All posts by VirginieSelavy

Home entertainment

LONDON IN THE RAW + PRIMITIVE LONDON

London in the Raw

Format: DVD

Release date: 25 May 2009

Distributor: BFI

Director: Arnold Louis Miller

UK 1964/1965

76/87 minutes

The BFI’s new Flipside strand unearths overlooked and obscure British films, but the almost-swinging 1960s presented in London in the Raw (1964) and Primitive London (1965) is a version of the myth we know well already, whether from cult movies like Beat Girl (1959), The Knack (1965) and Smashing Time (1967) or the more mainstream retro fare of Austin Powers (1997-2002) and The Boat That Rocked (2009). Post-war London, its rapidly changing landscape an ideal metaphor for accelerated culture, marauding sexuality and the shock of the new, here becomes an exotic backdrop for Arnold Louis Miller and cinematographer Stanley Long to undertake their ‘anthropological’ study of the city’s moral habits – a quest that leads almost inevitably back to breasts and buttocks, jiggling in proto-gyms, dancehalls, beauty contests and strip joints.

Of course, Miller and Long (who went on to shoot The Wife Swappers and Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate in the 1970s) were not, in any respectable sense, documentarists – yet this mondo double bill, by its very transparency of intent, is a fascinating insight into not only the British exploitation genre, but also the preoccupations that were ripe for being exploited. It is no surprise that sex is chief among these, but it’s primarily sex as fantasy and performance, with the realities of the act itself still a taboo. The body is viewed repeatedly as grotesque theatre (exotic dancers of all sorts, not only striptease artists, punctuate the first film, while martial arts, beauty parlours and body-builders pop up in the second); and some awkward teenage, working-class beatniks are asked their opinions about ‘free love’, as if representative of a libertarian lifestyle that in fact they’re unlikely ever to experience.

As historical artefacts of a pre-permissive society, both films deserve their reissue, but there’s little to elevate London in the Raw above curio status. Too many long sequences of stolid couples enjoying a taste of the ‘exotic’ in Indian and Moroccan restaurants do little but drive home the grim parochialism of the era, although a scene in the Universal Health Club, in which women in tights blithely lift weights to a chugging brass soundtrack with clanging industrial percussion, is wonderfully perverse.

Follow-up Primitive London is more enjoyable, if questionably so, revelling in its mondo status and upping the shlock tactics and nipple count accordingly, a solemn voice-over bemoaning the ‘synthetic eroticism’ of the day as the camera pans to yet another nylon-clad crotch. Horror composer Basil Kirchin provides music, and in true mondo style, sexualised murder gets a look-in, with a Jack The Ripper sequence alongside reconstructions of a contemporaneous series of killings of young prostitutes. These eerie, titillating shots of bodies dumped on suburban waste ground are a jarring reminder of the era’s attitudes towards women in the sex industry, lest we burlesque-fanciers get too comfortable in our nostalgia for the retro lingerie, ‘real’ bodies, furtive punters and quaint routines of the film’s many strip sequences. The inherent, often unpleasant, truth in clumsily staged, exaggerated versions of reality is what really fascinates with the mondo genre, and even more so when set against the mutable, war-ravaged, but instantly recognisable streets of London.

Extras include the semi-fictionalisted stripper doc Carousella (1966) on the Primitive London DVD while London in the Raw has three documentary shorts from Peter Davis and Staffan Lamm, their soft black and white tones and unobtrusive direction a respite from the preceeding brashness. Pub (1962) observes an evening in the comfortable fug of a local boozer, the camera and microphone drifting between half-heard conversations. Strip (1965) and Chelsea Bridge Boys (1966) intersperse fly-on-the-wall footage with interviews which, at times, sail close to the prurience of Miller’s youth vox-pops. Perhaps Davis and Lamm were shooting exploitation films of a less overt sort, asetheticising and fetishising those disempowered by youth and poverty, but the visual compassion shown to these young subjects and their surroundings, not to mention the value of capturing the actual voices - the timbre, accents, vocabulary - of the era, invite sympathetic reappraisal.

