mapping of time and space that blurs history with a recorded ‘present’ to force you to re-evaluate the real-world present and the space you occupy. This is a feat that is arguably very rarely achieved in film or indeed art of any medium.

Past the Hauptbahnhof, in the desolate train yard, is a four-storey house that is perhaps a century or so old. As you reach the threshold, you are asked to leave even the smallest of bags in the cloakroom. Immediately upon stepping inside the house, it becomes clear why your belongings could be considered hazardous inside. The house is plunged into almost complete darkness, with only tiny pools of light emitted from the video art scattered throughout several rooms. With only this light to guide you, your eyes are forced to pay attention to these works. The stillness and simplicity of the images are mesmerising and comforting as you are forced, fumbling, around the blackness. As you climb the stairs, the house gets lighter, although still the ‘House of Horrors’ sensation pervades. Each storey of the house contains more video work, but also blank, beautifully bound books, as well as letters exhibited on the walls that are the only clue to piecing together the history that has been created for this house. They are letters between two men over several years. The letters’ content is beguilingly simple, hiding an undercurrent of longing, nostalgia, loneliness and desire. Up in the attic are two large metal balls standing solemnly, their only artistic companions being the orchestral string music trickling into earshot. Their mystery is a fitting end to the tour of the house, whose history, created by Haris Epaminonda and Daniel Gustav Cramer (The End of Summer, 2012), generates more questions than answers. (It later became apparent that the music is part of Turner Prize-winner Susan Phillipsz’ latest sound installation, featured nearby at the Hauptbahnhof. No matter – the synchronicity of music and place only served to further articulate the sense of longing in this house.)

Back outside, towards the station, is an opening that leads to Artaud’s Cave, a film projected within a concrete ‘reconstruction’ of Plato’s cave. Created by Javier Téllez, the film was inspired by Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, and shot in a psychiatric institution in Mexico using non-actors. Viewers must crunch along a gravel path and clamber over cold stone walls to view the work. Somehow the combination of cave and film are claustrophobic, with the sense that you too are confined in an institution of sorts, with no clear way out.

Nearby is a five-channel video installation by Indian artist Tejal Shah, titled Between the Waves. The work is thematically positioned around an archaeological excavation in India that hopes to find the possible true origins of the unicorn. The work uses live-action video, animation and even an iPhone Morse code app to tell its story, and repositions a traditionally Western mythological creature back within its purportedly accurate Indian heritage. As Shah explains about her work: ‘All clues lie within, decoding them is a matter of our own cognitive or imaginative limits.’

Wooden cabins scattered across Kassel’s beautiful parkland, Karlsaue, contain all manner of installations and video works, including sail boats washed up in trees; a film depicting archived impressions from a Swiss sex commune from the early 20th century; a film and sound installation exploring the existential space of the voice that is at once haunting and frustrating (Manon de Boer, One, Two, Many, 2012); along with a narrative film depicting a privileged white family sitting around a candlelit dinner table, speaking about their son’s racist ‘honour killing’ of a violent man (Omer Fast, Continuity, 2012). At last, unassumingly nestled amongst the fir trees, is a cabin that you must book to visit and is an absolute must for your dOCUMENTA experience: the Hypnotic Show in the Reflection Room (Marcos Lutyens, Raimundas Malašauskas).

Upon your arrival, you must take off your shoes and follow the artist downstairs. There, once alone with the artist, you will find yourself in an almost bare wooden room, which is still somehow cosy. You are told that you are being filmed. You are told to relax and choose a ‘story’ from a book consisting of no words, only colour combinations. And from there on in, the hypnotist and your unconscious mind take over to become the featured artwork. The hypnotist works to project your inner thoughts back to you in the form of verbal descriptions woven into the narrative he speaks. In this sense, each individual session results in a completely new ‘artwork’, which is captured in an ongoing video. This process is accompanied by a series of events when the artist switches roles and places himself under a trance-like state. The artist, while in this state, escapes the cabin to roam the streets of Kassel, filming the results of his interactions with people going about their days and nights. This work is a disquieting example of how art can occupy your utmost personal space: it fixes the exhibition space of the film directly inside the unconscious mind.

The Hypnotic Show in the Reflection Room has the potential to occupy all four positions of thinking as outlined by Christov-Barakiev, depending only on the state of mind of its subjects: Siege, Hope, Retreat and Stage. And the same could be said for the poor meteorite trapped in the midst of all these artistic and political debates. The meteorite is at once besieged from all sides, hopeful for resolution, attempting to retreat and yet spot-lit on the world stage of media attention. One can only wonder what thoughts the meteorite itself would have under the spell of hypnosis. Four thousand years’ worth of tales to tell us. A humbling thought.

‘The riddle of art is that we do not know what it is until it is no longer that which it was.’ Christov-Barakiev

Siouxzi Mernagh