Makoto Shinkai’s 5 Centimetres per Second is having a belated DVD release on March 14. With only one feature film, three shorts and one medium-length work to his name, Makoto Shinkai is a thirty-something animé director who has generated far more praise than his relative youth and short career would seem to deserve. Dubbed the new Hayao Miyazaki by the animé press, this is something of a misnomer as the two directors have very little in common other than creating films with greater emotional depth and a more singular vision than those of their peers. However, while Miyazaki works primarily in the nostalgic fantasy genre for a child/family audience, Shinkai makes thoughtful, austere films that tap into contemporary concerns about humanity’s relationship with technology and how it both connects and separates us from the people around us. While 5 Centimetres per Second is slightly underwhelming compared to his previous two films The Place Promised in Our Early Days and Voices of a Distant Star, his films at their best show a director who has a genuinely affecting visual aesthetic that recalls the live action films of Andrei Tarkovsky. It is this sensitivity to form and place that have earned the director his reputation, cemented by the fact that his first two shorts were made by the director almost entirely by himself on a home computer.
Do you remember when film was democratised? Heady days. It was 1999, The Blair Witch Project had conquered the cineplexes and a hundred thousand auteurs blossomed overnight.
Or something like that; for all the talk of the barriers to entering the film industry shattering it’s still a huge lurch beyond most people’s reach. Compare it to, say, pens and paper - the two artistic tools that are native to almost anyone over the age of two - and you start to see how ridiculous a claim it is.
Recently though paper-craft blogs have gone wild for two films that seem to challenge even the assumption that pens and paper are easier than cinema.
Train of Thought is a gem from The Arts Institute at Bournemouth, shot in 2008. It resurfaced a few months back, when filmmakers Leo Bridle and Ben Thomas uploaded it to Vimeo. It’s had almost 100,000 views since and it’s an absolute treat.
The film follows one man’s journey by train to meet his lover. It’s that simple.
But the film is a product of painstaking stop-motion animation, made up almost entirely of cardboard cut-outs. Every frame of the characters moving involves a photo of the actor printed to card and shot on a paper set. Writing that does it a disservice, sells it short somehow, so you’ll just have to take a few minutes out of your life to watch it; the footage is mesmerising.
Yes, it’s paper craft, with the cut’n’stick aesthetics of an eccentric drawing table, but it’s sophisticated and touching in its transitions between cut-out set-piece and hand-drawn fantasia. At four minutes it only manages to sketch an emotional narrative, but as a model for creative and engaging visuals it’s magnificent.
Where Train of Thought is defined by its light touch and airy sensibilities, Thomas Beale Cipher appears murky, mired in obfuscation, smoke and mirrors. It too is brilliant.
The 10-minute film, directed by Andrew Allen, explores a snapshot in the life of code-breaker Professor White. His story too unfolds on a train, the mechanical motion of the engine playing off against the perpetual motion of the code-breaking machine he carries with him, a machine that almost gives away his presence to Mister Black, the FBI agent on his trail.
The noir-lite story, great as it is, would be nothing without the visuals, animation that sits somewhere between rotoscoping and fluid graphic design. It seems as if perfectly cut sheets of paper are moving before a camera. Elements blend and fracture, bisecting characters but allowing key objects to float above the surface of the film. It’s incredibly dynamic, and thoroughly moody.
By wrapping such energy up in paper it feels like these films leave something in their wake; something with a footprint, something with a weight. Somehow that seems especially true when I can shoot a scene on my smart-phone and upload it to YouTube in less than the time it took to write this column.
Writers: Henri-Georges CLouzot, Jérôme Géronimi, René Masson, Frédéric Grendel
Based on the novel Celle qui n’était plus by: Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac
Cast: Simone Signoret, Véra Clouzot, Paul Meurisse, Charles Vanel
France 1955
114 mins
One of cinema’s great misanthropes, Henri-Georges Clouzot combined a sombre view of humanity with a supreme mastery of clockwork suspense that made him Alfred Hitchcock’s rival and equal. These two characteristics found their peak in Les diaboliques (1955), a noir thriller set in a private school on the outskirts of Paris. Headmaster Michel Delassalle (Paul Meurisse) is a particularly nasty bully who mistreats not only his wife Christina (played by the director’s wife, Véra Clouzot), but also his mistress Nicole Horner (Simone Signoret) and the boys in his charge. The fragile Christina, who has a heart condition, and Nicole, sporting a black eye as the film opens, are led to comfort each other and conspire to murder their common tormentor.
