Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Format: DVD

Release date: 10 May 2010

Distributor: Artificial Eye

Director: Sergei Paradjanov

Writers: Sergei Paradjanov, Ivan Chendej, Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky

Original title: Tini zabutykh predkiv

Cast: Ivan Mikolajchuk, Larisa Kadochnikova, Tatyana Bestayeva, Spartak Bagashvili

Soviet Union 1964

97 mins

In wake of the BFI Southbank’s recent Sergei Paradjanov retrospective, Artificial Eye is releasing the DVD of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964), the film that marked a seismic shift in Paradjanov’s filmmaking style and also inadvertently landed the controversial Georgian director in a Soviet jail.

Both aesthetically and thematically the film departs dramatically from cinematic social realism, the style of choice for Soviet communist governments. An adaptation of the novel by Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors traces the life of Ivan, a Ukrainian peasant, who falls in love with Marichka, the daughter of the man who killed his father. Because of the feuds between the two families, their love is forbidden and doomed. As Ivan battles with grief, the vivid colours of the traditional costumes and landscape fade to a bleak, desolate monochrome. This story of an ordinary peasant hero may have been welcomed by the Soviet authorities; but in this case, the peasant in question belongs to an ethno-cultural group of Ukrainians, known as the Hutsuls, and Paradjanov uses the film to explore and emphasise their traditions. This championing of the Hutsuls’ history and culture did not sit well with the Soviet government’s policy of Russification, but Paradjanov was adamant that the dialogue should be spoken in the Hutsul language and not dubbed into Russian. Consequently, Paradjanov was blacklisted and imprisoned (this sentence was the first of three throughout his lifetime).

This is our DVD of the month! You can win a copy of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (courtesy of Artificial Eye) on our competition page.

Paradjanov viewed the governmental control of the film industry as catastrophic. In an interview conducted a few years before his death in 1990, in characteristically dramatic fashion, he remarked: ‘Eisenstein died with only one iota of his potential fulfilled… that’s a terrible tragedy’. After seeing Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Ivan’s Childhood (1962), Paradjanov saw an alternative to the restrictive filmmaking style of his youth. The resultant aesthetic of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is a mix of swooping, swirling camera angles and wide tableaux of breathtaking landscapes. In the potent opening sequence, the camera tracks a young Ivan, muffled up in a bright red coat and fur hat, trekking through snowy woodland. His arm outstretched with a loaf of bread, he calls up to an undisclosed figure on the hillside. The face of a waving, desperate man appears in urgent close-up. Suddenly the camera is up high in the treetops, a loud creak sounds, and the shot falls down past black, elongated trunks to the snow below. The figure of the little boy is pushed out of the tree’s path and the camera appears to land on the terrified face of the older man. Paradjanov cuts to his body trapped under the fallen tree, the little boy tugging at his arms through the broken branches. A horn sounds and we see the child running and tripping down the bright, white hillside, before cutting to a scene of a crucifix being erected in the bleak, wintry landscape.

This powerfully constructed opening exemplifies what is to unfold over the next hour and a half: the tragic subject matter - how innocence is lost through the experience of death - and the way in which Paradjanov approaches narrative. It is telling that at one point we see the action from the tree’s point of view and, after the moment of death and grief, the camera surveys the mountainside as the child makes his way back to his village. Rather than the focus of the shot, the little boy is merely a figure within the landscape. Nature is a major protagonist in the film. Indeed, extreme panoramic shots of characters racing up and down hills and across plains recur throughout the story. In Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Paradjanov is not concerned with in-depth characterisation or character development; instead, he portrays the doomed Romeo and Juliet love affair as a universal, mythical folk story. The camera acts as an omnipotent narrator, rather than as a means of projecting the character’s innermost feelings.

Ivan and Marichka’s story is a tragic tale; but not one that is specific to the characters involved. While the Hutsul culture pervades the film, it is never fully clear in what historical period the action takes place, further adding to the universality of the narrative. Paradjanov used largely unknown actors and non-actors (whose acting style is theatrical and at times melodramatic) to convey a story that could be experienced by anyone, anywhere and in any time. This attempt to universalise the tale may alienate some viewers hoping for a great deal of specific personal emotion. But it is not a film devoid of passion or sentiment; it is just that the emotion is of the uncomplicated, folk-tale kind.

