Yearly Archives: 2012

Check it out, Cinema releases, Festivals

Himizu

Himizu

Format: Cinema – UK premiere

Screening date: 15 April 2012

Venue: Prince Charles

Distributor: Third Window Films

Part of the Terracotta Far East Film Festival

Director: Sion Sono

Writer: Sion Sono

Based on the manga by: Minoru Furuya

Cast: Shôta Sometani, Fumi Nikaidô, Tetsu Watanabe

Japan 2011

129 mins

Directed by Sion Sono, who brought us Suicide Club (2001), and more recently Cold Fish (2010), Himizu is an urgent and topical film. Located in the midst of the devastation in the aftermath of the tsunami of 2011, the film shows a society that is not only physically destroyed but also socially falling to pieces. Fifteen-year-old Yuichi Sumida (Shôta Sometani) lives with his neglectful mother in a boat hire shop. His drunken father only lurches into view when he needs cash and curses Sumida, wishing him dead and reminding him about the time he saved Sumida from drowning, an act he bitterly regrets on account of the insurance he could have claimed. Sumida is also the object of a school girl crush on the part of the hyper Keiko (Fumi Nikaidô) - ‘Am I a stalker? Yes, I am’ - to whom he is (at best) indifferent. The boat house is also a gathering place for a disparate bunch of refugees who serve as a Greek chorus and attempt to help Sumida in his troubles even as he hopelessly pursues his wish to lead an ordinary, normal and boring life.

Tragedy overtakes him, however, and with his chances of normality gone forever, he teeters on the edge of madness, haunted by recurring dreams of apocalypse. Threatened also by the yakuza, who are pursuing his father’s gambling debts, Sumida considers suicide but wants to do something genuinely good that will redeem him before he dies.

Sono’s film is a deeply unsettling view of modern day Japan. It is a society in which the adults have an antagonistic, if not downright hostile, relationship to their offspring. Sumida’s parents are blandly negligent on one side and furiously hateful on the other, but this isn’t simply an isolated case. Keiko interrupts her mother and father, who are in the process of building her a gallows. ‘You’ll use it when we’ve finished,’ they tell her. School is an irrelevance that spouts new age platitudes about hope and individuality while having no real impact on the lives of the pupils. The only sympathetic adults in the piece are the refugees, but they themselves have had their lives reduced to vagabondage that in its precarious vulnerability is not that far from childhood.

Although originally based on a manga by Minoru Furuya, the script was changed at the last minute by Sono to incorporate the tsunami and the subsequent nuclear drama that was played out. Sono took his crew to one of the most devastated areas for some of the scenes. The film was premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2011, a mere six months after the tsunami had hit Japan. It treats the aftermath in a tangential manner, alluding rather than depicting. But the whole film is imbued with an out-of-joint surreality, a topsy-turvy universe in which the generations are pitched against each other. There is no sign of authority and every now and then an ominous growling roar is heard as if there is another earthquake on its way, waiting to happen on the margins of the frame. This is a much more serious film than the dark comedy of Cold Fish. Despite the freakishness of the plot, there is a mournful tone that the use of Mozart and Samuel Barber reinforces. This is a satirical and in some ways despairingly angry film. In its privileging of the point of view of the young, Himizu is reminiscent of The Tin Drum (Volker Schlöndorff, 1979). Hope, if it is to come at all, will be brought out by the young kids who play out their relationship in the worst possible conditions and yet have an independence and resilience that will allow them in some way to survive.

The Terracotta Far East Film Festival runs from April 13 to 15 at the Prince Charles, London.

John Bleasdale

Check it out, Comic Strip Reviews, Home entertainment

Crows Zero

Takashi Miike’s 2007 high school actioner is released on DVD on 9 April 2012 by MVM. Another typically ultra-stylised and violent offering from the director of Ichi the Killer and 13 Assassins, Crows Zero charts the battle between two delinquent boys and their factions fighting for supremacy in the lawless Suzuran high school. Based on the bestselling manga by Hiroshi Takahashi (screenwriter of the original Ring movies), Crows Zero is one of Miike’s most commercially successful movies.

