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The New York Ripper

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The New York Ripper

Format: Blu-ray

Release date: 27 June 2011

Distributor: Shameless Entertainment

Director: Lucio Fulci

Writers: Lucio Fulci, Gianfranco Clerici, Vincenzo Mannino, Dardano Sacchetti

Original title: Lo squartatore di New York

Cast: Jack Hedley, Almanta Keller, Howard Ross

Italy 1982

91 mins

‘To paraphrase Verlaine, in subtlety lies the essence of things.’
‘Bullshit.’
(Dialogue from The New York Ripper)

With the media frenzy around the banning of The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence (2011), it’s more illuminating than usual to watch Lucio Fulci’s notorious The New York Ripper (1982), a film that was not only banned in the UK, but had its review print escorted back to the airport by police, lest it infect the populace.

As hysterical as then chief censor James Ferman’s reaction might seem, there is plenty in the movie to provoke offence, even with a few seconds of nipple-razoring still redacted from Shameless Screen Entertainment’s new Blu-ray. Even so, disliking the film as much as I did (a response the film seems to welcome), I’m still glad Fulci became a filmmaker rather than pursuing the career in medicine he studied for: his keen interest in human suffering and mutilation and his apparent disdain for humanity would seem ill-suited for healthcare.

The movie itself is a basic giallo, divided between some hurried, permit-free location filming in the Big Apple and more careful studio interiors, allowing Fulci to take his time with the murder set-pieces that are the film’s raison d’ê. These feature a few striking uses of colour and framing, and Fulci pans, zooms and tracks, sometimes at the same time, to create a giddy momentum and instability. He also pulls off one the weirdest and ghastliest shots in the whole genre: since Fulci’s killer, like the real-life Yorkshire Ripper, who had only just been imprisoned when the film was released, mutilates his victim’s genitals, Fulci films a broken bottle thrusting into the camera lens, from the point of view of the victim’s vagina. As bad-taste extremes go, this easily trumps the shot in Jaws 3 where we see a shark eating its human prey, filmed from inside the shark’s mouth, in 3D.

The problem isn’t that the film includes numerous scenes of women being violently abused: the media attest that such cases do occur, and are therefore suitable for artistic treatment. The issue is the film’s gleeful cynicism in serving up such scenes as entertainment, and the slapdash and heartless way it goes about this.

Right at the start, after a dog retrieves a human hand from a bush, echoing Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, and a girl is knifed to death in a car on the Staten Island Ferry (the owner of the car disappears, never to claim his vehicle, but he never becomes a suspect), the unlikely NYC detective played by Brit thesp Jack Hedley (looking world-weary, as well he might) chats with the pathologist who suggests that the two crimes are related. Hedley wanders to the front of the station house, where he meets his director, Fulci himself, playing a police chief, who berates him for telling the press there’s a serial killer on the prowl. Let me stress: this is a continuous sequence. Hedley has just been told about the crimes being related, and has had no time to talk to anybody. If that isn’t a good enough example of the film’s reckless construction, how about the fact that the medical examiner tells him, from a blood sample, that the killer is a young man who’s lived in New York all his life.

Remember, Fulci studied medicine.

Still, in an impassioned and intelligent essay culled from his book Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci and included with the disc, Stephen Thrower makes a convincing case for the film as a brutal vision of hell and a nihilistic assault upon its audience, while in the video extras, the director’s daughter explains that her father was a very nice man if you knew him, both of which statements I accept. It’s not so easy to guess what the director was driving at by giving his antagonist the hysterical quacking voice of Donald Duck, other than attempting to drag even the most seemingly innocuous aspects of Western civilisation into the sewer.

What doesn’t convince about the film, for me, is its equation of sexual decadence with homicidal murder. The hilarious production of a cock-shaped pipe as evidence of a minor character’s depravity is the purest example of this silliness: why should we be appalled that he likes to puff his tobacco fumes through a ceramic Johnson? By showing the forensic profiler covertly buying a gay wank mag, Fulci thinks he’s making a point about general hypocrisy and creeping perversion, but Thrower is stretching things too far when he asks ‘if a psychoanalyst is ashamed of his sexuality, what sort of help can he offer to anyone else?’ Firstly, the guy is a lecturer rather than a therapist, and secondly, his personal problems, if we even see them as such, needn’t invalidate his insights.

That’s where the film seems ultimately rather silly, in its vile way: fair enough if Fulci wants to lambast the decline of modern civilisation, but he can’t make his points stick if he doesn’t himself possess enough perspective to see the very real difference between cock-pipes and jazz-mags on the one hand, and a razor to the eyeball and a broken bottle to the crotch on the other. No slippery slope exists from one to the other.

