Format: Cinema

Release date: 28 March 2008

Venues: ICA

Director: Tian Zhuangzhuang

Writer: Cheng Ah

Original title: Wu Quingyuan

Cast: Chen Chang, Sylvia Chang, Akira Emoto, Takayuki Inoue

China 2006

104 mins

Part of Spotlight Beijing: China in London Film Season
20 March-10 April 2008
ICA

Back in 1992, Tian Zhuangzhuang’s bleak and controversial The Blue Kite, which follows the daily lives of an ordinary Beijing family in the times of Mao’s Cultural revolution, fell victim to the hypersensitive Chinese authorities who pulled the plug after seeing the first cut of the film. The raw footage was smuggled out of China and post-production was completed without the director having seen the final cut. In this form, the film found its way into the international festival circuit where it became a major critical and commercial success. Meanwhile, the blacklisted Tian was sent to the countryside for ‘re-education’ and it was feared that he’d lost interest in filmmaking until he made a triumphant return with the excellent Springtime in a Small Town in 2002. Tian Zhuangzhuang’s latest film to date, The Go Master, is now opening at the ICA as the centrepiece of the China in London 2008 film programme, which features a long overdue retrospective of Tian’s small but ground-breaking body of work.

The Go Master, in contrast with his earlier films, which mainly focused on ethnic minorities in China, portrays the legendary master of the ancient board game ‘Go’, Wu Quingyuan, and his struggle to cope with life as a prodigy. The film traverses some forty years of turbulent Chinese-Japanese history, from Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in the 1930s through the Second World War and into the 1960s, bringing to life the political and social upheavals of the time through the details and circumstances that shape Wu’s extraordinary existence.

Born in China in 1914, Wu moves to Japan at a young age and is soon identified as a naturally talented Go player, establishing his reputation through a long competition against a Japanese master. Tutored by a harsh mentor while also battling tuberculosis as a young man, Wu is not driven to play Go merely by his love of the game but also by a search for inner peace, which also leads him to join a Buddhist sect.

The narrative charts Wu’s turbulent life, going backwards and forwards in time as though one were browsing through his diary, which is sometimes confusing. Audiences expecting the lush imagery that is associated with contemporary Chinese cinema might be disappointed and some might find its extremely slow pace boring. However, the film is a moving, intimate domestic drama, played out with subtle intensity on the characters’ faces. Perhaps Tian’s smartest move is to focus not on the wartime turmoil or on the nature of the chess-like game, but on the immense psychological struggle the master of Go faces every time he enters a new game. Chang Chen as Wu gives an outstanding performance of quiet power and brilliantly conveys the strangeness of being a prodigy. When not confined to the game board, he maintains an almost conspicuously low profile with his pale looks and introverted temper, whereas in competition he shows the intensity of a world champion, with a laser-sharp stare and a completely unshakeable concentration. In the film’s most startling scene, when the game is interrupted by an explosion after the atomic bomb has been dropped on Hiroshima, Wu’s only concern is to resume the game without delay.

Just like his central character, Tian maintains an even mood throughout the film. The characters may not all be well shaped; and the power of the images is undermined by the sometimes confusing sequence of events; but his strategy is one of understatement and it wonderfully complements the carefully elaborated visual style to create a beautifully shot and coherent whole.

While it seems a little odd that the China in London film programme features no films by Chen Kaige or Zhang Yimou, who are usually ranked first among China’s Fifth Generation film directors, the season is an opportunity to screen Tian’s lesser-known films together with other recent Chinese films. One wonders what Tian would have been able to achieve if he had not been banned from filmmaking for a decade; although The Go Master is not his masterpiece, it is an elegant biopic with sufficient psychological complexity to draw audiences deeply into the characters’ lives.

Pamela Jahn

Spotlight Beijing: China in London Film Season runs from March 20 to April 10 at the ICA, London.

Format: Cinema

Release date:8 February 2008

Distributor: Walt Disney

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Based on: Oil! by Upton Sinclair

Cast: Daniel-Day Lewis, Paul Dano, Dillon Freasier, Ciaran Hinds

USA 2007

158 minutes

There Will Be Blood is a brilliant, if at times difficult, film about greed, vengeance, and the loss of faith that comes with the overwhelming, burning desire for success. The power that emanates from Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest cinematic epic has as much to do with the intensity of Daniel Day-Lewis’ enthralling performance, as it does with its remarkable depiction of an America on the brink of industrialisation. Set in the early decades of the last century, it follows the sweep of the California oil boom, which helped transform the pristine, almost innocent landscape into an oil-blackened scar.

