Cast: Klaus Maria Brandauer, Julia Jentsch, Jeanette Hain
Austria 2012
In 2009, Antonin Svoboda made a TV documentary about the Austrian-American psychiatrist and experimental scientist Wilhelm Reich. He has now returned to the subject with a feature biopic that focuses in particular on the second half of Reich’s life and work in American exile. Drawing on the depth of knowledge that Svoboda has acquired working on the project over many years, the film stars Klaus Maria Brandauer as Reich, who lends a compelling presence and dignity to his character.
Reich, who devoted himself to searching for the fundamentals of life, arrived in America in 1939, after fleeing Nazi Germany. His story is related with the help of flashbacks to his earlier career and the research that led him to a theory postulating the existence of a bioelectric life-force energy called ‘orgone’, which, according to Reich, flows through all living beings. Blocking up this force with social taboos and ideological nonsense could only lead to harm – for the individual and for society. However, his radical dream of liberating human individuality made Reich an increasingly dangerous opponent to the American system and, in 1956, Reich found himself on trial, charged with fraud and sentenced to two years in prison, while six tons of his publications were burned by order of the court. Intriguingly shot, yet not free of dramatic flaws, the film manages to be both understated and epic, leading up to Reich’s death in jail, reportedly of heart failure, only days before he was due to apply for parole.
Pamela Jahn talked to Klaus Maria Brandauer at the 50th Viennale in October 2012, where the film had its world premiere. It opens for a theatrical run in Austria this month.
Pamela Jahn: What attracted you to the character of Wilhelm Reich?
Klaus Maria Brandauer: I read the script and thought the theme was very fascinating. As an actor, you don’t necessarily play a part simply because of the character, but because of the story and the environment associated with this character. And in the case of Wilhelm Reich, I found that environment very intriguing. The story offers so much scope to express yourself because it describes not only a moment in time, but the 20 years Reich spent as an immigrant in America after leaving Germany in the late 1930s to escape the Nazis. And sometimes this relates back even to his earlier life – which you gradually learn from selected flashbacks – and the difficulties he’d experienced when he was young. Both his parents died very early, the mother committed suicide after having an affair with his tutor, soon after the father died of tuberculosis; then the Russians invaded and Reich and his brothers flew to Austria where he joined the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War. After the war, he went to Vienna where he studied medicine and became a student of Sigmund Freud, because he was also very interested in psychology and the social environment of human beings and their relationships with each other. But then he became somewhat disillusioned with Freud’s psychoanalytic method, and unlike most analysts, Reich was not content to keep silent, so he took his own path. But I think what is crucial to understand in his case is that he was not only a doctor or psychoanalyst, but a sociologist who did a lot of research on the situation of women in the 1920s in Austria, for example, because he was convinced that everything is related to everything else in this world and beyond. To some extent he was also a visionary, because he was convinced that one day somebody would prove that everything that we think, see and feel, as well as what we dream and what we imagine, that all this is ‘true’ and part of our human identity.
But instead of the freedom he hoped to find in the US, he was crushed by the American legal system.
Yes, because he was a very strong opponent of the war, of any kind of conflicts really, but most importantly of nuclear power. Although he had some conversations with Einstein about his discovery of ‘orgone’, he didn’t support the invention of special nuclear material or atomic energy, simply because it was first and foremost invented to kill people. And that’s where our film starts, in the moment that he believes himself living in a free country – an exemplary democracy, as it where – and all of a sudden he’s no longer allowed to carry out any research because he’s against nuclear weapons and also against any methods of manipulating the human psyche. So the Americans chase him, he is maligned and later even put into jail based on faked witness statements, and there he dies.
But to get back to your earlier question, Reich is only one example of many, and still there is something special about him as a man and as a scientist in the way he fought against the oppression of others, and of their thoughts. And in terms of his own work, he just wanted to carry out his research, independently and without getting on anyone’s back. That’s what fascinated me about Reich.
Talking about your work, you’ve had a remarkable career both on stage and on screen, but you always seem to remain truly faithful to theatre.
Because for me film is not more exciting than theatre, that’s nonsense. Today, as an actor, you work in television and if you have the time, you play in theatre. But when I first started, it was the other way around. When someone offered me a part in a film, back then I said, ’No thanks, I do theatre!’ But in a way it doesn’t really matter. There are people who work more in film and television, and then there are others who do more theatre – everyone has their own priorities. And of course it’s easy to think that film work is better paid, which it is, and that’s why people go for it. But if you’re a true actor, you just love doing theatre, so I don’t really have a preference.
Would you like to direct again as well?
Of course, but the two films I have done so far [Georg Elser – Einer aus Deutschland (Seven Minutes, 1989) and Mario und der Zauberer (Mario and the Magician, 1994)], I was really dying to do, and even when I watch them today, I think, ‘Thank God that you’ve done this!’ But to direct another film, I would first of all need a lot of time, like Antonin, who spent more than eight years developing The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich. Or, take Sidney Pollack’s Out of Africa (1985), it took years and many drafts to get the screenplay right and still no one wanted to finance it. And before Pollack, it was John Frankenheimer who tried to make that film. It was only because they were friends, and Pollack had worked as an assistant for him in the past, that Frankenheimer said, ‘Look, why don’t you give it a try? You’ve just had a major success with Tootsie, maybe you can do it’. And Pollack did. All I’m trying to say is that there is always an awful lot to do before, eventually, you can see a film on the big screen, especially in Europe, and in smaller countries like ours, it’s a nightmare to even just get it financed in the first instance.
Did you see parallels between Antonin Svoboda’s work on The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich and your first film, which was also shot in the English language, about Georg Elser, the man who attempted to assassinate Hitler in 1939?
It’s difficult for me to say, because Antonin is a professional filmmaker who went to film school and, originally, I was only meant to play Georg Elser in the film and John Frankenheimer was supposed to direct it. But when John came to Europe the dollar hit rock bottom, which was terrible for the production because the entire budget deflated within seconds, and then John said, ‘It’s not going to work like that, let’s just leave it’. One or two years later the producer of the film, John Daly, called me up and asked, ‘Klaus, do you still want to do that film about Elser?’ I said, ‘Of course, it’s a great project, but who’s going to direct it? Is John back onboard?’ And he said, ‘No, not John, you!’ Two weeks later I was sitting in LA trying to plan how I could make this work. So I called my friend Lajos Koltai, the Hungarian cinematographer, and said, ‘Listen, we always wanted to make a film where there is hardly any dialogue’. Because what has always annoyed me, even when I was younger, was that there is too much talking in film, as if it was literature. Film is a visual medium and is meant to express with images in the first instance, not with words. And Koltai said yes, and we made the film together in the end. But again, I am not a filmmaker, I didn’t show up on the set and said, ‘OK, focus at 45 please’. I learned all that from Koltai. I really wanted to make this film because of the story and Georg Elser as a character, which fascinated me in a similar way that Wilhelm Reich does now, partly because they were both outsiders. The difference is that one of them knew he was going to die and the other one didn’t stand a chance.
What do you feel an actor has to have these days?
I have been doing this job for 50 years now and I still don’t really know. I just found a way to do it, like others did before me, more or less, with different premises. I am artistically minded, I need literature, I need music and so on and so forth, and I can try to express other people’s words and stories in many different ways and different formats: in an audio play, a TV production, on stage or on the big screen, it doesn’t matter. The most important thing is that you’re not trying to act, but to explore something, to delve into the character. Nobody likes actors who act, not in theatre and even less in film. Anyone can recite a text or a dialogue, but it’s my responsibility to bring this person to life – that’s my duty. But in order to succeed, it has to be the deepest passion of your mind and heart to be human. And I mean you as a person! In other words: you have to know for yourself whether you call the tune on a Stradivarius or you’re just scraping a fiddle. Of course you can develop through practice, but if you don’t care about it at all, sooner or later others will. Most importantly though, and this is the real problem: art makes no sense at all. But that’s why it is so fascinating.
Are you driven by self-doubt or disapproval, either as an artist or personally?
A devout human being, who believes in God, but who doesn’t sometimes doubt, will never find that God and is a complete idiot.
Original title:11-25 jiketsu no hi: Mishima Yukio to wakamono-tachi
Cast: Arata, Shinobu Terajima, Hideo Nakaizumi
Japan 2012
119 mins
‘If we value so highly the dignity of life, how can we not also value the dignity of death. No death may be called futile.’ – Yukio Mishima
In 11.25. The Day He Chose His Own Fate, one of his last completed films, the late Kôji Wakamatsu turned his attention to the final years of Japanese writer, critic and nationalist Yukio Mishima, who espoused traditional values based on the Bushido code. On 25 November 1970, Mishima, along with four members of his own private army – the Tatenokai – went to the Self Defence Forces headquarters in Tokyo, tied up the commander and took to the balcony to call upon the assembled military outside to overthrow their society and restore the powers of the Emperor. When he was jeered, he returned inside to commit suicide, leaving behind a set of controversial writings, including short stories, plays and novels, and a mystery that echoes to this day.
