All posts by VirginieSelavy

Check it out, Home entertainment

Rififi

Rififi

Format: Dual Format Blu-ray + DVD

Release date: 9 May 2011

Distributor: Arrow Video

Director: Jules Dassin

Writer: Jules Dassin

Original title: Du rififi chez les hommes

Cast: Jean Servais, Carl Mí¶hner, Robert Manuel, Jules Dassin, Magali Noí«l, Marcel Lupovici

France 1955

122 mins

Since Rififi is excellent and its excellence has been well recognised, critical assessment is probably otiose. Instead let me wonder what kind of film it is. It can be seen as an archetype of the genre now known as the heist movie (in this case, not so much ‘heist gone wrong’ as ‘heist gone right but…’). By many the film will be best remembered for the bravura 28-minute robbery sequence in which not a word is spoken. Stylistically the film seems influenced by a different genre, the American detective noir of the 30s and 40s. Rififi is no policier, however: the man who goes down these mean streets alone is not a detective but a criminal, and the police play only an incidental role. The genre which Rififi ultimately exemplifies is that of the showdown between rival criminals: trouble in the underworld. A close inspiration may have been Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au grisbi, of the previous year.

The question of what the film is about leads to the question of its title. The British and American distributors gave up on translation and simply abbreviated it to Rififi. Slang of a past era is notoriously difficult to translate. Use slang from the same period for your translation and you risk making what was once vigorous and fresh seem quaint. Use more recent slang and the anachronism will jar. A bland English translation of Rififi would be ‘trouble’. Perhaps ‘rumble’ would make clearer the suggestion of conflict. But an extra layer of sexual innuendo is added by Magali Noí«l’s nightclub song about her relish for rififi with her man. So what would have been a good English equivalent? ‘Rough and tumble’? ‘Naughtiness’? Too jokey. If only I could think of some suggestive and cool-sounding phrase meaning ‘Trouble among the Men’ - but I can’t.

If the film has a theme it is something like ‘honour among thieves’. Overworked and scarcely plausible now is the idea that there is something to admire in the honour-based value system that supposedly governs (or more often fails to govern) the criminal world. But it is memorably embodied in the central character Tony ‘le Stephanois’, played by Jean Servais, his features impassive but still somehow expressive of pain and determination, his recurrent cough a sign that his cards are marked. The film is his, with associates and enemies falling to one side or the other as he drives the drama through each new development to its grim but fitting conclusion.

I think the key to Rififi is its vividness: the swiftness of exposition, the tellingness of the dialogue, the immediacy of the character portrayals. Perhaps these are all lessons learned from the economical ways of Hollywood noir, but add to this a more European visual imagination, meticulous care with choreography of the action and framing of shots, and a delight in the Parisian locations and atmosphere (distinctly pre-teenager, pre-Elvis, pre-Gainsbourg). Amazing that Jules Dassin, creator of this masterwork of French cinema, was in fact McCarthy refugee Julius Dassin of Middletown, Connecticut.

Available now in a miraculously sharp print to bring out its deep chiaroscuro aesthetic, Rififi‘s status as a seminal crime film is secure.

Peter Momtchiloff

Check it out, Home entertainment

An Unflinching Eye: The Films of Richard Woolley

Illusive Crime

Format: DVD

Release date: 28 March 2011

Distributor: BFI

Director: Richard Woolley

Titles: Kniephofstrasse (1973), Drinnen und Draussen (1974), Illusive Crime (1976), Telling Tales (1978), Brothers and Sisters (1981), Waiting for Alan (1984), Girl from the South (1988)

UK 1973-1988

450 mins

Maintaining its commitment to preserving the disparate underbelly of our post-war national cinema, the BFI has just released a 4-disc DVD box-set of the all too brief output of Richard Woolley, another auteur that never was.

After studying structuralist aesthetics at the Royal College of Art, Woolley won a scholarship to Berlin in 1973, where he joined a group of ‘undogmatic Marxists’ concerned with the angst of capitalism and the inequalities of sexual politics. A determined avant-gardist, he made a few Godardian shorts and let his spare room to Takahiko Iimura, who he says taught him how to make money from being an artist - make it cheap!

