Writers: Johanna Sinisalo, Jarmo Puskala, Michael Kalesniko
Cast: Julia Dietze, Peta Sergeant, Udo Kier
Finland/Germany/Australia 2012
93 mins
Partly financed through fan crowd-funding, which offered supporters a chance to help not only producing the film but developing the plot, Timo Vuorensola’s eagerly awaited Iron Sky is an overwrought and unashamedly daft symbiosis of tongue-in-cheek sci-fi lunacy and old-school guerrilla filmmaking. It’s a film about a bunch of Nazi punks in outer space who, just before the end of the Second World War, managed to build a space station on the dark side of the moon. The action starts in 2018 when an African-American astronaut discovers the swastika bastion led by a Führer called Kortzfleisch (Udo Kier – who else?). Kortzfleisch leads an attack on Earth with an army of steel-armoured zeppelins, which ultimately causes a new war between world leaders. The film requires a reasonable amount of good will to get past the daft jokes, but the few sparks of true brilliance make Iron Sky a joyful B-movie space odyssey.
Pamela Jahn met with Udo Kier at the 2012 Berlin International Film Festival to talk about his career, the art of dying on screen and playing the game of truth.
Pamela Jahn: Your career started off in 1968 in London. How did that come about?
Udo Kier: I lived in London because I went to school there. I was a young, photogenic actor and after a small part in a short film called Road to St Tropez I was hired by William Morris, one of the biggest American talent agencies, who also had a branch in Germany. Soon after that, in 1968, I was cast in a black and white film called Shameless, directed by Eddy Saller, in which I played the lead role, the boss of the Vienna underground. The next film right after that, Mark of the Devil, became a cult film classic. And that was it. I knew I wanted to be an actor, and here I am.
Almost 45 years later your filmography counts about 200 titles. You’ve shot seven films in the last 12 months. What drives you to work so much after so many years?
Each of these seven projects was interesting to me for different reasons, so I wanted to do them all. For example, if a director like Oliver Hirschbiegel, whose work I greatly admire, asks me to play the pope, or if Lars von Trier asks me to play the wedding planner in Melancholia, or if I am asked to play a Nazi leader on the moon, or to be part of a Fatih Akin production in China, of course I won’t say no. I admit it would have been nice to have a bit more time in between the shootings, but it actually worked out quite well in the end. I started off in China, then went to Canada to shoot Keyhole with Guy Maddin, moving on to Copenhagen, then worked on a Turkish film playing Bela Bartok, from Turkey went on to Prague to star as the pope with Hirschbiegel, then went to Frankfurt to do the Nazi leader, spent Christmas back home, and from there went to Australia to finish Iron Sky.
How do you choose your projects?
The director is very important. If it is a director who I know and whose work I value, then in most cases I do it. I am much more careful though when it comes to young unknown directors. But, for example, I’m now going to Paris with Guy Maddin to shoot 100 short films, and I’m really looking forward to this. We already started while we were working on Keyhole. In the morning I would play a Russian tsar, at lunch time the German emperor and in the evening a drunk sailor trying to teach a gorilla how to do maths. For an actor, this is the best practice you can get.
What attracted you to the part of Kortzfleisch in Iron Sky?
The idea of playing a Nazi leader on the moon, especially because it’s a comedy. I have played Adolf Hitler twice in my career, in films by Rob Zombie and Quentin Tarantino. Both were comedies as well. When I saw the finished film yesterday for the first time, I laughed at the same jokes as the people in the audience. But the most interesting bit really was the idea of setting the story on the moon, not playing another Nazi.
You are famous for playing villains, and the most dangerous ones at that. Iron Sky is another example, but it is yet another film in which your character has to die. Do you find that difficult?
I always insist on having my eyes open. I never die with my eyes closed, because I find it very boring – you are just lying there like a piece of junk. It’s much easier to die with your eyes open, so you can stare at a particular focus point. And the trick is that it leaves the option of a sequel open. We have even thought about this with Iron Sky: we go back to the scene on the roof and then Kortzfleisch wakes up, gives himself a shot and the story goes on. If they can make people change their skin colour, they can rise from the dead too.
In your early career you have worked closely with Rainer Werner Fassbinder. You said elsewhere that one of the things you learned from him was to always tell the truth in interviews.
Not only in interviews. I always tell the truth, but especially when you are giving many interviews, chances are high that you become caught up in your own trap if you start lying about things. During the shoots, the truth was also very important. There was a game we used to play in the evenings while sitting in the kitchen with his crew after shooting. We called it ‘the game of truth’. For example, if another actor or member of the crew had said something bad about me, I mentioned it to Fassbinder. He would listen to me, but not say anything at that time. Then, in the evening, when everyone was sitting around the table and we played the game of truth, he would say: ‘Udo, what did you tell me earlier today? What did she or he say about you?’ And then I would tell the story again in front of everybody, including, of course, the person who had said this about me, and then we talked about it. It was great, because there were no intrigues.
It was also an unwritten law that if you worked with Fassbinder you couldn’t work with Werner Herzog or Wim Wenders at the same time as that would have been seen as committing espionage, right?
Yes, that’s true. I have made two films with Herzog but only much later, one in America about two years ago, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? , and before that Invincible. And with Wenders I made The End of Violence. But back then, it was Fassbinder only. But Fassbinder wouldn’t have cast someone like Bruno Ganz either. Wenders had Bruno Ganz, Herzog had Klaus Kinski and Fassbinder had his gang. That’s how it worked with the auteurs. Even today it’s very similar, for example with Lars von Trier. I quite like belonging to a circle of people around one director, where sometimes you play the lead and sometime you only play a small part. Twenty-odd years ago I started off playing the lead in Medea, and in his latest film I play a very small part, because the film is set in America again and my German accent is still very strong, so I talk less.
How did you start working with Lars von Trier?
I saw Element of Crime and was blown away by it, so I wanted to meet the person who directed it. To be honest, I imagined he would be someone like Kubrick or Fassbinder, a real character, a tough guy, moody, with a leather jacket, etc. But when I met him he looked like a well-behaved little school boy. We had a beer together and after that I found him a distributor for his film. After a while I got a phone call from his, saying: ‘Udo, I’m making a film about Medea and I’d like you to play Jason. Stop shaving, stop showering, because you’re going to be a Viking king and you just don’t look like that at all.’ When I arrived on the set, smelly and dirty as I was, he said to me: ‘Don’t act. I got you a horse as a symbol of virility, two huge dogs and a chain armour – just be a tired king.’ That’s the only direction he’s ever given me in our work together.
It might be clichéd to say that the landscape is the star of the film, but it is undeniably true of Clone (Womb), an ambitious, genre-blending drama set in one of the bleakest, windiest and most harrowingly beautiful parts of Germany – the North Sea coast. Amid the impressive scenery, Hungarian director Benedek Fliegauf imagines the love story between Rebecca (Eva Green) and Thomas (Matt Smith), who secretly loved and sadly lost each other when they were kids, only to meet again as adults and live happily ever after. But soon destiny takes another cruel turn, and loss and grief lead Rebecca to give birth to a cloned copy of her dead lover. Aesthetically and conceptually Fliegauf aims high, but while he impresses on the former level, he is not quite as successful on the latter. Edited with tranquil precision, the film takes its time exploring the parameters of the new family life and falters only when Thomas (who turns out to be the spitting image of his predecessor not only in looks, but, rather annoyingly, also in habits and behaviour) falls for a girl who joins and ultimately destroys the intimate togetherness of mother and son. Superbly photographed as it is, Clone, like Fliegauf’s previous films, is a piece of dark cinematic poetry that requires a certain amount of patience from the viewer, although this time, his grasp of emotional dynamics seems much more skilful, making for a strangely moving film.
Pamela Jahn
This review was originally published as part of our coverage of the London Film Festival 2011. Clone screens as part of SCI-FI-LONDON‘S opening night on May 1.
The 62nd edition of the Berlinale was marked by a feeling of relief. Not only did the line-up for this year’s film festival look more promising than in previous years, the programme ultimately featured fewer bad surprises as well as some truly excellent films.
