Format: Cinema

Date: 21 August 2009

Venues: Odeon Panton St (London) and key cities

Distributor: Network Releasing

Director: Antonio Campos

Writer: Antonio Campos

Cast: Ezra Miller, Addison Timlin, Lee Wilkof, Michael Stuhlbarg

USA 2008

107 mins

A giggling baby plays with his dad; a hair-tugging fight outside a suburban store; a bad bike spill; a grainy Saddam Hussein, noose around neck, drops to his death; a piano-playing cat; bodies in Iraq; clip follows clip, until we see a skinny blonde girl, nervous, uncomfortable, staring into the lens of an unseen cameraman, who is telling her to inform her mum on camera that she is a whore before the porn action starts. The website is ‘nastycumholes.com’, and a young student is wanking to it as his roommate bangs on the door to be let in. The first line of dialogue is ‘I smell come’.

Welcome to Antonio Campos’s feature debut Afterschool. We are in a preppy American boarding school in New York state when a class video project accidentally captures a tragedy; two popular seniors die, and we follow the reactions of the school, of its pupils, and particularly of the wanking student from the beginning, Robert (Ezra Miller), who shot the incident, an uncool and unliked tenth-grader who becomes a source of anxiety for the institution. He is tasked, by way of therapy, with making a memorial video to the two girls, and it quickly becomes clear that there is very much a right way and a wrong way to think about the girls, the school and the tragedy, and that Robert just isn’t in tune with everybody else. ‘I think I’m not a good person’, he says to his mum over the phone, and she promptly suggests medication.

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 school establishment and student body are damned alike, a world of hypocrisy and empty platitudes, where bullying is studiously ignored, drugs are the currency of cool and problem kids with rich parents just can’t be problem kids. Evil here is not some malevolent force but an absence of feeling, a failure to focus; everybody is so preoccupied with appearances they just can’t acknowledge the reality of the situation. It says something about the tone of the film that eerie, blank Robert emerges as almost heroic in this context for producing a strangely clumsy, insensitive, but ultimately truthful memorial video, while the school’s official version proves to be an appallingly glib, black comic highlight.

Afterschool‘s low-key, observational surface conceals its tight structure, coming across as Kubrick via mumblecore. Campos constantly asks us to consider whose eyes we are looking through and whose version of events we should believe. It lingers where we would pull away, and stares where we would not think to look. The sound is muted and music-free. 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. It’s creepy and smart, and it may just screw with your head for days - recommended.

Mark Stafford

Format: Cinema

Title: Mesrine: Killer Instinct (Part 1)

Release date: 7 August 2009

Venues: Cineworld Fulham Road, Haymarket, Curzon Soho (London) and key cities

Distributor: Momentum Pictures

Director: Jean-Franí§ois Richet

Writers: Abdel Raouf Dafri, Jean-Franí§ois Richet

Based on: L’instinct de mort by Jacques Mesrine

Original title: L’instinct de mort

Cast: Vincent Cassel, Cécile de France, Gérard Depardieu, Elena Anaya, Gilles Lellouche

France 2008

113 mins

Title: Mesrine: Public Enemy No.1 (Part 2)

Release date: 28 August 2009

Director: Jean-Franí§ois Richet

Writers: Abdel Raouf Dafri, Jean-Franí§ois Richet

Original title: L’ennemi public no.1

Cast: Vincent Cassel, Ludivine Sagnier, Mathieu Amalric, Gérard Lanvin

France 2008

133 mins

Thirty years after his death (he was shot 19 times in a brutal police operation), the facts of Jacques Mesrine’s life and criminal career read like the results of some fevered pulp imagination. Surely he can’t be real? An international criminal Renaissance man, murderer, kidnapper, a master of disguise, a bank robber who’d hit another bank over the road if the mood took him, who gave an interview to Paris Match while on the run, escaped from his own sentencing by taking the judge hostage, broke out of prison after prison, and on one occasion even returned to one to free his fellow prisoners? Mesrine seems to have been born from the 60s-70s zeitgeist, some weird Clyde Barrow/James Bond/Andreas Baader hybrid thrown up by the public subconscious. But nope, he did exist, Jean-Franí§ois Richet and Vincent Cassel have made a 245-minute film about him based on his autobiography, and they have trouble fitting everything in.

