Format: Cinema

Release date: 12 July 2008

Venue: ICA (London)

Distributor: Manga Entertainment

Director: Keiichi Sugiyama

Writers: Naoko Kakimoto & Nana Shiina

Original title: Gin-iro no kami no Agito

Cast: Ryo Katsuji, Aoi Miyazaki, Kenichi Endo

Japan 2006

95 mins

Recent animé seems to have become hyper-aware of the last couple of decades of genre filmmaking. Perhaps this is inevitable as animé creators struggle to find new cinema audiences in the West and seek to tap into tried and tested themes. Origin: Spirits of the Past shares with other recent releases Vexille and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time a jackdaw approach to the sci-fi and fantasy genres that the three films belong to. But while Vexille seems over-familiar to anyone who’s seen 1980s live action sci-fi such as Dune and Blade Runner, the recycling of ideas is not only forgivable but indeed works tremendously well in both Origin and The girl, perhaps because both contain aspects of time travel.

Origin is set in a post-apocalyptic future where the moon still orbits the Earth but has been blown up by an accident, the pieces drifting away into a ring of rocky fragments similar to Saturn’s. On Earth, humanity has managed to keep hold of some technology but has split into three factions, the druidic plant-worshippers who ‘protect’ a carnivorous forest, the low-tech inhabitants of the ruined city nearby who rely on the druids for their water supply, and the industrial warmongers who live in a settlement out in the arid zone. Into this strange new world, a girl from the past awakens (from cryogenic suspension), triggering a war between the three parties.

The style of the film combines slightly generic looking-characters (albeit with terrifically designed clothes), remindful of early Hayao Miyazaki, with beautifully rendered landscapes that look like moving oil paintings. This combination of stunning backgrounds with more traditionally ‘cartoony’ characters is a winning and aesthetically pleasing idea and Origin joins the likes of Metropolis / Metoroporisu (2001) and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time as a great example of the technique.

However, the brilliant animation work and intriguing narrative are somewhat let down by the clunky translation – if it is to follow in the footsteps of Princess Mononoke it could have done with a rewrite by Neil Gaiman or a writer of his calibre – and an inferior generic score. This film has so much going for it that it would be a shame if it doesn’t get the final polish that might ensure it reaches a wider fan base in the West. Considering the film has taken two years to cross nine time zones and comes from one of the artists of the most revered animé series of all time (Neon Genesis Evangelion), it would be unfortunate if it still doesn’t get the audience it deserves. An English dub or new translation and a reworked soundtrack would be enough to turn a film that is something of a curate’s egg into a classic of the genre.

Alex Fitch

Format: Cinema

Release date: 11 July 2008

Venue: Barbican (London) and selected key cities (from August 15)

Distributor Contemporary Films

Director: Tomí¡s Gutiérrez Alea

Writer: Tomí¡s Gutiérrez Alea and Edmundo Desnoes

Based on: Edmundo Desnoes’s novel Memí­Â³rias Inconsolables

Original title: Memorias del subdesarrollo

Cast: Sergio Corrieri, Daisy Granados, Eslinda Níºí±ez, Omar Valdés

Cuba 1968

97 minutes

Part of the Cine Cuba season at the Barbican

July 10-17

For more information on the programme, go to the Barbican website.

Sergio is a bourgeois dilettante who prefers to stay on in Cuba when his wife and family decide to leave the country for the United States in the aftermath of Fidel Castro’s Communist revolution in 1959. A man of leisure, he spends his days pondering his decision and his life; ruminating on the socio-politics of the country’s new leaders, and chasing – and finally seducing – a young woman, Elena. Like the classic flí­Â¢neur he wanders aimlessly about the streets of Havana, meditating on the true meaning behind the agitprop facade which continuously plays out on his TV. Was the human death toll worth it, and why are the philosophers and intellectuals rarely out there on the barricades, taking a bullet for the revolution like the proletariat?

These questions arise from Sergio’s sense of alienation – an existentialist self-examination and enquiry into not just Communist philosophy, but life’s meaning and its inherent ethical quagmire of politics, psychology, sociology, economics, gender and even evolutionary Darwinism, all in the best tradition of a Socialist symposium – an example of which he witnesses in a nonchalant, aloof manner.

Memories has no plot as such; the events play out like a semi-improvisatory fugue and the whiplash cutting, abstrusely edited soundtrack and neo-realist ambience remind one – perhaps too easily – of 60s Godard. Add to this the film’s overt political conceit and this sensibility could be construed as somewhat plagiaristic. Is Alea paying homage to Godard or is it just a case of him being responsive to the zeitgeist of the time and independently creating a Cuban corollary to the European New Wave? In retrospect it is hard to determine, and perhaps the film’s fragmented style is, after all, well suited to the first-person internal musings of the protagonist.

