Tokyo Tribe

Tokyo Tribe
Tokyo Tribe

Format: Cinema

Release date: 22 May 2015

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director: Sion Sono

Writer: Sion Sono

Based on the manga by: Santa Inoue

Cast: Akihiro Kitamura, Tomoko Karina, Hitomi Katayama, Ryôhei Suzuki, Nana Seino

Japan 2014

116 mins

A Jap hip hop gangsta musical, Sion Sono’s latest is set in an alternative Tokyo where the rival gangs that rule the city’s outer districts have been maintaining an uneasy truce for years, until, over the course of one night, a murky conspiracy is set in motion to set clan against clan and bring war to the streets. Can the various antagonistic pimps, hustlers, strippers, dealers and loved up teens overcome their differences, beat the bad guys and restore peace?

Of course they bloody can. This isn’t a film of murky moral complexity, this is an exhilarating, garish manga-based phantasmagoria, much more concerned with giving us a wild ride than with such fripperies as plot or storytelling or making a whole lot of sense. Filmed largely in fluid roaming steadicam takes that must have taken an age to set up and choreograph, Tokyo Tribe is a feast of outrageous action against over-the-top set design. The screen is full of scantily clad gyrating girls and splattery ultra-violence, when it’s not full of eccentrically dressed MC’s telling you what’s up. Rather than giving us anything authentically human, most of the actors are channelling hip hop archetypes, exemplified by Riki Tekeuchi’s utterly grotesque turn as chief bad guy Lord Buppa, a leering, groping cannibal king in a gold Elvis suit, eyeballs rolling so far back in his head it suggests he’s permanently overdosing on elephant tranquilisers.

If all this sounds like a blast, well, it is, up to a point, but after the first 20 minutes or so a certain repetitiveness creeps in. Once again, there’s the feeling with Sion Sono that he’s not really in control of his material. He’s having too much fun to be concerned with consistency of tone, or getting over characters and story. The result is a whole lot of cool stuff that doesn’t really slow down or speed up or build. Whilst it’s never boring, irritations creep in. The various ‘tribes’ are introduced to us over and over again, whilst the evil plot at the centre of the tale is left largely unexplained. A military tank is introduced with much fanfare only to be utterly forgotten about. A dick size joke that should, at best, have been a throwaway gag is allowed to take over the final moments of the film. Elements don’t gel; at times it plays like a Rooney/Garland ‘let’s put on a show right here’ flick, at others like Tinto Brass’s Caligula. The ‘one love’ vibe that ends the movie doesn’t fit with the fetishised weaponry and wall-to-wall arse- kicking. The colourful cartoon fun stylings don’t sit well with the rape and torture scenes.

Sure, some of these glaring contradictions may be part of the hip hop culture Sono is representing. But like a rapper yelling ‘Peace! Out!’ after a set filled with Glock-wielding revenge fantasies and badass bragging… well, you find yourself wishing for a little more self-awareness and self-control. The sexual politics especially are pretty horrible, from the opening scene where a naïve female cop is stripped to the waist to be used as a map of Tokyo by knife-wielding bad boy Mera (Ryôhei Suzuki, who, frankly, did not die enough) practically all the film’s female characters are used as squealing eye candy, when they aren’t being used as kung fu kicking eye candy: it’s a rare shot of female lead Nana Seino that doesn’t feature the gusset of her white panties.

Still, the music by B.C.D.M.G throbs and pulses effectively, and it has energy to burn. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it. But I’m still waiting for Sono to give us the undeniably great, mad film that he clearly has the chops to deliver. Tokyo Tribe: big fun on screen, bad taste in mouth. Peace. Out.

Mark Stafford

This review is part of our LFF 2014 coverage.

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The Wind Rises

Hayao Miyazaki’s very last film, a charming celebration of aeronautical designer Jiro Horikoshi’s big dreams and inventiveness, is now available on DVD and Blu-ray from Studiocanal. The Wind Rises is also available as part of The Hayao Miyazaki Collection, released on 8 December 2014 by Studiocanal. This special Blu-ray box set brings together all 11 of his directed feature films and includes a bonus disc with the full 90 minute press conference in which Miyazaki announced his retirement, and a specially commissioned booklet with analysis, essays and commentary as well as contributions from Miyazaki himself.

