Yearly Archives: 2009

Cinema releases

ANTICHRIST

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Antichrist

Format: Cinema

Date: 24 July 2009

Venues: Chelsea Cinema, Cineworld Haymarket, Curzon Soho, Renoir (London) + key cities

Distributor: Artificial Eye

Director: Lars von Trier

Writer: Lars von Trier

Cast: Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg

Denmark 2009

109 mins

TAKE 1: FRANCES MORGAN

In the brooding forests of the Pacific North West, a middle-class couple, played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, struggle to come to terms with the accidental death of their young son. It soon becomes clear, however, that grief is not the only opponent they face: malign, supernatural forces assail both protagonists, first implicitly, then with shockingly violent results, unleashing ancient evil, nature’s chaotic cruelty and primal female fury.

If the above précis sounds more like a by-numbers synopsis of a certain type of American supernatural horror movie than Lars von Trier‘s latest release, it is because Antichrist almost is one of those films, such is its adherence to middlebrow horror convention, and this is one of the most disorienting, frustrating things about the film. As Gainsbourg and Dafoe’s isolated cabin retreat becomes a hexed hell, one can almost tick off distinguishing features: the lost child as catalyst for terror; the family in conflict; the failure of institutions (in this case, cognitive therapy) to deal with evil; the reverberant folk memory of witch-hunting and devil worship; the uneasy truce between humans and nature; the vengeful or possessed woman who deploys torture, violence and voracious sexuality; even the obligatory hide-and-seek sequence of pursuit, capture, conquest and escape that concludes most horror films.

And yet, of course, although von Trier has used the genre to host the themes of suffering, manipulation and control that are echoed throughout the majority of his films, Antichrist is not a genre film. An efficient mainstream horror - and even the extreme body-horror films of Takeshi Miike, whose Audition (1999) springs to mind during Antichrist‘s latter segment - uses a particular pace to take us from unease to terror, from suggestion to gore, and, while not exactly hiding its political, sexual or religious intentions, will veil them enough with plot and action that they simmer more potently beneath the surface. This art-house take on horror does not work in that way, because its slower rhythm and self-aware script promotes an analytical response in the first instance - which is one way of saying that I spent much of Antichrist wondering why exactly von Trier had made the film; trying, in a sense, to justify to myself its disjointed structure, its choice of predictable esoteric material and, inevitably, the director’s seemingly infinite fascination (to the point of fetishism) with female suffering, which is combined here with clichés of female sexual power and its destructive intent. That this last might be a comment upon mainstream horror’s latent misogyny seems reasonable, for there certainly are distinct flashes of irony throughout. It is really only when the environment takes precedence and the setting emerges as a character in its own right that the questions stop, and Antichrist seems more than a sadistic exercise in style.

Von Trier’s citation of August Strindberg’s Inferno as an influence is perhaps not surprising. First published in 1897 and based on his journals, Inferno captures the author at a time of psychological crisis, which prompted a fascination with alchemy, dreams and the occult. It is a paranoid, claustrophobic read, imbued with a strange sexual tension, but it is also strikingly effective at summoning the sinister aspects of a place. A passage where Strindberg experiences a walk through a village as a visit to hell brings to mind von Trier’s impressive visions of the forest as charged with dark symbolism; a place visited in dreams and fantasy. The most effective of these scenes, in which Gainsbourg carries out a therapeutic visualisation exercise, has a kind of psychedelic resonance that is highly convincing, and more disquieting than much of what follows, perhaps because it hints at our fears and desires without seeking to scrawl their names in letters of blood.

TAKE 2: DAVID WARWICK

Controversial director Lars von Trier returns to the spotlight with Antichrist, a film sure to generate curiosity first, confusion second, and strong opinions third.

Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe play the only two characters – a couple mourning the accidental death of their son. Both are grief-stricken, but particularly Gainsbourg, who is quite overwhelmed by the loss. Fortunately (or not), Defoe is a trained therapist and prescribes for Gainsbourg a trip to their holiday cabin, where she is to face her fear of the woods. When they arrive, however, the atmosphere of the cabin is disturbing for both of them, and Gainsbourg’s condition proves more complex than Defoe had anticipated. Their convalescence quickly descends into madness and violence.

It isn’t clear, at first, exactly what Antichrist is. It’s not a horror film (because it’s not scary) and it’s not an art film (because it couldn’t be further from a work of art). It’s tempting to say that it’s just bad, just a hideous mess, and leave it there. But of course that wouldn’t do.