When Paradjanov made Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, he was experimenting with a new approach to filmmaking for the first time and the aesthetic achievement is spectacular. Although much has been made of the majestically beautiful visuals of the film the use of sound is also remarkable - idiosyncratic, bizarre and wonderful; spoken dialogue is largely replaced by a cacophony of horns, pipes, Jew’s harps and chanting to a dizzying effect. In his later films, notably The Colour of Pomegranates (1967), Paradjanov managed to create a subtler and perhaps more coherent emotional pull on his audience but the startling aesthetic and thematic seeds were sown with Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. It is commendable that Artificial Eye is providing an opportunity for audiences to see Paradjanov’s first attempt at an utterly extraordinary style of filmmaking.

Eleanor McKeown

Cube

Illustration by Oli Smith

Format: DVD

Release date: 17 January 2000

Distributor: First Independent Video

Director: Vincenzo Natali

Writers: Vincenzo Natali, André Bijelic, Graeme Mason

Cast: Maurice Dean Wint, David Hewlett, Nicole de Boer, Nicky Guadagni, Andrew Miller

Canada 1998

90 mins

Robert Heinlein, author of Starship Troopers, once wrote: ‘Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house’. The writing team behind Cube would probably agree. A gripping tale of survival horror, it’s one that gives the maths geeks the best chance to come out alive and shows the barbarism of men with no respect for geometry.

For more information on illustrator and writer Oli Smith go to theolismith.com.

Maths and horror are strangely comfortable bedfellows, as shown by the Omen films’ fixation on the number 666 (inspired by the Book of Revelation) or the many-angled devils found in the work of HP Lovecraft and Clive Barker. On TV, maths and sci-fi combined in two seminal game shows, The Adventure Game and The Crystal Maze, which have cult followings to this day. Indeed, one of the most thought-provoking documentaries of recent years - The Trap - showed the links between numerology and the tenets of modern society.

The numbers behind Cube‘s horror are as follows: it cost C$365,000 (Canadian), it features 6 actors and has 2 (inferior) sequels. It was shot in 1 room, 14 feet cubed, with 5 different gels on the walls so that it could be reused to represent the multitude of similar rooms that make up the cube. Which results in the following equation: 0 means + 1 good idea + 10 talented people = 1 good film.

This article is part of our ‘Confined Spaces’ theme.

The film opens in spectacular manner with the cubist vivisection of an unnamed character, following which we meet five other people wandering through the claustrophobic maze, none of whom know how they got there and all of whom are strangely named after prisons. Like animals in a science experiment, they begin to be affected in different ways by the conditions of their confinement. As they go from identical room to identical room, each hiding a more perverse and deadly trap than the previous one, a taciturn loner becomes a hero while the alpha male turns into a murderer. These are themes that director Vincenzo Natali would return to six years later in his film Nothing, which reunited him with two of the stars of Cube – David Hewlett and Andrew Miller. In Nothing, it’s being marooned in a white void that slowly drives the characters mad (or their madness that maroons them in a white void); but where in that film, their boundless situation is played for laughs, in Cube their world is as bleak as it is constricting. Inside the cube, the lack of information, the strange Jack Kirbyesque details on the walls and the absence of any outside world makes the environment of the film timeless and suitably, subtly existential. These are characters defined purely by their actions within the maze.

In the end, one person escapes - although into what is unclear - and the identity of the survivor is entirely in keeping with a game in which the only pure form of communication is maths. Watching the prisoners solve that puzzle makes the preceding 89 minutes an excellent form of escapism for the audience as well.

Alex Fitch

This article was first published in the autumn 08 issue of Electric Sheep Magazine.

