Format: DVD

Release date: 21 September 2009

Distributor: Optimum Home Entertainment

Director: René Clément

Writer: Sébastien Japrisot, Lorenzo Ventavoli

Original title: Le Passager de la pluie

Cast: Charles Bronson, Marlí¨ne Jobert

France/Italy 1970

120 mins

Mélancolie ‘Mellie’ Mau (Marlí¨ne Jobert) looks every inch the swinging 60s chick, a gamine with boyish red hair in a killer white plastic number and matching go-go boots. But it’s raining in the pretty French coastal town she swings around, her mother is a bitter lush and her husband is an unbearable sexist prick. Both are absent when a creepy stranger only she has seen breaks into her house and rapes her. She rather enterprisingly kills the bastard, but cannot face dealing with the police and elects to dump the body and hide the crime. It seems to be working until the mysterious Harry Dobbs (Charles Bronson) turns up at a wedding, and everywhere she goes thereafter, mocking, flirtatious and menacing by turns, full of questions, but not a cop. Slowly, everything Mellie knows about her life seems to be called into question. The stakes of this cat and mouse game are unclear…

For much of its length, Rider on the Rain is a two-handed play well handled by the leads. Jobert is great, sexy, vulnerable and defiant; we may worry for the seemingly friendless Mellie, but she is never a victim. It’s a tough trick to pull off, and I wish I was more familiar with the rest of her CV - it’s a damn shame if she wasn’t given the scope to be this good again. Bronson’s turn saddens for different reasons. He briefly holds a gun in Rider on the Rain, but, to many viewers’ doubtless confusion, fails to use it to blow away a gang of curiously multiracial street scum. It’s kind of heartbreaking to see him in this, giving the kind of playful, solid macho performance Hollywood leads used to deliver. His classic 60s roles behind him, a sea of right-wing horseshit ahead, and here he is being charming, graceful and strange. He’s not De Niro, but it’s a performance, goddamnit, and suggests that he was a lot better than Death Wish 14.

René Clément’s film comes from 1970, near the tail end of a lost age of Euro-cinema, the films that used to pepper the TV schedules in the 70s and 80s and then slowly disappeared: not art-house, they would be described as stylish in the listings, boasting chic clothes, swish locations and sharp camerawork. And it’s pretty damn fine, too, conjuring a dreamy, off-kilter atmosphere (it starts with a quote from Alice in Wonderland) in which we can’t quite be sure who’s up to what, or whether they are quite real at all. Clément at least plays with the idea that some or all of this may be in Mélancolie’s head, with odd flashbacks, recurring visual motifs and artful framing. It nods to Hitchcock (not subtly, a character is named Mac Guffin,) and satisfies as a conventional thriller, but is more open and ambiguous than Hitch would allow. No car chases, kung fu or exploding helicopters here - the best moments are created by actors being filmed with cameras by someone who knows what they are doing. Sweet.

Mark Stafford

Format: DVD and Blu-ray

Release date: 3 August 2009

Distributor: BFI

Director: Tony Young

Writer: John Ormonde

Cast: Harry Secombe, Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers

UK 1951

68 mins

During an interview in the 1970s, Peter Sellers was asked to recall his screen debut. His verdict – perhaps unsurprisingly for such a famously self-critical character - was pretty damning: Penny Points to Paradise, he said, was ‘a terrifyingly bad film’. Viewed at a distance of 58 years since its release, it’s hard to disagree too wildly with Sellers’s own opinion. As a very low-budget, very knockabout farce made in a hurry by a group of untested newcomers, at best it’s an uneven affair. Still, there’s more than enough rough vitality here to compensate for the film’s manifest shortcomings.