A lot has been made in the press about Antichrist‘s gruesomeness, and certainly, if it is anything, it is gruesome. The film’s unflinching close-ups of human mutilation are not only amongst some of the most extreme and unpleasant in the whole of cinema, but also some of the most pointless and gratuitous. The two naked, blood-splattered actors run around copulating and torturing each other, and it just doesn’t make any sense. It’s not a detached psychological deconstruction of power and sado-masochism, like Pasolini’s masterful Salí³, and it’s not a tense, titillating game of cat and mouse, like the hateful – but at least fathomable – Saw films.

Perhaps the talking fox has the key to Antichrist, when it pops up in the middle of the film and tells the audience that ‘chaos reigns’. Perhaps all the violent nonsense is profound because that is how life is. This would certainly seem to be the idea, especially given the film’s closing dedication to Andrei Tarkovsky (a dedication quite, quite deserving of the boos and belly laughs that it received at Cannes and elsewhere). Von Trier seems to want to follow Tarkovsky in dynamiting truth, and scrutinising the vague, misty appearance of reality, stripped of its bourgeois tint. Such pushing to the limits of consciousness and to the ineffable, however, tends to dramatically shrink the line between masterpiece and nonsensical garbage. Von Trier has walked this line before and, with The Idiots at least, made excellent work. With Antichrist, however, he has fallen into the stink. Beyond the simple fact that it doesn’t make any sense, every aspect of the film is also wildly overdone and off-key, from the leaden dialogue, to the gloopy, gimmick-ridden cinematography.

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.

Read our interview with Lars von Trier.

Cinema releases

MOON

Moon

Format: Cinema

Date: 15 July 2009

Venues: nationwide

Distributor: Sony Pictures

Director: Duncan Jones

Writer: Nathan Parker

Cast: Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey

UK 2009

97 mins

In the not-so-distant future, the Earth has been depleted of clean, natural resources. It is now powered by Helium-3, which Lunar Industries mines on the far side of the moon. Astronaut Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is the sole employee supervising the industrial mining station. Approaching the end of his three-year contract, he’s desperate to be reunited with his wife and young daughter back on Earth; a failure with one of the satellites means that he’s been unable to communicate directly with them, relying instead on recorded messages from his wife for some kind of human connection. Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey), an AI robot tasked with caring for Sam, is the only company he has in space. Sam’s health seems to be failing rapidly, and while out on a routine check in a lunar vehicle, he suffers an accident, only to wake up back in the station, unable to remember how he got there. Only he’s no longer alone - he finds a mirror image of himself ready to take over the running of the station.

The winner of the Michael Powell award for best new British feature film at this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival, 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. Moon is Jones’s attempt to reverse the course of science fiction cinema, a genre that’s been altered beyond recognition in recent years. Clearly inspired by an earlier generation of films including Silent Running, Outland, and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Jones is vastly more concerned with the genre’s human dimension, eschewing the kind of hyped-up special effects that in recent years have turned sci-fi films into a series of alien-launched missile attacks that inevitably blow up American targets like the White House.

Rockwell’s demanding performance is near perfect; playing two versions of the same character, he imbues both with contrasting traits and emotions. He plays the original Sam Bell as a man who seems to be in terminal decline, physically deteriorating as he gets nearer to his journey home, as if he’s reached his sell-by date, while his doppelgänger is healthy and fit, in the prime of his life. As they struggle to figure out what they’re both doing on the station, their consciousness is awakened; Jones’s characters confront the very nature of their own existence, and the disturbing truth behind the memories of their lives back on Earth.

Shot in high contrast, the gleaming white surfaces of the space station are almost luminescent; the lunar surfaces surrounding the station are cold, dark and chillingly ominous. 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

Home entertainment

BLOODY MAMA

Bloody Mama

Format: DVD

Date: 29 June 2009

Distributor: Optimum

Director: Roger Corman

Writers: Don Peters, Robert Thorn

Cast: Shelley Winters, Don Stroud, Robert De Niro, Bruce Dern

USA 1970

86 mins

Roger Corman’s Bloody Mama is loosely based on the true story of Kate ‘Ma’ Barker and her criminal offspring, whose exploits in the American Midwest from the early 1920s to the mid-1930s led to avid media coverage and inspired James Hadley Chase to pen his 1939 novel No Orchids for Miss Blandish, which concerned a mob controlled by their matriarch. Their crime spree lasted 15 years, although the pace of Corman’s account, and the few concessions made to the ageing process, suggest a shorter timescale. His film also embraces the myth of ‘Machine Gun Ma’ as the head of the operation, a legend that was reportedly cultivated by the FBI in order to justify their eventual killing of an elderly woman.