Frances Morgan

Read our review of the third Flipside initial release, the demented satire The Bed Sitting Room, based on a play by Spike Milligan, directed by Richard Lester and starring Peter Cook, in the summer 09 issue of Electric Sheep. Substitute is the theme of the new issue, with articles on the fraught relationship between Takeshi Kitano and ‘Beat’ Takeshi, the various cinematic incarnations of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley, interchanging identities in Joseph Losey’s films, the dangers of false impersonation in neo-noir Just Another Love Story, the paradoxes of black and white twins in offbeat lost classic Suture, not to mention cross-dressing criminals, androids and body snatchers. Also in this issue: interview with Marc Caro, profile of whiz-kid animator David OReilly, comic strip review of Hardware, and The Phantom Band’s favourite films.

Check it out, Home entertainment

Daisies

Daisies
Daisies

Format: DVD

Release date: 1 June 2009

Distributor: Second Run

Director: Věra Chytilová

Writer: Věra Chytilová

Original title: Sedmikrí¡sky

Cast: Ivana Karbanová, Jitka Cerhová

Czechoslovakia 1966

74 minutes

Two young women in their bathing suits sit listlessly by a pool, overcome by the alienation and apathy frequently observed in the youth of 60s European cinema. They move in jerky doll fashion, each gesture accompanied by creaking noises that emphasise the metaphor. After a brief philosophical exchange on the state of things, they conclude that, as the world has become bad and corrupt, they shall be bad too. What follows is a string of joyous anarchic pranks in which Marie I and Marie II eat, drink, smoke, mock, play with and destroy everything they can lay their hands on.

Daisies will be shown as part of the season Defiance and Compassion: The Films of Věra Chytilová at BFI Southbank in March 2015. For full programme details and to book tickets, visit the BFI website.

Given the central characters’ rebellious streak and their mischievous manipulation of men, the film has often been seen as feminist. The two Maries certainly do not conform to traditional expectations of femininity: they gleefully stuff their faces, fool around and fall over disgracefully or uninhibitedly take their clothes off. They display a total lack of interest in romance, ignoring a lover’s maudlin, clichéd pleas, all of which feels like a refreshingly truthful and satisfying representation of women. But their insubordination is not just an act of female resistance against patriarchal society: Věra Chytilová’s Daisies (1966) is more Dada than women’s lib, and the two Maries are above all non-conformist individuals, outsiders to the grinding machinery of society. Echoing Tristan Tzara et al responding to the madness of the First World War by retreating to Zürich to conduct turbulent artistic experiments, the girls’ bad behaviour is a direct response to the state of the world. This is emphasised by the stylised images of explosions that open and close the film, circumscribing the girls’ escapades within references to war. The resonance is made all the stronger by the film’s avant-garde style, the interest in visual experimentation, the sonic and graphic play with words, the non-sensical narrative and the delectable juvenile humour.

According to the accompanying booklet written by Peter Hames, the moral message of the film, as well as Chytilová’s own position in relation to her protagonists, are the subjects of some debate, with various commentators arguing that the director originally intended the film to be a critique of the girls’ behaviour. After the final scene of Dionysiac excess during which they ravage a richly laid out banquet hall, the two Maries, under threat of death, are forced to promise that they will now be good. But as they go about clearing the mess they’ve made, they do so in a manner that is entirely subversive, scraping cake off the floor before piling the revolting mush back onto dishes, or arranging fragments of broken plates and glasses in a mockery of the elegant table they ruined. In spite of their repeated assertions that they are ‘good’ and will work hard, order is not restored, and under the pretence of compliance the girls are still agents of chaos and destruction.

This final scene has been read in many different ways, with some critics seeing in it the failure of the girls’ revolt, and others a deserved punishment for their behaviour. Whatever Chytilová’s original intentions may have been, it is undeniable that the film delights in the characters’ total freedom; their anarchic spirit proves irresistibly infectious, and the same playfulness and irreverence infuse the direction. The corruption of the world is what liberates the girls from the social norm, and this liberation from convention, whether filmic or social, unleashes an enormous amount of energy, both creative and destructive. This, more crucially than anything else in the film, is profoundly Dada. The voracious embrace of absolute freedom, and of the chaos that inevitably comes with it, is what makes Daisies so thoroughly energising and joyously inspiring.

Virginie Sélavy

Home entertainment

Goto, Island of Love

1 Comment
Goto Island of Love
Goto, Island of Love

Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection

Format: Dual Format (DVD + Blu-ray)

Release date: 8 September 2014

Distributor: Arrow Academy

Director: Walerian Borowczyk

Writer: Walerian Borowczyk

Cast: Pierre Brasseur, Ligia Branice, Jean-Pierre Andréani, Guy Saint-Jean

Original title: Goto, l’île d’amour

France 1968

93 minutes

It is Walerian Borowczyk’s peculiar misfortune to have produced in The Beast (La Bête, 1975) one of the masterpieces of artful, twisted, preposterous erotica. Its success not only led him to making incompetent slop like Behind Convent Walls (Interno di un convento, 1978) and Emmanuelle V (1987): worse, it skewed his whole profile as a filmmaker, and many will view the meretricious tack available on DVD unaware, or at least disbelieving, that this was once one of the most inventive of animators.