Sergio is at a crossroads in his life – he’s been unfaithful to his wife, doesn’t believe in the redemptive power of politics and finds life generally absurd – a bona fide mid-life identity crisis corresponding to the Cuban missile crisis which unsettlingly rumbles along in the background. He is disengaged from life (epitomised by the tape recordings he surreptitiously makes of his estranged wife), analysing the world around him, abstractedly, from a distance; but when he is wrongly accused of exploiting and raping Elena, the world suddenly closes in on him and he becomes re-sensitised to reality and his raw emotions. He feels incomprehension and fear when questioned in court and the chasm between class-driven, state-sanctioned blind ‘justice’ and a higher moral law is thrown into sharp relief. Sergio’s subversive and questioning attitude leads to a grim and unwarranted personal ordeal which ultimately reflects the wider social crisis and fundamental inhumanity contained within any dogmatic, autocratic political system like Communism.

Towards the end of the film Alea succinctly delineates the rising tension of the missile crisis by having Sergio continually play with his Zippo lighter – in a sequence interspersed with dramatic newsreel footage from the TV news – its rhythmic clicking sound acting as the countdown to a very possible apocalypse. Thankfully, reason prevailed in those surreal, knife-edge moments, and Memories is a lasting legacy of that transformative, chaotic and sharply focused era.

James DC

From July 10-17 Barbican Film presents Cine Cuba, a season that explores the heart of Cuban Cinema, with gems from the Havana archives plus new works and films which celebrate Cuba’s musical heritage. More information on the Barbican website.

Format: Cinema

Release date: 18 July 2008

Venue: Empire Leicester Square (London) and selected key cities

Preview: July 11, Rich Mix (London)

Distributor: Yume Pictures

Director: Nicolas Roeg

Writer: Dan Weldon

Based on: the novel by Fay Weldon

Cast: Kelly Reilly, Miranda Richardson, Rita Tushingham

UK/Ireland 2007

120 mins

Messy is probably the best word to describe Nicolas Roeg’s Puffball, his first theatrically released feature in twelve years, and by far the most questionable and simplistic film in the director’s canon so far. A lacklustre mishmash of voodoo humbug, pregnancy and domestic frustrations, set in a grey, desolate community in the Irish countryside, Puffball is carelessly plotted, haphazardly stringing together obscure scenes and all-too-obvious hints. At its best, the film is painted in appealingly vivid strokes, and on occasion, generates a passably sinister air, but the overall work is terminally dull and creaks under the weight of its own pretensions. Buried under the surface, traces of Roeg’s famously strong and original visual sense are still identifiable, but the presence of Donald Sutherland in the film only serves to remind the audience of the director’s past achievements, emphasising the abyss that separates Puffball from a masterwork such as Don’t Look Now.

Adapted from a novel by Fay Weldon, the narrative centres around Liffey (Kelly Reilly), an ambitious young architect who decides to leave her job and – modern – life behind, setting out on a mission to restore an old ruined cottage in the countryside for herself and her partner Richard (Oscar Pearce). Soon upon arrival in the valley she meets her neighbour Mabs Tucker (Miranda Richardson), who lives on the farm nearby together with her husband, three daughters and her brilliantly eerie-looking mother Molly (Rita Tushingham), and from that point things rapidly start to get out of hand. Liffey learns that she is pregnant, but instead of telling Richard, who had to return to New York for work, she gives vent to her fears and confusion in a brief encounter with Mabs’s husband. Once the adultery is revealed, Molly is convinced that Liffey is somehow carrying the ‘little baby boy’ that Mabs is so desperate to have and takes matters into her own witchy hands.

Although attempts to add psychological weight by inserting fragments of weird flashbacks are largely unsuccessful, Roeg does manage to capture the ennui of provincial life, and the sense that passion, mystery and violence lurk not far beneath the surface. But this is not enough to rescue the film and as the plot veers towards melodramatic hocus-pocus territory and symbols are wielded in staggeringly heavy-handed fashion, it becomes an increasingly frustrating experience. In the circumstances, the actors acquit themselves reasonably well, though stripped of much of their back story and psychological shading, the characters they play fail to engage our sympathies. In any case, there is not much they could do to salvage the over-familiar script, which has echoes of Rosemary’s Baby thrown into a sinister locals versus townies who don’t belong there type plot. Accompanied by an interfering score, the overall style is essentially prime-time television mystery-drama and it is sad to see a director of Roeg’s quality churning out such uninspired material, which strikes a duff note in his otherwise awe-inspiring body of work.