This comic review reads from bottom to top. You can also read our Venice Film Festival review.

The Wind Rises
Comic Strip Review by Clare Wood
For more information on Clare Wood, go to unclearclare.tumblr.com.

Spring

Spring
Spring

Format: Cinema

Release date: 22 May 2015

Distributor: Metrodome

Directors: Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead

Writer: Justin Benson

Cast: Lou Taylor Pucci, Nadia Hilker

Italy, USA 2014

109 mins

A horror-imbued, science-fiction-tinged tale of rebirth and new beginnings, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s second feature avoids genre clichés to deliver an anxious exploration of romantic love. It follows young American Evan as he runs away to Italy after grief gets him into trouble at home. Coasting along with two loud Brits he met at his hostel, he arrives at a small seaside village, where he encounters the beguiling Louise, all sultry Mediterranean charm and free-spirited elusiveness. As their romance develops in this dreamy setting, it soon becomes apparent that Louise hides a dangerous, ancient secret.

A searching, fretful film, Spring probes the essence of love through earnest (at times a little clunky) dialogue. With a creature that could be a vampire, a zombie, a mutant, or a predatory animal, the horror elements are used to reveal a deep unease about the strange nature of women and their bodily transformations, as well as an intense yearning to find a way of making someone yours forever. It is the story of a taming of sorts, of the monstrous, menacing other, but also of one’s own fears, although that taming seems a little too much like wishful thinking for the resolution to be entirely convincing.

In his single-minded pursuit of love, Evan is endearingly naïve and single-minded. More experienced in many ways, Louise seems stronger and wiser, but her characterisation does not ring quite true, and she feels more like a fantasy than a real person. As she springs up in the village square almost like the incarnation of Evan’s desire, it is possible to imagine that she was conjured up by his imagination while he drifts in this far-off, foreign place.

The setting, near Pompeii, with the volcano as background, is used to great effect to create the feel of something archaic and primeval. The premise for the horrific aspect of the story is fascinating, with its insistence on scientific explanation over the supernatural, which is also part of Benson and Moorhead’s refusal to fall into easy genre categories. The story is firmly grounded in nature, with many inserts of insects, as well as unhurried sequences showing Evan’s work at the farm where he is staying, surveying the olive trees, the caterpillars that eat them and the strange brown goo produced by root rot.

Visually, it is a tremendously assured and inventive film that mixes detailed close-ups and startling aerial shots, small scale and large scale, to inscribe the nascent intimacy of the two lovers against the wider panorama of life. It is this ambition of vision together with the freshness of their talent that makes Benson and Moorhead ones to watch, and despite its weaknesses, the film as a whole, in its imperfect quest for love, has a winning dark charm.

Virginie Sélavy

This review is part of our LFF 2014 coverage.

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The World of Kanako

The World of Kanako
The World of Kanako

Format: DVD

Release date: 15 August 2016

Distributor: Metrodome

Director: Tetsuya Nakashima

Writers: Tetsuya Nakashima, Miako Tadano, Nobuhiro Monma

Based on the novel by: Akio Fukamachi

Cast: Kôji Yakusho, Nana Komatsu, Satochi Tsumabuki

Original title: Kawaki

Japan 2014

118 mins

From Memories of Matsuko through to this new offering, director Tetsuya Nakashima has developed a striking world of intense violence, emotional and physical, punctuated by moments of candy-coloured exuberance. While Matsuko, Confessions and The World of Kanako were all adapted from novels written by different authors, there is a continuing fascination for adolescent girls and the strange closed-off realm they inhabit running through them (as well as through Nakashima’s earlier Kamikaze Girls).

Kôji Yakusho, a favourite of the great Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s, plays Akikazu Fujishima, a washed-out former detective searching for his missing estranged daughter Kanako at the request of his distraught ex-wife. In the course of his investigation, he uncovers a vicious underworld of drugs, brutality and sexual exploitation. As terrible secrets are revealed, he is also forced to face the memories of his own actions as a father and husband.