Two of the three German titles in the competition stood out for their defiant narrative structure, both in their own way offering an exquisite blend of intensity and emotional restraint. Following up Jerichow with his fifth collaboration with actress Nina Hoss, Christian Petzold probably enjoyed the festival’s greatest triumph with Barbara even if the prize for best film went to the Italian prison drama Caesar Must Die (Cesare deve morire) by directorial duo Vittorio and Paolo Taviani, awarded by a jury headed by Mike Leigh (need I say more!). Set in 1980 in a small East German town, Barbara (Nina Hoss) is a doctor who was denied an exit permit by the country’s authorities and, for disciplinary reasons, was transferred from her prestigious post in Berlin to a hospital in the country. Secretly planning her escape via the Baltic Sea with Jörg, her lover in the West, Barbara has no intention to connect with her new colleagues or local residents, who in return counter her coolness with suspicion and defiance – except for Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld), Barbara’s new boss, who seems to have a crush on her. Barbara knows not to trust anyone around her and has no illusions about Andre’s role as observer reporting to the Stasi, who regularly search both the shoddy apartment she has been allocated and her own body, forcibly entering the most private parts of her existence. However, as Barbara realises that she and Andre share the same approach and dedication to work, her defensive wall slowly starts to crumble, which eventually forces her to make a decision about her future. In contrast to most of his previous work, Petzold gives the story a profound warmth and emotional charge, subtly balancing his usual laconic style and distinctive narrative approach, while Nina Hoss unfolds her character stunningly in yet another razor-sharp, painfully acute performance that justly won her the Best Actress prize for the second time, surpassing her breath-taking appearance in Petzold’s Yella in 2007.
The other remarkable German competition entry was Matthias Glasner’s Mercy. Glasner, who some years ago impressed us with The Free Will, about a rapist trying to readjust to society after years in a clinic, has crafted his most accomplished film to date with this strangely intimate moral melodrama. An inadvertent car accident shakes up the troubled marriage between engineer Niels (Jürgen Vogel) and his nurse wife Maria (Birgit Minichmayr), not long after their relocation to a small town on the very edge of the Arctic Ocean, where the couple and their tight-lipped pre-teen son where hoping to make a new start between black night and permanent twilight. One day on her way home from work, Maria appears to run over someone or something. Unable to face up to the situation, she panics and rushes back home. Niels checks the road, but although he can’t find anything, both realise well before the truth comes to light that the accident has forced them into a cruel dilemma – a dilemma that seems to revolve less around mercy than guilt, and ultimately reactivates their relationship. Glasner’s charting of their dark journey is acutely alert to the moral complexity of the situation and chillingly tender while free of sentimentality.
Anything but mercy could be found in Timo Vuorensola’s eagerly awaited Iron Sky, which immensely boosted the fun factor in this year’s Panorama section. Partly financed through fan crowd-funding, which offered supporters a chance to help not only producing the film but developing the plot, Iron Sky is an overwrought and unashamedly daft symbiosis of tongue-in-cheek sci-fi lunacy and old-school guerrilla filmmaking. It’s a film about a bunch of Nazi punks in outer space who, just before the end of the Second World War, managed to build a space station on the dark side of the moon. The action starts in 2018 when an African-American astronaut discovers the swastika bastion led by a Führer called Kortzfleisch (Udo Kier – who else?). Kortzfleisch leads an attack on Earth with an army of steel-armoured zeppelins, which ultimately causes a new war between world leaders. The film requires a reasonable amount of good will to get past the daft jokes, but the few sparks of true brilliance make Iron Sky a joyful B-movie space odyssey.
Far more serious illusions and delusions were at the core of two other Panorama entries: Sally El Hosaini’s My Brother the Devil and Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Headshot (Fon tok kuen fah), two thrilling, dark tales from a transnational, political present in which everybody is an alien one way or another. My Brother the Devil follows 19-year-old Rashid and his teenage brother Mo through the streets of Hackney, where Rashid has learned to make a living as a shrewd drug-dealing gang member. Being too good at heart, he takes the chance to enter a completely new world as it opens up to him, while Mo soon has to face his own prejudices if he wants to save his brother’s life. A moving, well-acted coming-of-age melodrama about repressed feelings and damaged community spirit, the film is told with care and sensitivity and is a welcome departure from the usual grim British social realism.
Aesthetically distinctive in its modern film noir-ish look and feel, Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s follow-up to his inaccessibly cryptic Nymph is a remarkably accomplished portrait of an altruistic cop turned assassin whose vision is inverted when a bullet hits his brain. Despite the brutal action that increases as Tul gets fatally caught up in the slippery concept of justice, Headshot is a marvel of fierce visual beauty, slow, yet effective storytelling and stylish precision: every frame and movement, every colour and texture seems completely controlled. While the story is by no means original, Ratanaruang knows what he is doing and safely steers his badass neo-noir thriller to a devastating finale in which Tul finds a new place for himself in the world of the lost.
A final word about a small, brooding masterpiece. Screened out of competition, 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), Sirk-like 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. It won’t convince everybody, but it put a spell on me.
As Monte Hellman’s legendary Two-Lane Blacktop is released on Blu-ray by Eureka, we publish an interview with the director on his latest film.
In Road to Nowhere (2010), his feature comeback after 20-odd years, Monte Hellman deftly blurs the line between cinema and reality: the film depicts a young director shooting a crime drama based on a true story, using the actual locations as a source of inspiration. During the shoot, he falls in love with his lead actress, who uncannily resembles the real-life crime’s femme fatale, and soon things get alarmingly tangled up, especially in the mind of one imaginative member of the crew. Although there is no denying that its decidedly artificial touch and wooden dialogue make this a flawed film, the director’s approach is complex, intriguing and worthy of attention. Ultimately, Road to Nowhere amounts to little more than a series of bravura noir scenes in which the tension and emotion sometimes build up too slowly, but a great meta-B-movie feel and fitting cinematography make it an enjoyable watch.
Monte Hellman talked to Pamela Jahn at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in July 2011 about how it feels to be back on set, what it takes to let things go and other things you don’t usually learn in film school.
Pamela Jahn: Road to Nowhere is your first feature film in over 20 years but in the meantime you had been working on various other projects that didn’t come to fruition. What was different this time?
Monte Hellman: My daughter decided that we would stop waiting for other people to give us permission to make movies and instead do it ourselves. So she went out and raised the money. She fell in love with the script and that was something that fascinated me because it’s a movie about my life in the sense that it’s about the process of making movies – it’s a film about the making of a film.
How important is the process of making a film to you as compared to the final outcome on screen?
Both things are important to me. In this case, the process was exciting because we tried something different. Filmmakers are control freaks, but we tried to give up this whole idea of controlling every aspect of it. I guess I got tired of it. Instead we tried to pursue something that was less intellectual and more emotional. I tried to get everybody to turn off their brains and let the subconscious take over. It’s not an easy thing to do, particularly for people who like to understand what they are doing and why they are doing it. Actors are trained to examine themselves like, ‘what was I doing 10 minutes ago’ and ‘where am I going with this’. And all this is very much about control. But we tried to find a way to forget about all that and just let this thing happen. It requires an awful lot of trust, of course, and faith. Both their faith in me and also their faith in themselves. But it worked. It was amazing.
How did it feel to be back on set after so many years?
It’s always the same for me. Before starting any movie I feel like I don’t remember what to do and how to do it and I am always terrified until the moment I get on the set. And it was the same this time. It’s been over 20 years… well, not really, because I directed a segment in a film called Trapped Ashes in 2006. But I get on the set and think, ‘This is where I belong to’, and I feel comfortable, and suddenly all the fear is disappearing.
Is there a relation between Mitchell Haven, the director in the movie, and yourself? How much of the young Monte Hellman do you see in him?
It started out that way. When we were sitting together working on the script, people would just shout out certain eccentricities that I have and put them into the script. But as soon as I hired an actor I realised that this was a mistake, particularly since he’s an actor who loves that kind of thing and I didn’t want to give him that comfort. And so, fortunately, he agreed not to do that and he even rejected some of the things that remained in the script.
Road to Nowhere is actually based on quite a simple story if you look at it a certain way, but on first viewing it can be a rather baffling experience.
I never thought of it as difficult or delusive or anything. We’re seeing this movie within the movie out of sequence but there is so little to that story, and actually we see the same scene over and over again. I didn’t expect it to be as hard to unravel as it turned out to be for some audiences.
It’s very film noir in its look and spirit.
Yes, and this is something that does attract me. The fact that no one can ever figure out the most difficult movies of the genre, like The Big Sleep for example. Even Howard Hawks said he could never figure it out. But that never bothers me, because I’m not really interested in figuring things out. I’m interested in entering into a dream world, it is partly my own dream and partly the movie’s dream, and I’m just letting things go and I’m going with it. That’s the way I relate to Road to Nowhere, and I unconsciously expect the audience to do the same thing.
Was it easier for you to have your daughter producing the film than, for example, Roger Corman?
Roger Corman was a good producer for me because he left me alone. My daughter was much better though because she not only left me alone, but she kept me unaware of the financial crisis and anything that would not be part of my creative process. She kept me really isolated so I could do my work. And she did her work, she was great.