Returning to the UK in the mid-70s, Woolley’s first featurette, Illusive Crime, was part funded by Yorkshire Arts, though its geography is far removed from Emmerdale. Filmed mainly in one location, the narrative develops over 12 revolving shots, with non-sync dialogue and off-screen action. The camera, often static and locked off, observes from a distance. It was shot on Ektachrome reversal stock, and there’s an apology/disclaimer at the front of the film for the slight imperfections and edge fogs on the print available here. Beginning with a long typewriter explanation of the film’s exposition, complete with sneezing and spelling corrections, it’s a voyeuristic exploration of a faceless rural housewife as she is sexually assaulted by the police, who believes her to be guilty of the non-existent event of the title, and dismissed as hysterical by her returning husband.

Telling Tales, Woolley’s first full-length feature, continues his exploration of gender and class politics. A middle-class couple bicker on the verge of divorce, while their servant couple grind their coffee and fetch the bottle openers. Framed through faraway doors, the film suggests that ultimately there’s little difference between both parties, all susceptible to money and greed. With Brechtian deconstruction, colour flashbacks and manifesto texts sometimes delivered direct to camera, it becomes a bleak comedy of manners.

In 1980 Woolley got his ‘proper’ break with Brothers and Sisters, a 35mm film funded by the BFI and inspired by the Yorkshire Ripper murders. A more conventional, realist film with professional actors and a quasi-whodunnit plotline, though retaining Woolley’s fondness for framing through doorways and his recurrent class and feminist themes, it achieved a wider distribution, but ultimately suffered from straddling the line between commercial and art-house. A final film, Girl from the South, followed in 1988, about a poor little rich girl who dreams of Mills & Boon, falling for a poor black boy who loves Elgar.

Strangely, by moving to a cosier and more accessible narrative form, Woolley became exhausted by directing and years of frustrated script development (the 1984 short Waiting for Alan is a reference to the Channel 4 commissioning editor). In the 90s Woolley turned to education, setting up the Northern Film School in Leeds, and then to music, and more recently has published three novels. An interview with Woolley on each disc extra includes an amusing anecdote about his encounter with R.W. Fassbinder. In his moment, Woolley had ranked alongside Peter Greenaway and Terence Davies in the pecking order of that elusive, contradictory category, British Auteur, and this box-set is a tragic reminder of how the UK gatekeepers have always missed the boat when it comes to nurturing a cinema of the left-field.

Robert Chilcott

Check it out, Cinema releases

Deep End

Deep End

Format: Cinema

Release date: 6 May 2011

Venues: Key cities

Distributor: BFI

Director: Jerzy Skolimowski

Writers: Jerzy Skolimowski, Jerzy Gruza, Boleslaw Sulik

Cast: Jane Asher, John Moulder-Brown, Diana Dors

West Germany/UK 1970

90 mins

Deep End is a film driven by and dripping with discomfort, an effect that’s heightened by the 40-year interval between its original release and recent revamp by BFI’s Flipside imprint. The story of Mike, a London teenager working his first job as a public bath attendant, and his sexual obsession with his co-worker Susan, it is morally ambiguous in tone, pitched somewhere between psychosexual thriller and a dark coming-of-age comedy. In that sense it’s quite typical of the era in which it was made: particularly where working-class characters are concerned, the sexual liberation promised by the seismic cultural shifts of the 60s often translated in British film into an atmosphere of acute sexual tension, characterised by anxious promiscuity and voyeurism, casual misogyny played for comic value and a kind of nervous laughter that seems to signify fear more than pleasure. (The merriment generated by Rita Tushingham’s use of the word ‘rape!’ in Richard Lester’s 1965 The Knack… and How to Get It springs to mind, as does weirder fare like David Greene’s 1969 thriller I Start Counting, a claustrophobic murder story that doubles up as a slightly creepy study of suburban schoolgirl Jenny Agutter’s developing sexuality.)