Daniel Day-Lewis plays the archetypal self-made man, a silver prospector named Daniel Plainview, whose discovery of black gold in Texas leads to an enormous and corrupting change in his fortunes. Plainview builds an empire to rival the corporate giants at Standard Oil, with the help of his young adopted son, H.W., who is pivotal in helping to soften his father’s grizzled image and win over their potential victims (the charismatic H.W. is played by Dillon Freasier, a first-time actor who delivers a perfectly attuned performance). Anderson contrasts Plainview’s blood-and-grits determination with the polished capitalism that presides over America, but his tremendous success leaves only a desolate and bitter legacy.

As his fortune grows, Plainview travels to Little Boston, California, after receiving a tip about a vast, unexploited oil field. His attempts to secure a concession are challenged by the local preacher, played by Paul Dano, virtually unrecognisable from his role as a sullen, angst-ridden teenager in Little Miss Sunshine. Dano is superb as Eli Sunday, the young evangelical minister determined to bring Plainview and his oilmen into his flock. Many of the film’s best moments unfold in the confrontation between the bible-thumping Sunday and the cynical, unbelieving Plainview, who’s forced to humiliate himself in front of the preacher and his congregation in order to gain access to the ocean of oil seething below the surface of the frontier town. Their tempestuous relationship courses through the film, their hatred and contempt for each other driving them both towards the mutually-assured destruction that closes the film. Through the characters of Dano and Plainview, Anderson pitches spirituality against profit in what is essentially a study in the nature of power.

Along with the quality of the cast, much of the film’s strength lies in its iconic imagery, captured brilliantly by Robert Elswit’s fantastic cinematography, and its excellent score, composed by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. From the entirely wordless fifteen-minute opening, the music drives the action, as we’re introduced to the filth and brutality of the silver mines and early oil-pits, and the poverty and tragedy that accompanied the gruelling work. The riveting music perfectly complements the transcendent images of a wild west: the dusty, scorched desert almost burns your eyes, while the oilmen and their rigs exist in brilliant silhouette against the enormity of the Californian sky, evoking the pioneering photography of American artists like Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange.

Though epic in scope, There Will Be Blood is a lengthy character study of a vile, often despicable and alienating man. Corruption wrought by success has been an enduring theme in American cinema, from the classic Citizen Kane to the tepid Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator. Day-Lewis’ riveting performance at times risks veering towards caricature, while Anderson also struggles to avoid the usual clichés. But despite its flaws, There Will Be Blood is the most evocative, visually stunning portrayal of ambition to emerge from America in decades.

Sarah Cronin

Format:Cinema

Release date: 1 February 2008

Venues: Clapham Picture House, Renoir (London) and selected key cities from 22 February

Distributor Contender Films

Director: Nick Broomfield

Screenplay: Nick Broomfield, Marc Hoeferlin, Anna Telford

Cast: Elliot Ruiz, Yasmine Hanani, Andrew McLaren

UK 2007

93 mins

Again utilising a stripped-down skeleton crew and drawing on the aesthetic of Ghosts, a harrowing and authentic account of the plight of Chinese immigrant workers in the UK, Nick Broomfield’s Battle For Haditha is another compelling human drama drawn from real-life events. On November 19, 2005 in the western Iraqi city of Haditha twenty-four men, women and children were killed by four US Marines. Initial reports claimed that Marines had returned fire after ‘gunmen attacked the convoy with small-arms fire’. A day after the incident, a Haditha student videotaped the scene at the local morgue and at the homes where the killings had occurred, which provoked a Time Magazine article disputing the original account. A subsequent Pentagon probe alleged a retaliatory US massacre in response to the death of a unit member in a roadside bomb attack. Commentators in certain sections of the media immediately began to refer to the event as ‘Iraq’s My Lai’.