Akikazu is a man who can only express himself and relate to the world through violence. His approach to the people around him, whether he feels affection or aversion for them, is pretty much limited to shouting, beating and raping. And although the film’s focus is on Kanako, it is really Akikazu’s vision of the world that the audience is plunged into, and it is a fairly relentless, harrowing experience. As the film progresses, it is as if the violence inside him became increasingly visible physically, as if it could no longer be contained: as he is forced to face himself, his already unkempt appearance gradually descends into full-on bruised and blood-stained messiness.

A gaping absence at the heart of the story, Kanako remains a question mark that looms over the film, an enigma that remains mostly unresolved. Essentially unknowable, she is outlined only through other people’s perceptions of her, people who all have deep, passionate, powerful feelings about her. Here as in Confessions, teenagers are troubling, ambiguous creatures, simultaneously playful and cruel, childlike and knowing, unpredictably alternating between innocence and nastiness, to the utter bewilderment and dismay of the adults around them – and Kanako is the ultimate example of that. But just as in Confessions, adults are capable of terrible acts of revenge for the wrong done to their loved ones. As morally murky as Confessions, and as emotionally intense as Memories of Matsuko, The World of Kanako is a visceral dive into hearts of darkness and the ties that bind them.

Virginie Sélavy

This review is part of our London Film Festival 2014 coverage.

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Horsehead

Horsehead
Horsehead

Director: Romain Basset

Writers: Romain Basset, Karim Chériguène

Cast: Lilly-Fleur Pointeaux, Catriona MacColl, Murray Head

France 2014

89 mins

Every year the Etrange Festival hosts its share of unreleased films, and this year it included the world premiere of the first feature film by a young French director, Romain Basset, who had already presented a short on vampires in 2008, Bloody Current Exchange, and another on ghosts in 2009, Rémy, at the same festival. Horsehead is his ambitious attempt at lifting the curse that has long prevented French cinema from producing good films in the horror genre.

After her grandmother’s death, Jessica (Lilly-Fleur Pointeaux) goes back to the spooky family manor, evidently loaded with dark secrets, where her mother Catelyn (Catriona MacColl, Lucio Fulci’s muse from the early 1980s) lives with her husband Jim (Murray Head) and George the gardener (Vernon Dobtcheff). Haunted by recurrent dreams since her childhood, Jessica has turned to studying the psychophysiological theories of lucid dreams, and her nightmares worsen with the proximity of her grandmother’s corpse. When she is bedridden with a strange fever (Fièvre was the working title of the film), she tries to control the visions of her grandmother’s ghost in order to communicate with her. Soon dream and reality merge, with reality altered by the unconscious, while the plot slowly navigates between the two states to unravel a shameful family secret.

The film seduces with its aesthetic choices. Vincent Vieillard-Baron, who was also responsible for the cinematography on Rémy, elaborates on a rich visual variation of The Nightmare, the famous painting by the 18th-century painter Henry Fuseli, whose title is literally represented by the head of a mare hovering over a sleeping beauty, on whose breast sits an incubus. The mare, or rather the eponymous Horsehead, becomes a character in the film, and Basset enriches Fuseli’s pun with a further paronomastic layer (which only works in French) between jument (mare) and jumelle (twin). It seems as if Basset’s intention were to base the whole plot on this Lacanian pun, and unfortunately, the result meets neither Basset’s ambitions nor our expectations. In particular, the film would have been better off without the religious imagery that blurs its main point. Jack of all trades and master of none, Basset cannot resist accumulating clichés. One can hardly grasp the need for Jessica’s nude crucifixion, let alone why anyone would want to have an abortion in a chapel, while the figures of the grandfather (described as an ‘Old Testament kind of man’) and of the Cardinal, mixed with the theme of immaculate conception, all seem strangely out of place in a plot whose main aim is a genealogical quest.

Basset errs on the wrong side of excess, unable to turn down ideas and desires when they arise, all in all less capable of controlling his opulent imagination than Jessica her dreams. To crown it all, hoping to fool the devil by opting for an English-speaking cast, Basset does nothing to justify the fact that the film was shot on location in the village of Argenton-sur-Creuse, right in the middle of France. Yet for all the imperfections of youth, Horsehead deserves the benevolent reception one usually grants a first film, though the French curse remains yet to be lifted.