An unsettling opening scene, in which a teenage Ma is raped by a gang led by her father, is one of Corman’s few attempts to speculate on the roots of her attitude towards society, with the director preferring to revel in the amoral activities of her outlaw family, and to evoke period trappings on a typically shoestring budget. Robert Altman’s Thieves like Us (1974) provides a more authentic snapshot of criminal life in Depression-era America, but Corman’s film is of interest to an audience beyond his core following of cultists, despite its inaccuracies. As Ma and her four sons - Herman, Fred, Lloyd and Arthur - travel across the United States, committing crime and occasionally lying low under the alias of ‘The Hunters’, they pick up two associates: Mona, a prostitute who has become Lloyd’s girlfriend, and Kevin (Bruce Dern), a sexually sadistic addition to the gang who ‘befriends’ Fred during a term behind bars. Their freewheeling lifestyle is curtailed by an overly ambitious kidnapping, which leads to a brutal shoot-out with the law.

Shelley Winters takes centre-stage as the domineering Ma, and Don Stroud is genuinely threatening as Herman, who becomes her second-in-command and ultimately overthrows his own mother to take control of the gang. Bloody Mama functions as a satire of the American family unit, with Ma effectively adopting the roles of both father and mother; keeping them afloat economically by masterminding robberies and kidnapping plots, and administering ‘tough love’ by physically scolding her brood whenever they have disappointed her, yet also comforting Herman when he has experienced one of his ‘bad moments’ and insisting that he ‘sleep with Ma’ to avoid having bad dreams. Herman is truly a product of her unconventional upbringing, a violent thug who is even described by his girlfriend as a ‘freak’; yet he is capable of moments of tenderness, allowing his lover to leave for Miami rather than risk her being killed in the inevitable climactic bloodshed.

However, it is a young Robert De Niro as Lloyd who offers the most fully-formed characterisation, one that runs the gamut from amusing to disturbing, to strangely sympathetic as he struggles to fit in with his more criminally proficient siblings. Lloyd becomes chemically dependent at an early age, initially getting high from sniffing glue while putting together plastic models, but is soon injecting dope, and De Niro reportedly shed 30 pounds for the role. His stoned seduction of an attractive female swimmer initially plays as an exercise in deadpan humour, but events take a more sinister turn as he pins the girl down to the deck and then kidnaps her, tying her to one of the beds in the family holiday home. ‘She was so cute I had to take a shot at her’, is his feeble justification for his actions. Lloyd is less volatile than Johnny Boy, the self-destructive character who would provide De Niro with his breakthrough in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973), but he is as equally misguided. Despite being part of a tightly-knit family, Lloyd is arguably one of the many socially alienated loners, prone to moments of intense introspection, that the actor portrayed during his 70s peak.

It is often difficult to evaluate Corman as a director, and to pinpoint his authorial signature, as his cinematic legacy is forever intertwined with the filmmakers who served their professional apprenticeships within his ‘B’-movie factory; directors such as Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich and Jonathan Demme, who would re-invigorate the Hollywood mainstream in the 1970s and the early 1980s. Corman stages his action scenes efficiently, identifying the marketable attributes of the gangster film, yet his subversive spirit does filter through to elevate Bloody Mama above the status of a low-budget programmer to something more memorable, even if the film is, at times, an uncomfortable hybrid. Consequently, Bloody Mama has much in common with Corman’s Death Race 2000 (1975): it is a fast-moving exploitation item, yet one which exhibits some finely observed, almost throwaway, satire at the expense of American society. These elements of Bloody Mama are more interesting today than the still shocking scenes of violence that were the film’s main selling point on its initial release.

John Berra

Home entertainment

PARADE

Parade

Format: DVD

Date: 22 June 2009

Distributor: BFI

Director: Jacques Tati

Writer: Jacques Tati

Cast: Jacques Tati, Karl Kossmeyer

France 1974

84 mins

It is an honour for me to write about Jacques Tati, for whom I have felt unconditional admiration and affection since childhood. The only films for which I remember my father showing enthusiasm were Tati’s masterpieces Jour de fíªte (1949), Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953), and Mon Oncle (1958). They enjoyed some mainstream success in British cinemas back in the days before our culture turned curatorial and they became pages in the annals of cinema history. (Amazingly, Jour de fíªte found a distributor here before it did in France.) I believe that these comic visions of rural, seaside, and suburban France respectively were, for my father, a nostalgic link with his francophone youth. Their deployment of speech as sound rather than communication must give them a special resonance for anyone growing up in a foreign-language culture. I came to realise that my father’s fondness for the comedy of gesture with wordless sound, of misunderstanding, and of the absurd banal, were Tati-underpinned. These innocent forms of humour have long tended to seem dated: one would court embarrassment if one tried to enact the first, especially, in sophisticated company today. But the work of the master Tati defies cultural change and can still make cynical 21st-century metropolitans laugh like delighted children.