David Cairns

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Cutter’s Way

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Cutter's Way

Format: Cinema

Release date: 24 June 2011

Venues: Key cities

Distributor: Park Circus

Director: Ivan Passer

Writer: Jeffrey Alan Fiskin

Based on the novel by: Newton Thornburg

Cast: Jeff Bridges, John Heard, Lisa Eichhorn, Ann Dusenberry, Nina Van Pallandt

USA 1981

105 mins

Cutter’s Way emerged at the wrong time, a 70s film in 1981, after Heaven’s Gate, during the death rattle of the ‘Hollywood brats’ era. We were now in Reagan’s America, where odd, ambiguous little films that suggested dark truths about the US of A would become increasingly unwelcome. Its titular character was the wrong kind of Vietnam veteran, a painful reminder of the actual war, alcoholic and bitter and missing a couple of limbs, just before Stallone told us that Vietnam was a brutal wonderland where men went to gain magic powers. In the year before Raiders of the Lost Ark, here was a film suggesting that heroism is a murky business where ordinary people end up paying the highest price. Like I said, the wrong time.

Cutter’s Way is a kind of sunset noir, a dark tale bathed in a golden West Coast glow. Santa Barbara is a weathered, frazzled, beautiful town of marinas, polo matches and shabby tourist tat. Cutter, Bone and Mo are clearly at the shabbier end of the social scale, but are able to mingle with the smart set and play with their toys through business and family connections. Jeff Bridges plays ‘golden boy’ Bone, a half-arsed gigolo and yacht salesman hired to look good on deck. John Heard is his friend, the caustic, broken Cutter. Lisa Eichhorn plays Mo, Cutter’s long-suffering lady, fending off Bone’s attentions while Cutter’s out causing trouble.

One rainy night during fiesta Bone sees, and interrupts, what turns out to be the dumping of a body, but does not realise it at the time. He tells the police what he’s witnessed when his car puts him at the scene, after a 17-year-old girl has been found in the trash, and her sister Valerie (Anne Dusenberry) has turned up seeking justice. Typically, Bone just wants to walk away, but Cutter won’t let him, especially after Bone fingers tycoon and Time magazine cover star JJ Cord as the man responsible. Cutter sees personified in Cord all the rich bastards who start the wars poor men fight, whose ‘ass is never on the line’, the kind that lost him an arm, a leg and an eye, and he seizes upon the chance to finally make one of them pay like a man possessed, and with Valerie and the reluctant Bone alongside, a plan is put into action… A plan that just a few notes of Jack Nitzsche’s plaintive, wobbling score will suggest is not going to go well…

Cutter, Bone and Mo are three people who have been together too long and know each other too well. Heard, Bridges and Eichhorn work beautifully together creating an instantly credible chemistry, a three-way relationship that’s tender and complex and disastrous, delivered through Jeffrey Allen Fiskin’s cutting dialogue, dripping with irony and bar room wit. ‘I remember food, people had to eat it during Prohibition,’ Cutter says when Mo brings home groceries instead of booze in another doomed attempt to turn their life around. Heard gets the flashy part, and the lion’s share of great lines, in a dream role, an erudite, charming and abrasive man in a wreck of a body, who still somehow, under all the crap, believes in bravery and heroism and, possibly, America. Quoting Shakespeare and Melville, self-righteously castigating the morality of those around him, but not above leching after Valerie, or using his war wounds to escape arrest after drunkenly trashing a neighbour’s car. Bridges has harder work as a man uncomfortably aware of his many moral failings, but incapable of making the tough decisions that might destroy his easy world. And Lisa Eichhorn as Mo delivers an absolute heartbreaker of a performance as a smart woman who clearly deserves better than this, but is wedded to a train wreck and just can’t go.

Passer’s film makes the personal political. What kind of world is this where the pursuit of justice is left to a sodden mess like Cutter? What kind of goddamn white knight is this? Everything is blurred, we are never sure what exactly Bone saw that night. We are not sure Cutter’s campaign is righteous, whether Cord is a monster, or that the cost will be worth it. For much of the running time we find ourselves nervously siding with Bone: isn’t it better to drop all this hero crap, pretend it’s none of our business and walk away? Cutter’s Way is not perfect: the ending feels abrupt and too blunt, Valerie’s problematic character simply disappears from the narrative before the last reel. But I don’t care. Watching it for the nth time in a screening room, I found myself laughing and crying all over again. Nittzsche’s music (a cousin to his Cuckoo’s Nest score) is wonderful, a woozy commentary on sadness. The photography is suntanned and hazy. But I mainly love the film because I know and love these people, and don’t want bad things to happen to them though I know it must.

It’s 2011 now, 30 years on. Eichhorn moved into quality TV for both the US and UK, Bridges is, in all senses, the Dude, and John Heard is probably best known as the dad in the Home Alone films. Czech émigré Passer continued his wayward career without ever producing anything quite like Cutter again. It’s a one-off, a largely overlooked shining gem. Do yourself a favour.

Mark Stafford

Check it out, Cinema releases

Viva Riva!

Viva Riva!