Do you need complete isolation in order to work?
I don’t want to be worrying about things that are unnecessary for me to worry about.
Roger Corman produced several of your early films. How did the collaboration come about?
My wife at the time was an actress working with Roger, so I met him socially and he invested a small amount of money in a theatre company that we had. And when this theatre was disbanded because we lost our venue after it was sold and converted into a movie theatre he said that we should take that as sign and I should start making movies. He asked me to do one and there was no looking back after that.
Your most critically acclaimed film to date, Two-Lane Blacktop, failed at the box office in America at the time of its initial release but has long reached cult status. Where you disappointed that it didn’t become the breakthrough film for you that it was meant to be?
I don’t remember it as such. I was angry that they did such a bad job of distributing the film. Especially because it was a big thrill for me to see the success of Two-Lane Blacktop in London at the Islington Screen on the Green. So much so that I invited my London agent to come to the screening and then he couldn’t get in because it was totally sold out. That was fun. But in the end, I just went on to my next project which, I think, never got made. Well, most of my projects didn’t get made [laughs], but I just kept plunging on.
When you did Cockfighter, it also failed commercially on release, but then Corman tried re-editing it. Where you aware of it at the time?
Yes, Corman did recut the film in a version called Born to Kill, which is weird because chickens are not born, they are hatched. I knew he was doing it. But luckily the original was restored afterwards, when they put it out on video they asked for the original version. So there’s now a good DVD version available in the States.
Of all the projects that never got made in the end, is there a particular one that you are hoping to still be able to do at some point?
I am currently working on an old script but, yes, there is another one that I was hired for by Bert Schneider and Paramount in the early 80s, which is one of my favourites.
What’s the story?
It’s a film noir as well. It was written by Lionel White in protest at the fact that Stanley Kubrick wouldn’t hire him to do the screenplay of Lolita, so he wrote his version of it as a film noir. I have the script, though first of all I need to persuade Paramount to sell me the rights. But I really hope to do it some time.
You’ve also been teaching film for several years now. What’s the main advice you give to your young directing students?
To be honest, I think teaching film is pretty much a sham. It’s something that can’t be taught. So one of the first things I tell my students is the same advice the director gives in Road to Nowhere, which is, if an actor asks, ‘How do you want me to act?’, you say, ‘Don’t’. Students are trained by the system and by other teachers to direct, and I always say to them, ‘Don’t’. Most great directors don’t direct, you don’t direct actors. Like Clint Eastwood said, ‘How can I tell Morgan Freeman how to act?’
What was the first thing you have learned in your career?
Fortunately, I learned very early on not to expect that pre-planning would lead to anything, which was very interesting. And so instead of staying up all night and doing little storyboards, I get a good night sleep and I trust that I’m going to be inspired once I get on the set. And most the time that works!
It’s been two years since Channel 4 unveiled its ambitious yet patchy Red Riding Trilogy, which was adapted from David Peace’s crime novels, with each of the three episodes made by a different home-grown director. Following a similar principle, the three-part German TV project Dreileben, which screened in the Cinema Europa section at this year’s London Film Festival, was directed by three of the country’s leading filmmakers, Christian Petzold (Yella, Jerichow), Dominik Graf (Germany 09) and Christoph Hochhä;usler (The City Below, Germany 09). This screening may not have been met with the same level of enthusiasm by UK audiences as back in Germany, when the films premiered at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, yet Dreileben is a bold, innovative and largely compelling experiment in cinematic storytelling that deserves more attention than it has received during its limited festival run.
Almost more fascinating than the outcome is the initial extensive email conversation between the three filmmakers about film aesthetics, which ultimately led them to continue their heated exchange on screen. ‘The three of us had a long and extremely intensive correspondence on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the DFFB, the German Film and Television Academy Berlin,’ says Petzold. ‘It started off with a discussion about the so-called “Berlin Schoolâ€, which Dominik criticised. According to him we were in danger of compromising our view, our deep and passionate criticism, in favour of a common style, which would ultimately lead to a feeling of artificiality, constraint, and a distrust in communication, in language. We wrote to each other on a daily basis for about six weeks. Suddenly, the DFFB anniversary had passed, but we missed having these conversations, so we continued to meet and to talk, without any recording devices or designated use, until we decided to start this film project together.’
Defined by Hochhä;usler as ‘sibling films rather than a trilogy’, each of the resulting films feels very much like a separate piece of work, although there are more or less obvious plot links and reoccurring characters, similarly to the format of the Red Riding Trilogy. Most importantly, the filmmakers agreed upon a criminal case as the golden thread that binds their individual narratives: the escape of a convict from police custody into a small town called Dreileben. Located in the beautiful yet chilling Thuringia Forest, in the former East Germany, it seemed to be the ideal place for what the directors where trying to achieve. ‘I knew Thuringia from my childhood,’ says Petzold. ‘My mother grew up there, and I made Christoph and Dominik go and visit the area. Despite its proximity to Weimar, the home of Goethe and Schiller, it has always been a very poor area. People didn’t want to live there, they left if they could, and those who stayed told dark stories to each other. We liked that.’ As a consequence, Dreileben draws heavily on the German romantic tradition in terms of its approach to nature – seeing it both as a place of danger and a place of inspiration.
This becomes most evident in the third part, One Minute of Darkness, directed by Christoph Hochhä;usler, which also proves to be the most compelling episode. The film focuses on the investigations by the local detective in charge of the case of Frank Molesch, the escaped murderer, who – if only in the eyes of the detective – may actually be innocent. ‘What I find very intriguing is that we can never be sure about anything,’ says Hochhä;usler. ‘Instead we have to construct reality time and again. And what interested me most about Molesch’s character was the question: to what extent are we the authors of our own destiny, and to what extent do other people have an influence on that? Molesch is an extremely malleable, extremely soft persona, whose entire life has been dictated by his foster mother and external authorities, and I thought it would be interesting to explore what happens if such a diktat no longer exists. Can he actually make use of this moment of freedom? Where does it lead to?’
Hence Hochhä;usler’s episode is told mainly from Molesch’s viewpoint. In one of the film’s most gripping scenes, Molesch, despite his almost brutish actions, enters into a wonderfully tender bond with a young runaway, who also happens to be hiding in the woods. Meanwhile, the police inspector tries to get inside the head of Molesch, in order both to find him and prove his innocence. Shot in the cool and sparse New German Cinema manner, One Minute of Darkness may bring nothing terribly new to the genre, but it still makes for an effective and solid thriller in its own right.
In contrast, Petzold’s Beats Being Dead (the first episode in the trilogy) dazzles on the aesthetic level, but fails to keep up the tension and intensity from start to finish. Petzold reveals very little about the murder; instead, we meet Johannes, a young male nurse, who begins an affair with an immigrant girl from Eastern Europe who works in a nearby hotel. While the hunt for Molesch always remains in the shadow of the film’s main narrative, Petzold decides to concentrate on the mismatched couple as they struggle with life as much as with their young, and doomed, relationship.
Sitting in between the two episodes is Dominik Graf’s Don’t Follow Me Around, in which a police psychologist has been ordered to Dreileben to help the local police in their investigation. Adopting a style that is less cool and detached than Petzold and Hochhäusler’s approach, Graf manages to deftly weave a compelling personal story about two women, who fell for the same lover in the past, into the crime scenario. However, he gets slightly too carried away by his own ambitions for the project, rather than simply sticking with its initial premise.
Taken as a whole, Dreileben might have benefited if Petzold, Graf and Hochhä;usler were slightly less hard-headed filmmakers. There seems to be a potential in their work that is not quite realised, a kind of brilliance that keeps bumping against the same creative blockages. Still, aesthetically and conceptually, Dreileben is an innovative and engrossing, if slow-burning, TV-style crime-drama experiment that often hits a note of genuine mystery and discomfort in its attempts to break away from the narrow scope that has characterised much of recent German filmmaking. It’s certainly worth four and a half hours of your time, even if it’s not quite the triumph that might be expected from each of these three directors.
Having started his career as a comedian and television presenter in the 1970s, Takeshi Kitano has always been more than the writer-director and actor of his own films. Already established as a multimedia superstar (working as a TV personality and actor) in Japan under the name ‘Beat’ Takeshi, Kitano earned himself an international cult following with yakuza gangster movies such as his feature debut Violent Cop (1989), Sonatine (1993) and Hana-Bi (1997). But the recent series of what Kitano has self-deprecatingly called his ‘auto-destruct’ cinema, including Takeshis’ (2005) and Achilles and the Tortoise (2008), has disconcerted distributors and damaged his standing, leading to increasingly limited or straight-to-DVD releases for his films outside of Japan in recent years. Yet, his latest offering, Outrage, which premiered in Competition at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, sees Kitano back with a vengeance both behind and in front of the camera, in what feels like one of his most refreshing and enjoyable yakuza thrillers to date.
