Interviews

The Illusionist: Interview with Sylvain Chomet

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The Illusionist

Format: Cinema

Release date: 20 August 2010

Venue: Key cities

Distributor: Warner Bros/Pathe

Director: Sylvain Chomet

Writer: Sylvain Chomet

Based on a screenplay by: Jacques Tati

Original title: L’illusionniste

UK/France 2010

80 mins

Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist is based on a script written by Jacques Tati, which he had kept in a drawer until his death in 1982. It tells the story of a past-his-prime stage performer, who is forced to accept questionable engagements in dubious venues in order to make a living. When he performs in a remote Scottish village, he meets little girl Alice, who is convinced that his tricks are truly the result of magic, and she follows him to Edinburgh. Delighted by her enthusiasm for his art, he rewards her by ‘conjuring up’ ever more generous presents, ultimately allowing himself to be bankrupted by the constant giving. But while The Illusionist is stunning to look at, it is a little more unkempt when it comes to the story it wants to tell and the story that’s behind this quite remarkable pairing of Tati and Chomet.

Pamela Jahn took part in a round table interview with Sylvain Chomet at the Berlin Film Festival in February, where the film had its world premiere before opening the Edinburgh Film Festival in June.

Q: Can you tell us a little bit about how you got hold of the script, because there seems to be some controversy over it.
Sylvain Chomet: No, there has been no controversy at all, but some very bad journalism was done in the UK. When I was working on Belleville Rendezvous I contacted Jacques Tati’s daughter, Sophie Tatisheff, to seek permission to use a segment of Jour de F&#234te in the film. To get her authorisation we showed her the material, small clips we had ready at the time and the script of Belleville Rendez-Vous, and she really liked it. All this rang a bell, and she remembered she had this script from her father. She knew that it was connected to her, because it is obvious that it is a letter from a father to his daughter. Tati wrote the script over quite a long period, three or four years, and Sophie was 13 when he started working on it, so he saw her change into a woman. She gave us permission to use the clip from Jour de F&#234te and she mentioned the script, but that was it. She died shortly after our conversation and so, unfortunately, we never met her. One day I contacted the estate of Jacques Tati, Jerome Deschamps and Mikall Micheff at Les Films de Mon Oncle, and they passed me the script – and I fell in love with it. I really loved the simplicity of the story and this very strong, beautiful relationship between father and daughter. It also felt very close to my relationship with my own daughter, who was five years old when we started the film and who is now 17. We bought the rights to make the film and Deschamps and Micheff were both very happy with it, so there is no controversy.

But as you mentioned before, there has been some discussion in the media about the script and your film.
I received a letter from a man called Richard MacDonald, who said he was the grandson of Jacques Tati. He told me the story that Tati had met someone at the Lido in Paris during the war and she became pregnant with a little girl. But Tati was married at the time, and he didn’t want to take responsibility. After I received this letter I decided to meet with this man, because I was interested in the details of this story. But when we met he became very aggressive and accused me of provocation and all that, and I said: ‘Look, if you are telling such a strong, emotional story about a father and a daughter you have to live with your daughter, you have to experience that. And that’s why I don’t see any reason why this script should have been dedicated to this girl he never lived with and who he didn’t see growing up.’ So I told him that if he had any problem with that, he should go speak to the estate of Jacques Tati. And he went off and I never saw him again. Then one day, there was this article in The Guardian saying all these terrible things about the film by a person who had never actually seen it.

[Note from the editors: Vanessa Thorpe at The Guardian quotes Tati’s grandson, Richard McDonald, as saying: ‘The sabotaging of Tati’s original L’illusionniste script, without recognising his troubled intentions, so that it resembles little more than a grotesque, eclectic, nostalgic homage to its author is the most disrespectful act.’]

Was there a moment when you worried about adapting this script because of the pressure of using the work of a distinguished director like Tati to make your own film?
There were two driving forces for me. One was Sophie, his daughter, but not because the script was all about her, rather because the story is about this father figure who is seeing this girl growing up like his daughter and who is trying to tell her something about life. When I read the script for the first time, I thought I should do something with it because otherwise it would have not gone anywhere, because Sophie Taticheff didn’t want this to be filmed in live action. She didn’t want somebody else to play her dad’s role in the film. And the other thing that was very important to me was that it was a very different film compared to Jacques Tati’s other work. I think if he had made the film at the time his career would have taken a completely different direction. The film takes place over a long period of time and in many different locations, and there’s a lot of travelling, which is all very unusual for Tati. So for that reason, because it wasn’t another Monsieur Hulot, I thought it would be really nice to do it. And the challenge for me was to make the script and all the emotion that’s in it work in animation.

Do you think Tati would have approved of an animated film?
I don’t know. I knew he was fascinated by drawings, and I think he was quite frustrated that he couldn’t draw himself. And in his films there is always a strong connection to childhood. If you look at the end of Play Time, for example, the world he describes in the film is very ugly. It’s sad, it’s grey, it’s uniform, almost robot-like. But at the end, you have this beautiful scene with the carousel of cars and it all becomes very childish. I think that is a beautiful way of looking at life. He’s got a lot of this in his films, like the relationship with the little boy in Mon Oncle. That’s why for me the ending in The Illusionist is not sad. It’s an evolution, I’d say. Father and daughter are both going their separate ways. She’s young, from a different generation, so she’s going to live her own life within her own culture. And he is an old man, but he’s also going to carry on and do something else. And I think it’s actually very redemptive when they meet in the end. But to answer your question, I don’t even know if I would have wanted to meet Tati to get his approval. Because most of the time when you have heroes like that it’s actually better not to meet them!

Why did you decide to include a live action scene with Tati in the film again, as you did in Belleville Rendezvous?
I felt I needed to put it in there so he could have a little look into the film. So you have the animated Tati and then you have the real Tati, like a mirror, and they look at each other and say ‘Do you want to stay?’, but they say ‘no, no, no’ and they leave. I think he needed to be there, if only for a moment.

The film is very different to your previous work.
Yes, exactly. Belleville Rendezvous went extremely well and a lot of people came to me and said: ‘Oh, are you going to make another one like this, this was really nice’, but I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to do something completely different. And here was the challenge, because this script wasn’t made for animation, it was made for live action, but I was convinced that it could work. I read the script when I was on the train to Cannes. The film is a voyage also, and I felt that it had something to do with the gentle balance of the train. I think I needed Jacques Tati to help me be a bit simpler in the way I use the camera and things like this. But that said, it was amazingly difficult, because nothing is more complicated than trying to do things very simply, and to make them look simple.

Was it also a challenge, or rather an attraction, for you to do something in 2D at a time when everything is going 3D?
Yes, but this was also a problem for us, because most of the really good animators are into 3D at the moment. And a 2D animator needs to know so many more things than 3D animators, because 3D basically means you have puppets without the strings, it’s a virtual world, so you have to be good in volumes and sketches and make them move. But a 2D animator is someone who can draw ‘classically’, who can draw fast, and someone who knows anatomy. You need to know the motion of animals and humans to make it work, and you need to know how to act as well.