Comic strip review by Joe Morgan.

Check it out, Cinema releases

This Must Be the Place

This Must Be the Place

Format: Cinema

Release date: 6 April 2012

Venues: Key cities

Distributor: Trinity

Director: Paolo Sorrentino

Writers: Umberto Contarello, Paolo Sorrentino

Cast: Sean Penn, Frances McDormand, Judd Hirsch, Harry Dean Stanton

Italy/France/Ireland 2011

118 mins

Proof that you can have too much of a good thing comes in the form of this Paolo Sorrentino work. After the assured, note-perfect Consequences of Love and Il Divo comes this bloated English-language co-production. Cheyenne (Sean Penn) is a Goth rock star living in Ireland, whose music has made him money enough that he doesn’t need to work again. He drifts through his mansion and through his life, a vision in bird’s nest hair and lipstick, until a phone call informs him that his estranged Jewish father is on his deathbed. After the funeral, back in the US he finds himself energised, to a point, by a mission to track down the concentration camp guard his dad had spent much of his life unsuccessfully seeking. Driving a pick-up through Utah and New Mexico he encounters a series of characters on the way towards a final confrontation, and perhaps some kind of reconciliation with his demons.

This bare-bones synopsis will give you no idea how rich, funny, beautiful, wayward, twee and overloaded This Must Be the Place is. It’s like three or more films in one. There’s the True Stories-style wallow in scorched Americana road movie, the Burtonesque Goth detective movie, the sweet, sad character comedy of the first half hour. There’s Frances McDormand as Cheyenne’s wife doing Tai Chi, there’s Harry Dean Stanton talking about wheeled luggage, there’s a teenage romance subplot, there’s the business with the loaned 4í—4, the business with the local Irish band, there’s Judd Hirsch’s Nazi hunter. It’s the kind of film where every conversation with a stranger at a bar or café will yield a little philosophical nugget. Every shot is a precise, louma-craned marvel of widescreen photography. A lot of it is terrific stuff, but there’s just too much here to be digestible, too much to be resolved satisfactorily.

Penn is wonderful as Cheyenne, and he is given great things to do and say. The soundtrack is by David Byrne (with lyrics by Will Oldham) and Byrne cameos in a magnificent one-shot live rendering of the old Talking Heads number that gives the film its title, a sequence that’s a reason to see the film in itself. I doubt any other single moment of cinema will give me as much pleasure this year. But it’s another cherry in an overcooked cake.

This review was first published as part of our coverage of the London Film Festival 2011.

Mark Stafford

Check it out, Cinema releases

Le Havre

Le Havre

Format: Cinema

Dates: 6 April 2012

Distributor: Artificial Eye

Director: Aki Kaurismäki

Writer: Aki Kaurismäki

Cast: André Wilms, Kati Outinen, Blondin Miguel, Jean-Pierre Darroussin

Finland/France 2011

93 mins

Le Havre is Aki Kaurismäki’s first film since 2006, which begs the question: is the previously prolific Finnish director slowing down with age, or is he having difficulty finding financing? Directed with a lighter touch than usual, and coming complete with a real feel-good element, this charming fable could (if not provide the box-office smash he deserves) certainly win him some new fans.

Although Kaurismäki’s films have always had a social element, his recent work has tackled such issues more directly. Thus we had unemployment in Drifting Clouds (1996) and homelessness in The Man without a Past (2002), and now in Le Havre we have immigration. The simple plot involves a young African boy (Blondin Miguel), who arrives at the French port in a shipping container and is helped by locals to hide from the authorities.