Released in two parts, Mesrine is, for the most part, an exciting, if conventional biopic. Richet (who directed the efficient, but pointless Assault on Precinct 13 remake in 2005) has a ball with yer regulation gangster schtick. There are pulse-pounding prison breaks, tense shoot-outs, bank and casino robberies and car chases. There are piles of money and hot molls on tap (Elena Anaya, Cécile de France, Ludivine Sagnier). There are all kinds of exciting low-lifes played by great character actors (Gérard Depardieu, Roy Dupuis and a great turn from Mathieu Amalric). There’s a Schifrin-esque 70s score peppered with period pop as we hop from country to country over three decades. It’s a film of set-pieces and sequences, thrilling, and disturbing, and familiar. Everything you need is present and correct, it’s glossy, sexy, good-looking and halfway in love with its own roguish glamour. It’s hard to begrudge this, though, when the results are so much fun to watch.

To Richet’s credit, there is some grit in the oyster. Young Mesrine is seen in Algeria killing Arabs with a gun and full sanction given by the government he later postured against, and the first film especially depicts him as a nasty piece of work under all the surface charm, a racist wife-beater with a hair-trigger temper, ruthless and capable of vile acts of cruelty. He becomes transformed, after a fashion, by his own narcissism. An off-the-cuff ‘Vive le Québec libre!’ to some assembled journalists politicises him in the media and the public mind, and his criminal career is magically turned into a revolutionary one by the ferment of the times. Entranced by this romantic vision of himself, he starts to act up to this press-created identity, and in the second film becomes trapped by it. There is an intriguing ambiguity to this; we are never sure how much he buys his own outlaw clichés, and this is mostly Vincent Cassel’s work. This is probably the meatiest role he’s ever going to get, and he excels as a man playing the part of a superstar subversive who never quite convinces himself in the role. Full of bravado and populist rhetoric when cameras or an audience are watching, but an empty self-serving bastard inside, Cassel’s Mesrine is all strut and swagger, smiles that never reach the eyes and shifty glances to monitor reactions, utterly convincing as a man racing towards the grave because he has nothing to lose. It is his utter fearlessness, his permanent state of rebellion against everything and the ambivalence of his one-man attack on ‘the system’ that make him such a fascinating character. Cassel has described Mesrine as ‘a symbol of freedom and a terrible man’, which seems about right. I would have liked a little more of the terrible man, personally, but there’s enough here to chew on.

Mark Stafford

Format: Cinema

Release date: 21 August 2009

Venues: key cities

Distributor: Vertigo Films

Director: í–zgí¼r Yildirim

Writer: í–zgí¼r Yildirim

Based on: L’instinct de mort by Jacques Mesrine

Cast: Denis Moschitto, Volkan í–zcan, Moritz Bleibtreu

Germany 2008

92 mins

‘If you want to be the best, you’ve got to earn respect. And if you want respect, you don’t show respect to anyone else. And if you don’t show anyone no respect, they think you fucking invented it.’ So runs the reckless mantra of í–zgí¼r Yildirim’s gritty gangster drama, Chiko, set in the immigrant neighbourhood of Hamburg’s rough Dulsberg district, its compelling hero portrayed with bristling intensity by Denis Moschitto.

Chiko, whose real name is Isa (Turkish for Jesus), is a street-smart young guy on the drug dealer career ladder, running a small business with his quick-tempered friend, Tibet (Volkan í–zcan), with whom he shares a yearning for cash, hot wheels and chicks. More than anything though, Chiko wants to get to the top and enjoy the power that comes with it, and he sets out to prove himself to the local drug boss, Brownie, by agreeing to sell 10 kilos of grass in 10 days on the condition that the merchandise must be sold from an apartment, not on the streets.

Although the operation is soon running smoothly and profitably for all involved, the amount of dope and cash that is suddenly crossing the table seems too tempting for Tibet, who scents an opportunity to beef up his share behind Chiko’s back and use the extra money to support his seriously ill mother, a plan that goes horribly wrong. Not only does he put his long-lasting friendship with Chiko at risk, but he is cruelly punished by Brownie in a moment of savage violence. As the story drifts deeper into genre conventions, Chiko finds some love and stability with the prostitute Meryam (a decent acting debut for Turkish-German rapper Lady Bitch Ray), but ultimately breaks under the pressure of trying to balance his own ambitions with his loyalty to Tibet.