Marking the first cinema outing for three quarters of the team who would very shortly afterwards find fame as The Goons, Penny Points to Paradise follows gormless pools winner Harry Secombe and his friend Spike Milligan as they attempt to avoid gold-digging girls and thieving forgers on holiday in an extremely gloomy-looking post-war Brighton. Paying homage to silent comedies, Abbott and Costello and some ancient music hall humour (‘did you know that a man dies once every six months from flu?’ ‘how boring for him’), at best the film is enthusiastically played - Secombe’s lengthy mime of a surgeon performing a heart operation is particularly memorable - but its main point of interest lies in seeing the young Goons – Milligan was the oldest at 33 - finding their feet despite the very obviously cheap and rushed circumstances surrounding the picture’s creation.

Indeed, Penny Points to Paradise was made so quickly that Arthur Dent’s Adelphi Films encouraged the team to fill a spare week in Brighton improvising the skits that ended up as the 30-minute short Let’s Go Crazy. Also included on this DVD, Let’s Go Crazy sees Sellers take on six different parts (including a passable Groucho Marx impersonation) with evident relish in a manner that prefigures both the multiple roles of 1959’s The Mouse that Roared and, more famously, Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, for which he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor. Interspersed with some local Brighton end-of the-pier-type variety turns, the result is a vivid portrait of the era of British seaside entertainment also captured in Tony Hancock’s underrated The Punch and Judy Man.

Both films flopped when released, although in 1960 enterprising distributors in Australia attempted to cash in on Sellers’s new fame by cutting segments from Penny Points to Paradise and replacing them with scenes from Let’s Go Crazy to increase the comedian’s screen time. Painstaking work was necessary on the part of the BFI to restore both films to their original form - and while neither exactly qualifies as art, as an artefact documenting a period in British history this new DVD is of undeniable importance.

Pat Long

This release launches the BFI’s new strand The Adelphi Collection.

Format: DVD

Date: 10 August 2009

Distributor: Terracotta Distribution

Director: Lee Hyung-gon

Original title: Gumiho gajok

Cast: Ha Jung-woo, Ju Hyeon, Park Si-yeon, Ko Ju-yeon

South Korea 2006

102 mins

Remember The Addams Family? That cartoonish clan of freaks and outcasts who lived on the border of normal society? They may have had some strange customs but they always stuck together - each family member proudly individual but also a valued part of the group. Now South Korea boasts The Fox Family, a similarly weird bunch with a Moulin Rouge-esque flair for the theatrical, who are forced to stick together because of their unique differences.

But the Foxes want to be normal, everyday humans. They really are foxes who have come down from the mountains and taken human form in order to fulfil a prophecy, one based on the Korean myth of the kumiho, or the nine-tailed fox. They can remain human if they eat a human liver during a lunar eclipse, which comes along every 1000 years. As you’d probably expect from a Korean film, that last little detail makes everything a little more macabre than your usual fairy tale involving enchanted fluffy animals.

The family are led by the widowed father (Ju Hyeon), who has them performing in a circus troupe that frequently splatters its audience with fake blood - Wednesday Addams would certainly approve. He tries to get his buffoonish son (Ha Jung-woo) and sexy daughter (former model Park Si-yeon) into the dating game as a way of finding suitable human sacrifices, which leads to some of the film’s more slapstick moments. But only the latter manages to score with a seedy pervert who reluctantly agrees to help them recruit further candidates from the fringes of society.

Meanwhile, the youngest daughter (Ko Ju-yeon) keeps to herself and may or may not be the brutal murderer of a local girl. A Columbo-style detective certainly suspects one of them but his sit-and-watch brand of police work is merely a distraction to the central plot, a plot that is already a little thin and from which director Lee Hyung-gon often gets sidetracked. As he circles around different genres and tones - the film is interspersed with some random, foot-tapping, musical interludes - it frequently feels like a Tim Burton mash-up.