Filmed with the same apparent simplicity that marked his debut Crime and Punishment (1983) and all 16 subsequent films, Le Havre is unmistakably a Kaurismäki film. This ‘simplicity’ - still cameras, close-ups of objects and faces, head-on camera angles - somehow seems quirkier and more unusual now than ever before. In a world where filmmakers seem so eager to show off their talents and innovations, a Kaurismäki shot of a pair of shoes seems to be from a different place and time (or perhaps just from Finland).

Le Havre is Kaurismäki’s second film in French (after La vie de bohí¨me, 1992), and despite being shot on location in the Normandy port, with its docks and run-down housing (reminiscent of depictions of Helsinki in earlier films), what we are given is a France of the imagination, and more particularly, of Kaurismäki’s cinematic imagination. From the opening shots of suspicious-looking men in trenchcoats with upturned collars, to accordion music playing in cafés, to the friendly grocer’s and baker’s shops (not a hypermarket in sight), we are reminded of the 30s working-class poetic realism of Le Jour se Leve (1939) and Quai des Brumes (1938), or even the 50s crime films of Jean-Pierre Melville and Jacques Becker. The character’s names more clearly reference French cinema history - thus we have Doctor Becker and even an Arletty (after the star of Le Jour se Leve). Other characters are given famous French names - Flaubert and Manet - while the lead character, and protector of the downtrodden, is interestingly named Marcel Marx.

Of course Kaurismäki films, whether filmed in England, France or Finland, are all really set in what has been called ‘Akiland’. It’s a strange, bleak but beautiful world of overcast skies and odd-looking people, where all the cars were built before 1980; guitars are played with extra twang; and electronic music, computers, mobile phones and supermarkets have not been and never will be invented. In Le Havre, taciturn French replace close-mouthed Finns, and the old cars are Citro&#235ns, but this is still clearly Akiland. He even finds an equivalent to his Finnish rockabilly bands with the appearance of the legendary (in Normandy, at least) Roberto Piazza of 70s French pub-rockers Little Bob Story. André Wilms, as the world-weary shoeshine Marcel Marx, gives a typically Akiland performance, and Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen (whose face Kaurismäki’s camera can’t help but linger on) plays his wife. The guitar track is provided by The Renegades, whose Finnish hit ‘Matelot’ seems so perfect I can’t help but wonder if the film was made to fit the song.

Although Kaurismäki defends this stylised world as merely his personal preference (he finds modern cars ugly and likes twangy guitars, apparently), this skewed reality is perfect for fables and fairy tales such as this. Such a heart-warming tale in any other hands could so easily become schmaltzy (a Spielberg remake would be awful), but the deadpan delivery and endless idiosyncrasies counterbalance this tendency.

As in all of Kaurismäki’s films, there is a strong anti-authoritarian streak in Le Havre. His film has the feeling of an Ealing comedy - such as Whiskey Galore! (1949) - with plucky underdogs and a downtrodden community standing up to some faceless authority. But it is there in his style too: in those close-ups that linger just a little bit longer than is necessary, in his genuine love of the unconventional, and his ability to find it in the seemingly mundane. It is this that makes Kaurismäki so special, and why this film should be another step on his move from being a Finnish national treasure to a truly global one.

Paul Huckerby

Check it out, Cinema releases, Home entertainment

La Grande Illusion

La Grande Illusion

Format: Cinema

Dates: 6 April 2012

Format: DVD + Blu-ray

Dates: 23 April 2012

Distributor: Studiocanal

Director: Jean Renoir

Writers: Charles Spaak, Jean Renoir

Cast: Jean Gabin, Dita Parlo, Pierre Fresnay, Erich von Stroheim

France 1937

114 mins

To mark the 75th anniversary of La Grande Illusion, Jean Renoir’s most successful film, Studiocanal and the Cinémathèque de Toulouse are releasing a new, digitally restored version. It is very moving to see a classic film so skilfully restored, the image as clear and blemish-free as if it were made yesterday, the soundtrack without the hint of a crackle. Jean Gabin and Erich von Stroheim are resurrected and, without any technical interference, the audience of 2012 is transported to World War I. They sense, with a shiver, the film’s original significance on the eve of a second world war. As Europe confronts financial crisis today, La Grande Illusion retains its power as an example of European camaraderie and co-operation.