Format: Cinema

Release date: 24 June 2011

Venues: Key cities

Distributor: Metrodome

Director: Djo Tunda wa Munga

Writer: Djo Tunda wa Munga

Cast: Patsha Mukuna Bay, Manie Malone, Hoji Fortuna, Diplome Amekindra

Democratic Republic of Congo/France/Belgium 2010

98 mins

Ambitious Riva (Patsha Mukuna Bay) returns to Kinshasa with a truck full of stolen gasoline in the middle of a drastic fuel shortage, intent on making money and becoming a player in his old home town. On his first night out, he starts to hit on Nora (Manie Malone) and makes an enemy of her boyfriend, local kingpin Azor (Diplome Amekindra). Meanwhile, nasty piece of work Cesar (Hoji Fortuna), the Angolan gangster whom Riva ripped off, has arrived in town with two heavies, intent on tracking him down. The stage is set for a series of confrontations in which Riva’s reckless pursuit of cash, status and pleasure puts him and everybody around him in the firing line.

Djo Tunda wa Munga’s Viva Riva! plays, for the most part, like a standard 70s blaxploitation gangster flick. The tough guys, molls, streetwise kids, the brothel keepers, priests and whores all seem to come from some discontinued stock character casting company. The dialogue is all on the nose. The theme, ‘money is like poison, in the end it always kills you’, isn’t soft-sold. And the story is one we’ve seen many times before. The fact that it’s Congolese is what makes Riva interesting; the familiar tale happens against unfamiliar politics, situations and settings. The cops, and any figures of authority, are largely absent, except as bribe-seeking irritants. The priest wants in on the stolen gas. Gangster Azor’s henchmen are washing a fleet of cars that can’t go anywhere, and he’s just as susceptible to sudden power cuts as the rest of his countrymen. The trappings that money gets you here are decidedly unspectacular; rising to the top doesn’t get you very far in Kinshasa, it seems. The casually murderous Cesar, with his loping stride and increasingly shabby white suit, provides a running commentary on what he thinks of the Congo: ‘What a country of niggers’; ‘What a cow pie of a country’; ‘You were better off colonised’.

There is pretty raunchy stuff, with stylised brothel scenes, whores wearing tribal mudmen masks, and an outrageous cunnilingus-through-a-barred-window moment. Everybody seems a few minutes and a couple of drinks away from shagging everybody else. And the sexual politics are intriguing. The female commandante (Marlene Longange), who is enlisted by Cesar to track Riva down, is revealed to be a lesbian with a no-nonsense hooker/informant girlfriend, and is one of the film’s most sympathetic and rounded characters. The mercurial Nora also shows herself to have more going on than your standard moll, fully aware she is making the most of a bad situation, and that the men around her are greedy, violent and short-sighted bastards, one and all.

The film has rough edges and dodgy performances, but also moments of cinematic flair and creative editing. The bits of old-school cheese (Cesar has a sinister musical motif that plays whenever he appears, for God’s sake) have to be weighed against little moments of insight and invention. It’s kind of refreshing, also, to see a film whose cast (Nora aside) probably wouldn’t make it as catwalk models: these are all real people on real streets. Viva Riva! has energy and pace, it’s a pretty creditable attempt at a Congolese The Harder They Come, a blaxploitation Treasure of the Sierra Madre. It’s fun.

Mark Stafford

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Mad Max

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Mad Max

Format: DVD

Release date: 1 June 2006

Distributor: Warner Home Video

Director:George Miller

Writers: Byron Kennedy, James McCausland, George Miller

Cast: Mel Gibson, Joanne Samuel, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Steve Bisley

Australia 1979

89 mins

[SPOILERS]

Cinematic visions of society on the brink of collapse have rarely been as frightening - yet thrillingly visceral - as Mad Max, the pre-apocalyptic Australian action classic that marked the directorial debut of George Miller and demonstrated how cash-strapped genre movies could make a virtue out of threadbare production values. Working in accordance with ‘Ozploitation’ production practices, which stated that actors and stuntmen were cheap but celluloid was expensive, Miller wastes no time in establishing that the Australia of ‘a few years from now’ will not be a safe place; Mad Max opens with motorcycle gang member Nightrider escaping from police custody and attempting to outrun pursuing officers in a stolen patrol car. Miller gives the audience a glimpse of how far he is willing to go to show a society that is rapidly going off the rails by placing a child in the middle of the highway, with the infant almost being run over by the speeding vehicles. With the officers in pursuit being outmanoeuvred by Nightrider, the responsibility of stopping this psychopath rests with Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson), a more capable lawman who uses his considerable skills behind the wheel to end the criminal’s vehicular rampage by causing an explosive crash. Max steps out of his patrol car to survey the burning wreckage, which is both a sign of a mission accomplished and a prophetic warning of what is to come: the Nightrider’s comrades in chaos, led by the villainous Toecutter, are on their way to town, and terrorising innocent bystanders is just their way of warming up for a war against the local law enforcement. However, they may have met their match in Mad Max.