Pamela Jahn took part in a group interview with Kôôji Wakamatsu after the premiere of his film on Mishima at the 65th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in May, where the film premiered in the Un Certain Regard section, to find out more about Wakamatsu’s take on Mishima and the reasons behind his actions.
Question: What was your motivation for making the film?
Answer: I first thought about it when I was shooting United Red Army. There is one scene where the Red Army marches during a very strong blizzard and it was actually a real blizzard that we were facing at that time when making the film. The Red Army was a formation of left-wing extremists. But I knew that there were also right-wing activists, young people who wanted to change the society just as much, even at the cost of their own lives, like Mishima, who formed his private militia – the Tatenokai, or ‘Shield Society’. I felt that portraying only one side of the whole spectrum wouldn’t be sufficient and that I should depict both extremes and I decided to make a separate film about the Tatenokai. First it was just an innocent joke. I’d tell my actors on the set of United Red Army that my next project would be on the extreme right for a change. But I knew that making these films in a row would be rather hard on me, so in the middle, as a sort of easy play, I shot Caterpillar . Both films turned out to get a very good audience and attendance that provided enough money for 11:25, and also two other films, Petrel Hotel Blue and The Millennial Rapture.
Your last visit to Cannes was just over 40 years ago when Sex Jack was shown at the festival in 1971. How does it feel to be back here after so many years with yet another film that is highly politically charged?
It doesn’t have any special meaning or significance. The only special thing back then was that on the way back I went to Palestine to film a documentary [together with Masao Adachi], and because of that, I was labelled as terrorist and declared a persona non grata in the United States, Russia and other countries. And the Japanese government also questioned me quite severely 15 or 16 times. It that sense, it was quite a memorable visit.
Arata Iura, who plays Mishima in the film, is very well known in Japan. You don’t usually cast stars like him.
He also had a part in United Red Army and I thought he was very good in it. I got to know him as an extremely hard worker and somebody who’s able to deliver great performances with consistency. I’m the type of person who feels strong gratitude and obligation towards those who give me something. Arata was very well known already, but he agreed to do the job on my terms and follow my method. I asked him to come alone, without any manager or personal assistant. On my set I use no make-up artists, script girls or secretaries – he had to accept that. I had several people in mind for Mishima’s part, but I finally gave it to Arata. Looking at the film only reassures me that I made the right choice. I never cast stars to attract a bigger audience. To me it doesn’t matter if it’s someone as famous as Arata or an amateur. As long as you have a heart, you can act. If cinema was only about attracting audiences with star power, I wouldn’t be making films anymore.
Both films, 11:25 and United Red Army, show a deep sense of comradeship that is essential to the development of any revolutionary movement but also more generally speaking in Japanese culture.
To put it very simply, the Japanese culture is not individualistic. The focus is not on the individual but on the community. Whatever we do, we always consider our neighbours, family and friends. For example, if you’re making dinner and it turns out really delicious, it is natural to offer it to your neighbours, to share. These cultural differences between Japan and Europe or the United States may be rooted in religious concepts of Christianity and Buddhism and, therefore, some behaviours or rituals might be harder to comprehend for a viewer from outside of our culture.
The only female figure in this otherwise male-dominated film is Mishima’s wife. She’s spoken of rarely, appears in one scene and barely has one line. How do you see her character in the film?
I believe that the very consciousness of her existence was necessary for the film. During the research stage, when reading through all the materials and documents available, I found many proofs of her role and influence in the Tatenokai, even though she acted behind the scene. But for example, every time they went to a training camp, she would come along and give pep talks to the trainees. Also in the household, her presence was natural. In Japan, the wife’s position is behind her man, in the background. It would have been difficult to bring Mishima’s wife into the spotlight because she would never have stepped out. She’d support him silently, like she did. Again, that’s a cultural thing that be might more difficult to understand for Westerners.
Your name is inevitably associated with the pink film genre (pinku eiga) that first appeared in Japan in the early 1960s, but actually soon after it became popular you stopped making that kind of films.
I was the first director of pink cinema, and everybody else followed me and copied what I came up with. But their imitations were focused only on showing naked women, sex scenes and so forth. Soon after, pink cinema went down the drain and became the mainstream. There were so many pink films around that I didn’t feel it was interesting for me to continue that path. If you compare pink cinema from the time when I was active in that genre and contemporary pinku eiga, they are entirely different. All the directors who made pink films back then have disappeared with the exception of Mr Takita, who became very successful. His film Departures is known around the world. To others, pinku eiga was just an easy way to make money. They’re too scared to be anti-establishment. For me, making a film means to throw a stone at the establishment, and what happened to pink cinema is that it became conformist entertainment.
You are not only an influence on, but a mentor to, young Japanese filmmakers like Banmei Takahashi, for example. Is helping the new generation of filmmakers important to you?
It is true that many young filmmakers started their professional career on my set or thanks to my recommendation. But it was they who came to work for me in the first instance. Of course, I can help them, I can give some assistance or mental support. But the truth is, they are my competitors, or in other words, they are my enemies. But by creating my own enemies I become more enthusiastic. If one of them makes a really good film, that only makes me more passionate about it and drives my own motivation to be better. I think that the young directors in Japan today whom I mentored are my best, most inspiring competitors. In the mainstream I don’t see anyone I’d consider as such.
You are a very precise author, whose art is so particular, that sometimes it might come across as hermetic.
I think in Japan, and anywhere else in the world, there are many mysterious things. My work might sometimes seem difficult, but I am just doing what I do and I am just turning these mysteries in society, which are sometimes hard to understand, into images, into films. Each person is different, in terms of their looks but especially in terms of their thinking – there are no identical human beings. Take this bottle of water on the table in front of you, for example. It might seem just ordinary clear water to you, but there may be someone else who doesn’t perceive it in the same way, who might think it’s red. It’s not us longing to be each other’s clones, it’s the authorities, who try to make everyone as identical as possible.
You are an internationally acclaimed director but your position in Japan is still difficult, especially in terms of financing your projects.
The government does not recognise my films because in a way they rebuild the part of Japanese history they’d like to hide. My work is most problematic especially for the Cultural Agency. They hold the budget to subsidise filmmaking in Japan but they wouldn’t give any of it to me, even though I requested it many times. They’d rather fund films with far less value instead of mine, mainly because I am very straightforward and open with bureaucrats and I tell them what I think about them. But in any case, you couldn’t make a film about the United Red Army or Mishima with money from the government. They wouldn’t give a single yen for a film like that.
How do you feel about Mishima’s suicide?
People in Japan have been wondering about Mishima’s suicide for long after his death. The reactions in the public have been quite ambiguous. People talk about it according to their own imagination and equally I made the film based on my understanding and interpretation of the events. I think that Mishima had chosen the venue and time of his own death quite carefully – he died at 45. The date, the 25th of November, was also the date when one of his close friends from the University of Tokyo committed suicide. That friend was involved in a financial fraud; he couldn’t get out of it and felt so cornered and hopeless that he decided to take his own life by hanging himself.
Could you relate to his decision?
At that time, when it happened, I thought it was just stupid. I also had my reservations about his idea of creating an army of ‘toy soldiers’. I thought that Mishima, who was an accomplished writer and well-established citizen, eventually went insane. But as time passed and I went through many documents, including his writings about planning that event, my opinion started to change. I also sometimes drink sake with one of the surviving members of the Tatenokai and slowly my view changed: I came to think that actually he is a phenomenon in his own right. There are other films about him and about the Red Army, but the names have been changed. I refuse to do that, in my films I use their real names. People around me warned me that I’d be assassinated by the right-wing if I did that and I said, ‘Well, if they want to do that, that’s fine.’ But I met some of the people and I read a lot of material and I believe that I am showing both sides, the right and the left extremes of the spectrum, and that it’s a fair view on both sides. I am telling them both that they were trying to do something good, that they meant good for society, and that they shouldn’t be ashamed or live in hiding. And after I made those films, they actually thanked me for what I did. They came to see the films, they even helped selling tickets, and I think it’s because my intention is genuine.
Sightseers, Ben Wheatley’s highly anticipated follow-up to Kill List, is a comedic character study starring Steve Oram and Alice Lowe as a freshly in love couple who are setting out on a road trip across the north of England, which turns into something unexpectedly darker and fatally dangerous for anyone who dares to spoil their twisted idyll.
Pamela Jahn met up with the director at the 65th Cannes Film Festival in May to talk about exploring the British countryside, romance and how women are sometimes the better killers.
Pamela Jahn: Sightseers is very extreme, like Down Terrace and Kill List, but feels more open and lighter.
Ben Wheatley: Yeah, one of the major attractions to the story for me was to get out and explore some of the broader space of England, but also in terms of cinematic space… Sightseers is much more about figures and landscapes rather than just faces in frames.
And there is more humour.