Set in Germany, the film follows a group of French prisoners of war. The central characters span the social spectrum: Lieutenant Maréchal (Gabin), a good-humoured, big-hearted man of modest means; Lieutenant Rosenthal, a rich Jewish banker who generously shares his care packages from Paris; and their captain, de Boeldieu, whose upper-class manners and habits keep his men at a distance, even though he considers them his equals. De Boeldieu feels more at home with a German of similar rank and background: Captain von Rauffenstein (von Stroheim), a captor who acts as a gracious host. All of the men regularly comment on the differences that separate them, but they equally demonstrate how friendship can overcome barriers of class, religion and nationality. Class is the greatest separating factor, specifically the divide between an increasingly outdated aristocracy and the plebs who are about to take over power in a fast-changing Europe. While Rosenthal’s wealth doesn’t prevent him and Maréchal from becoming firm friends, the stiff behaviour of de Boeldieu and von Rauffenstein isolates them. Yet these two repressed characters are at the centre of one of the film’s most moving scenes: the powerful emotions that de Boeldieu and von Rauffenstein must feel are made more poignant for being so carefully controlled and subtly expressed. All human relationships are precious here, as it is uncertain whether any of the men will make it to the end of the war.

There was uncertainty in the very existence of La Grande Illusion. An anti-war film made just two years before World War II, it was banned in Germany, Italy and France, before the Nazis confiscated the negative. Luckily, the Reichfilmarchiv was located in a part of Berlin that later fell to the Red Army. La Grande Illusion was taken to Moscow, where it formed part of the founding collection of Gosfilmfond, Russia’s National Film Archives. It was 20 years before the film was finally returned to France. The film’s first restoration in the 1990s reinstated previously censored scenes featuring sympathetic Germans or references to venereal disease. The new print will be released in UK cinemas on April 6, and from April 23, La Grande Illusion will be available on DVD and Blu-ray.

Alison Frank

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Check it out, Home entertainment

Lady Snowblood: Blizzard from the Netherworld

Lady Snowblood

Format: DVD

Release date: 2 Feb 2003

Distributor: Warrior

Director: Toshiya Fujita

Writers: Kazuo Kamimura, Norio Osada

Based on the manga by: Kazuo Koike

Original title: Shurayukihime

Cast: Meiko Kaji, Toshio Kurosawa, Masaaki Daimon

Japan 1973

97 mins

Lady Snowblood started her life as the heroine of a manga written by Kazuo Koike in the early 70s, before being incarnated by the actress Meiko Kaji in two film adaptations of the story, Lady Snowblood: Blizzard from the Netherworld (1973) and Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance (1974), both directed by Toshiya Fujita. Strong from her turns as the leader of a delinquent girl gang in the Stray Cat Rock series (1970-71), and as a cold-blooded avenger in the Female Convict Scorpion films (1972-73), the enigmatic, steely-eyed Kaji was the perfect choice to play a 19th-century assassin out to avenge the rape of her mother and the murder of her family.

Blizzard from the Netherworld opens in Tokyo Prison in Meiji 7 (1874). A woman gives birth as snow falls outside, announcing to her newborn daughter, barely out of the womb: ‘Yuki, you were born for vengeance, a child of the netherworld.’ The film cuts to the now adult Yuki dispatching a local criminal in an eerily quiet, snowy street. As she squares up to the gangster’s henchmen, snow falls from a nearby roof, landing inches from their feet, an act of aggression that suggests that Yuki is almost supernaturally in control. As we are repeatedly told throughout the film, Yuki is not quite human; her name means ‘snow’ in Japanese, and she is an elemental force, unstoppable and indestructible. Conjured up from hell to carry out her mother’s revenge, she is the embodiment of an idée fixe.