But there is something more self-aware about Deep End. The uncomfortable mood is not just the by-product of its time and our latter-day perspective on it, but also, perhaps, of director Jerzy Skolimovski‘s own slightly distanced perspective on his subject. This might seem at first like a British film, but much of it is shot in Munich, and it’s a UK/German production by a Polish director whose previous credits included the script for Polanski’s sophisticated Knife in the Water. So, immediately, the setting doesn’t feel right; something is off-kilter - and I admit I wasted a good few minutes trying to work out ‘where’ in London the bath scenes were filmed, while knowing somehow they weren’t quite English-looking enough. Certain sequences, such as the film’s dénouement involving bin-bags full of snow and a lost diamond, have a touch of avant-garde European theatre about them, and the use of ‘Mother Sky’ by German band Can on the film’s soundtrack adds to the sense of displacement: instead of the lumpy late-60s grooves often flowed over party scenes of the time, we get Jaki Liebezeit’s metronomic drums and Damo Suzuki’s androgynous Japanese-English vocal. In addition, Skolimowski effects some neat shifts in perspective that feel very deliberate, initially inviting us to bond with his young lead (played with disarming fervour by John Moulder-Brown) and enjoy the initial friendship between him and Susan (an impressive, dispassionate Jane Asher) as they deal with the demands of their unappealing elders, in the form of sexually rapacious customers, Mike’s forlorn parents and the repulsive schoolteacher with whom Susan has an on-off affair. As Mike’s desires get more aggressive and delusional, and Susan attempts to move on and away from her mundane life via her proprietorial mod boyfriend, the viewer is left stranded in a quite nightmarish miasma of frustrated wants and needs, and can only dread the outcome.

Where Deep End really excels and discomfits - and this is one good reason to catch the cinema re-release - is when it homes in on the physicality of everyday life, the weirdness of existing in our bodies and environments. The camera pays forensic attention to both Mike and Susan’s bodies with an unusual equality - lingering as much over John Moulder-Brown’s skinny, downy adolescent limbs as Jane Asher’s slender body. Their natural, young beauty is sharply contrasted with the poverty of their surroundings and attitudes. Aside from the clammy coldness of the pool itself with its mouldy changing rooms and slippery sides and walls in need of repainting, Mike and Susan exist in a world of crap British weather, muddy grey snow, uncomfortable clothes, cheap shampoo and health education posters asking ‘What if a man could get pregnant?’ The brief exterior shots of London offer no escape, showing suburbs still ravaged by Second World War bomb damage, stuffy porno cinemas, overpriced clubs offering a sedated kind of fun, and a bland Soho where Mike meets a maternal prostitute with one leg in a plaster cast.

Of course, much of this is only apparent in retrospect - it’s almost half a century later and we are so used to cleaned-up, non-furtive depictions of bodies and sex and exercise, even when they’re supposed to be gritty and ‘real’, that the grubbiness of the 1960s and 70s comes as a shock. But even if something is the contemporary norm, it can still be commented upon, and Skolimowski’s choice of setting suggests that this is so. The pool itself is laden with meaning, even before you get to any Freudian water/sex interpretations. At the time, a public bath was not just a place to keep fit or have fun, as it is now: for poorer people in London, still living in pre-war housing, it was where you went to wash. (It was also one of the few places you’d actually see or be in proximity to other people’s almost-naked bodies.) Wryly bleak, Deep End suggests that not only are we in over our heads, but we will never quite get clean either.

Frances Morgan

Check it out, Cinema releases

Outside the Law

Outside the Law

Format: Cinema

Release date: 6 May 2011

Venues: UK wide

Distributor: ICO/Optimum Releasing

Director: Rachid Bouchareb

Writer: Rachid Bouchareb

Original title: Hors-la-loi

Cast: Roschdy Zem, Jamel Debbouze, Sami Bouajila

France 2010

137 mins

Rachid Bouchareb’s breathless epic starts in 1945 with an Algerian family being unceremoniously turfed off the land where they have lived for generations, and then half-murdered by the police and army in a horrific massacre following an attempted march for independence. Of the three sons remaining, Abdelkader (Sami Bouajila), ‘the best in the class’, has been incarcerated, Messaoud (Roschdy Zem), the soldier, has been shipped off to fight in Indochina, and it is left to Saïd (Jamel Debbouze), the bandit, to drag his unwilling mother away from all this brutality to France in order to survive, vowing to return.

Outside the Law is a broad-brush history of the terrorist activities of the FLN in the struggle for Algerian independence, of their brutal repression by the French state, and the circle of escalating tit-for-tat depravities that followed. The opening half-hour or so detailed above has the audience sympathies firmly on the side of Abdelkader and Messaoud when they start their activities in 50s France, but those sympathies are increasingly questioned as the film progresses. Their inflexible revolutionary doctrine will require them to forego the comforts of normal life, finagle money from their brethren, kill and kill again, and ultimately to sacrifice their countrymen like pawns and make decisions that will destroy lives without deliberation. The state responds with intimidation, torture and outright murder, and its own brand of terrorism in the case of the activities of the ‘Red Hand’, whose members try to bomb and assassinate the FLN out of existence on French soil.