Pamela Jahn took part in a round table interview at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival in which Kitano talked about tackling genre conventions, dentist horror scenarios and what it feels like to be the boss of it all.
Q: Outrage marks your return to the crime genre but there is clearly a shift in tone compared to your early yakuza films such as Violent Cop and Sonatine. Although the film is equally violent, the characters are not as cold and cool as they used to be and and you seem to have fun playing with the genre conventions. Was it a conscious decision you made when you started the project to test new grounds with this film?
Takeshi Kitano: Of course it would have been much easier to focus on the main protagonist played by myself and make a straightforward yakuza genre movie with lots of violence rather than trying a different route. But when I started working on the film I noticed that many people were very interested to find out what I was going to do next and I thought that if I simply repeated what I have already done in the past people would say, ‘Well, he’s just doing the same old stuff again’. So, yes, I consciously tried to do something different with this film. First of all, I intentionally changed the pace and the rhythm of the whole film and incorporated a lot of dialogue, which I hadn’t really done before in my earlier movies. I also stepped back from the limelight as the main character. I mean, although I am the main character, the film is not just about this one protagonist. It’s more about the whole group of gangsters, so it becomes an ensemble film. Most importantly, however, it has this kind of detachment, it’s like watching one of those nature documentaries shows where you see the bugs in the woods killing each other, or ants chasing worms – I kind of treated the characters in the film in that way. So, the emotional aspect is much less important here.
Did all this evolve quite naturally or did you work on the script for a long time?
I worked on the script for this movie backwards in that the very first scene, the very first idea that I had, was the sequence when one of the yakuza characters gets beheaded with the string attached to his neck and gets dragged away by a car. And from that point on I went backwards in terms of developing the story line. I started thinking of the many ways of killing people, and it was only then that I came up with how the whole trouble begins and what would be the cause of the warfare. But after the first draft I noticed that there were too few scenes featuring myself to make this movie work, so I had to add some more scenes with myself in them because otherwise I would have had too many scenes with different characters and the story wouldn’t have worked as a whole.
How did you come up with the idea of the man getting beheaded by the car?
It is the development of an idea that I ended up not using for my previous movie Achilles and the Tortoise, where I thought that the protagonist that I played in that movie would hang himself. He would attach a string to a tree and put the rope around his neck and then the car beneath him would slowly move forward. But then the woman would drop from the tree and he would fail to kill himself. But I dropped that idea after discussing it with my crew, who said it would look too much like a comedy and that it wouldn’t fit with the rest of the story. The scene in Outrage is almost a revised version of that.
You said elsewhere that you wanted to make the audience feel the pain…
While I was writing this script and while I was shooting, my intention was that all the violence should look as painful as possible because that’s how it is in real life. Violence is a painful thing. But then I felt that it was actually very difficult to find a balance in portraying the violence because if you bring a chainsaw into a yakuza movie it suddenly turns into a horror movie. So you can’t get too carried away with how people get killed in a gangster movie. But one of the ideas I came up with was the dentist scene, which is inspired by me having treatment at a dentist in the past. What happened was that while I was receiving treatment, my dentist’s phone rang and she said, ‘Mr Kitano, I have to take this call, do you mind waiting for a moment?’ I said ‘OK’ and she went out of the room. And then I had this weird idea thinking, ‘Oh my God, what if somebody broke into the room right now and started drilling my teeth, that would be a nightmare’. And suddenly it hit me, that this could be a great scene in the film and as soon as I got out of that chair I wrote it down.
Then there is this tongue scene, I thought that worked really well in terms of trying to combine the violence and the humour, especially because I noticed the reactions of the audience at the official screening. I didn’t have the intention to make those violent scenes comical at all, but I noticed during the editing that many of the scenes are almost hilarious unintentionally. But although it wasn’t my intention in the first place, it eventually turned out to be a good thing because it somehow works as a relief for the tension.
Outrage is very much a film about men in conflict about their egos, their self-serving aspirations and ambitions. In real life, being the boss of your own production company Office Kitano, do you often come across these sort of ego problems with other people, or do people in general get a bit nervous around you?
I don’t think people are usually nervous around me because there is never any conflict on set. I have never screamed at anybody on set, in fact, I am a very quiet director, I think. I try to be as cooperative as possible with my crew, and I am open to listening to their ideas. So I’d like to think that my producers and crew members just like to help me too. They might even think I cannot do anything without them and that they have to help me, so actually they might be my nurses rather than being nervous.
From your film’s perspective, do you think much of the influence and tactics of the yakuza have changed over the years since you made Violent Cop? Do you have, or used to have, close contacts to members of yakuza gangs?
I don’t think this film is a very reality-orientated kind of yakuza movie. Although it is not entirely fictional it is not intended to be realistic either, simply because the conflict and warfare scenes in Outrage are slightly exaggerated. Those things are not really happening in the Japanese gang wars and the violence is not as explicit as in the film. But in terms of yakuza businesses, how they work and how they make a profit, this is an open secret for any Japanese, you don’t have to do much research to know how they operate. Japan is one of the very few countries where the gangsters don’t hesitate to show that they are gangsters, they even put a billboard up on their building saying ‘so and so family office’. You don’t see this in Western countries, right?
Aside from dealing with the same subject matter, is there a common thread that runs through your yakuza films?
I haven’t given it much thought to whether there is some sort of common thread that runs through my films or my career, because as an actor it is important to try to achieve what you are required to achieve in a project rather than to think about the consistency of a series of similar or different movies. For instance, even if I work purely as an actor for other directors, I basically try to be as cooperative and faithful to the director’s instructions as possible, not thinking about my own ideas, not thinking about my priorities, I am only listening to the director. And when I work on my own movies, it is really the film that calls for a particular performance and it is important to convey that in each project. So it is really difficult for me to reflect upon my work and find out what is different or what has been added to each movie.
Another difference that you haven’t mentioned earlier is that you seem to be using a rougher soundtrack than in previous films?
In terms of sound, including the music but also the sound effects and the acoustics of the whole movie, I wanted to bring in some notion of comic book sound effects, this same sort of exaggeration. Like in a manga, where you actually read the sound, like ‘bang’ is written on the picture, and I wanted that kind of effect on the sound.
Cast: Michael Shannon, Jessica Chastai, Shea Whigham
USA 2011
120 mins
Michael Shannon is Curtis LaForche, a caring family man and reliable construction worker, who slowly loses touch with reality as he deals with the panic that arises from a series of terrifying dreams in writer-director Jeff Nichols’s remarkable second feature Take Shelter. The film is a thrilling, genre-twisting and masterfully crafted drama, sensitively tackling what could have been lurid material in other hands, and it seems that Shannon and Nichols in their second collaboration since Shotgun Stories (2007) have only grown closer as a formidable director/actor team. What really makes this film, however, is its subtle ambiguity. Curtis’s dreams are either forebodings of an apocalyptic storm coming in, or the first symptoms of the same life-destroying paranoid schizophrenia his mother has suffered since he was a kid. In a standout performance, and supported by an equally convincing Jessica Chastain as the caring wife who is desperate to understand what is happening to her husband, Shannon portrays Curtis’s inner struggle with powerful conviction. For his part, Nichols manages not only to convey a sense of the dizzying confusion and nerve-racking tension that drive Curtis to desperate action but to build up to a climax that, depending on interpretation, is as devastating as it is peaceful.
Pamela Jahn took part in a round table interview at the London Film Festival in October 2011 where Michael Shannon talked about what drew him to the project, the difference between anxiety and mental illness, and the key to being an imaginative actor.
Q: Can you tell us a little more about what attracted you to the part in Take Shelter?
MS: I worked with Jeff [Nichols] on Shotgun Stories, which was his first movie, and I really think he is unique. I can’t think of any other young director in America today who is as focused as he is and who has as distinctive a vision as he has. He showed me the script and I could relate to the material because I was having similar experiences to Curtis in that it is a story about a young father who is having anxieties about trying to protect his family and, at that point, I was starting a family myself. Obviously it wasn’t to the extent that Curtis has in the movie – I didn’t have any dreams about storms. But anybody who starts a family would have some empathy for what Curtis is going through. Other things were similar as well in that Curtis’s father had just passed away and my father had just passed away. So there was some synchronicity between what Curtis was going through and some experiences I was having in my own life, and that’s what drew me to it.
Do you know whether Nichols wrote the part with you in mind?