How do you think children see your films?
I’ve never aimed my films at children as the main audience. I think you restrict yourself when you do that. But on the other hand, I was very surprised that a lot of kids actually watched Belleville Rendezvous, and they all loved it. My own daughter, for example, was never forced to watch the film. She actually has a lot of Pixar movies at home. But one day she saw the DVD and asked if she could watch it and she loved it too. For kids, I think, it’s all real… A lot of people are still fascinated when they see animation. It’s magic.

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Bluebeard: Interview with Catherine Breillat

Bluebeard

Format: Cinema

Release date: 16 July 2010

Venue: key cities

Distributor: New Wave Films

Director: Catherine Breillat

Writer: Catherine Breillat

Based on the fairy tale by: Charles Perrault

Original title: Barbe Bleue

Cast: Dominique Thomas, Lola Créton, Daphné Baiwir, Marilou Lopes-Benites, Lola Giovannetti

France 2009

80 mins

Although the film was one of the highlights on last year’s festival circuit, it has taken a while for Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard to get a UK theatrical release. Originally scripted and produced for French television, Bluebeard is a subtly suggestive retelling of Charles Perrault’s fairy tale about an ugly and extremely wealthy lord whose wives disappear under mysterious circumstances, until he falls for the much younger Marie-Catherine, who agrees to marry him in order to escape the shadow of her beautiful, talented older sister. What makes this understated, low-budget film a pure pleasure is the bold, teasing dialogue between the two sisters in the film’s framing plot, set in modern time, in which Catherine, the younger girl, thoroughly enjoys terrifying her older sister Anne by reading her the infamous tale from a book found in their attic. Playfully grim and increasingly disturbing, with a wonderfully cruel narrative that hints at the fiercely, sexually provocative spirit of Breillat’s previous work, Bluebeard slowly inveigles you before hitting you hard.

Pamela Jahn took part in a round table with Catherine Breillat at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival, where the film had its world premiere.

Q: Of all fairy tales, what is it that fascinated you so much about the story of Bluebeard?

Catherine Breillat: When I was a child this was my favourite fairy tale, but I was always astonished that this tale was actually told to little girls, because it’s a fairy tale in which women are killed – Bluebeard is a real serial killer. In fairy tales, you often find a protagonist who is an ogre, like in Little Red Riding Hood for instance, who feels the urge to eat the victims in order to feed himself. But in the case of Bluebeard, you are talking about a human being who marries his victims, including this young woman. But in a way, he is as innocent as Marie-Catherine.

If you look at my films, you will see that I am somewhat obsessed by the relationship between victims and their executioner, but as if the relationship was a rational thing in a physical sense, a relationship between two different forces that measure themselves. And therefore I’ve always wanted to make a movie about Bluebeard. I had decided to make it before I started shooting The Last Mistress. I went to Arte and told them that I wanted to make the movie in five months, and within three or four weeks I wrote the script and organised the shoot. But then I had my stroke and all of a sudden I got a little scared about making the film. But eventually, my desire to make it was stronger and I decided to go ahead with it.

In your film the elder sister dies in the end. Being a younger sister yourself, was revenge something that crossed your mind when you wrote that last scene?

I think a younger sister’s secret desire is always to eliminate the first one. So, the death of the elder sister was a bit of a treat for myself. When I read the fairy tale to my sister at the age of five, I did so because I knew she was going to cry and break down before me, and at that point I felt stronger than her. I could have shouted ‘I have no fear, I have no fear’, like the little one in the film, and I was very proud of that – sadly, very proud of that. In a way, I was the small Bluebeard at the time. And when the mother arrives we don’t see the dead sister, we just see the little one, and we see her finally hugged by the mother.

Why didn’t you show the mother’s reaction to the death of her daughter?

Because this is a children’s world, and the mother is only there to show that the little girl will now get all her attention – this is what really matters. This is why she’s not looking at the elder daughter, she is just concentrating on the little one.

Has your sister seen the film yet?

No. There’s also a direct reference to us in the names. My sister’s name is Marie-Hélène and in the film she’s called Marie-Anne, and the little sisters are called Catherine and Marie-Catherine.

When the girl enters the room with the hanged woman, why did you choose the little girl from the present time instead of the girl from the fairy tale?

Because in stories or fairy tales or fiction in general, people usually like to project themselves onto the story. And it’s the same for this little girl, she wants to see these women, so she goes into the room herself.

It is fascinating to see how well the different time settings work together.

The girls are reading the story in the present and projecting their own feelings onto ancient times. But ancient times are modern, in the sense that Shakespeare is very up-to-date and modern, and the same goes for Sophocles. I remember that I had a big discussion with my producer because she wanted to have the girls’ hair styled in a certain way, but I said no. They had to look exactly how they imagine themselves in the fairy tale, dressed as though they are in the Middle Ages. All the characters are themselves, with the exception of Bluebeard, who is dressed half way between François I by Clouet and Ivan the Terrible because he is a ghost and therefore is dressed like in a dream.

You also have a very playful way of dealing with the subject matter, for example, when the two girls start talking about homosexuality. Here you bring in a completely new topic into the story that, at the same time, creates some sort of confusion about their relationship.

Children have their own, delirious rationality, like when one of them says ‘God is somebody who is very busy and therefore he had to go down to the earth before going up to the sky’. This is something that I actually heard with my own ears, I didn’t make it up. And that’s why I decided to have this sequence, when they are talking about marriage, and the elderly sister starts talking in a very romantic way, playing with a ring all the time, and then the little one starts talking about sperm in a very rational way but, again, sort of in a delirious way also. Then she suddenly talks about homosexuality and I was absolutely struck by that and decided to keep it in the film. Little girls are not like puppets that will move and behave in the way you want. You just have to show children the way they really are. This is also why you should never explain fairy tales to children, I think, because children have their own imagination and their own way of interpreting them, which is much more important.

You mentioned before that, to some extent, Bluebeard was innocent too.

He is innocent in so far as he cannot not leave the castle, and he cannot not ask his wife to give him back the key, because the key is like a fairy. And this is fate, or a metaphor for fate. And we see very clearly that it is difficult for him to actually kill his wife because he loves her.

So, the monster is a friendly monster, in a way.

Yes, because he is the monster of desire – the monster of our desire, this obscure desire that we all have inside of us. And in that respect he must be somewhat nice, because what is exciting for us must have a nice side to it.

Does the killing of desire free the girl in the end?

She keeps him for herself, just like he keeps the hanged women for himself. So, that’s what unites them, because they do exactly the same thing. They become each other in a way.

So, in the end, the person, and his or her desire, is a very lonely thing.

Yes, I’ve just understood it myself because I’ve been asked the question. I hadn’t actually thought about it at all when making the film. This is why I am telling you that the real birth of the film happens when the audience watches the film. As Freud said, this is where the consciousness is being revealed.