Van Diemen’s Land

Van Diemen's Land

Format: DVD

Release date: 24 May 2010

Distributor: High Fliers

Director: Jonathan auf der Heide

Writers: Jonathan auf der Heide, Oscar Redding

Cast: Oscar Redding, Arthur Angel, Paul Ashcroft, Mark Leonard Winter

Australia 2009

104 mins

Jonathan auf der Heide’s gritty, gristly drama Van Diemen’s Land follows the travails of a group of escaped convicts in the remotest area of Australia in 1822. With its majestic but grim location photography and brooding, mystic voice-over (our narrator is prone to mystic utterances like ‘I am blood’), this is somewhat akin to one of Herzog’s tales of wilderness survival, or its opposite.

Initially, it is hard to get to know the characters - eight mostly bearded and unwashed ruffians in prison garb - but we’re helped by the fact that the cast of characters is steadily dwindling throughout as they are forced to resort to cannibalism. With no recognisable star faces, and a unified acting approach (gruff and sweary), the filmmakers rely on physiognomy and dialect to distinguish the characters, which partially works. Some sympathy is created (mainly for the characters who tell the best jokes), so that who is next for the pot does becomes a matter of at least mild viewer interest.

With such subject matter the prospects of a happy ending are slight, but the whole tone of the film has prepared us for that. In fact, one of the film’s greatest strengths, its brooding, relentless plod forwards, is also potentially a weakness: from the darkly jangling music to the darkly overhanging arboreal environment, there’s little opportunity for tonal variation - except in some truly black humour, provided by the traumatised characters rather than by filmmaking wit.

Ellery Ryan’s cinematography, with every lambent shot speaking of the hard physical effort it must have taken to capture these scenes, is the film’s strongest point, striking a balance between the impressionist wash of light through branches, on rushing water, through smoke, and the rough tactile qualities of dirty skin and unwashed hair, mud and bark and stone. It all has an impressive ‘you are here’ quality. The dialogue is sometimes less sure-footed, with anachronistic-sounding expressions like ‘OK’ and ‘no fucking way’ breaking through some generally convincing regional dialects and harsh profanity.

Besides being a persistent visual feast, in its dour way, the movie scores in its sensitive handling of the unpleasant business of cannibalism. Neither squeamishly coy nor gloatingly visceral, the treatment of most of the characters’ eventual fates manages to show enough to appear quite frank, while making it seem as if we’re catching most of the more gory details by accident. An arm is placed in a sack, and it feels like we weren’t supposed to see. The violence is certainly intense, and quick except when it goes wrong. Realism doesn’t become an excuse for splatter excess.

In the end, the escape attempt doesn’t seem to have had much point, and it’s not absolutely certain that the film does, in narrative terms at least. But in its evocation of a bleak, hostile environment in which even the meanest cannot eke out an existence, it packs a bloody punch.

David Cairns

The Temptation of St Tony

The Temptation of St Tony

Format: DVD Region 1

Release date: 25 January 2011

Distributor: Olive Films

Director: Veiko &#213unpuu

Writer: Veiko &#213unpuu

Original title: Püha T&#245nu kiusamine

Cast: Taavi Eelmaa, Ravshana Kurkova, Tiina Tauraite, Sten Ljunggren, Denis Lavant

Estonia 2009

110 mins

The Temptation of St Tony website

I
It needs to be said that Tony (Taavi Eelmaa) is not an angel. Tony exhibits rarely the defenceless qualities that other characters see as angelic traits, and only then does he do so to highlight the abject emotional poverty of the people he is surrounded by. In every other instance Tony is as cold as the world around him, lacking the iconic properties of sainthood or martyrdom. Tony is unmoving, and unmoved by his immediate landscape. Tony’s outbursts - such as they are - are tiny compared to the scale of atrocity heaped upon the earth. Tony is swimming in big themes, big metaphors, but doesn’t have the power to react to them himself. Tony is not where the audience can find themselves. Tony is a role played onscreen.

II
The ordeals are unevenly distributed among five parts. They may see Tony’s father buried, his wife cheating on him, his spirituality shaken, his workers sacked, his mistress abused, his car hit a dog, his life threatened. They may not. It is unclear how these intersect with the surreality of a pastor possessed, Satan’s private club The Golden Age, the ritualised slaughter and devouring of whores. The symbolism is heaped, it doth overflow, it bludgeons the viewer about the head with the words INTERPRET ME until five parts seem like five thousand.