Parade is very different from Tati’s other films. It is ostensibly a real-time documentary record of a circus performance in a Swedish cinema. The performance that Tati shows us is not only that of the circus artists but also that of the audience, whose lurid hippy clothes are nicely captured on fuzzy colour-saturated film stock (mainly videotape, it appears). As filmmaking, Parade is surprisingly shoddy for a meticulous craftsman like Tati. His preference for dubbing sound afterwards (shared by many great filmmakers) is a key element in the art of his other films, but here is bodged. Eclectic techniques are employed. A camera weaving through backstage comings and goings is reminiscent of Altman or Tati’s friend Fellini. The ‘real’ members of the audience are mingled with planted performers and cardboard cut-outs. A freaky rock group is filmed with wild abandon, which is surprisingly apt, though expressive more of bewilderment than excitement. In general, the blurring of the image, the crude editing, the abrupt switches from one kind of deteriorating film stock to another, from blazing to faded colours, all buy spontaneity at the price of coherence. In its whimsical, chaotic mood, its self-consciously studio-bound character, its visual punning and love of the incongruous, and its variety-bill structure, Parade is more reminiscent of anarchic British TV comedy like Do Not Adjust Your Set than of any cinema film.

Tati is the compí¨re, benign presiding presence and modest star. He offers us five mime routines, dating back to his music-hall act of the 1930s. At the age of 65 he still executes them brilliantly. Although Parade cannot stand comparison with Tati’s best loved works, there are moments of genius in the film that amply justify its existence.

Peter Momtchiloff

Home entertainment

FRANKLYN

Franklyn

Format: DVD

Date: 22 June 2009

Distributor: E1 Entertainment

Director: Gerald McMorrow

Writer: Gerald McMorrow

Cast: Ryan Phillippe, Eva Green, Sam Riley, Bernard Hill

France/UK 2008

95 mins

For someone who has never been a fan of the myopic, small-scale social realism that is too often synonymous with contemporary British cinema, the stirrings that are currently visible in the work of home-grown filmmakers are an exciting development. These ferments are evident in the season of new British cinema hosted by the ICA, which includes films such as Summer Scars, The Disappeared, The Hide and Crack Willow, which respectively attempt to infuse the reality of hoodies, council estates, bird watching or daily misery with something deeper, darker, richer and more mysterious. Simultaneously, June sees the DVD release of Gerald McMorrow’s Franklyn, an inventive, ambitious, genre-defying debut also located on the borderline between the real and the imaginary, which deserves more attention than it received on its theatrical release.

Franklyn opens in the retro-futuristic world of ‘Meanwhile City’, which combines Gothic architecture with post-apocalyptic urban stylings and is ruled by religion (any religion, adherence to one of the myriad cults, which include for instance the Seventh Day Manicurists, being compulsory) and policed by ‘Clerics’ clad in austere 17th-century black garb. We are guided through the bazaar-like atmosphere by a masked narrator called Preest (Ryan Phillippe), a mysterious lone operator who expresses himself in clichéd noir language and is up against the Individual, the leader of one of the most powerful religious sects that rule the city. The film cuts back and forth between this fantasy world and the real world, where we follow the three parallel stories of Milo (Sam Riley), a young man who has just been dumped by his fiancée; Emilia (Eva Green), a troubled young artist who attempts suicide every month as part of her art project; and Peter Esser (Bernard Hill), who is looking for his son, an ex-soldier who has disappeared from the mental institution where he was interned.

Aesthetically and conceptually, McMorrow aims high, but while he dazzles on the former level, he is not as successful on the latter. Although the film was made on a tight budget, Meanwhile City is beautifully crafted and is brimming with atmosphere and visual ideas. Preest’s striking hollow-eyed mask is perfectly sinister and marks him out as an ambivalent character from the start, contrasting with the narration that naturally places the audience on his side. The first transition between fantasy and real world is effected through shots of Gothic details of the Houses of Parliament, a great idea that draws attention to the beauty and magic of pre-industrial London, as it co-exists with the soulless steel and glass conformity of the capital’s modern developments.