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Edinburgh International Film Festival 2010


My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?

Edinburgh International Film Festival

16-27 June 2010

EIFF website

The 2010 edition of the Edinburgh International Film Festival opened with Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist, an animated film based on a script written by offbeat French comic genius Jacques Tati, which had never made it to the screen. This remarkable pairing did not quite produce the exciting result one could expect, and although the animation was beautiful, the story was somewhat insipid and lacked the oddball humour of Chomet’s earlier Belleville Rendezvous.

It was an unchallenging opening but this was corrected to some degree the next day with the screening of Kôji Wakamatsu’s Caterpillar (Kyatapirâ), an angry account of the relationship between a soldier, who comes back terribly maimed after fighting in the Second World War, and his wife. It was great that Edinburgh offered British audiences their first chance to see this subversive exploration of duty, heroism, and the cruel ties that bind a husband and wife. Caterpillar had already screened at the Berlinale in February, together with another of the Edinburgh Festival’s stand-outs, Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, a remarkably assured hillbilly tale about a young girl forced to face violent relatives to save her family from ruin.

There were few established directors on view and among them Werner Herzog gave us one of the most enigmatic and provocative films of the selection. Similar in style to his bizarrely brilliant Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, and with an equally star-studded cast – this time including Willem Dafoe, Michael Shannon, Chloe Sevigny, Udo Kier and Grace Zabrisky – My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? is, at heart, a Greek tragedy set in a contemporary San Diego suburb. Inspired by the true story of a son who killed his mother, seemingly at random, the film is told from the perspective of the investigating detective (Dafoe), who is trying to piece together the murderer’s story with the help of his fiancée (Sevigny) and an old mentor and friend (Kier). Although the film was produced by David Lynch and borrows deftly (and unashamedly) from his creepily surreal fare, Herzog insists in deploying his own wonderfully outlandish cinematic tropes – a scene in which Kier visits an ostrich farm is one particular highlight. But what makes My Son, My Son a singularly mesmerising treat is the sense of persistent delirium and delight at play here, and the impression that actors and audience are led through events and flashbacks by some mischievous puppet master.

While it seems that Herzog has found great pleasure in unconventional ‘genre’ movie-making, director Steven Soderbergh’s latest offering And Everything Is Going Fine is arguably his most modest work to date, one in which his directorial hand is barely evident. So complacent and burbling is this low-budget biopic about the writer-actor Spalding Gray that after watching 90 minutes of snippets of performances, TV interviews and home movies of the man in question, both his personality and the necessity for this documentary were still, unfortunately, unclear.

The fourth major work by Filipino director Brillante Mendoza (Kinatay, Slingshot, Serbis) had bigger ambitions. In Lola, Philippine cinema icons Anita Linda and Rustica Carpio portray two elderly grandmothers who face the consequences of a robbery-homicide involving their beloved grandsons: one the victim, the other the accused. Frail and destitute as they are, both women seek money in the aftermath of the killing – for a burial and a bail bond, respectively. Everything in this touching tragedy of right and wrong, acceptance and forgiveness, is adroitly done, but it feels so stretched and overlong that any sympathy you may have for the characters is in danger of vanishing even before reaching the half point.


Monsters

This year, the Night Moves and Under the Radar sections were disappointing: they were vaguely defined and almost interchangeable, their identity and aims too hazy and muddled to produce coherent, meaty selections. Launched two years ago to showcase ‘raw, risk-taking work’, Under the Radar was no more than a hotchpotch of vacant kitsch. We had high hopes for Zach Clark’s Vacation!, the follow-up to Modern Love Is Automatic, which had impressed us last year. It had a similar mix of retro world and female-focused melodrama, but where Modern Love was surprisingly moving and visually stylish, Vacation! offered only ugly 80s Day-Glo as a background to the underwhelming story of a girly holiday that goes badly wrong. Mike McCarthy’s Cigarette Girl was of no higher standard than a student film, and a badly misjudged one at that. Demonstrating a disastrous lack of skill in all areas of filmmaking, it featured over-stylised, cartoonish characters, wooden acting, awful dialogue and an inexistent plot, and was striving pathetically hard for a coolness that entirely eluded it. The Black Panther (La pantera negra) was an instantly forgettable, nonsensical noir pastiche from Mexico; filming in black and white, having God and Death as characters and dropping references to Kiss Me Deadly does not a good film make.

The Night Moves section for late-night screenings was equally marred by pastiche and déjà vu. Particularly depressing was The Last Rites of Ransom Pride, another ludicrous attempt at making a ‘cool’ film, this time in the Western genre. The rapid-fire MTV-style editing and overbearing soundtrack frantically tried to hide the lack of substance and the preposterousness of both plot and characters, which included a gun-toting hot chick, a witchy woman prone to pompous mystical statements, and villainous outlaw caricatures aplenty. Dutch horror movie Two Eyes Staring (Zwart water) had obvious echoes of The Orphanage and was too hackneyed to offer any real scares. British supernatural story Outcast was a mishmash of hocus-pocus and grim council estate realities, a mix previously attempted in Philip Ridley’s Heartless and Johnny Kevorkian’s The Disappeared. It was sad to see such excellent actors as Kate Dickie and James Nesbitt mislaid in this silly mess. The other British offering in the selection, Monsters, was much better, although not entirely original. A cross between District 9 and In Search of a Midnight Kiss, it was a romance with a sci-fi twist, charting the relationship that develops between a war photographer and a rich heiress as they try to make their way back to the USA through a Mexico infected by an alien invasion. Although the focus was more on the romance than on the action, it was well written and engaging, albeit in an undemanding, Saturday-night-entertainment kind of way.

Other British films of note included stop-motion animation Jackboots on Whitehall, which presented an alternative version of the Second World War that saw the Germans invading England and Churchill escaping to Scotland. It was a hilarious, witty, satirical romp featuring brilliant caricatures of all the nationalities involved (the weaselly Goebbels, the politically-confused American pilot and the Scots were special highlights) and was one of the most enjoyable films of the festival. In an entirely different style, Amy Hardie’s documentary The Edge of Dreaming also proved a crowd-pleaser. After dreaming she was going to die, Hardie set about to investigate dreams and their relationship to reality and conscious life. Although the scenes of perfect family life are fairly dull and somewhat indulgent, and the film could have gone further in its exploration of the human mind, Hardie, an open-minded woman with a scientific background, was a congenial guide through an uncharted and fascinating territory.

Another interesting British film was Viv Fongenie’s Ollie Kepler’s Expanding Purple World, starring Edward Hogg (White Lightnin’) as a smart, young web designer with an obsessive passion for astrophysics, who experiences a schizophrenic breakdown after the death of his girlfriend. This charming yet at times unsettling portrait of mental illness is unlikely to set the world alight, but it is involving and altogether adult, and Hogg once again lends his character a psychological depth, charisma and soft-eyed madness that is hard to resist. By contrast, Karl Golden’s Pelican Blood was another example of a film that tries too hard in all respects, although it did boast strong performances. Harry Treadaway plays the gloomy antihero Nikko, a birdwatcher who plans to kill himself after ticking off 500 rare birds on his list. He has tried to commit suicide before and failed; now he’d like to do it properly, in a Romeo-and-Juliet way with his unpredictable, animal rights activist, trouble-making girlfriend, whom he met in a suicide chat room. Golden’s film tries hard to position itself as an ‘edgy’ British film, and on the surface it ticks all the boxes, but it never quite pulls it off, partly because the characters are simply too handsome and angelically lit in their misery.

