Fashion blogs terrify me. For every super-detailed analysis of why it’s important to kiss buttons in thrift stores I scroll through page after page of ‘shoe enthusiasm‘. Compare and contrast: old vs new, in vs out; these blogs work in casually distinguished binaries. And they throw up the strangest gems.
Aanteni by fashion brand Rodarte and director Tod Cole is a twisted film. Showcasing ancient (it’s a year old now) fashion, the film strives to look like the final traces of humankind in soft focus.
Star Guinevere van Seenus carries the film with a heavy, ungainly motion. In running she seems to tumble, all clipped thrusts and contorted features, her clothes appearing to disintegrate, as if her skin were reacting violently with our too-human atmosphere. She sprints through blasted pockets of LA, frightened and exhausted, behind her a pursuer we’ll never understand. And between her skips and stumbles we cut to factories and test-sites.
Through all, van Seenus never quite seems human. Human frailties are captured, but they seem too raw, too keenly experienced to be genuine.
This film sounds like doom. Fuzzes and spits of sound make sense of the scanners tracking van Seenus’s body; of her neck lolling sideways in agony; of a rocket taking flight. The soundtrack is made up of the compressed, clipped sounds of mission control, sputtering to get a message to the moon. It fits the debris floating around Los Angeles just as well as the debris floating miles above the earth.
Rodarte is the brand name of fashion designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy, sisters, so it’s fitting that Aanteni has a sister too. The Mulleavys and Cole released a new film in February, The Curve of Forgotten Things, showcasing a new collection. Again making use of the schizophrenic landscape of LA, this film follows actress Elle Fanning as she explores an empty house on a hill.
Fanning too seems unnatural, but the alien fear in van Seenus’s eyes isn’t here at all; Fanning is shot with the face of a nymph. She seems to get younger and younger as each frame passes, while her soundtrack twinkles and glitters.
The yellow light of the film and the aged wood surrounding Fanning serve to emphasise how little of her has frayed. Where the fashion of Aateni is ragged and torn The Curve of Forgotten Things presents something whole and wholesome, full of blocks and sleeves, more of the prairie than of the future.
In each, these lonely women explore enough emotional range that it becomes impossible to see what they wear as anything but costumes. Watching both films alongside another slew of fashion weeks makes the thought of such clothes being worn by people - human people - about as impossible to grasp as the concept of interstellar travel.
More so in fact; the grainy footage of STS-133 (Space Shuttle Discovery’s final mission) streaking above the cloud line, shot by a cameraphone from a plane window no less, suddenly placed the concept of space within my grasp; I never feel that scrolling through fashion blogs.
Alternative title:A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop
Based on the film Blood Simple by: Ethan and Joel Coen
Cast: Dahong Ni, Ni Yan, Xiao Shen-Yang
China 2009
95 mins
Undeniably one of the most colourful films on offer this month, Zhang Yimou’s Blood Simple is a remake of sorts of the Coen Brothers’ 1984 debut. Moving the action to northern China in the imperial age, the film follows Ni Dahong, the owner of a noodle shop in the middle of the desert, who pays a killer to murder both his unfaithful wife and her squeamish lover. It’s a shame that the banal slapstick and oddball jokes that Zhang decided to employ instead of the black humour of the original inevitably turn his ambitious venture into a comic farce as the plot rolls on, and it is only in the film’s showdown that he manages to get back on solid ground. There are plenty of things wrong with this film, including the wildly varied and exaggerated acting on display, but Blood Simple is nonetheless a visual treat throughout, from the luridly coloured landscapes and floral costumes to the film’s deft cinematography that are clear reminders of Zhang’s earlier work.
Cast: Simon Yam, Kelly Lin, Law Wing Cheong, Ka Tung Lam
UK 2008
87 mins
It’s clear from the opening scene of Sparrow that this isn’t a typical Johnnie To film. Simon Yam gets dressed in his tailored suit amid the impossibly chic retro furniture of his Technicolor apartment when a sparrow flits in through the open window. You half-expect Yam to start whistling Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah. It’s a world away from the gritty gangster lands of To’s Election or Exiled, but then, as shown by the bonkers Mad Detective, To isn’t one for playing it safe.