Inevitably, the Foxes discover that the secret to becoming human isn’t as simple as ripping out someone’s liver. It’s about love and understanding, the bonds that form when you get to know and care for people. As they extend their family to include those that have been neglected by their own, the real transformation occurs. But it is perhaps because it’s such a universal theme that Lee seems uninterested in exploring it in any depth. He’s much more concerned with mastering the visuals; the sets, costumes and lighting are all wonderfully decadent while his framing and comic timing seem inspired by a crazed Scooby-Doo episode. In a way, the film is incredibly childlike, a classic fable on what it means to be human, yet it also attempts to be dark and sexy without being explicit. It amuses with oddball humour - where else will you see break-dancing riot police? - and the ‘Wonder Woman’ finale saves the day, but ultimately it rarely gets under the fur of its intriguing characters.

Rich Badley

Format: DVD and Blu-ray

Date: 3 August 2009

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director: Rolf de Heer

Writer: Rolf de Heer

Cast: Nicholas Hope, Claire Benito, Ralph Cotterill

Australia 1993

114 mins

Rolf de Heer’s Bad Boy Bubby was a controversial art-house success when released in 1993; audience response to de Heer’s tale of an abused man-child belatedly let loose on society at the age of 35 was polarised, but the film picked up five awards at the Venice Film Festival and became an underground cult item in the United States when a commercial distribution deal fell through. Notoriety in the UK was ensured when the BBFC ordered 20 seconds of footage to be trimmed, fearing that a scene in which a cat is choked to death with cling film was a genuine act of animal cruelty, although de Heer has since provided evidence to show that this was not the case, and the offending footage has been restored to this re-issue.

The almost unbearably claustrophobic opening stretch takes place entirely in the squalid flat where Bubby (Nicolas Hope) lives with his depraved mother, a vile woman who alternately scolds her son and uses him for sex. She has made him fearful of the outside world by claiming that the air is poisonous, and puts on a gas mask whenever she goes out to maintain the lie. This barely functional domestic existence degenerates into chaos when Bubby’s father, a lapsed priest, returns to the fold, causing a rift in the relationship between the ‘child’ and his mother. After realising that the air outside is not toxic, Bubby kills his parents and, in the freewheeling mid-section, sets out to explore urban Adelaide. He encounters a variety of characters that range from a sexually promiscuous Salvation Army girl to a cash-strapped rock band and a scientist who denies the existence of God. The final third lurches into redemptive sentimentality, as the scientist convinces Bubby that he has to take responsibility for his actions.

As with Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump (1994), a less confrontational and more widely popular film about a simpleton’s odyssey through modern times, it is debatable as to whether de Heer is actually concerned about Bubby’s plight, as the character exists in a sustained state of arrested development. Instead, he offers a social commentary, with Bubby serving as a child-like viewpoint from which to observe the positive and negative attributes of society. Bubby understands little, and ‘learns’ about life by mimicking those around him, often with anti-social consequences. An act of police brutality leads to Bubby stealing money from a petrol station by assaulting the attendant, and his attempt to pick up a lonely woman in a restaurant by using the salacious words of his father results in him being thrown into jail for sexual harassment. De Heer embraced the episodic nature of his narrative, utilising the skills of 32 cinematographers to capture the scenes that take place outside the family flat, and the dense sound design recalls the unsettling industrial hum of David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977). Despite these technical achievements, and Hope’s remarkable performance, Bad Boy Bubby struggles to maintain narrative momentum, and the concluding reaffirmation of familial values seems strangely hollow considering the extremity that has preceded it.

John Berra

Format: DVD

Date: 10 August 2009

Distributor: Terracotta Distribution

Director: Singing Chen

Writers: Singing Chen and Lou Yi-an

Original title: Liu lang shen gou ren

Cast: Singing Chen and Lou Yi-an

Taiwan 2006

119 mins

Taiwanese director Singing Chen’s second film God Man Dog is made up of four or five interwoven narratives. It made me wonder what the purpose of this cinematic form can be. Perhaps the stories might join together to make a single larger story. Or what happens in one story might reflect interestingly on what happens in another. Or it might just be that one of the ways a work of art or entertainment can give pleasure is by letting us see how a puzzle is solved.