No, he absolutely did not have me in mind. Jeff wrote this story regardless of anything. It was a very personal story for him. He was writing about some things he was going through himself. It just happened that we were both having similar experiences. It’s funny because he didn’t intend to do a very topical movie, in the way that there are a lot of other films about people sensing an apocalypse, or the end of the world, that deal with it more directly. For Jeff, the genesis of it was all very personal.
How much research did you do for your role? Did you delve into personality disorder and mental illness?
No. I didn’t think about mental illness at all. To me this isn’t a film about mental illness. I mean mental illness is on the spectrum of possibilities because I think in our culture we’re all very aware of it and we’ve been instructed to be on the lookout for it. But I don’t ultimately think that this is what Curtis is experiencing. I have heard Jeff saying that the whole storyline is not necessarily a red herring because that would be manipulative, but that it is just not what the film is about. I don’t think anxiety is a mental illness. Anxiety is healthy. I think that people who don’t have any anxiety about anything are strange. I also didn’t want to know more about what Curtis was going through than Curtis did, because I think what’s happening to him is a mystery to him as much as to everyone around him. Part of the journey of the film is him trying to figure out what’s happening there, and I simply didn’t want to be ahead of him.
The film becomes even more interesting on second viewing when you have the ending in mind. Where you always very aware of the ending throughout the process of shooting?
I was very aware of the ending. It was actually one of the first things that Jeff thought of when writing the script. It wasn’t something that he tagged on at the end of the process, it was one of the original thoughts that he had for making this film. But personally I think the ending is a bit tricky. I think there is a big shift in tone in the movie, it alternates between a super-realistic, blue-collar, gritty everyday Americana slice of life and a very poetic and lyrical element. I think this works because it’s a film about dreams and the dreams are establishing a duality of consciousness, your waking life and your dream life. And the end of the film, to me, is not necessarily meant to be taken literally, and it’s not necessarily there to say that Curtis was right or Curtis was wrong. This is not the point of it, because the fact of the matter is that the world is in the process of destruction. That’s not open for discussion, at least not in the way I look at it. Who could argue against that? It’s more about how you deal with it. And the important thing about the end is that the family is together. That’s the difference between the beginning and the end of the movie. In the beginning of the film, you’re seeing a man standing in his car park looking up at the sky all by himself, and in the end he is standing there with his family, he is not by himself anymore.
In a weird, twisted way it almost seems like a happy ending.
Yes, I mean, that’s the way Jeff describes it. I can’t debate it in the same way that he can because it’s ultimately his vision. I only have my own interpretation of it, but he always said he sees it as a hopeful ending.
You and Nichols seem to make a very good team. You seem to trust and respect each other very much. Did you have any influence on the development of the film at any point while shooting it, or did you totally trust Nichols in what he was doing and wanted to achieve with the film?
Jeff is very thorough when he writes. When Jeff shows up he knows what he wants to do and you can’t really surprise him with a question because he’s considered every angle. He is very rigorous in his writing style and with himself. So, it wasn’t like he was asking, ‘So Mike, what do you want to do with this here’ or ‘What do you think should happen there?’ He had it all pretty well thought out, and I think the reason we are good together is because I can tell where he is going with something. It’s kind of an unspoken understanding that we have. And I really trust Jeff visually now that I’ve worked with him twice. Each time I see the film I am really impressed with the way it looks. Jeff is actually very old-fashioned, for example, he insists on shooting on film. He shot his first film 35mm anamorphic, his entire budget was just for film stock, so he basically had to get everything else for free.
So there wasn’t much of a rehearsal period before the shoot this time either?
No, because I had just finished working on the first season of Boardwalk Empire on a Friday, and on the Monday I was shooting Take Shelter. We shot just outside of Cleveland, Ohio, and I met Jessica [Chastain] for the first time in my life on the Saturday, so we had one day to hang out and get to know each other and then Monday morning we were shooting. So I was really lucky that it was someone as brilliant as Jessica, because if there had been any trepidation on the part of the woman playing Samantha, if there had been any fear there, I don’t know if we would have been able to pull it off. But Jessica just leaps into things, she’s fearless, so it really made a huge difference.
How would you describe your approach to acting?
It’s very instinctual. I don’t like to talk too much about something before I do it because I think it takes the spontaneity out of it. For me, the most important thing is to make sure that whatever is exciting or interesting about a scene happens in front of the camera and not off camera. The first time I worked with Jeff on Shotgun Stories, Jeff and I showed up and then the cast showed up and Jeff was confiding in me because, at that time, I had the most credits. A lot of the other people where immature and non-professional actors, or not even actors at all. So Jeff said to me, ‘What shall we do, shall we rehearse?’, and I said, ‘Don’t do anything, because probably the most exciting things these people are going to do will be the first time they do it. And the more you are trying to talk about it and make sure everybody understands everything the less likely it is that something spontaneous is going to happen’. So, that’s kind of my approach. I have a very fertile imagination. When I read things, I have a vision that comes to me, that’s just my imagination. It’s very childlike though, it’s not super-sophisticated. Children can do this, you give them the story and they can figure it out for themselves. And I think the struggle is, more than anything, to hold on to this ability and not lose it. Not to get sullied by the business of it all.
Sarah Cronin and Pamela Jahn report on the London Film Festival as it enters its final few days.
Headhunters
A slick thriller with hints of B-movie horror, Norwegian director Morten Tyldum’s Headhunters is an entertaining adaptation of Jo Nesbø’s bestselling crime novel. Aksel Hennie plays Roger Brown, a man who – on the surface, and despite his insecurity about his height – seems to have it all: beautiful wife, stunning home, flashy car. But none of this is really paid for by his job as a renowned headhunter. Instead, Roger is also an art thief, whose wealthy, high-powered clients are all potential victims, including Clas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), an extremely successful executive with chiselled good looks and an inherited Rubens. While some of the early twists in this classic heist film might be predictable, the film soon shifts into some unexpected directions, as Clas turns out to be a terrifying opponent who mercilessly hunts Roger down, completely upending his life.
Some of the plotting does not hold up to close scrutiny, and sympathising with Roger is a stretch (he’s a womaniser as well as a thief), but it’s a well-executed, well-acted film that has enough going on to make it a fun watch. Occasionally gory, sometimes silly, it’s a cut above the usual crime caper. SC
Sleepless Nights Stories
Jonas Mekas’s latest offering is a weird and wonderful mix of short-film montage, essay and film diary that emerged out of a jet lag-induced insomnia. In 20-odd episodes, inspired by the tales of One Thousand and One Nights, the tireless Mekas strolls through the night, meeting old friends and random acquaintances and listening to their stories. Many of the people who appear in front of his shaky digital camera are prominent artists, including Patti Smith, Harmony Korine, Louis Garrel, or a lovelorn Marina Abramovic, who shares her inner feelings with the 88-year-old filmmaker. The more stories, both intimate and eccentric, the film reveals, the more it becomes clear that there is more than one Scheherazade at work here. The episodes, which are introduced by sometimes hilarious, sometimes philosophical, sometimes plain weird intertitles, build a series of devices to avoid desperation and death. But most importantly, what becomes manifest is the fact that sleepless nights don’t pass without a certain amount of alcohol. Mekas drinks, his friends follow suit and the camera totters, suggesting that you are better off picking up a glass of wine (Mekas prefers red) before going into the screening too, to be able to fully chime in with the admirably free spirit conveyed on screen. PJ
Shame
One of the most talked about films at this year’s festival, Steve McQueen’s Shame could have been a great movie. His follow-up to the acclaimed Hunger, it stars Michael Fassbender as Brandon, a man who is pathologically addicted to sex, filling his need with an endless stream of pornography and prostitutes. His (outwardly) tightly controlled, orderly life begins to unravel when his sister, Sissy, played by Carey Mulligan, appears at his immaculate, minimalist flat, begging for a place to stay. While Fassbender puts in a terrifically compelling performance, Mulligan is given much less to work with – her character is the ditsy, manic-depressive blonde, needy and demanding, desperate for attention, leaving endless messages for men that she’s slept with, not understanding that all they wanted from her was sex. While she has a few great scenes – and one in particular, already notorious – her character is a cliché that’s been seen and done before. Predictability is the problem with the film as a whole. The nearly wordless opening and closing scenes that bookend the film are incredibly powerful, but there are times when the dialogue is frustratingly flat, and the depiction of corporate New York and its club scene are too reminiscent of the early 90s and American Psycho. There is real tension in the tormented relationship between Brandon and Sissy, while his uncontrollable, violent outbursts are a shock, but the screenplay just isn’t quite strong enough to make the whole a truly remarkable film – what’s frustrating is that it comes so close. SC
Walking Too Fast
Following hard on the heels of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others, slow-burn Czech psychological thriller Walking Too Fast offers an equally compelling, if less original, glimpse into lives under a communist regime before the fall of the Iron Curtain. Set in Czechoslovakia in the early 1980s, the film draws heavily on the story of its predecessor: troubled agent Antonín Rusnák (Ondrej Malý;) is a loyal, and consequently savage, henchman of the official state security service, whose brutal façade starts to crumble as he develops an obsession with Klára, the young lover of the persecuted dissident Tomáš, whom Antonín attempts to force into emigration. Antonín’s motive, however, is less an urging romantic desire than a desperate attempt to overcome his inner struggle and despair, which makes his character thoroughly unlikable but, at the same time, more interesting and powerful. In fact, his gradual transition from faithful servant to ruthless maverick, who, in his pointless attempts to win Klára over Tomáš, gradually starts to fight on all fronts, is where the film is most gripping. Although the pace lags slightly towards the end, Malý; delivers a solid performance as the cold-blooded spy going astray, and thanks to the chilling electronic score and apt cinematography director Radim Špaček has crafted a film that is both absorbing and subtly unsettling in its own right. PJ
Without
Without
The debut feature from writer-director-editor Mark Jackson, Without was a personal highlight at this year’s LFF. It features an outstanding performance from newcomer Joslyn Jensen as an unstable young woman who’s secretly coping with a terrible loss. Joslyn takes a job on an island off the coast of Washington State, caring for Frank, an elderly man in a near-vegetative state who’s confined to a wheelchair. The set-up – it’s just the two of them, alone, in a remote house in the woods – suggests a thriller, but the suspense and mystery really revolve around her perilous emotional state. There are lots of (sometimes disturbing) comedic moments in the film, but as it unfolds, Joslyn’s charming, seemingly innocent character begins to evolve into something deeper and darker. Her transformation is mesmerising; her treatment of Frank at times shocking. The director hints throughout the film at her reasons for taking the job, but never gives away too much at once, leaving it to the audience to try and piece together the rest of the puzzle.