Sparrow is all about lightness of touch and easy charm. So it’s fitting that Yam plays a quick-fingered pickpocket named Kei who, along with his three brothers, gads about old Hong Kong making an easy buck before riding about on his bike and taking photos with his cool antique camera. Yam takes to the playboy persona with ease, in a role akin to Cary Grant’s in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, and, inevitably, it’s a striking woman who knocks him off balance.
The brothers all have a chance meeting with the beautiful Chung Chun Lei (Kelly Lin), who’s desperate to escape the clutches of a rival pickpocket, the cigar-chomping Mr Fu (Hoi-Pang Lo). What ensues is a breezy collection of pickpocket ‘showdowns’ that test the various skills of the players. There’s little substance to these episodes, but To’s worked hard on some deft camera movements to capture the balletic nature of the pickpocket at work. It’s all highly romanticised, as if the protagonists were in a make-believe 60s Paris where such a crime is seen as an art form, but it’s a joy to watch thanks to the vintage cinematography and jazzy soundtrack.
There’s an element of screwball comedy to the proceedings, with To relying on slapstick comedy and visuals to move the story on, as if he was worried that any heavy expositional dialogue might stop it dead. And it largely works; the brothers don’t really talk to each other but their actions drive things forward. At first, they try to help Chung Chun Lei without Kei but end up in hot water, so they turn to their leader to sort things out. Things culminate in a largely wordless stand-off involving umbrellas and rain that To draws out with the confidence and flair he has become famous for.
While Sparrow has done without the realism and darkness of To’s previous movies, it still excites and engages in different ways. It’s something unique, a fusion of styles and cultures that you rarely find in cinema. Luckily there’s directors like To out there, who experiment with the different filmic languages they’ve been exposed to, and with Sparrow he’s put together a marvellous blend of hip European cool and offbeat Asian storytelling.
As the Pang Brothers, Oxide and Danny have been frustrating filmmakers. For every Bangkok Dangerous or The Eye, there’s been a silly Bangkok Dangerous Nic Cage remake or The Eye: Infinity. So it’s refreshing to see Oxide go it alone and taking on a more adult, complex genre in this downbeat tale of a lonely gumshoe on the trail of a missing girl through the sweaty streets of Bangkok’s Chinatown.
Kwok plays the detective-for-hire Tam, not the smartest tool in the box (in fact, the film’s original title grades him as C+ Detective), but an enthusiastic character who hopes to get by with just a notepad and a camera phone. His case leads him stumbling blindly into apparent suicides that he quickly claims to be murders, much to the annoyance of his weary policeman buddy Chak (Kai Chi Liu).
The story is nothing new; as expected, Tam gets drawn deeper into a tangle of money and betrayal, but Kwok’s charisma pulls you along. He gives Tam a boyishness, a taste for adventure, that leads him down some dark alleyways as he struggles to crack the case despite his own shortcomings. This is where Pang really nails the genre; being a detective isn’t all guns and dames, but constantly going over the scant evidence until something clicks, or you get beaten up.
For Pang, the film is an exercise in evocative visuals combined with sticky tension, punctuated with the odd car chase or surreal comedic moment. Tam even gets a jaunty ‘theme song’ during the opening scenes. Although it goes down the supernatural route during the second half, the focus is always on the detective story, which plays out to a satisfying, if over-explained, conclusion. Thankfully, Pang has resisted breaking out the jump cuts and easy scares and has started an engrossing, mature franchise. In the forthcoming sequel, Tam is even promoted to B+.