Her full name, ‘Shurayuki-hime’, is a pun on the Japanese for Snow White, ‘Shirayuki-hime’. The Kanji character ‘Shura’ means ‘the netherworld’, a place of carnage, and ‘hime’ is ‘princess’. In the Grimm fairy tale, Snow White is also conjured up by her mother out of blood and snow: the queen, having pricked her finger and seen the drop of blood on the snow, wishes for a daughter that would have ‘skin white as snow, lips red as blood, and hair black as ebony’. Just like Lady Snowblood, Snow White is plucked from her mother’s fancy, and fashioned out of the elements that the queen can see around her. This quasi-magical birth conveys all the mystery of procreation, and the combination of blood and snow clearly has sexual undertones, with the hot red flow fertilising white water; a mixing of fluids, but also of states, liquid and solid, life and death, to create a new being. No wonder that the combination of blood and snow, so over-used, still remains powerful: it is the image of primordial creation.

Or destruction, in the case of Yuki. As she walks away from the first scene of carnage, the narrator explains: ‘People say that what cleanses this world of decay is not pure white snow but snow that is stained fiery red: the snow of the netherworld.’ It is a striking inversion of the symbolism of snow, and the image is brilliantly paradoxical. True to her name, Yuki is a contradictory being: a demonic creature hell-bent on destruction, but pure in her single-minded purpose of revenge.

Visually, the film makes much of the white/red contrast, starting with the female convicts in their red prison uniforms surrounding the newborn Yuki, wrapped in a white cloth. Yuki wears a white kimono for most of the film, the perfect backdrop for the Grand Guignol sprays of blood that regularly gush out of her victims. White clothes are in fact the starting point of the whole story: the husband of Yuki’s mother was killed because he was wearing white, and for that reason was mistakenly taken for a hated government official.

Naturally, the film ends with more blood and snow. Having accomplished the final act of her revenge, Yuki staggers out in the snow, wounded, her white kimono stained with blood. Clearly the welding of these elements - snow, blood, women and revenge - exerts a strange attraction, with that final scene in particular sowing seeds in the imagination of other filmmakers. Norifumi Suzuki’s Sex and Fury, released in 1973, was seemingly influenced by Blizzard from the Netherworld, although it upped the quotient of nudity, violence and sheer lunacy. Suzuki’s film similarly ends with the heroine stumbling out in the snow, her bare tattooed chest covered in blood, which she cleans with a handful of snow before walking away in the darkness as the snowflakes turn into hanafuda gambling cards. No such inventive re-interpretation in Tarantino’s Kill Bill 1 (2003), which simply regurgitated its cinematic precedents like a lesson well learnt. Park Chan-wook, on the other hand, ended his Lady Vengeance (2005) with the heroine being given tofu by her daughter; as they embrace in the snow, the white substances inside and around her offer the promise of cleansing and renewal. The snow holds no such promise at the end of Blizzard from the Netherworld, unique in its complex reading of snow; herself the purifier, Yuki is beyond cleansing and can only carry on down her path of revenge, even as all her enemies lie dead.

This article was first published in the Winter 08 issue of Electric Sheep Magazine, which focused on snow in film.

Virginie Sélavy

Check it out, Cinema releases

Into the Abyss: a Tale of Death, a Tale of Life

Into the Abyss

Format: Cinema

Dates: 30 March 2012

Distributor: Revolver

Director: Werner Herzog

USA/UK/Germany 2011

107 mins

‘I know the hearts of men. And that is why I am a director.’

Werner Herzog handles grim matters in his work as a whole with genuine love and familiarity, and the quote above is no flippant boast: he does fully identify with his subjects and their suffering. He is, however, rarely sympathetic, and instead reveals humanity in the materiality of being human. The honesty of the flesh, the absurdity of the sacred, the enduring equivalence of meaninglessness that all men share. Into the Abyss: a Tale of Death, a Tale of Life finds its foothold here. In this documentary about life on death row, Herzog does not linger on eviscerating questions of guilt versus innocence. Instead, the film is concerned with the banality of the immanence of death, the curious paradox of denial and commitment in the mind of the living-about-to-be-dead, and their strange hybrid communities where the families of criminals and their victims overlap to create an unwilling and unwanted extended family in mourning.