Basically, I wanted to make a comedy after Kill List, because on the one hand, if I had made another horror film, everyone would have said I am a horror filmmaker forever and that would have been bad. The door would have just been shut and locked. We also felt depressed after Kill List, because it was just so horrible and it was such a hard film to make and to edit and to be involved in. And then you get this thing when you watch a film back, and you think, oh, well, I could have made anything, and I made this. Why did I do this? [laughs] So we thought, let’s just make something that feels lighter and happier, and more fun. And the other reason why we wanted to make this film is because we wanted to do something that is much more playful and loose. We knew that the movies coming up after this are going to be much more technical and difficult, so we wanted to be able to play a little more here.
The violence is still pretty shocking in places.
Yeah, but it’s not that shocking. Like Kill List wasn’t that violent, I mean not really. It’s just that you feel it because of the emotional kick, but physically and in terms of body count, it’s not that bad.
The script was co-written by the stars of the film, Steve Oram and Alice Lowe. Does it still feel very close to you though?
Amy Jump, who is credited with additional material, is my wife, and she co-wrote Kill List and edited on Sightseers as well. We restructured it a bit from their script and took things on board that we had learned from doing the two previous movies. So this way, we brought it into the family of the previous films. We also did the editing, and there is so much improvisation in it. There is actually a level of authorship that goes on top of the script, which comes purely from us.
There’s a line that seems to run through your films, that somehow refers to the extreme, or the animalistic in human nature. What is it that fascinates you so much about that?
Talking about England – but it’s the same in all of Europe, actually – it feels to me that there’ve always been layers of reality. Beneath the pavement is the earth, and there have been all sorts of things happening here for over thousands and thousands of years, and it’s all in us. And this is what we’re trying to show in these movies, that it is only a step to the left or the right and you find this stuff… Things aren’t as modern as we think.
What is it that attracted you in particular to this couple and their story?
When I first read the script and got to know the characters, what struck me was that they’re crossing over the boundaries of society, they’re not held back by modern manners. In a way, I could have been in the film, except I wouldn’t murder anyone, but I’d probably go back to the caravan, crunching my teeth, thinking ‘gggrrrrr’. And I think there is something about watching people who actually go through to the very end and break social rules and do it.
But it’s also that kind of strange story about a couple who are throwing at each other what they like and what they don’t like. First, he shows her his darkest side, and then she can do it much better than he can, and that’s really depressing for him. So he’s crushed. I like that… For me that’s quite romantic.
Are women the better killers?
In this one, yeah, absolutely! But I don’t think she speaks for all women [laughs].
You don’t seem to be worried that people might take your films the wrong way and actually be inspired by them.
It doesn’t end well for them, so I don’t know… And I made Kill List. Jesus, if I was worried about that, I would have stopped there.
Did the success of Kill List come as a big surprise to you?
Yes, it did. But I don’t know how you’re supposed to react when that happens. You can’t really think about it, because it just chains you from doing anything else. And you can’t take any of it seriously, because if you did, you’d take yourself too seriously and that’s a disaster – it totally inhibits how you work. So I just say ‘thank you very much’ and move on. And although you can pretend that you’ve got a plan, you just end up making the films you make. This is the only way I know how to do things. In retrospect, you could look at the movies and probably slot them in and go, ‘oh it’s a bit like this and a bit like that’. But they’re never conceived like that.
Do you feel there is something particularly British about your characters or your films?
In Britain, it’s like everywhere, there are people who are very meek and there are people who are just really, really violent. You wouldn’t want to stagger around drunk on a Saturday night in a seaside town in Britain without your wits about you. And I guess there are still people shooting pheasants with shotguns somewhere, things like that.
What’s your favourite killing scene in Sightseers?
I really like Ian’s death, mainly because I like the parallel editing, you see lots of things happening at the same time, and cut to the music – I really enjoy those sequences. And we’re trying to make each of them different, but then use certain elements again for her murders and his murders.
Is there something you think you consciously have to do, or not do, if you want to be a good director?
I don’t know…But when I became an editor that ruined everything. So once you know how to edit, you’re fucked.
Have you ever been on a caravan trip yourself?
I have been camping a lot, but not in a caravan, no. And I don’t know if I will now, after sitting with a camera in the toilet of that caravan with a monitor on my lap. The caravan thing might be over for me.
Compared to Haneke’s earlier works, Amour stands out for its astounding sensitivity and subtle tenderness, but ultimately, the story, which centres around 80-year-old retired music teachers George (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), is no less hard-hitting. As the couple are faced with Anne’s physical and mental deterioration after two successive strokes, the film scrutinises, in a profoundly intelligent and unsettling way, the consequences of life and death, and the role that long-standing love plays when one half of an ageing couple is facing the end. As one would expect from a filmmaker as precise and skilful as Haneke, Amour is finely scripted, superbly composed, and often hauntingly beautiful and desperately sad. The quiet grandeur of the film, however, would be lost without its two main actors, whose astonishing, disarmingly honest performances breathe life into Haneke’s formal perfection in capturing the realities of terminal illness in meticulous detail. Crafted with passionate conviction and a mastery of film language, Amour is that rare work of genius: an acute philosophical inquiry that’s highly emotionally charged, but also dramatically gripping, incredibly discreet and utterly credible in its depiction of human behaviour.
Pamela Jahn talked to Michael Haneke after the premiere of Amour at the 65th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in May to find out more about one of the most exciting films this year, and what makes a great director.
Pamela Jahn: Amour is essentially a chamber play, and the apartment where the film is set feels very much like its own character. What role did the premises play for you in the story?
Michael Haneke: The apartment in the film is based on my parents’ apartment in Vienna, which I had rebuilt in a French studio. We gave it a French atmosphere but the layout is the same. When you’re writing a film it’s easier to use a geography that you know so intimately.
The film describes in a very sensible but precise way how an elderly couple deals with the ravages of old age and looming death. What made you explore that subject matter?
Like I think all of us do, at some point in our lives, I knew someone in my family who I felt very close to and who I loved very deeply. But this person had to suffer for a long time and went through a lot of pain while I had to look on helplessly. This was a very difficult and disturbing experience for me and so it motivated me to write the script. But please don’t think that because it is the apartment of my parents this is also the story of my parents. It’s not.
Was it difficult to get Jean-Louis Trintignant involved in the project? Amour is the first film he has made in years.
Yes, that’s true, but it was not difficult to get him involved. I wrote the part for him, in fact, I wrote the script for him. And he had seen my previous film, The White Ribbon, which he liked, so it was actually quite easy for me to get him for this film.
It seems like you wanted to work with him for a long time?
Yes, I always admired his work. But the problem is always in finding the right part for an actor. I know many actors I’d like to work with, but I haven’t had the occasion to offer them what I think is the right part for them. In Jean-Louis’s case, because of the theme and the fact that you are dealing with elderly characters, he was the only person I wanted to work with in this film. In fact, if he hadn’t been available, I wouldn’t have made it. Hidden, for example, was a very similar situation for me. I wrote the film for Daniel Auteuil because I wanted to work with him.
Why did you choose to make George and Anne music teachers, who have a very particular place in society?
I wanted to avoid the danger of the film coming across as a social drama. I wanted to set aside any financial constraints, because if the film had been set in the working-class environment, people would probably have thought: oh, if they only had enough money, things wouldn’t be all that bad. But that’s not true, it doesn’t matter how much money you have, the situation, the tragedy is the same. Another reason why I wrote the film for a musical couple is because my stepfather was a conductor and composer, so again, it’s a milieu that I am familiar with and it is easier for me to describe the setting with the most precision and detail.
You are widely recognised as a master of film language and the different aspects of filmmaking. What do you find most difficult as a director?
Good question… The hardest part is probably not to feel nervous in the morning when you wake up.
What do you do to avoid that?
Nothing, unfortunately. The difficult thing is getting ready before the shoot. It’s similar to being an actor just before a theatre performance. Usually, the actor is terribly nervous while waiting in the wings but, as soon as the curtain goes up, he’s totally concentrated. It’s that constant stress that you feel on a daily basis and the fear that you are not going to be able to succeed and achieve what you are looking for. But unlike in theatre, where, if you’re rehearsing and something doesn’t work out one day, you can come back to it the next day and try again, you don’t have that luxury in film. You just shoot a scene on one day and if it doesn’t turn out the way you wanted it, then it’s lost, because you have to move on to the next scene. That’s one of the disadvantages of making films compared to theatre and opera.
There is also this great story about Ingmar Bergman, that whenever he was shooting a film there had to be a bathroom nearby because he was so nervous that he needed to go to the bathroom frequently. I don’t know whether the story is really true or not but I can certainly empathise with this.
You said elsewhere that you work better with your ears than with your eyes. How do you explain this?
It’s because your ears are more sensitive than your eyes, or at least that’s the case for me. Sometimes when I look at a scene, I get too easily distracted by thousands of details. But when I don’t look, I hear immediately if there is something wrong with the sound or if somebody said something that is not quite right. There is also a simple example: if you need to loop a scene, which means if you are asking an actor to come back to the sound studio and re=record a sentence, that for some reason didn’t work out the first time around, people always think that synchronising the lip movement is the hardest part. But actually that’s the easiest part, because, as long as the lip movements match, it is credible for the audience. It’s the scenes that are off-camera, like voice-overs, that are the tricky ones because you immediately hear if the tone is wrong. In the many years I have been directing for theatre, I have often gazed to the ground while my actors were rehearsing on stage, not for the entire time of the rehearsal, but for parts of it, because I thought I could better comment on their performances that way.