Cast: Stephen Spinella, Jack Plotnick, Wings Hauser
France 2010
79 mins
Quentin ‘Mr Oizo’ Dupieux’s gamble of making a serial-killer thriller with a tyre in the role of the psychopath had Electric Sheep salivating in anticipation. It starts well, opening with a US cop in the desert warning spectators armed with binoculars that sometimes there is ‘no reason’ for what happens in films. Their entertainment programme begins when a tyre thrown away in the desert comes back to life and starts exterminating the animals in its path, blowing them up with the sheer force of its evil vibrations. So far so good, but all the deaths follow exactly the same pattern, so that it soon becomes very repetitive. Inventive cruelty is one of the essential ingredients of a good horror film and it is sorely lacking here. The tension and terror one could hope for fail to materialise, and it isn’t imaginatively surreal enough to hold the audience’s attention. A great idea, but ultimately a disappointingly underwhelming experience.
Rubber screens at Sheffield Showroom Cinema presented by Celluloid Screams on Tuesday 5 April and at The Ritzy (London) presented by Midnight Movies and Culture Shock on Friday 8 April.
Sion Sono’s follow-up to the extraordinary Love Exposure (2009) is another long and convoluted tale, but without the scope and exuberance of the preceding film; rather, it seems to be a return to the dark spirit of Suicide Club (2001), with its provocative, inventive gore and an enigmatic, oblique approach to meaning. The opening scene is brilliantly incongruous and announces the strangeness and brutality to come: a banal domestic scene depicting an unhappy-looking housewife microwaving her family’s dinner is filmed like a violent action scene, the fast, jarring editing exuding phenomenal aggression. Rarely has a microwave seemed so menacing.
Cold Fish charts the descent of the meek Shamoto, owner of a small exotic-fish shop, into violence and madness after an unfortunate encounter with the brash and ruthless Murata, owner of a much bigger rival fish store. The mechanics of Murata’s manipulation and Shamoto’s gradual breakdown are superbly observed, the indication of the date and time of each unfolding event adding to the sense of an implacable mechanism at work. The direction is controlled and well-paced, although the film does feel overlong. The story is based on a real-life crime, known as the ‘Saitama serial murders of dog lovers’. Sono has transferred it to the world of tropical fish retailing, which adds to the surreal quality and visual beauty of the film, thanks in part to the multi-coloured exotic fish and immersive aquarium atmosphere of Murata’s enormous shop.
With not one sympathetic character, the film offers an extremely downbeat view of mankind. Women are submissive, devious, immoral, and seem to enjoy rough sex with unattractive men, which would be somewhat problematic if it wasn’t for the fact that men are depicted equally negatively: although Shamoto’s sensitive man is initially contrasted with Murata’s thug, both will turn out to be dangerous and violent, particularly to the women around them.
Although the film is awash with copious amounts of blood, dismembering and eye-popping, alarmingly inventive murder scenes, which may deter the more squeamish, Cold Fish is also blackly funny throughout. There are great moments of macabre humour and absurd violence, some involving a bizarre display of Catholic artefacts and a statue of the Virgin Mary (interestingly, Love Exposure was about Catholic guilt). Former comedian Denden contributes to the comic side of the film, giving a fantastic performance as the over-the-top, sinister and disturbingly funny Murata.
Just as with Suicide Club, the deliberate weirdness and detached tone of Cold Fish may initially leave audiences befuddled, but this a sign of its complexity. It is an uncompromising film, with no chance of the redemption glimpsed in Love Exposure, but it is a triumphantly unhinged achievement from an intelligent and profoundly individual filmmaker, who clearly delights in darkness.
Armadillo, the prize-winning Danish documentary on a group of soldiers during their first tour of Afghanistan, is essentially a ‘coming of age’ story, albeit one that aims to work on multiple levels. On one level, we have the story of soldiers changing as they are increasingly drawn into warfare during six months on the frontline, while on the other, a subtler story regarding the psychological effects of watching hostilities unfolds without a discernible moral standpoint. From the altruistic desire to help the locals to an instinctive urge to eliminate as many Taliban as possible, director Janus Metz explores the addictive nature of fighting and why so many of the soldiers opt to return to active duty despite injury and trauma.