Produced by Fatih Akin (director of the stunning Head On and most recently The Edge of Heaven), Chiko is writer-director Yildirim’s first feature and much like his aspiring hero, he makes no pretence about his own dreams and utter conviction, describing Chiko as his Scarface in the film’s production notes. But ambition alone cannot generate excellence and although Chiko has good pacing and is engagingly witty (some of which is unfortunately lost in the rather careless subtitling), the film’s largely predictable plot is laced with clichés and a slick visual style that gradually defuses its fierce tension, leaving it to a strong cast to carry the film until its final act of desperation and ferocity. The vibrant hip hop soundtrack and well-tuned dialogue lend polish to the drab suburban location, but the mix of raving social commentary and dynamic storytelling is only half-convincing, and Yildirim’s film remains a straightforward rise-and-fall story about a small-time dealer with big dreams, whose reach turns out to exceed his grasp.

In spite of its flaws, Chiko is persuasive in the way it recreates the milieu in which the characters struggle to make it to something bigger and better than what is expected of them, but its uneven blend of social criticism, domestic drama and gangster tragedy illustrates just how difficult it is to capture that distinctive Scarface quality.

Pamela Jahn

Format: Cinema

Release date: 7 August 2009

Venues: London and key cities

Distributor: Soda Pictures

Director: Ursula Meier

Writers: Antoine Jaccoud, Olivier Lorelle, Ursula Meier, Gilles Taurand, Raphaelle Valbrune, Alice Winocour

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Olivier Gourmet, Adélaí¯de Leroux, Madeleine Budd, Kacey Mottet Klein

Switzerland/France/Belgium 2008

98 mins

Ursula Meier’s debut feature Home tells the story of an insular and unconventional family who live in a house by a disused motorway. Meier wanted to create ‘a road movie in reverse’ (the tagline of the film) by reflecting not the passenger’s gaze but the point of view of the people standing by the roadside.

When the motorway reopens, this kooky, sexually liberated, left-field family’s days of cavorting around semi-naked in front of each other are numbered. They have previously treated the road as an extension of their home, somewhere for the kids to play, for the teenage Judith to sunbathe, and for mum Marthe (Isabelle Huppert) to fit in a ride on her son’s scooter in between the chaos of domestic chores - all of which are undertaken with the style and poise that seem to come so effortlessly to the French (in cinema, at least).

Madness slowly takes hold as the noise and pollution of passing traffic inhibits the household’s daily routine. Dad Michel (Olivier Gourmet) is angry and territorial, while Julien daubs fresh white paint from the road across his face in a gesture of defiance. Marthe can’t hang out her washing anymore for the sound of truck drivers blasting their horns at a half-naked Judith, who persists in sunbathing in a bikini by the busy road. Practical middle child Marion, the scholar of the family, is worried about the effect of carbon monoxide on the family’s health, and defies her mother by refusing to wear a swimsuit that flatters her burgeoning figure.

The family decide to brick in the windows and sweat out the summer inside their house. Marthe, until now the devoted mother, puts her needs above the rest of the family by insisting they stay on no matter how bad it gets. Here is the only place she can be truly happy, even if the entire family suffers as a result. This seems contradictory: until this point, much has been made of her maternal bond with the children, especially with her young son Julien. But when the ultimate breakdown occurs and Michel threatens to leave with the children, Marthe is prepared to stay on alone in the dark, hot house; still more baffling is her lack of concern when Judith goes missing later in the film.

Meier intended to create ‘a sort of immobile expedition - an inner voyage, a mental journey’, yet Marthe’s breakdown amounts to nothing more than mindless pacing around a messy house full of dirty dinner plates. Marthe’s is a flattering, camera-friendly brand of madness, and luckily her ability to match this season’s floral prints with an edgy pair of heeled ankle boots seems to be entirely uncompromised by her mental demise. This type of superficiality permeates Home, rendering Marthe’s change in attitude to her family nothing more than an irksome plot contrivance, and Meier’s intentions are ultimately undermined by the precedence of aesthetic ideals over substance.

