Format: DVD

Release date: 14 July 2008

Distributor: Optimum Releasing

Directors: Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Marc Caro

Titles: Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children, The Bunker of the Last Gunshots

Writers: Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Marc Caro, Gilles Adrien

Cast: Dominique Pinon, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Ron Perlman

France 1991/1995/1981

99/112/26 mins

Before Amélie and before Alien: Resurrection, French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet had a partnership with designer and comic book artist Marc Caro, which began in 1974 when the pair met at an animation festival. In the early animated shorts they made together, Jeunet was responsible for the camera work and the cast, and Caro would take care of the overall design. Later they went on to make two live action features, Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children – arguably Jeunet’s best work – which are now collected in a new box-set from Optimum together with their 1981 short The Bunker of the Last Gunshots.

Delicatessen is the story of Louison (Dominique Pinon), an ex-clown in a post-apocalyptic France who is forced to take a job as a handyman in an apartment building above a butcher’s in exchange for food and lodging. There he meets and falls in love with Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac), the butcher’s daughter. However, the reason the tenants survive while everyone outside is starving is that the butcher (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) is supplying them with ‘long pig’ and next on the menu is filet Louison!

Several critics have argued that the plot of Delicatessen is really just an excuse for the visually stunning and endlessly creative set pieces. This is supported by the theatrical trailer, which only contains the celebrated scene where some squeaky bed springs provide the rhythm for a symphony arising from the activity of each tenant – painting with a roller, playing the cello, inflating a bicycle tyre, etc. However, this is to do an injustice to Jeunet and Caro’s storytelling abilities. In the context of the film, the tenants are trying to drown out the noise of the local tart earning her cut of the meat by satisfying the butcher’s sexual appetite. So while the set pieces are very funny, they’re never gratuitous and each scene is in line with the plot.

Like that other great directing partnership the Coen brothers, Jeunet and Caro use circles as a kind of visual signature for their work. In Delicatessen, it’s bubbles, plug holes and manhole covers. In The City of Lost Children, it’s the bionic eye that Krank (Daniel Emilfork) – the degenerate clone of a mad scientist who must steal children’s dreams in order to live – gives to blind men in exchange for their service as cyclopean child catchers. However, the most important circle to Jeunet and Caro is the circus. Delicatessen‘s clown Pinon returns in Lost Children as the original scientist, playing also seven of his healthy clones. He’s joined by Ron Perlman as a strongman looking for his kidnapped brother and by Delicatessen‘s butcher Dreyfus as an-ex ringmaster who’s lost everything except for his flea circus. Taking the best bits from Oliver!, Annie and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and transporting them to a sci-fi future, the film has it all, including incredibly detailed sets, CGI that at the time was pioneering, costumes by Jean-Paul Gautier and a soundtrack from Angelo Badalamenti. The performances are great too, with the precocious Judith Vittet as the leader of a gang of orphans being the perfect counterpart to Perlman’s monosyllabic giant.

Both movies have been available as separate DVDs with all the usual extras for a while now. However, the box-set offers the first chance to see Jeunet and Caro’s 26-minute live action short The Bunker of the Last Gunshots. The film focuses on a bunch of soldiers and military scientists who become increasingly paranoid while waiting for the enemy to show up during the last days of a war that could have created the barren world of Delicatessen and Lost Children. This short will be of most interest to fans looking to trace the development of Jeunet and Caro’s style. With no dialogue, there’s already the emphasis on rhythm and the bald bad guys with wires coming out of their heads that characterise their later work. There is also an interesting connection to Aliens: the striking similarity between the external scenes and armoured personnel carrier in Bunker (1981) and the external scenes and armoured personnel carrier in Aliens (1986) makes it possible to speculate that James Cameron may have seen and been influenced by Bunker.