III
Tony’s landscape is a panorama of depression. Empty vistas filled with negative space swamp the screen in shades of grey of cinematographer Mart Taniel’s vision, drowning every character, isolating them among loved ones. Where there are buildings there are no trees; where there is nature it is permitted no beauty. It is a caricature of the contemporary suburban landscape, wet with mud, striking but grotesque. When scenes end, fading to white or black, the characters are literally swallowed by this bleak world - you may find yourself hoping that when the sequences fade back in they are no longer alive to live through the ceaseless horror of existence. Yes, the threat of unburied bodies lies in every frame, but that certainty becomes one of the film’s only redeeming qualities.

IV
There are, in the first act, glimmers of a world without hate, cast into darkness by bystanders who say things like ‘A life isn’t worth a shit’. After that the metaphysical evisceration of love, marriage, religion and glamour is superseded by the physical evisceration of Nadezhda (Ravshana Kurkova), the only person that represents escape. She is the closest to human that any character comes in the film, allowed to portray a grand total of two emotional traits - the sadness of a doting and loyal daughter and the feistiness of a whore - while lacking the agency to do anything but submit to the darkness of her circumstances.

V
The Temptation of St Tony leaves the viewer desolate, inconsolate, incredulous. There remains, throughout, a distinct lack of temptation, no moment of promise or redemption, no sense that Tony has any say in his destiny. Instead the slow crawl to its brutal, silent finale is crushing and depressing. The world the film inhabits is, in its totality, entirely shit and the viewer has no reason to believe otherwise. Its desired effect is to upset, but it lacks the emotional traction for that; instead the viewer is moved only if they project their feelings about lust, hate and horror onto the screen. You come to despise the film as object, not the content.

Matthew Sheret

The Temptation of St Tony will be released on Region 1 DVD by Olive Films on 25 January 2011. More information at Olive Films and on the The Temptation of St Tony website.

Film writing competition: Battle Royale

Battle Royale

Electric Sheep Film Club

Venue: Prince Charles Cinema, London

Every second Wednesday of the month

The winner of our April film writing competition, run in connection with the Electric Sheep monthly film club at the Prince Charles Cinema, is Adam Powell. Our judge was John Berra, editor of Directory of World Cinema: Japan. This is what John said:

Battle Royale was burdened by the ‘Asia Extreme’ banner when it was released in 2000, but more recent discussion of Kinji Fukasaku’s controversial cinematic swansong has focused on its underlying social commentary, which considers the ‘collapsed class’ syndrome that is affecting the Japanese education system and the cut-throat world that awaits students upon graduation. The reviews submitted for this competition strived to place the horrific imagery into social-political context, carefully considering this aesthetically visceral and culturally complex film from a variety of perspectives. Adam Powell’s winning review references many of the most graphic moments of Battle Royale as a means of illustrating Fukusaku’s critical stance towards both the modern media and the almost sacrificial manner in which young people are sent to war by their government, while identifying some of the elements that make the film a uniquely Japanese experience.

Here’s Adam Powell’s review:

A scrum of outstretched microphones and flashbulbs attempt to reach an almost idyllic lone infant sat soiled by endless flecks of blood. A hysterical media satire, Battle Royale plays out like a dystopian Japanese game show where the grizzly body count is confirmed constantly through a subtitled scoreboard. Japan’s favourite game show host Takeshi Kitano even oversees the bloodbath, appearing as himself by way of the morose and scorned sensei of the supposedly delinquent children. The school kids are dispatched by government order, screaming and tearful in their prim uniforms to do battle on an island where waves collide against the rocks and fog streams across empty landscapes like a warzone. The children die as soldiers among rapturous gun fire, crossbows, swinging axes, sickles and samurai swords. A fable for history’s children of war, it wallows in the bitterness of its graphic executions and suicides with a romantic and lushly melancholic classical score. A boy’s decapitated head is thrown mouth stuffed with grenade, a pretty schoolgirl repeatedly stabs a randy classmate through his genitals, playground confrontations become terminal and one boy learns of justice and honour in a senseless situation. As Kitano says, ‘Life is a battle, so fight hard for survival!’