Characters appear in both worlds in various guises, and the manner in which the many strands of the story fit together is not revealed until fairly late into the film. The labyrinthine narrative is pleasurable while it lasts, and by contrast the explanation, when it comes, feels rather trite and overly simplistic. So much effort and imagination have gone into creating a sumptuous, textured, enigmatic fantasy world, that it seems a shame to just explain it away in such a manner. None of the initial ambiguity and complexity remain at the end as the focus shifts to what is essentially a twisted but sentimental romantic drama.

Despite these flaws, Franklyn is a bold, impressive debut feature that attempts to break away from the narrow scope that has characterised much of recent British filmmaking. Visually, McMorrow shows himself to be a remarkably accomplished director; all he needs now is a script that matches his talents and provides substantial concepts on which to build even more elaborate cinematic constructions.

Virginie Sélavy

Cinema releases

THE DISAPPEARED

The Disappeared

Format: Cinema

Date: 19 June 2009

Venues: ICA Cinema (London)

Distributor: ICA Cinema

Director: Johnny Kervorkian

Writerz: Johnny Kervorkian, Neil Murphy

Cast: Harry Treadaway, Tom Felton, Greg Wise, Ros Leeming, Alex Jennings

UK 2008

96 mins

FrightFest remains the highlight of the horror calendar for many genre fans in the UK, offering the opportunity to not only see some of the hottest films in horror but also several chillers that are unlikely ever to legally see the light of day in this country. The Disappeared, a low-budget British supernatural horror with a largely unknown cast and rookie director, could well have fallen into the latter category, so it’s a delight to see the film receive an admittedly limited theatrical release almost a year after it debuted at the festival.

Director Johnny Kervorkian will not be a name overly familiar to cinema-goers, but The Disappeared, his first fully-fledged feature film, has every chance of putting his name on the map. It’s a ghost story at heart and, while not entirely original - The Sixth Sense is the most obvious comparison - Kervokian shows plenty of talent for building a creeping sense of terror and delivering genuinely heart-in-your-mouth shocks.

The film is set in the a grey, crumbling London council estate, where the teenage Matthew is racked by guilt following the disappearance of his younger brother Tom, who he was supposed to be babysitting but neglected to party with his friends instead. After a failed suicide attempt, Matthew’s already strained relationship with his father is put under even more pressure when he starts hearing his brother’s pained voice calling out to him. When his best friend’s young sister goes missing, Matthew is beset by horrifying visions and ghostly visitations leading him to both her whereabouts and the shocking revelation of her kidnapper’s true identity.

Harry Potter’s Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy) is probably the best-known name in the cast, but it’s Harry Treadaway who puts in the most impressive performance as the tortured, sullen and beleaguered Matthew. Starring in almost every scene, the captivating young actor shows he is more than up to the task of shouldering the responsibility of being a lead and is clearly someone to watch in the future - he’s soon to appear (albeit in a supporting role) in Oscar-winner Andrea Arnold’s sophomore feature Fish Tank, which was officially selected for competition at this year’s Cannes and will be playing at the forthcoming Edinburgh Film Festival.

Not all of the acting in The Disappeared is quite as good - in our experience London’s council estates are not quite so densely populated with such well-spoken, stage school kids - and the story occasionally slips into cliché, unwisely taking a step into the world of the satanic at the end. However, with Treadaway’s standout central performance coupled with Kervorkian’s directorial flair, The Disappeared offers a tense and absorbing experience that favours the kind of foreboding atmosphere of dread found in Hammer’s best supernatural thrillers of yore over the extreme violence and blood-splattering gore of more recent Brit genre fare.

Toby Weidmann

There will be a Q&A with the director and cast after screenings at the ICA Cinema on 17 and 22 June.

Read about other films in the New British Cinema season at the ICA Summer Scars and The Blue Tower.

Cinema releases

THE BLUE TOWER

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The Blue Tower

Format: Cinema

Date: 26 June 2009 (Preview 23 June)

Venues: ICA Cinema (London)

Distributor: ICA Cinema

Director: Smita Bhide

Writer: Smita Bhide

Cast: Paul Chowdhry, Sonnell Dadral, Abhin Galeya, Indira Joshi, Nicholas Khan, Alice O’Connell

UK 2008

85 mins

Screening as part of the ICA’s New British Cinema strand this month is The Blue Tower, the blistering debut from Smita Bhide, which won the best UK feature award at last year’s Raindance Film Festival. Made for a scant budget and set in the director’s hometown of Southall, the film takes familiar themes such as twenty-something angst and traditionalist family oppression, weaving them in a romantic thriller framework that’s at once realistic and thoroughly gripping.