It is in this straightforward detailing of incident after incident that Outside the Law most resembles one of its clear models, Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic The Battle of Algiers (1966). Near the beginning, Bouchareb’s film has a march that recalls those of The Battle of Algiers, and a scene where an imprisoned Abdelkader witnesses a political execution of one of his cellmates strongly echoes a similar scene in the earlier film. But whereas The Battle of Algiers adheres to a heightened documentary-style approach, concerned mainly with the events, the facts of the case, Outside the Law builds the historical business around a fictional family drama. This becomes clearer after its relocation to France, when the brothers emerge as distinct personalities. Saïd is apolitical and amoral, happy to grasp the opportunities the new country offers, forced into joining the revolution by blood ties. Messaoud is the reluctant soldier, committed to the cause but appalled by his own capacity for murder and the gulf it is opening between him and any chance of a normal life with his new family. Abdelkader is probably the least sympathetic, and most fascinating of the three, an intellectual turned revolutionary firebrand by his time in prison; his adherence to the practice and rhetoric of the FLN barely conceals a physical distaste for what this entails, and chinks in his true believer status emerge throughout.

The film’s breakneck pace and sheer amount of incident have their victims, alas: the three main female roles are never fully fleshed out as characters, and ultimately disappear from the narrative. As the titles ‘one year later’, ‘eight months later’ flash up scene after scene you may wish, like Messaoud, for a little breathing room outside of the struggle. A brief conversation about the merits, or lack thereof, of Western pop music in the last hour makes the viewer aware of how little humour or actual family life there has been in the depiction of this family. It’s to the credit of the three central performances that the characters seem as human as they do. The story necessitates a fair few sketched-in characters, a lot of exposition and some clunky on-the-nose dialogue along the way, problematically so in the opening Algerian section, where the compressed cavalcade of human misery and story information delivered in such a short space of time borders upon parody. None of this would be a problem had Outside the Law adhered to The Battle of Algiers‘ austere journalistic blueprint, and a lively argument could be had over what each film has gained or lost through its approach to filming contentious history. Incidentally, the climax of Bouchareb’s film occurs during the events that lie at the heart of Michael Haneke’s Hidden, now there’s a triple bill waiting to happen…

Ultimately, Outside the Law bulldozes through most objections with its sure-footed pace and wealth of tense, well-mounted set-pieces, a series of battles, killings and escapes set to a brooding pulsing score that will have most viewers gripped, if slightly battered and exhausted by the end of its 137 minutes. It’s handsome, confident large-scale cinema, with a fascinating historical heart. Take no prisoners stuff.

Mark Stafford

Check it out, Cinema releases

Dark Days

Dark Days
Dark Days

Format: Cinema

Release date: 24 January 2014

Distributor: Dogwoof

Director: Marc Singer

Music by: DJ Shadow

Original UK release date: 9 March 2001

USA 2000

94 mins

Now over a decade old, the sole directorial credit of British expat Marc Singer, the multiple award-winning Dark Days is a powerful, illuminating and ultimately hopeful documentary exposé of a homeless community living under the streets of New York in part of the city’s disused subway tunnels. Focusing on one tight-knit group of underground squatters and their makeshift dwellings, part Depression-era tent city and part Third World shanty town, Dark Days candidly shines a light, both physical and metaphorical, on this extreme version of communal living, itself just one branch of an often forgotten or ignored section of society. Popularised in urban myth, and the focus of a factually disputed 1993 non-fiction book The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels beneath New York City by Jennifer Toth, the subterranean community is revealed in Singer’s lyrical portrait to be much like any other, with only their desperate circumstances and hellish living environment to differentiate them from mainstream society. Borne of an altruistic urge to raise awareness of the plight of the community in order to bring about a positive change in their lives, Dark Days subsequently raises many questions about contemporary society, the human spirit, social problems and the documentary form itself.