Next screening: Wednesday 12 May – Midnight Cowboy + Q&A with London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival programmer Emma Smart. More details on our events page.

Dogtooth

Dogtooth

Format: Cinema

Release date: 23 April 2010

Venue: Gate, Odeon Covent Garden, Renoir, Ritzy (London) + key cities

Distributor: Verve Pictures

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Writer: Efthymis Filippou, Yorgos Lanthimos

Original title: Kynodontas

Cast: Christos Stergioglou, Michelle Valley, Aggeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni, Hristos Passalis, Anna Kalaitzidou

Greece 2009

94 mins

The well-deserved recipient of the Un Certain Regard award at last year’s Cannes festival, Dogtooth (Kynodontas) is the strikingly bizarre and genuinely mind-blowing second feature from Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos. Taking place almost entirely within a single location, a spacious house with a garden and a swimming pool surrounded by a tall wooden fence, the film centres around a married couple and their three grown-up children, who have never set foot outside and are confined to the ludicrous universe created by their tyrannical parents. Peculiarly innocent and eager to make sense of the skewed world they live in, the siblings are subjected to a regimented daily life that includes rigid exercise sessions and competitions as well as lessons from home-made tapes on which the parents teach them perverted definitions of words. The only outsider allowed to penetrate this insane domesticity is Christina, a female security guard at the father’s factory who is employed to have sex with the son but seems to have her own agenda.

Proving to be the chink in the family’s armour, Christina’s intrusion sets off a chain of events that has increasingly nasty and tragic consequences. To elaborate further would give too much away, but the madness and cruelty of the father’s plan to raise his kids in a completely sheltered existence is exposed as the three ‘children’ characters slowly forge ahead to explore their growing curiosity about the outside world. The relationships between them are superbly performed in a matter-of-fact style that is at times shocking, yet unashamedly funny too, as when the brother is forced to choose one of his sisters to relieve him of his sexual urges when Christina stops coming to the property. And although determinedly not a horror film, there are a few moments that are sure to make the audience gasp.

Set on the borderline between the real and the incredible, Dogtooth plays on everyone’s perception of the family while offering a glimpse of the distorted dynamics that are set in motion by over-controlling parents. Yet, the film has a lot more to offer than a psychological survey into the shoals of family dysfunction. Contributing to the parents’ outrageous stories about the dangers that lie beyond the garden fence, the isolated country home gives the film a claustrophobic feel and a consistently troubling atmosphere of hilarious otherworldliness and lurking evil. But the film’s truly brilliant achievement, and what makes this odd fable all the more effective and original, is the deftly balanced mixture of raw and uncompromising realism with a dark and absurd sense of humour and occasional, unpredictable moments of cruelty. Marking Lanthimos out as a great talent to watch, Dogtooth is a bold and unsettling mini-marvel that first sneaks up on you before biting you to the bone.

Pamela Jahn

DVD of the month: Henri Georges Clouzot’s Inferno

Inferno

Format: DVD

Release date: 12 April 2010

Distributor: Park Circus

Director: Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea

Original title: L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot

France 2009

102 mins

This documentary about Henri-Georges Clouzot’s unfinished 1964 psycho-thriller L’Enfer is as tantalising as it is frustrating. Clouzot remains one of the most masterful of French directors, having produced such unsurpassable classics as The Raven (Le Corbeau, 1943) and The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la peur, 1953). A meticulous filmmaker as well as a master of suspense to rival Alfred Hitchcock, he inexplicably seems to have lost control on the big-budget production of L’Enfer. The long-lost raw footage is intriguing and dazzling, infused with swirling lights and blue-lipped, cigarette-puffing fantasy temptresses. A real shame, then, that although directors Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Mederea have managed to speak to numerous members of the original crew, this behind-the-scenes investigation has so little to say about the reasons behind Clouzot’s failure to complete the film. In spite of this, the undiminished power of Clouzot’s extraordinary images makes the documentary a fascinating watch.