You mentioned Bergman before. How much of an influence was he on you, in particular in this film?
I am influenced by Bergman in the same way that I am influenced by a number of different directors. In fact, I think it’s very important for a filmmaker to try not to be influenced by other people and rather find your own language. As an artist, your artistic equation is ultimately the result of all the other films you have seen, all the books that you have read, all the personal experiences in your life, everything really. And you should just try and do what you feel you have to do instead of asking yourself all the time what Mr X or Mrs Y would have done in that situation. But nonetheless, I think it is true that what my films have in common with Bergman’s is that they all focus on the actors, because that’s what interests me most.
When was the moment you decided to become a director?
Well, let’s say when I was 15 I was hoping to become an actor like my mother, when I was 14 I wanted to be a pianist and when I was 13 I wanted to be a priest. But as an actor, I wasn’t accepted at the academy, so I studied philosophy instead and did a lot of writing, short stories and a bit of film criticism. I was a terrible student though because I was in the cinema three times a day. Then, I went to television and became a story editor. I also worked in theatre for 20-odd years and at the same time directed films for television. And then, at the age of 46, I decided to make my first feature film. With hindsight, I think it is almost always very easy to draw some sort of red line through your biography, but I believe that in your life most things are determined by luck and coincidence, and the goals you set for yourself develop, just as you do along the way.
Why do you refuse so vehemently to offer an interpretation to your films?
If I were to explain things myself and offer an interpretation then this would automatically reduce the spectator’s ability to find their own answers. My films are offerings, I invite the audience to deal with them, think about them and reflect upon them and, ultimately, to find their own answers. I also think that an author doesn’t always necessarily know what he intends and what the meaning is behind his work. For example, I am always amazed by the many theses and books I read about myself, all of which reveal what I supposedly wanted to express in my films or was supposed to have dealt with. I strongly believe it would be very counterproductive for the audience if I were to answer the questions I am raising in my films, because then no one would have to think about them.
Have you ever been disappointed by the reception of a film you made?
Would you generally consider yourself a pessimist or an optimist?
I don’t think I am a pessimist or that I have ever been a pessimistic person. If this was the case, I would only make entertainment films because I wouldn’t think that people actually care, and are intelligent enough, to want to deal with the questions I raise in my films. In that sense, I believe every so-called artist can only be an optimist, because otherwise they wouldn’t be motivated to try and ask questions and to communicate with their audience. A pessimist would simply say: it’s pointless, so I am not doing anything.
Has your motivation to make films changed over the years?
No, but that may be because I can’t really say why I am making films in the first place. Probably it’s because that’s all I know how to do.
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.
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 (Až 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 Až, 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.
Best known internationally for his chilly, haunting melodramas Yella (2007) and Jerichow (2008), Christian Petzold has yet again teamed up with actress Nina Hoss for his latest film Barbara. Hoss gives a mesmerising performance as Barbara Wolff, a doctor who has applied for an exit visa from the GDR only to find herself transferred from Berlin to a provincial hospital in the countryside, spied upon by the Stasi while her lover in the West is secretly preparing to help her escape via the Baltic Sea. Like all Petzold’s films, Barbara is informed by the director’s background in literature and cinema history, and yet it stands in its own right as a subtly balanced, emotionally restrained and elegantly shot drama crafted by a real auteur, with a style, vision and worldview entirely his own.
Pamela Jahn talked to Christian Petzold at this year’s 62nd edition of the Berlin International Film Festival in February where Barbara premiered in Competition and earned him the Silver Bear for Best Director.
Pamela Jahn: Your films are often inspired by literature. In Yella, for example, you are borrowing your genre conventions from James M. Cain’s cult pulp novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. Your new film Barbara, however, feels more like a classic novella.
Christian Petzold: There are two books that served as an inspiration for me this time: Hermann Broch’s novella Barbara, which is set in 1928 and tells the story of a female doctor who takes a job in a rural hospital in order to hide her communist activities from the police, and Werner Bräunig’s novel Rummerplatz. In Bräunig’s book a doctor’s son is consumed by physical work for the first time in a uranium mine. He defines himself through this work, which is interesting because work as a theme had almost completely disappeared from the literature and cinema in the West. Another aspect that appealed to me was that the book tells how women replaced the workers who had been wooed by the West, which somewhat gave those women a new purpose and self-understanding, and I wanted to tell a story about this.
Barbara marks your fifth collaboration with actress Nina Hoss. How would you describe your work relationship?
Part of the reason why we work together so well is because we help each other develop and, at the same time, with each film our work relationship grows stronger. For example, when we were shooting Jerichow I felt that I had to do something different in my next film, especially with the ending, because I realised that I kept pushing Nina into tragedy every single time; like a writer, who keeps killing his heroine at some point so he can finish this book and get on to a new story. I got really annoyed with myself for always working within that same pattern. When Nina and I talked about the final scene, I told her that, next time, I would like to make a film with an open ending and we ended up having a very long conversation about what this means for my work, for our work, and for what we’re trying to achieve, which helped me a lot. And that’s the great thing about our collaboration: that we can have those conversations and support and inspire each other. That’s what makes it so exciting for me.
Aside from working with Nina Hoss, you have developed a very special way of casting people.
Yes, when I start casting for a new film, I first listen to the voices of actors. If you ask me, all these talent agencies should send out CDs instead of DVDs; there is much more to get from listening to voices. But if you find an actress like Nina Hoss and you work together for so many years, your attitude towards the character changes in a way. I don’t really describe her anymore in the script, which means she somewhat appears out of a situation; I don’t need to support her literarily because she already exists. But at the same time, I also need to keep a sort of respectful distance from that particular character.
Barbara is set in former communist East Germany in 1980. What fascinated you about this particular era and how did you approach it, since you grew up in West Germany?
My parents fled the GDR when I was still very young, so I grew up in the Western part of Germany. But my parents kept travelling back to the East part quite regularly and they took my brothers and me with them, so East Germany was not so unfamiliar to me. The problem is the kind of stuffiness that exists in Germany, that narrow thinking that only someone who has lived through a story has the right to tell it. But if you look at the great works of world literature, many of these stories are actually told from the perspective of an outsider. Like in The Great Gatsby, for example, the narrator is the only character who is dead. With Barbara, it was very important to me that the actors understand my particular perspective. Before I start shooting, I always watch selected films with my team in order to get everyone in the mood and, this time, one of the films we watched during the rehearsals was The French Connection. There is a scene in the film in which Gene Hackman’s character, [Jimmy] Doyle, wanders back to his apartment after a long shift and suddenly gets attacked by a sniper. What makes this sequence so fascinating and one of the most frenetic moments in the film is the perspective. Normally, any director would cut from Gene Hackman walking down the street to the sniper and then follow him through the reticle just before the gunshot to build up tension and suspense. But the film doesn’t do that: instead the camera keeps at eye level with Hackman during the entire chase. Only after 15 minutes of chasing the sniper through the jammed streets of New York, only in the very moment when Doyle seems to have caught himself in a dead end, when he struggles to stay in control, that’s when the camera changes its perspective and points at him. What I was trying to explain with this sequence was the importance of my viewpoint in Barbara, which is similar in terms of the camera position. I wanted everyone to understand why the camera has to be in a certain spot, why can’t it be anywhere else because that would change my perspective on the story.
It is your first historical film. How difficult was it for you to reconstruct the setting of the GDR in the early 1980s?
What I wanted to achieve with Barbara was to make a historical film but without evoking history merely through the setting where you have the hammer and sickle symbol in every frame. Instead, I tried to create an open space. There is a nice anecdote about François Truffaut and Jean Renoir having a conversation about Renoir’s The Golden Coach [1952]. Truffaut was of the opinion that you could only do history in the studio, you couldn’t show any sky, because the sky is always the sky of today. Renoir disagreed. In his view, you had to use both the studio and the sky, as in the historical and the present. If you pretend that the film was only about the past with no relation to our present time, then the film itself would be a lie. And I thought I actually agree with Renoir, which is why in Barbara, you see lots of sky, lots of wind, and lots of colour. But there was another aspect that was important to me in that regard: I watched Chinatown [1974] again because it’s a historical film and I kept wondering why the Los Angeles of the 1930s that is recreated in the film never feels like a German historical film, for example. I realised that it is because of the different aggregate states at play such as heat, drought, and male and female sweat, and I think all this is linked together. Or, take Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons [1971], he also managed to create a sense of the historical atmosphere with very little means, but still to great effect. It’s almost like a childhood memory, like with Proust, you smell something and history begins to unfold. The only other option would have been to go with Bresson, cool and distanced. Those were the two options I considered and, ultimately, I decided to go with The Merchant of Four Seasons.
Looking at your previous films, they seem to be strongly informed by the fundamental cracks in German society.