Abhin Galeya plays Mohan, an out-of-work twenty-seven-year-old stuck with a beautiful wife with whom he shares no chemistry, her oppressive family ever increasing the pressure on him to extend the family line and join their import/export business. As he sees it, his only real chance to escape is a job with his old friend Vivek, who at best has an unreliable reputation. Adding to his troubles is his bedridden Auntie Kamla (Indira Joshi), his only living relative, whom he relies on for money. Tyrannical and unappreciative, Auntie K appears to represent everything that is wrong with his life at present. Things change when he begins to fall for her pretty white nurse Judy (Alice O’Connell), a seemingly simple yet enigmatic girl who not only gives Mohan a temporary escape from his problematic life, but also suggests how he could permanently solve his dilemmas if he’s willing to go the required distance.

The Blue Tower is a remarkably assured film, especially given that this is Bhide’s first feature. The lead characters are all multi-layered, allowing the script to take many unpredictable turns while remaining believable and coherent. It’s also palpable that much thought has gone into even the minor characters, such as Mohan’s slacker friends who spend most of their time eating cheap food in a high street restaurant or hatching ridiculous money-making schemes, and there’s a convincing sense of menace in his wife’s intimidating family. There’s a great authenticity to be found in the film, which sets it apart from other British Asian hits such as East is East or The Guru, which arguably played upon racial stereotypes. The Blue Tower appears more like a solid Mike Leigh film given a new perspective by Bhide’s fresh female voice.

The relationship that builds between Mohan and Judy is engaging and heartfelt, making it difficult not to empathise with them despite the forbidden nature of their liaison, and while the lengths they go to in securing their future may appear extreme, in the context of the piece their actions are understandable. The natural yet beautiful cinematography and orchestral score further evoke the realities of Mohan’s experience dealing with his own culture and underline the difficult choices he has to make to change his situation.

With strong performances and a refreshingly smart and darkly funny script The Blue Tower is a little gem, and one hopes that the current interest in British Asian cinema in the wake of Slumdog Millionaire‘s success allows it to be discovered by eager audiences nationwide.

James Merchant

There will be a preview of The Blue Tower at the ICA (London) on June 23 followed by a Q&A with the director and cast. The film will then show at the ICA from June 26 to 30.

Read about other films in the New British Cinema season at the ICA Summer Scars and The Disappeared.

Cinema releases

ANYTHING FOR HER

Anything for Her

Format: Cinema

Date: 5 June 2009

Venues: Barbican, Cine Lumiere, Cineworld Haymarket, Curzon Soho (London) and key cities

Distributor: Metrodome

Director: Fred Cavayé

Writer: Fred Cavayé

Original title: Pour elle

Cast: Diane Kruger, Vincent Lindon, Olivier Marchal

France 2008

96 mins

Everyone, at some point in their lives, has been a fool for love, doing the most reckless things for the person who has stolen their heart, but the protagonist of co-writer and director Fred Cavayé’s debut film takes this a step further than most. In a neat twist on the prison break genre, popularised by such cinematic greats as The Great Escape (1963), Cool Hand Luke (1967) and The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Cavayé’s film cunningly switches the action from inside the prison to the outside world, where loving husband Julien (Vincent Lindon) plots to break his beautiful wife, Lisa (Diane Kruger), out of jail and then abscond with their young son to a place far out of reach of the French authorities.

As exciting a premise as this is, the plot of Anything for Her does unfortunately rely too much on incredulous developments, not least because Julien is not a criminal mastermind, as an early botched encounter with the Parisian underworld illustrates, but a middle-aged everyman and humble teacher who is driven by a desire to help his loved one, who has wrongly been convicted of murder. Although he is faced by a few hurdles - a tense confrontation with a drug dealer is particularly well played out - Julien overcomes most of them far too easily, and while chance will always have some bearings in such an audacious scheme, he enjoys so many lucky coincidences he must be carrying round a sackful of shamrocks.

Equally, his moral transformation from loving husband and doting father into a stop-at-nothing Jack Carter hardman character is too simplistically portrayed. The film also misses a trick by quickly assuaging any anxiety over his wife’s guilt, undermining an ambiguity that would have added extra spice to their seemingly perfect relationship.

And yet the film has many redeeming features. It is particularly well cast: Lindon is excellent as the tortured Julien, juggling bringing up a child, relating to his suicidal wife, confronting his parents’ scepticism over Lisa’s crime and plotting their escape; Kruger’s descent into despair is both unnerving and captivating; and even young Lancelot Roch plays their distressed moppet with suitable conviction. The rest of the cast is filled out with some wonderful character actors, including Olivier Marchal (a former French copper and the mastermind behind 36 Quai des Orfí¨vres) as a former prison escapee who becomes Julien’s Yoda, and the granite-faced Hammou Graí¯a, who plays the tough investigating detective hot on their trail.