Shot on a shoestring budget over a few years in the mid-90s (with loaned cameras, homemade dollies, patched-up lighting and donated, slightly damaged black and white film stock) by novice filmmaker Singer and a skeleton crew comprising various members of the community itself, the finished article is a provocative and in many ways timeless film given the historic and ongoing problem of homelessness, economic deprivation and growing urban populations. The decision to shoot the film in black and white, adding an extra layer of murkiness to the already nocturnal environment was, according to Singer, partly taken to avoid the costly difficulties of lighting such an environment, and eventually made for him when the film stock was donated.

Dark Days is released on DVD in the UK and available to download from 3 February 2014. For more information please go to the Dogwoof website.

Eschewing the overtly subjective documentary style utilised by the likes of Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock and The Yes Men, Singer’s admirably objective film marries traditional to-camera monologues with unforced vignettes of everyday life. Culled from over 50 hours of footage, Singer’s loosely constructed narrative highlights heartbreaking personal stories, unguarded moments of humour and despair, daily struggles and collective insights into living in an alternative community that exists within a much larger one. Familiar, but still depressing, tales of dysfunctional, abusive upbringings, unforeseen tragedy, relationship breakdowns, mental illness and alcohol and substance abuse are recounted by the troubled but remarkably self-sufficient subjects amid the rat-infested filth and shadowy, brutal concrete environment of the labyrinthine tunnel system. By keeping a relatively low profile, aside from positing a few off-camera questions, Singer’s approach allows for a candid and authentic view of life in the community to play out. What could have been a hectoring, emotionally manipulative or voyeuristic piece is instead a poetic, humane and visually arresting account of the inner workings, relationships, tensions, hopes and eventual break-up of the ‘family unit’ that some have been a part of for over 20 years.

With a soundtrack supplied by DJ Shadow, and typography designed especially for the film by NY street artist Jaylo, this compelling, collaborative project is a testament to its subjects’ indefatigable spirit and dignity. The mostly, but not all, male community members display all the traits of ‘normal’ domesticated life - cooking, shaving, showering, cleaning, caring for pets - and strict house rules apply. As with residential areas above ground, home security is also an issue underground, where more ad hoc alarm systems warn of potential intruders. Homeless but resolutely not helpless, the community’s ability to ‘scavenge’ (or freecycle as it’s called now), feed themselves and sell, recycle or make use of the endless supply of often perfectly edible food or products in good working order thrown away by mainstream society reflects well on them and poorly on the consumerist society in which they exist. The intimate, and at times humorous, domestic sequences, petty arguments and swapped anecdotes evoke traditional family life, demystify the ‘homeless’ and foster a sense of endearment devoid of condescension towards those portrayed onscreen.

Any notion that the squatters are happy to live in their subterranean world is quashed when an eviction notice is served by Amtrak, leading Singer to enlist the help of the city’s Coalition for the Homeless. In a hard-fought compromise between the respective parties, housing vouchers are secured and the squatters take to breaking down and cleaning up their habitat with unabashed relish before being relocated above ground in clean, safe accommodation. This isolated story may end on an uplifting note, much to Singer’s and the subjects’ credit, but Dark Days remains a vital documentation and representation of a continuing, widespread problem, the resonance of which is heightened in these fragile, economically troubled times.

Neil Mitchell

Watch the trailer:

Check it out, Cinema releases, Home entertainment

I Saw the Devil

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I Saw the Devil

Format: Cinema

Release date: 29 April 2011

Venues: tbc

DVD, Bluray + EST release: 9 May 2011

Distributor: Optimum Releasing

Director: Kim Jee-woon

Writer: Park Hoon-jung

Original title: Akmareul boatda

Cast: Lee Byung-hun, Choi Min-sik, Jeon Gook-hwan

South Korea 2010

141 mins

When it comes to revenge, the punishment should not only fit the crime but it should re-enact it. William Wallace’s execution in Braveheart (1995) is a re-enactment of the crimes of which he has been found guilty. He inspires internal rebellion, so his own intestines are ripped out; he wishes to separate the kingdom, then his limbs are racked; he disobeys the head of state, his own head must come off. This is a principle of the law as vengeance, on which public executions used to be based, and which in turn inspired a whole spate of Jacobean revenge dramas, most famously Hamlet. In Kim Jee-Woon‘s new film, I Saw the Devil, vengeance is all, in a full-throated, blood-soaked revenge opera.