Pamela Jahn

Format: Cinema

Screened at Tiger Festival 2008

Director: Wang Fen

Writer: Cheng Zhang

Original title: Xiang zi

Cast: Wu Gang, Wu Yujuan, Wang Sifei, Wang Hongwei

China 2007

87 mins

Dank, dark spaces and untamed tropical nature encroach upon a remote Yunnanese inn, where the appearance of a mysterious, floating case signals the return of dormant, irrational desires for the mild-mannered protagonist He Dashang (Wu Gang). Wang Fen’s The Case is a playful black comedy, with more than just a nod to Freudian-Surrealist symbolism, accompanied by a suitably absurdist, theatrical sensibility. The film is an enjoyable satire on marriage and relationships as social institutions, exploring private notions of libido, desire, happiness and trust.

He Dashang is trapped in a stifling marriage and runs a quiet Lijiang guesthouse under the constant scrutiny of his brutally distrustful wife (Wu Yujuan). The crushing tedium of his life is disrupted when he fishes out the eponymous case from a stream. After impulsively hiding it from his wife he soon discovers its unspeakable contents; an obscenity that he scrabbles to conceal – or should it be repress? – from his wife’s knowledge.

Simmering tensions soon escalate when a strikingly coquettish Lily (Wang Sifei as a noir-ish femme fatale) checks into the guesthouse with her near-wordless husband (Wang Hongwei). Unable to restrain himself, Dashang embarks on a furtive relationship with Lily that involves equal measures of counselling and spying. Are the new lodgers connected with the mysterious case? Why does Dashang’s wife seem to know what he has done, unnervingly, even before he realises? While these questions hang in the air, events spiral out of control before the film reaches its cathartic, and utterly divisive, conclusion.

Wang Fen’s debut achieves thrilling levels of suspense with admirable efficacy, which owes much to the uniformly strong performances, particularly from Wu Gang and Wu Yujuan as the spouses. Wu Gang is convincingly downtrodden and guilt-racked as Dashang, and it is difficult to believe Wang Sifei is anything other than the feisty, phobic Lily that she plays with such relish. Even the location itself, China’s most south-westerly province Yunnan, plays a crucial supporting role, its vegetation infusing the film with a palpable sense of organic life, reminding the viewers of the lawlessness of nature and its accompanying urges.

The Case is the best known of the first ten films (all by women directors) produced by the state-funded Yunnan New Film Project. Initiated in 2001, the project was established to mark both the centenary of Chinese cinema and to stimulate a new crop of indigenous filmmakers. The film’s overt eroticism and daring immorality indicate perhaps that China’s relaxing grip on censorship is softening further, and allegorically that the nation itself is succumbing to its own irrational desires.

Edwin Mak

Format: Cinema

Premiere: 5 June 2008

Venue: Curzon Soho, London

The premiere will be attended by director Bruce Weber who will take questions from the audience. The Curzon Soho are also screening a retrospective of Weber’s work on June 14-15, including his acclaimed short The Teddy Boys of the Edwardian Drape Society and his debut feature Broken Noses.

Release date: 6 June 2008

Distributor Metrodome

Director: Bruce Weber

USA 1988

115 minutes

DVD to be released by Metrodome on 28 July 2008.

A prodigiously talented, self-taught jazz trumpeter, Chet Baker began his spectacular, lauded career in the early 1950s and carved out a singular pathway through the history of jazz.

Baker’s melodious, lyrical style was traditional and conservative when compared with the developing experimental Free Jazz scene of the 1950s and 60s, yet despite this he became popular on the bohemian/beatnik jazz circuit, rocketing to fame in his early 20s when the photographer William Claxton produced a series of iconic images of the young James Dean lookalike. Over the years his formidable musical skills made him a legend, but a wild, erratic lifestyle became his downfall, leading to heroin addiction, prison sentences and ultimately his untimely demise, aged 58 – shortly after this film was completed – when he fell out of a high window to his death. Retroactively this gives Let’s Get Lost an ominous, portentous quality.

Bruce Weber’s 1988 documentary portrait has, at its heart, an irreducible mystery: Baker himself, who is an elusive, obscure presence, hardly allowing the filmmaker or the audience into his opaque inner life and thoughts; the fundamental passions, drives and motivations behind his cool, seemingly unruffled exterior. After a meandering, restless tour through the US and Europe, we are left little the wiser as to who the ‘real’ Chet Baker actually is and why he later became drug-dependent, abandoned his family and had such volatile, fractious love affairs. Most of Baker’s persona is elliptically constructed through observations and revelations from family, ex-wives, girlfriends and acolytes, who are probably a more reliable source in their subjective portrayals of him than his own somewhat cagey, stilted exposition, gradually and patiently coaxed out by the director.