Herzog’s hallmark co-option of melodramatic sentiment also serves as an eccentric form of comedy, buoying his scrutiny of human ethics. In the film, he claims that as a German who survived the Second World War, and as a ‘guest’ in America, he has no position of moral authority from which to condemn the American judicial system. Even this statement contains a playful double meaning. Conversely, the state-mandated philosophy surrounding the execution of condemned men is curiously clumsy and archaic. There has seemingly been some attempt by unnamed governing bodies to address the praxis of execution, and the extent to which the prisoner is conscious of its ‘variables’ as relative factors in his own mortality - when, where, how. Of equal or greater concern, though, is the extent to which these devices are used to shield the executioners (known collectively in Texas as the Tie-Down Team) from the very terms of Herzog’s tongue-in-cheek allusion to state-sanctioned killing in Germany, as is the problematic role of a shared religious faith as a coping mechanism for victims of crime, criminals and representatives of the state apparatus.

There is currently an accompanying series of one-hour episodes airing on Channel 4 that deal with other death row inmates and their trajectories towards death. Herzog is quick to point out that he has spent no more than 60 minutes each with any participant in the film and the TV series - having measured time allocated to his interactions with people who have lost a loved one, either to crime or to prison, against the constraints of time allotted visitors of death row inmates as determined by state correctional facilities. The film is often cold, lacking the wild outbursts of violence and madness Herzog is known for, but it is also darkly funny in its peculiar earnestness. Its purest moments are those that show emotions clearly groomed for the camera, rehearsed and played out in their entirety. Oddly, it is in the most manufactured and rehearsed demonstrations for the camera that the visceral conflict of the situation reveals itself; in tears unshed – glimpsed or swallowed, rather than in the choreographic design of yet-unbaked cookies and dead bodies in a suburban American household.

Emily McMehen

Check it out, Home entertainment

A Horrible Way to Die

A Horrible Way to Die

Format: DVD + Blu-ray

Release date: 19 March 2012

Distributor: Anchor Bay

Director: Adam Wingard

Writer: Simon Barrett

Cast: A.J. Bowen, Amy Seimetz, Joe Swanberg

USA 201o

84 mins

Having impressed FrightFesters at last year’s festival, A Horrible Way to Die is now released on DVD and Blu-ray by Anchor Bay. An original take on the serial killer genre, it is seen mostly from the point of view of the former girlfriend of a murderer. After Garrick’s arrest, Sarah is trying to rebuild her life and address her problems, attending AA meetings, where she meets a sensitive young man. When Garrick is released, the film intercuts flashbacks of Sarah and Garrick’s lives together before she found out the truth about him with his journey down to the town Sarah now lives in, and her tentative new romance. Shot in an impressionistic, elliptical style, the film paints a nuanced picture, evoking the tenderness and love Sarah and Garrick shared, making her realisation of his betrayal all the more horrifying. A well-observed, evocative, heartbreaking story, it never feels sensational despite moments of violence, and develops slowly but compellingly, until all the pieces of the puzzle sickeningly fall into place.

Virginie Sélavy

This review was originally published as part of our coverage of Film4 FrightFest 2011.
Check it out, Cinema releases, Home entertainment

The Devils

The Devils

Format: Screening of the director’s cut

Part of Ken Russell Forever

Date: 19 March 2012

Time: 8pm

Venue: BFI Southbank

Format: DVD of UK original X certificate version

Release date: 19 March 2012

Distributor: BFI

Director: Ken Russell

Writer: Ken Russell, John Whiting

Based on The Devils of Loudun by: Aldous Huxley

Cast: Vanessa Redgrave, Oliver Reed, Dudley Sutton, Michael Gothard, Christopher Logue, Graham Armitage