Like so many other war narratives, Armadillo starts at the airport with the emotional departure of the soldiers, the hand-held camera and gritty footage an instant clue to a desired sense of authenticity. On site at Armadillo, the cameraman becomes one of the boys as we are hurtled through fields, shot at, and ultimately in the same ditch as the Taliban soldiers executed after a particularly brutal battle, rummaging around blown up bodies in order to retrieve whatever weapons can be found.
We are, then, in the same territory as in The Hurt Locker, a film that markedly aims to ‘explain’ the addictive nature of soldiering in psychological terms, the addictive nature, in other words, of murdering within the context of an institutionalised force. Our sense of the purpose of the documentary itself is shaped by its ability to relatively quickly establish this context, chiefly though the juxtaposition between those soldiers who embrace the necessity to kill with uncomfortable relish and those whose traumatised and glazed expressions post-battle indicate darker and less comprehensible forces are at hand.
Situated on the Helmand frontline, Camp Armadillo becomes, like so many cinematic outposts of soldiering, a curious mixture of infantilised male camaraderie - complete with computer games and the shared viewing of pornography - and rather hollow machismo, as the increasing awareness of the futility of war is repressed. Metz takes the time to show us how emotional attachments are played out on the micro-level of male bonding and in terms of a vaguely defined patriotism. One of the most notable aspects of Armadillo, and the Scandinavian psyche may be partly responsible for this, is the way in which rank seems rather perfunctory, the hierarchy in place based more on experience and age. It is all the more noticeable then that the parameters of the battle in ethical and even practical terms seem oddly makeshift, as though the people in charge were themselves slightly puzzled over what they are doing there. Excursions into enemy territory are explained as forays designed to signal that the coalition has the upper hand, and yet the sense of Armadillo being under siege becomes more palpable as we realise that the local population more or less uniformly wants them to leave.
Some of the more remarkable and telling footage therefore takes place away from the camp, where we get a breather from the official line as presented by the commanders and get to fix our gaze - albeit an uncomfortable one - on the local population. The fact that this gaze is uncomfortable is as it should be - the locals are given cash settlements to cover for the loss of crops, animals and even, one surmises, family members. We sense a certain embarrassment in this, even when the social liaison officer explains to the locals that they have to allow the ‘good’ soldiers to win so they can rebuild local schools and roads. In this respect, Armadillo‘s sense of narrative construction is paramount in establishing what effectively can only be seen as criticism of the war’s raison d’être, but it does so, wisely, in subtle ways. When the climactic moment towards the end of Armadillo reveals that one of the recruits has phoned home with information about the ways in which Taliban soldiers are executed rather than captured, we are left guessing which soldier has retained his sense of moral outlook.
Screened to both politicians and a shocked public upon its hastened release in Denmark, the film was used politically by both right- and left-wing forces to alternately prove the futility of the war or the heroism of the soldiers. Metz clearly wants the film to situate itself between both positions, a stance that many will see as lacking the male body parts that the soldiers reference in nearly every scene. Nevertheless, the aesthetics of the film’s construction, and in particular the haunting and evocative soundtrack by Uno Helmersson, one of the best I’ve ever heard in a documentary and eerily reminiscent of both Errol Morris and Werner Herzog’s best work, does a great deal to add a lyrical quality to the proceedings and thus paradoxically ensures that we feel both a sense of pathos and melodrama throughout. At one point, we see the soldiers in a moment of respite, playing with their motorcycles like boys let loose on a playing field; at another, a group of soldiers, their naked torsos marked by both scars and muscles, leap into the Helmand river, reminding us of the fact that these men are boys first and foremost.
If one wants Armadillo to clarify the moral ramifications of engagement both in terms of embedded journalism, a fact that Metz himself has drawn attention to in interviews, or in terms of whether Western troops should be there in the first place, then the film refuses to deliver. But as a remarkably exciting, and I would say insightful, reminder of what happens when nations send boys off to fight, this documentary tells a gripping, and sadly still topical, tale.