What became obvious as the festival unfolded was that the most accomplished works came from German-speaking filmmaking. Herzog’s outlandish crime comedy was accompanied by a couple of gems from Germany and Austria, both clearly deserving of a UK release. Benjamin Heisenberg’s The Robber (Der Räuber), which also screened in Berlin, is a smart psychological thriller about a bank robber who is also a talented and passionate amateur marathon runner. Just as impressive was Maximilian Erlenwein’s Gravity (Schwerkraft), starring emerging actor Fabian Hinrichs as Frederik, a seemingly mild-mannered young banker, who, after witnessing a customer shoot himself, plunges into an early mid-life crisis that sees him get dangerously involved with a former schoolmate and ex-convict Vince (Jürgen Vogel). Although the story is heavy-handed in places, and at times a little clichéd, overall it is a witty, dark and thoroughly entertaining film, and it was one of the unquestionable highlights of the festival.

Pamela Jahn and Virginie Sélavy

Festivals

Cannes 2010

Carancho

63rd Cannes Film Festival

12-23 May 2010, Cannes, France

Cannes Festival website

Pamela Jahn reports back from the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.

Complaining about lacklustre films at festivals is a favourite pastime for critics, but it seems that this year interesting films are genuinely harder to find. Still recovering from a disappointingly underwhelming Berlinale edition in icy February, my hopes were high for a more exciting experience of high-profile festival programming on the bright and bustling Croisette. At least on paper, this year’s line-up didn’t look as predictable as in 2009 where the Competition section primarily featured a handful of established old masters such as Palme d’Or winner Michael Haneke (The White Ribbon), a couple of cine-provocateurs of the von Trier and Tarantino variety and some of the most talked-about up-and-comers. Although there was no unexpected breakout gem to impress jury, critics and audience alike, the festival’s 63rd edition offered a late spate of extraordinary finds and must-sees in the Competition and Un Certain Regard section, as well as in the screenings of the Marché du Film.

Among those were Olivier Assayas’s sprawling, yet thoroughly enjoyable five-and-a-half-hour television docu-fiction Carlos, a compelling portrait of one of the world’s most notorious terrorists of the 1970s and 80s, and Pang Ho-Cheung’s excellent slasher Dream Home, which sees a young woman fight back against Hong Kong’s corrupt property market practices in a vicious and brilliantly dark comical way. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s delicate, dreamy Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives deservedly won the Palme d’Or and – like most of Weerasethakul’s work – stood out as both an artistic and cinematic revelation. Drawing on the Buddhist notion of animism, the film follows an old man in need of kidney dialysis, who returns to the jungle and encounters the ghost of his deceased wife and the monkey spirit of his disappeared son, and also includes a fairy tale about a princess, a slave and a talking catfish. A film of wonderfully subtle emotions, both harrowing and heartening, Uncle Boonmee achieves a soft, yet ambiguous philosophical transcendence that confirms Weerasethakul as one of the most inventive and insightful artist filmmakers of our time.

Among a strong Korean contingent, directors Im Sang-soo and Hong Sang-soo made solid showings with, respectively, The Housemaid and Hahaha, the latter taking home the Un Certain Regard prize. A slick, slow-burning remake of Kim Ki-young’s cult 1960 Korean movie of the same name, Im’s The Housemaid profits hugely from its opulent production design and the performance of Kim Ki-young veteran actress Yoon Yeo-jeong in the role of the elderly housekeeper Byung-sik, yet does not quite produce the exciting result one could have hoped for. Depicting an affair between a rich, narcissistic husband and a newly employed maid, the plot soon turns into a twisted tale of male anxiety, materialism, sexual competition and obsessive psychosis. Perhaps the film is too slickly Hitchcockian for its own good, but there are some great moments, in particular the stunningly violent ending.

Although it was written off by many critics (just like The Housemaid), another notable Competition entry was Takeshi Kitano’s Outrage, his first yakuza gangster film in a decade. Despite the typical crime plot becoming a bit too muddled towards the climax, it was great to see Kitano back on form, both behind and in front of the camera, in what is arguably his most direct and violent film to date.

While Hideo Nakato’s eagerly awaited latest endeavour Chatroom proved very disappointing, one of the strongest films in the Un Certain Regard section was Carancho by Argentine filmmaker Pablo Trapero, whose Lion’s Den impressed us last year. Although not quite as good as its predecessor, Carancho is a well-crafted, tough-as-nails thriller built around the world of ambulance chasers, corrupt hospitals and unscrupulous lawyers who make their money out of late-night traffic accidents and other calamities. Echoing the style and moral decay of 1930s and 1940s Hollywood film noir, it feels at times like Trapero is a little too caught up in his own ambitions to push social realism on screen beyond its usual thematic and emotional boundaries, and to get the right balance in the web of corruption, murder and love that connects Sosa (Ricardo Darín), a legal vulture who is tired of his job, to young ER doctor Luján (Martina Gusman). But as predictable as the narrative is, the procedural set-pieces in which the culmination of car crashes and the couple’s dangerous liaison play out are shot in a handheld style with great old-school skill and energy, and the intense performances by the two leads make for a gripping film that aptly rings alarm bells for the state of the nation.

Another thoroughly enjoyable find was Gregg Araki’s Kaboom, which screened at one of the always well-attended midnight slots. Although the film didn’t turn out to be as stunning and exceptional as one would expect from the American enfant terrible – especially as a follow-up to his wonderful Mysterious Skin – Kaboom spins a totally out-of-this-world narrative of teen sex, drugs, dreams, cuckoo conspiracies and animal mask-wearing cultists. At the centre of this maelstrom is handsome but shy college student Smith, who secretly lusts for his chav surfer roommate Thor, but prefers hanging out 24/7 with his sarcastic lesbian best friend Stella. It’s a candy-coloured, bizarre, chaotic, silly joyride that wins you over instantly once you abandon yourself to its wackiness. Twin Peaks and Donnie Darko might obviously have been influences for Araki here, but Kaboom is way too soft and outright ridiculous to ever draw you in in the same way. Nevertheless, it’s sexy to look at and a fun piece of cinema for short-term pleasure.