Jessica Dimmock and Diego Garcia’s cinematography is superb; much of the film is shot with a shallow depth of field, lending a rich, soft-focus look to the visuals, while the warm hues contrast with the darkening tone of the film. It’s a remarkable, original feature that will hopefully get the recognition that it deserves. SC
Restless
Gus Van Sant’s latest film seems like an unlikely choice for the director: a very twee romance about two adolescents who fall in love while coming to terms with both life and death. Enoch (played by Henry Hopper), struggling to cope with the loss of his parents in an accident, likes to crash funerals dressed in gothic attire. His best friend is Hiroshi, the ghost of a kamikaze pilot (why, I have no idea); they like to play Battleship together, but the pilot always wins. Annabel (Mia Wasikowska) is dying from a brain tumour, although she keeps this information to herself when she first meets Enoch at the funeral home.
It’s a classic teen love story, complete with the tragic but uplifting ending and added quirkiness. The problem is that the evolution of their romance is so sickeningly sweet it’s exasperating to watch, while their world is made up of elements from a nostalgic past that lends a painfully contrived air to the film (perhaps trying to recreate Harold and Maude for today’s generation, but failing). She reads books on Darwin and birds, they play Operation, and Enoch toys with a slinky while waiting in the hospital for news from Annabel. They’re completely removed from reality, and the result is that the film has little resonance, or anything believable to say about weighty subjects like love and death.
But despite the film’s serious flaws, I think it will have an audience: it’s the perfect sleep-over movie for tween girls who are too cool for the stuff that passes for romance in Hollywood, and not yet cynical enough to reject screenwriter Jason Lew’s blatant tugging on the heartstrings. SC
Restless is released by Sony Pictures in the UK on 21 October 2011.
Crazy Horse
For his 39th film, Frederick Wiseman has taken a close look behind the scenes of the famous Parisian cabaret club, which, since its foundation in 1951, offers a burlesque show billed as celebrating both beautiful women and the art of the nude. After a first glance into the dressing rooms, a gently moving camera follows a couple of catchy on-stage performances. However, much as in La Danse, in which Wiseman observes the dancers and choreographers of the Paris Opera Ballet as they break the most complex movements down into their component parts, the director’s primary interest here remains in revealing the hard work needed for choreographer Philippe Decloufé and his ensemble to revive and sustain the success of the show. Wiseman records the long, tiring hours of practices, staff meetings and heady discussions about lighting design and budget constraints, and costume-fitting sessions followed by more rehearsals and repetition. Working precisely with the curiosity of an anthropologist and the eye of an aesthete, Wiseman manages once again to achieve what any ordinary observer would fail to do: making the boredom of routine work captivating. Enriched by footage of the ensemble’s most compelling on-stage acts and moments of casual beauty, Crazy Horse is a vibrant, fascinating celebration of dance as a multi-faceted art form. PJ
She Monkeys
Nominated for the Sutherland Trophy at this year’s LFF, She Monkeys is an intriguing debut from Swedish filmmaker Lisa Aschan about the intensely competitive relationship between two young women teetering on the cusp of adulthood. Emma dreams of joining the local equestrian acrobatics team, practising diligently in her sparsely furnished bedroom in the house that she shares with her precocious seven-year-old sister Sara and their father (we never learn what’s happened to their mother, although her unexplained absence is clearly a disturbing factor in their lives). When Emma succeeds in making the equestrian team, she’s befriended by the attractive, worldly Cassandra. It’s soon clear who is in control; Cassandra is a bully, and the prank that she plays on a young man who’s interested in Emma is painfully cruel. But a fatal moment of vulnerability on Cassandra’s part leads to a twist in their power struggle, and the discovery that Emma is perhaps not as innocent and vulnerable as she first seems.
It’s an original retelling of the coming-of-age story, but what makes She Monkeys so remarkable are the performances delivered by the non-professional actresses, Mathilda Paradeiser, Linda Molin and Isabella Lindquist, who is simply astonishing as Sara, a child far too young to be grappling with her sexuality. It’s a compelling, disquieting watch that earned Aschan the top narrative prize at the Tribeca Film Festival. SC
Electric Sheep‘s first visit to the beautiful Czech spa resort of Karlovy Vary for the 46th edition of its multi-stranded festival was a five-day marathon that offered a wonderfully mixed bag of hidden gems and charming low-key works, with only a few disappointments. Sadly, part of the latter category was the official opening film, Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre. Similar to the 1944 version starring Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles, Fukunaga’s adaptation offers an atmospheric, moody and finely tuned Gothic take on Charlotte Brontë’s famous novel about the plight of an orphaned governess who disastrously falls in love with her enigmatic employer. But although everything in this tragedy is adroitly done, it falls short of the brilliance and verve of the director’s 2009 debut Sin Nombre and, ultimately, feels no more ambitious than a compelling and well-performed British television drama.
By contrast, Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito), which, like Jane Eyre, screened out of competition, sees the Spanish master on excellent form. Based loosely on French crime author Thierry Jonquet’s dark novel Tarantula, the film tells the story of celebrated plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas), who becomes dangerously obsessed with creating the perfect form of artificial skin after the death of his wife, who was burnt alive in a car crash. Serving as his guinea pig is the beautiful Vera (Elena Anaya), whom he keeps locked up like a prisoner in his isolated mansion run by a doting servant, his former nanny Marilia (Marisa Paredes), who has her own secrets to conceal. To reveal more of the story here would spoil the joy of discovering this heady brew of deep passion, family horrors and dizzyingly uninhibited revenge. Though it might not be as daring and unruly as Almodóvar’s earlier work, The Skin I Live In is an absorbing, savage and grotesque, yet beautifully shot tale that finds the filmmaker vividly reworking his favourite themes of obsession, desire and sexual identity, while artfully borrowing from and playing with the great tradition of horror-infused melodramas.
The Skin I Live In is released in UK cinemas on 26 August 2011.
Aside from the big headliners, where Karlovy Vary excelled was in its selection of distinctive, often small-scale art-house films. Veteran Polish director Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross is a carefully crafted study of Pieter Bruegel’s 1564 Procession to Calvary, which takes the audience both inside and behind the scenes of the painting, in all its meticulous detail. In Kim Ki-duk’s distraught Arirang, one of three Korean entries in this year’s selection, the esteemed director points the camera at himself in a confessional and heart-rending, yet at times undeniably annoying, attempt to overcome his personal and professional crisis. The superbly deadpan and physically intense Enemy at the Dead End (Jugigo ci-peun), by writer-director duo Owen Cho and Kim Sang-hwa, was one of the true standouts of the festival. It is a taut, unsentimental, tightly plotted revenge thriller about two bed-ridden men whose mysterious pasts and ill-shaped memories are linked by an unsolved murder that sees them turning their small hospital room into a deadly battlefield, as they desperately try to torture and, eventually, kill each other. Remaining consistently unpredictable right up to its nail-biting last act, the film offers a dazzling mix of pitch-black humour and off-kilter suspense, and proves that there is still zest and energy in Korean independent cinema beyond its more established front-runners.