Pierre Kapitaniak

This review is part of our Etrange Festival 2014 coverage.

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No Man’s Land

No Mans Land
No Man’s Land

Director: Ning Hao

Writers: Ning Hao, Shu Ping, Xing Aina

Cast: Xu Zheng, Yu Nan, Huang Bo, Duo Bujie

Original title: Wu ren qu

China 2013

117 mins

One of the most thoroughly enjoyable films in the Berlinale 2014 Competition line-up, No Man’s Land was originally shot in 2009, but then held by censorship authorities and rescheduled several times over the past few years because of its allegedly negative portrayal of the police. After at least three official resubmissions and endless editing and re-cutting, the currently circulating version of the film finally got a general release in China in 2013. Except for its newly attached, and effectively arbitrary ending, it comes as a welcome surprise that Ning Hao’s wildly cynical (and frequently bonkers) fable remains tightly paced and eminently fun to watch.

A nihilistic neo-Western road movie comedy thriller, No Man’s Land concerns the relationship between man’s animal instincts and social responsibility, with greed being the driving force in a spectacular cat and mouse game set on a lonely stretch of the Gobi Desert highway. The action-packed, if inherently simplistic, plot spins around attorney Pan Xiao, a swanky city slicker who drives to the remote desert region of Xinjiang to defend Lao Da, a falcon poacher accused (and, in fact, guilty) of murder. An expert in his profession, Pan manages to get him off the hook, but when the two men sit down to settle business, disagreements about Pan’s fees lead the greedy lawyer to take over the reins and drive off in his client’s brand new red mustang. And while things may have been slightly ‘off’ from the outset, they inevitably turn sour from here.

As he rushes back to town for his very own book launch party, Pan gets caught in an escalating cycle of ugly misunderstandings that, eventually, prevent him from meeting his self-aggrandising commitments. And it’s not to say he isn’t trying. It’s just that every one of his more or less ingenious attempts to save his skin is answered with more car crashes, gunfire, high kicks and heavy punches.

With its engine deliberately set to run idle, the film adopts a blatant gonzo style and mocking tone that aptly serve its underlying philosophical parable about a society which has gone completely off the rails, while pitch-black wit and occasional daredevil stunts ensure that one does not lose interest for too long. Visually compelling and suitably fitted with a boisterous Morricone-inspired score, No Man’s Land is, quite literally, a blast.

Pamela Jahn

This review is part of our LFF 2014 coverage.

Open Windows

Open Windows
Open Windows

Director: Nacho Vigalondo

Writer: Nacho Vigalondo

Cast: Elijah Wood, Sacha Grey, Neil Maskell

Spain, USA 2014

100 mins

Is there a regular pattern in the careers of post-Almodóvarian Spanish directors? It would seem that those who get famous enough to awaken interest in pan-European or Hollywood studios lose something when they open up their horizons to the English-speaking world. Alejandro Amenábar’s Agora is stripped of what made the strength of his Spanish films. Alex de la Iglesia’s Crimes in Oxford is his least eccentric and imaginative film. So has Nacho Vigalondo joined the club with Open Windows?

Looking at the plot you might well be tempted to answer that he has. Nick Chambers (Elijah Wood), a fan of the successful actress Jill Goddard (Sasha Grey), running a website devoted to her career, wins an invitation to spend an evening with her. But while he is awaiting the big event in his hotel room he is contacted on his computer and told that his rendezvous is cancelled. As compensation, the man on the phone offers him access to Goddard’s cell phone and much more of her privacy. By the time Nick realises that he is being manipulated by a dangerous psychopath into kidnapping the helpless star, it is too late. From there on Nick – and the viewer – are rushed through a ‘Russian dolls’ scenario, which, like the many computer windows that pop up on the screen, constantly reveals yet another ‘hidden’ reality behind appearances. This eventually becomes so unrealistic and unlikely that, unless you are gifted with a preternatural capacity for suspending your disbelief, you cannot help but lose interest in what is actually happening.