I find it very difficult to think about why this is, but it seems obvious that I am interested in people who don’t feel comfortable in their skin. I believe a lot of it has to do with the fact that my parents fled the GDR and when we first got to West Germany I spent quite some time in transitional housing and never got the feeling that I arrived anywhere properly. I always felt more like an outsider myself, whereas my parents desperately tried to adapt to their new surroundings but, at the same time, it made them become even more estranged. All these are themes that worry me in a way but I think that, one day, I’ll just pay for a psychoanalyst to get to the bottom of it all (laughs). That said, my next film also follows a similar line – I just can’t help it.
Can you tell us a little bit more about your new film?
It’s set in Berlin in 1945, so it’s a historical film again. In short, it’s about a woman who survived Auschwitz and she now wants her life back.
Do you feel you had to go through different steps in your career before you could approach that part of German history?
No, it was not quite like that. The story almost fell in my hands in a way. My long-term co-author Harun Farocki and I read a crime novel from 1946 which had a similar plot line. That was about two or three years ago and for some reason it stuck with me. But it’s true that, back then, it didn’t feel like the right thing to do. A Jewish woman, Berlin, the Holocaust, it felt too charged, too close to me then.
How do you explain your particular interest in female characters?
Good question. To answer that, I probably have to go through at least 10 years of psychotherapy (laughs). No, honestly, I think some filmmakers have a preference for male characters and then there are others, who are more interested in female characters. David Lynch, for example, is a ‘women director’ in that way, and John Ford is a ‘male director’. That doesn’t mean that one is better than the other, it’s just how you project yourself into the world. And the way I look at women in my films is not like a pure Hitchcockian look, where the woman functions as an erotic object for the desiring look of the male. I am not fetishising anything. Especially with Nina, it’s more like there is someone whom I don’t know and who I can’t be, who is something completely strange to me. It’s like these female characters are somehow caught in a different world, like in exile, and they’re trying to get back in touch with the world I live in, the world we all live in. On the other hand, with my camera I am somewhat in exile too, and from there I keep trying to get to the core of the story. This is how it all correlates.
Nina Hoss has said elsewhere that she would love to make a comedy with you one day. Can you imagine yourself doing that too?
Of course Nina said that, because she is great in comedies (laughs). And I would love to make a comedy too. But it’s incredibly difficult to make a really good comedy and so I keep putting it off just as I keep putting off to quit smoking. I guess I am just not ready for it yet.
Cast: Jason Patric, Isabella Rossellini, Udo Kier, Kevin McDonald
Canada 2011
94 mins
Keyhole is Guy Maddin’s latest and by far most ambitious film to date. Trying, as usual, to make sense of the memories and feelings from the past that haunt him day and night, Maddin this time has crafted a heady amalgam of sinister black and white 40s noir-gangster flick, Homer’s Odyssey (loosely adapted), Hollywood melodrama and haunted ghost story. Like all of Maddin’s work, it’s a perfectly twisted, dark, dreamlike cinematic encounter that stays in the back of your mind long after you have re-entered reality.
Pamela Jahn met with Guy Maddin at the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival in February to talk about dreams, light switches and wolf heads, the importance of giving movies a second chance and the horror of watching your own films with an audience.
PJ: Let’s start with the obvious: do you actually believe in ghosts?
GM: It’s funny, I don’t believe in ghosts at all and I am not scared of the dark or things like that until I hold a movie camera in my hand. Then I believe in ghosts. Maybe there is some sort of natural selection at work but it’s just so convenient to believe in ghosts when you are a filmmaker, either as a metaphor or a way to get your sense of a story airborne, or even just to make yourself suspend disbelief. It’s all sorts of things, but the truth is, when movies are working well people start believing in things they wouldn’t normally believe in. So I am quite comfortable with that little camera-generated adhocracy. It’s just like when you’re a little kid and your grandmother is telling you a bedtime story. There are all sorts of things at play, and at least for the time being you believe in what she’s telling you. And it feels pretty good. But on the other hand, I feel very haunted all the time. Maybe I am far more than average a backward peering guy.
What are you haunted by?
Well, we all live in the past and the present simultaneously, but for some reason the past seems to have a stronger demand on my emotions than on most people’s. Sometimes I’m haunted just by the way things once were and by a longing that they could be that way again. But it’s also quite simple in the way that I’m haunted by a love that is gone. Don’t get me wrong, I like these hauntings. I have a dream life that is cramped with sadness for some reason. I don’t get nightmares, instead I get these kind of emotional injections. But I like them in the same way people like, say, listening to Billy Holiday.
What happens in your dreams?
I see people and places. Places are very important to me, especially homes that I once lived in and which really mattered to me. Or people that have already gone reappear with a vibrancy of recollection that I can’t master while I am awake. But I like these experiences. It is my way of keeping these old relationships alive. I even got to know my father better in my dreams. He is a much nicer man now and we agree a lot more on things. I remember I had a girlfriend once who had a very ‘New Agey’ attitude towards it and one day she told me: ‘You really shouldn’t be dwelling on this stuff. Next time someone reappears from the past in one of your dreams, just tell them you love them but that it’s time for them to go. So you can say goodbye to them and then they won’t reappear in your dreams anymore.’ Basically, after that, we just broke up.
What is the strongest memory you have had that found its way into the film?
That’s an interesting question because I haven’t had the courage to assess what insistent memory made it all the way to the final cut… I’m not sure. There are a couple of little mentions of things. For example, when Jason Patric, who plays the father in the film, enters a room – even though he is not sure who he is or whether or not he is alive – it’s just the fact that his hand knows exactly where the light switch is. I had a few very uncanny dreams about that in the past. I normally have no control over my dreams otherwise I would just stay in bed all the time, dreaming. But I had one or two dream experiences in my life where I could literally stay in a dream on purpose. I found myself in my childhood home, which for some reason I miss very badly. About four or five years ago I think, I stopped dreaming less and less about people and more about architecture, precisely, the architecture of an empty home. Sometimes there seem to be people present in the next room or so, but it is mostly architecture.
I had one dream where I was just in my old bedroom and I opened up my drawer, and that’s a scene that made it into the film, where I could actually see everything exactly the way it was in 1968. And it wasn’t me bullshitting myself, it really wasn’t uncanny. I remember looking into the drawer and seeing a razor and a pencil sharpener and a little ink pot that I hadn’t thought of for some 40- odd years. Things that I had forgotten all about were in that drawer. Then I decided to look up from the drawer because I couldn’t exactly remember what was on my shelves. When I looked up, I saw exactly what was there, and I started walking around in the room and I could remember where the light switches were and what the plastic plates around the light switches looked like. I do remember that, as a kid, I knew exactly were all the light switches where. At certain doors there were on your left and at other doors they were on your right when you entered the room. Sometimes you had to switch the switch upwards or you had to remember to switch it downwards. It took me many years to figure that out, lots of trial and error, but in my dream it was all clear. Then it became an issue not worth remembering at all because the house was sold. But in this dream it all came back.
I have heard that you don’t really forget anything and that your brain is full of all the memories you’ve ever had. It’s just a matter of accessing them. I had a similar dream that was not as good but where I could access everything as well and it felt like maybe I was dead. It felt like I was literally haunting. At first I was thinking: ‘Jesus, I’m haunted by this house.’ But then I realised it felt more like I was the one haunting the house, because there was no one in it except for me wandering around, trying light switches and looking in drawers. And while I don’t believe in ghosts it gave me gooseflesh to think that maybe in those moments I am just a ghost myself. Since we all live in the past and the present simultaneously, maybe I was living in the future as well, I don’t know.
Do you wake up and make notes immediately after you’ve had a dream like this?
I do find that if you write a dream down afterwards you will remember it forever, but if you don’t, you sort of forget it. But that one was so vibrant that I couldn’t forget it anyway. It hasn’t all stayed with me though. But then I arranged for a visit inside my old childhood home, and a lot of the light switches were still there. Also, I had my own bathroom as a boy, and there was a little chip in the plaster above the heating that you could only see when sitting on the toilet. You could see this little dent, someone had put some scotch tape over it and then painted it but, to me, it looked like a wolf’s head. That was the first thing I checked when this guy gave me permission to look through the house. I went straight to my old bathroom to see if the wolf’s head was still there, because I also had a couple of dreams about it and I was very worried that someone had chipped it off or fixed it but, luckily, it was still there. After that visit, I often wondered whether the guy who bought the house maybe also sees a wolf’s head in the tape, or if he sees something else because his childhood was so different to mine. He is exactly the same age, a My Lai survivor. So, when I was 12 years old and looking at Playboy magazines in my bathroom, he was in My Lai going through horrible things. Now he sleeps in my bedroom and I often wonder what he’s haunted by. It must be the most unhealthy way of planning one’s future, but if I ever get enough money, I would just buy the house back from him, or live with him. It’s a big house. And I love my childhood, so it would be a way to sort of slide back with perfect symmetry into my second childhood.
Keyhole is more than just a childhood memory though. There are many different elements coming together, and critics have talked about your films before as being impossible to grasp and to classify. Do you like that idea, or do you sometimes feel disappointed that audiences and critics don’t get what you are trying to do or say?