All three films screened in the Another View strand, which turned out to be the most reliable for discoveries. The most striking debut was Breathing (Atmen), directed by Austrian actor Karl Markovics (best known for his lead performance in The Counterfeiters). The film premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight section in Cannes this year, where it picked up the Europa Cinemas Label award, which includes promotion and programming support, raising hopes for a UK release. The story revolves around the rebellious and solitary Roman, who is trying to reintegrate society after serving time in a juvenile detention centre for murder. Soon after he picks up a job at the city mortuary, to avoid a life spent behind bars, he discovers the body of a nameless woman, whose outward appearance triggers a need to search for his mother. Though inadvertently similar in its minimalistic accuracy and disquieting sense of normality to Austrian filmmaker Markus Schleinzer’s Michael, which also premiered in Cannes and played at KVIFF, Breathing is a compelling and consistently impressive first feature in its own right, which deserves to be seen widely. Out of Variety’s selection of ‘Ten Euro Directors to Watch’ (presented as another sidebar of the main programme) the best films I saw were Lisa Aschan’s deft coming-of-age tale She Monkeys (Apflickorna) and Ben Wheatley’s eagerly awaited, impressive genre flick Kill List.
In addition to the main programme strands, this year Sam Fuller and Denis Villeneuve were given retrospectives, and although the contrast between the director of Shock Corridor and The Street Helmet and the maker of Oscar-nominated Incendies is striking, the range of Villeneuve’s work revealed a tough sensibility that isn’t so far from Fuller’s hard-edged themes and stories. Also worthy of note was a selection of ‘Out of the Past’ titles, including a rare screening of Barbara Loden’s wonderfully unwieldy directorial debut Wanda and a restored version of Czech classic Marketa Lazarová, a breathtaking, mesmerising epic directed by František Vláčil, either of which would have made the trip worthwhile.
Owing to such an intriguing range of classic films, I regrettably didn’t see as much contemporary Czech cinema as I had planned, and in particular missed Vladimir Blaževski’s Punk´s Not Dead (Pankot ne e mrtov), the winner of the East of the West section, a programme dedicated to films from Eastern Europe and the Balkans. The two competition films I did see – German director Christian Schochow’s Crack in the Shell (Die Unsichtbare) and the Danish Birgitte Stærmose’s Room 304 (Værelse 304) – were both disappointing.
Without doubt, the highlight of the trip was the masterclass given by legendary American director Monte Hellman. He was on magnificent, passionate form as he unpicked his latest film, Road to Nowhere, about a young filmmaker who gets involved in a crime while shooting his latest project, based on a true story. During the absorbing session Hellman also gave an insight into the vagaries of a career that has spanned 50 years and, according to the director, revolves around making A-movies on a Z-movie budget. Or, as Hellman put it: ‘The producer thinks I’m making an exploitation movie and in my mind I’m making Gone with the Wind.’
The 65th edition was a year of transition for the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Under a new directorial team, the festival had teething problems, including a dearth of international guests, an unambitious film selection, technical issues (wrong projection format, out-of-synch subtitles) and venues impractically spread out across the city. On the positive side, however, there was a dynamic attempt to open up and diversify the festival experience, and interesting efforts to look at film in relation to other areas, including music and science.
Among those initiatives, Project: New Cinephilia was a multi-platform venture aimed at stimulating debate around film criticism, curated by Kate Taylor and Damon Smith. It culminated on June 16 in day-long talks between critics, writers, bloggers and filmmakers. Electric Sheep took part in the panel discussion on new tools for film criticism, which involved comics, blogs and video essays. Thought-provoking talks and interaction with the audience made it a very energising and inspiring event. As part of the project, Mubi published a series of essays, including the video essay created especially for the event by Eric Hynes, Jeff Reichert, and Michael Koresky from Reverse Shot, on a special section of their website – a visit is highly recommended.
Improvising Live Music for Film was part of the Reel Science initiative. Norman McLaren’s hypnotic animations from the 1940s, 50s and 60s were given new soundtracks by members of the Glasgow Improvisers’ Orchestra, who responded to abstract ‘dot’ and ‘line’ films as well as the anti-war parable Love Thy Neighbor and dance film Pas de Deux. Featuring impressive guitar from George Burt, the mini-orchestra’s improvisations were warm and accessible, with nods to the jazz styles of McLaren’s era. The promised discussion on film music’s neurological impact, while introduced well by Edinburgh University Reid Professor Nigel Osborne, didn’t have time to fully materialise – a shame, given the fascinating subject matter.
One of the unquestionable highlights of the festival was the presence of Hungarian master Béla Tarr, who was there to introduce his latest film, Turin Horse. An austere film, and a hard watch in some respects – it is very long, slow and deliberately repetitive – it is also extremely rewarding. The film is an oblique take on an anecdote about Nietzsche, which recounts how the philosopher protested at a man who was beating his horse in Turin. The story has inspired many interpretations; Tarr chooses to focus on the horse, the man who owns it and his daughter. Set in a bleak, constantly wind-swept landscape, it is a soberly apocalyptic tale, a sort of creation story in reverse, as the characters’ world is gradually diminished and restricted over the course of six days until total darkness engulfs them. Tarr has said that it was his last film, and the disappearance of light at the end makes it a particularly poignant farewell to cinema.
Béla Tarr was also one of the guest curators (together with Jim Jarmusch and Gus Van Sant) asked by the festival to choose a small selection of films. He picked three black and white Hungarian films with an interest in film language, which had clear connections with his own work. The best known was Miklós Jancsó’s 1966 The Round-Up, about the detention of political dissidents in Austria under an authoritarian regime. Gábor Bódy’s American Torso (1975) was a wonderful film, centring on a Hungarian map-maker fighting in the American Civil War. Full of references to literature and history, playful and poetic at the same time, it is a spellbinding meandering that loosely connects war and revolution, the development of map-making, Hungarian exiles and a mysterious, death-defying devil of a man at its heart. György Feher’s Passion (1998) is a take on James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, made to look like a 1930s film. Feher’s approach is both elliptical and drawn out, as if he had only kept the essential moments of the story, and extended and deepened them. It is a very evocative film, in which the contrast between darkness and light and the positioning of the characters in the frame are more important in conveying emotion and mood than dialogue or narrative.
Convento
This year, the festival had also decided to celebrate its historic interest in documentary. One highlight was Jarred Alterman’s Convento, a lyrical, beautifully shot film that shines an intimate light on an artistic family living in a restored convent and nature reserve in Portugal. It’s a gorgeous place, tenderly cared for by its inhabitants: Geraldine Zwanniken, a former dancer, now artist, and her two sons, the nature lover Louis, and Christiaan, who creates kinetic sculptures using found materials, often the bones of dead animals, reanimated in a sometimes eerie, sometimes humorous way. Alterman’s almost poetic visual style allows us a fleeting chance to share in the family’s extraordinary lives.
Stylistically, James Marsh’s new film, Project Nim, is a more classic documentary. Using interviews and archival footage, Marsh pieces together the remarkable and disturbing story behind Project Nim, the misguided experiment to teach sign language to the eponymous chimpanzee, raised from infancy by a human family in New York. It’s a heart-breaking story; Nim was a victim of unbelievable hubris, and while loved by the people who cared for him, he was also abandoned when he became less like a human child and more like a wild animal. It’s an intriguing film, but the people interviewed (Nim’s original family, the scientist who devised the experiment, other researchers), with one or two exceptions, are just so unlikeable, and some of their actions so unconscionable, that it’s impossible to identify with them.
The same can’t be said of the subject of Calvet, Dominic Allan’s engrossing documentary. While describing someone as larger than life may sound like a cliché, the phrase surely applies to Jean-Marc Calvet – runaway, legionnaire, vice cop, bodyguard, alcoholic, drug addict, and now painter. Allan lets Calvet do all the talking, the camera following him as he revisits locations from his tortuous past; the artist is a fascinating, charismatic character, given a near-miraculous opportunity for redemption when he decides, with Allan discreetly following, to find the son he abandoned years ago. It’s a remarkable film about a remarkable man, who, in his words, has been to hell and back.