Widely acknowledged for his documentary work, and specifically for his re-invention and re-popularisation of the discipline, Broomfield has continued to use extensive research as the foundation of his recent pursuit of ‘fictive’ filmmaking and his ongoing quest for truth. Before a single page was written Broomfield and co-writers Marc Hoeferlin and Anna Telford spent over nine months on research, scouring government and witness reports and conducting lengthy and revealing interviews with Marines, survivors of the massacre and insurgents. The journalists who had been involved from Time Magazine and The Washington Post were also sought out and consulted. The result of this meticulous drive towards authenticity is the fact that the viewer often feels uncomfortably close to events. More importantly perhaps, it allows Broomfield to achieve his stated objective of making the film as ‘an attempt to understand the event from the three different points of view in a very human and compassionate way’.

Though still relatively low-key in terms of scale and budget, the brilliantly balanced Battle For Haditha undoubtedly operates on a broader scale than Ghosts and it is in this regard that Broomfield shows his progression as a filmmaker. Again casting non-professional actors, many of whom are actual Marines and massacre survivors who improvised dialogue under instruction, the director offers a visceral recreation of the sounds and images of combat to ultimately reveal the cost of this combat in terms of human life. There’s a startling realism to the presentation of the language of war which makes the consideration of how humanity is compromised by acts of barbarism and conflict all the weightier.

The film was shot in Jordan, where the conservative and traditional Muslim culture presented numerous problems, not least a difficulty to enlist the on-screen participation of family members and females. The incredibly diverse backgrounds of those cast to appear and the hostilities that divide them would also, one assume, make for a tempestuous filming environment but Broomfield claims that tensions were evaporated due to an incredible letting of emotion and the seizing of an opportunity to share experiences. Offering conclusive proof that the director, who cites Battle of Algiers as his inspiration, has found a method of working with which he feels entirely comfortable and which intelligently blurs the line between documentary and ‘real’ cinema, Battle For Haditha is a work of both authority and integrity.

Jason Wood

Jason Wood is the author of Nick Broomfield: Documenting Icons (Faber).

Format: Cinema

Release date: 22 February 2008

Venues: tbc

Distributor: Optimum Releasing

Director: Wong Kar Wai

Screenplay: Wong Kar Wai, Lawrence Block

Cast: Norah Jones, Jude Law, David Strathairn, Rachel Weisz, Natalie Portman

Hong Kong/China/France 2007

111 minutes

It seemed sadly inevitable that Wong Kar Wai’s first American film, starring songstress and first-time actress Norah Jones, alongside the consistently mediocre Jude Law, would be a disappointment compared to his earlier, Hong Kong-based work. Billed as a romantic road trip that explores ‘the distance between heartbreak and a new beginning’, My Blueberry Nights is a flimsy, saccharine confection that suffers from a weak script, trite dialogue and miscast actors.

In its favour, the acclaimed director’s first English-language feature does echo some of his earlier films, such as the excellent Chungking Express. His continued fascination with the nocturnal city as a symbol of alienation and loneliness is both evocative and visually striking, his actors framed by the lush hues of neon lights, reflected in the surfaces of the bars and diners in which his characters exist. However, while it may be beautiful to look at, My Blueberry Nights lacks the spontaneity and subtlety of his earlier films, while the dynamism that actors like Tony Leung, the late Leslie Cheung and Faye Wong – a singer like Norah Jones – lent them is sadly missing from this latest work.

Jones plays Elizabeth, a young woman living in New York who’s just discovered that her boyfriend has been seeing another woman. She finds solace in a café run by Jeremy (Jude Law), a charismatic expat from Manchester. Night after night, Elizabeth sits on a stool at the counter, seeking answers for her loneliness and betrayal. Jeremy, with his own story of heartbreak, feeds her banal philosophies and blueberry pie as consolation. Just as he predictably begins to fall for her, Elizabeth decides to set off across America in an attempt to ease her heartache, waitressing along the way. She encounters one miscast actor after another as she travels from New York to Nevada, with the exception of David Strathairn, who plays a cop down on his luck, drinking away his sorrows in a bar in Memphis, trying to forget his Southern bombshell of an ex-wife, played by the vampy Rachel Weisz.