This high-concept film is a 2.0 version of the ‘found footage’ genre, where computer screens replace CCTV or amateur cameras. And Vigalondo sure knows how to exploit the genre’s constraints with creative efficiency, displaying impressive accuracy in directing hours and hours of footage that are then edited to be shown simultaneously on screen. The rhythm never slows down and his inventiveness in providing us with the unexpected is impressive and hardly troubled by realism. Witness, for instance, the spherical cameras in a bag which, assembled into a remote network, recreate the inside of the car boot where Goddard is locked. Yet, as many critics have already complained, in contrast to Vigalondo’s Timecrimes (2007) and Extraterrestre (2011), the constraints of the initial concept of Open Windows have failed to produce a masterpiece. The implausible plot, with a villain whose evil motivations one could not care less about, and the consensual and conventional criticism of the celebrity culture and the dubious role of information technology, leaves us under the impression that there is nothing new here. The easiest conclusion would be that Hollywood got the better (or in this case the worse) of Vigalondo, and we might even be tempted to blame it on Elijah Wood, since he also starred in Alex de la Iglesia’s flop Crimes in Oxford. Coincidence?

Yet there might be more to Open Windows than it may initially seem. If we trust Vigalondo with the talent he displayed previously, then the implausibility of the film’s twists and turns may be a signal rather than a flaw, as in Extraterrestre, where the alien plot was only a way of highlighting the characters’ self-fashioning. What if the director were planting false clues, offering a double discourse that would suit both Hollywood and his acute sense of humour? Open Windows is all about subversion – of identity, of reality, of information… Might not the spectator’s frustration be part of the subversion as well? Isn’t it quite subversive to cast an ex-porn star, to give Nick all the freedom to make her satisfy his wildest fantasies, and then leave the spectator with only one quick glance at her breast? And can it really be coincidental that the heroine’s name is Jill Goddard? J.L. Godard did you say? The Godard, who subversively sings the end of cinema every now and then? Might this be why the film makes us put up with a crew of silly French-speaking hackers (who are not even really French)? If we watch the film not as an umpteenth criticism of the media’s rape of privacy but as a spirited reflection on what cinema actually is, then the far-fetched plot can be seen as a statement about the pleasures of cinema with its problematic relation to reality. In that perspective, Open Windows may be seen as reconnecting with the old genre of tragicomedy where order is eventually restored thanks to a deus ex machina device. So there may still be hope for Nacho Vigalondo after all.

Pierre Kapitaniak

This review is part of our Etrange Festival 2014 coverage.

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Shrew’s Nest

Shrews Nest
Shrew’s Nest

Directors: Juanfer Andrés, Esteban Roel

Writers: Juanfer Andrés, Sofía Cuenca, Emma Tusell

Cast: Macarena Gómez, Nadia de Santiago, Hugo Silva, Luis Tosar

Original title: Musarañas

Spain 2014

95 mins

Presented at the 47th Sitges Film Festival to a full auditorium buzzing with anticipation, Shrew’s Nest is an oblique addition to the growing body of horror-tinged Spanish dramas/thrillers that plunge their dark and twisted roots into the Civil War. Produced by Alex de la Iglesia, this first feature by Juanfer Andrés and Esteban Roel is set in the claustrophobic confines of an apartment inhabited by the agoraphobic Montse and her younger sister, who has just turned 18. As it becomes obvious that the latter is growing up and will soon want to live her own life, their neighbour Carlos falls down the stairs, breaks his leg and is rescued by Montse, who, desperately latching on to this providential new object of affection, will do anything to keep him helplessly there.

From the very beginning, childhood memories create an atmosphere of dread and doom that overwhelms the sisters’ lives, and strongly hint at the nature of the dark secrets that lie beneath respectable appearances. The bond of warped love and violence that connects the two sisters is thicker than it first seems, and as they fight over the younger sibling’s growing independence, then over Carlos, all the terrible acts that connect them are forced to the surface. The bloody ending brings a resolution of sorts, but no liberation, simply a confirmation that it is impossible to escape from the prison built so solidly by unwholesome family ties.