Even though Max deals with such speed freaks in a calmly decisive manner, his psyche is being ripped apart; at home, he is a loving family man, but when patrolling the road, he is as merciless as the maniacs he takes down. Confiding in his wife, Max admits, ‘I’m scared. It’s that rat circus out there. I’m beginning to enjoy it. Any longer out on that road and I’m one of them, a terminal psychotic, except that I’ve got this bronze badge that says that I’m one of the good guys’. Although civilisation is collapsing, Max manages to keep his cool and it is instead his partner Goose who is first to snap; the infuriated Goose beats up gang member and rapist Johnny ‘The Boy’ Boyle when the perpetrator is released without charge as all witnesses are too scared to testify. Max restrains Goose and stands by a justice system that is insufficient in a world gone wrong, but realises that his personal and professional responsibilities are out of balance when his partner is burnt to death in a revenge attack. Taking an extended family vacation at a remote farm, Max is followed by Toecutter’s gang, who run down his wife and son; Max pulls his uniform back on and takes to the road in a super-charged pursuit vehicle to settle the score. This quest for vengeance effectively represents the end of any social order, and the method that Max uses to kill Johnny - handcuffing him to a wrecked vehicle and setting a fuse - suggests that he is now almost as unhinged as Toecutter. The hero has succumbed to the sadism of the ‘rat circus’.

Produced for just AUD$400,000, Mad Max exhibits a crude efficiency that holds up remarkably well in the age of CGI-enhancement. Mad Max 2 (1981) is often cited as a rare example of a sequel that is superior to the original, and Miller’s follow-up is certainly a fine exercise in narrative economy. However, the post-apocalyptic landscape presented by the second film is now overly familiar from countless straight-to-video imitations that pass off cheap desert locations as post-nuclear wastelands. Because of its budgetary shortcomings, Mad Max remains frighteningly credible, with its sparsely populated small towns, desolate highways and an almost abandoned Hall of Justice where law enforcers half-heartedly listen to the police radio and fail to prosecute the guilty. The film was inspired by the 1973 oil crisis, which had Australian motorists committing acts of violence in order to fill their petrol tanks, with screenwriters Miller, Byron Kennedy and James McCausland speculating on what society would be like several years down the line if the fuel situation were to continue; they envisioned a world where only savages and scavengers survive, a point made in a not-so-subtle manner when Miller pans up to a buzzard overlooking the activities of Toecutter’s gang. The raw intensity of the attack sequences - a couple being chased, Max’s wife running for her life with her son in her arms - makes Mad Max the action genre equivalent of Tobe Hooper’s relentless shocker The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), with distressing sounds (screaming, smashing metal, the revving of engines) being used to keep the audience on edge in-between the rough-and-ready bursts of road rage. Brilliantly realised with limited resources, Mad Max remains an unrivalled example of future shock.

John Berra

Check it out, Cinema releases

Stake Land

Stake Land

Format: Cinema

Release date: 17 June 2011

Venues: Key cities

Distributor: Metrodome

Director: Jim Mickle

Writers:Nick Damici and Jim Mickle

Cast: Nick Damici, Connor Paolo, Kelly McGillis

USA 2010

98 mins

Jim Mickle’s Stake Land (2011) is a pretty good watch, with rousing action scenes where locals turned vampires tear up rural America, although this is hindered by some unneeded frills. The film is set in apocalyptic America (what has caused this is unexplained). Towns and cities are dysfunctional and many are deserted. Various groups jostle for position: an extremist Christian cult, disenfranchised ‘simple folk’ searching for a new frontier and a pack of blood-guzzling vampires, each aiming for supremacy.

The story follows the travels of vampire stalker Mister (Nick Damici, Mulberry Street, World Trade Center) and orphaned Martin (Connor Paolo, Gossip Girl), picked up by Mister as an apprentice/vampire killer pal (I hope named after George Romero’s awkward be-fanged teenager). They are trying to find the promised land, a mysterious place called New Eden.

Stake Land is part buddy movie, part road movie, part sci-fi, part social commentary, part Western. Watching the film is like flicking through cable channels: Mad Max follows Karate Kid follows The Champ, all with teeth. There is a lot going on and it’s impressive that the filmmakers manage to cover so much film territory. But it feels a bit like an attempt to cover their bases and have something for everyone: slowed-down glamorous sections where the leading actors look cool, set to a melancholic soundtrack, are next to gripping and noisy action scenes of blood lust and staking (the best part of the film for me), and sensitive bonding scenes between the characters as they travel through a stunning landscape. All this set to music that is so unnecessary it feels like being smothered with a pillow of emotional impact.