The oppressive atmosphere of the school, the high contrast black and white, the evocative shadows and the basic premise characterise Les diaboliques as a film noir, but as noir triangles go, this is a very strange set-up. In the classic formation, two men compete for the attention of the same beautiful temptress (Gilda, The Killers, Out of the Past) and a number of films revolve around a femme fatale seducing her lover into murdering her husband (Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice). Les diaboliques presents a fascinating inversion of the usual pattern, with two women becoming allies to murder the man for whose affection they are meant to compete. The result is a powerful reversal of traditional male and female roles: whereas in classic noirs the (criminal) action is performed by a man on the instigation of a woman, here it is performed by two women; and while the noir perpetrators are usually a couple ostensibly wanting to get rid of the person standing between them, here they are rivals for their victim’s love, or at least they should be.
The lesbian undertones of the situation are clear, especially as the film predominantly focuses on their relationship as they plot the murder, showing their complicity, their concern for each other as well as their disagreements. As they plan a secret weekend getaway to Nicole’s pad to accomplish their dark deed, the sexual connotations of the plot become even more evident, and the crime they are about to commit suggests a ‘criminal’ sexuality, a transgression of sexual and social roles as they overthrow the authority of the man who brutally rules their lives.
The casting further enhances the ambiguities of the plot. Simone Signoret, a blonde and curvaceous 50s sex symbol whose best-known role was as a gangster moll and femme fatale in Jacques Becker’s Casque d’Or (1952), is here masculine, decisive and physically strong. Beautiful and immoral, she recalls the blonde temptress of classic film noir, but in her relationship to Christina, she occupies the traditional position of the man, leading the action and making decisions. The delicate, slender, raven-haired Véra Clouzot is the ultra-feminine half of the couple, and yet, in spite of her physical weakness and moral doubts, her Christina may be capable of murder. As the male/female contrast is paralleled by a good girl/bad girl opposition, traditional images of the sexes are blurred further.
Although the relationship between the two women is central to the film, the sexual ambiguity in itself is not the main theme of the film, but rather an essential part of it. Here, as in many of his films, Clouzot is concerned with the dissolution of certainties: sexual, moral and otherwise. He makes us identify with a would-be murderess confronted with increasingly incomprehensible events before a final twist changes our perception of everything we’ve seen up to that point. Correspondingly, on a formal level, horror and supernatural elements disrupt the noir world established in the rest of the film. In Clouzot’s vision, truth is mutable, love is a lie, human relationships are constantly shifting and the human heart is complex, contradictory and compromised. Formally, morally and sexually, it is a world in which nothing is ever simple or as it seems. The only certainty that remains is that, in Les diaboliques, Clouzot has created not only a perfectly crafted noir gem, but also an enduringly fascinating female double act.
Les diaboliques runs at BFI Southbank from March 18 to 31.
Pan-Asia Film Festival opening night screening: 2 March 2011
Venue: BAFTA
Release date: 11 March 2011
Venues: key cities
Distributor: Soda Pictures
Director: Tran Anh Hung
Writer: Tran Anh Hung
Based on the novel by: Haruki Murakami
Original title:Noruwei no mori
Cast: Rinko Kikuchi, Kenichi Matsuyama, Kiko Mizuhara
Japan 2010
133 mins
Norwegian Wood has long been one of Haruki Murakami’s most popular novels, selling millions of copies in Japan alone. But despite its success, Norwegian Wood is one of my least favourite Murakami novels, lacking the surrealistic magic of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the Edge of the World.