In that claustrophobic hothouse, Macarena Gómez is sensational as Montse, simultaneously pathetic and horrifying, loving and tyrannical, frail and violent, while Nadia de Santiago’s fresh-faced innocence becomes gradually tarnished by fear and truth. It is a hysterical film, saturated with repression, progressively descending into grotesque insanity. There are narrative incoherencies and implausibilities, but what matters here is less the story than the thick, dense, pungent mood. Plunging the audience into a world of brutalisation and oppression, of relationships distorted by abusive power, of impotent victims’ perverted strategies of survival, Shrew’s Nest cannot help but resonate with the painful history of the country. Damningly, it is a world in which the corruptions of the past leave no one is unsullied.

Virginie Sélavy

This review is part of our Sitges 2014 coverage.

Black Coal, Thin Ice

Black Coal Thin Ice
Black Coal, Thin Ice

Format: Cinema

Release date: 5 June 2015

Distributor: Studiocanal

Director: Diao Yinan

Writer: Diao Yinan

Cast: Liao Fan, Gwei Lun Mei, Wang Xuebing

Original title: Bai ri yan huo

China 2014

106 mins

Diao Yinan’s disarming frozen noir begins in 1999 in northern China, where we follow the progress of a package mixed in with a coal delivery to a plant, where it is discovered to be a severed hand. Several other body parts are found in other coal shipments, and recently divorced mess-of-a-cop Zhang (Liao Fan) is part of a team called in to work the case. The investigation has barely started, however, before an attempted arrest at a beauty salon turns into an unholy clusterfuck that results in Zhang taking a bullet and losing his place on the force. In 2004 we find him a drunken wreck with a gig as security guard at a coal factory, when a chance encounter with an old colleague leads to his becoming entangled with the case again. With nothing else in his life to cling to, he quickly becomes obsessed, both with the investigation, and with the widow (Gwei Lun Mei) around whom it all seems to revolve…

While all the ingredients for a standard policer are present and correct, and plot wise, there’s nothing new here, Diao seems to take great delight in taking things apart and making them strange; it’s slow burning and snowbound and largely music-free. There’s an absence of Hollywood glamour, and everyone and everything looks a bit shabby and worn down. His femme fatale is skinny and passive and taciturn, unable to stop the unwelcome attentions of her boss at her unrewarding dry cleaning job. Our hero rides a crappy scooter after having his bike nicked. Following a police interview, a witness turns the corner of her residential block to find a horse in the corridor, in a typical scene that doesn’t advance the story much, but suggests a dysfunctional world of absurdity and neglect.

Visually, the film is extraordinary: the camera continually does unexpected things, the framing is unconventional, fights and shocking moments disappear off camera or appear in deadpan medium shots. The passage of time from 1999 to 2004 is accomplished in one majestic take, as we ride with Zhang’s car through a motorway tunnel to find him sprawled drunkenly on the other side. There’s a magically odd skating sequence where Zhang pursues the widow as she glides, impossibly smoothly, into the darkness, a Strauss waltz playing over Tannoy speakers. The days are harsh white, the nights taken over by yellow sodium and coloured neon.

All of this visual invention does not alter the conventional heart that beats at the centre of the narrative. There’s a hard-drinking cop, a woman who spells trouble, a killer to chase and a mystery to solve. But it does make Black Coal, Thin Ice engaging, and raises it a cut above the rest. There’s a mood of melancholy underlying the piece, a sense that justice may well be served, but love will be crushed along the way. Everybody seems to be lonely and lost and hurting, and this atmosphere, and the film’s off-kilter focus, make it linger in the memory.

Mark Stafford

This review is part of our LFF 2014 coverage.