The initial murder and the subsequent investigation occupy a slim part of the film and are slickly despatched. The pregnant fiancée of National Security agent Soo-hyun is captured, tortured and murdered by Kyung-chul (played by the Oldboy himself, Choi Min-sik). Soo-hyun tracks him down with relative ease and, unhampered by the niceties of due process, sets about his revenge. It is here the film takes a genuinely perverse turn. Reckoning killing’s too good for this psycho, Soo-hyun sets about a game not so much of cat and mouse as rabid cat and rabid cat, torturing Kyung-chul only to release him so he can be hunted again. Soo-hyun goes about his task with a steely-eyed determination and grimly funny verve, which wins reluctant admiration from the serial killers he comes across even as it risks losing audience sympathy. But who cares about sympathy? This is a world of banal and ubiquitous evil, populated by school children, defenceless women (with one exception), ineptly woeful cops and predatory sadists of whom Kyung-chul seems like a charismatic leader. An old pal speaks of him as if he were a guru from the 60s: ‘We were going to turn the world upside down.’ The ordinariness of Kyung-chul is disconcerting. As in the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), this is a banal evil. Kyung-chul has a disapproving father, an abandoned son and a day job (school bus driver, I know, I know). His victims are despatched with whatever comes to hand, a piece of pipe, a screwdriver, and souvenirs are kept in filing cabinets, rather than a Seven-like shrine.

Soo-hyun’s revenge is grimly witty, but the film, despite the extremity of the violence, never gets bogged down in torture porn. Soo-hyun’s main dilemma is not so much concerned with the morality of vengeance, but rather a technical question: how can the revenger truly replicate the crime to be avenged? How can the pain and fear of the innocent victim be inflicted on the guilty? Surely, if you care enough to want it, you’ve already lost. Soo-hyun’s solution is both blackly hilarious and tragically absurd.

John Bleasdale

Check it out, Home entertainment

Long Weekend

Long Weekend

Director: Colin Eggleston

Writer: Everett De Roche

Cast: John Hargreaves, Briony Behets, Mike McEwen

Australia 1978

92 mins

Christopher Eggleston’s cult Ozploitation shocker Long Weekend (1978), released at the height of the Australian New Wave, is an eco-horror movie portraying all aspects of Mother Nature as being interconnected and humanity as a pollutant to be eradicated. Scripted by Everett De Roche, whose other screenplays include Patrick (Richard Franklin, 1978) and Razorback (Russell Mulcahy, 1984), Long Weekend offers up a sinister vision of the planet’s collective ‘immune system’ closing ranks and fighting back against unwelcome foreign bodies. With a tag line reading ‘their crime was against nature… and nature found them guilty’, De Roche’s plot sees crass, macho Peter (John Hargreaves) and cold, neurotic Marcia (Briony Behets), a closeted, selfish and unhappily married urban couple, descend on an untamed coastal area rich in flora, fauna and wildlife for a weekend camping trip arranged to help save their failing marriage. Out of their ‘natural’ city environment and showing ignorant, callous disregard for their new surroundings, the wholly unsympathetic couple upset the rhythm and equilibrium of the area with fatal consequences. Their ‘crimes’ include running down a kangaroo, blindly ignoring a ‘Private - keep out’ sign, destroying plant life, taking an axe to a tree for fun and shooting a harmless sea cow. The ensuing clash, as plant life, wildlife and land, sea and air fight back against the man-made guns, axes and insecticides, dominates the unfolding events and the ostensibly beautiful ancient surroundings turn ugly, a reflected physical manifestation of the couple’s contemporary inner torments. Peter and Marcia, symbolic of mankind’s self-indulgent and rapacious appetites, are watched, judged, rejected and finally coughed up and spat out like an unwanted furball.

Reminiscent of Saul Bass’s woefully under-appreciated ant invasion chiller Phase IV (1974), Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) and William Girdler’s The Day of the Animals (1977), among other loosely related man-against-nature films, Eggleston and De Roche’s imagined scenario has a strong subversive streak running through it. Audience expectations are constantly challenged: the titular break, that cherished extended weekend, becomes a drawn out, tortuous descent into marital breakdown, paranoia and death, the lead characters are the invaders to be repelled and audience sympathy is squarely aligned with Mother Nature’s vicious retribution. By alternately having the camera at ground level among the plants and insects, circling the incessantly argumentative and unlikeable couple in a predatory fashion or assuming the God-like position among the treetops, the director leads the audience to become omnipotent, judgmental and complicit. A combination of striking imagery, tight narrative structuring and impressive use of sound creates an ultra-weird and increasingly delirious sense of paranoia, which the couple simultaneously suffer and are accused of causing. The soundtrack, a mixture of cacophonous, discordant electronica, primal, guttural animal sounds and moments of eerie deathly silence, is an essential factor in creating the tension, off-kilter atmosphere and sense of symbiosis in the film. A repeated aural motif is used to link the differing elements - when one creature or plant is hurt or destroyed an anguished howl of pain/rage is heard coming from elsewhere in the environment. The supposedly dead sea cow exemplifies the disturbing and uncanny events, dragging itself incrementally up the beach and into the couple’s campsite, invading their territory as they have invaded nature’s.