Jessica Dickenson

Format: Public Domain

Director: Orson Welles

Writers: Anthony Veiller, Victor Trivas and Decla Dunning

Cast: Edward G Robinson, Orson Welles, Loretta Young, Philip Merivale

USA 1946

90 mins

The legend of Orson Welles has no room for The Stranger. Masterpieces, studio-butchered (or simply flawed) classics, even bad films with elements of genius, but mediocrity never. As Welles’s co-star, Edward G Robinson, once put it, ‘Orson has genius but in this film it seems to have run out’. And yet other great auteurs were permitted hundreds of mediocre films; John Ford seems to have made at least one for every Stagecoach or The Searchers, and even Alfred Hitchcock was allowed his fair share.

The Stranger shows what Welles could have become had he been allowed to work as a jobbing director within the studio system. His output for the radio between 1938 and 1940 was certainly prodigious and not every programme sent Americans panicking into the streets as War of the Worlds did. Perhaps his film career could have been similar. The Stranger was even finished a day ahead of schedule and under budget and actually made money at the box office - not the stuff of Welles legend.

Perhaps it’s because Welles himself disliked the film, but for some reason The Stranger has become one of the filmmaker’s most forgotten and overlooked movies. It merits barely a page or two in most biographies and there are very few stories about its production. Welles apparently directed the film (following the script) by day and performed magic tricks at drunken parties in the evenings. The studio overruled an interesting casting option - Agnes Moorehead (the first wife in Citizen Kane) in the Edward G role - but other than trimming the opening section, interfered very little.

Thus the film is directed entirely by Welles, unlike The Magnificent Ambersons, which had an ending added by Robert Wise, and bears all the hallmarks of an Orson Welles film. His strong (heavy-handed) directorial style is much in evidence: his roving camera and striking angles, chiaroscuro lighting and his composition in depth (although without Gregg Toland’s wide angle lenses and dramatic depth of focus). The film’s strengths, as well as its flaws, are largely due to Welles.

The first reel is excellent - full of drama, tension and dramatic noir-ish shots as former Nazi Meinike is set free from prison in order to lead the war crimes investigators to a bigger fish - Franz Kindler. Edward G Robinson repeats his calm, all-knowing investigator from Double Indemnity. Kindler is played with hammy urbanity by Welles in what seems to be a dry run for his villain in The Third Man, Harry Lime. His speech on a ‘Carthaginian peace’ for Germany bears comparison with Lime’s story of the cuckoo clocks and the Borgias. Welles’s performance is often considered the film’s major flaw, although it is certainly not as jarring as the irritating Irish brogue he employs for The Lady from Shanghai, and seems to be indicative of his restless spirit and his constant striving to try something different, which led to his much lauded voodoo Macbeth as well as War of the Worlds. It is also indicative of his sheer love of acting.

The following reels are set in a sleepy Connecticut town complete with prep school and colonial style buildings (looking remarkably like the set from Gilmore Girls). The film itself takes on the pace of the place as we are treated to fishing trips, discussions on antiques and repairing the town clock, as well as the quirky locals who don’t much mind that the church clock hasn’t worked in decades and are annoyed by the noise when it is fixed. There is the town clerk and store-owner who inadvertently invents the self-service mini-mart so he can listen to the radio and play checkers instead of serving customers.

Disguised as a teacher and married to the daughter of a Supreme Court judge, Kindler hopes to hide out in the idyllic town until the Nazis rise again. But as the net slowly closes in around him the audience finds itself almost sympathising with the unrepentant Nazi (perhaps not to the disturbing extent Hitchcock achieves in Psycho) as he hurriedly redirects a children’s paper chase so they don’t find Meinike’s body. But of course Robinson, with his bulldog tenacity, eventually leads us to a finale that although not quite as baroque as the ‘crazy house’ in The Lady from Shanghai is certainly memorable.

The Stranger won’t trouble the greatest films of all time lists but it is not a bad movie. There are good moments in the overall mediocrity and it is probably better on the whole than The Lady from Shanghai, which alternates between the brilliant and the awful. It might even be the fifth best Orson Welles film…

Paul Huckerby