Alexander Pashby

Format: DVD

Release date: 23 June 2008

Distributor: Tartan Video

Director: Kinji Fukasaku

Writer: Kinji Fukasaku

Titles: Blackmail is my Life, Black Rose Mansion, If You Were Young: Rage

Cast: Hiroki Matsukata, Tomomi Sato/Akihiro Miwa, Eitaro Ozawa, Masakazu Tamura/ Tetsuo Ishidate, Gin Maeda

Japan 1968/1969/1970

90/90/89 mins

The Japanese filmmaker Kinji Fukasaku is arguably best known in the West for Battle Royale (2000), his controversial depiction of civil unrest which re-imagined Lord of the Flies with high-tech weapons and Nintendo generation teenagers. However, he was also the director of sixty-five features, at once a commercially consistent ‘journeyman’ capable of working within numerous genres for Shochiku Studios, and also a serious social commentator with an acute awareness of the potential perils of post-war Japanese capitalism.

Blackmail is my Life (1968) follows the fortunes of a crew of hustlers who attempt to graduate from small-time extortion scams to taking down the yakuza and corrupt government officials. Although the film embraces the freewheeling spirit of Godard and Richard Lester, whilst also sharing stylistic similarities with the altogether more eccentric work of Seijun Suzuki, Fukasaku’s initially feverish depiction of youthful camaraderie in the age of new money belies a cautionary tone, or as its anti-hero puts it, ‘the prettier something looks on the outside, the more revolting it is on the inside’. This is also an apt description of the heroine of Black Rose Mansion (1969), in which the famed female impersonator Akihiro Miwa portrays a nightclub performer who becomes the star attraction of the titular gentleman’s club, only for her enigmatic presence to lead to tragedy when both her wealthy benefactor and his son fall under her spell. It is a rare excursion into gothic melodrama for the director, but he is not shackled by formal restrictions and indulges in a lurid nightmare sequence and a sitar-infused soundtrack. Less surreal and more socially relevant, If You Were Young: Rage (1970) concerns five low-level workers who pool their resources to purchase a truck and set up a delivery company, but the character flaws imbedded by their poor upbringing sabotage their plans for progression. Fukasaku’s social anger is palpable, yet each character is fully realised to avoid becoming a political mouth-piece, and the truck that they name Independence No. 1 serves as a symbol of the heavy price that can be paid for aspiring to economic freedom.

These films exhibit a vibrant aesthetic sensibility, one that maintains a cinematic coolness that never succumbs to camp or kitsch. Fukasaku frequently uses jump cuts, freeze-frames and colour-coded flashbacks to capture both a nation and a cinematic movement in transition, while scenes often erupt into moments of signature graphic violence, with each film featuring a protracted death, usually the result of a fatal knife wound. Although the influence of the French New Wave is evident, Fukasaku’s work is rarely as self-consciously detached as that of Godard or Truffaut; even the criminals of Blackmail is my Life develop a social conscience and recognise their own shortcomings, while If You Were Young: Rage employs the music of Taku Izumi as a stirring cry for the hopeless fate of the uneducated men who were left neglected by the economic boom. This box set will hopefully extend Western appreciation of the oeuvre of Fukasaku beyond his notorious cinematic swansong.

John Berra

Format: DVD

Release date: 23 July 2007

Distributor: Yume Pictures

Director: Yasuzo Masumura

Writer: Kazuro Funabashi

Original title: Kuchizuke

Based on: the novel by Matsutarô Kawaguchi

Cast: Hiroshi Kawaguchi, Hitomi Nozoe, Aiko Mimasu, Sachiko Murase

Japan 1957

74 mins

‘In July 1957, Yasuzo Masumura’s Kisses used a free revolving camera to film the young lovers riding around on a motorcycle. I felt now that the tide of a new age could no longer be ignored by anyone, and that a powerful irresistible force had arrived in Japanese cinema.’ These lines were written by Nagisa Oshima in a landmark 1958 essay in which he described the revolution that was taking place in Japanese cinema, initiated two years earlier by the rich wild youth or ‘sun tribe’ (taiyozoku) movie Crazed Fruit, and confirmed by Masumura’s assured first feature. With its cool monochrome, nonchalant protagonist, freshness of tone and naturalistic feel, Kisses has as much to do with European neo-realism as it does with Japanese cinema, and was no doubt influenced by Masumura’s stint as a student at the Centro Sperimentale in Rome in the 1950s.