UK 1971

109 mins (screening) / 107 mins (DVD)

Ken Russell’s 1971 film deliberately sets out to shock and does so with a verve and an integrity of purpose that few films can equal. The shock does not simply reside in its subject matter of religious hysteria, taken from the Aldous Huxley book The Devils of Loudun and a 1961 play by John Whiting, also based on the Huxley book, but arrives in a 360-degree arc. There is the disgusting body horror of the plague, the soundtrack by Peter Maxwell Davies, hell-bent on giving an aural rendering of Pandemonium, and the radically shifting tone of the film, which lurches from low comedy to high tragedy, often in the same shot.

It is 17th-century France and Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue) conspires to have the battlements of various French towns torn down. When Baron De Laubardemont (played by Tinker from Lovejoy, Dudley Sutton) tries to carry out the orders in Loudun the charismatic but deeply flawed priest, Father Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed), intervenes, having been given control of the town by the dying Governor. Unfortunately, Grandier has made a series of powerful enemies, including the Baron, a pair of conniving quack doctors and a noble, whose daughter Grandier has impregnated, and Grandier is set for a fall. This promptly happens, when rumours of his secret marriage to Madeleine (Gemma Jones in her debut) incense the local convent. Unwittingly, Grandier has become the object of the nuns’ repressed lust, and a specific dream object of Vanessa Redgrave’s hunchback Sister Jeanne. During a hysterical outburst, Sister Jeanne names Grandier as being party to a demonic possession of several of the sisterhood. The reenactment of the hysteria is itself hysterical, and of course Russell leaves himself open to the criticism that he ‘goes too far’. But thank god. His camera doesn’t just show an orgy of cavorting nuns, but leaps right in and takes part. With a disapproving priest masturbating under his cassock the camera starts a delirious zooming in and out, in and out, in and out until … oh… my.

Listen to the Electric Sheep show Ken Russell: ‘All Art Is Sex!’ on Resonance 104.4 FM on Friday 16 March, 5pm.

Aside from the orgies and the enemas and the frolicking nuns and what not, Russell has great fun with the satire. One of the quacks, Adam (Brian Murphy, famous as George from George and Mildred), while assisting in the exorcism, comments, ‘nice day… bit chilly, but still…’ to Sister Jeanne. A disguised King Louis XIII (Graham Armitage) also assists and in the process exposes the whole thing as a sham, but rather than denounce the rock’ n’ roll exorcist (a fantastic performance by the tragically wasted Michael Gothard), he sees it as all part of the fun. After all, his monarchy is based on an empty box of sorts and he shows himself to be a keen fan of the theatre. ‘Enjoy yourself,’ he tells Sister Jeanne.

The tragedy comes with Grandier’s fall. Oliver Reed is magnificent. His Grandier is carelessly witty and licentious and yet convincingly heroic. In the shambolic comedy of the trial, he maintains a credible dignity and indeed begins to rise to grandeur. Only Reed could deliver the line ‘Go away, De Lauberdemont, you grow tedious’ while he is being tortured and make you at once laugh and feel crushing sorrow. His tormentors and Russell refuse him every consolation, and in a particularly horrific moment his illegitimate son is held up so the ‘lucky bastard can watch his father burn’. Of course, as the flames climb high it is no longer Grandier who burns, but all of Loudun and us as well.

The film looks wonderful - sets designed by Derek Jarman - and the healthy punkish nihilism, the anger, is as relevant today as it ever was. We could have a paean to what might have been, if Warners hadn’t so hated the film and if Oliver Reed and Russell had formed a collaborative partnership similar to Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog that somehow balanced their crazy talents, but as one of the most outstanding 70s films to come out of Britain, I am simply thankful that it is at last (almost all) here.

The Devils is released on DVD by the BFI in its original UK X certificate version. BFI Southbank will screen the director’s cut of The Devils on March 19. For more details of the season, please go to Ken Russell Forever.

John Bleasdale