The perhaps-daunting job of directing the big-screen adaptation has fallen to the French-Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung, who won the Camera d’Or and an Oscar nomination for his 1993 film The Scent of Green Papaya. His latest film is lovingly faithful to the spirit of Murakami’s novel, capturing the sensual and emotional longing that pervades the original - but also replicating its frustrating story and weak protagonists.
The adaptation, like the book, is often pure melodrama, mixing together love, sex and grief. The relationship between three close friends is torn asunder when Kizuki, best friend to Toro Watanabe and long-term boyfriend to Naoko, commits suicide. The two survivors pull themselves together long enough to find their way to university, where, against the backdrop of student protests in the late 60s, they meet again by chance. Their friendship is rekindled, but a sexual encounter triggers guilt and regret in the fragile Naoko, and she disappears, emerging only months later with the news that she’s sequestered herself in an institution outside Tokyo.
Naoko is tormented by a preoccupation with her feelings of loss and betrayal; Watanabe, madly in love with her, is helpless as she struggles to reconcile her despair with desire. Played by Rinko Kikuchi, best known in the West for her role in Babel (2006), Naoko is full of contradictions, but her tendency for self-indulgence, her inability to let her misguided guilt go, is as irritating in the film as it is in the novel. It’s unquestionably a sympathetic performance from the soft-spoken, waif-like Kikuchi, and anyone who isn’t as exasperated as I am by the very nature of her character might find it endearing.
As Naoko and Watanabe (played by another rising star, Kenichi Matsuyama) struggle to cope with their shared loss, he is offered solace by Midori, a fellow student who falls for him despite - or perhaps because of - his tortured feelings for Naoko. Played by the model Kiko Mizuhara, Midori’s the most likeable, charming character in the film; she’s spirited, light-hearted, and a relief from the emotional angst that weighs the film down.
Frustrations aside, Norwegian Wood is a lovely film to look at, beautifully shot by Lee Ping-bin, with a lush autumnal colour palette and an evocative late 60s backdrop. The sensual nature of the images perfectly captures the erotic tension that complicates the relationship between Naoko and Watanabe, and the bleak, emotional despair that follows Naoko’s incarceration and worsening breakdown. Lee Ping-bin’s cinematography is complemented by Jonny Greenwood’s terrific score, adding another rich layer to the film.
There can be beauty in suffering, as Tran Anh Hung believes, and for fans of Norwegian Wood, this is as good an adaptation as anyone could wish for.
Norwegian Wood will be opening the Pan-Asia Film Festival on 2 March at BAFTA. Screenwriter-director Tran Anh Hung, musician Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead and actress Rinko Kikuchi will be at Asia House for a special discussion on the art of adaptation on 1 March.
A beautiful but unkind young professional from Seoul goes back to the remote island where she grew up for a break. There she is reunited with her sweet-natured childhood friend Bok-nam, married to a violent man and badly mistreated by his family. Bok-nam bears the beatings and indignities she is subjected to for the sake of her daughter, but one day, a tragic event tips her over the edge and she turns from subservient wife into violent avenger.
Directed by Yang Chul-soo, this South Korean feature debut has the feel of a folk or fairy tale. Denouncing the oppression of women in Korean society, it tells a compelling story, but the characterisation is two-dimensional and it comes across as very heavy-handed. That said, it is interesting to note that the film shares similarities with another South Korean film released the same year. Im Sang-soo’s The Housemaid was another slow-burn Korean film about the exploitation of a lower-class woman that culminated in a stunningly extravagant, violent dénouement. Considering also Yang Ik-joon’s Breathless (2009), it seems that what may come across as excessive to Western audiences is in fact a strong response to an acutely unfair and brutal state of affairs in Korean society. For further explanation of the context and the real events that inspired the film, see an extract from a promotional interview with Yang Chul-soo below.
Both Bedevilled and The Housemaid follow a similarly unusual structure, proceeding at a slow pace for most of the film until the abuse of the central character erupts into a spectacularly violent ending. In Bedevilled, the sudden change of tone makes the blood-splattered finale all the more shocking. Although flawed, Bedevilled paints an intriguing portrait of a woman faced with the most extreme injustice and creates an original and engaging horror heroine in Bok-nam.