When the official festival programme lets you down, Cannes’ Film Market usually offers plenty of distractions. My personal stand-out was David Michôd’s Australian crime drama Animal Kingdom, which caught my attention as it had just premiered at Sundance, where it deservedly won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize. Animal Kingdom tells the story of Joshua ‘J’ Cody (James Frecheville) and his entry into a world of armed robbery, drugs and murder as he falls into the care of his two uncles, who are working with their business partner Barry ‘Baz’ Brown to protect their eldest brother, the heinous Pope, from the police. Soon Josh gets caught right in the middle of the conflict, but he quickly realises that the only way to survive is to learn how to play the game. Striking a perfect balance between moments of extreme violence and gut-wrenching drama, Animal Kingdom makes for a riveting, thrilling, and in the end, heartbreaking cinematic experience. You could argue that alone made the trip to Cannes worthwhile.

Pamela Jahn

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Dogtooth: Interview with Yorgos Lanthimos

Dogtooth

Format: Cinema

Release date: 23 April 2010

Venue: Gate, Odeon Covent Garden, Renoir, Ritzy (London) + key cities

Distributor: Verve Pictures

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Writer: Efthymis Filippou, Yorgos Lanthimos

Original title: Kynodontas

Cast: Christos Stergioglou, Michelle Valley, Aggeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni, Hristos Passalis, Anna Kalaitzidou

Greece 2009

94 mins

Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth is an inventive and riveting film that blurs the line between the real and the utterly grotesque. The story (the less you know, the better) takes place almost entirely within the confines of a spacious family house, inhabited by a married couple and their three grown-up children, who have never left the house and are confined to the bizarre world created by their parents’ cruel games and peculiar educational methods. Opting for fixed, meticulously framed shots and a dazzling, yet unhurried visual style, Lanthimos gradually reveals the details of this twisted, self-enclosed world while crafting an increasingly unsettling atmosphere. Full of weird surprises, wonderful dark humour and irreverent spirit, Dogtooth is a bold and brilliantly perverse gem. Pamela Jahn talks to Yorgos Lanthimos about parenting, Greek views on sexuality and the necessity of a good sense of humour.

Pamela Jahn: In Dogtooth you’re telling a story about a dysfunctional family that abandons the norms, rules and logic that have been taken for granted in society. What attracted you to this kind of subject matter?

Yorgos Lanthimos: It didn’t really start as a story about family dysfunction as such. In the beginning, I was wondering about family life and parenting in general and if the way we think about it would ever really change. But I had a conversation with some friends one day, and I was making fun about the fact that two of them were getting married and having children, because today many people get divorced and kids are being raised by single parents, so I said there was no point in getting married. But although I was obviously just joking, all of a sudden they got extremely defensive about what I had said. This made me realise how someone I knew and who I would never have expected to react that way freaks out when you mess about with his family. And that’s how I got the initial idea about this man who would go to extremes to protect his family, and who would try to keep his family together forever by keeping his children away from any influence from the outside world, being firmly convinced that this is the best way to raise them.

But it’s obviously a bit more than just keeping them away from the outside world, because the parents also play pretty cruel games with their children and teach them nonsense.

The thing is that because the father really does have the best intentions for his children, or at least that is what he believes, he tries to provide them with the best environment to grow up in, like this big house with a big garden and a swimming pool and all that. But at the same time, he has to create all these myths and fears so that the children don’t dare going out of the house. But since he has been able to do that from the moment they were born it also shows just how much you can influence people’s minds and create a view of the world for them that is exactly the way you want it.

Read our review of Dogtooth.

It’s also interesting that you decided not to give any background information about why the parents decided to raise their children this way in the first place.

Yes, that was very important to me from the beginning, because I think it would have been a completely different film otherwise – you would be too engaged in judging if it was right for them to behave that way depending on the reasons they had for doing so. What interested me most was the result of their actions and to see how far you can go when messing with people’s minds and making them believe the things that you want them to believe. It’s a very dangerous thing to do and I hope my film provokes reactions from people because in the film it is obviously too late. Sooner or later this had to explode.

It all seems to work out until Christina comes into play, a woman who is brought into the house by the father on occasion to have sex with his son. She is basically the trigger that starts the fatal chain of increasingly violent events.

That’s right, she is the trigger. But what fascinates me most about her character is that she enters this obscure world and for her there is a temptation to take advantage of the situation and of the children. For example, she demands things from the older sister so they start dealing in this way, ‘I give you that, so why don’t you give me this’. You can feel the power Christina has, which she plays out on the children. It’s the temptation to take advantage of the weaker ones, and that’s what I like about her character. I think I would be tempted to act in the same way if I came into contact with someone so naïve, and to fool them and get whatever I want from them. Why not do it?

Although the son is daddy’s darling and gets special treatment, the two girls seem much more mature and stronger. How did you develop the different characters of the siblings?

I do believe that girls or women in general are stronger characters than boys. They are the smartest ones (laughs). So it was just natural for me that the older boy would be the father’s favourite, but at the same time he tries the hardest and seems somewhat more immature. But it also has to do with the fact that boys are seen as much more deserving of having sex and entitled to more things than the girls. When it comes to the girls, the parents never think that they need to be educated about sex and they deal with them in a much more conservative way. So it creates this bizarre situation, where they just discard any kind of thought about this with regard to the girls. For the boy, however, they are very proud of him having sex. At least this is the mentality we have in Greece. I have to admit, it’s quite dated, but I guess it still exists in other countries too.

How much research did you do before or while writing the script?

We didn’t do any research at all, because I thought it was such a surreal story we were working on. It was only afterwards, when we were already rehearsing, that this Austrian story came out about the father who kept his daughter in the basement, where she grew up like an animal, and he had children with her. But still, this felt very different from what we were trying to do since it had a very different tone to it, way too dark and dreadful.

Your film has a ferocious wit and a great sense of humour, which at times makes it feel more like an inverted comedy, in which absurdity gets out of control when some sort of normality finds its way in. Why was humour so important to you in this story?

That’s true (laughs)… It’s interesting what you’re saying. I actually never thought about it in this way, but it was the only way for me to approach the subject, because to really go deep into things the film had to be violent and, at the same time, have a great sense of humour, with the contradiction of being in an open space with light and beautiful garden and beautiful children. I think it brings out the most intense and powerful emotions when you experience contradictions like this. By employing a certain sense of humour you essentially get more serious about things and show conflict more effectively than if you were overly dramatic or only violent because that’s a one-way approach that just forces audiences to watch something appalling. With humour you can really make people think in many different directions, and it feels like a more existential experience to me. I always try to infuse humour into my work. I also work in theatre a lot, and you often end up working on a play without much humour. But it is very important for me to always find a way to introduce the ridiculous side of things into whatever I do, no matter how dramatic or tragic the given situation is.

It seems quite clear that you are not advocating violence because we see that the kids’ actions lead to some very nasty events. On the other hand, violence and dancing seem to be the only ways for the siblings to express their frustration at their lack of freedom.

I am very close to physicality in general, and I think I can only really work things out that way. I only work physically with the actors when rehearsing. I don’t sit down with them to analyse their parts in terms of what they should be thinking of and how they should approach their character. I just don’t like analysing things too much and I guess that’s why I deal with things physically. It just feels more real to me, and especially in film, where you have actors pretending to be a character in a situation. I don’t like setting up a frame of mind in their head. I just like them to act, literally speaking.