This review was first published in 2009 for the first UK release of Goto, Island of Love on DVD release by Nouveaux Pictures in 2009.

This release of Goto, Island of Love fills in a vital, pre-erotic step in Borowczyk’s work, revealing a highly individual approach to live action as seen through the eyes of an animator. A largely immobile camera fixed head-on to flat but grimy monochrome backdrops produces boxes within which actors are pinned with absurd symmetry like displays in the cabinets, or flies in the fly-traps, that litter the ritualistic world of Goto. The cells of this world also contain, and are seen from, improbable vantage points suggestive of optical devices. Binoculars are given thematic prominence throughout, but the whole mise en scéne implies peephole and camera obscura. In the opening credits we seem to peer into the workings of a giant live-action zoetrope. The rough planks of a riding school wall fill the screen as two horses periodically circle into view. Any idea of freedom or escape is produced and framed within a space of repetitive, mechanical illusion.

As we quickly learn via a school lesson, the island itself has been closed off from the outside world since the remarkable catastrophe of 1887, which wiped out most of the population and locked the survivors into the preservation of arcane tradition, like Gormenghast rewritten by Gombrowicz. Although suitably catechistic, the lesson is illustrated by an anamorphic image of the three governors to date - Gotos I, II & III. The attic of the riding school similarly offers three disjointed and illusory views: from one side, a grassy hill sloping down into woodland; from the next, a stark quarry; from the third, the rolling waves on a rocky shore. But these vistas prove deceptive in a world that offers no escape, no distance to run into. Imagine Father Ted‘s Craggy Island as a benevolent dictatorship: Goto III frolicking on the beach in full uniform is oddly reminiscent of Bishop Len Brennan’s holiday video. His adulterous wife Glossia, a mix of Garbo gloom and Buster Keaton stiffness throughout, is more the hapless marionette than ever in rugged nature. Clearly she will never make it out to sea, and escape from the island.

Meanwhile, we follow arriviste crim Grozo’s ruthless ascent from dog-minder and fly-catcher. Scenting success, he lets out the dogs and we see them bounding through a tiny door into the light, down to the sea. The camera follows them a little way in a rare moment of exuberance, but finally leaves them in the inconsequential distance, bounded by the sea, framed by the viewfinder of the door. Grozo’s ambition has never risen higher than to be a hound with its muzzle in Glossia’s lap. Even his treason is subservient, obeisant to the machine, and his moment of success brings not even the limited freedom of a dog. He, more than anyone, is caught up in the ‘manège’; that is to say ‘riding school’, but also ‘machination’, and ‘merry-go-round’. Through the objective lens of the wryly named animator, it’s just a complicated game. Where a dictator is chosen by a round of spin-the-shoe-last, the only revolution is the turning of the machine.

Stephen Thomson

Home entertainment

ENTHUSIASM: SYMPHONY OF THE DONBASS

1 Comment
Enthusiasm

Format: DVD

Distributor: Austrian Film Museum

Director: Dziga Vertov

Original title: Entuziazm: Simfoniya Donbassa

USSR 1930

67 minutes

It twists, it clunks, it shifts, it squeaks. Objects in motion, objects in synchronisation with sounds; audio-visual harmony, a perfect metaphor for Soviet collectivist supremacy. A pulsating network of people and machines and machines that make machines that people use to make machines to excavate coal and reap wheat and make movies. The dynamism of production shot with a gimlet-eyed mechanism and chopped with the finesse of a novice butcher.

Dziga Vertov’s symphonic 1930 experimental documentary film is primarily known as a bold foray into audio-visual synchronisation, commended for its deft and poetic use of concrete sound. Sound was not a new plaything for Vertov. Prior to experimenting with film, Vertov lurked in the orbit of cubo-futurist poet Mayakovsky, studied music, despatched miscellaneous essays and polemics about sound, radio and cinema and had attempted a major phonographic project - essentially a sound studio for the recording and cataloguing of concrete sound. He was also well versed in the art of propaganda film, having been an editor of the Kino-Pravda newsreels. He formed the Kino-eye collective, its remit to document actuality as opposed to theatrical or literary cinematic staging. Indeed, unlike that other Russian master of montage, Sergei Eisenstein, Vertov actually went out into the field, the factory, the street, to document quotidian life as it unfurled. Whereas Eisenstein would manipulate, restage and re-enact reality on scales both grand and pompous.

Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass deploys, as its title implies, a musical structure in three movements derived from the symphony. The first movement appears to riff on religion (as opiate) versus mass communication. The second engages with heavy industry and the third primarily deals with agriculture. The soundtrack bristles with a gorgeous Brillo pad fuzziness, the images the work of a kinetic, acrobatic, camera that has its roots firmly embedded in the follicles of constructivist geometry and futurist dynamism.

Enthusiasm begins with three sounds, a cuckoo and an andante pizzicato bass and woodwind motif. We see extreme close-ups of tightly framed faces, a telephonist or radio operator, symbolising the auditory. Vertov plays a Brechtian card - we see the conductor of the film’s musical score conducting the film’s musical score. The sound of a bell is juxtaposed with the image of an ornamental crown - the death knell of Czarist autocracy. Shots of fluid religious architecture follow - church spires, onion-domed temples that quiver in the lens, and phrenological studies of the proletariat. We hear Russian orthodox liturgy underscored with a cuckoo, people at prayer followed by the gorgeous close-up of a human ear. Vertov rather crudely juxtaposes religion with mass communication. He tries a few camera tricks - time-lapse, double exposure - to convey both ecstatic delirium and just what a man with a movie camera is capable of.

Then he pauses to show us a constructivist maquette of a factory, the merry-go-round of state industrial production. In a loop, miniature tractors and goods speed around, followed by shots of a real factory and a mine. Chiaroscuro industrial pornography shot from hard geometric angles - furnaces, gantries, chimney stacks, a bridge, a black mound of coke. These images are loosely affixed to the sound of a steam whistle edited into a modulating electro-acoustic drone, which recurs throughout Enthusiasm in different variations.

The final, agricultural, section features a dance in a grain field, demented folk music, a procession of collectivist agricultural workers intercut with yet more industrial smoke belches, filthy black mechanisms and more Stalinist brass band pomp.

Enthusiasm is ultimately a propaganda film for totalitarian Soviet collectivisation. However, the film does not depict Soviet efficiency so much as it is itself mechanised Soviet state capitalism incarnate. It was an innovative thing no doubt, yet the innovation took place against a backdrop of hardcore economic interventionism, famine, Gulags, ethnic cleansing and slave labour. Riefenstahl aside, one wonders why cinema historians don’t have the same regard for fascist cinema or, rather, why cinema critics are a little softer on communist totalitarianism than they are on fascist totalitarian art.

Philip Winter

Home entertainment

Baba Yaga

Baba Yaga

Format: DVD

Date: 27 April 2009

Distributor: Shameless Entertainment

Director: Corrado Farina

Writer: Corrado Farina

Based on the Valentina comic books by: Guido Crepax

Cast: Carroll Baker, George Eastman, Isabelle de Funes

Italy, France 1973

91 mins

If it didn’t date from 1973, this fumetti-based curio could be neatly filed under ’60s films that swing too hard’. Isabelle de Funes plays, or rather, looks good as Valentina (huge eyes, great Louise Brooks hair), a liberated photographer who comes under the malign influence of witchy Baba Yaga (Carroll Baker, with a fine piled mussy blonde do). Baba Yaga wants Valentina in a blatantly Sapphic way, but her seduction technique seems to involve cursing her camera, and killing one of her models with a creepy fetish doll that periodically transforms into a scantily clad dominatrix. This, unsurprisingly, doesn’t seem to push Valentina’s buttons, but does make her prone to some fantasies involving Nazis, boxing rings and firing squads, which periodically invade the narrative until it all gets a bit baffling in typical Italian Euro-sleaze style.

Frankly, Baba Yaga isn’t all that concerned with plot or internal logic, but serves more as a tick list of groovy stuff. It begins with an anti-American happening in a Milanese graveyard and continues to throw comics, radical politics, light bondage, fruggable music and half-naked models in cute cowboy/Indian costumes at the viewer throughout. This is fine by me, and most of the film’s minor pleasures come from odd period detail, like a startling racist detergent advert directed by Valentina’s half-arsed radical lover Arno (George Eastman, horrible hair and beard, like a Swedish porn star). But Baba Yaga suffers from an uncertainty of tone; it trundles on by in a swirl of funky, busily edited scenes, leaving the audience unsure as to how moving, amusing, creepy or meaningful all this is supposed to be.