God Man Dog is a converging ensemble piece í  la Altman, but lacks his masterly orchestration of disparate elements. It is hard to see a coherent narrative whole, or one element making sense of another. The stories are connected not intrinsically but by chance elements. The characters all make journeys, and there is some convergence of time and place (Taipei, a regional village, and the highway that joins them). But the stories do not contribute significantly to each other’s development or resolution.

Perhaps this is too analytical a way to approach what this film has to offer us. It may be better seen not as narrative-driven but as a set of contrasting studies of people confronted by weighty problems, to do with alcohol, depression, work, money, growing up, sex, parenthood, disability, death. We are shown how they try to get to grips with their lives, and in several cases are invited to consider the role that religious or superstitious feeling plays in this. God and the supernatural do not seem to give the characters what they need: we are left thinking that they face their troubles alone unless they find something in the human world to give meaning to their lives.

There is an impersonal feeling to the cinematography - little sense of a human touch in the filming, of the camera’s presence, of light playing on film. The blank, detached gaze of the camera emphasises the characters’ isolation, but also gives them a kind of equality: there are no protagonists or privileged characters in this film. They are on an equal footing not only with each other but with us, for there is no judgement and no irony in the way they are depicted - the viewer does not see more than the characters see, or understand better than the characters understand.

God Man Dog is not, I am pretty sure, a deep film, though it is ‘about’ Life, Death, and all that. However, it does show us things about people in ways that are perhaps its own. The acting always carries conviction: what we see seems real, even when it is intriguingly odd. The dogs? I think they are just random interlopers into the human stories.

Peter Momtchiloff

Format: Cinema

Date: 10-21 July 2009

Venue: ICA (London)

Director: Paul Schrader

Writers: Chieko Schrader, Paul Schrader and Leonard Schrader

Cast: Ken Ogata, Masayuki Shionoya, Go Riju, Yasosuke Bando, Kisako Manda

USA 1985

120 mins

Also available on DVD Region 1 from Criterion

Yukio Mishima was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor and leader of the private militia, the Tatenokai or Shield Society. Paul Schrader’s 1985 film, Mishima: a Life in Four Chapters, attempts to shed light on the development of this complex figure, famous for the circumstances of his death as much as for his literary work.

Schrader paints Mishima as a modern-day Byron, forever cultivating his celebrity image while seeking to fuse art with action and social change. The story mixes episodes from Mishima’s life and work and is told in flashback over four chapters. The fourth chapter depicts Mishima’s infamous siege of the Japanese Self-Defense Force headquarters while the earlier chapters go back to the past events that could have motivated him. Sequences in black and white indicate episodes from Mishima’s early life while hyper-stylised, hyper-colourful studio scenes represent the world of Mishima’s fiction.

Despite considerable aesthetic ambition, Mishima always feels more like a writer’s film than a director’s. I say this not just because it is about the life of a writer, but more because it is obsessed with the processes of writing and story-telling. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem in itself, but it becomes one as Schrader’s literary obsessions smother the cinematic potential of the film. (One is reminded that Schrader also wrote Taxi Driver, but that it was the cine-love evident in Scorsese’s direction that really made this film a classic). The scenes from three of Mishima’s novels that Schrader crams into the narrative are flat, repetitive, and nauseatingly over-staged. As episodes, they serve only to point out obvious parallels between Mishima’s life and work, and to contribute to a whole that is already too wordy, too codified, and too bogged down with information. The manically stylised images are entirely at the service of narrative information and intellectual ideas; they have no real feeling or truth of their own.

The fourth chapter is admittedly better, as Schrader drops the camera acrobatics and focuses more on the action of Mishima’s final work in all its mad, heroic glory. This is the only place in the film where there is space to really look at the mature Mishima, to ponder what he was all about, and to feel genuine fascination at his enigmatic personality. It perhaps just saves the film from being completely bloated and boring, and leaves it standing as an informative introduction to an impressively dedicated life.

David Warwick