Did you have a clear idea from the beginning of how you were going to approach the visual style of the film?

I never try to visualise a film while writing the script or when I am casting. This happens only when I start rehearsing, I start getting an idea of what the film could look like. And in this particular film I thought it should be shot in a way that was quite realistic on the one hand – for example, there is not much lighting and the location is real – but with really strict framing and a cool, surreal look to go with the narrative. I guess that this is also related to my general philosophy about filmmaking. To me, it looks fake if you try to be too involved in the way you film things and if you ask your actors to get really emotionally involved. As much as I don’t like forcing feelings onto my actors, I also don’t like forcing them onto the audience. I prefer to keep the film open to allow people to get engaged in their own way. So I try to not guide people to conclusions too much, but rather expose things and have the audience react to what is happening on screen. For me, it is also a way of avoiding being too didactic in my films.

Dogtooth feels like a slap in the face of suburban life. In that sense, is it a personal story too?

No, it’s exactly the opposite. I grew up with only my mother, she got divorced when I was very young, and she died when I was 17 years old. From then on, I was by myself, so I had to go out into the world quite early and earn a living and study and do all these things. So, in a way I am observing the characters and the story in the film from a very different point of view. But even so, I really don’t know what I would do if I was a parent. If you asked me today how I would raise my children I would say that I’d try to have them experience freedom and be much more in contact with the world, and I think I would live somewhere in the centre of the city where they can come into contact with as many different elements of life as possible. But I am saying this now and in a year or so we might be speaking again and I might live in a nice suburban house with a garden and a swimming pool… who knows? I really don’t know what life has in store for me, but it’s amazing how your mind can fool you sometimes. (laughs)

Check it out, Festivals

Berlinale 2010: Dispatch 4

Kanikōsen

In her final dispatch from Berlin, Pamela Jahn reports on the Asian films in the programme, including new works by Zhang Yimou and Kôji Wakamatsu.

Kanik&#333sen
There is traditionally a strong Asian presence in the Forum section, and after last year’s inventive Korean features (including Baek Seung-bin’s debut feature Members of the Funeral) I was hoping for another batch of exciting films this year. Unfortunately, I missed the two Korean films on offer, but the most original of the four Japanese entries in the section was undoubtedly Sabu’s Kanik&#333sen. A witty, ferociously crafted screen adaptation of Takeji Kobayashi’s 1929 agitprop novel, the film mainly takes place on a battered cannery ship in imperialist Japan. The set is somewhat reminiscent of Metropolis, and the film tells a similar story, focusing on a crew of downtrodden workers who eventually rise up against their tyrannical oppressors. As one would expect from a filmmaker who is known for fast-paced action-comedies and anarchic satire, Kanik&#333sen is informed by a pitch-black sense of humour that at times turns into slapstick; yet Sabu manages to make the novel’s fundamental and still relevant critique clear by keeping the right balance between theatrical elements, brutality and idiosyncratic ingenuity. Employing an anti-realist approach to the historical context, Kanik&#333sen is a bizarre and often claustrophobic cinematic experience where Brecht meets Chaplin on the high sea.

Parade
Diving into the abyss of modern Japanese society, Isao Yukisada’s Parade is an often comical but increasingly gloomy urban tale revolving around the phenomenon of people in their mid-20s who refuse to grow up and face life. At first, the narrative is driven merely by dialogue and the infrequent actions taking place in a household of four troubled Tokyo drifters, but it sparks up the moment a homeless teenage hustler suddenly takes over the couch in the living room. The film is roughly divided into four chapters, each focusing on one of the tenants and his or her private obsession, and the dark nature of the story is emphasised by the soundtrack and sublime twists that carefully hint at the film’s surprise ending. Although Parade lacks the drive, visual subtlety and thoughtfulness that made Yukisada’s 2001 teen drama Go such a compelling watch, just following these offbeat, gentle dreamers is a pleasure, and it made this somewhat overwrought film stand out as one of the wittier and more honest works on show in the Panorama section.

Caterpillar
Excoriated as a ‘national disgrace’ in the Japanese press at the time, Kôji Wakamatsu’s Secrets Acts behind Walls (Kabe no naka no himegoto) caused a stir when it premiered at the Berlinale in 1965, which ultimately helped push the pinku eiga pioneer to fame home and abroad. Forty-five years later, Wakamatsu’s eagerly awaited new feature Caterpillar – a loose follow-up to his 2007 monstrous docu-fiction drama United Red Army (Jitsuroku rengô sekigun: Asama sansô e no michi) – was screening in competition, but although it confirms Wakamatsu’s credentials as one of Japan’s most fiercely independent directors/producers to date, the style and backdrop of his latest effort are quite different from his earlier work. Set in a rural village during the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1940, Caterpillar tells the story of severely disabled war veteran Lieutenant Kyuzo Kurokawa (Shima Ohnishi) who returns home disfigured and dumb, and with no arms and legs, but highly decorated, with three medals paying tribute to his heroic deeds. For his wife Shigeko (Shinobu Terajima), however, he is less a ‘war god’ than a burden, as rude and demanding with her as he was before he was maimed, and while carrying out her duty as the docile peasant, sacrificing herself by caring for the glorified soldier and taking him out for public display, her meek patience is thinning rapidly and eventually turns into a desire for revenge. Caterpillar uses documentary war footage, radio propaganda and excessive, brutal imagery that hint at the violently, sexually and politically provocative spirit of Wakamatsu’s previous work, but the film is strongest in its meticulous depiction of the strained relationship between Kyozu and Shigeko. Overall, it makes a fitting addition to the 73-year-old director’s remarkable oeuvre, which now stands at 100 films.

A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop (San qiang pai an jing qi)
Undeniably the most colourful entry in this year’s programme was Zhang Yimou’s A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop – a remake of sorts of the Coen Brothers’ 1984 debut Blood Simple. Moving the action to northern China in the imperial age, the film follows Ni Dahong, the owner of a noodle shop in the middle of the desert, who pays a killer to murder both his unfaithful wife and her squeamish lover. It’s a shame that the banal slapstick and oddball jokes that Zhang decided to employ instead of the black humour of the original inevitably turn his ambitious venture into a comic farce as the plot rolls on, and it is only in the film’s showdown that he manages to get back on solid ground. There are plenty of things wrong with this film, including the wildly varied and exaggerated acting on display, but A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop is nonetheless a visual treat throughout, from the luridly coloured landscapes and floral costumes to the film’s deft cinematography that are clear reminders of Zhang’s earlier work.