Reservations over some of the plot mechanics aside, the final third of the film is also genuinely thrilling. Its breathless pace and some bold editing touches indicate that Cavayé does have a talent for suspense and could be a director to watch in the future. While this French-language film’s influences are certainly more Hollywood than European, lacking the edginess and profundity associated with the latter and bamboozling style over content, it still delivers enough excitement and drama to satisfy fans of prison break films. Forget plausibility, just sit back and enjoy Anything for Her‘s escapist fantasy.

Toby Weidmann

Home entertainment

LONDON IN THE RAW + PRIMITIVE LONDON

London in the Raw

Format: DVD

Release date: 25 May 2009

Distributor: BFI

Director: Arnold Louis Miller

UK 1964/1965

76/87 minutes

The BFI’s new Flipside strand unearths overlooked and obscure British films, but the almost-swinging 1960s presented in London in the Raw (1964) and Primitive London (1965) is a version of the myth we know well already, whether from cult movies like Beat Girl (1959), The Knack (1965) and Smashing Time (1967) or the more mainstream retro fare of Austin Powers (1997-2002) and The Boat That Rocked (2009). Post-war London, its rapidly changing landscape an ideal metaphor for accelerated culture, marauding sexuality and the shock of the new, here becomes an exotic backdrop for Arnold Louis Miller and cinematographer Stanley Long to undertake their ‘anthropological’ study of the city’s moral habits – a quest that leads almost inevitably back to breasts and buttocks, jiggling in proto-gyms, dancehalls, beauty contests and strip joints.

Of course, Miller and Long (who went on to shoot The Wife Swappers and Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate in the 1970s) were not, in any respectable sense, documentarists – yet this mondo double bill, by its very transparency of intent, is a fascinating insight into not only the British exploitation genre, but also the preoccupations that were ripe for being exploited. It is no surprise that sex is chief among these, but it’s primarily sex as fantasy and performance, with the realities of the act itself still a taboo. The body is viewed repeatedly as grotesque theatre (exotic dancers of all sorts, not only striptease artists, punctuate the first film, while martial arts, beauty parlours and body-builders pop up in the second); and some awkward teenage, working-class beatniks are asked their opinions about ‘free love’, as if representative of a libertarian lifestyle that in fact they’re unlikely ever to experience.

As historical artefacts of a pre-permissive society, both films deserve their reissue, but there’s little to elevate London in the Raw above curio status. Too many long sequences of stolid couples enjoying a taste of the ‘exotic’ in Indian and Moroccan restaurants do little but drive home the grim parochialism of the era, although a scene in the Universal Health Club, in which women in tights blithely lift weights to a chugging brass soundtrack with clanging industrial percussion, is wonderfully perverse.

Follow-up Primitive London is more enjoyable, if questionably so, revelling in its mondo status and upping the shlock tactics and nipple count accordingly, a solemn voice-over bemoaning the ‘synthetic eroticism’ of the day as the camera pans to yet another nylon-clad crotch. Horror composer Basil Kirchin provides music, and in true mondo style, sexualised murder gets a look-in, with a Jack The Ripper sequence alongside reconstructions of a contemporaneous series of killings of young prostitutes. These eerie, titillating shots of bodies dumped on suburban waste ground are a jarring reminder of the era’s attitudes towards women in the sex industry, lest we burlesque-fanciers get too comfortable in our nostalgia for the retro lingerie, ‘real’ bodies, furtive punters and quaint routines of the film’s many strip sequences. The inherent, often unpleasant, truth in clumsily staged, exaggerated versions of reality is what really fascinates with the mondo genre, and even more so when set against the mutable, war-ravaged, but instantly recognisable streets of London.

Extras include the semi-fictionalisted stripper doc Carousella (1966) on the Primitive London DVD while London in the Raw has three documentary shorts from Peter Davis and Staffan Lamm, their soft black and white tones and unobtrusive direction a respite from the preceeding brashness. Pub (1962) observes an evening in the comfortable fug of a local boozer, the camera and microphone drifting between half-heard conversations. Strip (1965) and Chelsea Bridge Boys (1966) intersperse fly-on-the-wall footage with interviews which, at times, sail close to the prurience of Miller’s youth vox-pops. Perhaps Davis and Lamm were shooting exploitation films of a less overt sort, asetheticising and fetishising those disempowered by youth and poverty, but the visual compassion shown to these young subjects and their surroundings, not to mention the value of capturing the actual voices - the timbre, accents, vocabulary - of the era, invite sympathetic reappraisal.