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga
USA/France 2011
93 mins
In less than a year, three films have been released that have been profoundly influenced by the style and structure of (rather than adapted from) computer games. If anything, it is a cinematic trend that is overdue, in the wake of the likes of Tron and The Matrix in the 80s and 90s. Following last summer’s Inception and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which transferred the plotting and aesthetics of video games to the big screen, Source Code is reminiscent of the kind of game where you have to complete a mission; if you die, the level resets and you have to start all over again, trying to master the level based on your prior knowledge of the behaviour of the non-player characters. In the plot of this film, Jake Gyllenhaal’s character starts ‘the level’ believing that he is in a simulation where he has eight minutes to discover the identity of a bomber on a train. Between each attempt he wakes up in the cockpit of a crashed helicopter and tries to work out why he can’t escape this environment. As the film progresses, we discover the truth about the two worlds between which he moves and the nature of his interaction with military personnel, who are communicating with him via video screen.
In other hands, this could have been a dull ‘Channel 5’ action film, but with Gyllenhaal wringing the maximum amount of emotional potential out of his time-and-body-displaced hero, and with compelling direction by Duncan Jones, the team lift the material out of its familiar genre trappings into something more intriguing and moving than you might expect. Gyllenhaal has made a career of looking slightly perplexed in unusual situations - from playing the disturbed eschatological lead in Donnie Darko to a gay rancher in Brokeback Mountain - and his endearing performances help the audience to accept the outré scenarios he often finds himself cast in.
For Jones, this movie is the cinematic equivalent of ‘the difficult second album’. His debut Moon was an underrated cult hit with a nuanced performance from Sam Rockwell (a very watchable actor who can be his own worst enemy by playing unusual characters a little too broadly) in the role of a lonely astronaut with existential angst on the titular planetoid. Fans of this first film, and indeed the company that bankrolled Source Code, probably expect his new film to be similar to a certain extent, but with higher stakes and a bigger budget, and be slightly more accessible. Luckily, Source Code manages to achieve all these things with aplomb. The science fiction is both more accessible than in some of the film’s predecessors - many people have seen Quantum Leap and Groundhog Day, which are both referenced in the casting and dialogue respectively - and more obtuse, as I for one can’t quite get my head around the nature of the lead character’s time travel. Moon‘s theme of a character dealing with the nature of his own ‘less than human’ status and experience of his own death over and over again is repeated and successfully reimagined here, and the only faults I found with the film were the tacked-on romance, which is of the Sandra Bullock ‘relationships that start under intense circumstances’ style, and slightly annoying product placement.
Like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, Gyllenhaal reacts to the time loop he’s trapped in with a similar range of responses: bewilderment, bemusement, hysteria, denial and eventually acquiescence, making the best out of a bad situation even if his final visit to the past might prove fatal. Both films ignore the immorality of the situation - Murray learning to ice-sculpt and play piano just to woo the woman he fancies and Gyllenhaal essentially stealing another man’s life - but they are both so enjoyable that you ignore the unspoken and concentrate on the excellent filmmaking.
Moon was helped in achieving cult status by an excellent ad campaign and word of mouth. Unfortunately, Source Code has had little of either - the disappointing posters being as generic as any dismal Philip K. Dick mis-adaptation - but this is the first great thriller and first great science fiction film of 2011, and it deserves to find as large an audience as possible.
Alex Fitch
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Bowie, rarely as effective again on screen, completely inhabits the role of the fallen angel, his otherworldly persona and physical frailty perfectly meshing with Newton’s own.
Following apprenticeships at various London film studios, Nicolas Roeg worked his way up to camera operator on, among others, Ken Hughes’s The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) and Fred Zinnemann’s The Sundowners (1960) before gaining writing credits on Cliff Owen’s A Prize of Arms (1961) and Lawrence Huntington’s Death Drums along the River (1962). It was as a cinematographer that Roeg established his reputation as a distinctive cinematic visionary. Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death (1964), Franí§ois Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1965) and Richard Lester’s Petulia (1968) all in some way looked forward to Roeg’s own visually and thematically arresting work as director, where colour was used to symbolic effect to probe taboo subjects and linearity was eschewed in favour of complex time leaps and splintered narratives.