Golden Slumber (Goruden Suramba)
With no more major surprises to be expected after a week of enjoying an inspiring, yet patchy festival programme, my last choice turned out to be something of a lucky draw. Golden Slumber is essentially a Japanese indie man-on-the-run conspiracy thriller that follows the conventions of the genre, but the imagery of Yoshihiro Nakamura’s film is all his own. Aoyagi (Masato Sakai), a delivery-truck driver, is meeting up with his old college friend Morita (Hidetaka Yoshioka) when the new prime minister is assassinated in a bomb attack during a procession through the streets of the Japanese city of Sendai, and, through some far-fetched coincidences, Aoyagi becomes the prime suspect. Nakamura deftly hurls his unobtrusive hero from one hair’s breadth escape to another, filling in his background in comic-style fashion, and even though the story feels a bit longwinded in the middle, it lays the groundwork for the triumphant climax. A witty, refreshing genre treat, and arguably one of the most easily enjoyable films at the Berlinale this year.

Read Pamela Jahn’s first report , second report, and third report from the Berlinale.
Festivals

Berlinale 2010: Dispatch 3

Jew Suss: Rise and Fall

In a third dispatch from Berlin, Pamela Jahn reports on a new American indie talent and Oskar Roehler’s unsuccessful take on a famous case of Nazi propaganda. Check this section for more reports from the festival in the coming days.

Winter’s Bone
An austere, dark adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s country noir saga about a teenager’s search for her missing father, Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone is a chilling, nightmarish tale of rural struggle for survival complicated by family feuds. When 17-year-old Ree (impressively played by Jennifer Lawrence) learns that her drug-dealing father has disappeared after pawning the family home and jeopardising her sick mother and young sibling’s existence, she decides to find him – dead or alive. Looking for the truth among members of his criminal circle of friends and relatives scattered in the forests of the Ozark Mountains, she is faced with a series of dangerous and violent events, but gradually disentangles the web of lies that surrounds her father’s vanishing. As the mystery is solved, however, the story becomes overly sentimental, which feels at odds with the film’s otherwise intriguing atmosphere of mistrust, threat and everyday misery. But besides this, Winter’s Bone is gripping enough to keep you interested, with Granik showing an eye for detail and a genuine talent for building a creeping sense of obscurity and despair.

Jew Suss: Rise and Fall (Jud Süß – Film Ohne Gewissen)
Boos and incredulous gasps greeted the end of the press screening of Oskar Roehler’s Jew Suss: Rise and Fall, a star-studded and slick but overall disappointingly hollow Nazi drama about one man’s Faustian pact with the Hitler regime. A confused, clunky mix of satire and melodrama, the film tells the story of Austrian actor Ferdinand Marian (Tobias Moretti), who is forced to perform the role of Joseph Suss Oppenheimer in Jew Suss, a film based on Goebbels (ridiculously overplayed by a ranting Moritz Bleibtreu) and Veit Harlan’s fraudulent adaptation of a novel by German-Jewish writer Lionel Feuchtwanger. Married to a half-Jewish woman, Marian’s initial attempts to turn down Goebbels’s offer only serve to intensify the excitement of the latter, leaving the actor no choice but to accept and perform the part of the powerful, manipulative Jewish businessman and financial adviser of the Duke of Wurttemberg, who was hanged in Stuttgart in 1738. The main problem with Roehler’s film is that he focuses merely on Marian’s tragedy, ultimately turning the attention away from the history of the notorious film that became one of the Third Reich’s most offensive and commercially successful pieces of propaganda to concentrate on an all too predictable human drama.

Read Pamela Jahn’s first report and second report from the Berlinale.
Festivals

Berlinale 2010: Dispatch 2

Exit through the Shop

In her second dispatch from Berlin, Pamela Jahn tells us about Banksy’s first directorial effort as well as a German crime thriller based on the real-life story of an Austrian robber-cum-marathon runner. Check this section for more reports from the festival in the coming days.

Exit through the Gift Shop
Given all you know, or rather don’t know about Banksy, it comes as quite a surprise that for his first foray into filmmaking the clandestine street artist has made a documentary that to a certain extent features his secretive self. Billed as ‘the world’s first street art disaster movie’, Exit through the Gift Shop gives an exclusive insight into the street art scene of recent years as seen through the eyes of an over-excited French second-hand-clothing dealer, Thierry Guetta, who became obsessed with videotaping street artists and graffitists at work in Los Angeles and abroad, and ultimately plunged into the art scene himself. Both Guetta’s life and Banksy’s film take a dramatic turn as the illustrious Frenchman and the street artist become friends. Encouraged by Banksy to mount his own show, Guetta conquers the art world as Mr Brainwash and in return entrusts his enormous tape collection to Banksky who knows how to use the material to good effect. What follows has to be seen to be believed – or not. For entertaining as Exit through the Gift Shop is, it is not quite clear whether what we see is real or just another hoax, or as Bansky himself prudently claims in a video message that precedes the screening: ‘As it turns out, some of the people don’t believe it anyway and they think the film is some kind of spoof. This is ironic because Exit through the Gift Shop is one of the most honest films you’ll ever see.’

Exit through the Gift Shop is released in UK cinemas by Revolver Entertainment on March 5.

The Robber (Der Räuber)
Based on the real-life case of the Austrian serial bank robber who became known as ‘Pump-gun Ronnie’ in the late 80s, Benjamin Heisenberg’s The Robber was a welcome discovery in a competition section that so far has been rather dreary. The film tells the story of Johann Rettenberger (Andreas Lust), both a successful marathon runner and confirmed criminal, who is driven by a constant, uncontrollable need for speed and adrenalin rushes. Shortly after he is once more released from jail, Rettenberger inevitably falls back into his old habits, raiding and running, and soberly measuring his heart rate after any physical strain. He even breaks records as an athlete at local competitions, but neither the sport nor the unconditional love he receives from his girlfriend Erika (Franziska Weisz) can bring his troubled mind to rest. Following a man permanently on the move, Heisenberg succeeds in capturing the inner turmoil of Rettenberger’s animal-like spirit with the same meticulous precision and steely determination that his character puts into his strict training scheme. And although some might argue that with its bleak, cold visual style and sparse narrative The Robber doesn’t add anything new to the gangster genre, the film is well done and has an unsettling intensity and unfaltering energy from start to finish.

Read Pamela Jahn’s first report from the Berlinale.
Festivals

Berlinale 2010: Dispatch 1

Metropolis

The 2010 edition of the Berlinale has just started and in her first dispatch from Berlin Pamela Jahn tells us about the highlights of the first few days. Check this section for more reports from the festival in the coming days.

Metropolis
This year’s Berlinale opened on Thursday 11 February, but the real standout event was the gala screening of the newly restored version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis at the Friedrichstadtpalast on Friday 12, with live accompaniment from the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin. Part of the myth surrounding Fritz Lang’s best known work comes from the fact that the original was cut shortly after the premiere of the film at the Ufa-Palast in Berlin on 10 January 1927. Although the restored version is 30 minutes longer than the print released in 2001, it still doesn’t completely recreate the original version. One sequence of the 16 mm negative of the film that was miraculously found in Buenos Aires in 2008 was simply too damaged and had to be narrated in intertitles. The newly added scenes not only help to better understand the fragmentary plot of Lang’s futuristic epic about the struggle between workers and bosses in a capitalist dystopia, but they also ensure an entirely unique and captivating cinematic experience. In addition to sequences depicting the conflict between industrialist Joh Fredersen and scientist Rotwang, creator of the machine woman, and extended scenes at the end of the film, when Maria is pursued by the masses of uprising workers, stunningly mounted images of Metropolis‘s red-light district Yoshiwara and inserted biblical references intensify the fantastical portrait of a time and place that feel both strangely affecting and disturbingly familiar. This reconstructed classic was the perfect – if ‘unofficial’ – opening to the 60th Berlinale.