Virginie Sélavy
PROMOTIONAL INTERVIEW WITH YANG-CHUL-SOO
To what extent is Bedevilled inspired by real events?
Yang Chul-soo: There were three shocking cases that shook Korean society, which had given me inspiration. First was the KIM Boo-nam case in 1991 when KIM, a 30-year-old woman, murdered a man who used to be her next-door neighbour and raped her when she was 9 years old. Second was the KIM Bo-eun/KIM Jin-gwan case in 1992 when KIM Bo-eun, with the help of her boyfriend KIM Jin-gwan, murdered her stepfather who had abused her sexually for 10 years. And the last was a case where a large group of high school boys had sexually abused two junior high school girls, who were sisters, in Milyang for over a year. Out of around 40, only three assaulters had received a mere 10 months’ sentence, and the police mishandled the case, one officer implying it was the girls’ fault. All three cases had extreme results because the bystanders showed no concern.
Why have you decided to tackle Korean women’s social status in your first feature film?
Women in Korean society are the weak, but they are not the weak kind. Women are discriminated against and have obligations under the feudalistic customs, but Korean society has in fact been maintaining itself as it is and developing because there are mothers who strived to protect their families. In reality, women and mothers are mostly given supporting roles, so I wanted to have a woman as the main lead in my film. The film is a personal dedication to my own mother and all the mothers in Korea.
Can you say some words about the gender politics of the movie?
I’m not sure how to describe this but although the film deals with gender issues, I had not considered politics in it. I only mirrored out the general relationships between Korean men and women that I had noticed, but without any political views. The film shows a complex aspect of the men oppressing the women, the suppressed women putting the men on a pedestal while oppressing another woman, and that woman to take revenge against those women and men. I believe this sort of evil circle happens because humans, regardless of their sexes, are weak beings.
Cast: James Frecheville, Guy Pearce, Joel Edgerton
Australia 2010
113 mins
When gormless teen Joshua or ‘J’ Cody’s mum dies, he has little choice but to move in with the side of the family that she had previously shielded him from. It’s not a good time for him to do so. It probably never was. His uncle Andrew or ‘Pope’ is/was an armed robber, now trying to keep a low profile. With their house being watched by the cops, drug dealing and the stock market are becoming more tempting forms of employment for what’s left of the gang, and relations in the house are becoming increasingly fractious, barely kept together by ever loving ‘Grandma Smurf’ Janine. When the most level-headed member of the gang is removed from the picture, the more unstable relations are left in charge, led by Pope, who instigates an insane blood feud with the police force, a war that J inevitably becomes part of, becoming an accessory to dark deeds, and viewed by investigating officer Leckie (Guy Pearce) as the loose link of the Cody clan to use as a weapon against his newly adopted family…
David Michôd’s Australian crime drama Animal Kingdom is wholly credible right from the first shot, which sets up the film’s world perfectly, a blend of grim tragedy and the suburban mundane, with a trace of jet black humour. No one sports a sharp suit here. We are in a Melbourne of plywood and breezeblock, of bungalows and barbeques, and Michôd continuously avoids conventional genre scenes to emphasise odd moments of character business and domestic detail. The family chat and bicker about noise, the use of a blender in the morning, bathroom hygiene and proper drug etiquette. A SWAT team raid occurs without warning immediately after an awkward attempt at nephew/uncle bonding in front of the TV. A scene involving a middle-class dad getting his kids’ shoes on to go on a car trip becomes imbued with unbearable tension. Most of the business that would take place in, say, a Michael Mann epic is either ignored or played out against a backdrop of mantelpiece kitsch and ill-considered lawn furniture. Performances tend towards the naturalistic and low key. There are very few wide shots or chances to get a bigger perspective. And this grubby little world of banal terrors seems to close in on us as the intensity level rises, trust begins to wither, and there’s nowhere left to go.