The subtext of the film seems to suggest that in a new era of sluggish economies and ecological disaster only the fittest will survive, and those commonly portrayed as a drain on resources and not ‘pulling their weight’ are cast out. Indeed, many sequences are reminiscent of media-fetishised disasters. Vampire-struck towns with deserted houses, shops and people scavenging for food reminded me of images of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina or images of terrorist attacks. The vampire format has been used before to flesh out a particular time’s anxieties (disease, addiction, etc), and here it’s a fear of terrorism. With Stake Land, we’re made more aware than ever of a ‘watch your back’ generation of Americans desperately in need of a bit of meditation and some Ritalin.

Some of these references to contemporary society work well. One of the film’s strengths is the way familiar American suburban tropes are adjusted to fit this apocalyptic vamp landscape. The scenes where these mythical beings are seen as roadkill for ‘Nam-styled Mister, or where an infected Santa Claus awaits his impending doom in a cul-de-sac, dripping with tar-like blood, are high points. On the other hand, the relationships between the characters are not allowed to fully develop, so that the audience can neither genuinely root for them, nor really despise them. Damici’s character has some great moments and his cool lines give the film some laughs, but part of the narrative draw is dropped too early. Four of the people that Mister and Martin befriend are promptly killed off, notably an old woman and a black man, and rather predictably, it’s the young white couple who survive long enough to try and reach the promised land in the end.

Nicola Woodham

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L’&#226ge d’or

L'âge d'or

Format: Dual Format: Blu-ray + DVD

Release date: 30 May 2011

Distributor: BFI

Director:Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí

Writers: Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí

Original title: Lásky jedné plavovlásky

Cast: Gaston Modot, Lya Lys, Caridad de Laberdesque

France/Spain 1930

63 mins

The BFI’s new Blu-ray release of Luis Buñuel’s L’âge d’or (1930) provides a comprehensive introduction to surrealist cinema. In addition to the 50-minute movie, the DVD includes Luis Buñuel’s shorter début film, Un chien andalou (1929), another collaboration with Salvador Dalí. These two titles are the most famous surrealist films ever made, but L’âge d’or was the only one that completely satisfied surrealist leader André Breton.

The DVD contains three other special features: a Spanish-produced documentary on Buñuel, a voice-over commentary on selected clips from L’âge d’or by Robert Short, and an introduction to surrealist cinema, also by Short, in the form of a talking-head lecture. The Spanish documentary gives a chronological survey of Buñuel’s life and career, and is enlivened by the variety of its contributors: it is composed entirely of anecdotes from the director’s friends, family and collaborators, with a few clips and quotations from the great man himself. While entertaining, the stories are also useful, as they shed light on the themes that dominate Buñuel’s entire oeuvre. Although many of the interviewees are recognisable from Buñuel’s films (Michel Piccoli and Angela Molina, for example), the documentary strangely fails to identify the contributors with the usual on-screen titles. The material from Robert Short suffers by comparison with this engaging documentary. Short’s contribution is informative, certainly: he assumes zero knowledge about surrealist cinema on the part of the audience, and provides all of the necessary material for a basic understanding of its history. He also offers relevant background details to the two films as well as some helpful interpretations. Still, Short’s style of expression is ill-suited to reading aloud and would have been far more enjoyable as liner notes.

L’âge d’or still holds an astonishing capacity to shock. The film’s male lead, Gaston Modot, kicks a puppy, slaps his prospective mother-in-law and knocks over a blind man. Co-star Lya Lys is introduced rolling in the mud with Modot, screeching with erotic pleasure; subsequently, she appears sitting on the toilet, sucking suggestively on the toe of a statue and reclining on a couch in post-masturbatory bliss. The film implies that society’s repressive attitude towards sex results in productive drives being sublimated into cruel and violent acts. The film also criticises the bourgeois for their selfishness: they are outraged by relatively minor affronts to people of their own class, but indifferent to true tragedies that befall their servants. While Un chien andalou, with its infamous eyeball-slicing sequence, is arguably the better-known of the two films, L’âge d’or succeeds where the surrealists felt that Un chien andalou failed. While the first movie was received with enthusiasm by the public, who didn’t bother trying to understand its dream-like images and missed its intended ‘call to murder’, L’âge d’or was banned for provoking far-right riots. The film’s attack on Dieu, famille, patrie had not been missed, and the surrealists basked in the ensuing scandal.

Alison Frank

Check it out, Cinema releases

Cr&#237a Cuervos

Cria Cuervos

Format: Cinema

Release date: 10 June 2011

Venues: Key cities

Distributor: BFI

Director: Carlos Saura

Writer: Carlos Saura

Cast: Ana Torrent, Geraldine Chaplin, Mónica Randall, Florinda Chico

Spain 1975

110 mins

One of the great Spanish directors, Carlos Saura has not had the attention he deserves in the UK, perhaps because his recent output is not on a par with his 70s work. It is all the more welcome then that as part of their season on Spanish cinema after Franco, the BFI are screening Saura’s 1975 masterpiece, Cría Cuervos, a haunting reflection on memory, loss, history and transmission.