Pamela Jahn and Virginie Sélavy

Buy Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno [DVD] [2009] from Amazon

The Sky Crawlers

The Sky Crawlers

Format: Cinema

Release date: 23 April 2010

Venue: ICA Cinema (London) + preview BFI Southbank April 16

Distributor: Manga Entertainment

Director: Mamoru Oshii

Writer: Chihiro Itou

Based on the novel by: Hiroshi Mori

Original title: Sukai kurora

Japan 2008

122 mins

A glorious return to form for director Mamoru Oshii after the innovative but impenetrable Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters in 2006, the pointless CGI remix of Ghost in the Shell (as version 2.0) in 2008, and the overly complicated and visually crowded Innocence in 2004. The Sky Crawlers is a languid tale of young fighter pilots in a near future that evokes both real world conflicts, such as the 1940s War in the Pacific, and fictional ones, such as the perpetual warfare in George Orwell’s 1984.

Although not explicitly located in the same fictional universe as Oshii’s ongoing ‘Kerberos saga’, which includes the aforementioned Amazing Lives, Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade (for which he wrote the script) and a number of manga and live action films, this is another depiction of alternate history that explores Orwellian themes of continually ongoing, distant warfare against a vague enemy and a retro future in which the development of culture is stalled due to the priority given to war. Set against the backdrop of conflict, The Sky Crawlers resembles American live action movies that use the Second World War as the historical setting for generic romance, but Oshii uses these tropes as a springboard for meditations on youth, memory, the fetishising of technology and the war against terror.

The above might suggest this is a dark, heavily laden movie about war and death, but this is far from the case. The Sky Crawlers is a dreamy, beautiful film that gently weaves its way around the lives of various young fighter pilots as they learn their skills, romance local girls, clash with authority and take part in graceful, exhilarating dogfights with the enemy. The general look of the film is inspired by the 40s and 50s but with a hard SF twist that I won’t reveal here, which adds additional poignancy to the notion of the brief lives of the (handsome) young when pressed into military service. Many of Oshii’s films unwind at a deliberate pace, but the elegiac animation of sky, land, sea and aircraft here also seems inspired by younger filmmakers such as Makoto Shinkai, whose melancholy style suits the material and is echoed as Oshii captures memories of long, golden, youthful summers that now seem alien and impossible.

But it is not simply a wistful, nostalgic film and there are clear parallels with the real world, starting with the so-called war on terror: the young pilots are kept ignorant of all but the skills required to do their jobs while the long, pointless war with a foreign enemy serves as almost another form of entertainment in the media. There are also parallels with the dumbing down and narrow focus of modern education and entertainment and the resulting short attention span of audiences, but all of these themes are subtly dealt with and never mentioned explicitly or heavy-handedly. Wherever these ideas come from, be it from Hiroshi Mori’s original novel or Chihiro Itou’s screenplay, it is interesting that they should fit so well with the worldview expressed in the rest of Mamoru Oshii’s filmography.

The Sky Crawlers is Oshii’s finest film since 2001’s underrated Avalon and his best animé since the original Ghost in the Shell. The familiar subject matter of wartime romance may even attract new fans to the director’s work who might not have initially warmed to the cyberpunk thrillers and Gothic siege warfare found elsewhere in his oeuvre. My only concern is that the gentle pace of the film might put off viewers who expect more ‘bangs for their bucks’ after the violence of Ghost in the Shell, Patlabor and the director’s various other war movies.

Alex Fitch

Life during Wartime

Life during Wartime

Format: Cinema

Release date: 23 April 2010

Venue: Curzon Soho, The Gate, Renoir, Ritzy (London) and key cities

Distributor: Artificial Eye

Director: Todd Solondz

Writer: Todd Solondz

Cast: Ciarí¡n Hinds, Allison Janney, Shirley Henderson, Ally Sheedy, Paul Reubens

USA 2009

96 mins

The term ‘sequel’ suggests a cinematic safety net for filmmakers and audiences alike; bigger and better than before, but immediately familiar and easily accessible. Sequels are, of course, also associated with the role of cinema as a commercial enterprise, and it is rare that Hollywood invests in a follow-up to an unsuccessful film, unless there is a palpable sense that the core market was not adequately targeted. In fact, sequels are so synonymous with the Hollywood mainstream that they represent the antithesis of American independent cinema, which is defined more by its social-political sensibility and aesthetic experimentation than it is by box office returns. However, some American independent filmmakers have navigated the cinematic territory of the sequel; Richard Linklater revisited the characters of his backpacker romance Before Sunrise (1995) with Before Sunset (2004), while Kevin Smith caught up with the convenience store slackers of his debut feature with Clerks 2 (2006). Both directors were able to comment on the passing of time through characters that were already familiar to their small but loyal audiences.