Outside of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre, I can’t think of a more corrosive portrayal of family life, where ties of loyalty are tools of coercion. The Cody’s are a nest of paranoia and substance abuse. And Ben Mendelsohn’s uncle Pope is a quietly chilling creation, all the more so for his lack of physical muscle. He has a weaselly inability to meet anybody’s eye, or voice what’s on his mind, masking a truly depraved heart that his brothers are unwilling to confront or control. Mother dearest only goes so far as to suggest that he ought to start taking his pills again. Jacki Weaver is fantastic as the matriarch, all bleached blonde hair and lipstick, demanding kisses and cuddles from her sons, calling everyone ‘sweetie’, her true reptile nature only emerging when her boys are threatened, and is all the more disturbing for being logical and controlled. At least her sons are mentally unstable drug abusers, she knows exactly what she’s doing.
J (played by James Frecheville) asserts in a piece of voice-over early in the film that he accepts all of this craziness as normal, in the manner of most teenagers’ attitude to their families. His taciturn, dull-eyed demeanour rarely betrays what we suspect, that this isn’t true. Exactly how much J is a typical Cody is left ambiguous. He could be, as Leckie asserts, looking for a place to fit, but all options seem wanting. What’s normal, anyway? Different families and value systems are contrasted and brought into conflict throughout. The police are corrupt and murderous and the legal system is morally bankrupt. His girlfriend’s folks look like pretty decent people, but from Animal Kingdom‘s point of view they seem ignorant of the real world, until it comes crashing horribly into their lives. It’s left to Guy Pearce’s solid cop with a wife and family to provide the picture with an ethical magnetic North. Nothing else is on the level, life is messy and chaotic, and idiocy and miscommunication have as much impact on events as intentions and desires. As the plot twists and turns and characters reveal their true colours, Animal Kingdom shocks, surprises and amazes but never seems false or unreal. A great film.
Venues: Soho, Wimbledon Curzon, Notting Hill Gate, Ritzy (London) and key cities
Distributor: Soda Pictures
Director: Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman
Writer: Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman
Cast: James Franco, Jon Hamm, Mary-Louise Parker
USA 2010
93 mins
‘You can’t translate poetry into prose. That is why it is poetry,’ explains a witness in the spectacular 1957 obscenity trial against Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and publisher of ‘Howl’, when asked by the prosecution to help make sense of some verses in Allen Ginsberg’s expansive, powerful 3,600-word outcry against conformity and injustice. It’s a compelling argument, and the fact that documentary filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman decided to make it early on in Howl, a portrait of the late Beat poet and an illustrated vision of his most famous work, suggests the writing-directing duo is well aware of the bold venture they’ve undertaken in their first fictional film. It inevitably raises the question of whether it is indeed possible to visualise the passion, heart and soul of a poem such as ‘Howl’, which, in its entirety, reads as a man’s fierce inner monologue, a confession of his controversial thoughts, his deepest desires, his fantasies and anxieties, all carefully drafted in sharp, candid, yet mostly surreal language.
Combining recreated scenes from the courtroom with animated sequences that accompany parts of the poem, and a docu-style dramatisation of Ginsberg’s life, Howl is striking for its deftly interwoven structure. But what makes the film captivating is the surprisingly convincing performance by James Franco, who seems to have found true inspiration in the young, intellectually complex Ginsberg, impersonating him with an understated charm that shows his potential as a great character actor. Deliberate yet subtly persuasive, and fuelled with an overwhelming passion, Franco as Ginsberg reads the poem for the first time at Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1955, sits in his New York apartment while talking to an unseen interviewer and recalls flashbacks from the past - in particular, the time he spent with Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and his long-time lover, Peter Orlovsky, searching for truth and the meaning of life, and his own voice and personal liberation.
As in Ginsberg’s poetry, there is not really a beginning, middle or end to the film, apart from the verdict that is eventually revealed in the courtroom scenes. Instead, Epstein and Friedman compose the different narrative elements almost like a great piece of jazz: repeatedly drifting back and forth, varying style and technique, and free-associating ideas, especially in the animated sequences. In addition to the free-floating visual fluidity with which the poem unravels, what is essential to the film’s subversive charm is the rhythm of Franco’s voice: as he reads the entire ‘Howl’ in slow, radiantly emphatic intervals, his recitation is underpinned by a fiercely energetic verve that vividly brings the words to life, though without necessarily forcing their meaning upon the audience.