Valentina was the late Guido Crepax’s regular heroine in 30 years of comic strips, and much of the reason to watch the film lies with curiosity over how well Crepax’s world transfers to celluloid. To be fair, director Corrado Farina, not a prolific filmmaker, has a decent stab at bringing Crepax’s scratchy eroticism to the screen, especially in the heavily stylised sex scenes, which use montages of black and white photographs to approximate the comic’s layered close-up panels. There is also an effective emphasis on the sensual, on the look, the texture, the touching of things, with Baba Yaga’s house full of strange Victorian clutter contrasted with Valentina’s chic minimal décor (I want that transparent phone). But this is half the film’s problem; it’s too preoccupied with surface detail and too little concerned with ideas. And anyone expecting this Baba Yaga to play with the rich details of the Slavic legends will be sorely disappointed. For what its worth, this is a lovingly packaged disc from Shameless, with a newly restored version, two cool short docs on fumetti and a commentary by Farina. Knock yourself out, if that’s your bag, man…

Mark Stafford

Cinema releases

FERMAT’S ROOM

2 Comments
Fermat's Room

Format: Cinema

Date: 29 May 2009

Distributor: Revolver Entertainment

Directors: Luis Piedrahita and Rodrigo Sopeí±a

Writers: Luis Piedrahita and Rodrigo Sopeí±a

Original title: La habitacií³n de Fermat

Cast: Lluí­s Homar, Alejo Sauras, Elena Ballesteros, Santi Millí¡n, Federico Luppi

Spain 2007

88 mins

There’s a sub-genre of murder stories called ‘the locked room mystery’, which consists of a dead body being found in a locked room with no obvious way for the killer to escape. This has been investigated by everyone from Sherlock Holmes to Agatha Christie’s various detectives and is the main premise behind the TV series Jonathan Creek. Fermat’s Room presents a novel variant on the genre: a murder is being committed in a locked room, which is shrinking to crush its four inhabitants (played by Lluí­s Homar, Alejo Sauras, Elena Ballesteros and Santi Millí¡n) to death, and the murderer may be inside.

This makes for a film that is both original and also over-familiar. The idea of characters being crushed to death in a shrinking room has been covered in all kinds of films from Goldfinger to Toys, Indiana Jones and Star Wars while rooms that exist purely as death traps have filled screens in recent years from the Cube trilogy to the endless Saw franchise. Even having a maths genius as the main protagonist occupies the middle ground between the TV series Numb3rs and the tedious Russell Crowe biopic A Beautiful Mind.

However, due to elegant cinematography, an intriguing premise and a good cast and script, Fermat’s Room rises above the ubiquity of its premise to make for an intriguing mystery that unsettles the viewer by combining claustrophobia and the modern fascination with games. There’s been a number of unspeakably awful movies based on computer games, but Fermat’s Room flirts with the medium by using the iconography of ‘brain-training’ games, and features a genuinely gripping and subversive car chase that is reminiscent of one of the early Grand Theft Auto games. The film’s low budget necessitated a small cast and limited number of locations, but as in Richard Linklater’s underrated Tape, creative set design, superlative camera work and intelligent use of the resources mean a lot of enthusiasm and a little money go a long way.

The film, like its characters, is flawed. No one in the film is as interesting as the plot thinks they are, and having everyone operate under a pseudonym distances the characters more than the story necessitates. And, because there’s no real concern for the characters, or their dual identities, this device does occasionally make the film a purely intellectual exercise, like a game of Cluedo.

As a film that lauds genius, the plot treads a double-edged sword. The characters in Fermat’s Room are aided in their escape by their common interest in maths and puzzles but are equally handicapped by their all too human vices. In the same way, the film is likely to attract an audience that has seen other examples of the genre and will probably spend the picture trying to double-guess the plot and spot the references. This kind of obsessive study could ruin enjoyment of the film, even though the story celebrates such activity. It might seem disingenuous to state there’s a lot to be appreciated in a movie that comes across as a more intelligent and family friendly version of Saw, but in this case familiarity doesn’t breed contempt.