One of the most enjoyable documentaries was Liz Garbus’s Bobby Fisher against the World, about the rise and fall of the American chess master who became caught up in Cold War politics when he was asked to compete against the Russian Boris Spassky in the 1972 World Championship match in Reykjavik. The film is worth watching for the meticulously detailed footage from the incredibly tense, nerve-wracking games leading up to Fisher’s victory, which ended 24 years of Soviet domination of world chess. It also provides an interesting insight into Fisher’s upbringing and troubled state of mind, exploring the fatal relationship between genius and insanity and asking whether the former can ever exist without the latter.
Life in Movement offered another well-crafted glimpse at what it takes to be a talented, ambitious and passionate individual. Its subject is Australian choreographer Tanya Liedke, who died in a car accident in 2007 at the age of 29, the night before taking up the position of Artistic Director of the Sydney Dance Theatre. Like Bobby Fisher, this simple yet moving portrait by producer-director duo Bryan Mason and Sophie Hyde would have benefited from slightly tighter scripting, but both documentaries managed to capture the charisma and unique personality of their central character, and remained compelling and informative throughout.
Screened on the last weekend of the festival, Hell and Back Again, by first-time director Danfung Dennis, will probably be discussed mostly for the impressive daring and visual beauty of its ’embedded journalism’ and its filming of troops in action in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. But in fact, the film follows the slow recovery of a seriously wounded sergeant, with the combat footage relegated to flashbacks. Mainly free of political commentary, the film only lapses into sentiment and borderline propaganda with an ill-judged Willie Nelson song over the end credits.
Phase 7
It says a lot about this year’s edition of the EIFF that one of the most high-profile screenings was David MacKenzie’s Perfect Sense, starring Ewan McGregor and Eva Green as a mismatched couple who, much to their own surprise, fall for each other as the world falls apart during an epidemic. The mysterious disease causes people to lose their senses, one at a time, which is followed by temporary and uncontrollable outbursts of sorrow, anger or hunger. Other than taking a more personal approach to the apocalyptic genre, the film does not have much to offer, and although it is largely sustained by the lead actors, the flaws in the script ultimately make it a tiresome watch.
An unnamed epidemic also hits in Nicolás Goldbart’s Phase 7: residents of one quarantined Buenos Aires apartment block are up against not only a killer virus, but also their neighbours in this witty, low-budget horror. Coco, a peaceable young dude trying to keep his pregnant wife safe and well-fed, forms an unlikely alliance with Horacio, the maté-drinking, gun-toting conspiracy theorist next door, when the intentions of the other residents – humorously drawn as both impeccably bourgeois and utterly ruthless – become clear. Phase 7 offsets the gore and tension with a sharp script and a cool John Carpenter-esque soundtrack by Guillermo Guareschi.
Latin America offered another futuristic tale with Alejandro Molina’s By Day and by Night, from Mexico. Tackling the timely theme of over-population, the film is set in a world where people have to live under a dome that protects them from the ‘exterior’; due to the limited space, half of the population has to live during the day, while the other half lives at night. The film follows a mother’s search for her daughter after the child’s ‘shift’ is inexplicably modified. Visually, it’s a cross between Star Trek and Solaris, and Molina’s nostalgic, minimalistic, slow-paced approach and sparse use of dialogue are a welcome change from recent slick, pompous 3D sci-fi blockbusters; but the result is mostly a joyless, soporific and sentimental cinematic experience that is not as deep as it pretends to be.
There was more dystopian science fiction on offer with Xavier Gens’s apocalyptic action thriller The Divide, which had generated some hype after screening at the Cannes film market earlier this year. After New York is destroyed by unidentified causes, a mismatched group of eight adults and a young girl are trapped inside a basement. As they try to survive not only the outside menace, but also one another, the film’s annoyingly stereotyped cast and unconvincing plot twists fail to maintain interest, despite fairly energetic directing from Gens.
A sprinkling of horror films included Troll Hunter, directed by André Øvredall, which follows in the mockumentary footsteps of The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity. Øvredall’s scenario isn’t exactly bursting with ideas, but it does play imaginatively with its single premise. The trolls themselves are rather splendid, and the film is very handsomely photographed amid spectacular Norwegian scenery, all looming mountains and misty meres. To its credit, the film never gets caught up in trying to make its absurd conceit plausible, and derives a lot of enjoyment from the bare-faced silliness of it all.
By contrast, The Caller was just a pile of derivative trash. After separating from a violent ex, Mary moves into a new apartment. But soon, she starts getting strange calls from a woman named Rose, and events from the past appear to influence the present. The premise seemed interesting; sadly, the realisation is entirely incoherent from a narrative and thematic point of view and chock-full of clichés.
Although not a straightforward horror film, Alex de la Iglesia’s The Last Circus had elements of the genre. The Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship are treated with de la Iglesia’s customary outrageousness, the film starting with an army of clowns in full make-up roped in to fight against the General’s forces. One of them has a son, Javier, who decides to follow the family tradition after his father is caught by the Franquists. Silliness and quixotic heroism, outlandish humour and hideousness mix in this exuberant response to a dark period of Spanish history. But despite inspired moments (a particular highlight is Javier, treated like a dog by an officer during a hunting party, biting the hand of an ageing Franco), the film prefers to focus on an uninteresting, hackneyed romance between the sad clown and the beautiful trapeze artist, rather than really sinking its teeth into its historical context.
Our Day Will Come
Among other films worthy of note, Pablo Lorrain’s Post Mortem particularly stood out. Mario (Alfredo Castro) is an emotionally stilted functionary at the city morgue, who becomes an inadvertent member of the military regime as the body count rises dramatically in the days surrounding the death of Salvador Allende. While the film starts slowly, tension builds as Mario falls pathetically in love with the troubled Nancy, a cabaret dancer who disappears when her father is arrested – although Lorrain refrains from showing much action. Instead, the sounds of a violent struggle are heard off-screen as Mario showers in his house across the street, oblivious to the brutal crackdown that is taking place around him. When he leaves for work, the streets are empty of people, cars bulldozed by the tanks that have swept through, crushing everything in their path. The film’s very deliberate, subtle pacing leads to a troubling climax, and while the surprising final scene is easily read as a metaphor for the oppressive, dehumanising regime imposed by Pinochet, it’s no less tragic.
Anyone who has seen the video for MIA’s ‘Born Free’ will be familiar with the basic set-up in Romain Gavras’s original debut feature, Our Day Will Come: red heads are second-class citizens, tormented and persecuted for their looks. In the bleak Nord-Pas de Calais region, Rémy (Olivier Barthelemy) is treated like a joke, ostracised by his family and football team, while his only ‘real’ relationship is conducted online in a gaming forum with someone he’s never met. But then, like a warped knight coming to his rescue, Patrick (a terrific Vincent Cassel), a psychologist and greying red head, decides to take Rémy under his wing and teach him a few life lessons. Over the next 48 hours, they buy a Porsche, get hammered in a supermarket after hours, check into a luxury hotel – where Gavras amusingly subverts the usual male-fantasy group-sex scene – and Rémy discovers that Ireland is the red heads’ spiritual homeland. The slightly absurd subject matter makes the film a bit of an oddity, but it’s confidently directed, entertaining and humorous, and laced with sinister undercurrents.
In Ryan Redford’s Oliver Sherman, a veteran (Garrett Dillahunt) from an unnamed war shows up unannounced at the remote home of the man who saved his life during a firefight (Franklin, played by Donal Logue). One man has a medal for bravery, the other a gaping scar across the back of his skull. The injury has left Sherman a bit slower, a bit dimmer, and certainly unable to cope with the social niceties demanded of him by Franklin’s wife. Redford, with the help of a chilling performance from the eerie Dillahunt, creates a palpable air of tension in the remote household, keeping the audience guessing what direction the volatile reunion between the two men, with their completely different lives, is going to take. It’s a bleak, disturbing and ultimately engrossing picture.
Yoon Sung-hyun’s debut feature Bleak Night was the only Korean entry in this year’s selection. It follows a grieving father as he investigates his son’s closest friends to piece together the events that led to the tragic accident in which the teenage boy has died. Although Yoon Sung-hyun’s assured directing style and the convincing performances from his young cast create a disquieting tension in the first half of the film, the atmosphere and mystery that initially sustain it dissipate gradually, and what remains feels like a plodding analysis of teenage discontent.
Overall, although there were a number of interesting films in the programme, they were too often films already scheduled to have a UK release in the near future. The desire of the directorial team to revitalise the Edinburgh festival is entirely laudable, and it is to be hoped that they will be able to propose a more original and daring film selection next year.
Festival report by Sarah Cronin, Pamela Jahn, Virginie Sélavy, Frances Morgan and David Cairns
A Deviant View of Cinema – Features, Essays & Interviews