Shot in the summer of 1975 as General Franco lay dying, Cría Cuervos perfectly captures a moment of transition: that of a child into an adult, of life into death, and of a dictatorship into an unknown future. Focusing on eight-year-old Ana over the course of a summer after the death of her father, a high-ranking officer, the film is an achingly personal examination of the past that is also obliquely, but no less powerfully, political.

Cría Cuervos is released in the UK as a BFI Dual Format (DVD/Blu-ray) edition on 27 May 2013.

The film starts as Ana, awake at night, listens to whispers of lovemaking in her father’s room before seeing his married mistress leave hurriedly, dishevelled and half-dressed. Ana walks into the bedroom to find her father dead. She strokes his hair and takes the empty glass by his bedside away to wash it in the kitchen, a gesture we will only later understand. In that first scene, sex and death are inextricably linked, one a secret, the other a mystery, and it is this dark matter at the heart of her parents’ lives that Ana will probe throughout the film.

A few scenes later, the cold, rigid Aunt Paulina, now looking after Ana and her sisters, instructs them to kiss their father’s corpse in front of both his military colleagues and the mistress, who is there with her husband. But Ana refuses to perform the expected ritual; it’s her first act of resistance against her aunt’s determination to keep up appearances and maintain established social rules. Ana’s gesture, in this room lined by officers in uniform, is of course highly resonant.

Ana, the observer of adult life, unblinkingly lays her intensely serious eyes on all around her, her limpid, dark gaze in itself almost a reproach for the compromises and betrayals of adulthood. She sees more than she should, but as a child is impotent to alter the course of events - although she thinks she can, having been led by her mother’s innocuous lie to believe that she is in possession of the deadliest poison in the world. Unlike her sisters, the older Irene and the younger Maite, she is in between the adult and the child worlds, maybe because of the strength of the connection between her and her beloved mother.

Her mother appears early on, walking in as Ana washes her father’s glass in the kitchen, later brushing her daughter’s hair before the funeral. It is only later that we realise she is dead, and her playful, tender presence in those scenes makes her actual absence and Ana’s longing for her even more poignant. The film fluidly moves between reality and fantasy, past and present, never delineating them clearly, suggesting they all have the same texture in Ana’s mind and are part of the same continuum.

Adding to the narrative complexity, the adult Ana comments on her past in direct addresses to the camera. We don’t know what her adult life is like, but she talks in a confessional way, trying to piece together the events of her childhood. She is played by Geraldine Chaplin, who also plays her mother, a double role that emphasises the echo between past and present, and the film’s disquieting intimation that history will repeat itself, that the children will reiterate what their parents have passed on to them. This is evoked in the title of the film, a reference to a Spanish proverb meaning ‘raise ravens and they’ll pluck out your eyes’. Tellingly, Ana’s Francoist father bequeaths her his gun.

The large, gloomy house in which they live, and that is the setting for most of the film, is like a last vestige of the past in the middle of encroaching modern life, busy Madrid traffic, advertising billboards and loud city life, an enclave that is both a claustrophobic and repressive space of sadness and death, but also a protected bubble for the childhood imagination. Saura is exceptionally good at conveying the feel of the self-contained world of childhood through his depiction of Ana and her games with her sisters, which are often ambiguously funny, as when they dress up as their parents and re-enact an argument, or when Ana makes her sisters play dead. Particularly affecting is the scene in which they dance to Jeanette’s pop hit of the time, ‘Porque te vas?’, whose melancholy lament for a lost lover colours this bittersweet moment.

Saura could not have painted such a vividly authentic portrait of childhood without the phenomenal eight-year-old actress Ana Torrent, whose uncanny seriousness is mesmerising, and small, expressive face deeply moving. How she managed to come across as so artless and sincere, to so profoundly inhabit her character, is unfathomable. Two years earlier, Torrent had played a similar role in Victor Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive, another film that is as richly evocative of the world of childhood and as indirectly political as Cría Cuervos.

Despite the gloom, there is a real warmth to the film, in the character of the kindly, earthly maid Rosa, and in the scenes of Ana with her sisters or her grandmother. And even though Ana’s childhood is dominated by sorrow, there is a certain feeling of nostalgia. When the film ends with the three girls leaving the house, passing the advertising billboards to start a new school year, there is the sense that this is the end of an era, and the nostalgic feeling comes not from the fact that it was a happy period, but simply from the fact that that time, the time of childhood, has ended and will never come back.