Frances Morgan

Read our review of the third Flipside initial release, the demented satire The Bed Sitting Room, based on a play by Spike Milligan, directed by Richard Lester and starring Peter Cook, in the summer 09 issue of Electric Sheep. Substitute is the theme of the new issue, with articles on the fraught relationship between Takeshi Kitano and ‘Beat’ Takeshi, the various cinematic incarnations of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley, interchanging identities in Joseph Losey’s films, the dangers of false impersonation in neo-noir Just Another Love Story, the paradoxes of black and white twins in offbeat lost classic Suture, not to mention cross-dressing criminals, androids and body snatchers. Also in this issue: interview with Marc Caro, profile of whiz-kid animator David OReilly, comic strip review of Hardware, and The Phantom Band’s favourite films.

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Daisies

Daisies
Daisies

Format: DVD

Release date: 1 June 2009

Distributor: Second Run

Director: Věra Chytilová

Writer: Věra Chytilová

Original title: Sedmikrí¡sky

Cast: Ivana Karbanová, Jitka Cerhová

Czechoslovakia 1966

74 minutes

Two young women in their bathing suits sit listlessly by a pool, overcome by the alienation and apathy frequently observed in the youth of 60s European cinema. They move in jerky doll fashion, each gesture accompanied by creaking noises that emphasise the metaphor. After a brief philosophical exchange on the state of things, they conclude that, as the world has become bad and corrupt, they shall be bad too. What follows is a string of joyous anarchic pranks in which Marie I and Marie II eat, drink, smoke, mock, play with and destroy everything they can lay their hands on.

Daisies will be shown as part of the season Defiance and Compassion: The Films of Věra Chytilová at BFI Southbank in March 2015. For full programme details and to book tickets, visit the BFI website.

Given the central characters’ rebellious streak and their mischievous manipulation of men, the film has often been seen as feminist. The two Maries certainly do not conform to traditional expectations of femininity: they gleefully stuff their faces, fool around and fall over disgracefully or uninhibitedly take their clothes off. They display a total lack of interest in romance, ignoring a lover’s maudlin, clichéd pleas, all of which feels like a refreshingly truthful and satisfying representation of women. But their insubordination is not just an act of female resistance against patriarchal society: Věra Chytilová’s Daisies (1966) is more Dada than women’s lib, and the two Maries are above all non-conformist individuals, outsiders to the grinding machinery of society. Echoing Tristan Tzara et al responding to the madness of the First World War by retreating to Zürich to conduct turbulent artistic experiments, the girls’ bad behaviour is a direct response to the state of the world. This is emphasised by the stylised images of explosions that open and close the film, circumscribing the girls’ escapades within references to war. The resonance is made all the stronger by the film’s avant-garde style, the interest in visual experimentation, the sonic and graphic play with words, the non-sensical narrative and the delectable juvenile humour.

According to the accompanying booklet written by Peter Hames, the moral message of the film, as well as Chytilová’s own position in relation to her protagonists, are the subjects of some debate, with various commentators arguing that the director originally intended the film to be a critique of the girls’ behaviour. After the final scene of Dionysiac excess during which they ravage a richly laid out banquet hall, the two Maries, under threat of death, are forced to promise that they will now be good. But as they go about clearing the mess they’ve made, they do so in a manner that is entirely subversive, scraping cake off the floor before piling the revolting mush back onto dishes, or arranging fragments of broken plates and glasses in a mockery of the elegant table they ruined. In spite of their repeated assertions that they are ‘good’ and will work hard, order is not restored, and under the pretence of compliance the girls are still agents of chaos and destruction.

This final scene has been read in many different ways, with some critics seeing in it the failure of the girls’ revolt, and others a deserved punishment for their behaviour. Whatever Chytilová’s original intentions may have been, it is undeniable that the film delights in the characters’ total freedom; their anarchic spirit proves irresistibly infectious, and the same playfulness and irreverence infuse the direction. The corruption of the world is what liberates the girls from the social norm, and this liberation from convention, whether filmic or social, unleashes an enormous amount of energy, both creative and destructive. This, more crucially than anything else in the film, is profoundly Dada. The voracious embrace of absolute freedom, and of the chaos that inevitably comes with it, is what makes Daisies so thoroughly energising and joyously inspiring.

Virginie Sélavy