Beginning with Performance (1968, co-directed by Donald Cammell), a tale of identity crisis set amid London’s late 60s criminal underworld and taking in Walkabout (1971), Don’t Look Now (1973) and The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), Roeg became the leading light of British film, establishing a run of films that remains unparalleled in contemporary cinema. Frequently focusing on characters cut adrift from their usual moral and physical surroundings, Roeg seemed unstoppable until first Bad Timing (1980) and then Eureka (1983) ran into problems with their uncomprehending distributors. The director found himself at odds with an industry increasingly resistant to his pioneering vision and tendency to shine a light on areas of the human psyche many would prefer left darkened.
Newly restored in 4K, The Man Who Fell to Earth will return to UK cinemas for a 40th anniversary reissue on 9 September 2016. For venue details check the Park Circus website.
In more recent years, The Man Who Fell to Earth has arguably emerged as perhaps the director’s most characteristic and richly rewarding work. Adapted from the Walter Tevis novel by Paul Mayersberg (who would also script Eureka), it’s a film that takes pleasure in resisting categorisation, retaining the science fiction origins of its source material while heavily accentuating Tevis’s less overt allusions to capitalism, corporate power (the film remains the closest Roeg has come to any kind of political statement) and the alienating effects of contemporary American society. The first non-children’s film that I can ever actually remember seeing, it is a work that seemingly contains all the infinite possibilities of cinema (often in a single frame), and I return to it periodically for inspiration and stimulation. It is not and never has been universally loved. It was cautiously received at the time by critics, as so many of Roeg’s films were: Nigel Andrews, writing in The Financial Times, accused it of having ‘enough ideas for six different films; and far too many, in my opinion, for one’.
Initially favouring Peter O’Toole for the central role of Thomas Jerome Newton, an alien who comes to a fertile earth in order to save the inhabitants of his own dying planet, only to become marooned as a potent cocktail of sex (courtesy of Candy Clark), gin and television slowly take control, Roeg instead dipped once more into a pop star pool that had proved so effective with Mick Jagger and Performance. Roeg became convinced that David Bowie, the recent subject of a BBC Alan Yentob documentary charting a tour of America of equally irresistible and infinite temptation, was in fact his Newton. The financiers (the film was among the first ever British-financed movies to be made in the United States) failed to share the conviction, expressing their scepticism as to whether the singer could actually act. Roeg remained undaunted, exclaiming, ‘what do you think he’s doing when he gets up in front of 60,000 people to perform?’ Bowie, rarely as effective again on screen, completely inhabits the role of the fallen angel, his otherworldly persona and physical frailty perfectly meshing with Newton’s own.
Beginning with stock NASA footage of a space rocket leaving earth before cutting to a vessel - assumingly jettisoned from the rocket - crash-landing back to earth in a New Mexico lake, Roeg and Mayersberg frequently undercut the genre elements of their material (in fact they don’t seem especially interested in the novel at all) in favour of thematic juxtapositions and kaleidoscopic cross-cultural allusion. In one of the more overt, a randy college professor later seconded into Newton’s expanding business empire (the alien arrives on earth with a small stock of gold rings that he swaps for cash and with a number of futuristic product patents that will allow him to amass a fortune), Bryce (Rip Torn), is seen lingering over an image of Brueghel’s Icarus. The Man Who Fell to Earth also incorporates W.H. Auden’s contemplation of the Greek myth (‘the expensive, delicate ship that must have seen something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on’), emphasising Roeg’s interest in the notion of watching and being watched.