Virginie Sélavy

Check it out, Home entertainment, TV series

Treme: The Complete First Season

Treme

Format: DVD + Blu-ray

Release date: 30 May 2011

Distributor: HBO Home Entertainment

Directors: Agnieszka Holland, Simon Cellan Jones, Anthony Hemingway

Creators: David Simon, Eric Overmyer

Writers: David Simon, Eric Overmyer, David Mills, Tom Piazza

Cast: Steve Zahn, Kim Dickens, Clarke Peters, Wendell Pierce, John Goodman

USA 2010

4 disc set (10 episodes)

Having spent the best part of two decades creating cop shows - albeit two of the best ever (Homicide: Life on the Streets and The Wire) - David Simon seems to have found himself with something close to a carte blanche as to what to make next. Avoiding self-indulgence, he used this situation to tackle some of America’s most traumatic and controversial moments of recent years. Thus Generation Kill (2008) and Treme (2010-11) depict the ‘War on Terror’ and Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath respectively. These intelligent realistic dramas are shows that needed a bankable name behind them, and in television (quality television at least) the writer/creator is the name above the title - the star. Of course the actors must be outstanding, and Simon provides us with a great ensemble cast including New Orleans natives John Goodman and Wendell Pierce (The Wire‘s Bunk) and many non-professional local actors such as Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, who was so memorable in Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke. But it was the guaranteed quality of Simon’s writing team that got these projects green-lighted.

Treme is an area in New Orleans right by the French Quarter. Largely populated by African-Americans, it is undoubtedly of great cultural importance, containing Congo Square, the birth-place of that great American art form, jazz. As my pre-Katrina tourist guide claims, ‘there aren’t many reasons to wander into the Treme’, and certainly not after dark, but compared to The Wire‘s Baltimore housing projects the Treme depicted here is something short of a fallen Utopia. Despite the mould, crumbling houses and missing neighbours the sense of community is a thing to behold. And of course, the great authentic New Orleans music is everywhere - played by locals for the locals away from the Bourbon Street tourist traps and ‘titty-bars’.

The series opens with the first ‘second line’ (marching brass band) parade since the storm. It might not be Mardi Gras but these smaller parades are an almost weekly event in New Orleans. It illustrates how important the music is to the people, who randomly join in the parade as it marches to its conclusion at a local bar. At a time when many Americans were asking whether the city was even worth rebuilding, this depiction shows why people love New Orleans and why it is worth preserving. It certainly appears to be a city unlike any other in America - there are still the highways cutting through the city centre, and I’m sure fast food chains (although we don’t see them), but even the failing Tower Records store has an arrangement with local musicians. It is also a city with a real sense of its own cuisine beyond a differently shaped pizza or local brand of frankfurter.

Where The Wire attempted to contextualise the police procedural - with each season focusing on schools, city politics, the press, etc. - Treme goes even further, to the point where the background takes the lead. This loosely connected bunch of characters represent the different aspects of New Orleans culture - a jazz trombonist (Pierce), a Creole/Cajun-food chef (Kim Dickens), a writer and lecturer (Goodman), a stoner DJ (Steve Zahn) and Clarke Peters (The Wire‘s Lester Freamon) as the chief of a tribe of Mardi Gras Indians. Much of the culture is merely shown with little direct explanation - for instance, who are the people organising and paying for the ‘second line parade’? And the curious world of the Mardi Gras Indians - an African-American subculture that involves dressing up in the most elaborate native American costumes - is left in part a mystery.

One of the great things about HBO television shows has been the space allowed for both plot and character development that the 90-minute cinema release can never hope to equal, and this is certainly the case here. The plots largely focus on rebuilding and attempts to return to some pre-Katrina normality - cleaning up homes, repairing roofs, trying to find a job or a gig, saving a business. There is no overall story arc to encompass these fragments - each story works its own way towards its own conclusion.

There is also room for some blatant political comments with John Goodman’s character’s interviews and YouTube rants. He explains how the flood was caused by negligent work and poor maintenance of the levees (‘this is a man-made catastrophe, not a natural disaster’). George W. Bush’s decision to view the disaster from the window of Airforce 1 flying overhead is ridiculed in Zahn’s musical satire (‘Shame on you Dubya’). The frustration with the federal government’s response can be seen everywhere - ‘Buy us back Chirac,’ asks one carnival float of French-costumed New Orleanians.

But taking up even more screen time is the music. The plot takes a back seat while we watch yet another great musical performance. From traditional to modern jazz from blues to rhythm and blues - real musicians such as The Rebirth Brass Band, Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint (who recreate their post-Katrina New Orleans recording sessions), Dr John and Steve Earl all have cameos. As an English reporter suggests, New Orleans music may have lost some of its international importance, but locally it is still the beating heart of the city.

The series has flaws but pretty minor ones. The dialogue can be difficult to follow - peppered with New Orleans accents, jazz musician in-jokes and obscure references - but at least the characters are not speaking in the military acronyms of Generation Kill. At times the writing is too good: there are too many good lines, too many profound statements for it to be truly realistic and authentic. And there seems to be just too much integrity in the main characters. But the meandering pace is perfectly suited to the subject matter, and the moments of high emotion and drama are beautifully handled with great understatement.

Free from the need to sneak good writing into a cop show formula (Homicide), Simon delivers another of his epic Tolstoyan depictions of intensely personal stories and their socio-economic and cultural milieu. The Wire is widely recognised as one of the all-time great TV shows and with a few more seasons at this standard Treme could equal this status - as long as you like jazz.