Film critics at the time claimed that Hargreaves, described as ‘the quintessential Australian man’, and Behets, a regular in television soaps, were miscast in their roles, but it is precisely because they seem ill at ease that their unnatural status within the narrative is strengthened. Long Weekend, while not without flaws, succeeds in its exploitation and twisting of genre conventions, with its eco-horror themes and re-positioning of mankind as an alien threat creating an effective, unsettling experience. Eggleston’s film, the subject of an inferior 2008 remake starring Jim Caviezel by fellow Australian director Jamie Blanks, is an enduringly bizarre example of reversed psycho-geography, where the effects of mankind on environment produces extreme and unforgettable results.

Neil Mitchell

Check it out, Comic Strip Reviews

Adele Blanc-Sec

Luc Besson’s adaptation of Jacques Tardi’s famous comic follows the adventures of a beautiful and daring young reporter at the beginning of the 20th century. Adele Blanc-Sec is released on April 22 in UK cinemas by Optimum Releasing.

Luc Besson’s adaptation of Jacques Tardi’s famous comic follows the adventures of a beautiful and daring young reporter at the beginning of the 20th century. Adele Blanc-Sec is released on April 22 in UK cinemas by Optimum Releasing.


Comic review by Dan Lester
For more information on Dan Lester, go to monkeysmightpuke.com.
For more information on Dan Lester, go to monkeysmightpuke.com.
Check it out, Festivals

The Dybbuk

The Dybbuk

Format: Cinema

Screened at: Kinoteka on 5 April 2011

Director: Michal Waszynski

Writers: S.A. Kacyzna, Andrzej Marek, Anatol Stern

Based on the play by: S. Ansky

Original title: Der Dibuk

Cast: Abraham Morewski, Ajzyk Samberg, Mojzesz Lipman

Poland 1937

108 mins

Now here‘s exotica: a supernatural drama filmed in Poland, on the brink of the Holocaust, entirely in Yiddish, in 1937. You won’t see many like this. Two good friends make a solemn vow that when their as-yet-unborn offspring are grown, they will be wed (assuming they are a son and a daughter). But the mother of Leyele dies in childbirth. The father of Khonnen dies trying to get to his son’s birth and the oath is forgotten. Leyele’s father Sender prospers over the years, while young Khonnen becomes a devout, mystically minded scholar. When the fated couple meet they feel an instant bond, but Sender, unaware of this, sets up his daughter’s marriage to another. In a desperate bid to thwart this union Khonnen tries to summon Satan, but dies in the attempt, and the distraught Leyele, in the middle of a traditional ‘dance with the poor’ before her union with a man she does not love, becomes possessed with Khonnen’s restless spirit. It is left to an ageing Rabbi to try to sort out the rights and wrongs of this mess, in a trial attended by Khonnen’s long-deceased father, and to send Khonnen’s soul to its rightful place in the universe…

All very odd, but those are just the bare bones of the tale. Michal Waszynski’s The Dybbuk is as rich and strange an artefact as any aficionado of fantastic cinema could hope for. It overflows with esoteric rituals, customs and superstitions, some of which seem unfamiliar even to the characters on screen: there’s numerology, bits of Kabbalah, odd bursts of song and poetic turns of phrase, mannered acting, and vaudeville schtick. It is based on a popular play by S. Ansky, which clearly leaned heavily on folklore and fable, and you can still see its roots as a night in the theatre with something for everyone: a little physical and character comedy, a love story, the occasional tune, all manner of unflattering hairstyles and a large helping of tragedy. But seeing the rituals and customs of Judaism acted out on the big screen was apparently a big draw in and of itself. In the first few minutes, the developing narrative is brought to a halt as Sender sings the Song of Songs: ‘Your ointments yield a sweet fragrance, …give me the kisses of your mouth…’

This sets a pattern for a drama that always finds space for poetry and parable (even the wedding has to accommodate the musings of a ‘Wedding Bard’). Most of the film’s best moments are verbal, even in a subtitled translation: Leyele’s lament for ‘unborn children, never mine, lost forever, lost in time’, the churchyard summoning of the dead to trial beginning ‘blameless departed’, and Khonnen’s last, mournful coda, ‘I left your body to return to your soul’.