When Newton takes his first tentative steps on earth he is observed by an unknown spectator, who will again later appear at the alien’s bedside once he has undergone a series of painful and incapacitating medical examinations. Newton himself turns voyeur. Initially using television to learn about his new planet and humankind through the medium’s multiple images and signals, he fashions a wall of television screens to which he ultimately becomes addicted. Television helps fuel Newton’s increasing paranoia, with Roeg and Mayersberg suggesting that the modern technological age of observation and endless consumerism is corrosive. There are elements of this also perhaps in the film’s incredibly prescient presentation of an increasingly global America nostalgic for its past (the music of Louis Armstrong, Artie Shaw and the flashbacks to sequences involving early pioneers, glimpsed by a weary Newton from his limousine), yet enthralled to the point of obsession by the notion of its future. The Man Who Fell to Earth concludes with a shot of the crown of Newton’s head, an image similar to that of Turner in Performance just before Chas puts a bullet through it, revealing a man utterly broken and adrift, who has undergone the process of becoming human only to discover, to his cost and that of his homeland, what a wilfully destructive race we are.
This review was first published in April 2011 for the UK DVD release of the film by Optimum.
Screening at: the opening night of Kinoteka on 24 March 2011
Venue: Renoir Cinema, London
UK release date: 1 April 2011
Venues: tbc
Distributor: Artificial Eye
Director: Jerzy Skolimowski
Writers: Jerzy Skolimowski, Ewa Piaskowska
Cast: Vincent Gallo, Emmanuelle Seigner
Poland/Hungary/Ireland/Norway 2010
83 mins
Frustrated with lack of control over his work, legendary Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski had abandoned filmmaking for 17 years, dedicating himself to painting instead, until he returned in 2008 with the intimate psychological thriller Four Nights with Anna. He has followed this up with Essential Killing, a more ambitious film in scope and theme that echoes his career-long interest in outsiders, and in the struggle of the individual against oppressive forces.
Essential Killing opens the 9th Kinoteka Festival of Polish Cinema on March 24 at the Renoir in London. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Jerzy Skolimowski. For more details, go to the Kinoteka website.
Starring Vincent Gallo as an unnamed (possibly Afghan or Iraqi) fighter, Essential Killing opens as he attacks American soldiers and is captured among barren mountains. After a brief depiction of an American-run prison, Gallo’s character is flown to an unknown northern location. He manages to escape, but barefoot and dressed only in a flimsy orange boiler suit, running in an unfamiliar snow-covered forest in the dark, he seems to have little chance of remaining free. Sparse and economical, Essential Killing is a stripped-down, existential tale of pure survival in which Gallo, finding himself in an alien country, confronted with well-equipped pursuers and a spectacular, but hostile nature, becomes increasingly animal-like.
Despite the initial politically charged prison scenes, Skolimowski is not interested in making specific political points, but rather in presenting a universally resonant story. Although the orange boiler suits and the torture scenes of the beginning are highly recognisable, the film gives no further indications of place and time, and the identity of Gallo’s fighter is purposefully left undefined. There are memories of prayers and preaching, and a woman in a blue burqa with a baby, but nothing can be established from these fragmentary images, which, as we find out later, come not just from the past, but also from the future. As Gallo’s motivations are never elucidated, the film leads us to relate to him simply as a man, whatever he may be.
The film is virtually dialogue-free and events and emotions are conveyed almost exclusively through the images. After Gallo’s capture, he is interrogated by his American captors, but no amount of shouting via a translator can get him to answer their questions - not because he is unwilling, but simply because he can’t, for a reason the Americans have not even thought of. This is a great detail that is part of the film’s thought-provoking exploration of various forms of non-verbal communication, one of its central concerns.
Gallo gives an extraordinarily intense performance and his emotional involvement in the character keeps the audience firmly on his side as extreme circumstances force him to commit increasingly desperate and brutal acts. Poetic, savage and beautifully expressive visually, Essential Killing is an exceptionally rich and powerful cinematographic experience that should not be missed.
Essential Killing is released in UK cinemas on April 1. Read our interview with Jerzy Skolimowski next month.
Virginie Sélavy
A Deviant View of Cinema – Film, DVD & Book Reviews