Just as in Oshima’s own Naked Youth (1960), Kisses centres on a young couple in post-war Japan, struggling with their first experiences of love and desire against a background of strict social conventions and difficult economic conditions. This oppressive environment appears literally: Kinichi and Akiko meet in prison where they’re both visiting their fathers, the former’s held for election fraud, the latter’s for embezzling funds in a desperate attempt to find the money to pay for his sick wife’s care. Kinichi and Akiko each need 100,000 yen to pay for bail, and it looks like Akiko may be forced to resort to prostitution. Despite her desperate situation, Akiko bursts with joie de vivre and she and Kinichi spend a blissful, carefree day at the beach, after an unexpected win at a bicycle race.

Kisses is an unaffected, crisp, fresh film, entirely devoid of the perverse pleasures of Masumura’s later films, and yet some of the director’s recurrent themes already surface here. Though social rules weigh the two young characters down, they face the morose repressiveness of the adult world with tremendous reserves of spirited energy. Both Kinichi and Akiko resist expectations and are rebels of a sort, but their revolt is fuelled by youthful exuberance and an irrepressible sense of freedom, rather than by a desire to destroy conventions or transgress boundaries. Akiko prefigures the long line of fascinating female characters to come in Masumura’s work, but without the (self-)destructive edge that marks so many of them. Kinichi describes Akiko as ‘full of life’, saying she ‘loves everything’. And indeed while later Masumura characters give in to more complicated and dangerous desires, Akiko is driven simply by an immense and infectious lust for life.

At the core of the film lies the initiation of Kinichi and Akiko to both love and money, and more specifically to the uneasy relationship between the two in the adult world. This is made particularly clear by Kinichi’s mother, a tough divorcee who will only pay her son attention if he makes himself ‘valuable’ to her. The later-period Masumura surfaces in the initial hardness of the mother, and in the suggestion that love is just another kind of transaction in a world where everything is valued in financial terms. But even she softens up in the end, as Akiko’s lovely spirit wins over. As in Naked Youth, it is the female character who teaches her boyfriend how to love.

An unusually sweet and sober film in Masumura’s oeuvre, Kisses is full of youthful energy and hope, with at its heart characters who believe that they can win against the odds. While Oshima’s films of the period are filled with disillusionment and despair, Kisses celebrates the pleasure of being young, poignantly framed within a difficult social and economic situation.

Virginie Sélavy

By the same director: Irezumi, Manji, Red Angel, Blind Beast.

Format: DVD

Release date: 23 June 2008

Distributor: Tartan Video

Director: Il-gon Song

Writer: II-gon Song

Original title: Geomi sup

Cast: Woo-seong Kam, Jung Suh, Kyeong-heon Kang, Hyeong-seong Jang, Byung-ho Song

South Korea 2004

120 mins

The central protagonist of Spider Forest is not the luckiest of souls. When we first encounter Kang Min, he is awakening in the titular forest, having been knocked unconscious, only to wander into a remote cabin where his girlfriend and his boss have been brutally hacked to death. Catching a glimpse of the killer, he is pursued through the woods until he finds himself on a freeway, and is hit by a vehicle, sustaining a head injury that renders him comatose. Spider Forest then balances two time-frames that gradually deconstruct the fractured psyche of Kang Min. Through flashbacks, we learn that he lost his wife in a plane crash, and has embarked on a new relationship with a colleague from the TV station where he serves as the producer of a true-life mystery programme. This is juxtaposed with Kang Min’s return to the Spider Forest to reconstruct the events prior to his accident, and revelations about his own past and its relation to the area.