I always thought that it was great when people told me that my films are impossible to put in a drawer. So I’d say: ‘Oh, thank you’, and they’d respond: ‘No, that’s terrible. You would be doing yourself a big favour if you worked in a genre.’ And then they’d tell me I should work in science fiction, a genre I don’t find much of a connection with for some reason, even though it has so much potential. To some extent, science fiction and horror seem so close together as an element of fantasy. But I still like my horror films scary yet slightly allegorical to a degree where I’m not sure whether I can figure out the allegory. If I can’t figure it out, that’s even better. But it has to be rooted in something that we all feel, whether we believe in saucers or vampires or not. We all feel those things but they are dressed up in the horror genre garb. I like that.
Lately I’ve been trying to work in genres a little bit as well. I accidentally worked in genre, or more a hybrid genre, in 2002, when I accepted a commission to make a ballet version of Dracula. I was shocked, because it was originally just made for Canadian television broadcast and then it ended up getting a theatrical release. Then I realised that this genre advice was actually pretty good advice, because I think what enabled people to go and see this movie was the fact that they knew exactly what they would be getting. It’s Dracula and ballet, it’s two genres but at least it’s only two and you could see how they fused together. I think it gave people a point of reference from which to approach it. And it just made it easier on the picture and on myself that the public could figure out what it was.
With Keyhole, I thought again I would make a kind of hybrid genre film where gangsters meet ghosts. A bit like cowboys meet aliens, something you understand right away! But I’m actually not very comfortable with the gangster genre, because gangsters have guns and I didn’t want the script to get bogged down with all the technicalities involved with this, things like who is carrying a gun and who is not, and fill it all up with a lot of gun shots. I just wanted a story about gangsters. the protagonist’s father should be a gangster, some sort of alpha male hero that a boy could admire in the same way that Homer’s Ulysses is a soldier and a hero. I am not even sure why I picked a gangster, I just wanted something that looked right in black and white for my one last fling, or love affair, with black and white before I move on and try to challenge myself to colour.
Given the positive audience reactions it seems to have worked fine. In fact, Keyhole has been described as your most accessible film to date.
I think that when I set out to make Keyhole I wanted it to turn out a little more accessible. I was enjoying the fact that for various reasons my last two pictures have been increasingly accessible. I am used to really low ratio shows, like down to zero. But still, I do want to reach people with my movies, though maybe just more like an author wants to reach an audience rather than a member of the film industry who needs to reach people to be able to make another movie. But I do want to reach them, because I love the feeling of understanding how an audience feels when they are watching a movie. I was forced to watch My Winnipeg and Brand upon the Brain many times because I was narrating the films behind the stage, and I really began to feel more like a showman than a filmmaker, which was nice, so I’ve tried to keep that attitude going while making movies. That said, in a way, I never felt closer to a conventional filmmaker than when I was making Keyhole.
What inspired you to base the film on Homer’s Odyssey?
To be honest, that story was just an excuse for a structure and I am glad I found one that really fit in well with what I was trying to say. I was looking for any sort of narrative, because I’m not quite formal and crazy enough to make a movie about an empty house without any characters in it. So, I knew I wanted it to have a plot and certain characters and things that matter, even though my dreams are mostly about little objects. But those little tokens and objects and wolf’s heads, they all matter because they have soaked up a lot of people before they became precious to me.
At one point, I was tempted to use a plot structure suggested by Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea. It’s also an unrealised film by Leni Riefenstahl: just a couple of gangs holed up in a house fighting and then a gang of Amazonians come in and start hysterically tearing both fighting parties to shreds. But then I realised that what initially seemed a good excuse to explore every piece and corner of the house with all that war and fighting going on would probably just get derailed into gender politics in the end, so themes that I am nowhere near qualified to explore – at least not yet. I think I’ll wait until I’m a veteran of another war before touching on that.
Instead, I tried to concentrate on what really matters to me about the home, and maybe I also tried to sum up what I hope is the first half of my filmmaking career, and I realised that The Odyssey had a lot to do with my dream life. For instance, my very first movie was a short film about my father who had died, but actually in my dreams he hadn’t died. In my dreams, he just went off to live with a better family. He would come home almost every night just to get his razor or pick up some glass eye that he had forgotten, and every time I had about one minute to convince him that our family loved him and really missed him and that he should stay. But he never did stay. Nevertheless, they were still wonderful dreams because I got to hear his voice, a voice I couldn’t remember properly. And those dreams generally left me with a slowly dissipating pleasurable feeling until lunchtime and then a dream might return later that night or in a week or so. The years went by and, one day, I read Homer’s Odyssey and realised that it was just that dead father dream. It’s the ultimate ‘dead-beat-dad’ story, and I came to the conclusion that this is the story I should use for my storyboard structure. I like using a very durable structure and then abusing it as much as possible by overburdening it with my own concerns and seeing how much of it can survive.
Is it easier for you to develop your own story if you base it on a work of literature or a play?
Yes, if I just use it as a framework. For example, Cowards Bend the Knee is very loosely based on Electra, but totally debased from Euripides. I even changed a brother of Electra into a boyfriend. What I mean is that I am willing to change things so that it is all already psychologically a different thing all together but, on the other hand, it’s good to know that it is a pretty sturdy structure of a centuries-old story and still reads like something that has happened to me yesterday. So, yes, I am happy to make adaptations, I just happen to make them of ancient texts and in such a surreal way that no one can complain that I have messed with the original shape of the text.
Do you sometimes feel that, as a filmmaker, you’d have been better off living in the early days of cinema?
Naturally I went through a real biologically driven love affair with the 1920s when I was in my twenties and thirties and felt I needed to sexually possess the decade. But now I just think it looks nice. I have mellowed out about it, and I am happy not to be considered an impersonator, that I am not doing complete adaptations, that my editing style is different and that I am using digital tools. I am happy to eventually having graduated from being a false pioneer to a real pioneer.
What is also very unique about your films is that you seem to use music and film as interrelated languages. Is that something you do deliberately, or is this a natural process for you while making the film?
No, it is actually a goal of mine to shoot a film where I write the script and have the score written at the same time. That would be ideal. I had the chance to do this once on a short film called Glorious that I used as a rough sketch for Keyhole, because it is also a gangster story. The Netherlands-based British composer Richard Ayers and I worked on this by writing the script and writing the music back and forth in a series of emails and that was really amazing. Generally, most composers are given a somewhat flawed movie and then it is up to them to kind of fluff up scenes that are somewhat sagging, or they are supposed to really underscore something that needs building up. Famously, even with Vertigo, although that’s not flawed of course, Hitchcock apparently said to Bernhard Hermann: ‘Reel four especially needs your help’, or something like that.
But actually I think music and imagery are working together in a more occult way. It’s something that mystifies me and no amount of thinking about it can get me closer to an answer. I often have a piece of music in mind for a scene, but almost never does that piece of music fit in the end. I remember when I was making Archangel, I had special music picked out for certain scenes and when I got to edit the film it didn’t work at all. So, I tried switching scenes around, because I had it on magnetic tape and didn’t feel like recording new music altogether. But when I switched the scenes, the music I had picked before worked in exactly the different scenes that I had originally intended it for. I even thought that they worked very nicely, so I kept it like that. That’s when I realised that it really is witchcraft how these things work. But again, it is and it isn’t, because composers know how to create such visual sounds.
Thank you for mentioning music. It had been a long-term goal of mine to get people to trust their feelings about film as much as they do about music. When you listen to music you either like it or you don’t but, mostly, you don’t even know why, you are just letting yourself go. But when people are watching movies they get nervous if they don’t quite understand something. Even if they are enjoying it, they don’t know why, so a lot of them are shutting down saying: ‘I don’t get it, I don’t get it’, because they can’t just let go. But with music it seems so natural and I just wish we could all watch movies the same way we listen to music. So I try to fuse the two together as much as possible in my films, just in a desperate hope that somewhere along the line they take up and weld themselves in some sort of occult union and really work in ways that no one can explain.
It also seems more difficult to give films a second chance in the same way that you would listen to a song again until you get used to it and, eventually, you start liking it.
Yeah, absolutely. I have given some films a second chance. For example, the first time I saw L’Atalante, which is now one of my favourite films, I think I expected it to be a bit more like a Buñuel picture. I wanted it to be more surrealist and so I was disappointed in it the first time round. And then it just stayed with me, submerged in my memory for about five years until I found myself thinking more and more about it. And when I watched it again I fell totally in love with it. I think that’s the way we know it works with music, for example, when your favourite artist puts out a new album and you resist it first, but next thing you know, you realise that you have to put that thing back on and listen to it again. For some reason, it is just easier to do so with music than it is with movies.
Do you go back to your own films a lot?
No, not much, not if I can avoid it. I remember reading in Buñuel’s biography that he only watched his films once and then he knew what they were like and he never watched them again. At first, I didn’t believe him, partly because he was such a fantastic liar, but now I can understand him better, because I really don’t need the agony of watching my films with an audience more than once.
Why is it so horrible?