Alex Fitch

Cinema releases

DELTA

Delta

Format: Cinema

Date: 8 May 2009

Distributor: ICA Films

Venues: ICA Cinema, Renoir (London) and key cities

Director: Kornél Mundruczí³

Writers: Kornél Mundruczí³ and Yvette Biro

Cast: Félix Lajkí³, Orsolya Tí³th, Lili Monori, Sí¡ndor Gí¡spí¡r

Germany/Hungary 2008

96 mins

In an insular rural community where cattle and people exist alongside one another, a man struggles with a shrieking pig as his wife’s son Mihail returns after a long absence. Delta is Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczí³’s award-winning third feature film and it is named after the geographical location where the story unfolds. Set in the verdant Romanian Danube Delta, the film is a simple, universal tale of true love between siblings Mihail and Fauna.

Shortly after Mihail’s arrival, Fauna leaves the parental home in order to devote herself to helping Mihail build a house away from the village. The community’s disapproval of her decision and of the introspective Mihail is felt strongly, encapsulated in a real Straw Dogs moment when Mihail enters the local village bar, his discomfort palpable as the hostile attention of the entire room turns towards him.

The disquiet intensifies as it becomes clear that the pair intend to live together when the house is completed. The stepfather rejects the idea of Mihail and Fauna ‘living together like pigs’. Fauna’s very name alludes to this assimilation of animal and human behaviour in Delta, although the animal metaphor is a complex one. In a scene of sexual violence that recalls the opening pig-handling scene the viewer is distanced from the action by long shot framing and this sense of restraint is characteristic of the film.

As brother and sister grow closer, their flourishing physicality is elliptically suggested rather than explicitly shown and the viewer is again denied another voyeuristic opportunity. In one scene, Mihail and Fauna lie contentedly on the wooden floor of the unfinished house, intimating that their relationship has been consummated. They are framed from above, Fauna gently caresses her tortoise, and in the microcosm of this moment they seem perfectly happy. Their self-containment is interrupted when Mihail opens a door in the floor to board his boat, visually bisecting the space. Fauna’s reluctance to see him go is unsettling, a portent of events to come.

Delta‘s brilliant soundtrack was created by virtuoso violinist Félix Lajkí³, who also played the role of Mihail. Taking inspiration from the Delta region, he composed the music as filming took place. Also notable are the hammer symphony that scores the building of the house and the fervent cacophony of insects whirring over an earlier scene of acute sexual tension between Fauna and Mihail. The use of Popol Vuh’s music to accompany the ethereal floating funeral procession made me wonder if, like Werner Herzog, who used their music in several films, Mundruczí³ wishes to impart to his audience the indifference of nature to mankind.

Drawing from Shakespeare’s classic revenge tragedy Hamlet and Euripides’ Electra, the siblings’ downfall is duly played out, their circumstances and familial relations contriving towards their destruction as surely as the river flows. I am reminded of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s debut The Return (2003), which also features a fractured family floundering amid a vast and tranquil wilderness. The natural setting of both films is cinematically impressive and the characters are not hindered by their environment but by each other; the brutality of human nature ultimately overcomes and destroys the protagonists of Delta of in spite of their resilience. The immutability and impartiality of nature further accentuates the humans’ violent tendencies; in the closing shot of Delta, Fauna’s adored pet tortoise crawls slowly along in total oblivion to the fate of its keeper.

Jessica Dickenson

Cinema releases

MOMMA’S MAN

Momma's Man

Format: Cinema

Date: 8 May 2009

Distributor: Diffusion Pictures

Venues: London and key cities

Director: Azazel Jacobs

Writer: Azazel Jacobs

Cast: Matt Boren, Ken Jacobs, Flo Jacobs

USA 2008

94 mins

On paper, Momma’s Man sounds uninspiring: a thirty-something man named Mikey (played by Matt Boren) with a wife and baby in Los Angeles visits his parents’ New York loft while on a business trip and finds himself incapable of returning to the West Coast. But this quietly astonishing film from Azazel Jacobs is much more than the sum of its parts; it’s a smart, beautifully constructed lo-fi meditation on childhood, family and aging. Jacobs filmed his follow-up to The GoodTimes Kid (2005) in his childhood home in lower Manhattan and cast his own parents, Ken and Flo Jacobs, as Mikey’s parents. Although they have little acting experience, they are both important artists in their own right - Ken an influential experimental filmmaker and Flo a painter.