The filmmaking is pretty creaky in places, a little like an old Universal feature, but with less elaborate sets and more location photography. Camera movement is largely restricted to the odd pan or dolly shot, music is sporadic and the special effects extend only as far as fades, double exposures and dissolves. This doesn’t stop The Dybbuk creating a heady supernatural atmosphere from the start, in which the spiritual and natural worlds blend and overlap. Especially in the figure of a wandering messenger from elsewhere, who, bearded, heavy-lidded and humourless, appears unbidden into this realm to deliver wisdom and warning to the cast, who seem aware, and accepting, of his otherworldliness. We don’t, unfortunately, get a guest appearance from Satan when Khonnen calls him (boo!), which leaves Leyele’s ‘dance with the poor’ as the film’s standout moment of the fantastique, and a great sequence it is too, as her despair and anguish seem to take physical form in a moment of whirling disorientation and delirium, and she finds herself literally dancing with death.

To a decided non-believer, this comes across as a weird little bubble of cinema, both familiar and strange, a film overlaid with real tragedy, created by artists long disappeared, dispersed and destroyed, but one still brimming with life and soul and artistry.

Mark Stafford

Check it out, Cinema releases

How I Ended this Summer

How I Ended This Summer

Format: Cinema

Release date: 22 April 2011

Venues: Key cities

Distributor: New Wave Films

Director: Alexei Propogrebsky

Writer: Alexei Propogrebsky

Original title: Kak ya provyol etim letom

Cast: Grigory Dobrygin, Sergei Puskepalis, Igor Chernevich

Russia 2010

130 mins

Pavel (Grigory Dobrygin) and Sergei (Sergei Puskepalis) are clearly already getting on each other’s nerves from the outset of Alexei Popopgrebsky’s fine Russian film. This would be no big deal, if they weren’t the only human inhabitants of a meteorological station on a remote island somewhere within the Arctic Circle. The walrus meat diet, solitude and repetition would test most relationships, but dilettante college graduate Pavel and taciturn veteran Sergei were never going to see eye to eye, and, we are reminded, this is an environment where personality clashes can get you killed….

While Sergei has disappeared for a few days on an impromptu fishing trip Pavel accepts an emergency message concerning the older man’s family. But when Sergei returns, Pavel, through some combination of fear and weakness, avoids passing on the bad news, setting up a time bomb that will eventually result in conflict between the two, a war in which, typically, no war is declared, escalating into desperate and murderous behaviour on both sides.

Pavel’s inability to simply relay the bad news seems at once baffling and completely understandable. Living in the moment, listening to sludgy Russian rock through his headphones, playing video games, he is clearly used to a world where you can run away from your problems until they blow over; he has not realised where he is and what that means. The landscape, the polar bears and weather are more of a threat to life and limb than Sergei, who seems at one with the territory, who thinks in the long, long term, having adjusted to the island’s patterns years ago. The island is most definitely the third character in this drama. Popobgrebsky used the possibilities of digital cameras to shoot loooong takes of changing weather and light in real time throughout, and has captured a mysterious and inhospitable place, of solid fog banks, mountains of loose rock, frozen seas, and everywhere the remains of long-abandoned attempts at human habitation and relics from the cold war, a graveyard of human ambition.

How I Ended this Summer has all the makings of a more conventional cat-and-mouse thriller, and may disappoint anybody who wants, or has been led to expect that kind of film, but it’s a subtler, more surprising and nuanced piece of work than that. It’s a film about character where dialogue has been stripped to the bone, where body language and gesture speak volumes, and the fractious relationship of distrust and lousy communication rings wholly true. It’s a film about temperament and time and territory, clearly shot in arduous conditions in a bleak and breathtaking landscape.

Mark Stafford