Because when you watch your films with an audience, you can poke your ear drums out and still sense the audience reaction. It’s just the fact that you know the audience is there and you can no longer kid yourself and tell yourself that it will all be OK. Instead, total objectivity is brought to you by the presence of an audience and, trust me, one experience like that per movie is enough. You give yourself a report card and it’s written in indelible ink, so you don’t have to go back again and again.
Do you dream about your films before, while or after making them?
Sometimes I do. A couple of times I have had dreams while making a movie in that I see myself watching it and it is obviously way better than in reality. But luckily, on some occasions, I had these dreams in time that I have actually been able to add things to the movie and improve it slightly. But that’s happened less than 10 times in my whole life, and if I dream about my movies then it’s almost always that they look better in my dream. So, when I wake up I mostly regret that I didn’t think to make those scenes.
You said elsewhere that you felt Careful was the only film that turned out exactly the way you wanted it to be. Is Keyhole coming close now though?
I think I have also come close with shorter film, for example, my short Heart of the World turned out to be exactly the way I planned. But, of course, with longer films that is less likely to happen. I think with Keyhole I did get the feelings right and also the levels of confusion which I was willing to have anywhere between perfect clarity and complete abstraction. But I also do care about Keyhole a lot for another reason, not even so much because of the dreams but because of the conversations I had with my mother about some of the years I drew my inspiration from for this movie. I have to say, my mother has got a kind of really sweet grade of dementia right now. She has become this lovely, sweet and agreeable old lady but she just told me the most brutally frank anecdotes about my family and my childhood, stories I had never ever heard of before. She has filled me with enough stuff that would have fit into the Keyhole universe to make another movie all together. I won’t do that though, I am leaving that subject behind now. But, God, it’s killing me that I didn’t get my mum to open up just half a year earlier. The movie could have been so much better. I mean, I don’t think anyone else would have noticed it, or people would have liked it more, but it just would have meant more to me. I think I would have managed to get my whole family in one piece in that house.
Do you feel that now that you have made Keyhole and that it turned out the way you wanted it to be you can eventually put your childhood memories to rest and move on?
Oh no! Thank God no! I don’t want my memories to rest, because I like them way too much. I won’t let that happen. Never!
The heavy rain that poured on the 65th edition of the Cannes International Film Festival might have put a damper on some of the beach parties and special anniversary celebrations, but the programme was strong, with much love and death at its heart, some welcome oddities and two certifiable masterpieces. One was Michael Haneke’s formidable Love (Amour), which eventually took home the Palme d’Dor while the other, Leos Carax’s original and brilliantly elusive Holy Motors came away empty-handed – a decision that left many critics baffled.
Compared to Haneke’s earlier works, Love stands out for its astounding sensitivity and subtle tenderness, but ultimately, the story, which centres around 80-odd-year-old retired music teachers George and Anne, is no less hard-hitting. As the couple are faced with Anne’s physical and mental deterioration after two successive strokes, the film scrutinizes, in a profoundly intelligent and unsettling way, the consequences of life and death, and the role that long-standing love plays when one half of an ageing couple is facing the end. As one would expect from a filmmaker as precise and skilful as Haneke, Love is finely scripted, superbly composed, and often hauntingly beautiful and desperately sad. The quiet grandeur of the film, however, would be lost without its two main actors: Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant, whose astonishing, disarmingly honest performances breathe life into Haneke’s formal perfection in capturing the realities of terminal illness in meticulous detail. In fact, for the first time in his career, Haneke, the grand puppet master, seems to have dropped his strings: with a troubling and omnipresent sense of inevitability, his method here is not to masterly lead his characters into gloom and hopelessness, but to follow the couple through their spacious Paris apartment with the utmost trust and delicacy, without a trace of pathos or sentimentality. Crafted with passionate conviction and a mastery of film language, Love is that rare work of genius: an acute philosophical inquiry that’s highly emotionally charged, but also dramatically gripping, incredibly discreet and utterly credible in its depiction of human behaviour.
Despite the resemblance in title, and the fact that both directors come from the same country, Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise: Love (Paradies: Liebe) couldn’t be more different. In Seidl’s film, which marks the first instalment of his Paradise triptych (the second part, Hope, is premiering in competition in Venice later this year), Margarethe Tiesel stars as Teresa, a chubby single mother in her fifties, whose desperate search for love and affection turns increasingly wolfish when she steps out of her hotel room at a luxury holiday resort in Kenya, where her friend has assured her that sex is plentiful. At first reluctant to have sex with one of the many underage beach boys on offer, she soon can’t help but give in to temptation. However, not unlike Haneke, Seidl slightly tones down the brutal rigidity of his earlier work as he moves into warmer territory, both climatically and emotionally – for many, a welcome relief that nonetheless doesn’t prevent the film from being yet another of the Austrian provocateur’s apt, poignant and fiercely honest explorations of the incorrigibly odd and debauched side of society.
As the festival, and the rain, continued, more films emerged that concerned themselves with the joys and sorrows of love. In this context, the more accessible approach offered by Miike Takashi’s For Love’s Sake (Ai To Makoto) turned out to be mildly entertaining. Based on Ikki Kajiwara and Takumi Nagayasu’s 1970s cult manga The Legend of Love and Sincerity, Miike’s revitalised screen version blithely mixes exuberant action, daft comedy, narrative-framing animé sequences and tongue-in-cheek high school musical scenes galore, as it follows the boisterous romance between the rebellious Makoto (Satoshi Tsumabuki) and innocent student Ai (Takei Emi), their chemistry at moments exploding like pop-art fireworks against a burning sky. For Love’s Sake certainly has style and ambition to spare, but a flawed script and overlong execution leave it somewhat unfulfilling. Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s Japanese venture Like Someone in Love was equally too flat and overlong. More interested in its Tokyo environment than in anything else, it was too plodding and self-regarding to be charming. The film tells the story of a brief encounter between elderly professor Takashi (Tadashi Okuno) and young, erratic, part-time call-girl Akiko (Rin Takanashi), who in turn is the object of desire of clinging, jealous Noriaki (Ryo Kase). Perhaps a more rigorous editor than Kiarostami’s son Bahman could have disposed of the protracted dialogue sequences, and made the few great scenes and ideas cohere into a deeper narrative. But whereas Kiarostami’s best films keep haunting, nagging and daring you to think about them long after watching them, this one is instantly forgettable.
The Directors’ Fortnight offered a first glimpse of the smaller-scale cinematic pleasures on show with Pablo Larraín’s No. Gael García Bernal plays an ambitious, young Chilean advertising man who is asked to help create a persuasive campaign for the anti-Pinochet ‘No’ vote in the 1988 national plebiscite, which ultimately ended the military dictatorship that had ruled the country for 16 years. Not as dark, and much less surreal and distinctive in style than Larraín’s previous work revolving around the repressive Pinochet regime, No is an extremely watchable lesson in historically and politically charged filmmaking.
The other stand-out in the Director’s Fortnight was a documentary exploring the inner meanings of a horror classic that was shot over 20 years ago, namely Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Brimming with clips from the original film and enriched with footage from the shoot, as well as detailed sketches and maps that reveal the architectural layout of the notorious Timberline Lodge, Rodney Ascher’s intriguing and lovingly constructed Room 237 does a brilliant job of staging the mind-boggling and often hilarious interpretations of the film’s subtext, offered by various narrators. Ascher never dismisses any of the outlandish arguments (for example, those concerning Kubrick’s involvement in the ‘faked’ Apollo 11 moon-landing footage) or takes the side of the more plausible ones. It’s a special treat for film fans (not only those of Kubrick’s film or the horror genre as such), and the perfect excuse to re-watch The Shining again for the umpteenth time.
Without doubt, however, the most polarising and excitedly discussed film of the festival – and my personal highlight – was Holy Motors, Leos Carax’s comeback film after over a decade of failed projects and aborted dreams. Some of these might even have found their way into this story of an actor at work and a man challenged by, as Carax put it, ‘the experience of being alive’. Played by Denis Lavant, Monsieur Oscar is chauffeured through the nocturnal streets of Paris in a white stretch limo by his assistant Celine (Edith Scob), rushing from one mini-acting job to the next. Each of them requires him to read a script and change his look entirely using the pre-selected outfits that he finds carefully prepared for him in the fully equipped dressing room that is the back of his car. Some of the episodes – in particular, when Lavant becomes an old man on his deathbed; or as he squeezes into a slick, black Lycra suit to act in an erotic motion-capture scene together with another performer – are brilliant. Others, like the sequence in which he turns into the Monsieur Merde (from Carax’s segment in the 2008 anthology film Tokyo) and kidnaps Eva Mendes at a fashion photo shoot, are just goofy. In all, however, the sundry characters burst with imagination, personality and drama. Carax knows that mixing cinema and reality can be a dangerous game, but in Holy Motors, life seems way too short to waste time with conventions. It is the kind of film Cannes should be celebrating. It’s a delightful oddity, a dazzling and daring labour of love that reawakens faith in – and appreciation for – cinema, and the art of acting. In fact, that alone would have made it worthy of an award.