Mikey, already on his way back to the airport, suddenly decides to delay his flight by a day. After his exceptionally kind, patient mom cooks him dinner, he heads up to his bedroom in a ramshackle alcove, drapes himself in an old Halloween costume, finds a guitar and thumbs through a high school notebook, full of badly written lyrics about break-ups like ‘I hope you die too’. As the days start to pass by, he keeps delaying his flight home, repeatedly making excuses for prolonging his stay, jeopardising his relationship and his career.

Haunted by the idea of watching his parents get old, he begins to revert back to adolescence, seeming more juvenile with every day that passes. He creeps back into the house after getting drunk playing arcade games, and sits around reading comic books in bed wearing nothing but shabby long johns. His mother fusses over him, constantly trying to feed him, making sure that he’s dressed warmly enough, and even gives him pocket money - in short, fulfilling all of the endearing, yet exasperating, rituals of parenthood. Eventually, Mikey becomes more childlike, more helpless, unable to even leave the loft by himself.

What makes the film so exceptional, aside from a great performance by Boren, are the filmmaker’s inspirational parents, and the loft itself. It’s packed with eccentric ephemera collected over the 40 years that the family have lived there, from dancing plastic robots and a collection of snow globes to 78 records, which Ken lovingly listens to. His son, with the help of the cinematographer Tobias Datum (who also shot Gerardo Naranjo’s Voy a explotar), seems to document his home for the sake of posterity, but it’s also an intimate exploration of a very personal space, laid bare for the audience. The incredibly genuine performances delivered by both Ken and Flo seem to further blur the line between biography and fiction; scenes of them watching Ken’s films, projected in the loft, add another beguiling dimension to the picture.

Although the laid-back pacing demands a little patience, Momma’s Man is full of comic moments, while the poignant relationship between parent and child is rarely portrayed on screen with so much honesty. It’s a tribute to both Jacobs’s parents and to childhood, not to mention a bohemian New York lifestyle on the verge of extinction.

Sarah Cronin

Cinema releases

O’HORTEN

O'Horten

Format: Cinema

Date: 8 May 2009

Distributor: Artificial Eye

Venues: Curzon Soho, Ritzy, Screen on the Green (London) and key cities

Director: Bent Hamer

Writer: Bent Hamer

Cast: Bí¥rd Owe, Espen Skjí¸nberg, Ghita Ní¸rby, Henny Moan

Norway 2007

86 mins

I think I understand this film. Not that it’s difficult, but I think that there is something to ‘get’ about the film.

It is a film about Odd Horten. A taciturn train driver who has just retired. It is obviously a film about old age and death. That is what the narrative is about. But the literal depiction of this subject is embedded in its metaphorical and symbolic representation. The things that are done and said are not just things that occur in a few days of an old man’s life: they poetically express his human condition.

It is all over for him. He sits quietly amid fun and noise. He gets left behind. He gets stuck. He is late, he is missing, he escapes, he can’t be contacted. He gets shut in. He casts off his possessions. He puts the cloth over his canary’s cage. He is alone and in the dark.

He meets another old man. This man is lying in the snow. Odd goes to where he lives, in a dark place full of ice and strange things from other places in the past. This man shows him something very old, and tells him that though it has come to rest, its journey is not over. Odd accompanies him as he goes blindly on a last journey.

Finally, Odd sees someone from his own past. He takes a leap into the unknown. And he is reunited with someone who thought she wouldn’t see him again.

Here are a few things that the film is not:

It’s not weird, contrived, or surreal. All these events happen plainly, gently. The mood is sombre but not grim. Sad but not depressing. Melancholy but not maudlin. Slow but not boring. A cliché would be ‘bittersweet’, but in fact it’s better for being neither bitter nor sweet. It looks unblinkingly at some of the most difficult things in life without ever dipping into the sentimental.

Here are some reasons to see the film:

It looks beautiful. It shows a dignified, old-fashioned side of Norwegian urban life, set off against the gleaming winter landscape that surrounds it, and the svelte iron machines that master that landscape.

It sounds beautiful. The Norwegian dialogue is a delight for an Anglophone to listen to, with its pleasing resemblance to a quaint form of English (for instance someone who ski-jumps appear to be a ‘hopper’). And there is a suitably icy soundtrack featuring glockenspiel and pedal steel.

It is about age, loss, and death, and it reflects on these things in a calm, quiet way.