Writer-director II-gon Song has adopted a determinedly obtuse approach to the psychological thriller genre, and although details of his film will continue to puzzle even the most attentive viewer long after the closing credits, the twist in the tale is obvious from the outset, making Spider Forest a dramatically inert experience, albeit an intriguing and atmospheric one. Non-linear narratives and distorted memories have become favoured cinematic approaches and subjects in recent years, and Spider Forest shares similarities with David Lynch’s Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr in its juggling of the real and the imagined. The relationship between Kang Min and the sympathetic police detective who wants to believe that the obvious murder suspect is actually the victim of an elaborate corporate set-up, is reminiscent of the bond that develops between the disfigured playboy of Alexander Amenabar’s Abre los ojos and his fatherly psychiatrist, although Song’s film is too preoccupied with its own form of symbolic logic to properly develop any palpable character dynamics or emotive undercurrents.

Ultimately, Spider Forest lacks the narrative momentum of those earlier films, succeeding more as a series of strangely unsettling moments. Kang Min grinning perversely when he cuts his mouth on a whisky glass whilst drowning his sorrows, or his wife miming the eating of an apple as she makes herbal tea are scenes that linger longer than the themes of memory and personal loss, or the explicit blood-letting of the final reel. Woo-seong Kam is oddly emphatic in the lead role, but of the supporting characters, only Kang Min’s stone-faced boss registers, delivering such business maxims as ‘If the sword is too short, you lunge’ and ‘If things are tough, double your efforts’ as he simultaneously performs sexual acts and munches on fresh fruit. Those who become entangled in Spider Forest may struggle with its sedate pacing and overly interpretive conclusion, yet the beautifully photographed opening and closing scenes, and a haunting score that is reminiscent of Mychael Danna’s music for the films of Atom Egoyan, lend the film a dreamlike quality that is far removed from most Asia Extreme offerings.

John Berra

Format: DVD

Release date: 28 July 2008

Distributor: Momentum Pictures

Director: Franck Vestiel

Writers: Franck Vestiel and Pierre Bordage

Cast: Clovis Cornillac, Vimala Pons

France 2007

98 mins

As soon as the epigraph that opens Eden Log appears on the screen, ‘So the Lord God banished him from the garden of Eden to serve the ground from which he had been taken’ [Genesis 3.23.], you know that you’re in for a sci-fi movie with metaphysical pretensions along the lines of Cube.

Clovis Cornillac plays a man who wakes up naked in a cave with no idea of who he is or how he got there. Climbing out of the cave, he finds the entrance to a plantation where an automated orientation video tells him that if he wants to be admitted to paradise, he must tend to the tree (the Tree of Knowledge? the Tree of Life?) growing in the centre of the plantation. The video goes on to say that the tree’s sap is the source of enough energy to power a city. Not only that, but the sap makes the workers mining it down in the caves impervious to pain and fatigue. But where are all these workers? Unfortunately for Cornillac’s character, what’s really going on is that the tree absorbs energy from the workers by plunging its roots into them and if that doesn’t annihilate them, the sap turns them into mutants with a taste for human flesh.

Through this highly metaphorical plot, writer-director Franck Vestiel could be referring to organised religion as a system of control, or – as it’s later revealed that the workers are immigrants – he could be making a comment on the political expedience of crusades such as the war on terrorism. However, the religious/political references don’t really stand up to close scrutiny and the film is best enjoyed if they are just interpreted as an excuse for an atmospheric escape movie.

Atmospheric, but not exactly original. Fully aware of the history of the genre, Vestiel foregrounds his influences: the elevators used to take up the dead bodies that have been discarded by the tree like spent batteries are translucent cubes. But the film that Eden Log owes most too is Alien. There’s an Alien homage early on when Cornillac’s character finds a technician being eaten alive stuck to a wall. Endless corridors and hanging ducts represent the roots of the tree instead of the guts of a spaceship. Instead of stomachs bursting out, they are burst into by the tree’s roots. Like Ridley Scott, Vestiel relies on dimly lit, highly detailed sets to create atmosphere. Refreshingly, there’s no CGI in sight until the very last scene.