Paul Huckerby

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Cross of Iron

Cross of Iron

Format: Blu-ray

Release date: 6 June 2011

Distributor: Optimum Releasing

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Writers: Julius J. Epstein, Walter Kelley, James Hamilton

Based on the novel The Willing Flesh by: Willi Heinrich

Cast: James Coburn, Maximilian Schell, James Mason

UK/West Germany 1977

127 mins

‘God is a sadist… but he probably doesn’t even know it.’

For the purposes of Cross of Iron (1977), God is Sam Peckinpah, and the victims of his bloody vengeance are the German and Russian soldiers dragged through the mud in this impressively grim panoply of horrors. Misty Yugoslavian locations serve as the Eastern front, and a mixed pack of American, British and German actors play German soldiers on the slow, confused retreat from the Soviet Union.

Julius (Casablanca) Epstein’s script treads lightly around politics: there’s only one dedicated Nazi in the film, the sinister Zoll, the rest being a disillusioned bunch of pragmatic soldiers and one fanatic, but he’s a Prussian aristocrat intent on military glory, rather than a typical representative of the regime. As played by Maximilian Schell, he’s both the film’s main antagonist, and its principal source of comic relief: Schell’s witty performance stresses the character’s preening narcissism, incompetence and innate cowardice (his greatest fear: being found out and exposed).

Against this absurd madman, the film poses James Coburn as Steiner, initially presented as a noble and relatively humane killer, slowly revealed as a typically conflicted, neurotic Peckinpah hero, addicted to the strife of war, feeding on his hatred of officers, ultimately ineffective.

Coburn plays the role, oddly, with his Oirish accent from Duck You Sucker! (1971), which is mildly distracting at first. But he tamps down his lusty movie-star charisma and gives an impressively bitter, glowering performance. James Mason and Peckinpah regular David Warner provide support.

It’s no surprise that the film features lengthy, manically cut battle sequences at deafening volume, with slow motion deployed energetically for moments of mayhem and destruction. More pleasingly, there’s little of the modern fetishising of military technology. The Russian tanks have a dinosaurian rumble and sway to them, and are quite terrifying, but the filmmaker privileges death-porn over gun-porn. As early as in The Getaway (1972), Bloody Sam’s slo-mo had ceased any pretence to capture the adrenaline surge of death agony, and was celebrating the beauty of exploding hubcaps, paperbacks and banisters, a ballet of destruction that had more in common with the pyrotechnic climax of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) than with the original intent behind the mayhem of The Wild Bunch (1969). So while the script attempts a dissection of the urge to fight, the camera and cutting indulge in an orgiastic celebration of the aesthetic possibilities of large-scale destruction and slaughter. There’s certainly a tension between the two, but it’s not necessarily damaging.

The film, like Peckinpah himself, is nevertheless on the verge of disintegration. The jittery, blinking montage of the battles is carried on into conversation scenes (few of which are devoid of the sound of distant explosions). Like Borges’s mythical Aleph, Peckinpah’s cinema wants to see everything at once, so we restlessly snap from set-up to set-up, with a commendable, neurotic attention to nuances of performance. Time is distended, not just in moments of violence, but in the multiple exchanges of glances punctuating the dialogue.

Then, at the end of Act One, a Russian shell pitches Coburn through a series of random dissolves, like a melting hall of mirrors, and into a combat shock sequence that brilliantly uses Peckinpah’s deranged montage to evoke a disconnected, fractured state of being. Coburn wanders through this disjointed mindfuck with bandaged brow, his intelligent-simian face contorted into a lobotomised monkey glower.

This sense of disintegration anticipates the film’s startling ending, which folds in jauntily singing German schoolchildren, maniacal laughter, a quote from Brecht, and a stutter of freeze-frames to paint a vivid portrait of… what? Peckinpah’s over-indulgence in Slivovitz, a diabolic plum brandy that can remove the top of a human head if used correctly? His coke-frayed nerve-endings finally strained to snapping? The madness of war? The impossibility of making a film about it? Whatever the answer, this is an intense, nail-biting, seedy and mad-eyed movie.

Alongside the garbled but well-meant denunciation of war, Peckinpah’s more retrograde side is in evidence, although more muted than in the wild-man rampages of Straw Dogs and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia: a rapist receives harsh punishment, but Coburn’s men seem on the point of committing sexual assault moments before. The camera leers, hand-held, over a voluptuous female bather. Homosexuals are untrustworthy. Killing is manly - but still terrible.

Optimum’s new Blu-Ray looks beautiful, and comes stuffed with extras. Alas, some over-zealous grading seems to have turned day-for-night scenes into brightly, if coldly lit dawn, making lines like ‘We go in at first light’, play nonsensically. A shame, since John (Witchfinder General) Coquillon’s smoky, glazed cinematography is one of the movie’s principle enticements.

David Cairns