In their attempt to create a celebration of one of the most influential American poets and his revolutionary work, Epstein and Friedman aim high both aesthetically and conceptually, but they only really dazzle on the former level. Yet, although Howl sometimes feels long-winded and the animation might not work for everyone, the film remains in the mind as a visceral amalgam of words, images, streams of thoughts, confessions and feelings, employed in a daring fashion. Do you need to care about poetry to be able to enjoy the film? It might help. But even if you don’t, it is still a beautifully shot, softly nostalgic look into an artist’s imaginative, intense and troubled life. And just like the poem, the film is also much richer than any attempt to describe it.
Asian cinema does revenge well, and already boasts many excellent films on that theme, from Shunya Ito’s Female Convict Scorpion series to Park Chan-wook’s vengeance trilogy. Tetsuya Nakashima has added one more to the list with Confessions, which equals Park’s Oldboy in the cruelty of the punishment and the sophistication of the set-up. Adapted from Kanae Minato’s best-selling novel, Confessions tells the story of teacher Yuko Moriguchi’s diabolical revenge against the two 13-year-old boys she accuses of murdering her little girl.
In a remarkable opening sequence, the soft-spoken Yuko quietly tells her rowdy class that she will leave at the end of term. She then calmly proceeds to tell them about the murder of her daughter, how she discovered that the killers were two boys from her class, and how she has already taken revenge on them. Each of her disclosures is made all the more shocking by her even tone of voice, her astonishing words finally forcing the unruly students to pay attention to her. This mesmerising sequence lasts for 30 minutes and seemingly reveals the whole plot of the film. But Yuko’s ‘confession’ is followed by a series of further confessions from other characters, the film intercutting their points of view, each revealing some new twist until we reach the culmination of the revenge story.
Brilliantly, intricately edited, often using the juxtaposition of different viewpoints and moments in time to create complex meanings, the film offers a sombre view of an immoral youth. Admittedly, there is something somewhat reactionary in the broad portrayal of young people as hopelessly self-centred, callous and insensitive, but the pessimism includes the adult characters too. There is no possibility of redemption for anyone, and social relationships are just a web of cruelty in which everyone is guilty.
Confessions picks up on the extreme sentimentality and extreme cruelty that exists in Japanese cinema, and combines them, for instance, when the bullying of one of the accused boys is turned into a fun-looking, brightly-coloured, point-scoring game on the students’ phones. Scenes of the boy’s harassment are set against images of happy young girls leaving school amid beautiful cherry blossoms and even a quirky musical number. Teenage sentimentality is specifically ridiculed: ‘Pop… the sound of something important disappearing forever’; this catchphrase, repeated with a fair amount of self-pity by one of the boys throughout the film, will be thrown back at him later by Yuko, with a devastating new meaning.
Dominated by blue-ish tones and making frequent use of fish-eye shots and distancing low and high angles, Confessions feels like a disturbing dream. Characters recount terrible misdeeds in strangely detached voices, as if in a daze, and a number of scenes are filmed at a slowed down pace. The oneiric effect is emphasised by the music, which combines an emotive Radiohead ballad with atmospheric, gloomy tracks from The xx and Japanese noise band Boris, as well as ironic pop songs (‘That’s the Way I Like It’) and gentle, melancholy pieces.
In Confessions, Nakashima has toned down the stylistic exuberance that marked his Kamikaze Girls (2004) and Memories of Matsuko (2006). Those two films shared an almost insanely upbeat quality and a strong visual style based on an orgiastic use of bright colours. But where Kamikaze Girls was a light, pink cream puff of a film, there was a very bleak tale hidden in Memories of Matsuko‘s candy wrapper. In Confessions, there is no sweetness to balance the darkness, and it is Nakashima’s most accomplished film to date.