Life during Wartime finds Todd Solondz attempting a similar trick, revisiting the dysfunctional family of his jet-black comedy Happiness (1998) to explore the theme of forgiveness through reference to the seemingly irredeemable acts committed in the earlier film. The work of Solondz, which also includes Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) and Storytelling (2001), has always been more divisive than that of Linklater and Smith due to his exploration of such subjects as child molestation and statutory rape and his strangely sympathetic attitude towards paedophiles and obscene phone callers. The director must be commended for finding financing for a sequel to a film that many viewers struggled to sit through on its initial release, although Happiness has since become a cult favourite and the subject of some discussion with regards to the suburbanisation of American culture. Solondz also breaks with sequel convention by refusing to bring back the actors from the previous film while aiming to achieve tonal consistency through his finely observed screenplay.

Life during Wartime opens with Allen (Michael K Williams, formerly Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Joy (Shirley Henderson, formerly Jane Adams) celebrating their first wedding anniversary, only for Joy to discover that her husband is still a pervert, prompting a move to Florida where her mother and sisters have relocated. She finds Trish (Allison Janney, formerly Cynthia Stevenson) moving on with her life following the incarceration of her ex-husband Bill for sex crimes and embarking on a romance with the older but ‘normal’ Harvey (Michael Lerner), while Helen (Ally Sheedy, formerly Lara Flynn Boyle) is now writing screenplays in addition to novels, but remains mean-spirited despite receiving attention from Keanu Reeves and Salman Rushdie. Joy struggles to reconnect with her family, and receives ‘visitations’ from former suitor Andy (Paul Reubens, formerly John Lovitz), who committed suicide after being jilted by Joy ten years earlier. Although the early scenes seek to establish Joy as the emotional anchor of Life during Wartime, the focus shifts to the more grimly compelling story strand of Bill (Ciarí¡n Hinds, formerly Dylan Baker), who is released from prison and visits his son Billy, now a college student majoring in sexual deviancy in the animal kingdom, to make sure that the sex crime gene has not been passed on to the next generation.

Solondz’s stab at subverting sequel conventions through re-casting is sometimes distracting, but serves to underline his oft-stated view that, as much as people may try to change, they remain fundamentally the same. Some of the casting changes are more successful than others; Paul Reubens mines the same tragicomic depths as John Lovitz, while Ciarí¡n Hinds is a hulking, haunting presence, a self-declared ‘monster’ who physically embodies the potential threat that was so expertly disguised behind Dylan Baker’s buttoned-down suburban facade. Unfortunately, Ally Sheedy does not so much take over the role of Helen from Lara Flynn Boyle as deliver an exaggerated impersonation of her predecessor, and Michael T Williams is not afforded enough screen time to establish a dramatic link between his interpretation of Allen and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s earlier incarnation.

The title of the film refers to the current political climate in the United States, and there is discussion of terrorism, which Solondz links to the topic of paedophilia, and references to Bush and McCain. Perhaps surprisingly, the director is less interested in criticising the Republican regime than he is in finding forgiveness in its aftermath, while Trish’s insistence that ‘sometimes it’s better not to understand’ suggests that the director may even be questioning the necessity of his own brand of cinematic provocation. While there have been subtle shifts in the cinematic universe of Todd Solondz, there have been more noticeable readjustments in the world of American independent film; in 1999, Happiness received a release through Universal subsidiary Good Machine, while Life during Wartime will rely on the comparatively guerrilla strategy of IFC. It is arguable that Solondz has been somewhat marginalised in recent years, but this ‘sequel’ exhibits a newfound mellowness that those who lost interest following the middle-class mockery of Storytelling may find oddly endearing.

John Berra