Weber’s style alludes to a range of cinematic tropes: from the abstract camera angles and stark black and white chiaroscuro of film noir to the grainy, rough-edged flexibility of cinéma vérité and the French New Wave, redolent of Godard, the Maysles brothers, Cassavetes and Haskell Wexler. The director composes, photographs and edits his film in much the same way his subject performs – there is an unrehearsed, immediate, open-ended feel to the scenes where Baker riffs on how he conned his way out of the army or got his teeth smashed out in a fight. Weber reinforces this fairly unstructured, yet quietly designed and captivating ambience through the subtle use of techniques like audio overlay, as when an interviewee’s voice encroaches onto – but somehow smoothly combines with – footage of Baker softly crooning or eliciting a plaintive, mellifluous melody from his trumpet. This irresolute audio-visual quality perfectly appropriates and is synonymous with the free-flowing, spontaneous nature of jazz, although the inexplicable paucity of film clips of Baker’s wonderful trumpet playing – his raison d’í­Âªtre – is a glaring weakness.

Nevertheless, this slow-burning, nostalgic elegy to an artist’s free-spirited youth and his one eternal love, music, is a timeless capsule of a fleeting, intense and unbridled life, made all the more poignant by the tragic death of its star.

James DC

The summer print issue of Electric Sheep is a jazz and cinema special to coincide with the re-release of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, a heart-rending, soulful monochrome gem. To celebrate the belated recognition of one of American independent cinema’s greats, we look at the influence of jazz on film in the US with articles on Shirley Clarke, John Cassavetes, Jim Jarmusch and Beat cinema among others. For more information on where to buy the magazine and how to subscribe, please contact amanda [at] wallflowerpress.co.uk.

Format: Cinema

Release date: 30 May 2008

Distributor: Artificial Eye

Director: Cristian Nemescu

Writers: Cristian Nemescu, Tudor Voican

Cast: Armand Assante, Maria Dinulescu, Razvan Vasilescu, Jamie Elman

Romania 2006

155 mins

It’s unfortunate that Cristian Nemescu’s debut feature will most likely be viewed mainly as a promising work-in-progress. The tragic death of the 27-year-old writer/director in 2006 left the film unfinished, and the final cut was compiled according to what was known of his intentions. In spite of this, what emerges is a compelling story that triumphs on several levels.

California Dreamin’ begins with a gritty black and white prologue detailing the brutal bomb attacks on Romania during the Second World War and outlining the paradoxes of the situation: frantic locals cry out for American support while an unexploded shell bearing a ‘Made in USA’ logo crashes through an inhabited building.

Flash forward 55 years and the country finds itself in the middle of another military crisis, this time the conflict in Kosovo. A NATO-commissioned radar is being transported by train into Romania to aid the accuracy of air raids on Serbia. Due to the covert and urgent nature of the cargo, there was no time to obtain the necessary customs documents. Under guard from the US army, headed by Captain Doug Jones (an inspired Armand Assante), the train runs into trouble when it is stopped in the small village of Capalnita by bitter stationmaster Doiarum, who demands to see all relevant documentation before it can proceed. During the unplanned stopover, the young army officers mix with the small traditional community.

At the heart of the collision of cultures is Doiarum’s daughter Monica, a striking 17-year-old who commands the attention of every boy in town, yet secretly wants to escape the constricted future that awaits her in Capalnita. The influx of American soldiers not only stimulates her hormones but also her desire to leave, much to the dismay of her father who has positioned himself as a figure of authority within the community. Captain Jones sees this control as tyrannical, and soon looks to convince the locals to overthrow him, bringing the future of the village into question.

One of Nemescu’s greatest achievements is the way in which the vast historical context is weaved seamlessly with engagingly human strands of narrative, without ever feeling contrived. There’s no formulaic love story subplot; rather, the relationship between Monica and her American lover develops organically amidst the push and pull of external events. While the film is infused with allegorical meaning it never feels like Nemescu is consciously trying to get a point across. Instead, the social significance of the Americans’ arrival is perfectly demonstrated through events such as the party scene, where the excited locals invite the soldiers to a celebration complete with a Romanian Elvis tribute act.

While it is uncertain that this is the cut of the film Nemescu would have chosen, its win of the ‘Un Certain Regard’ prize at Cannes last year demonstrates the significance and accomplishment of the director’s efforts, a posthumous success tinged with sadness as one can only imagine what this young talent could have gone on to achieve.

James Merchant