Listen to the Lucky Cat podcast Series 5 Episode 5, in which Virginie Sélavy was the guest of presenter Zoë Baxter to discuss Confessions. First broadcast on Resonance FM, 104.4, on Saturday 12 February 2011. Lucky Cat is a weekly show that focuses on East Asian culture.
Cast: Anne Parillaud, Arthur Dupont, Thierry Frémont
France 2010
79 mins
One year on from the violent death of her son, Sarah (Anne Parillaud) is still clearly not the full shilling. Medicated and disconnected, she is sleepwalking through her job as a nurse. She is sent home to get some clearly needed rest, and driving down a narrow country lane she runs, literally, into Arthur (Arthur Dupont), a young man apparently running from a burglar he caught in the act, a bloodied lunatic (Thierry Frémont) who dogs them with his car as she tries to drive him to safety. Two police at a roadblock had indeed warned her earlier about a housebreaker in the area, but Arthur isn’t telling all he knows, and there are worse crimes than burglary…
Clocking in at a lean 79 minutes, Caroline and Eric du Potet’s In Their Sleep is a creepy little psycho-thriller that makes the most out of comparatively little; it has a location or three, some cars, Eric Neveux’s effective (Theremin!) score and a small cast, but exploits these resources to great effect. The du Potets have clearly spent some time working out their tale and how best to tell it; information about the characters and what’s going on emerges gradually in well-timed flashbacks, and as much through visual clues, physical acting and expression as through the minimal dialogue. While much of the business of the film will be familiar to genre fans (home invasions, chases, moonlit attacks, narrow escapes) it is made more interesting by the psychological dynamics. None of the characters appears to be quite in their right mind, and, as the title suggests, In Their Sleep is preoccupied with different states of consciousness: insomnia, death and coma, being knocked out and coming to. From the start, it has a fractured waking dream quality, where terrible unexplained things can happen in broad daylight, and from then on nobody has the full picture, and the truth remains elusive. We know more than any of the people on screen, but the filmmakers aren’t above screwing with our perceptions either.
Sarah and Arthur are the heart of the film, both are damaged in their own ways, and it’s their relationship that gives the film some bite and depth. She clearly begins to see a substitute son in Arthur, and can’t stop her maternal instincts overcoming her reason. He begins to find something in her that he clearly needs. It’s a goddamn Freudian minefield, and well played by Parillaud and Dupont as they swing through states of distrust and affection (and a queasy sexual attraction).
It’s a class act, and relatively restrained, which may be a problem for anyone expecting anything along the lines of Switchblade Romance or Frontiers, who may be disappointed by the paucity of overt violence or visual hysteria. But it walks its own path, the understatement just makes some scenes more unsettling, and while In Their Sleep is essentially just a neat low-budget thriller along the lines of many others, Arthur and Sarah will linger in the memory.
Cast: Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield
UK/USA 2010
103 mins
Alex Garland writes a screenplay based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Mark Romanek directs. A slow-burning nightmare, as a strange boarding school in a timeless limbo England raises children for a sinister purpose. It’s a film about the evils that can be concealed behind politeness and bureaucracy, and the horrors society is prepared to tolerate if it suits our purposes.
If I was the ridiculous smart arse that I clearly am I’d try to draw parallels between the film’s theme, where official euphemisms (‘donors’, ‘completion’ etc) are used to make all manner of nastiness acceptable, and the film itself, where a quality cast, a string quartet soundtrack and a little cinematic restraint can be seen to be covering up the fact that this is essentially The Clonus Horror/The Island with a university degree.
This review was first published as part of our coverage of the 2010 London Film Festival.
But I won’t, because it’s actually pretty bloody good, the tastefulness and restraint making the nasty stuff all the more horrible and moving. Andrew Garfield, Keira Knightley and Charlotte Rampling all do good work, Carey Mulligan is great. I think the film loses something and becomes more clearly an adaptation of a novel after it leaves the weird bubble of Hailsham House. But it still weaves a disconcerting spell.
Mark Stafford
Watch the trailer:
A Deviant View of Cinema – Film, DVD & Book Reviews