Peter Momtchiloff

Home entertainment

THE DECAMERON

The Decameron

Format: DVD and Blu-ray

Date: 27 April 2009

Distributor: BFI

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Writer Pier Paolo Pasolini

Based on the book by: Boccaccio

Original title: Il Decameron

Cast: Franco Citti, Ninetto Davoli, Pier Paolo Pasolini

Italy 1971

112 mins

Pier Paolo Pasolini, poet, painter, writer, homosexual, Marxist, filmmaker and enfant terrible, was certainly a multi-faceted artist. His films similarly show great variety, from his late neo-realist gangster classic Accattone (1961) to Greek tragedy in Medea (1969), from intellectual allegory in Theorem (1968) to the popular pastoral bawdy romps that Pasolini called his ‘Trilogy of Life’. The Decameron makes up the first part of this trilogy; the other two films - The Canterbury Tales (1972) and Arabian Nights (1974) - are similarly based on medieval folk tales and storytelling. However, from the opening shot, which shows the director’s regular collaborator Franco Citti (who starred as Accattone) bludgeoning an unseen victim, we are never in any doubt that this is a classic Pasolini film.

Choosing 10 stories from Boccaccio’s 100, and dispensing with the framing narrative - seven women and three men (with their servants) tell stories to while away the time spent in the country to avoid the Great Plague of 1348 - Pasolini’s film nevertheless perfectly captures the spirit of these tales. The film is divided into two parts, each composed of five stories, one framing the other four. All are faithful to Boccaccio’s originals but are also well suited to Pasolini’s world view: sinners are remembered as saints, evil doings go unpunished and religious hypocrisy is rife. Typically, Pasolini also juxtaposes contradictory tales to emphasise their political aspect. We go from aspirational parents who insist on marriage when they catch their daughter in flagrante with the son of a wealthy man, to the famous ‘Pot of Basil’ story, in which a girl is caught with a lower-class lover, with grisly results. The latter tale is kindly shortened, allowing the girl to keep her pot of basil and water it with her tears, in contrast to Boccaccio’s original tale or Keats’s great poem. Although Pasolini is interested in the political subtext of the tales, he hardly offers a Marxist reworking - the bawdy folk tales are told simply and the film never feels didactic.

Pasolini himself plays an artist dreaming of and painting frescoes of heaven and hell on a church wall. In Boccaccio’s epic, the artist is the Early Renaissance painter Giotto, although he is modestly recast here as a ‘student of the master’ (in The Canterbury Tales, Pasolini similarly plays Geoffrey Chaucer). The film has a painterly look with colours that seem to have been taken directly from Giotto’s palette, although the scenes are perhaps more reminiscent of Breughel or Bosch. Perhaps Giotto’s most important legacy was his introduction of the technique of life drawing; a similar impulse can be seen in Boccaccio’s embrace of popular folk tales and particularly in his decision to write in vernacular Italian rather than Latin. Similarly, Pasolini, it seems, is striving to create a vernacular cinema.

The depiction of the Middle Ages may not be quite as filthy as that in Monty Python and The Holy Grail (1975), with its mud-encrusted peasants, but with carefully chosen locations and non-professional actors (framed in Pasolini’s long, still close-ups) clearly cast for their medieval dentistry, we get an essentially realist depiction akin to Rossellini’s Francesco Giullare di Dio (1950). Unfortunately, the clumsy post-synchronised sound seems to be the price we pay for those great locations.

The emphasis on simplicity means that the stories seem slight and at times underwhelming (even Ennio Morricone’s score is free of bombast and confined to folk ditties), and the humour (falling into cesspits, etc.) is not so far removed from a Carry On film. However, there is an honesty about sexual relations rarely found in 20th-century literature or film, as well as a determination to entertain the audience that was key to the storytelling tradition. These films were Pasolini’s biggest box-office successes. This led to a series of imitation bawdy romps to be released in Italy, which caused Pasolini to write a repudiation of his trilogy and to return to a rather less crowd-pleasing cinema with his next film - Salí³, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975).

The Decameron, like most of Pasolini’s work, never fully satisfies, lacking the epic sweep that such an adaptation deserves, but it is a serious and worthy attempt. The film ends with Giotto’s student (Pasolini) looking at the completed dream-inspired frescoes, asking a question that could be applied to any such adaptations or even to artistic creation itself, one that fully captures Pasolini’s self-doubts: ‘Why paint a picture when the dream is so much better?’

Paul Huckerby

Also available from the BFI on DVD and Blu-ray: Arabian Nights and The Canterbury Tales.