Because almost all the dialogue comes from the video recordings that Cornillac’s character encounters along the way, the DVD is able to boast both a French and an English version of the film. It seems like a great idea, allowing Vestiel to double his audience. However, it doesn’t quite work as not enough attention has been paid to the dubbing of the little dialogue that Cornillac does have, so you’re still better off watching the movie in French with English subtitles.

Alexander Pashby

Format: DVD

Release date: 4 August 2008

Distributor: Optimum Releasing

Director: David Lynch

Writers: Christopher De Vore, Eric Bergren, David Lynch

Cast: John Hurt, Anthony Hopkins, John Gielgud, Anne Bancroft

USA 1980

124 mins

Arguably one of David Lynch’s finest works, The Elephant Man was his first major studio film. The inexperienced director only kept his position thanks to the unlikely patronage of comedian Mel Brooks, whose Brooksfilms produced the movie for Paramount. According to Lynch, a private screening of his debut film Eraserhead ended with Brooks declaring, ‘You’re a mad man, I love you. You’re in’. And, as this film shows, it was a great decision.

Lynch makes the jump from American Gothic to Victorian Gothic with ease. The scenes of top hat-wearing doctors searching through the seamier sides of London could be straight out of a RL Stevenson novel, while the film is directed with far more atmosphere and style than anything from the Hammer studio. From the opening shot – a dreamlike image of Merrick’s mother’s ‘encounter’ with an elephant (apparently one did escape from a zoo in Leicester, the real-life Merrick’s hometown, around the time of his birth) – we are clearly in the realm of the fairy tale, a world akin to Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête.

The pantomime villains, who resemble Oliver Twist‘s Bill Sykes and Fagin, treat Merrick like a circus side-show. The night porter, in a brilliant turn from Michael Elphick at his most obnoxious, brings drunken revellers to ‘visit’ Merrick (including a young Pauline Quirk), while his former ‘owner’, the fairground showman Bytes, parades him like a performing animal. Tellingly, Bytes is a character invented for the film: the real-life Merrick made a lot of money by exhibiting himself in carnivals, before being robbed by his business partner.

Merrick is rescued by Dr Treves (Anthony Hopkins) who at first seems eager to use him to further his own career. ‘He’s only being stared at all over again’, the head nurse tells him. But when Treves has a crisis of conscience, he puts the simple question to his wife – ‘Am I good man or am I a bad man?’ We are in no doubt as to the answer.

As Merrick becomes more accepted, having tea in the Treves’ drawing room and taking a trip to the theatre, Lynch skilfully avoids the mawkishness of films like Mask. The moments of sentimentality are a result of Merrick’s character, rather than the film trying to provoke an emotional response from the audience. It is Merrick who overreacts, bursting into tears when being ‘treated so well by a beautiful woman’ and placing the actress Mrs Kendal’s signed photo next to one of his mother. John Hurt puts in a great emotional performance through all of the latex and make-up; Hopkins does just as well through the doctor’s equally confining middle-class restraint.

As with all such tales, morality is simplified into two polar extremes (‘twin peaks’ of good and evil) with little grey area in between. The Elephant Man is depicted as an innocent whose soul is as beautiful as his body is ugly (a twist on Dorian Gray perhaps). As we gradually get to know him, we discover him to be god-fearing, well-spoken (without a hint of a Leicester accent), sensitive and even romantic. ‘You’re not an elephant man, you’re Romeo’, Mrs Kendal (Anne Bancroft) tells him after reading a scene together.

The Elephant Man is a beautiful film, and not simply because of Freddie Francis’s monochrome cinematography. It is a story told with just the right amount of wonder and emotion (although Barber’s Adagio has perhaps been overused since). The combination of David Lynch and Britain’s finest acting talent – Gielgud even makes an appearance – makes you wish he’d made more films in the UK.

Paul Huckerby