Holy Motors is released in UK cinemas on 28 September 2012 by Artificial Eye.
After last year’s hit-and-miss transition, the 66th edition offered an impressive bounty of excellent films. David Cairns, Pamela Jahn and Virginie Sélavy report on their festival highlights.
Chapiteau-Show
This delirious, absurdist three-hour-long Russian film set in a Crimean seaside resort revolves around four intersecting stories: a pretty, lively young girl goes on holiday with a socially-challenged, grumpy, chubby geek she met online; a deaf-dumb singer leaves his deaf-dumb friends behind to join a troupe of street performers; an ageing famous actor takes his estranged son on a trip; a hapless Warhol-inspired music producer tries to make a star of a Russian Elvis lookalike.
The narrative is pleasurably intricate and brilliantly constructed, with characters, scenes and themes recurring from different viewpoints. In each story, a character is taken out of their usual environment and placed in a new one in which they are uncomfortable: the film treats the difficulty of going out into the world and creating relationships light-heartedly and with offbeat humour, and pokes gentle fun at people’s self-importance and thwarted ambitions.
The stories are interspersed with musical interludes and they all converge into the final show taking place in a mysterious circus tent set up at the resort: for the filmmakers, as for the troupe of street interventionists who provide anarchic fun throughout, life is a permanent spectacle of small dramas and surreal ordinariness. VS
Berberian Sound Studio
Berberian Sound Studio is the latest from Peter Strickland, whose Katalin Varga combined horror genre and art-house tropes to considerable acclaim. Here Toby Jones plays a put-upon sound mixer at work on the audio tracks of a nasty giallo-type horror film, his personality disintegrating under a barrage of bullying from his bosses. Rather than having life imitate art, the violence of the film-within-the-film infecting ‘reality’, Strickland keeps the movie bloodless and focuses on the psychological disintegration of his hapless protagonist. This is an even more relentlessly interior film than Polanski’s apartment horrors Repulsion and The Tenant, confined to a couple of rooms and a corridor, and to Jones’s fragmented point of view. Strickland’s throbbing analogue soundscapes and fetishistic ECUs of decaying vegetables and shiny audio knobs combine to create a hypnotic film that’s more melancholy than scary. His evident love of Italian horror has paradoxically produced a film that’s quite the obverse of the savage cinema of Argento and friends. DC
Berberian Sound Studio is released in UK cinemas on 31 August. Look out for our interview feature with Peter Strickland.
The Imposter
By far one of the most bizarre and excitedly discussed true-life stories to be revealed on screen recently is told in Bart Layton’s The Imposter. It’s the story of Nicholas Barclay, who, in 1994, went missing from his home in San Antonio, Texas, and, to everyone’s surprise, was found in Spain three years later – or at least it seemed that way, despite the fact that the blond, blue-eyed, 13-year-old American suddenly had brown eyes, dark stubble and a French accent. The Imposter is the story of a 23-year-old drifter who pretended to be Nicholas Barclay, in the hope of finding a new home and the family he never had. Mixing dramatic re-enactments, interviews and archival footage to detail the key events of the baffling case, from the moment the interloper hatched his plan up to the point when the identity of the man known as ‘The Chameleon’ was revealed, Layton has crafted a gripping, powerful and eye-opening documentary that surpasses many wannabe fiction thrillers produced in recent years. PJ
The Imposter is released in UK cinemas on 24 August. Look out for our full review.
Sun Don’t Shine
This dark, poetic American indie road movie was one of the great surprises of the festival. Crystal (Kate Lyn Sheil) and Leo (Kentucker Audley) are young lovers on the run in humid, summery Florida. They are getting away from a dark secret in their past, the nature of which is only very slowly revealed. Crystal is instinctive, impulsive and sensual; she simply reacts to what happens around her. Leo is calm and tries to organise their chaotic lives, as much as he can. Elliptical, hazy and dreamy, the film tells their story in an impressionistic way, through small gestures, looks and atmospheres as well as contrasting juxtapositions – between what we see on screen and what the voice-overs tell us, or in a sequence intercutting a scene of almost childish innocence with one of inevitable violence. Despite the obvious influence of Badlands (1973), Sun Don’t Shine creates its own world and the dynamic of Crystal and Leo’s relationship develops according to its own fatal logic, making this impressive debut mesmerising to the end. VS
Brake
Brake
Brake, directed by Gabe Torres, offered a largely enjoyable, adrenaline-charged thrill ride that at first seemed reminiscent of Rodrigo Cortés’s Buried, but ultimately didn’t live up to its promise. Stephen Dorff gives a ferocious performance as Secret Service agent Jeremy Reins, who finds himself confined in a plastic box in the trunk of a moving car, with no memory of what happened and how he got there. From that point on, his time is running out, inescapably controlled by the terrorists who have taken him captive as part of their mission to assassinate the president. The set-up follows all the rules of an asphyxiating, claustrophobic thriller, with absurd but compelling plot twists coming fast and furious along the way. But Brake inevitably loses momentum in the last 20 minutes of the film, when the story becomes all too ridiculous, phasing out in an unnecessarily wound-up twister of an ending that beggars belief. PJ
Brake is out on Blu-ray in the UK.
Demain?
Demain? is the work of Christine Laurent, long time script collaborator of Jacques Rivette (e.g. La Belle Noiseuse, 1991). It’s far from a conventional biopic, but it does cover part of the short life of Uruguyan poet Delmira Agustini. The film seems bathed in summer light, and moves in either floating, dreamy fashion or more vigorous bursts of energy: Laurent’s style can be abruptly playful when you least expect it. Like Shinji Somai (see below), she has a feeling for adolescent yearnings and explosions of passion, and blurs the line between reality and dream without making a manifesto out of it. DC
Tabu
Breaking classic genre conventions in the most apt and eloquent way, while consistently subverting them with bold narrative choices and a beautifully dreamlike visual style, Miguel Gomes’s Tabu turned out to be the special treat of the festival. In his third feature, the Portuguese director combines the story of an impossible love affair with a quirkily surreal, poetic view of colonial history. The film is formally divided into two different narrative parts – one set in contemporary Lisbon, the other in Mozambique in the late 1960s – but revolves around one central heroine: the elderly Aurora (Laura Soveral), a compulsive gambler with a mysterious past. The prologue, which in itself offers another superb small film within a film, captures the caustic politics that make Tabu such a unique and compelling cinematic experience. PJ
Tabu is released in UK cinemas on 7 September. Look out for our full review.
The Ambassador
Think you know about neo-colonial corruption in Africa? Think again. Yes, we’ve all heard about blood diamonds, dodgy politicians and the involvement of Western countries. But in his jaw-dropping documentary, Danish provocateur Mads Brügger reveals the cynical extent of the dangerous political and economic games played. To do this, he buys a Liberian diplomatic assignment to the Central African Republic and attempts to organise a diamond-smuggling operation, setting up a match factory employing Pygmies to cover up his real activities. Astoundingly brave/reckless, Brügger arrives in CAR in stereotypical colonial attire, complete with white suite and permanent cigar. As he reveals the mind-bending ramifications of corruption in the country – including the brutal, ruthless manoeuvring of France to control CAR’s resources, particularly shocking in contrast to their official discourse – his situation as a ‘freelance diplomat’ becomes more and more precarious and it becomes clear that the people he is trying to manipulate are playing their own game. And yet, despite the perils of the situation he has engineered, to his credit and unlike many shock reporters, Brügger never once comments on how much danger he is in. With a great sense of the absurd, he takes his set-up as far as he can, exposing the appalling farce of corruption that plagues Africa. VS
Love Hotel (Shinji Somai)
Shinji Somai
The Shinji Somai retrospective unearthed a filmmaker almost wholly unknown in the West, a distinctive personal voice whose short career spanned both commercial genre works (especially teen movies) and purely personal dramas, with a visual style based around stunning long takes and a love of fireworks, water and rain. There’s also a mysterious mythological or supernatural quality, which bleeds through even in quite realistic stories. A perfect fit for a complete retrospective, Somai’s cinema can encompass both The Catch (1983), a largely, even grittily realistic drama about tuna fishermen, and Luminous Woman (1987), which seems to combine the most operatic elements of Fassbinder, Fellini and even Tarkovsky. It also feels like Somai somehow blended One from the Heart and Diva and made it work. Apart from these strikingly different extremes, the retrospective included Somai’s masterpieces Typhoon Club (1985), Moving (1993) and The Friends (1994). Heady stuff. DC
Gregory La Cava
Gregory La Cava is better known than Somai, but his films are rarely gathered in one place. The festival screened six, ranging from the bittersweet comedy drama Unfinished Business (1941), which attains depths of emotion and maturity startling in its genre, and the knockabout romantic farce Feel My Pulse (1928), which eschews such niceties altogether – but its rollicking inventiveness had more than one audience member declaring it the highlight of the Fest. Both films touch on the subject of alcoholism, which blighted La Cava’s life but also informed much of his art. DC
Festival report by David Cairns, Pamela Jahn and Virginie Sélavy
A Deviant View of Cinema – Features, Essays & Interviews