Strathairn’s performance is the only one in the film that feels both natural and credible. He has a screen presence that the other actors, despite their A-list status, all seem to lack, and one that even further diminishes Jones’ acting capabilities. She may be a talented singer, but on-screen she’s incapable of conveying emotion, instead seeming listless and aloof from her own role in the film. As she travels from Memphis to Nevada, it becomes increasingly difficult to empathise with her journey from one lonely figure to another, all typically seeking some kind of redemption. In a seedy, third-rate casino, she meets a tough-talking, peroxide-blonde gambler, somewhat unconvincingly played by Natalie Portman, who, estranged from her dying father, buries her own sorrows in poker chips. Adultery, alcohol, gambling – they’re commonplace vices that should have been handled by the filmmaker with greater subtlety and dexterity, and much less banality.

While the film is visually enticing, most of the actors seem to have been cast for their fame and looks rather than their abilities. They simply aren’t strong enough to salvage the predictable, insubstantial script, co-written by Wong and Lawrence Block, who’s better known for his crime novels than his screenplays. Nothing more than a light piece of entertainment, My Blueberry Nights is a minor footnote in Wong Kar Wai’s brilliant body of work.

Sarah Cronin

Format: Cinema

Release date: 29 February 2007

Venue: BFI Southbank, Renoir (London)

Distributor: BFI

Director: Bernardo Bertolucci

Based on: novel by Alberto Moravia

Original title: Il Conformista

Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania Sandrelli, Dominique Sanda

Italy/France 1970

111 minutes

The Conformist is screening as part of a BFI season of European noir, films that take the distinctively American concepts and clichés of 1940s crime fiction and filter them through a more experimental and internalised European new wave aesthetic. In its narrative, The Conformist looks back to the early days of Italian fascism, detailing the efforts of a zealous convert to submerge himself in the new conventions of his country. But in its style and subtext the film is very much of its time, a child of the late 60s, loaded with existential questions of identity, sexuality and gender.

Marcello Clerici lives with psychological scars inflicted in boyhood, sexual traumas which have driven him to seek out the most ordinary life possible. In Mussolini’s Italy this means marriage, procreation and an unquestioning acceptance of the new political order. Eager to follow his masters’ instructions, Clerici takes his new bride to Paris, ostensibly on their honeymoon but actually to contact Professor Quadri, an old tutor who has since become a leading light in the anti-fascist movement. But when Clerici’s orders change from assignation to assassination he balks, his innate cowardice warring with his overwhelming desire to obey.

The first act of the film is restless and at times frustrating, toying with ideas and then discarding them, giving us insight into Clerici’s tortured past and newly fanatical present but struggling for coherence. Events shift back and forth in time, seemingly key characters are introduced never to reappear, and bizarre events, such as a festive dance at a local centre for the blind, cause jarring interruptions to the narrative flow. But following Clerici’s departure for Paris the main thread of the plot becomes clearer. Tension is permitted to build, characters to develop, as the narrative progresses inexorably towards its gripping, horrific conclusion.

As a central figure, Clerici is at first enigmatic, then reprehensible, then pitiable and finally simply pathetic. For Bertolucci the most terrifying face of fascism is not the sneering demagogue but the willing follower, the one who takes the path of least resistance, offering tacit support and justification. Clerici is repeatedly offered the opportunity to act – either in support or defiance of his leaders – but at every turn he does nothing, floundering in self-pity and confusion. Jean-Louis Trintignant’s performance is restrained but achingly effective, assuming the character of a man who has none.

But the real star of The Conformist, and justifiably so, is Vittorio Storaro’s breathtaking photography. Hailed as a textbook example of the cinematographer’s art, the film luxuriates in washes of soft colour and pale, gauzy light, contrasting the hard, grey architectural edges of fascism with the warm, vulnerable contours of the human form. The climactic sequence on a remote mountain road is utterly devastating, a scene of pure savagery played out amid the towering tranquillity of the silent, shimmering forest.

The Conformist is a problematic film, in its structure and coherence, and particularly in its portrayal of women, who seem either to be brainless ditzes or predatory hunters, but who pay the price either way. But still it is regarded as a masterpiece, and with good reason. The film explores a complex and vital topic with intelligence, insight and emotional clarity, asking important and relevant questions about humanity’s desire for acceptance, while creating a visual spectacle unmatched in modern cinema.

Tom Huddleston