Eureka Entertainment have just announced that they will release the newly restored version of Metropolis in UK cinemas later in the year, before making it available in a new DVD and Blu-ray edition in The Masters of Cinema Series.

Howl
Also worthy of note in the first few days of the festival was Howl, one of the American films in competition, which dramatises the landmark 1957 obscenity trial revolving around Allen Ginsberg’s poem of the same name. Combining animated sequences, dramatic narration and documentary style, the film offers a captivating, yet partly unsatisfying, insight into the creative process and personal struggle that Ginsberg was going through while writing poetry. The dark Kafkaesque animation – which is reminiscent of the visual style of Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir – creates a vibrant and fascinating imagery that brilliantly evokes the poem, complementing the dramatic courtroom scenes and fragments of a re-imagined interview with Ginsberg (played by James Franco), given to an unseen interviewer and interspersed with flashbacks from his past. Directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman aim high both aesthetically and conceptually, but they only really dazzle on the former level. Yet, despite a slightly artificial, long-winded feel, Howl is a vivid, engaging and lovingly made film.

Features

Review of the Year 2009

Let the Right One In

The Electric Sheep team look back at the heroes and villains of 2009.

THE GOOD

Love Exposure
A four-hour long hymn to the redemptive power of love, Love Exposure creates a magnificently alien universe that careers from cartoony farce to serious drama. For all its oddness, the film has an epic, biblical quality, and there is a truth in the characters and their relationships that keeps us gripped despite the marathon length. ELEANOR MCKEOWN

Let the Right One In
This sweet and bloody subtle horror tale charts the relationship between lonely 12-year-old Oskar and vampire girl Eli. There is an ever-present sense of danger whenever Eli and Oskar are together and it is this threat underlying their love that makes the film so touching and melancholy, so real and unsentimental. Let the Right One In perfectly captures the nature of love as a delicate and dangerous balancing act, lovers poised for a fleeting, magical moment between need and defiance, trust and menace, sweetness and violence. TINA PARK

The White Ribbon
Violence is yet again the main subject of Haneke’s excellent The White Ribbon, which deservedly won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year. The White Ribbon is very much a German film, and it is impossible to ignore that the overly quiet and polite children depicted here are the ‘Nazi generation’. But, more than that, it is, in Haneke’s words, ‘a film about the roots of evil’. It is a didactic play of sorts, but one in which the names of the culprits are as irrelevant as any direct answers or lessons. The finely crafted screenplay, the stunning black and white photography, the aural landscape, the use of omission and silence make this nightmarish fable one of Haneke’s most accomplished films to date. PAMELA JAHN

White Lightnin’
Merging real-life events and unbridled fiction, writers (and co-producers) Shane Smith and Eddy Moretti have crafted a bold, nightmarish tale of Southern darkness and director Dominic Murphy takes the subject matter to cinematic extremes, using a hand-held camera, bizarre angles and repeated blackouts to convey Appalachian mountain dancer Jesco White’s disturbed state of mind. Intensely imagined and vividly directed, White Lightnin’ is a raw, rabid, howling hillbilly hell trip that doesn’t let up. PAMELA JAHN

Afterschool
If, as is usually the case, high school/college movies are intended as portraits of America in microcosm, then this is the most bilious, vicious picture of that nation I’ve encountered in years. The dark nature of the story is emphasised by visually inventive, oddly framed photography throughout, imitating both the lopsided compositions of amateur cameramen and the disaffected gaze of a sociopath, building a woozy, unhealthy atmosphere, a world viewed through the wrong head. Creepy and smart. MARK STAFFORD

Johnny Mad Dog
Set in an unnamed African country, Johnny Mad Dog opens with a shockingly brutal, surreally violent scene in which a pack of frenzied, coked up, brainwashed children attack a village. The film plunges us into their perception of the senseless chaos and madness of war, avoiding any simplifying, worthy platitudes about the situation. They are both terrible victims of the war and terrifying murderers, childish and vulnerable on the one hand and capable of the most chilling acts of violence on the other. A cross between Lord of the Flies and Apocalypse Now, this is an extraordinarily powerful film. VIRGINIE SÉLAVY

Moon
Duncan Jones’s independent debut feature is a fascinating and visually stunning sci-fi film that explores the alienation and bitter loneliness of space, as well as the very essence of the human condition. Filmed in little more than a month, and refreshingly making use of models rather than relying solely on CGI, the picture beautifully captures Jones’s unique vision, both aesthetically and philosophically. Moon is an instant classic of the genre, as well as one of the most impressive and original films to emerge from the UK in years. SARAH CRONIN

Big River Man
This unconventional documentary charts eccentric Slovenian swimmer Martin Strel’s extraordinary attempt to swim the Amazon. An unlikely champion, the rotund, hard-drinking, 53-year-old Martin combines a day job as a flamenco guitar teacher with a line in swimming the world’s most polluted rivers. The megalomaniac nature of the project, the strangeness of his relationship to his entourage and the spectacular Amazonian scenery make for one of the most enjoyable films of the year, a soulful journey into dark places, lunacy and the extremes of human behaviour that is at turns desperately farcical and profoundly affecting. VIRGINIE SÉLAVY

THE BAD

Antichrist
Watching Antichrist, one gets no sense of the artist grappling with his materials, trying to strike a balance between order and chaos. Instead, von Trier seems a confused and desperate director, whose latest film has completely evaded his control. Having made good work in the past, he may well make good work again in the future, and should he do so, Antichrist may come to be seen as an intriguing low in the director’s oeuvre. Considered on its own, however, Antichrist is utter nonsense, an irredeemable mess, and one of the worst films I have ever had the displeasure to see. DAVID WARWICK

THE UGLY

Synecdoche New York
We are asked to sympathise with an outrageously self-absorbed, self-pitying blob of a man who cannot get over the momentous tragedy of his own mortality. Caden’s fixation with death stops him from living life, making him the most bloodless, gutless, humourless, lifeless cinematic character I’ve come across in a long time, and there is no sense of distance or self-deprecation to help us through this bloated, indigestible whine-fest. Structural convolutions fail to fill the film’s empty heart or disguise its stunningly narrow perspective on the world – Kaufman is absolutely incapable to see beyond the confines of a peculiarly North American, white, male, middle-class, middle-aged perspective. Depressing beyond words. VIRGINIE SÉLAVY