Hard to Be a God

Hard to be a God
Hard to Be a God

Format: Cinema

Release date: 7 August 2015

DVD/Blu-ray release date: 14 September 2015

Distributor: Arrow Films

Director: Aleksei German

Writers: Aleksei German, Svetlana Karmalita

Based on the novel by: Arkadiy Strugatskiy, Boris Strugatskiy

Cast: Leonid Yarmolnik, Dmitriy Vladimirov, Laura Lauri

Original title: Trudno byt bogom

Russia 2013

170 mins

Last month, the Etrange Festival presented Aleksei German’s sixth and last film, Hard to Be a God, an artistic testament on several accounts. It took the director nearly 15 years to complete: after releasing Khrustalyov, My Car in 1998, German spent seven years shooting in the Czech Republic, with additional interior scenes shot in Moscow, followed by six years of editing. He literally put his life into the film, as he died in February 2013 during the last stage of the editing, which was then completed by his son Aleksei Junior. But Hard to Be a God is more than just his final film: German had been thinking about adapting Arkadiy and Boris Strugatskiy’s successful novel virtually from the moment it was published in 1964, coming up with a first script as early as 1968, which failed to pass the filter of Soviet censorship. One can easily imagine how familiar an echo the persecution of all intellectuals in the fictional Kingdom of Arkanar might have sounded in the late 1960s when, after a relative thaw during Khrushchev’s era, Brezhnev restored the stranglehold on information and academia with new Stalin-like trials of writers in 1966.

The book tells the story of scientists supervising a planet whose evolution has reached the stage of the Dark Ages, but where the Renaissance has not happened, as we are told at the beginning of the film. All those who can read and write are persecuted and executed, and Don Rumata, the visiting observer who is forbidden to interfere, suffers because of his despair and helplessness at improving their civilisation.
In contrast to the previous adaptation of the novel by Peter Fleischmann, Es ist nicht leicht ein Gott zu sein in 1989 (which German may have seen, as Andrei Boltnev, who played the titular character in German’s 1984 My Friend Ivan Lapshin, also played Budach in Fleischmann’s film), German chose to reduce the science fiction plot to almost imperceptible hints. This invites comparison with Andrei Tarkovsky’s adaptation of another of the Strugatskiys’ novels, Stalker (1979), not so much because of the common source, but rather because both directors opted for a minimalistic treatment of the science fiction genre.

German’s cinematographic language, which he had so masterfully perfected in Khrustalyov, My Car, combines black and white wide shots reminiscent of Grigori Kozintsev’s Shakespeare films (which is not surprising, as German had studied with him) and the painstakingly precise construction of long shots and relentless camera movements already used in his previous films – which may also have influenced Aleksandr Sokurov’s Faustus (2011). The images are conjured up to present the civilisation of Arkanar in as odd and uncanny a way as possible, leaving the spectator with the difficult task of interpreting the puzzling actions that unfold on the screen. The first two shots of the film set a stark contrast: the black and white beauty of a mountain village overhanging a snow-covered lake, worthy of a Brueghel winter landscape, is immediately followed by the filthiness of the streets where two characters get happily splashed with excrement by a man using his first floor window as a latrine. Throughout the film the muddy, rainy and dirty moistness of the urban environment is echoed in the social conventions of spitting, sneezing, belching and farting, added to the bleeding, gutting and poisoning of brutish violence. Often felt as salutary for the spectator, the choice of black and white, or rather infinite shades of grey, provides a visual echo of the colour and meanness of Don Reba’s guards and ministers, who persecute all forms of culture. This disquieting atmosphere has a hypnotic effect, endlessly dragging the spectator through closed, stifling, claustrophobic indoor spaces, crowded with a cornucopia of objects scattered across rooms and hanging from ceilings, which the protagonists spend their time avoiding bumping into, while minor characters do all they can to divert attention from the main story, even making signs to the camera.

In the novel the real experiment is not observing the barbarians’ evolution, but determining whether the evolved scientists from Planet Earth are likely to regress to a state ruled by emotions. Unsurprisingly, the film’s climax – Don Rumata’s bloody intervention – is reduced to one unique killing, the rest being relegated to an ellipsis, which is probably why German renounced the alternative title of History of the Arkanar Massacre. Rumata’s failing is inscribed into the film’s framing structure: it opens and closes on a snowy landscape, but the innocence of the initial lake is contrasted with another snow-covered countryside where death is omnipresent. A further framing element is the Duke-Ellington-like jazz music played by Don Rumata on an odd and anachronistic clarinet, the only tangible sign of his modernity, rejected by Rumata’s slaves plugging up their ears, and the last words of the film, a little girl complaining that the music makes her retch. But the spectators will know better: this three-hour baroque and nauseous journey through mankind’s worst nightmares is a lesson in cinema and humanity that one is not likely to forget.

This review was first published as part of our Etrange Festival 2014 coverage.

Pierre Kapitaniak

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